Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

The assassination on Wednesday of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Federal Minister of Minorities, killed in broad daylight in Islamabad by four gunmen, is one of the most shameful acts of political violence committed by Pakistani extremists. That it comes just two months after the murder of Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab and one of the country’s leading liberal voices makes it all the more chilling. Yet the government and state’s reaction to the two killings has been even more shameful—raising the disturbing possibility that extremism is still being used by the security services in its efforts to oppose Western policies in the region.

The 40-year-old Bhatti was a Roman Catholic and the only Christian member of the cabinet of Prime Minister Yousf Reza Gailani. It was a death foretold. Taseer had been assassinated for his courageous struggle to amend Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which has been used to persecute minorities—a struggle to which Bhatti had also dedicated himself. Bhatti made a videotape some months ago that he wanted released to the BBC if he was killed. In it he said he would carry on the campaign to amend the blasphemy law.

“I will prefer to die for the cause [of defending] the rights of my community rather than to compromise on my principles,” Bhatti said in the tape. “The forces of violence, militants, banned organizations, Taliban and al-Qaeda, want to impose their radical philosophy in Pakistan and whosoever stands against it, they threaten him.”

More here.

Daniel Picker on Seamus Heaney, in The Oxonian Review:

This past August, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Justin Kaplan asked me, “What was it like to study with Seamus Heaney?” I fell silent for a bit, just as I often did around Heaney. Even now, it remains a difficult question to answer.

I first met Seamus Heaney in January in Warren House, the graduate English office at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was about 22 years old.

I recall hearing him speak to the gathered crowd of students with his distinctive Irish accent. “I will be teaching two poetry writing classes: RBR and SBR. If you are interested, you should submit a manuscript of poems.” I very clearly recall first hearing him say, “RBR and SBR” (the course identification codes). With his accent, those letters sounded sort of thick and rubbery. He probably specified how many poems we should submit, perhaps around five.

In a brief letter of introduction I included with my poems, I’m sure I mentioned that, “I met with William Alfred, and he had read my poems.” Alfred suggested I mention his name in my letter. I had told Alfred in one of our informal conversations in his parlor at his house on Athens Street, “My mother’s maiden name is Haney.”

Alfred said, “Put that in your letter to Heaney, too.”

Over at Mother Jones:

A Harvard business prof and a behavioral economist recently asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth is distributed in the United States. Most thought that it’s more balanced than it actually is. Asked to choose their ideal distribution of wealth, 92% picked one that was even more equitable.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Frank Ramsey, who died aged 26, made important contributions to philosophy, economics and mathematics. In this episode of Philosophy Bites Hugh Mellor discusses Ramsey's approach to truth.

Listen to Hugh Mellor on Frank Ramsey on Truth

Listen to 'Better than the Stars' (a radio programme Hugh Mellor made in 1978 about Frank Ramsey and which includes interviews with A.J.Ayer and Richard Braithwaite. Transcript also provided).

From The Telegraph:

From Smithsonian:

Paul Gauguin did not lack for confidence. “I am a great artist, and I know it,” he boasted in a letter in 1892 to his wife. He said much the same thing to friends, his dealers and the public, often describing his work as even better than what had come before. In light of the history of modern art, his confidence was justified.

A painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist and writer, Gauguin stands today as one of the giants of Post-Impressionism and a pioneer of Modernism. He was also a great storyteller, creating narratives in every medium he touched. Some of his tales were true, others near-fabrications. Even the lush Tahitian masterpieces for which he is best known reflect an exotic paradise more imaginary than real. The fables Gauguin spun were meant to promote himself and his art, an intention that was more successful with the man than his work; he was well known during his lifetime, but his paintings sold poorly. “Gauguin created his own persona and established his own myth as to what kind of a man he was,” says Nicholas Serota, the director of London’s Tate, whose exhibition, “Gauguin: Maker of Myth,” traveled last month to Washington’s National Gallery of Art (until June 5). “Gauguin had the genuine sense that he had artistic greatness,” says Belinda Thomson, curator of the Tate Modern’s exhibition. “But he also plays games, so you are not sure whether you can take him literally.”

More here.

Uluru was built up during the creation period by two boys who played in the mud after rain. When they had finished their game they travelled south to Wiputa … Fighting together, the two boys made their way to the table topped Mount Conner, on top of which their bodies are preserved as boulders.
………………………………………………………………….. –Australian Aborginal Legend

Uluru/Ayers Rock

old Mr Uluru
a proud man
the day the Rock
was handed back
sits waiting

old Mr Walkabout
a proud man
at the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the
hand back
sits waiting

in the Red Rock tavern
the old men sit
waiting

yous wanna beer
the barman yells

he comes over
whatcha waiting for

the old men stare out
over their Country
waiting

waiting
for recognition
as Traditional Owners

more than just
a few days
in their life time.

by Ali Cobby Eckermann
publisher: PIW, 2011

From NPR:

In 1960, there were 400,000 lions living in the wild. Today, there are just 20,000.

“That represents a 90 to 95 percent decline,” says National Geographic explorer-in-residence Dereck Joubert. “Unless we start talking about this, these lions will be extinct within the next 10 or 15 years.”

Joubert and his wife, Beverly, have lived among populations of big wild cats for decades. Based in Botswana, the filmmakers and conservationists have spent much of their career documenting Africa's animal population for National Geographic. In their latest documentary project, The Last Lions, the Jouberts follow the dwindling lion population living in Botswana's Okavango Delta as they battle their prey — the buffalo — as well as rival prides.

“Marauding lions [come] in from the outside into their territory and fight with them,” says Dereck Joubert. “These territorial battles are dramatic and often end up in death one way or another.”

But obtaining dramatic footage of lions battling each other in the murky, swamplike Okavango Delta is not easy, even for seasoned documentarians like the Jouberts. They followed lions across river systems, pushing their car into chest-height water while driving — and they often had a front-row seat to heated attacks.

More here.

Veteran diplomat Ilan Baruch quits, says he can no longer represent government; Israel's foreign policy is 'wrong,' he says, adds that blaming global anti-occupation views on anti-Semitism is 'simplistic, artificial'.

From Ynet News:

A veteran diplomat says he has resigned from his post because he had a hard time defending the policies of Israel's current government, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Wednesday.

Ilan Baruch says he quit because “Israel's foreign policy is wrong,” pointing to the Palestinian issue.

Should this trend continue, he warned, Israel will turn into a pariah state and face growing de-legitimization.

Baruch told Israel TV Wednesday that Israel's standing was in danger because of its policies, which he said were “difficult to explain.”

“I can no longer honestly represent this government,” he said earlier. “As (Foreign Minister) Lieberman was elected by a large public in a legitimate manner, I cannot question him – but I don't have to serve him, and therefore I'm quitting.”

More here.

Fasih Ahmed in Newsweek Pakistan:

“Shahbaz, from your blood revolution will come!” Thus the protesters outside the Lahore Press Club some four hours after the assassination on Wednesday of Shahbaz Bhatti, federal minister for minorities. If this scant, disorganized protest—some clutching umbrellas, others holding up blood red crucifixes as irate motorists splashed by—is any indication, this crowd is more likely to be at the wrong end of any revolution here in Pakistan.

Despite the widely known threats to his life, which started in 2009 after Pakistani Christians were massacred in the small Punjab town of Gojra, Bhatti was not traveling with his security detail when he was attacked. Like Salmaan Taseer, the governor of the Punjab who was assassinated barely two months earlier, also in Islamabad, Bhatti was slain in an audaciously public manner. Bhatti, 42, had just left his mother's house for a cabinet meeting when a white Suzuki Mehran stopped his black Corolla. Wajid Durrani, inspector-general of capital police, says three men stepped out and opened fire. Bhatti was shot 30 times, according to the autopsy, including in the head. His driver survived the attack.

“Bhatti's ruthless and cold-blooded murder is a grave setback for the struggle for tolerance, pluralism and respect for human rights in Pakistan,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, country representative for Human Rights Watch. “An urgent and meaningful policy shift on the appeasement of extremists that is supported by the military, the judiciary and the political class needs to replace the political cowardice and institutional myopia that encourages such continued appeasement despite its unrelenting bloody consequences.”

More here.

