Report row ousts top Indian scientist

Posted on by Azra Raza

From Nature:

Shiva2 The first appointment in a scheme to recruit expatriate scientists to senior positions in the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) — India's largest science agency — seems to have misfired badly. A US scientist of Indian origin has been dismissed just five months after he was offered the position of 'outstanding scientist' and tasked with helping to commercialize technologies developed at CSIR institutes. Shiva Ayyadurai, an entrepreneur inventor and Fulbright Scholar with four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, was the first scientist to be appointed under the CSIR scheme to recruit about 30 scientists and technologists of Indian origin (STIOs) into researcher leadership roles. “The offer was withdrawn as he did not accept the terms and conditions and demanded unreasonable compensation,” Samir Brahmachari, director general of the CSIR, told Nature.

Ayyadurai denies this. In a 30 October letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is also president of the CSIR, he claims that he was sacked for sending senior CSIR scientists a report that was critical of the agency's leadership and organization. The report, published on 19 October, was authored by Ayyadurai and colleague Deepak Sardana, who joined the CSIR as a consultant in January. Ayyadurai says that the report — which was not commissioned by the CSIR — was intended to elicit feedback about the institutional barriers to technology commercialization. “Our interaction with CSIR scientists revealed that they work in a medieval, feudal environment,” says Ayyadurai. “Our report said the system required a major overhaul because innovation cannot take place in this environment.”

More here.



Tuesday, November 10, 2009

a kind of all-purpose novel-killing novel

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Chess+piece+Cruella+De+Ville

We now have everything in place to convert two texts into a game of chess: we simply feed the program the two novels, asking it to play one text as “white” and the other as “black”; the program searches through the white text until it finds the first tuple corresponding to a movable piece (in the case of an opening move, either a pawn or a knight), and then, having settled on the piece that will open, continues searching through the text until it encounters a tuple designating a square to which that piece can be moved. When it has done so, the computer executes that move for white, and then goes to the other text to find, in the same way, an opening move for black. And so it goes: white, black, white, black, until—quite by accident, of course, since we must suppose that the novels know nothing of chess strategy (and our program cannot help them, since it knows only the rules of the game)—one king is mated. Such a set up would be close (there turn out to be interesting differences, but put that aside for now) to permitting two monkeys to play chess against each other by giving each a keyboard and permitting them to jump about on them: send the resulting string of letters to our program, and it scans this string of gobbledygook for tuples that constitute legitimate moves, makes them, and voilà, monkey chess.

more from D. Graham Burnett and W. J. Walter at Cabinet here.

To sum up, my dear Guy, you must beware of melancholy

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Maupassant_21

One of the great examples of literary advice-giving took place in the summer of 1878. Guy de Maupassant was on the verge of becoming famous. As Flaubert’s literary nephew, and a member of the new group calling themselves Naturalists, he was already well known in Paris; three years previously, he had made his first appearance – as ‘le petit Maupassant’ – in the Goncourt Journal, delighting a company of already famous writers with a long story about Swinburne’s decadent behaviour in Etretat. He had written poems, stories and journalism, coauthored a lewd play, and was working on his first novel, Une Vie. He was socially and sexually successful, and physically very fit: the previous summer, having bought a small boat on Zola’s behalf, he had rowed it the 50 kilometres from Bezons to Zola’s house at Médan. Yet on 3 August, two days before his 28th birthday, he made the following complaints to Flaubert about life: ‘Fucking women is as monotonous as listening to male wit. I find that the news in the papers is always the same, that the vices are trivial, and that there aren’t enough different ways to compose a sentence.’

more from Julian Barnes at the LRB here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Rain

A teacher asked Paul
what he would remember
from third grade, and he sat
a long time before writing
“this year somebody tutched me
on the sholder”
and turned his paper in.
Later she showed it to me
as an example of her wasted life.
The words he wrote were large
as houses in a landscape.
He wanted to go inside them
and live, he could fill in
the windows of “o” and “d”
and be safe while outside
birds building nests in drainpipes
knew nothing of the coming rain.

