Sam Smith in Harper's Magazine:

All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity.

Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.

It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.

The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely.

More here.

Udi Aloni in Haaretz:

Philosopher, professor and author Judith Butler arrived in Israel this month, en route to the West Bank, where she was to give a seminar at Bir Zeit University, visit the theater in Jenin, and meet privately with friends and students. A leading light in her field, Butler chose not to visit any academic institutions in Israel itself. In the conversation below, conducted in New York several months ago, Butler talks about gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and how Jewish values drove her to criticize the actions of the State of Israel.

In Israel, people know you well. Your name was even in the popular film Ha-Buah [The Bubble – the tragic tale of a gay relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim].

[laughs] Although I disagreed with the use of my name in that context. I mean, it was very funny to say, “don't Judith Butler me,” but “to Judith Butler someone” meant to say something very negative about men and to identify with a form of feminism that was against men. And I've never been identified with that form of feminism. That?s not my mode. I'm not known for that. So it seems like it was confusing me with a radical feminist view that one would associate with Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin, a completely different feminist modality. I'm not always calling into question who's a man and who's not, and am I a man? Maybe I'm a man. [laughs] Call me a man. I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.

More here.

Dear friends, your mission is truly noble. For years you have been sharing the hope of understanding and cooperation, tolerance and readiness for listening and understanding others. You are building dialogue bridges between young generations of writers in the region and replacing hate with hope. Hope that we are able to live together in harmony. Sarajevo Notebooks are the lighthouse for the region and for Europe. They are bringing back the same Olympic spirit that died on blood stained Sarajevo streets some years ago. Rest reassured that in Brussels we admire your work, your sincere fight for a better world out there, in your region, in my region. One should believe in one’s own abilities, in one’s own strengths, in one’s own future. One should believe that borders, be they on the ground, in the air or sea, or, even more importantly, in our heads, can fall. The process of European integration is exactly the process in which the borders are falling, slowly but steadily, especially those in our heads. Let me finish by saying that I am proud of the role my country is playing in supporting Sarajevo Notebooks. For being open to promote this initiative for a better future in our region. Sarajevo Notebooks are strengthening the beating of our fragile Balkan European heart. It echoes loud and far.

more from Janez Potocnik at Eurozine here.

For the past several months, my home page has been James Maliszewski’s blog Grognardia. Though it’s nominally about “the history and traditions of the hobby of role-playing” — Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk — it’s also an invigorating meditation on aesthetics. Maliszewski is an adherent of the “old school” movement, which favors flexible, elegant gaming systems (the original D&D, circa 1974, a.k.a. OD&D, published in “little brown books”) to those that pile on so many supplementary rules and tables that they begin to feel restrictive rather than prescriptive. How many rules — how many words — do you need to create a world? The same question could be asked of literature. Indeed, a session of a role-playing game, or RPG, with its emphasis on character and absence of winning or losing, often resembles a story, collaboratively generated by the players. Reading Maliszewski’s lucid writing — on vintage RPGs, unearthed Gygaxia, the literary DNA of D&D, and contemporary system-philosophy brouhahas — is both a kick of nerdy nostalgia and a satisfying take on what it all means, even if you’re someone (like me) who hasn’t rolled a 12-sided die in ages.

more from Ed Park at the LAT here.

One day, apparently before the rise of Google Book Search, Marilyn Johnson made an odd request at the New York Public Library. She needed to find the symptoms of an imaginary illness called “information sickness,” which she recollected from a 1981 novel by Ted Mooney, “Easy Travel to Other Planets.” She couldn’t find her own copy, so a team of librarians went spelunking in the stacks, wearing miner’s helmets, as Johnson tells it. They surfaced with a copy preserved, strangely enough, on micro­film, and soon Johnson was reading the dimly remembered passage in which a woman keels over, blood gushing from her nose and ears as she raves about disconnected facts. When the woman recovers from her fugue state, she says: “I was dazzled. I couldn’t tell where one thing left off and the next began.” If Johnson herself displays symptoms of information sickness, she has a glorious form of the disease. In “This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All,” she offers a lively parade of people and places, all related to library science, or sort of related. Johnson ushers us into the American Kennel Club Library and introduces us to the inevitable graying librarian in a boiled-wool jacket with a Scotty pin. She also teleports over to a Las Vegas “gentlemen’s club” called the Library, where ladies wearing spectacles (and not much more) slide their way down stripper poles. She peppers the book with lots of random instructions, like how to remove odor from an old Graham Greene paperback.

more from Pagan Kennedy at the NYT here.

