Dan Bilefsky in the New York Times:

Life appears to be imitating art in a drama convulsing the Czech Republic: an accusation that Milan Kundera, one of Eastern Europe’s most celebrated writers, denounced a Western intelligence agent to Czechoslovakia’s Communist police when he was a 21-year-old student. The agent, Miroslav Dvoracek, served 14 years in jail, including hard labor in a uranium mine.

In Mr. Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke,” a mordant satire of Stalinist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, the protagonist, Ludvik Jahn, is expelled from the Communist Party and forced out of a university after being denounced by his friend Pavel. For the unlikely crime of possessing a sense of humor, Ludvik is sent to work in the mines.

Few here have failed to notice the parallel, which has added a fitting literary tint — along with the sort of denunciation and betrayal that haunt Mr. Kundera’s books — to an episode that has spurred a complex bout of national soul-searching. The accusation was published Monday by the Czech political weekly magazine Respekt and immediately denied by Mr. Kundera.

More here.

From The Guardian:

If you’d predicted that economics was going to be the big new thing in books five years ago you’d probably have been laughed out of the room. But thanks to the success of books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist, a new genre has been spawned. And despite the collapse of western capitalism it’s still going strong, with football due the Freakonomics treatment in the new year.

But the question that’s being asked is why aren’t any of these books by women? Julia Cheiffetz, blogging at publishing website HarperStudio, dubs the genre “big think” books – making serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular. “The point is, all of them promise access to a club whose sole activity is the exchange of ideas; all of them promise, however covertly, to make us feel smarter. And all of them are written by men,” she writes, also singling out The World is Flat by Thomas L Friedman, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. “It is hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas (I’m thinking of Susan Orlean, Mary Roach, Karen Abbott), or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses about the world simply isn’t in our genetic makeup.”

Over at Galley Cat, they’re not quite convinced, and shoehorn Susan Faludi and Naomi Klein into the “explain-it-all” category. “But we did find Cheiffetz’s distinction between ‘storytellers’ and ‘big thinkers’, and the suggestion that these two types of writing might play out along gender lines at least as far as what sells, intriguing,” they add.

More here.

I was hanging out with Morgan last night, and we were lamenting the absence of conservative giants like Joseph Schumpeter or Michael Oakeshott on the intellectual scene, whatever the problems of conservatism as a philosophical orientation.  Now the Michael Oakeshott Association has made a 1948 BBC radio broadcast on the philosophy of history available on the web.

In 1948 Michael Oakeshott made a radio broadcast about the philosophy of history on the BBC’s University Program. Leslie Marsh obtained permission from the BBC to play the broadcast at the MO Association’s inaugural conference in 2001 and to make it available on our web site.

Hence, available once again for you to download are the transcript of the broadcast and the following audio files.

• First lines in .mp3 format (570 Kb)
• First lines in .wav format (6.12 Mb)
• Later lines in .mp3 format (719 Kb)
• Later lines in .wav format (7.73 Mb)
• Full broadcast (.mp3 only, 11.8 Mb)

Their case:

Sen. Obama’s pledged stance on science resonates with us. He has vowed to restore integrity to the role of science advisor by reestablishing the senior status of the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and more broadly, by surrounding himself with individuals with exemplary scientific credentials; his selection of Dr. Harold Varmus as the campaign’s science advisor was a very promising and laudable step in that direction. Sen. Obama understands that basic research is fundamental to how scientific advances are made. He sees the importance of expanding funding for “high-risk, high-return” work, strengthening tax policy to spur R&D, and encouraging the careers of young scientists who pursue innovative lines of thinking. He has offered a comprehensive plan to reinvigorate math and science education, and he recognizes the vital importance of re-architecting nationwide science literacy for these times. His positions on topics ranging from agriculture, alternative energy, and medical research to internet policy, patent law, and space are more robust and ultimately more in line with scientific consensus than those of Sen. McCain. These are important policy positions, and they reflect Sen. Obama’s appreciation of the need to invest in science and science education as a precondition for growth and prosperity in the 21st century. We recognize, however, that these are not the issues that most voters will be thinking about when they cast their ballot.

