Sontag’s image of remote and disciplined rationality was altered by Swimming in a Sea of Death (2008), her son David Rieff’s painful and dismaying memoir of her frantic, self-deluded fight against the leukaemia that killed her. It will be further changed by the publication of three volumes of her private journals, meticulously, if reluctantly, edited by Rieff, who has explained in interviews that while he himself would have preferred not to publish the journals, Sontag sold them to UCLA without restriction, and he decided to do the editing job himself rather than leave it to a stranger. The first volume, Reborn, takes Sontag from adolescence to the beginnings of her ascendancy among the New York intellectuals of the 1960s. Relentlessly self-analytical, unsparingly honest and explicit, she describes her identity as a lesbian and an outsider, her unhappy marriage, her flight to Oxford and Paris, her experience of motherhood, her determination to survive alone, and, always, her ambitious self-formation as an artist and thinker. Sontag began to keep an intimate record of her thoughts and experiences in 1947, when she was a terrifyingly precocious girl of fourteen. As she later observed, she used her writing to try out new selves, and to construct her formidable persona. ‘In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person. I create myself.’

more from Literary Review here.

From The Telegraph:

So where does she draw consolation in the face of ageing and death?

'Consolation? I'm not sure I have it. I have a belief, I guess, in the power of the aggregate human attempt – the best of ourselves. In love and hope and optimism – you know, the magic things that seem inexplicable. Why we are the way we are. I do have a sense of trying to make things better. Where does that come from?' She laughs. 'And why do some people just seem to want to make other people miserable?'

Streep's father was a pharmaceutical executive, her mother a commercial artist. She is the eldest of three children, and the only daughter. After studying drama at Vassar and Yale, and acting on stage and in television, she made an acclaimed film debut in 1977, at the relatively late age of 28, in a supporting role in Julia, Fred Zinnemann's film about the novelist Lillian Hellman. In 1979 she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards for her role in The Deerhunter, and a year later she won the first of her two Best Actress Oscars for Kramer vs Kramer. (She won the second in 1983, for Sophie's Choice.)

Streep has a way of dividing opinion. It has become a favourite critical saw to describe her as a technically immaculate actress who lacks feeling; but audiences – and her fellow actors – tend to disagree. Diane Keaton once described her as 'my generation's genius', while among younger actresses she inspires an admiration bordering on the awe-struck. Vera Farmiga, who worked with her on The Manchurian Candidate, describes Streep as 'untouchable. I try to take all my cues from her as a role model for women, as an actress, as a human being.' (Dustin Hoffman, famously, was less complimentary. After starring with Streep in Kramer vs Kramer he described her as 'selfish' and 'obsessed', stating, 'I hate her guts – although I respect her as an actress.' Streep, for her part, has equably described Hoffman as an 'old buddy'.)

More here.

Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose and Lee Smolin in Edge:

The economic crisis has to be stabilized immediately. This has to be carried out pragmatically, without undue ideology, and without reliance on the failed ideas and assumptions which led to the crisis. Complexity science can help here. For example, it is wrong to speak of “restoring the markets to equilibrium”, because the markets have never been in equilibrium. We are already way ahead if we speak of “restoring the markets to a stable, self-organized critical state.”

In the near-term, Eric Weinstein has spoken about an “economic Manhattan project”. This means getting a group of good scientists together, some who know a lot about economics and finance, and others, who have proved themselves in other areas of science but bring fresh minds and perspectives to the challenge, to focus on developing a scientific conceptualization of economic theory and modeling that is reliable enough to be called a science.

