Owens has had meteoric success since graduating from CalArts in the mid-nineties, and this spring her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Los Angeles—a mid-career survey that seems all the more impressive for the fact that the artist is only thirty-two years old. One criticism that has been leveled at Owens is that there is too much of a feel-good quality in the work, which would be a problem if her paintings were maudlin or shallow or overly cute, but they are not. . .

THE BELIEVER: I’m curious about your depictions of bats. Are they just fun to put in paintings, or is there some deeper personal interest on your part?

LAURA OWENS: Recently someone accused me of having only the benevolent in my work, and I think the bats were my attempt at a certain point to bring in less benevolent imagery. But bats have a lot of different meanings depending on which culture you’re talking about, meaning they’re not always seen as bad. In China, you’ll see them in embroidery, and they aren’t the menacing-looking type of black bat. I think they signify good luck. But then there’s a Tiepolo painting at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, about the triumph of virtue and nobility over ignorance, and I think ignorance is signified by bats…

moe from The Believer here.

From EGO:

Internationally-acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, and video artist Shirin Neshat has been interpreting boundaries in Islam—boundaries between men and women, between sacred and profane, between reality and magic realism—through her work for many years. She came to New York to study art, but the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 made it impossible for Neshat to return for over eleven years. Returning to Iran in 1990 after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Neshat found that the Iran of her childhood was smothered under a layer of conservative, fundamentalist Islamic tradition. Feeling that she had something to say, Neshat came back to New York and began working on a series of extraordinary photographs and video installations through which she explored her relationship with Islam and Iran. In particular, she is known for a unique and stirring visual discourse on the place and identity of women in Iran, and on the complex relationship between genders in Islam.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can’t lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

More here.

Shahzia Sikander. Pleasure Pillars, 2001.

Water color, dry pigment, on Wasli paper.

More on Shahzia here, here, and here.

From The Washington Post:

“The Golden Years” are always some other time, aren’t they? They’re an idealized part of the past or a dreamed-of piece of the future when everything is just a little bit better. Food tastes more succulent, music sounds sweeter, movies actually move you and art transports you to another plane. But our critics think that 2005 had moments that were surprisingly golden. There were more than enough good films to fill a top 10 list. Artists continue to challenge and amaze. Musicians from a wide variety of genres delivered quality work that will outlast passing trends. Maybe 2005 wasn’t a golden year, but it definitely had its moments. Join us in a look back at some of the shinier ones.

FILMS

DESSON THOMSON

Once again, the choices for the best 10 films of the year was an agonizing ordeal: So many choices, too few spots. Which is why you won’t see — but could easily have found — “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Junebug,” “Syriana,” “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” “Crash,” “Mysterious Skin,” “Millions,” “Tropical Malady,” “Paradise Now” and “Frank Miller’s Sin City” on this list.

More here.

Steve Mirsky in Scientific American:

1. What’s the difference between RNA and the NRA?

2. It has been said that gravity is not just a good idea, it’s the law. Is gravity indeed the law? Is gravity indeed a good idea in a land of rampant obesity?

3. What’s the second law of thermodynamics? What’s the third law of motion? Who’s on first?

5. Do you believe in spontaneous human combustion, or do you refuse to answer on the grounds that you might incinerate yourself? (The kids, they love that one.)

6. In commenting on the death penalty, Justice Antonin Scalia said, “For the believing Christian, death is no big deal.” Is death, in fact, a big deal? And if death isn’t a big deal, why is murder?

7. Original Law and Order, or Law and Order: Criminal Intent?

And more:

11. If Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg leaves Washington, D.C., heading west at 60 miles per hour and Justice Anthony Kennedy leaves Los Angeles heading east at 70 miles per hour, will they meet before Justice Clarence Thomas asks a question?

13. Would you use Microsoft Word to write an opinion in a case involving Microsoft?

14. In the recently concluded Scopes-like trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, one of the defendants claimed not to know the source of the funds for 60 copies of an intelligent-design book, which he admitted to only having glanced through, for the school library. He was then confronted with his own canceled check. Should such a defendant face charges of perjury or, despite the Eighth Amendment implications, be forced to actually read the book?

More here.

Nick Gillespie in TCS Daily:

One of the subtexts of this year’s Modern Language Association conference — and, truth be told, of most contemporary discussions of literary and cultural studies — is the sense that lit-crit is in a prolonged lull. There’s no question that a huge amount of interesting work is being done — scholars of 17th-century British and Colonial American literature, for instance, are bringing to light all sorts of manuscripts and movements that are quietly revising our understanding of liberal political theory and gender roles — and that certain fields — postcolonial studies, say, and composition and rhetoric — are hotter than others. But it’s been years — decades even — since a major new way of thinking about literature has really taken the academic world by storm.