by Naomi Shihab Nye

from New American Poets of the 90s;
David Godine, Publisher, 1991

On Myth

Posted on by Azra Raza

Marina Warner in The Liberal:

Europa WRITERS don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew. If some individuals present weren’t acquainted with Odysseus’s wanderings or the Trojan War, and were listening in for the first time (as I was when a child, enthralled by the gods and goddesses in H.A. Guerber’s classic retelling), they were still aware that this was a common inheritance that belonged to everyone. Its single author – if Homer was one at all – acted as a conduit of collective knowledge, picking up the thread and telling it anew.

In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of The Arabian Nights’, Jorge Luis Borges praises the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become. Borges wasn’t a believer in anything – not even magic – but he couldn’t do without the fantastic and the mythological. He compiled a wonderfully quixotic and useful bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, to include the fauna of world literature: chimeras and dragons, mermaids and the head-lolling catoblepas whose misfortune is to scorch the earth on which he tries to graze with his pestilential breath. But Borges also included some of his own inventions – The Creatures who Live in Mirrors, for example, a marvelous twist on the idea of the ghostly double.

Borges liked myth because he believed in the principle of ‘reasoned imagination’: that knowing old stories, and retrieving and reworking them, brought about illumination in a different way from rational inquiry. Myths aren’t lies or delusions: as Hippolyta the Amazon queen responds to Theseus’ disparaging remarks about enchantment: ‘But all the story of the night told o’er, / And all their minds transfigured so together, / More witnesseth than fancy’s images / And grows to something of great constancy’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.24-7). One of Borges’s famous stories, ‘The Circular Ruins’, unfolds a pitch-perfect fable of riddling existence in the twentieth century: a magician dreams a child into being, and then discovers, as he walks unscathed through fire in the closing lines of the tale, that he himself has been dreamed.

More here.

A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain

Posted on by Azra Raza

From The New York Times:

ArticleInline It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?

Uh-oh.

Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations. Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking. “It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”

More here.

Monday, November 9, 2009

WE ARE ALL AFRICANS

Posted on by Tolu Ogunlesi

by Tolu Ogunlesi

Africa-map; courtesy www.geology

To the outside world, we are all “Africans”.

‘Africa’, that continent of “colourful emergencies” (a term coined by novelist Helen Oyeyemi in a 2005 essay); ‘African’, that oversized brush dripping a paint handy for tarring every living thing found within a thousand-mile radius of the Sahara desert.

As Africans – and by extension African writers – we’re supposed to be united by geography, culture and experience (mostly of the negative sort), and thus a herd of interchangeable entities. There is after all such a thing as African literature, written by African writers, dealing with African issues – poverty, wars, AIDS, Aid, military dictatorships, coup d’états, corruption, civilian dictatorships, and very lately, dubious power sharings.

Never mind that Nigeria and Uganda are no more similar (in my opinion) than America and Russia. Or that Nigeria’s religious dichotomy (and the resulting tensions) confers on it a greater similarity with India than with South Africa. Or that Nigeria and fellow English-speaking Ghana are separated by two impregnable walls of language known as Benin and Togo. Or that a conference proclaimed as a “Festival of Contemporary African Writing” will very likely be no more than a Festival of Anglophone African Writing.

Chimamanda Adichie’s short story, Jumping Monkey Hill (first published in Granta 95, and which appears in her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck) – which William Skidelsky, writing in the Guardian (UK) calls “the most obviously autobiographical (and funniest) of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck” – tells the story of an “African Writers’ Workshop” for which the British Council has selected participants.

The workshop is overseen by Edward Campbell, “an old man in a summer hat who smiled to show two front teeth the colour of mildew.” Campbell is British, with a “posh” accent, “the kind some rich Nigerians tried to mimic and ended up sounding unintentionally funny.” He is also the final authority – using what one might call his “Africanometer” – on the quality and plausibility of the stories produced during the workshop.