Far more important is this: Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method. Science is a lens through which we can and should visualize and solve complex problems, organize government and multilateral bodies, establish international alliances, inspire national pride, restore positive feelings about America around the globe, embolden democracy, and ultimately, lead the world. More than anything, what this lens offers the next administration is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes its way, no matter how complex or unanticipated.

Sen. Obama’s embrace of transparency and evidence-based decision-making, his intelligence and curiosity echo this new way of looking at the world.

For the technically minded, in the October 2008 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, there’s an interesting symposium on forecasting the election, and at you can find an associated video of a panel with many of the scholars.  From Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien ‘s piece:

Our Jobs Model forecasts that the Republicans, now incumbent in the White House, will experience a shattering defeat, indeed the greatest incumbent popular vote loss on record from 1948, garnering just 43.4% of the two-par ty popular vote. How accurate is this forecast? Consider simple statistical error. The standard error of estimate is 1.4; but adding even three times that amount to the point forecast would still predict a clear Republican loss ~at 47.7%!. Put another way, if Obama receives less than 50% of the popular vote, the Jobs Model would have registered an error of over 6.6 points. That would be the largest out-of-sample error in the data-set. It implies that there is less than a 1 in 14 chance that the model is wrong in forecasting an Obama victory.

Nevertheless, the Jobs Model is not a “shoo-in” for Obama, once ballot box racism is taken into account. By various estimates, Obama will lose a chunk of votes because he is Black, rather than White. This seems unavoidable. In the foregoing, we evaluated four possible correction values: 0.77, 0.87, 0.90, and 0.93. Which is closer to the truth? In order to avoid appearing arbitrary, we simply take the median of these four values ~0.885! as the proportion of voters who will not take race itself into account. By that reckoning, Obama would win in a close contest ~i.e., a 0.885 correction to the Jobs Model predicts an Obama two-party popular vote forecast of 50.1%!. 3 But if the correction number is lower, by even a small amount, he could well lose. In any event, we expect the competition to be much closer than what is implied by our original, uncorrected Jobs Model.

Ezra Klein over at his blog has a mainstream defense of Khalidi, who’s been offensively maligned in this election:

[Seth Colter Walls] A 1998 tax filing for the McCain-led group shows a $448,873 grant to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies for work in the West Bank. (See grant number 5180, “West Bank: CPRS” on page 14 of this PDF.)

The relationship extends back as far as 1993, when John McCain joined IRI as chairman in January. Foreign Affairs noted in September of that year that IRI had helped fund several extensive studies in Palestine run by Khalidi’s group, including over 30 public opinion polls and a study of “sociopolitical attitudes.”

Of course, there’s seemingly nothing objectionable with McCain’s organization helping a Palestinian group conduct research in the West Bank or Gaza. But it does suggest that McCain could have some of his own explaining to do as he tries to make hay out of Khalidi’s ties to Obama.

Oops. This, of course, just goes to show how absurd it is to suggest that Khalidi is some sort of radical polemicist. The guy is such a credentialed and respected scholar that even right-leaning organizations have funded his work, simply because it’s good work. They may not agree with his personal conclusions, but Khalidi’s scholarship gets taken seriously.

As his work should.

The novelist explains his rage at what the Bush presidency has done to the world – and the world we should be living in.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

If there is something getting Auster’s goat, it’s American politics. It was his disgust at the outcome of the 2000 US elections that sparked the story-within-a-story at the heart of Man in the Dark, about a counterfactual US where civil war reigns and New York leads a movement to form the Independent States of America.

“It’s a war of bullets and bombs, whereas the divisions in the US now are similar to a civil war, but we’re fighting it with words and ideas,” he says.

