Michael Crowley in The New Republic:

On August 26, 2008, Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, touched down for a secret meeting on an aircraft carrier stationed in the Indian Ocean. The topic: Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The summit had been arranged the previous month. Mullen had grown anxious about the rising danger from Pakistan’s tribal areas, which Islamic militants were using as a base from which to strike American troops in Afghanistan and to plot terrorist attacks against the United States. He flew to Islamabad to see the country’s army chief of staff, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Kayani is Pakistan’s most important general, commanding its 550,000-man army. By some accounts, he is also the ultimate source of power in a militarized society that reveres its generals more than its politicians. Mullen had been blunt with Kayani: The United States needed Pakistan’s army to take on the militants flourishing along the border, he said. The days of Pakistan looking the other way–cutting deals and playing double games with the radicals–had to end.

It was hardly a painless request; the Pakistani military is organized for warfare against its arch-nemesis India, and many of its mid-level officers are sympathetic to the Taliban and, at best, wary of the United States.

More here.

Joseph Stiglitz on financial regulation reform, in the FT (registration required):

[E]ach country looks at each proposal and assesses how it affects the competitiveness of its financial system; the objective too often is to find a regulatory regime that crimps competitors more than one’s own companies. As the saying goes, all politics is local, and, at least in the US and many other jurisdictions, finance is a big political player. This, combined with deep philosophical differences – as remarkable as it may now seem, there are some that still believe in unfettered markets – mean the only agreements that are easy to come by are those involving the least common denominator, or small countries not at the table; and even these victories are often hard fought, as evidenced by the struggle to deal with tax havens.

Given the difficulties in achieving global co-ordination, insisting on such co-ordination may be a recipe for paralysis – just what the bankers who don’t want regulations want. It is perhaps no surprise that they have become among the most vocal advocates of the need for global action.

Mark Blyth and Leonard Seabrooke provide some additional thoughts on the benefits of an unleveled playing field:

Readers may recall that in the 1970s and 1980s the Laffer Curve for taxes imagined a one-size-fits-all Goldilocks solution, where there was too hot, too cold and a sweet spot for taxes. Tax them too hot, they said, and the high-income earners will run. We seem to have a rerun of this argument today. Too light regulation and the national economy implodes. Too much regulation and the bankers run. Where then is the sweet spot that we today refer to as “right-sizing” finance with appropriate regulation?

In this regard Prof Stiglitz points to something fundamentally important: global solutions may not be the appropriate target for financial regulation. However, we would go further. Favouring national autonomy is superior to home regulation where big banks can throw their weight around and dictate terms to widely divergent national economies. While global regulations benefit global banks by enabling them to lower the costs of capital, it is far from clear that these regulations benefit the countries where these banks operate, given the volatility they can produce. Just as the Laffer Curve for taxes can’t explain why Danes, Germans and Americans are willing to pay different tax rates, so the idea of a Laffer Curve for Financial Regulation, with its presumed global sweet spot, is surely fallacious.

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber make the case:

Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow the persistence of erroneous beliefs. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all of these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and favor conclusions in support of which arguments can be found.

The claims the paper presents are not as disheartening as the abstract may suggest:

[T]he argumentative theory of reasoning..maintains that there is an asymmetry between the production of arguments, which involves an intrinsic bias in favour of the opinions or decisions of the arguer whatever their soundness, and the evaluation of arguments, which aims at differentiating good arguments from bad ones and thereby genuine information from misinformation. This asymmetry is often obscured in a debate situation (or in a situation where a debate is anticipated). People who have an opinion to defend don't really evaluate the arguments of their interlocutors in search for genuine information but rather consider them from the start as counter-arguments to be rebuked. Still, as shown by the evidence reviewed in section 2, people are good at assessing arguments, and are quite able to do so in an unbiased way, provided they don't have a particular axe to grind. In group reasoning experiments where participants share an interest in discovering the right answer, it has been shown that truth wins.

Amanda Marcotte and Lindsay Beyerstein debate Y Tu Mama Tambien. Amanda in Pandagon:

After I quit squelching my doubts about “American Beauty” and saw it for the bankrupt film it is—and was happy to see other critics and people I admire express those same doubts down the road (who doesn’t like validation?)—I got a little firmer in my opinions, a little braver about my own tastes. Which is why I humbly wish someone had reamed the crap out of “Y Tu Mama Tambien” on this list, since that’s the last movie I saw that I just absolutely hated and couldn’t believe that so many people were impressed by it. It’s probably the same issue as “American Beauty”—since it’s well shot and well acted and has all the markers of an arty film, it suckers people into ignoring that it has the same plot as “Love Story”. Except worse, in a way, because the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is not only interested in teaching young men to live life so she can expire with her purpose in life being filled, but she’s there to teach us something about men’s relationships with each other. In this case, the attempt to weasel out of a tedious, sexist cliche involves injecting some man-on-man action and having the men’s relationship with each other fall apart, but I was unimpressed, since the basic idea that cheeky women are there as muses and conduits for men, and that they have no reason to continue to exist having accomplished their assigned task, was central to the story.