More here.

Shabnam Nasir in The Dawn:

One evening, while contemplating on the subject of my future article, I was rather amazed to see a cake crumb moving shakily across the floor. As I focused my eyes to get a better look at the object in question, I saw two tiny ants struggling with the crumb — which in ratio to their own size would make it equivalent to a heavy boulder being lifted by two children. It seems that these amazing insects have all the virtues that are needed by any society to function effectively.

* Ants can carry up to 10–20 times their body weight working in teams to move very heavy objects.

* Their brains are amongst the largest of the insect kingdom and it has been estimated that their brains may have the same processing power as a Macintosh II computer.

* The combined weight of ants is greater then the combined weight of all humans.

* Ants have specific duties and division of labour is the key to their successful society.

* When the situation calls for it, ants can easily adapt to a new skill or job.

* They take great care of their young and feed and teach them their skills.

* The tiny creatures are capable of organizing and executing massive group projects where they raise an army of specialized soldier ants that defend the nest.

* Ants build nests which are highly complex structures that are built in the dark and construct two tunnels from different directions that meet exactly halfway. They also build water traps to keep out the rain water.

More here.

Following are literary biographies reviewed by The New York Times Book Review since Dec. 31, 2000.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
By LEO DAMROSCH
In this fine new biography, Leo Damrosch restores Rousseau to us in all his originality.

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life
By TOM REISS
Tom Reiss explains how a not-so-nice Russian Jewish boy became a dagger-wielding Muslim writer.

Richard Wright: The Life and Times
By HAZEL ROWLEY
Hazel Rowley’s biography of Richard Wright documents his early success and growing disaffection.

More here.

Dear Readers,

Okay, this is our last list for a while. Promise. As regular readers of 3QD know, in April of 2005 we started featuring original writing by our editors and guest columnists on Mondays (as opposed to links to articles elsewhere, which is what we do the rest of the week). This has turned out to be a popular idea, and we now get more traffic on Mondays than any other day of the week. In a somewhat immodest mood, and in an attempt to honor all our very talented writers, Robin and I have decided to pick the best of the Monday columns from each author this year. To avoid further charges of immodesty (or false modesty!), I have chosen one of Robin’s columns, and he has chosen one of mine. Without further ado then, here they are, in alphabetical order by last name of the author (link to essay follows picture):

1.  Real Sweat Shops, Virtual Gold, by Descha Daemgen

2.  Down the Rabbit Hole, by Timothy Don

3.  Bathroom Pastoralism, or, The Anecdote of the Can, by Tom Jacobs

4.  Bite Your Tongue, Movies Turn Dumb, by Jaffer Kolb

5.  Summer Lyrics, by Morgan Meis

6.  Gangbanging and Notions of the Self, by Husain Naqvi

7.  Benjamin Britten, by Peter Nicholson

8.  Rage, by Jedediah Palmer

9.  Betting on Uncertainty, by Abhay Parekh

10. The War on Cancer, by Azra Raza

11. Stevinus, Galileo, and Thought Experiments, by S. Abbas Raza

12. Optimism of the Will, by S. Asad Raza

13. Through a Pixelated Eye, by Sughra Raza

14. Early Modern Primitives, by Justin E. H. Smith

15. The Life and Times of Fridtjof Nansen, by Ker Than

16. George Orwell Hated Torture and Lies, Mr. Hitchens, by J. M. Tyree

17. Bandung and the Birth of the Third World, by Robin Varghese

If you like what we do, we need your help: please help us be better known this upcoming year in whatever way you can. Link to us, email your friends, vote for us for web awards, tell your family about us! And most of all, stay in touch: each of us has our email addresses listed on our “About Us” page. Write to us, and let us know what you like and what you don’t. And leave comments! We really need your feedback…

We at 3QD thank you for your liking, and sincerely wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Kathryn Schulz in The Nation:

… while genetics has spawned a robust watchdog industry, complete with academic departments, annual conferences and dedicated funding, neuroscience currently receives far less scrutiny.

Ultimately, though, neuroscience may raise even more troubling ethical issues, for the simple reason that it is easier to predict and control behavior by manipulating neurons than by manipulating genes. Even if all ethical and practical constraints on altering our DNA vanished tomorrow, we’d have to wait for years (or decades) to see the outcome of genetic experiments–and all the while environmental factors would confound our tinkering. Intervening on the brain, by contrast, can produce startlingly rapid results, as anyone knows who has ever downed too many margaritas or, for that matter, too many chocolate-covered coffee beans.

