Ahmed Rashid at the BBC:

Pakistan is going through a multi-dimensional series of crises and a collapse of public confidence in the state.

Suicide bombers strike almost daily and the economic meltdown just seems to get worse.

But this is rarely apparent in the media, bar a handful of liberal commentators who try and give a more balanced and intellectual understanding by pulling all the problems together.

The explosion in TV channels in Urdu, English and regional languages has brought to the fore large numbers of largely untrained, semi-educated and unworldly TV talk show hosts and journalists who deem it necessary to win viewership at a time of an acute advertising crunch, by being more outrageous and sensational than the next channel.

On any given issue the public barely learns anything new nor is it presented with all sides of the argument.

Every talk show host seems to have his own agenda and his guests reflect that agenda rather than offer alternative policies.

Recently, one senior retired army officer claimed that Hakimullah Mehsud – the leader of the Pakistani Taliban which is fighting the army in South Waziristan and has killed hundreds in daily suicide bombings in the past five weeks – had been whisked to safety in a US helicopter to the American-run Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.

In other words the Pakistani Taliban are American stooges, even as the same pundits admit that US-fired drone missiles are targeting the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan.

These are just the kind of blatantly contradictory and nut-case conspiracy theories that get enormous traction on TV channels and in the media – especially when voiced by such senior former officials.

More here.

I happened to mention this phenomenon to Robin Varghese, and he immediately brought to my attention the following paper published in 1996 by Jack Snyder and close 3QD friend Karen Ballentine:

From “Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas,” International Security, Vol. 21, no. 2 Fall 1996:

We agree that media manipulation often plays a central role in promoting nationalist and ethnic conflict, but we argue that promoting unconditional freedom of public debate in newly democratizing societies is, in many circumstances, likely to make the problem worse. Historically and today, from the French Revolution to Rwanda, sudden liberalizations of press freedom have been associated with bloody outbursts of popular nationalism. The most dangerous situation is precisely when the government's press monopoly begins to break down.(4) During incipient democratization, when civil society is burgeoning but democratic institutions are not fully entrenched, the state and other elites are forced to engage in public debate in order to compete for mass allies in the struggle for power.(5) Under those circumstances, governments and their opponents often have the motive and the opportunity to play the nationalist card.

When this occurs, unconditional freedom of speech is a dubious remedy. Just as economic competition produces socially beneficial results only in a well-institutionalized marketplace, where monopolies and false advertising are counteracted, so too increased debate in the political marketplace leads to better outcomes only when there are mechanisms to correct market imperfections.(6) Many newly democratizing states lack institutions to break up governmental and non-governmental information monopolies, to professionalize journalism, and to create common public forums where diverse ideas engage each other under conditions in which erroneous arguments will be challenged. In the absence of these institutions, an increase in the freedom of speech can create an opening for nationalist mythmakers to hijack public discourse.

More here.

Hans M. Kristensen in Federation of American Scientists Strategic Security Blog:

The world’s approximately 23,300 nuclear weapons are stored at an estimated 111 locations in 14 countries, according to an overview produced by FAS and NRDC.

Nearly half of the weapons are operationally deployed with delivery systems capable of launching on short notice.

The overview is published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and includes the July 2009 START memorandum of understanding data. A previous version was included in the annual report from the International Panel of Fissile Materials published last month…

Israel probably has about four nuclear sites, whereas the nuclear storage facilities in India and Pakistan are – despite many rumors – largely undetermined. All three countries are thought to store warheads separate from delivery vehicles.

Despite two nuclear tests and many rumors, we are unaware of publicly available evidence that North Korea has operationalized its nuclear weapons capability.

Warhead concentrations vary greatly from country to country. With 13,000 warheads at 48 sites, Russian stores an average of 270 warheads at each location. The U.S. concentration is much higher with an average of 450 warheads at each location. These are averages, however, and in reality the distribution is thought to be much more uneven with some sites only storing tens of warheads.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Steven Martinovich in Enter Stage Right:

One can't help but be sympathetic to American Muslims in the post-9/11 era. Their patriotism has been questioned and they are simultaneously pulled in opposite directions by the fundamentalists and reformers in Islam. Though secure in their faith, many are beginning to question some of the assumptions that their communities have accepted and promoted, triggering what may be the beginning of an Islamic reformation. It is not surprising, therefore, that many Muslims in the United States are confused about their place in the world.