Lindsay:

Onion AV writer Nathan Rabin coined the term to describe Kristen Dunst's character in a scathing review of Elizabethtown:

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

We feminists roll our eyes at the MPDG character for obvious reasons. It's an annoying form of objectification most commonly perpetrated by male writers who are smugly convinced of their own progressive sensibilities. They think they're better than the guys who leer at pinups, but the MPDG doesn't have any more depth. The MPDG is wish-fulfillment for all those nice guys out there who just want someone conventionally beautiful to see their inner beauty and appreciate their mix tapes. The writer doesn't want you to doubt that the guy totally deserves her–maybe not in the sense of being handsome, successful, or charming. But, see, those are bullshit social norms that are keeping our hero down, which is why he needs a crazy girl to truly appreciate him in ways that shallow cheerleaders cannot. Lazy writers think that if they make the girl a little daft, they can skip the part where they explain what she sees in him. She's whimsical, that's why!

Whatever else you can say about Y Tu Mama, and it's not a flawless movie by any means, Luisa is no MPDG.

Julia Felsenthal in Double X:

In his piece for the New York Times Book review on Just Kids, Patti Smith’s new memoir about her long-term relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Tom Carson writes:

Peculiarly or not, the one limitation of “Just Kids” is that Mapplethorpe himself, despite Smith’s valiant efforts, doesn’t come off as appealingly as she hopes he will. When he isn’t candidly on the make — “Hustler-hustler-hustler. I guess that’s what I’m about,” he tells her — his pretension and self-romanticizing can be tiresome.

Carson’s criticism is well-deserved. At first read, Smith’s memoir tells a pretty romantic story: Two 20-year-old dreamers arrive penniless in New York, find in each other kindred spirits, and build a life together in pursuit of art. The messy little details—like that Mapplethorpe turns out to be gay, or that he eventually dies of AIDS, or that their pennilessness forces them to steal, hustle, and compromise themselves in manifold ways—don’t really get in the way of Smith’s message: that this is a love affair for the ages. Smith is a seductive storyteller. She has at her disposal an enviable range of allusions and references. But her greatest asset as a writer is the clarity with which she sees herself and the people around her—a clarity that is compromised only by a gigantic, Robert Mapplethorpe-shaped blind spot.

How to Photograph the Heart

You remember how the lens squeezed
unimportant details into stillness:
the essential trail of rain down glass,
the plummet of autumn dead leaves,
your grandfather's last blink when
the breath moved on.
Your startled hands compressed
the shutter when you realized: this is it,
this is the last movement he will take
away from the silent fall of morphine,
beyond the soft gasp of the nurse,
past the sick, slow thud of your heart
moving in the luminous silence.

by Christine Klocek-Lim

from How to Photograph the Heart;
The Lives You Touch Publications, 2009

From Nathanielturner.com:

When Ralph Ellison’s impassioned, compelling novel Invisible Man was published in 1952, it won the National Book Award for fiction. Although Ellison himself was modest in his estimate of the novel’s durability, the book has shown every indication that it is on its way to becoming an American classic. In a poll of 200 writers, editors, and critics conducted by the New York Herald Tribune’s Book Week magazine in 1965, Invisible Man was voted the most distinguished novel published in the twenty years since 1945. In Invisible Man Ellison constructed, from the fabric of his own background as a Negro, a nightmarish story of the brutal experience endured by a young American black man and their effect on his once naively idealistic psyche. Despite its theme, the book transcends the bounds of a traditional Negro novel. “This is not another journey to the end of the night,” Wright Morris once wrote of Invisible Man. “With this book the author maps a course from the underground world into the light. The Invisible Man belongs on the shelf with the classical efforts man has made to chart the river Lethe from its mouth to its source.” Ellison has also published Shadow and Act (1964)

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on March 1, 1914 to Lewis Alfred and Ida (Millsap) Ellison. His father, a construction worker and tradesman, died when Ellison was three, and his mother supported herself and her son by working as a domestic. From an early age Ellison was interested in music and books, and his mother brought home for him from the households where she labored discarded phonograph records and magazines. Growing up in Oklahoma City, Ellison knew Hot Lips page, the jazz musician, and he was a friend . . . of Jimmy Rushing, the blues singer. In high school, he played trumpet in the band.