At the workshop are a Ugandan, a white South African, a black South African, a Tanzanian, a Zimbabwean, a Kenyan, a Senegalese and Ujunwa, a Nigerian. East, West and Southern Africa are represented, the North is not, as is often the case in real life reporting about the continent where the term ‘Africa’ is used to refer to “sub-Saharan Africa” and North Africa is somewhat set apart like some entity off the coast of the real Africa. And, needless to say, the workshop is conducted in English, not French or Swahili.

One of the more interesting scenes in Adichie’s story is when all the writers (except for the Ugandan) gather to drink wine and make fun of one another, and make comments such as: “You Kenyans are too submissive! You Nigerians are too aggressive! You Tanzanians have no fashion sense! You Senegalese are too brainwashed by the French!

This scene took me right back to Crater Lake, venue of the 2006 Caine Prize workshop, in which I participated. NM, a young South African novelist and I were roommates at the Crater Lake resort where the workshop took place. As ‘African writers’, we should have instinctively known everything about each other’s countries. We should have been able to complete one another’s sentences.

But not exactly. We were different people, with little experience of each other’s daily realities.

Read more »

Health Care

Posted on by Zaneb Khan Beams

by Zaneb Khan Beams

ScreenHunter_01 Nov. 07 09.24 It’s 4:45 PM on Friday. I’m covering a colleague’s phone calls while she’s out of the country, and there’s a newborn boy who needs phototherapy. This means he needs to be in the hospital in what looks like a miniature tanning bed for at least one night and one day. So, I call his parents and tell them the test results- their baby has a dangerously high bilirubin level.

Bilirubin is the by-product of red blood cells recycled through the liver and GI tract. Newborns’ livers are not efficient at recycling red blood cells, and the bilirubin by-products can accumulate in their bloodstream, cross their fragile blood-brain barrier, and cause kernicterus, ( serious permanent brain damage), or, in extreme cases, death. Neonatal Physiologic Hyperbilirubinemia represents a “bread and butter” pediatrics challenge. High bilirubin levels are easily and cheaply treated with UV light rays.

These parents knew their baby might have high bilirubin. Still, when I tell the baby’s mother he has to go to the hospital, she bursts into tears. I ask her why, and she describes a two year saga of problems with her health insurance provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield. Both parents in this family work in respectable jobs and receive health insurance “through their employer.” In other words, their employer negotiates a bulk rate for health insurance plans, and employees can buy insurance in bulk. Payment for the insurance comes out of their paychecks, and neither the employer nor the employee ends up paying income tax on dollars spent on health insurance. BCBS earns profits of about 30%. Win/ Win situation, right? Wrong. Blue Cross Blue Shield will pay for the medical care in the hospital, but not for being in the hospital. Room and board, at $600/ day, are not considered part of the baby’s treatment, and therefore not reimbursed.

Meanwhile, it’s almost close-of-business on a Friday, and I realize I need to get this baby home phototherapy equipment.

Read more »

Lévi-Strauss and Philosophy

Posted on by Justin E. H. Smith

Justin E. H. Smith

6a00d8341c562c53ef0120a65e789c970b-320wi I.

In his Tristes Tropiques, composed in 1955, Claude Lévi-Strauss writes with characteristic humor of his decision, some years earlier, to study philosophy:

When I reached the top or 'philosophy' class in the lycée, I was vaguely in favour of a rationalistic monism, which I was prepared to justify and support; I therefore made great efforts to get into the section taught by Gustave Rodrigues, who had the reputation of being 'advanced'… After years of training, I now find myself intimately convinced of a few unsophisticated beliefs, not very different from those I held at the age of fifteen. Perhaps I see more clarly the inadequacy of these intellectual tools; at least they have an instrumental value which makes them suitable for the service I require of them.

