Anita Singh in The Telegraph:

Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin's “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as “a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”. His “half-baked theory” directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”, the site stated.

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as “a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying”.

More here.

Justin Gillis in the New York Times:

Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night. He was 95 and lived in Dallas.

The cause was complications from cancer, said Kathleen Phillips, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M University, where Dr. Borlaug had served on the faculty since 1984.

Dr. Borlaug’s advances in plant breeding led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin America and Asia and brought him international acclaim. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was widely described as the father of the broad agricultural movement called the Green Revolution, though decidedly reluctant to accept the title. “A miserable term,” he said, characteristically shrugging off any air of self-importance.

More here. [Thanks to Shabbir Kazmi.]

Americans Observing 9/11 By Trying Not To Masturbate

From lensculture:

Covered, 2009 is a body of work that depicts a palm tree in my father’s garden wrapped in material to protect it from frost over the winter months. The project was completed at the start of spring just before the covering became redundant as a protection from the cold weather.

The domestic garden is a controlled and contrived space, one that often has ambiguous status. Here the natural world is explored but equally is a symbol of man’s continued desire to bend nature to human will. In this project I see the garden as a studio space or stage where I have documented sculptural forms created by my father. Inspired by Paul Nash’s late photographs in which he explored domestic landscapes in reference to ‘object-personages’ – curious or evocatively shaped forms that seemed to resemble or take on the personality of something else- I seek to highlight the way that space can function as a matrix of unnoticed possibilities.

Thus the interpretation of the object within the photograph is dependent on projection, as the viewer may be unaware of what lies beneath the wrapping. In the photographs the plant becomes a sculptural object, the folds in the material imply jellyfish or mushroom clouds, resemble mouths, noses and eyes: anthropomorphic, faceless and silent forms. Rooted to the spot the object comes out of the ground as if fixed to a plinth. Presented as a series the images may be read as exhibits within the tradition of ethnographic display. The documentation of a ritualistic process of a north London suburban garden within which an object becomes otherworldly: fetishised and surreal.

More here.

Ma Will Be Late

that I come back to you
tired and without memory
that the kitchen door is open I

shuffle in with suitcases hurriedly bought presents
my family’s distressed dreams
slink down the corridor the windows stained

with their abandoned language in the hard
bathroom light I brush my teeth
put a pill on my tongue: Thur

that I walk past where my daughter sleeps
her sheet neatly folded beneath her chin
on the dressing table silkworms rear in gold

that I can pass my sons
frowning like fists against their pillows
their restless undertones bruise the room

that I can rummage a nightie from the drawer
slip into the dark slit behind your back
that the warmth flows across to me

makes me neither poet nor human
in the ambush of breath
I die into woman

by Antjie Krog

from Down to my Last Skin; Random House,
South Africa, 2000

At this year’s Biennale, the most eloquent work on display is made from the blood, grime and detritus of violent crime. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reports from Italy on the transformative work of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, and on the dwindling usefulness of nationally-defined art.

From The National:

Once a day, a young man mops the floor of a dilapidated palazzo in Venice. With his head down and his two hands gripping a long handle, he pushes a damp lump of soiled rags from room to room. The rags have been soaked in the blood and filth of crime scenes in Mexico, dried, transported to Italy, and are then plunged into buckets of water and sloshed back and forth in half-moon patterns across the floor. Every day they leave behind a thin layer of grime and the unmistakable stench of death. This quotidian routine, which is more about accumulating residue than removing it, is part of an extended performance piece conceived by the artist Teresa Margolles, whose work comprises Mexico’s official participation in this year’s Venice Biennale.

One of the most controversial figures in the recent history of the Mexico City art scene, Margolles has been making work from the material traces of death for 20 years. In 1989, she joined a group of radical artists, musicians and performers to form SEMEFO, an acronym for Servicio Medico Forense, or Forensic Medical Service. The collective, which disbanded in 1999, used municipal morgues as studios and turned the refuse of crimes into an artistic medium. Along the way, the group created a template for artists to act as amateur detectives, picking up clues not for the purpose of solving individual crimes but rather to address the long-term damage that criminal activity does to a society when murders become commonplace.

More here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Despite the contradictions within the west, mainstream Orientalism holds that all cultures are developing towards the universal—or, more specifically, globalised—model of secular modernity and the market. According to this view, the Muslim world experiences backwardness to the extent that it resists secularisation. The Crisis of Islamic Civilization, a subtle and erudite book by former Iraqi minister Ali A Allawi, challenges this thesis. Surveying the Muslim world’s social, economic and moral failures, and the terror espoused by certain Islamist groups, Allawi suggests the problem might not be too much Islam, but too little.

Islam is a civilisational framework that rests on the tripod of private ritual, public ethics and individual spiritual striving—and the legs of the tripod must balance each other. But, Allawi argues, the current Islamic “revival” is operating only in the field of religiosity: focusing on naked symbols and rules, proclaiming the superiority of Islam while adopting indiscriminately the technology, economics and cultural products of the west. It emphasises Sharia as a set of fixed punishments rather than as a framework of legislative principles. For the revivalists, the public sphere is too often reduced to the state—and their political project is simply to seize control of repressive state apparatuses.