Shortly after midnight in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, after having delivered a victory speech celebrating the results of the Democratic primary in California in which he had defeated Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy was shot three times, once in the head, by Sirhan Sirhan in a service area of the Ambassador Hotel. He was rushed to a hospital, where he underwent surgery; all night and throughout the next day and much of the next night his life hung in the balance; my wife and I remember staring numbly and futilely at the small black-and-white TV in our student apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts as the endless hours dragged by. Eventually a spokesman appeared and announced that Kennedy was dead. Barely two months earlier Martin Luther King, Jr. had been murdered in Memphis, and a short time after that Andy Warhol, of all people, had been shot and gravely wounded as well. And of course Robert Kennedy’s brother, JFK, had been assassinated in Dallas in 1963. In Vietnam the war showed not the least sign of abating. Anyone in my generation who wanted to believe that there was hope for an American future worth having would have a hard time finding the terms in which to express that hope after the events of 1968.

more from Michael Fried at nonsite.org here.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cézanne on twentieth-century art. He’s the modern Giotto, someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed. Matisse called Cézanne “a sort of God”; Picasso said he was “the father of us all.” Max Beckmann called him “the last old master … the first new master.” He’s also an artist who can be hard to come to terms with: Great art often looks ugly when first seen, and Cézanne’s is an extreme case, so much so that his work can still vex. His optical disequilibrium made peers dubious, friends skeptical, and critics jeer. Twelve stunning Cézanne canvases are now up at the Metropolitan, in a teensy show centered on three of his five Card Players paintings. They’re fantastic, even if they’re not my favorite Cézannes—those would be the bathers, still lifes, and landscapes—and they precisely mark a turning point in the history of art. These quietly grand insurrectionary works were made around Aix-en-Provence in the 1890s, when Cézanne was in his fifties and growing sickly. He had, by then, been virtually abandoned by increasingly successful Impressionist colleagues, who felt that the public ridicule his work attracted reflected poorly on their group exhibition. (In his time, he was attacked far more than Van Gogh was.)

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Dump.fm (http://dump.fm) is a chatroom in which images, primarily in jpeg, png, bmp, and gif formats, text, and animated gifs are posted in real time by registered users. It was created by Ryder Ripps, Tim Baker and Scott Ostler and became available to the general public in 2010. Users range in age from their teens to their forties with a majority being in their twenties. They use pseudonyms like hypothete, noisia, timb, mirroring and frakbuddy. These and such dumpers as tommoody, frankhats, mrkor, ryder, jeanette, minty and zoesaldano, among many others, produce images and animated gifs that are worthy of the imprimatur of Art. The problem is that for all the radical, chic talk about it since the 1960s, the art establishment does not know how to deal with the actual dematerialization of the art object represented by this unfetishizable medium. Dump.fm is a digital version of the old Surrealist genre of the exquisite corpse, a “show and tell” for the polymorphously perverse. The art of dump.fm is genuinely interactive. Social relations are inherent to the entire art making process for these artists, rather than just getting tagged on when a conventional, art world artist begrudgingly begins the promotional stage for their work. The creators of dump.fm have allowed users to post images by pasting URLs into a box or uploading them from users’ computers. There is a convenient interface that allows users to post stills from webcams that dump.fm users often modify. The text is usually chatty and has an insider feel to it. Long time users appear to have developed genuine friendships. However, as long as you can keep up and communicate something using the visual grammar and syntax that lies behind the at times seemingly random flow of images you can join the fun.

more from Eric Gelber at artcritical here.

From The Independent:

The back cover of the journalist Leo Benedictus's debut is emblazoned with details of a gimmicky publicity campaign. Or is it? That this is actually part of the novel is only one of the feats of trickery that Benedictus pulls off in this shockingly accomplished novel. Even the dedication turns out to be part of the same achingly smart metafictional joke. Novels within novels are often Pandora's boxes of complexity, and nowhere more than here. The story kicks off with an email to a literary agent, Val, from a writer, William, wanting to get his debut novel published. The first chapter of William's novel follows, plunging the reader into William's fearlessly funny prose. In it, a dweeby red-top sub editor, Michael, takes refuge in the loos at the exclusive party in London to celebrate the birthday of Hugo, a reclusive film star. Michael is a timid soul. He would rather have stayed in his taxi and be subjected to the cabbie's stories than brave the party, and within the social setting sees himself as “a sterile node. Humanity's appendix.” Having not been personally invited, he knows that he doesn't fit in with the glamorous throng, which includes Hugo's coke-snarfing model wife, Mellody, and the callow but puppyish X-Factor reject Calvin, whose beauty is buying him teeny adoration and commercial success. William emails Val with more chapters as he writes them. The novel's important events unfurl at the titular afterparty, where the unbridled entertainment of the earlier chapters darkens. But that tale, compellingly recounted as it is, isn't the only one. William's occasional tetchiness with Val hints that all is not well in his life, and, as with Andy Coulson or Alastair Campbell, the story manager becomes bigger than the story.