Later, in a 1972 interview, he confesses that his decision to study philosophy was motivated by a sense that this discipline, more than any other, would enable him to remain non-committal, to continue to develop all his other interests, under the big-tent of a vaguely defined cluster of intellectual projects called 'philosophy'. This understanding of philosophy, I think, remains significant for our assessment of Lévi-Strauss's intellectual legacy.

For better or worse, while his approach may have made sense in the Paris of the 1920s, as I can personally attest it certainly would not in the New York or California of the 1990s (when I was a student of philosophy). Here, a different conception of philosophy and its boundaries reigned, and still reigns. As Jason Stanley recently reflected at the Leiter Report blog:

Many academics use the term 'philosopher' not as a description of the people working on the set of problems that occupy our time, but rather as a certain kind of honorific. As far as I can tell, on this usage, a philosopher is someone who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline – be it cultural criticism, history, literature, or politics. So while it would be odd for a philosopher to call themselves a literary critic because they work on interpretation, it is not unusual for English professors to describe themselves as philosophers. In contrast, we philosophers do not regard the term 'philosopher' as an honorific. We tend to think that there are many people who are really truly philosophers, but are pretty bad at what they do. We also think that there are many brilliant thinkers who are not philosophers.

Stanley argues in another post that his own philosophical tradition may be distinguished from a rival tradition, represented by Walter Benjamin, that might better be called 'anthropology' than 'philosophy':

Benjamin isn’t at all confused about metaphysics or the problem of intentionality. He just finds no interest in the question of how, by the use of language, one person can communicate something about the world to another. What’s interesting to him is how language is represented in human mythology, and what that reveals to us about the cultural significance of our practice of naming. This kind of question is one that is not apt to be taken up by a philosopher in the analytic tradition. Someone in my tradition might say that the issues that interest Benjamin are questions of anthropology rather than philosophy. Someone in Benjamin’s tradition might say that the issues that interest me are bourgeois.

Stanley makes two claims in these passages that interest me: first, that not just any abstract or broad-focused thinker may appropriately be called a 'philosopher', and, second, that much of the thinking that is called by some people 'philosophy', might better be called 'anthropology' to the extent that it is principally interested in questions of culture rather than, I take it, in transcultural features of the human mind and its connections to the world.

While I certainly know Stanley is a first-rate philosopher, I do not at all share his conception of what philosophy itself is. If anything, my own understanding of the meaning of 'philosophy' is the one at work not in the United States today, nor in France in the 1920s, but rather in the title of the distinguished journal of the Royal Society of London, the Philosophical Transactions, which, since 1666, has been featuring articles on everything from the reproductive organs of eels, to the smelting of metals, to the causes of comets, to the nature of the passions, to the existence of God. It seems to me that if Stanley wants to make the case for a narrower conception of philosophy, he needs not only to argue against the misguided deployment of the word that we've certainly all heard at dinner parties, but also to explain why the very most recent self-description of a certain academic discipline in a certain part of the world should be permitted to cancel out so much accrued meaning in a word that has migrated and mutated across so many centuries, languages, and continents.

Read more »

Short Takes

Posted on by Gerald Dworkin

by Gerald Dworkin

Hemingway was thought to have written the finest, very short, story. It was a classified advertisement whose text was “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” I have always been attracted to very miniature versions of linguistic expression. It is interesting to seek the minimum number of words for various categories. So, for example, I have never found a better, shorter sentence that Ring Lardner, Jr’s “Shut up, he explained.” For five words, I have Woody Allen’s “ I am two with Nature.” but once one has that many words available there must be many others. Best short Seder text: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.”

For many years I have been collecting aphorisms, jokes, witty remarks, etc. for a someday-to-be published Common-Place Book. It is divided into two sections.; one on general Philosophy and the other on Morality. I do not restrict myself just to short passages. But I do tend to favor brief encounters. Ideally the upper limit would be something like Nietzsche’s limit on aphorisms. “ It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.” One of his best “All truth is simple…is that not doubly a lie?” comes in at ten words.

So today I present a sampling, a taste, a nibbling of very short takes on Philosophy. If there is sufficient interest I will follow up with material from the Morality section. Where I know the source I give it. Where I do not I welcome information as to the original. I divide them, roughly, into categories although they are obvious enough that they could be omitted.

Definitions of Philosophy

You make a few distinctions. You clarify a few concepts. It’s a living.

Sydney Morgenbesser

The ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers.

David Hills

[Philosophy is] an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.

W. Sellars

Philosophy is the cure for which there is no adequate disease.

Jerry Fodor

Read more »

Early Islam, Part 3: The Path of Reason

Posted on by Namit Arora

By Namit Arora

Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two key currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
__________________________________________

ArabPhilosophers Islamic scholars during the golden age of Islam (roughly 9th-12th centuries) widely referred to Aristotle as the ‘First Teacher,’ evidence of the high regard in which they held the ancient Greek philosopher. The man ranked by them as second only to Aristotle was a tenth-century Muslim thinker by the name of Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE). [1] Perhaps a good way to illustrate the rational current of early Islam is through the life and times of this important thinker. In the words of Muhsin Mahdi, a modern scholar of Islamic studies,

‘[Al-Farabi was] the great interpreter of the thought of Plato and Aristotle and their commentators, and the master to whom almost all major Muslim as well as a number of Jewish and Christian philosophers turned for a fuller understanding of the controversial, troublesome and intricate questions of philosophy … He paid special attention to the study of language and its relation to logic. In his numerous commentaries on Aristotle’s logical works he expounded for the first time in Arabic the entire range of the scientific and non-scientific forms of argument and established the place of logic as the indispensable prerequisite for philosophic inquiry.’ [2]

For a flavor of what other notable thinkers of his age thought of him, consider this remarkable passage from the autobiography of Ibn Sina (aka Avicenna, 980-1037 CE), the Persian philosopher and physician famous in the West as the ‘Islamic Galen.’ Ibn Sina wrote that after a diligent study of ‘the logical, natural, and mathematical sciences’ in his youth, he finally reached the study of metaphysics:

BukharaArkCitadel‘I read the Metaphysics [of Aristotle], but I could not comprehend its contents, and its author’s object remained obscure to me, even when I had gone back and read it forty times and had got to a point where I had memorized it. In spite of this I could not understand it nor its object, and I despaired of myself and said, ‘This is a book which there is no way of understanding.’ But one day in the afternoon when I was at the booksellers’ quarter a salesman approached with a book in his hand which he was calling out for sale. He offered it to me, but I refused it with disgust, believing that there was no merit in this science. But he said to me, ‘Buy it, because its owner needs the money and so it is cheap. I will sell it to you for three dirhams.’ So I bought it and, lo and behold, it was Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s book on the objects of Metaphysics. I returned home and was quick to read it, and in no time the objects of that book became clear to me because I had got to the point of having memorized it by heart. I rejoiced at this and the next day gave much in alms to the poor in gratitude to God, who is exalted …’ [3]

Read more »

Health Care Reform

Posted on by Shiban Ganju

by Shiban Ganju

Health care begets health; the two are inseparable. Experience of developed countries shows that disease is recession proof while national income is not; demand grows inexorably while funding shrinks. When the resources lag to fulfill the minimum need, health becomes a mere dream.

People of the world are unhappy with their national systems, no matter which country. In a survey done by the Commonwealth Fund in six OECD countries majority wanted either fundamental changes or to rebuild the system.