Ali Eteraz, noted blogger and lawyer, was certainly one of those Muslims. As he relates in Children of Dust: A memoir of Pakistan, he was born in Pakistan but was raised for much of his life in the United States. Told from an early age that he would play a prominent role in the Islamic world, his given name of Abir ul Islam translates into “Perfume of Islam”, Eteraz has suffered through a crisis of faith, fundamentalism and finally becoming a proponent for reform. Coming from a traditional culture like Pakistan has meant that he has also had to fight outsized battles against temptation, and not always successfully.

More here.

Julian Baggini presses Peter Singer on his call for much more charitable giving, in The Philosopher's Magazine:

I want to make it clear that I did not pay for this hotel.” Peter Singer is understandably keen to distance himself from the incongruous opulence of our surroundings. There is a rich irony in discussing his latest book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, in the lobby of a five-star central London hotel, to a soundtrack of the obligatory easy-listening pianist./p>

Hearing the message of Singer’s book is anything but easy listening. In it, he reiterates for a popular audience the argument he first put forward in his famous paper “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, published in the first issue of the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1971. It starts by arguing that we should accept the deceptively uncontroversial-sounding principle that “if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.” From this, however, Singer concludes that “I and everyone else in similar circumstances ought to give as much as possible, that is, at least up to the point at which by giving more one would begin to cause serious suffering for oneself and one’s dependents – perhaps even beyond this point to the point of marginal utility, at which by giving more one would cause oneself and one’s dependents as much suffering as one would prevent in Bengal.”/p>

In The Life You Can Save, Singer reiterates the same argument, but deals head-on with the problem that, obviously, hardly anyone is going to meet the stringent demands it makes of us. So what he proposes is a much less exacting sliding scale, where the rich are obliged to give quite a lot, and the less well-off hardly anything, or nothing at all. Is it then true to say that the populism of the book is a double-dilution of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”: a less-rigorous argument for a less-rigorous principle?

Olivia Judson in the NYT:

The basis of evolutionary potential is clear enough in principle. Whether a population can evolve to cope with new circumstances depends on how much underlying genetic variation there is: do any individuals in the population have the genes to cope, even barely, with the new environment, or not? If not, everybody dies, and it’s game over. If yes, evolution may come to the rescue, improving, as time goes by, the ability of individuals to cope in the new environment. What determines the extent of the underlying genetic variation? Factors such as how big the population is (bigger populations usually contain more genetic variation) and how often mutations occur.

Let me give an example of how this works. Imagine you have a population of algae that have been living for generations in a comfy freshwater pool. Now suppose there’s a ghastly accident and, all of a sudden, the pool becomes super-salty. Whether the algae will be able to survive depends on whether any individuals already have any capacity to survive and reproduce in salty water. If none of them do, they all die, and the population goes extinct. But if some do, then the survivors will reproduce, and over time, beneficial mutations will accumulate such that the algae get better and better at living in a high-salt environment.

This isn’t just hypothetical: many experiments have taken organisms, be they algae, fungi or bacteria, from an environment to which they are well-adapted to one where they are not, and watched what happens. The result is reliable: at first, they tend not to cope that well (measured, as usual in evolution, by their ability to survive and reproduce). However, as long as the environment doesn’t change again, their coping ability rapidly improves: within a few tens of generations, beneficial mutations appear and spread, and the organisms evolve to become much better at handling their new circumstances.

But here’s the thing. A big drawback of experiments of this type is that the initial change the organisms experience is not that severe — it is not, in fact, so severe that no one can cope, and the population goes extinct.

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: “A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition.” And if this looks to us like one of Johnson’s lexical eccentricities, we’re chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement (“The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays”) and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: “a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range.” Which is it, though, that attracts novelists – the comforts of limit or the freedom of irregularity? A new book by the American novelist-essayist David Shields (to be published here by Hamish Hamilton early next year) makes the case for irregularity. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call “truthiness” – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an “unbearably artificial world”. He recommends instead that artists break “ever larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work”, via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary. And conventional structure be damned.

more from Zadie Smith at The Guardian here.

Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s “Confessions.” A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to within an inch of his life; Mary was set on fire, and survived just five days in the I.C.U. By day, Phaedo translated; at night, he worked on a novel about Charlie Dark, who was never convicted. Then Phaedo drank himself senseless with Scotch. He drank to drown his sorrows, to dull his senses, to forget himself. The phone rang, but he never answered it. Sometimes, Holly Steiner, an attractive woman across the hall, would silently enter his bedroom, and expertly rouse him from his stupor. At other times, he made use of the services of Aleesha, a local hooker. Aleesha’s eyes were too hard, too cynical, and they bore the look of someone who had already seen too much. Despite that, Aleesha had an uncanny resemblance to Holly, as if she were Holly’s double. And it was Aleesha who brought Roger Phaedo back from the darkness. One afternoon, wandering naked through Phaedo’s apartment, she came upon two enormous manuscripts, neatly stacked. One was the Rousseau translation, each page covered with almost identical words; the other, the novel about Charlie Dark. She started leafing through the novel. “Charlie Dark!” she exclaimed. “I knew Charlie Dark! He was one tough cookie. That bastard was in the Paul Auster gang. I’d love to read this book, baby, but I’m always too lazy to read long books. Why don’t you read it to me?” And that is how the ten-year silence was broken. Phaedo decided to please Aleesha. He sat down, and started reading the opening paragraph of his novel, the novel you have just read.

more from James Wood at The New Yorker here.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is a writer even most Russians knew nothing about until his work was resurrected from Soviet archives and published–most of it for the first time–in the late 1980s. He was ethnically Polish and grew up near Kiev. He studied law without much enthusiasm, worked for an attorney in that city for a few years and spent as much time as he could writing and lecturing on literature, drama and music. In 1922, when he was in his mid-30s, he moved to Moscow hoping to make a living from his writing. His timing was not auspicious. Krzhizhanovsky became acquainted with other Moscow writers, gave private readings of his work and collaborated on scripts with experimental theater director Alexander Tairov. But publication eluded him. In the story “The Bookmark,” he describes the situation of a writer who has arrived in Moscow just after the revolution with a collection of stories he’s eager to publish. One editor after another rejects his manuscript: the style and subject do not fit with the new Soviet ways of thinking. “On one manuscript,” the writer recalls, “I remember finding the penciled comment: Psychologizing.”

more from Elaine Blair at The Nation here.

From Salon:

America's universities are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas, but last week they looked more like theaters of the absurd, as representatives of an evangelical group descended on an undetermined number of campuses to hand out free copies of Charles Darwin's “The Origin of Species.” The catch: They used an edition of Darwin's seminal 1859 text that included an introduction by Ray Comfort, a minister who has made a specialty of arguing for creationism.

Was this stunt shrewd or moronic? From the first it's been hard to tell. The plan, innocuously named “Origin Into Schools,” was announced this September in a video featuring Kirk Cameron, a former television child star who co-founded a ministry called Living Waters with Comfort. There's something almost pitiable about the way Cameron crows over the scheme; he truly seems to find it ingenious. He points out that the University of California at Berkeley cannot prevent the action because “their own Web site” dictates that “anyone is free to distribute noncommercial materials in any outdoor area of the campus.” “Besides,” he gleefully adds, “what are they really going to do? Ban 'The Origin of Species'? That would be big news! Especially when their own bookstore sells it for $29.99!”

More here.

The Two of us Together

The two of us together have no need
of dreams, nor sagas, legends, or rites,
stringed instruments, we have no
need of enameling, stucco, porcelain,
distinct is the spiral motif
of our fingertips, the auditory
opening surmounted by a shell
of flesh, which, grazed by hands
or tip of tongue, irradiates
the fever everywhere, the trembling,
the plunge of the blood, transparent,
dazzling is the sense of our
organs, clear is the use of breath,
saliva, finger, the shadows
that darken the gaze, assured,
sedating is the depth of the passes,
the tunnels, the pleats, good
is the surface, the tip, the tint
of the cuffs, the fabric and the lining
of flesh. On this altar
the bible is our hoarse
words, escaping our lips, the demented
keening. Here the divinities, all of them,
are hushed, stunned they fall silent,
learn from us, spasm after spasm,
terrestrial nourishments.

by Andrea Inglese

translation Gabriele Poole, 2005
from Inventari
publisher Editrice Zona, 2001

Read more »

From MSNBC:

Science books used to show dinosaurs exclusively in shades of scaly green and brown. Books about the solar system used to list just nine planets, and books about the subatomic world didn't go much farther than protons, neutrons and electrons. As times have changed, so has the science – and so should science books. Just in time for holiday giving, here's a selection of books for kids (and grownups) that incorporate recent developments on the scientific frontiers.