More here.

From Stats:

STATS is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to improving public understanding of science and statistics . Each December STATS issues a list of scientific studies that were mishandled by the media during the preceding year. This year’s “Dubious Data Awards” detailing the worst examples of shoddy science reporting go to:

7. Media Gorge on Obesity! – The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report suggesting that a little extra weight may not always be dangerous – which the media trumpeted as proof that the “food police” were dieting us to death. But some of the results were statistically insignificant, and even the CDC didn’t claim they were conclusive.

6. Toothpaste Terror! – After American researchers found that an antibacterial substance found in toothpaste can produce chloroform, the British press published panicky reports that warned of “depression, liver problems and… cancer.” After supermarkets in England began taking toothpaste off their shelves, the American Dental Association pointed out that the effect occurred only in experimental conditions that placed pure forms of the chemical in very hot and heavily chlorinated water – not the way most people brush their teeth.

More here.

Charles Elliott reviews The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord, in Literary Review:

Around two thousand years ago, a Greek doctor named Dioscorides described a plant that he considered to be medically useful. It was called ‘crocodilium’, he said, and it was supposed to help people who were splenetic. When boiled and drunk, it ’causes copious bleeding at the nose’. Other characteristics, apart from the shape of its roots and seeds, and the fact that it grew in ‘wooded places’, were unfortunately obscure.

What exactly was crocodilium? And why should anyone care? As Anna Pavord splendidly makes plain in this elegant and scholarly history of taxonomy, a science usually regarded as even dismaller than economics, such questions are far from insignificant. Exactly which plant is which, and what its relationship is to other plants, are matters central to our understanding of the world we live in. Crocodilium is a case in point, though on the whole a depressing one. The confusion surrounding it, as with so many of the plants mentioned by Dioscorides, lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years. Even when the sixteenth-century Italian botanist Luca Ghini finally managed to pin it down as being most likely a species of Eryngium (at the same time apologising for not drinking an infusion to see whether it really did make his nose bleed), he was taking only a modest step out of the chaos.

More here.

T. A. Frank in The New Republic:

The outposts of tyranny have enjoyed a tranquil holiday season, with a number expressing excitement for the new year and a few offering enthusiasm for Christmas. (Hanukkah received limited attention.) Even during the holidays, however, the patterns of daily life were able to continue: Americans were denounced, heads of state were feted, and landslide reelections were prepared. All in all, a time for rest and contemplation, as outpost leaders work to ensure that 2006 (barring violent uprising, economic meltdown, or war) will be exactly the same as 2005.

Country-by-country report here.

From Ego:

“The knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton has never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.” – Aldous Huxley

Myth #1: Aging is natural and so we shouldn’t fight it: First of all, aging is not universal. A number of complex species such as lobsters, rockfishes, some tortoises, etc. do not appear to age. Therefore, aging is not a prerequisite to life. Aging is neither inevitable nor universal. Secondly, humankind is, in a sense, a struggle against nature. We have antibiotics and vaccines because we don’t want to be sick, which would be the natural outcome for many of us. If we were to follow Nature’s will, many of us wouldn’t be here and wouldn’t be reading these lines, on a monitor, over the Internet.

Myth #2: What’s the point of extending life if we are old: This is a common misconception about research on the biology of aging. The ultimate goal of my work and that of many biogerontologists is to preserve health and life. Yet we aim not just to make elderly people live longer but to diminish, not extend, age-related debilitation (also see de Grey et al., 2002). What we want is to find ways to extend healthy life span by postponing disease and eventually eradicate all forms of age-related involution. In other words, to find a cure for aging, an intervention that permits us to avoid aging and all pathologies associated with it. Instead of improving the quality of life of the elderly, I want to avoid having elderly patients in the first place. People would still die from accidents, infectious diseases, etc. After all, children and teenagers die too even though they are not yet aged.

My calculations for a cure for aging yield an average longevity of 1,200 years. This is assuming one would be forever young in body and mind.

More here.

From MSNBC:

For female guppies, there’s more to life than making babies. A new study finds that guppies experience menopause just like humans and other animals. The study is the first demonstration of menopause in fish and raises the question of why some female animals live beyond their fertile years at all. It was previously thought that fish don’t experience menopause because they produce eggs throughout their entire lives. Birds and mammals, in contrast, have a finite number of eggs that they are born with.