Adults with health problems; Commonwealth Fund survey 2005

Percent saying:

AUS

CAN

GER

NZ

UK

US

Only minor changes needed

23

21

16

27

30

23

Fundamental changes needed

48

61

54

52

52

44

Rebuild completely

26

17

31

20

14

30

World has evolved four models of health care financing: (1) Bismarck model: where employers and employees contribute into a not for profit fund and providers are usually private as in ‘Sickness funds’ system of Germany. (2) Beveridge model: government is both the payer and provider as in the UK and Cuba. (3) Single payer: government is the sole payer from funds collected though employee contribution and taxes. The providers are both private and public. Canada, Taiwan and South Korea have adopted this system. (4) Out of pocket model: where no organized risk pools exist and individual pay as they fall sick. Most of the low income countries do not have the resources to organize national financing systems for health care.

The US has evolved a pluralistic system. Government funds 46 percent, a private commercial insurance fund 35 percent and 13 percent is out of pocket as deductibles and co-pay. Providers are mostly private. Innovations like HMO capitation and health saving account have not dented the costs.

Read more »

My Life As An Observer: Target Practice – Part 2

Posted on by Norman Costa

By Norman D. Costa

Rod_rankin_photo_50669222

Note: The following is a true story, but the names of certain individuals, and other identifying details, have been changed.

Part 1 of this story can be found HERE.

The story so far: I learned to hit a bull’s eye with an M14 rifle in U. S. Marine Corps officer training at Quantico, Virginia, the summer between my sophomore and junior years at college. I still remember, and have recalled throughout my life, my thoughts at hitting a long range target on my third shot, using only two rounds to adjust my aiming point. I had the immediate realization that I just put a bullet through the head of someone who was 100 yards away. And it was easy. It also brought up a memory from six years earlier – a memory that had been entirely repressed, and now overwhelmed me on the rifle range. I had spent my early teens hanging out with Felix Crimmins, a mildly retarded neighbor boy, and hero-worshiping his father, Fred. Mr. Crimmins carried a 38 caliber revolver on his job as an armed toll booth collector in New York City. Felix’s mother, Lena, was to my naïve eye an embarrassing religious fanatic, sometimes neglecting to leave supper for her children while rushing out to her weekly meeting of the Holy Rosary Society. The scope of Lena’s hypocrisy, her betrayal, and the desperation it engendered in Fred, were beyond my ability to comprehend, though not to observe.

The Final Trip to the Farm

Felix (he was 16, and three years older than I) got permission from his mother, Walena (Lena) Crimmins, to invite me to come with the family on a long weekend visit to his grandparents. I had been there before, and going to the farm was like landing in our own personal theme park, except we made our own adventures, and the food and desserts were much better and free. Put a kid on an old farm with 112 acres, and a rain free summer day, and it's like dying and going to heaven. Felix's grandmother had been a pastry chef, and still supplied two restaurants and the one hotel in town. The confections at the farm were nonstop and the best in the world. The milking barn, tool and tractor sheds, wood shed, long unused pig sty and chicken coop, and farm equipment idle for years were made to order for discovery, preoccupation, and play. The woods, the hay fields now harvested by a neighbor farmer, and a creek with a swimming hole, were gifts from God Almighty for young explorers on safari.

The best part of the trip, itself, was sitting in the rear-facing back seat of the Ford station wagon with Felix. We were entertained by the panorama of things gone by, and making eye contact and getting a wave from the driver behind us. The front hood of a car is a huge obstruction to your view. Facing forward you adopted, unintentionally, some of the attentiveness and stress required to drive a car, like keeping eyes AND mind on the road. The rearward view was easy and relaxing on the eyes, and free of the stress of watching where you were going. In the days before car seat belts, seating arrangements could be as fluid as in the TV room at home. Fred and Lena Crimmins were in the front seat, Felix and I were in the back seat, and Penny (13) and Maureen (10) were in the middle seat, always. It was a different story with Tommy (7), Harry (3), and Michael (6 months). Tommy and Harry, at different times into the trip, could be in front with their mom and dad, in the middle with their sisters, or in the rear with Felix and me. The baby, Michael, was freely passed back and forth between the front and middle seats, but he never made it all the way to the back seat. The inside of the car was like a room at home with kids coming and going, and occasionally stepping on each other.