More here. (Picture shows my dear friend Stuart Kauffman)

William Saletan in Slate:

A few days ago, I wrote about a test, now being marketed in the United States, that predicts whether your toddler has more potential as a power athlete or as an endurance athlete. The test examines ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of muscular force. Fray poster Andrea Freiboden isn't impressed. “What a lot of crap. Just look at the race of the athlete,” she writes:

Generally, people of West African origin have more fast twitch muscles which allow intense bursts of power. This is why running backs, defensive linemen, and receivers are almost all black. We don't need any expensive test. All you have to do is look at the physique. Blacks in basketball are lean and musularly [sic] hard. Whites have softer muscles, which is why white basketball players have to rely more on skill than blacks who have the advantage of skill + great speed/strength.

Oy. I've been through this wringer before. It's true that some racial averages differ in part for biological reasons. It's also true that that this is one of them. But Freiboden is exactly wrong. Race is a less, not more, reliable gauge of physical characteristics than genes are. In fact, that's one of the chief consolations of nontherapeutic genetic testing: No matter how inaccurate genes are as a predictor of this or that ability, they're more accurate than predictions based on race. And the sooner we get past judging by race, the better.

More here.

Arjun Appadurai at The Immanent Frame:

In other words, as we learn more about the deep geo-politics behind the terrifying attacks on Mumbai earlier this month, we need to recognize that there is a tectonic struggle going on in and near Mumbai on at least three axes: the deepest axis (from a historical point of view) is the struggle between the Indian Ocean commercial/criminal nexus and the land-based nexus that stretches from Mumbai to Delhi to Kashmir. The second, more recent struggle is the struggle between political and commercial interests now located in Maharashtra and Gujarat for control over Mumbai, a struggle that was superficially resolved in 1956, when Bombay was declared the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. The third, most subtle, is between a land-based, plebeian form of Hindu nationalism, best represented by the auto-rickshaw drivers and small street vendors of North Mumbai and Greater Mumbai, who would be happy to see South Mumbai destroyed; and the more slick, market-oriented face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose elite supporters know that South Mumbai is crucial to the mediation of global capital to India, and where business tycoons like Mukesh Ambani are building homes larger than many global hotels.

More here.

I am proud to say that my sister, Atiya B. Khan, M.D., is one of the leaders of this organization which is doing tremendously useful work in bringing healthcare and secular education to thousands of poor children in many areas of Pakistan. In addition to maintaining a very busy medical practice in Maryland, my sister travels on weekends to raise funds for HDF and visits Pakistan frequently to oversee its work there, thereby providing my whole family with a role model worthy of emulation. This is from the Human Development Foundation website:

“Development is a process of enlarging people's choices—not just choices between different detergents, television channels or car models, but the choices that are created by expanding human capabilities and functioning—what people do and can do in their lives.

A few capabilities are essential for all levels of human development, without which, many choices in life would not be available. These capabilities are to lead long and healthy lives, to be knowledgeable and to have access to the resources needed for a decent standard of living-and these are reflected in the human development index.”

Human development in the words of Paul Streen is: “Human. But many additional choices are valued by people. These include political, social, economic and cultural freedom, a sense of community, opportunities for being creative and productive, and self-respect and human rights. Yet human development is more than just achieving these capabilities; it is also the process of pursuing them in a way that is equitable, participatory, productive and sustainable.”

The Project has a holistic approach to Human Development, based on the three criteria included in the Human Development Index, devised by Dr. Mahboobul Haq. The model was developed by specialists working in the field of social sciences. This successful model teaches responsibility and eliminates dependency. The main areas of intervention are:

a. Community Empowerment
b. Education
c. Health
d. Grassroots economic development
e. Community Physical Infrastructure

More here.

In this season of charitable giving, please consider donating to this worthy cause. To do so, use the topmost ad in the righthand column at 3QD. Thank you for your attention.

Charges of hypocrisy can be surprisingly irrelevant and often distract us from more important concerns.

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse in Scientific American:

Former U.S. vice president Al Gore urges us all to reduce our carbon footprint, yet he regularly flies in a private jet. Former drug czar William Bennett extols the importance of temperance but is reported to be a habitual gambler. Pastor Ted Haggard preached the virtues of “the clean life” until allegations of methamphetamine use and a taste for male prostitutes arose. Eliot Spitzer prosecuted prostitution rings as attorney general in New York State, but he was later found to be a regular client of one such ring.

These notorious accusations against public figures all involve hypocrisy, in which an individual fails to live according to the precepts he or she seeks to impose on others. Charges of hypocrisy are common in debates because they are highly effective: we feel compelled to ­reject the views of hypocrites. But although we see hypocrisy as a vice and a symptom of incompetence or insincerity, we should be exceedingly careful about letting our emotions color our judgments of substantive issues.

Allegations of hypocrisy are treacherous because they can function as argumentative diversions, drawing our attention away from the task of assessing the strength of a position and toward the character of the position’s advocate. Such accusations trigger emotional reflexes that dominate more rational thought patterns. And it is precisely in the difficult and important cases such as climate change that our reflexes are most often inadequate.

More here. [Photo shows Spitzer.]

Asif Ali Zardari in the New York Times:

The recent death and destruction in Mumbai, India, brought to my mind the death and destruction in Karachi on Oct. 18, 2007, when terrorists attacked a festive homecoming rally for my wife, Benazir Bhutto. Nearly 150 Pakistanis were killed and more than 450 were injured. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai may be a news story for most of the world. For me it is a painful reality of shared experience. Having seen my wife escape death by a hairbreadth on that day in Karachi, I lost her in a second, unfortunately successful, attempt two months later.

The Mumbai attacks were directed not only at India but also at Pakistan’s new democratic government and the peace process with India that we have initiated. Supporters of authoritarianism in Pakistan and non-state actors with a vested interest in perpetuating conflict do not want change in Pakistan to take root.

To foil the designs of the terrorists, the two great nations of Pakistan and India, born together from the same revolution and mandate in 1947, must continue to move forward with the peace process. Pakistan is shocked at the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. We can identify with India’s pain. I am especially empathetic. I feel this pain every time I look into the eyes of my children.

More here.

///
In Praise of Dreams
Wistawa Szymborska

In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek
and not with just the living.

I drive a car
that does what I want it to.

I am gifted
and write mighty epics.

I hear voices
as clearly as any venerable saint.

My brilliance as a pianist
would stun you.

I fly the way we ought to,
i.e., on my own.

Falling from the roof,
I tumble gently to the grass.

I've got no problem
breathing under water.

I can't complain:
I've been able to locate Atlantis.

It's gratifying that I can always
wake up before dying.

As soon as war breaks out,
I roll over on my other side.

I'm a child of my age,
but I don't have to be.

A few years ago
I saw two suns.

And the night before last a penguin,
clear as day.
.

As one contemplates the life and work of Georges Simenon, the question inevitably arises: Was he human? In his energies, creative and erotic, he was certainly extraordinary. He wrote some 400 novels, under a variety of pseudonyms, as well as countless short stories and film scripts, and toward the end of his life, having supposedly given up writing, he dictated thousands of pages of memoirs. He could knock off a novel in a week or 10 days of manic typing — he never revised, as the work sometimes shows — and in Paris in the 1920s he is said to have broken off an affair with Josephine Baker, the expatriate American chanteuse and star of La Revue Nègre, because in the year he was with her, he was so distracted by his passion for her that he had managed to write only three or four books. He put himself in the way of many such distractions. In 1976, when he was in his 70s, he told his friend Federico Fellini in an interview in L’Express that over the course of his life he had slept with 10,000 women. True, he was an early starter. He lost his virginity at the age of 12 to a girl three years his senior, who got him to change schools so that they could continue to see each other and then promptly threw him over for another sweetheart. Young Georges had received his first lesson in the school of hard knocks.

more from the LA Weekly here.

AN HOUR at the zoo is enough to convince most people that apes and monkeys are close kin to humankind. Some say that an hour watching proceedings in any parliament is enough to show that humans are close kin to monkeys. Either way, we know that the primate family is an intimate one, with the great apes – gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orang-utans and humans – particularly closely related. It did not take genetics to tell us this, however, nor comparative anatomy. We now know that we share many of our genes with insects too, and the anatomies of all mammals are just resized and repositioned versions of one another. The key to understanding the true closeness of apes, ourselves included, is ethology. When Jane Goodall first sat in the Gombe rainforest, giving with fortuitous naivety anthropomorphic interpretations of the chimpanzee behaviour she witnessed, she was initiating a rethink: about apes, about humanity’s relationship with them, and ultimately about humanity itself.

more from the New Scientist here.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust. We are not used to such revolutionary sentiments in our poets. When he left Cambridge, Milton refused to take holy orders and, in his first great poem Lycidas, he mounted a blistering assault on the corruption of the clergy. He was a champion of Puritanism at a time when that meant rejecting a church in cahoots with a brutally authoritarian state.

more from The Guardian here.

From Nature:

Society must respond to the growing demand for cognitive enhancement. That response must start by rejecting the idea that 'enhancement' is a dirty word, argue Henry Greely and colleagues.

Today, on university campuses around the world, students are striking deals to buy and sell prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin — not to get high, but to get higher grades, to provide an edge over their fellow students or to increase in some measurable way their capacity for learning. These transactions are crimes in the United States, punishable by prison. Many people see such penalties as appropriate, and consider the use of such drugs to be cheating, unnatural or dangerous. Yet one survey estimated that almost 7% of students in US universities have used prescription stimulants in this way, and that on some campuses, up to 25% of students had used them in the past year. These students are early adopters of a trend that is likely to grow, and indications suggest that they're not alone.

In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and potential abuse. Still, cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society, and a proper societal response will involve making enhancements available while managing their risks.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Imagine you’re in a dark room, running your fingers over a smooth surface in search of a single dot the size of this period. How high do you think the dot must be for your finger pads to feel it? A hundredth of an inch above background? A thousandth? Well, take a tip from the economy and keep downsizing. Scientists have determined that the human finger is so sensitive it can detect a surface bump just one micron high. All our punctuation point need do, then, is poke above its glassy backdrop by 1/400,000th of an inch — the diameter of a bacterial cell — and our fastidious fingers can find it. The human eye, by contrast, can’t resolve anything much smaller than 100 microns. No wonder we rely on touch rather than vision when confronted by a new roll of toilet paper and its Abominable Invisible Seam.

Biologically, chronologically, allegorically and delusionally, touch is the mother of all sensory systems. It is an ancient sense in evolution: even the simplest single-celled organisms can feel when something brushes up against them and will respond by nudging closer or pulling away. It is the first sense aroused during a baby’s gestation and the last sense to fade at life’s culmination. Patients in a deep vegetative coma who seem otherwise lost to the world will show skin responsiveness when touched by a nurse.

More here.

Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

The student population of my school in New Delhi was composed of girls from practically every part of India belonging to several different linguistic groups and religions. Nearly fifty percent of the Punjabi and Bengali students came from families who had lost their ancestral homes in the partition of India in 1947, my own being among them. In middle school, a class mate whose folks had moved to India from the Pakistani city of Lahore, once casually commented that her father's family used to observe Muharram in their hometown before the partition. At the time I didn't think much of what my friend had said. We were young and many of us had heard interesting pre-partition tales from our parents. It is only now, on thinking back, that her story acquires a special meaning and given the subsequent deterioration in Hindu-Muslim relations in general and between India and Pakistan in particular, also a certain amount of poignancy. You see, the remarkable thing about my friend's Muharram story was that she was not a Muslim, but a Hindu Brahmin.

My class mate belonged to the Punjabi community of Dutts, in more communally harmonious times also known as the Hussaini Brahmins. They, along with their Shia Muslim friends and neighbors, used to commemorate and grieve the deaths of Imam Hussain and his disciples in the bloody battle of Karbala during the 7th century power struggle among early Muslims.

More here. [Photo by Feroz Shakir.]

The season of year-end lists is upon us. Here is a metalist, from Lifehacker:

1. Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks
   “Dozens of Google search guides detail the tips you already know, but today we're skipping the obvious and highlighting our favorite obscure Google web search tricks.”
2. Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks
   “Since the dawn of time, geeks have been playing harmless pranks on their beloved (but unsuspecting) associates, and it's up to all of us to carry the torch forward.”
3. Top 10 Ways to Stay Energized
   “You can overcome a late night of net surfing, a rough morning, or just the post-lunch stupor without becoming an over-wired mess.”
4. Top 10 Software Easter Eggs
   “The best easter eggs aren't painted pink and stuffed with jelly beans—they're the undocumented and unexpected fun features hidden deep inside various software apps.”
5. Top 10 BitTorrent Tools and Tricks
   “BitTorrent is the go-to resource for downloading everything from music and movies to software and operating systems, but as its popularity continues to grow, so do the number of tools available for making the most of it.”
6. Top 10 Firefox 3 Features
   “The newest version of our favorite open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox 3, offers dozens of new features and fixes, but only a handful will make the most dramatic difference in your everyday browsing.”
7. Top 10 How To Videos
   “Your crafty older relatives used to have to mail-order their video tutorials or wait for “This Old House” reruns to get their DIY on, but the age of streaming video has been good to those who like to tinker and try out neat tricks.”
8. Top 10 Things You Forgot Your Mac Can Do
   “From pure eye candy to outright productivity-boosters, read on to get reminded of some of the more obscure things you can do with your Mac, fresh out of the box.”
9. Top 10 Telephone Tricks
   “When getting things done involves making phone calls, you want to spend the least amount of time and money on the horn as possible—and several tricks and services can help you do just that.”
10. Top 10 Computer Annoyances and How to Fix Them
    “Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, but too much of the time they can be frustrating, time-wasting, stubborn machines.”

More here.

Graeme Wood in Culture + Travel, reproduced on his own website:

Residents of Vidracco (pop. 500) knew the newcomers were different. Since 1977, they had been showing up one-by-one in the little Piedmontese valley, marching in from Turin like bugs following a trail of syrup. They kept to themselves. Their chitchat, when it came, zoomed right past the commonplace – nothing on the latest Juventus game, or the sorry state of farming in the valley. Instead, they spoke eagerly of “esoteric physics,” astral-plane travel, and Vidracco’s remarkable “synchronic energy lines,” supposedly unique on earth. And they rarely came out at night.

One day in 1992, Vidracco found out why. Backed by carabinieri and motivated by a tip, a magistrate showed up and demanded that the newcomers unlock a nondescript wooden door in the side of the mountain, next to their compound (called “Damanhur,” after the ancient Egyptian city). Inside, a cramped passage led to a section of wall decorated in pharaonic themes. The Damanhurians pointed a garage door opener at the flat stone surface, and clicked its button. Gears whirred, and a wall-section fell away.

Damanhur’s handful of citizens – dozens at first, but by now 330 — had been working in shifts, under cover of darkness, scratching at the earth with picks and shovels, and building shrines deep in the steep, forested mountain. Behind a series of false walls lay a revelation as mysterious as King Tut’s tomb, but grander — as ethereal as the Sistine Chapel, but weirder. In all, they had dug out over 8000 cubic meters, a space larger than Big Ben, excavated mostly by hand, with neither building permits nor technical expertise. They had decorated these “Temples of Humankind” with a rainbow of wall paintings, Tiffany stained glass, and mosaics. Endless halls snaked around the innards of the mountain, lit with candles and reeking of incense and paint.

More here.

Joe Deal. From the Beach Cities Series, Zuma Beach. 1978.

More here and here.