Astronomy:
The solar system is usually a crowd-pleaser among the kids, and our perspective on our own cosmic neighborhood has changed quite a bit in the past few years. “The New Solar System” by Patricia Daniels, which came out in August, reflects all those changes – including the shifting views on what it means to be a planet. That shift is also reflected in two children's books that take a wide stance on the planethood question: “11 Planets” by David Aguilar and “Ten Worlds” by Ken Croswell. What's a parent to do? I address that in my own newly published book about the solar system shift, “The Case for Pluto.”

More here.

Michael Dirda in the Washington Post:

Should this book have been published? Certainly all the work of a great writer like Vladimir Nabokov ought to be available to scholars and interested readers. To my mind, Dmitri Nabokov was clearly right to ignore his dying father's request that he destroy these fragments of an unfinished novel. But that doesn't mean “The Original of Laura” actually deserves the attention of anyone but the most rabid Nabokov fanatic. Apart from a few enchanting phrases — “the orange awnings of southern summers” — there's just not much here.

But first a little background.

When Nabokov (1899-1977) died in Switzerland at the age of 78, he left behind an extraordinary artistic legacy. During the first half of his life, he produced a series of important novels in his native Russian, including at least one masterpiece, “The Gift.” He was, arguably, the leading writer among those Russians who, having fled the Bolshevik Revolution, were then living in exile in Germany and France. But when Hitler's forces began to overwhelm Europe, Nabokov, his wife, Vera, and their little son, Dmitri, fled to the United States. Here the writer found teaching jobs, most notably at Cornell University, while he began to create — in English — technically dazzling and deeply moving books, among them “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,” “Pnin” and the exquisite memoir “Speak, Memory.”

More here.

Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian:

Yes, these are troubled times for the country. Friends of mine in Lahore tell me their children have not gone to school in three weeks because of fears of a Beslan-style terrorist atrocity. The university where my sister teaches has been installing shatterproof window film. Hundreds of people have been killed in attacks on Pakistan's cities since the army launched its operation in Waziristan last month.

But there is reason to be hopeful. After a long history of backing religious militants, the state and army may finally be getting serious about taking them on. Swat was successfully wrested from Taliban control this summer. The Waziristan offensive is said to be proceeding well. Pakistani public opinion has hardened against the extremists, and at the same time an increasingly independent media and judiciary are amplifying popular demands for a redistribution of resources to the poor. It is possible that out of the current uncertainty and bloodshed a more equitable and tolerant Pakistan will be born.

So when, a month after Dina's arrival, Zahra and I again discussed Pakistan, we decided to go. Given the peripatetic nature of my life so far, I don't know how long we'll stay there. Maybe a year, maybe 10, maybe for ever.

But I do know this. When it comes to where we think Pakistan is heading, we are voting with our feet.

More here.

Below I offer an outline for an Eating Animals sequel entitled A 21st Century, Balls-out Decadent Explosion of Naughty Vegetarian Food Exploration Appealing to Degenerates, or for short VEGETABALLS. It will be written by an intrepid vegetable adventurer who wears a cabbage hat and lamé hotpants, a postmodern-molecular-gastronomist-Shackleton of beans who could care less about tradition and “the earth.” VEGETABALLS is for a vegetarianism of chocolate, vodka, fries, and habanero sauce that shows how you can be a selfish drunk fat slob and still do your part to limit the unnecessary suffering of animals. A vegetarianism that is an expression of freedom from the habit and the anachronism of meat-eating. A vegetarianism that embraces its relationship to artifice and technology. A vegetarianism that is a celebration of life rather than a denial of it. A diet that is more futuristic, more fun, and more satisfying morally than meat-eating. A vegetarianism, as Verlaine would have it, of ultimate civilization, all shimmering in purple and gold.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

‘Whatever my work was made up of in the beginning,’ Ed Ruscha said in 1989, ‘is exactly what it is like today.’[*] Well, not ‘exactly’, but his art is consistent, and this is still true 20 years later, as is made clear by the excellent survey of his paintings of the last 50 years curated by Ralph Rugoff, now at the Hayward until 10 January. Ruscha is ever intrigued by ‘paradox and absurdity’, and for all the immediacy of his images, which combine the emphatic qualities of both abstract art and commercial design, they also emit a low or high buzz of ‘visual noise’, a little or large glitch in communication that provokes ‘a kind of a “Huh?”’ in the viewer. Most often Ruscha produces this ‘Huh?’ effect through mischief with the relationship between words and pictures. On the one hand, he treats words as images in their own right; on the other, reading is never quite congruent with seeing in his work. ‘A flip-flop between those two things’ is how Ruscha describes the relationship, though a weird elasticity is even closer to the case: ‘I like the idea of a word becoming a picture, almost leaving its body, then coming back and becoming a word again.’ The upshot of these visual-verbal miscues is a sequence of puzzles that look obvious but are impossible to solve.

more from Hal Foster at the LRB here.

FOR DECADES, NOBODY in the US had seen the bee. The silver-haired black Epeoloides pilosula was once widespread in New England, often found where native yellow loosestrife plants grew. But as the region’s pastoral landscapes gave way to forests, the bee lost its sunny open home. In 1927 it was spotted in a Needham meadow and then, despite years of searching, not again. By the start of this century, dejected bee lovers were forced to conclude that the insect was likely extinct in the US. Then, one bright June day in 2006, eureka: The bee was found in a hillside meadow by David Wagner, a University of Connecticut conservation biologist conducting a two-year bee survey in southern New England. Once the species was confirmed, there was a celebratory Mexican dinner and a published paper that rippled through the conservation world. If a rare bee like that could be found again, biologists reasoned, maybe there were other rare bees, plants, and wildlife hidden in similar environments. Even more remarkable, though, was the environment where this find was made: In a 250-foot-wide power line corridor off Route 163 in Southeastern Connecticut. Transmission corridors have long been considered symbols of environmental degradation, with their enormous steel skeletons and high-voltage lines slicing through forests, wetlands, and salt marshes; they divide the landscapes that thousands of species need to survive. Yet now they are gaining a new reputation: As critical homes for faltering species of birds, bees, butterflies, plants, and a host of other species.

more from Beth Daley at the Boston Globe here.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was first published on November 24, 1859. Today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of the landmark book. John Wilkins considers what would've happened in a world in which it wasn't published (via SEK at Lawyers, Guns and Money):

The Origin acted as a seed in a supersaturated cultural solution. The solution was already set to crystalise, and he came along and made evolution, phylogeny, heredity, dispersal, and other topics respectable. So far from being a “class traitor” as Desmond and Moore make him out to be, Darwin’s bourgeois respectability is what made him effective as a motivator of evolutionary biology, where evolution had previously been seen as politics in naturalists’ dress. He was in many ways more prescient than those who followed him. But had he not lived, had he drowned on the Beagle voyage, as Peter Bowler is presently writing a what-if history, would we have had evolution anyway? Almost certainly. If Owen hadn’t shaken off the shackles of the clergy who ran Cambridge, very likely others would have. But the tenor of the field would have been somewhat different. Here’s how I think it would have played out, based on a discussion with Bowler about his work. Anything original is his.

Common descent/phylogeny might not have developed as early. Heinrich Bronn had given an “evolutionary tree” in 1858, but his mechanism was no different to Buffon’s – the degeneration of types from an original stock; basically evolution was localised and played out on existing potentialities.

Natural selection might not have been seen to be a mechanism of evolution for another fifty years, and when it was, it would not have been in terms of an analogy with artificial selection. Wallace would have been “rediscovered” the way Mendel was, without being all that influential directly. Sexual selection might not have popped up until the mid-20th century or so.

There would have been a much stronger emphasis on developmental biology, coming out of von Baer’s work and later experimental developmental biology in Germany. Evo-devo would have been the first state of the field.

A Variation

And I really don’t know
now when was I very
honest and when
was I not, it cannot be
distinguished
and it’s hard to sort it out. For there’s no
lie which could not
be used in order to keep
things as they are
really or in reality, I wonder
which of these is the correct
expression here, I cannot remember,
but somehow the word
real has to be in it.
And because I do not change
at all, for better or for worse,
I’m not uglier or more beautiful
than before, up or down. Or
maybe just a shade. But:
to die: no. Death is not an option.
It’s possible that
while I am changing, I usually
sleep through those hours.
Or else am hovering upside down.

by Endre Kukorelly
translation, George Gömöri, 2001