That Friday when we departed from the Crimmins's house, the only thing that seemed to be not normal was Mr. Crimmins. Fred was distracted and unfocused. He appeared a little sad. He didn't even offer a token rebuff to Lena who was complaining that he didn't know how to pack the car for a trip. “Stupido,” she used to call him. At another time he would be, at least, attentive to his children either to make sure everyone was all right, or issuing the usual threat to turn the car around unless good behavior was restored in the family vehicle. He had always been a very good driver, and took great pride in his car, which he kept in tip-top condition. Felix and I were always helping Fred Simonize his car on the weekends. For effect, he would throw water on the hood to impress upon someone, proudly, how the water beaded and danced. None of that pride in owning and operating a car was apparent the day we left for the final trip to the farm.

Read more »

Sunday, November 8, 2009

In Las Vegas, history has a price, not a past

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Stefany Anne Golberg in the Washington Post:

ScreenHunter_01 Nov. 08 23.31 Pawn shops thrive in the United States. They are the country's original institutions of consumer credit, offering quick cash (sale or loan) for goods. Giant retailers such as EZPAWN and Cash America offer a Costco-like setting. Since the economy soured and bank loans dried up, Americans are becoming increasingly reacquainted with such stores. Pawn America, a chain in the Midwest, reported a 15 to 20 percent increase in revenue in 2008.

Offering a window into this world is “Pawn Stars,” whose viewers watch the amusing ins and outs of pawn shop life and learn about the business. The show is pulling record ratings for the History Channel. In one clip, proprietor Rick Harrison boasts about a 2001 Super Bowl ring once owned by a player he doesn't name with a story he doesn't remember. We learn instead how Super Bowl rings are made and how their worth is determined. In another clip, Harrison shows off two anonymous Olympic bronze medals, explaining that their value is determined by how, where and when they were won.

But why are Gold & Silver's customers pawning their most cherished belongings?

More here.

Sunday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Water be a String to my Guitar

Water, be a string to my guitar. The new conquerors have arrived
and the old ones have gone. It’s difficult to remember my face
in mirrors. Be my memory that I may see what I lost…
Who am I after this exodus? I have a rock
that carries my name over hills that overlook what has come
and gone…seven hundred years guide my funeral behind the city walls…
and in vain time circles to save my past from a moment
that gives birth to the history of exile in me…and in others…
Water, be a string to my guitar, the new conquerors have arrived
and the old ones have gone south as nations who renovate their days
in the rubble of transformation: I know who I was yesterday, so what
will I become tomorrow under the Atlantic banners of Columbus? Be a string,
water, be a string to my guitar. There is no Egypt in Egypt, no
Fez in Fez, and Syria is distant. And no hawk
in my kin’s banner, no river east of the palm trees besieged
by quick Mongol horses. In which Andalus will I end? Right here
or over there? I will know that I perished here and left my best
behind me: my past. Nothing remains for me except my guitar,
O water, be a string to my guitar. The conquerors have gone
and the conquerors have come…

Mahmoud Darwish

translation: Fady Joudah
excerpted from If I Were Another;
Farrar, Straus, and Grioux, 2009

Game, set and match — Agassi

Posted on by Azra Raza

From The Washington Post:

Agassi Agassi was born in Las Vegas to a brutal Iranian immigrant, a former Olympic boxer, who forced his four children to play tennis. As a pre-schooler, Andre began hitting balls on the backyard court for hours every day. School, friends, social life and especially thinking were considered distractions by his father, who terrified the entire family. But while his sisters rebelled and his older brother, Philly, finally lacked the killer instinct, Andre became his father's obsession and whipping boy — one who was expected to whip other boys and unsuspecting men on court. His father pitted him at age 8 against suckers, including football great Jim Brown, who foolishly bet $500 that he could beat the kid. Before junior tournaments, Mr. Agassi fed his son caffeine-laced pills. Later, he tried to turn Andre on to speed.

At the age of 12, Andre traveled to Australia with a team of elite young players. For each tournament he won, he got a beer as a reward. Then in the seventh grade he was shipped off to the Bollettieri Academy in Florida, where his tennis flourished, but his life turned feral. Drinking hard liquor and smoking dope, he wore an earring, eyeliner and a Mohawk. Nobody objected as long as he won matches. The academy, in Agassi's words, was “Lord of the Flies with forehands.” Since the press and the tennis community still regard Nick Bollettieri as a seer and an innovator whose academy spawned dozens of similar training facilities, Agassi's critical opinion of him may shock the ill-informed. But in fact, Bollettieri is the paradigmatic tennis coach: that is, a man of no particular aptitude or experience and no training at all to deal with children.

More here.

How power changed a president

Posted on by Azra Raza

James Crabtree in Prospect Magazine:

Obama One year on from his election victory, how should we judge President Barack Obama? He has passed a $787bn (£500bn) stimulus package and a $3.4 trillion budget, bailed out America’s floundering car makers, and launched landmark legislation to reform healthcare, tighten regulation on a crippled financial sector, and cut greenhouse gases. Against a backdrop of economic chaos and partisan division, and especially if some form of health reform passes by the end of the year, Obama’s early record will look impressive. It’s been a good start.

That said, a president who promised unity has also brought discord. The saner wings of the American right (and some Democrats) worry that his moderate tone hides policies that dangerously expand the grip of the state, and the depth of its debt. The less sane gather in the streets and howl about the road to socialism. Critics on the left, meanwhile, already see a once-in-a-generation missed opportunity. Obama has a thumping electoral mandate, and control of congress. Yet he stimulated the economy too little, and fluffed a perfect moment to bring in radical measures to take on America’s banks and health insurers. Behind these worries, doubts lurk about what the president stands for, and whether the “Obama-ism” implicit in his campaign can translate into governance. Put more simply: has Obama begun to change Washington, or has Washington begun to change him?

More here.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Captives: What really happened during the Israeli attacks?

Posted on by Azra Raza

Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker:

Gaza In southwest Israel, at the border of Egypt and the Gaza Strip, there is a small crossing station not far from a kibbutz named Kerem Shalom. A guard tower looms over the flat, scrubby buffer zone. Gaza never extends more than seven miles wide, and the guards in the tower can see the Mediterranean Sea, to the north. The main street in Gaza, Salah El-Deen Road, runs along the entire twenty-five-mile span of the territory, and on a clear night the guards can watch a car make the slow journey from the ruins of the Yasir Arafat International Airport, near the Egyptian border, toward the lights of Gaza City, on the Strip’s northeastern side. Observation balloons hover just outside Gaza, and pilotless drones freely cross its airspace. Israeli patrols tightly enforce a three-mile limit in the Mediterranean and fire on boats that approach the line. Between the sea and the security fence that surrounds the hundred and forty square miles of Gaza live a million and a half Palestinians.

Every opportunity for peace in the Middle East has been led to slaughter, and at this isolated desert crossing, on June 25, 2006, another moment of promise culminated in bloodshed. The year had begun with tumult. That January, Hamas, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist group, won Palestine’s parliamentary elections, defeating the more moderate Fatah Party. Both parties sent armed partisans into the streets, and Gaza verged on civil war. Then, on June 9th, a tentative truce between Hamas and Israel ended after an explosion on a beach near Gaza City, apparently caused by an Israeli artillery shell, killed seven members of a Palestinian family, who were picnicking. (The Israelis deny responsibility.) Hamas fired fifteen rockets into Israel the next day. The Israelis then launched air strikes into Gaza for several days, killing eight militants and fourteen civilians, including five children.

More here.