More here.

Eugenie Scott in Panda's Thumb:

I and NCSE staff were invited to view the new Jon Amiel movie, Creation, starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly. I believe it to be a thoughtful, well-made film that will change many views of Darwin held by the public—for the good. The acting is strong, the visuals are wonderful, and it treats with loving care the Victorian details of the furnishings at Down house and other sites (such as Malvern), and the local church.

The movie takes place after Darwin has returned from the Beagle voyage, and has settled down with his wife, Emma. It concentrates on their relationship, on the growth of their family, and of course, on the production of his most famous scientific work, On the Origin of Species. It looks hard at Darwin’s growing disenchantment with Christianity, especially the concept of Providence, and how poorly it fits Darwin the naturalist’s knowledge of a very unpeaceable kingdom. Darwin’s frequent illness is portrayed with brutal honesty. Sometimes pale, nauseated, unable even to eat dinner with his family, much less work on his science, Darwin is shown suffering from vague symptoms which he attempts to cure with what we would recognize as quack treatments.

A centerpiece of the movie is the death of Annie, the Darwins’ beloved 10 year old daughter, and how it affected the relationship of Charles and Emma.

More here.

Herbert J. Gans in Transformations of the Public Sphere:

Michael Burawoy’s dramatic reinvention of and powerful advocacy for public sociology at the ASA’s 2004 annual meetings has set off a process to incorporate public sociology into the current discipline. Although it is too early to determine what paths that process will take, so far there seems to be more discourse about public sociology than activity to advance it, or for that matter, a new outpouring of high quality public sociology. This essay argues that such activity–and outpouring–require some serious structural changes in the discipline and describes several urgent ones, both in the organization of the discipline and in sociological graduate education.

I emphasize urgent because the active development of public sociology is essential to the healthy future of the discipline. Although sociology is growing numerically in a variety of ways, its status in the social sciences and in American intellectual life has not kept up with that growth. Exciting intellectual work is being done in a number of sociology’s fields, but it does not show up often enough in the journals that speak for the entire discipline or in the now existing varieties of public sociology.

More here.

“I am Heathcliff,” the willful Cathy declares, but then she marries somebody else, the rich and weak Edgar Linton, then owner of Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff flees and returns years later, intent on revenge and ruining everybody and taking their money. Cathy dies in childbirth, and Heathcliff calls down a curse, demanding that she haunt him forever. It’s wild, gothic stuff, but there’s much more going on. “Wuthering Heights,” as Joyce Carol Oates has pointed out, is a parable of innocence and loss, of “childhood’s necessary defeat.” But it presents too a contrasting tale, a story of education, maturing and affection — that happens in the novel’s present-day frame — observed by Lockwood and the glowering Heathcliff. This second romance, between Cathy’s daughter and the grandson of Heathcliff’s foster-father, thought by some critics and many readers to be but a pale reflection of what has gone before, is essential to the novel’s conception. Escape from family doom is possible, Brontë suggests, even though the shadow of that doom will always linger, out there on the moor.

more from Richard Rayner at the LA Times here.

Kevin Carey in Washington Monthly (via Pablo Policzer):

Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

Kenneth Rogoff in Project Syndicate:

Everyone from the Queen of England to laid-off Detroit autoworkers wants to know why more experts did not see the financial crisis coming. It is an awkward question. How can policymakers be so certain that financial catastrophe won’t soon recur when they seemed to have no idea that such a crisis would happen in the first place?

The answer is not very reassuring. First, the fact is that economics tells us much more about a country’s vulnerability to financial crises than it does about the timing. Second, there is every reason to worry that the banking crisis has simply morphed into a long-term government debt crisis.

After all, why exactly are most investors now so confident that it is over? Mainly because they see that the governments of the world have cast a vast and expansive safety net over the major financial institutions and markets. At the same time, policymakers have turned on all the tools of modern macroeconomic stimulus to full blast, with huge fiscal deficits and near zero policy interest rates.

But if the governments have shown they will spare no expense to backstop the financial system, who is to backstop governments, particularly with so many running out-sized deficits at the same time.

As governments pile up war-level debt burdens, when will the problem explode? One again we just don’t know. Our theoretical models tell us that even a massively leveraged economy can plod along for years, if not decades, before crashing and burning. It all boils down to confidence. It is precisely when investors are most sure that governments will eventually dig their way out of huge debt holes that politicians dig their way deeper and deeper into debt. Economics theory tells us a lot about which countries are most vulnerable, but specifying exactly where and when crises will erupt is far more difficult.

“There are four types of people,” teaches an ancient rabbinical text. “The one who says: What is mine is mine and what is yours is yours — this is the common type, but there are some who say that this is the type of Sodom. What is mine is yours and what is yours is mine — this is a boor. What is mine is yours — a saint. What is yours is mine — a villain.” Brothers and sisters, is this liberal or conservative? The legitimacy of private property is certainly championed, but that is both a liberal conviction and a conservative one; and the tradition sees fit to record also the remarkable opinion that this elementary and uncontroversial norm — a scholar many years ago called it “possessive individualism” — was the custom of the most wicked city on earth. Moreover, legitimacy does not confer sanctity: the rabbis entertain the prospect of different distributions of wealth, and prudently contemplate the extremes of selflessness and selfishness. So liberals and conservatives, and socialists too, and even the Club for Growth, will all find a use for this text, which is to say that the text is useless, I mean, for establishing the liberalism or the conservatism of the Jewish tradition.

more from Leon Wieseltier on Norman Podhoretz (!!) at the NYT here.

James Traub in the NYT Sunday Magazine:

In July, President Obama met for 45 minutes with leaders of American Jewish organizations. All presidents meet with Israel’s advocates. Obama, however, had taken his time, and powerhouse figures of the Jewish community were grumbling; Obama’s coolness seemed to be of a piece with his willingness to publicly pressure Israel to freeze the growth of its settlements and with what was deemed his excessive solicitude toward the plight of the Palestinians. During the July meeting, held in the Roosevelt Room, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told Obama that “public disharmony between Israel and the U.S. is beneficial to neither” and that differences “should be dealt with directly by the parties.” The president, according to Hoenlein, leaned back in his chair and said: “I disagree. We had eight years of no daylight” — between George W. Bush and successive Israeli governments — “and no progress.

It is safe to say that at least one participant in the meeting enjoyed this exchange immensely: Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and executive director of J Street, a year-old lobbying group with progressive views on Israel. Some of the mainstream groups vehemently protested the White House decision to invite J Street, which they regard as a marginal organization located well beyond the consensus that they themselves seek to enforce. But J Street shares the Obama administration’s agenda, and the invitation stayed. Ben-Ami didn’t say a word at the meeting — he is aware of J Street’s neophyte status — but afterward he was quoted extensively in the press, which vexed the mainstream groups all over again. J Street does not accept the “public harmony” rule any more than Obama does. In a conversation a month before the White House session, Ben-Ami explained to me: “We’re trying to redefine what it means to be pro-Israel. You don’t have to be noncritical. You don’t have to adopt the party line. It’s not, ‘Israel, right or wrong.’

Robert L. Dorit in American Scientist:

A simplified, and ultimately misleading, account of the evolutionary process argues that natural selection inexorably leads to optimal adaptation. According to this perspective, organisms face challenges presented by the environment, and ultimately, through the agency of natural selection, find the best solutions. From this point of view, the living world—from the three-dimensional structure of enzymes to the drag-minimizing shape of porpoises—could thus be described as a compendium of these supposedly ideal adaptations.

This perspective beguiles in its simplicity, but in the end, it trivializes the complexities of the evolutionary process. Natural selection sorts among existing alternatives, but sometimes a good-enough solution may become inextricably locked in place. Evolution is not about what’s best, but what works. Organisms do fit their environments exquisitely—and the task of contemporary evolutionary biology is to elucidate the interplay of history, chance and selection that shapes life on this planet. To be sure, we can ease our burden by downplaying the reach of history. We can even maintain that chance delays, but ultimately does not derail, the emergence of peak adaptation. And finally, we can dismiss what appears to be a suboptimal design by asserting that it simply reflects our lack of understanding of what is being optimized. But these are risky simplifications. In the end, life is more than a collection of adaptations, and evolution is more than the ascent to perfection. My job as an evolutionary biologist goes beyond simply imagining the plausible benefits that disembodied features might confer on individual organisms.

The 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth seems as good time as any to revisit the tension between history and optimality. I want to do so, however, by focusing on two seemingly disparate evolutionary narratives: The typewriter keyboard and the genetic code.

More here.

Tony Karon in Time:

The purpose of the 9/11 attacks was not simply to kill Americans. Rather, the attacks formed part of bin Laden's strategy to launch a global Islamist revolution aimed at ending U.S. influence in Muslim countries, overthrowing regimes there allied with Washington and putting al-Qaeda at the head of a global Islamist insurgency whose objective was to restore the caliphate that had once ruled territory stretching from Moorish Spain through much of Asia.

Today, however, al-Qaeda is believed to comprise a couple of hundred desperate men, their core leaders hiding out in Pakistan's tribal wilds and under constant threat of attack by ever present U.S. drone aircraft, their place in Western nightmares and security determinations long since eclipsed by such longtime rivals as Iran, Hizballah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. This year's official threat assessment by the U.S. Directorate of National Intelligence cited the global economic downturn as the primary security challenge facing the U.S. The report found “notable progress in Muslim public opinion turning against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda” and said no country was at risk of falling to al-Qaeda-inspired extremists. It argued that sustained pressure against the movement's surviving core in the Pakistani tribal wilds was degrading its organizational cohesion and diminishing the threat it poses.

More here.