William's novel hums with astute comments on celebrity, and characters that pulse with life and depth, and are observed with delicious insight. Gormless Calvin wonders, for example, why Mellody's Pete Doherty-esque ex says, “Not tonight Josephine”, “in a voice like he was quoting someone”, and earnestly looks forward to releasing his own version of Chris de Burgh's “Lady in Red” – much to the jeering derision of the cool hipsters around him.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

British investigators, in a new study released on Wednesday, looked at the strange dynamics of choice in speed-dating, a fashionable way for singles to meet. Speed-daters race through a rota of one-on-one meetings, judging each person for suitability after a conversation of a few minutes that ends when a bell sounds. Assessing large numbers of candidates was not a problem in itself, the researchers found. In fact, many speed-daters found more potential partners when they were able to cast their net into a larger pool. But this advantage only worked when the available candidates were all broadly similar. When candidates were too dissimilar, speed-daters became confused by many conflicting factors — and often failed to choose anyone. “There are models of human 'rationality' which posit that variety is a good thing,” said researcher Alison Lenton at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “What will be surprising to some people is that our results suggest that increasing option variety leads to chooser confusion. People are more likely to choose no-one at all when faced with greater variety.”

The study, published in the British journal Biology Letters, tracked 1,868 female and 1,870 male participants at 84 commercial speed-dating events. Hopeful singles gave details of their occupation, education level, age, height, weight and religious affiliation, allowing researchers to gauge differences. The women's mean age was 34.3 years and men were aged 35.6. Twenty percent of women and 27 percent of men were in professional or managerial positions, and the remainder classified themselves as “skilled non-manual” or other occupations. Speed-daters met in groups and engaged in three-minute encounters with between 15 and 31 singles of the opposite sex. After the event, the organiser matched up individuals who indicated a mutual interest in each other, thus opening the way to a possible date. Big speed-dating events typically generated 123 such “proposals,” or shows of interest, when candidates were similar, the researchers found. But the number dropped by more than a quarter, to 88, when candidates were varied. Small speed-dating events would lead to 85 proposals when candidates were similar. But this fell by nearly a third, to 57 proposals, when candidates were varied. Men were generally keener than women in formulating a proposal — but were also likelier to be stumped by choice.

In short, variety is fine… but in manageable doses.

More here.

Octavio Paz
from Octavio Paz – The Collected Poems 1957-1987
Carcanet Press, 1987

Greg Waldmann in Open Letters Monthly:

“Let me propose,” writes the Palestinian academic and activist Sari Nusseibeh in What is a Palestinian State Worth?, “that Israel officially annex the occupied territories, and that Palestinians in the enlarged Israel agree that the state remain Jewish in return for being granted all the civil, though not the political, rights of citizenship.” It will seem startling that such an idea could come from the pen of an organizer of the first intifada, a former prisoner of the Israeli military, and a one-time representative of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. But Nusseibeh isn’t exactly endorsing this, not as a permanent solution. It is a provocation, one he hopes is “so objectionable that it might well generate its own annulment, either by making all parties see the need to find a tenable alternative or, if indeed adopted, by serving as a natural step toward a single democratic state.” The two-state solution has become stale in the imagination, and it is time, he says, to “think outside the box,” to find another way forward. He wants Israelis and Palestinians to prepare to live together because he believes the dream of two peaceful states living side by side is probably dead. Few people have more authority to issue that judgment.

More here.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Huffington Post:

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades — against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News — fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into Canada after all! The reason: Canada regulators announced last week they would reject efforts by Canada's right wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to repeal a law that forbids lying on broadcast news.

Canada's Radio Act requires that “a licenser may not broadcast….any false or misleading news.” The provision has kept Fox News and right wing talk radio out of Canada and helped make Canada a model for liberal democracy and freedom. As a result of that law, Canadians enjoy high quality news coverage including the kind of foreign affairs and investigative journalism that flourished in this country before Ronald Reagan abolished the “Fairness Doctrine” in 1987. Political dialogue in Canada is marked by civility, modesty, honesty, collegiality, and idealism that have pretty much disappeared on the U.S. airwaves. When Stephen Harper moved to abolish anti-lying provision of the Radio Act, Canadians rose up to oppose him fearing that their tradition of honest non partisan news would be replaced by the toxic, overtly partisan, biased and dishonest news coverage familiar to American citizens who listen to Fox News and talk radio.

More here.