Letting Go

I love the abandon
of abandoned things

the harmonium
surrendering
in a churchyard in
Aherlow,
the hearse resigned to
nettles
behind the pub in Carna,
the tin dancehall
possessed
by convolulus in
Kerry,
the living room that
hosts
a tree in south
Kilkenny.

I sense a rapture
in deserted things

washed-out circus
posters
derelict on gables,
lush forgotten sidings
of country railway
stations,
bat droppings
profligate
on pew and font and
lectern,
the wedding dress a
dog
has nosed from a
dustbin.

I love the openness
of things no longer
viable,
I sense their shameless
slow unbuttoning:
the implicit nakedness
there for the taking,
the surrender to the
dance
of breaking and
creating.

by Michael Cody

from Oven Lane;
The Gallery Press, Oldcastle, 1987

From The Guardian:

During the 1980s and early 90s, Hanif Kureishi's screenplays, novels and plays made him not only a famous writer but a talismanic figure to young Asian Britons and metropolitan liberals of anti-Thatcherite stamp. Like Philip Roth, with whom he was friendly, he served as a glamorously provocative pin-up to second and third-generation immigrants brought up to be unassuming and well behaved. In his screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and his novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), pop music, sex and cultural self-invention were lined up against Tory England and suburban self-denial, with little doubt about which side Kureishi favoured.

His novel The Black Album (1995) and the story “My Son the Fanatic”, which he adapted into a movie, also tackled the confluence of Islam and identity politics. By the late 90s, though, ageing, divorce and disillusionment were increasingly becoming his stock in trade. Patrice Chéreau's film Intimacy (2001), adapted from Kureishi's writings, distils some of the key ingredients of the later, sadder work: forlorn drug-taking, affectless extra-marital sex, grimy London locations.

More here.

Craig Seligman in The New York Times:

In the annals of injustice, as The New Yorker might phrase it, the obscurity into which St. Clair McKelway has fallen amounts to a literary crime. His writing for the magazine rivaled that of his far better-remembered colleagues, Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, both of whose careers he was instrumental in promoting. From 1936 to 1939, he served as The New Yorker’s managing editor in charge of fact (as opposed to fiction) pieces. During those crucial years he played a major role in solidifying the magazine’s non­fiction style — “the choreography,” as Ben Yagoda describes it in “About Town,” his history of The New Yorker, “of the extraordinary number of facts the writer had collected.” Today he’s all but forgotten.

I remember him, though, because I knew him — briefly. In 1978 The New Yorker hired me as a typist; it was my first job out of school. Since the typing pool wasn’t overburdened with work, occasionally some of us would be lent out for odd jobs. One summer day I was informed that Mr. McKelway had turned up and needed baby-sitting. (I’m not sure that was the word used, but it was clearly the meaning.) So we settled in an empty office and I took dictation for a memoir about his stint in the early ’30s as editor of The Bangkok Daily Mail. (I still have the eight pages I typed up, headlined “A Reporter at Youth’s Goal.”) Mostly, though, we just sat around and smoked, and I listened to him talk. I’d been given to understand that he was kind of crazy, and I was supposed to keep him out of the halls, where Maeve Brennan, one of his five ex-wives (and another New Yorker writer with a storied past), was wandering around in a state even battier than his. I knew I was in the presence of a legend, but the place was crawling with legends. It would be years before I read him and finally grasped what made him one.

More here.

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

Antonyms, of course, are pairs of words that have meanings opposite to each other. Autoantonyms, in turn, are single words that themselves can mean either one thing or its opposite. This can happen either by convergence –e.g., the English verb 'to cleave' comes from two separate but similar Anglo-Saxon verbs, and today can mean either 'to separate' or 'to latch on'– or it can happen through a cleavage, so to speak, within a single lexical item– thus 'to dust' means either to remove the dust from something or to cover something, perhaps that very thing, with dust or a dust-like substance. You might think that autoantonyms of the latter sort are rare birds in the dictionary, but in fact they are all over the place, particularly when the opposition between motion and rest is in question. Thus the adjective 'fast' means both 'swift with respect to motion' and 'bolted down', i.e., 'motionless'. A little reflection will also convince you that most prepositions are capable of autoantonymy. This in fact may have happened to you already: when confronted by a well-intentioned fund-raiser in the street, who tells you that she is raising money 'for breast cancer', does a little part of you not wish to reply: 'Sorry, no, I'm against breast cancer'?