Guppies typically reproduce about every 30 days and lay eggs approximately 20 times throughout their lives. The researchers found that as female guppies aged, they began to skip litters or even stop reproducing for extended periods of time, effectively ceasing to reproduce after a certain age. In other words, the guppies were going through a fish version of menopause.

More here.

From Salon (via Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance):

When we asked him what he was reading, he sighed and mentioned a book on the economic wars of the future, author and title unknown to me.

“Better to read ‘Don Quixote,'” I said to him. “Everything’s in there.” Now, the ‘Quixote’ is a book that is not read nearly as much as is claimed, although very few will admit to not having read it. With two or three quotes, Clinton showed that he knew it very well indeed. Responding, he asked us what our favorite books were. Styron said his was “Huckleberry Finn.”

I would have said “Oedipus Rex,” which has been my bed table book for the last 20 years, but I named “The Count of Monte Cristo,” mainly for reasons of technique, which I had some trouble explaining.

Clinton said his was the “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to “Absalom, Absalom,” Faulkner’s stellar novel, no question, although others would choose “Light in August” for purely personal reasons. Clinton, in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the table, recited from memory Benji’s monologue, the most thrilling passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from “The Sound and the Fury.”

More here.  In the comments to Sean’s post at Cosmic Variance, a reader says the following:

I once wrote President Clinton about the books that most influenced his growing up and as president. He wrote back and included a list of 21 books that he felt really had an impact on him. They included:

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
Lincoln by David Donald
One Hundred Years of Solitude by G.G. Marquez
Politics as a Vocation by Max Weber
The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quigley
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch
Living History by Hillary Clinton
The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilzations to the Eve of the 21st Century by David Fromkin
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes by Seamus Heaney
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Herois in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas Kempis
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics by Reinhold Niebuhr
Home to Catalonia by George Orwell
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats by W.B. Yeats

Thanks for sharing this list, Cameron!

From Kottke.org:

Banksy Hits New York’s Most Famous Museums. The installation of unauthorized art into some of the top museums in NYC.

Dot-Con Job. A Seattle Times investigation into InfoSpace, a high-flying dot com that bilked investors out of millions.

13 things that do not make sense. A list of open scientific questions.

Life on the Scales. About the quarter-power scaling laws.

More here.  And here are the runners up:

Bad to the Last Drop. On bottled water.

Why do McDonald’s customers order smaller Cokes at the drive-thru window?

Grim Meathook Future.

Not a Word. About intentional fake words in dictionaries.

Six Feet Under, 2001-2005

Being Poor

10 Reasons to Eat Local Food.

Redemption. The NY Yankees and redemption.

My Outsourced Life. A.J. Jacobs outsources his life to India.

More here.  [NOTE: the penultimate link is to an essay by Jed Palmer at 3QD!]

Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books:

In 2005 I heard that Coalition forces were camped in the ruins of Babylon. I heard that bulldozers had dug trenches through the site and cleared areas for helicopter landing pads and parking lots, that thousands of sandbags had been filled with dirt and archaeological fragments, that a 2600-year-old brick pavement had been crushed by tanks, and that the moulded bricks of dragons had been gouged out from the Ishtar Gate by soldiers collecting souvenirs. I heard that the ruins of the Sumerian cities of Umma, Umm al-Akareb, Larsa and Tello were completely destroyed and were now landscapes of craters.

I heard that the US was planning an embassy in Baghdad that would cost $1.5 billion, as expensive as the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, the proposed tallest building in the world.

I saw a headline in the Los Angeles Times that read: ‘After Levelling City, US Tries to Build Trust.’

I heard that military personnel were now carrying ‘talking point’ cards with phrases such as: ‘We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.’

I heard that 47 per cent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein helped plan 9/11 and 44 per cent believed that the hijackers were Iraqi; 61 per cent thought that Saddam had been a serious threat to the US and 76 per cent said the Iraqis were now better off.

Much more here.

Eric Reeves in The New Republic:

One reason is that there is no real international pressure on the architects of the genocide–the National Islamic Front security cabal in Khartoum–to bring the killing to a halt. On the contrary, as the genocide enters its fourth year, the international community continues to defer to Khartoum, or even to suggest disingenuously that the regime has somehow reformed itself. Either way, the clear implication is that the lives of Darfur’s civilians are not worth the diplomatic price of confronting Sudan’s brutal leaders.

There is no more appalling illustration of this phenomenon than recent announcements by the African Union and the Arab League that both groups will hold their upcoming summits in Khartoum. These summits will represent symbolic triumphs for Sudan’s genocidaires. And they will reinforce in very public fashion what Khartoum already knows: that none of its neighbors really cares what it does in Darfur.

More here.