He can pinpoint the idea for his latest story to his “frustration and disgust after the 2000 elections … Gore won, Gore was elected president, and it was taken away from him by political and legal manoeuvering, and ever since then I’ve had this eerie feeling of being in some parallel world, some world we didn’t ask for but we nevertheless got. In the other world Al Gore is finishing his second term now, we never invaded Iraq, maybe 9/11 never happened, because they were getting close to figuring it out, the Clinton people, and then the Bush people ignored all the warnings, so I think that’s the origin of it.”

More here.

Sean Carroll over at CV:

Time is running out!  October is careening its way toward Halloween, at which point the month devoted to the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge will be over. As of this typing, we’ve received $6,110 worth of donations, which, I must admit, is extremely awesome. Even better, out of 23 proposals we chose for support, 13 have been fully funded! Still, it falls a bit short of our $10,000 goal…

And what is more galling, despite this groundswell of support, Uncertain Principles has pulled ahead!  And he’s only one blogger (plus a dog).  Are you going to stand for that?

It’s a great program, and you feel great after you donate. It’s the swank $200 donations that get all the glory (and we’re very grateful for them, don’t get me wrong), but — following the lead of the Obama campaign — we’re running a people-powered donation drive here. For the starving students out there, consider throwing in $10. Contributions that size would really add up if everyone chipped in. A small price to make the world a better place.

So consider helping out.

From my observation perch in Stanford, California, an English European turned 24/7-cablenews-Webcast junkie, I notice that many Americans still suffer from a touching delusion that this is their election. How curious. Don’t they understand? This is our election. The world’s election. Our future depends on it, and we live it as intensely as Americans do. All we lack is the vote.

The world may not have a vote, but it has a candidate. A BBC World Service poll, conducted across twenty-two countries this summer, found Barack Obama was preferred to John McCain by a margin of four to one. Nearly half those asked said an Obama victory would “fundamentally change” their perception of the United States. And it certainly needs changing. Over the two terms of President George W. Bush, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a series of worldwide public opinion surveys, has documented what anyone who travels around the world knows: a substantial fall in the standing, credibility, attractiveness, and therefore power of the United States.

more from NYRB commentators on the election here.

Hi there, Asad Raza here.  Most people assume this election is already a done deal–this is simply not so.  Turnout will be determinative, especially during an election when many voters will be tempted to stay home, thinking the race is decided.  The party that does the better job of getting its supporters to the polls will win.

So, do some kind of civic service on U.S. Election Day this coming Tuesday. Even better, volunteer over the weekend as well.  One reason: if everyone in the U.S.A. voted, our political discourse would be very different.  No matter where you are, it is possible to do something to support the candidate of your choice.  Talk with undecided voters, help the infirm to get their polling location, encourage people who have to work and then stand in a line for four hours at the polls. If you are homebound, go to your preferred candidate’s website and download lists of people you can call and help.

Excitement about this election is running high.  Here’s an email a New York man named Conor Creaney sent to roust his acquaintances into action:

Esteemed Friend,

You know that the day will come when your doe-eyed offspring will gaze up at you and ask “Parent, what did YOU do the weekend before the 2008 election that could have changed the world?” Ponder for a moment how hard it will be to look the little one in the eye and say “I regrouted the tiles in the shower” or “I went to a really fascinating Maya Deren retrospective at Film Forum”. That will be the moment you wave goodbye to your moral authority, and the moment your child realizes that she is aboard a rudderless ship and has carte blanche to defy and mock you at will. Your future as a moral being is at stake here, and there is only one option (I call it an “option” but we both know that choice is an illusion here): COME TO PHILADELPHIA THIS WEEKEND AND VOLUNTEER FOR THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN.

We are going there. We can provide transport, accommodation (nothing fancy, but it will be free), and we will put you in the hands of Sidra Campbell, Obama’s South Philly Out-of State Volunteer Co-ordinator, a woman of formidable organizational skills. She will put you to work out of Obama’s office on S.15th and Christian.  Your energy and charisma will not be wasted.

PA is still in play electorally, McCain is pouring money and time into it.  Sarah Palin is there right now, searing her message into the minds of these goodhearted people.

If you can’t make it for the whole weekend, you come down on the bus for a day. 

So get in touch (conor.creaney at gmail), and let’s fix this.

Yours,

A Concerned Citizen

I think Mr. Creaney has the correct attitude.  Please consider joining him or someone like him.  Thank you, and have a nice day!

The conventional wisdom in presidential politics is that presidential candidates win their home states. In Arizona one would expect every corner to look like a jubilee celebration in honor of John McCain. It’s a hot election season, which means many street corners are festooned with red and blue campaign signs, lined up like colorful sheets drying in the Arizona sun. Surprisingly, though, McCain’s name is absent from most corner festivities.

Even more surprising, volunteers are scant at McCain’s Phoenix headquarters and other GOP offices throughout the state. The McCain campaign has a national website presence, but lacks a cadre of helpful and informed local volunteers — people who answer for their candidate when he’s away. Are these indicators that the McCain campaign is complacent in Arizona, or are Arizonans that blase about McCain’s candidacy? The campaign did not return phone calls, so it’s hard to know. In fact calls to Republican McCain offices around the state often go unanswered.

This is McCain’s backyard, so where are his supporters?

more from Huffington Post here.

From Slate:

Noreen Malone, Executive Assistant: Obama

David Sedaris framed the choice with this metaphor: “Can I interest you in the chicken?” … “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” I definitely want the chicken.

Farhad Manjoo, “Technology” Columnist: Obama

This is the third presidential election in which I’ll cast a ballot, but only the first time that I’ll be voting for someone: The last two times, I was voting against Bush. I’m choosing Obama for one main reason: He’s the smarter candidate. I don’t just mean he’s got smarter policies, though he does. I mean he seems to have the higher IQ. His books and speeches suggest deep intellectual curiosity—a calm, analytical, rational mind of the sort we haven’t seen in the White House in years.

I’ve long admired John McCain; I rooted for him in the 2000 primaries, and I might have picked him over Al Gore in the general that year. I also admired his stance against soft-money political donations and the Bush tax cuts. If that John McCain had been on the ballot this year, I might have thought harder about this vote. But over the last four years, that McCain has transmogrified into exactly the kind of divisive agent of intolerance he once decried, and now I’m terrified at the thought of him in charge.

More here.  [55 out of 57 votes to Obama, 1 vote for McCain.]

///
For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15
Naomi Shihab Nye

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

So don’t gentle it, please.

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying—friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

From You and Yours (CBOA Editions, 2005)

///

From Andrew Sullivan:

More here.  [And you can vote there for your favorite, too.]

From The Guardian:

Karl With, the German art critic who published a life of Marc Chagall in 1923, began his book with two definitions: “Chagall is Russian” and “Chagall is an eastern Jew (Ostjude)”. He went on, “One part of him is reserved . . . melancholic and eaten up inside by burning passion . . . The other side of him is sensual, worldly, sensory, baroque, and blooming. He is lithe as an animal, agile, given to tantrums like a child, soft and charming, amiably sly mixed with a peasantlike coarseness and the delight of a provincial in everything colourful, dazzling and moving.” Making allowances for the period language, it was a shrewd analysis – and although Chagall was to live for another 62 years (he died in 1985), it never ceased to be true. The paradoxes of Chagall’s personality only became clearer with time. He was an introvert who delighted in the world. He was a dreamer and a manipulator. He was instinctively selfish, yet lavishly kind with his eye.

Jackie Wullschlager shows us all this and more, in her beautifully produced book. She has talked to Chagall’s surviving friends, she has a sharp sense of what is gorgeously original in the paintings and also of what is tediously self-cannibalising, and she writes prose that registers intense feeling yet is coolly well organised. Furthermore, she has had the cooperation of Chagall’s estate, so has been able to draw on Chagall’s correspondence with his first wife Bella, who was the mainspring of his greatest work and a profoundly interesting spirit in her own right (her autobiography is wonderful). As had to be the case if Wullschlager was going to do her subject justice, her book tells the painter’s story while also giving a compelling account of modernism in general, and of the 20th century political turmoil that both fed and frustrated it.

More here.

From Science:

Coming from Sarah Palin, it sounded like the ultimate folly: U.S. taxpayer money funding a study of fruit flies in Paris, France. But scientists jumped to the defense of the work that the Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate derided as wasteful on 24 October during a speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The studies, actually carried out at a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) laboratory near Montpellier, 750 kilometers south of Paris, may help protect California olive trees from a serious pest, scientists say. In a speech about her running mate John McCain’s policies on children with disabilities, Palin condemned so-called earmarks, congressional mandates to spend money on specific projects. “You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good,” Palin said. “Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” In a video of the speech, somebody can be heard snickering in the audience.

To fight invasive insects, Hoelmer says it’s important to be able to study them over the long term in their native habitats–in the olive fruit fly’s case, the Mediterranean region and Africa. That would be impractical for U.S.-based researchers. EBCL’s predecessor opened in France a century ago to study the European corn borer, which had just crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The lab also serves as a base for expeditions to scout for insects’ natural enemies.

Hoelmer says that he believes he could convince anybody, including Palin, that his work is worthwhile. But as a government researcher, he can’t comment on political speeches. Zalom can. “This kind of stuff always drives me nuts,” he says. “It’s a total lack of understanding of the importance of research.”

More here.

Amy Serafin in The Smart Set:

If you were to go looking for evidence of France’s huge North African population, you’d find it in the grim public housing projects of the suburban cités, in the gritty peripheral neighborhoods of Paris, and near my home in the relatively privileged 5th arrondissement, where the Great Mosque draws enormous crowds on Fridays and during Ramadan. You would be hard pressed, however, to find many North Africans in the corridors of French business or political power, where they are close to invisible.

And yet, for the last year and a half, a woman of Moroccan-Algerian descent has become famous as one of the most influential and glamorous figures in France. Rachida Dati is the minister of justice, and until recently one of President Sarkozy’s closest confidants. She is a self-made success story who radiates chutzpah, for lack of a better word. She’s also single — and pregnant. As of this writing, the identity of the father is still a secret, and guessing it has become one of the top dinner-party games throughout Europe.

Dati was born in a small town in Burgundy in 1965, the second child of 12. Her father was a mason from Morocco, her mother a French-born Algerian. To please her Muslim parents, Dati wed at age 26, but regretted her decision and had the marriage annulled soon afterward. She studied business and obtained a master’s degree in law.

She has always demonstrated an uncanny talent for meeting the right people. In 2002 she contacted Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then interior minister, offering to advise him on immigration issues.

More here.

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic:

I’ve only watched the 12-minute version of “Obsession,” the film sent to more than 28 million people in various swing states, apparently by associates and partisans of the Jewish movement known as Aish HaTorah, or “Fire of the Torah,” but it was enough for to understand that it is the work of hysterics. One of my favorite hysterics, the Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick, is featured prominently, pieces of the sky falling about her head as she rants about the End of Days.

Aish HaTorah denies any direct connection to the film, which is designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama’s ascension to launch the attack. But the manifold connections, as laid out in this article, among others, make it clear that high-level officials of Aish are up to their chins in this project. The most disreputable flack in New York, Ronn Torossian, who represents Aish, makes an appearance in this story, which was to be expected: Torossian last made the news when he employed sock-puppetry in defense of one of his many indefensible clients, Agriprocessors, Inc., the Luvavitch-owned kosher slaughterhouse that treats its employees nearly as badly as it treats its animals, which is saying something, because Agriprocessor slaughterers have been filmed ripping out the tracheas of living cattle.

But I digress. It’s said of Ronn Torossian that he represents “right-wing” Israeli politicians, but this description does not do his clients justice. “Right-wing” is Bibi Netanyahu. Torossian represents the lunatic fringe. Several years ago, in one of my only encounters with him, he introduced me to Benny Elon, a rabbi and settler leader who was then Israel’s tourism minister, and who, at various points in his career, has more or less advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel of its Arab citizens.

More here.  The movie can be seen on YouTube here.