More here.

[Thanks to Basit Qari. Seeing this video yesterday promted me to contact an old favorite chemistry professor of mine after more than 20 years. I exchanged some emails with her, and am happy to report that she is still working at Johns Hopkins University at age 81!]

Micheál Martin, the foreign minister of Ireland, in the New York Times:

Last week I visited Gaza, the first European Union foreign minister to do so in over a year. My purpose was very much a humanitarian one, to see for myself the impact of a blockade that has now been imposed on the people of Gaza for some two-and-a-half years and to meet with the courageous and dedicated staff of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), including its director of operations, Irishman John Ging. They play an indispensable role in maintaining vital humanitarian services to the people of Gaza.

From my arrival in Gaza, the deprivations and hardships resulting from the blockade were all too evident. Visiting an UNRWA food distribution center, I could see for myself the despair and suffering etched in the faces of those who queued for the most basic rations of rice, milk powder and sunflower oil. Eighty percent of the population of Gaza now lives below the poverty line and UNRWA is encountering increasing levels of abject poverty where people basically do not have enough food, even with their meager food allocations, to live.

The tragedy of Gaza is that it is fast in danger of becoming a tolerated humanitarian crisis, a situation that most right-thinking people recognize as utterly unacceptable in this day and age but which is proving extremely difficult to remedy or ameliorate due to the blockade and the wider ramifications of efforts to try and achieve political progress in the Middle East.

More here.

NOTE: The scientist who made this discovery, Jeff Wilson, will be writing about it himself here on 3QD on Monday.

Christpher Joyce at National Public Radio:

Scientists have discovered a macabre death scene that took place 67 million years ago. The setting was a nest, in which a baby dinosaur had just hatched from an egg, only to face an 11-foot-long snake waiting to devour it.

The moment was frozen forever when, apparently, the nest was buried in a sudden avalanche of mud or sand and everything was fossilized.

The discovery was made by Jeffrey Wilson, a professor at the University of Michigan. He had heard about the amazing fields of dinosaur eggs discovered in India.

Wilson visited a scientist in India who showed him a broken, fossilized egg encased in a briefcase-sized block of stone. He leaned in to take a closer look and saw something else.

“I was stunned when I saw it,” Wilson says, “because, sort of leaping out at me, were the peculiar articulations between the vertebrae of a snake, and so I had no idea that there would be a snake there but there it was sitting in front of me.”

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein over at her new blog Focal Point:

Jonah Lehrer argues in the New York Times Magazine that depression might be good for us. He's popularizing a theory advanced by two Virginia researchers who claim that depression is an adaptive mechanism that compels us to withdraw from the world and focus intently on our problems.

The fact that depression is so common strikes him as an evolutionary paradox. About 7 percent of adults will experience some depression in any given year, according to Lehrer's statistics. We know that at least some kinds depression have a heritable component, i.e., that genes help explain why depression strikes some and not others. At first glance, depression seems obviously detrimental to fitness. Every classic symptom seems to hurt a sufferer's chances of passing on her genes: Depression saps productivity and decreases mental accuity. Depressed people lose interest in food, socializing, and even sex. Depressed parents may struggle to care for their children. Hardly a recipe for fitness. So, why did such terrible genes persist?

But Lehrer thinks he sees a silver lining:

The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.

Lehrer is arguing for an evolutionary take on the so-called analytical rumination model of depression.

Holding Rosa

The body does not long to be unencumbered.
The arm wants a child to hold away
from the boiling pot. I miss it: their fury
strident as junior paramilitaries,
their extravagant grievances, their
bottomless sleep.
Mostly I miss their small bodies,
sweet as summer ices, as berries.

We can be parted from the sea and live.
It is like overcoming a stammer, or a tick.
By daily teaching the body new habits,
planets are persuaded out of orbit.