Ellison began reading Hemingway in adolescence, and later he became interested in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. “At first I was puzzled when I began to read Ernest Hemingway . . . as to just why his stories could move me but I couldn’t reduce them to a logical system. . . .” Ellison told Mike McGrady of Newsday (October 28, 1967). “Then I began to look at my own life through the lives of fictional characters. When I read Stendhal, I would search within the Negro communities in which I grew up. I began, in other words, quite early to connect the worlds projected in literature and poetry and drama and novels with the life in which I found myself.”

(Picture: Invisible Man: A Memorial to Ralph Ellison
Sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, 2003
Riverside Park @ 150th Street, Manhattan
Bronze, granite

This sculpture honors author Ralph Ellison, who lived opposite this park. It consists of a bronze monolith through which is cut the silhouette of a striding man –a literal allusion to Ellison's epic novel, Invisible Man. A quotation from the novel and biographical details relating to Ellison are inscribed in low-lying pink granite wall framing an oval landscape designed by Ken Smith.)

More here.

From The New York Times:

Almost four decades after the federal education law called Title IX opened the door for girls to participate in high school and college athletics, a crucial question has remained unanswered: Do sports make a long-term difference in a woman’s life? A large body of research shows that sports are associated with all sorts of benefits, like lower teenage pregnancy rates, better grades and higher self-esteem. But until now, no one has determined whether those improvements are a direct result of athletic participation. It may be that the type of girl who is attracted to sports already has the social, personal and physical qualities — like ambition, strength and supportive parents — that will help her succeed in life.

Now, separate studies from two economists offer some answers, providing the strongest evidence yet that team sports can result in lifelong improvements to educational, work and health prospects. At a time when the first lady, Michelle Obama, has begun a nationwide campaign to improve schoolchildren’s health, the lessons from Title IX show that school-based fitness efforts can have lasting effects.

More here.

Hartosh Singh Bal interviews Professor T Padmanabhan about the work for which he was awarded the 2009 Infosys Prize for the Physical Sciences, in Open Magazine:

Q You combine your interest in science with pursuits that can loosely be termed ‘spiritual’. Are these not at odds? What do you make of the assault on religion by someone like Richard Dawkins?

A Dawkins has erected a straw man and knocked it down. I have no respect for this. It is very easy to knock down a particular class of models for God and religion. Russell and others, for example, have already done this a long time ago and far more effectively.

My take is that my concept of fundamental reality does not require any support from science or vice-versa. The two things lie in different domains and represent different types of knowledge. One is by its nature introverted, an inner knowledge, and the other is extroverted. Together, they complement each other.

Q Where does this other knowledge come from?

A The idea of direct experience lies beyond Aristotelian logic. It is born out of a personal knowledge—say, through a meditative experience. It is not translatable into the normal grammar of ideas, but nothing in ordinary logic precludes its existence.

Q Once you step beyond Aristotelian logic, what keeps you interested in physics? Does it not then become just a game?

A There was an enlightened Zen master who was asked what he did before enlightenment, and he replied, “I used to fetch water and chop wood.” And asked what he does now after gaining enlightenment, he said he fetches water and chops wood. Nothing external changes. Doing physics is like chopping wood and fetching water!

More here.

Joe Kloc in Seed Magazine:

Muddy Waters had made the honey bee “synonymous with the pains and frustrations associated with love and intimacy,” writes Tammy Horn in Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation. And the entertainment industry was only the most visible force in shaping the honey bee as the societal metaphor of the day. By the 1950s, Apis mellifera was also being used to describe, “difficult power struggles between races, between spouses, between political parties, between generations, between legal rulings.” A decade ago, it might have seemed unlikely that there would be any real connection between the story of Waters’ “Honey Bee” and that of the European honey bee in North America. But since 2006, when bees began disappearing in record numbers as the result of a mysterious ailment known as Colony Collapse Disorder, scientific investigations into the honey bee’s history have revealed that, just as the honey bee was coming to symbolize Chicago’s struggling labor class, it was itself weakening under the modern industrial agriculture system it was tasked with maintaining. The story of the honey bee—like that of “Honey Bee”—is, at bottom, the story of modernization. And stopping the bees’ disappearance is ultimately a question of understanding this story. What’s left to ask, after three years of research, is why has that been so hard to do.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Self-portraits on the Roof at Sunrise. January, 2010. Dubai.

Composite of digital photographs.