In seconds it is all undone. Holding Rosa
in a Dublin hotel is going to sleep
in a house on the shore and waking up
to the same sound. The magnetic dock
of child to hip, earth to moon, time stolen.

by Mary O'Malley

from A Perfect V
publisher: Carcanet, Manchester, 2006

From The Boston Globe:

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close. But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.

Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.

These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.

More here.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

That great woman of letters Mary McCarthy once described playful, intricately structured novels — like Nabokov's “Pale Fire” and Felipe Alfau's “Locos” — as her “fatal type.” She couldn't resist them. “Hocus Bogus” would have left her swooning, faint with palpitations, madly in love.

Beautifully produced by Yale University Press, the book is the perfect length — just under 200 pages. Roughly the size of a trade paperback, it fits nicely in the hand. The black matte-finished dust jacket catches the eye with its cover image of a man's face, half in shadow, half outlined in spooky white, like an old-style photographic negative. The sturdy binding opens easily without cracking; the paper is a faint cream and thick enough to avoid see-through; and the page layout is airy, with good margins. Even the chapters are invitingly short.

Most important of all, the award-winning translator — Princeton professor David Bellos — provides not only a wonderful English version of “Pseudo,” as the book is called in French, but also a brief introduction that one should under no circumstances skip: It provides the essential context for this elaborate jeu d'esprit. Even more detail can then be found in the appended “Life and Death of Émile Ajar,” a confessional essay translated by the brilliant Barbara Wright.

More here.

If you voted for Barack and realized that he alone would not magically transform America into a better country for its own citizens and for the world, if you knew that your work and support of Barack during his campaign should not end on the day he is elected, and if you really want the changes that you know we need, do something.

Shadi Hamid and Steven Brooke in Policy Review:

Despite occasionally paying lip service to the idea, few politicians on either the left or right appear committed to supporting democratic reform as a central component of American policy in the [Middle East] region. Who can really blame them, given that democracy promotion has become toxic to a public with little patience left for various “missions” abroad? But as the Obama administration struggles to renew ties with the Muslim world, particularly in light of the June 2009 Cairo speech, it should resist the urge to abandon its predecessor’s focus on promoting democracy in what remains the most undemocratic region in the world.

Promoting democratic reform, this time not just with rhetoric but with action, should be given higher priority in the current administration, even though early indications suggest the opposite may be happening. Despite all its bad press, democracy promotion remains, in the long run, the most effective way to undermine terrorism and political violence in the Middle East. This is not a very popular argument. Indeed, a key feature of the post-Bush debate over democratization is an insistence on separating support for democracy from any explicit national security rationale. This, however, would be a mistake with troubling consequences for American foreign policy.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette? I tremble to report that this wonderfully creepy possibility may be true.

The human body is, to some extent, just a luxury cruise liner for microbes. They board the SS Homo sapiens when we’re born and settle into their assigned quarters–the skin, the tongue, the nostrils, the throat, the stomach, the genitals, the gut–and then we carry them wherever we go. Some of microbes deboard when we shed our skin or use the restroom; others board at new ports when we shake someone’s hand or down a spoonful of yogurt. Just as on a luxury cruise liner, our passengers eat well. They feed on the food we eat, or on the compounds we produce. While the biggest luxury lines may be able to carry a few thousand people, we can handle many more passengers. Although the total mass of our microbes is just a few pounds, the tiny size of their cells means that we each carry about 100 trillion microbes–outnumbering our own cells by more than ten to one.

More here.

Aroosa Masroor in Dawn:

Pakistani H. M. Naqvi’s debut novel, Home Boy, launched in the US in August 2009 has caught the attention of readers and critics in Pakistan and the US, with glowing reviews in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and USA Today and a flurry of interviews and reviews in the Pakistani media. The novel is set in New York following the 9/11 attacks that changed the lives of Pakistani immigrants, but at the same time the author has shared experiences from his hometown Karachi, thus giving a voice to people of both metropolises. On the occasion of the official Pakistani launch of his novel at the Indus Valley School of Arts & Architecture in Karachi on March 5, Naqvi chats with Dawn.com

Q. You represented Pakistan in the National Poetry Slam in the US in 1995. Share your favourite line/s of verse with us.

“I carnivore/I eat meat.”

More here. And a bonus video: