“What woods are the sturdiest, or the most visually pleasing?” Messner said. “What does a birch dam say? Everyone seems to love sugar maple, but it’s such an overfamiliar scrub tree. Would I be making a stronger statement with willow? I don’t want this to be one of those generic McDams.”

“What do I have to say—as a beaver and as an artist?” he added.

After much thought, Messner decided to reconstruct the anterior section of the dam with poplar wood on Tuesday, after he finished “highly necessary” preparatory work chewing the branches into uniform-sized interlocking sticks. Yet such tasks struck fellow lodge members as excessive.

“Get to work, get to work, build the dam, build the dam,” Cyril Kyree said as he dragged a number of logs into the shallow lick of river where the rest of the lodge has built their nests. “Chew-chew-chew. Need a mate. Build the dam.”

more from The Onion here.

There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic’s mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. And as we are also dealing with the house of mirrors that is the art world, I have no doubt that somebody is ready to explain that I am confusing appropriation with approbation or that fascism is just another way of spelling freedom. I must say, the theory people have a lot to answer for. But here is the bottom line: the global art world’s burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime’s efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love.

more from TNR here.

Former Senator Jesse Helms, friend of the likes of Roberto D’Aubisson (the founder of El Salvadoran death squads, murderer of Oscar Romero, spiritual inspiration for the rape-murder of the Maryknoll nuns) and Argentine junta head Leopoldo Galtieri, defender of Jim Crow and South African apartheid, and general philistine, is dead. In the Telegraph:

A fervent anti-Communist, his closest known foreign associate was Roberto d’Aubuisson, the leader of the El Salvadorean Right and the man identified by the State Department as responsible for the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero while he was saying Mass.

Helms had also supported Pinochet in Chile and had been the only senator to back the Argentine junta against Britain during the Falklands war. He once advocated the invasion of Cuba and was one of the few American conservatives to back the white apartheid regimes in Southern Africa.

Helms was also known for his strong personal animosity towards President Clinton. He had been particularly incensed by Clinton’s decision – one of his first on becoming President in 1992 – to remove the ban on homosexuals in the military.

Following his election as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Helms was asked by a journalist whether Clinton was fit to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. “No,” he replied, “I don’t and neither do the people of the armed forces.”

Two days later he compounded the damage by saying – on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination – that “Clinton better watch out if he comes down here (North Carolina). He’d better have his bodyguard.”

///
Question
May Swenson

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

without cloud for shift
how will I hide

///

From The Los Angeles Times:

In his studies of entropy and the irreversibility of time, Caltech physicist Sean Carroll is exploring the idea that our universe is part of a larger structure.

Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American, Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.

What’s the problem with time?

The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.

Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn’t used to have.

We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.

What does entropy have to do with all this?

The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.

The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.

You don’t need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.

From Scientific American:

Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is best known for his work on mirror neurons, a small circuit of cells in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. What makes these cells so interesting is that they are activated both when we perform a certain action—such as smiling or reaching for a cup—and when we observe someone else performing that same action. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. In recent years, Iacoboni has shown that mirror neurons may be an important element of social cognition and that defects in the mirror neuron system may underlie a variety of mental disorders, such as autism.

His new book, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect to Others, explores these possibilities at length. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Iacoboni about his research.

LEHRER: What first got you interested in mirror neurons? Did you immediately grasp their explanatory potential?

IACOBONI: I actually became interested in mirror neurons gradually. [Neuroscientist] Giacomo Rizzolatti and his group [at the University of Parma in Italy] approached us at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center because they wanted to expand the research on mirror neurons using brain imaging in humans. I thought that mirror neurons were interesting, but I have to confess I was also a bit incredulous. We were at the beginnings of the science on mirror neurons. The properties of these neurons are so amazing that I seriously considered the possibility that they were experimental artifacts. In 1998 I visited Rizzolatti’s lab in Parma, I observed their experiments and findings, talked to the anatomists that were studying the anatomy of the system and I realized that the empirical findings were really solid. At that point I had the intuition that the discovery of mirror neurons was going to revolutionize the way we think about the brain and ourselves. However, it took me some years of experimentation to fully grasp the explanatory potential of mirror neurons in imitation, empathy, language, and so on—in other words in our social life.

More here,

Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

A hearty welcome, then, to Elizabeth Pisani, holder of a Ph.D. in epidemiology, who perfectly incarnates the link that should exist between writers and the world. The Wisdom of Whores, her rollicking, eye-opening, hilarious account of the underbelly of international AIDS research, awaits the Hollywood producer smart enough to make it into a Brangelina vehicle.

Pisani began with a leg up. She’s a former Reuters reporter in Asia who retooled herself into an infectious-diseases specialist. Having grown “tired of trying to reduce human experience to 600 words on a two-hour deadline,” she decided to leave the gung-ho foreign correspondence to her future husband, also a Reuters reporter.

But Pisani still exhibits the chops of a wire-service veteran, topped by a wry voice and the irreverent style of a ’60s New Journalist. Forget everything you’ve ever gleaned from boilerplate stories about AIDS research: The Wisdom of Whores vibrates with “I’ve been there” authenticity.

Epidemiology, Pisani explains at the outset, is “the study of how diseases spread in a population,” but, like all science, it’s much, much more: “a world of money and votes, a world of medical enquiry and lobbyists, of pharmaceutical manufacturing and environmental activism and religions and political ideologies. … ”

As she “lounged in the library’s leather armchairs” during her graduate-school makeover, an idea kept gnawing at her: that “we could save more lives with good science if we spent less time worrying about publishing the perfect paper and more time lobbying, more time schmoozing the press, more time speaking in the language that voters and politicians understand.”

“If we behaved more,” she quips, “like Big Tobacco.”

More here.

Martha C. Nussbaum in Dissent:

After a period of relative impotence, the Hindu-supremacist right in India has rebounded, with the December reelection of Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Narendra Modi as chief minister in Gujarat. Modi’s role in the mass murders of Muslims in that state in February 2002 has long been so well documented that he has been denied a visa to enter the United States. Recently, moreover, extensive corroboration of his role was elicited by a hidden-camera inquiry conducted by the news-magazine Tehelka. Despite overwhelming evidence that he is a mass murderer extraordinaire—or perhaps, because of it—Modi defied media predictions, and even exit polls, to win by a landslide, a victory in which fund-raising and politicking by Indians residing in the United States (40 percent of Indian Americans are Gujarati) played a large role. Because the rival Congress Party, which controls the central government in a coalition, understands well the intense hatred of Muslims that animates many Gujarati Hindus, leading politicians tiptoed around the issue of sectarian violence, hoping to defeat the BJP in Gujarat on its weak economic record. Only Sonia Gandhi, courageously and repeatedly, denounced Modi’s reign of blood. (American Gujaratis responded with an e-mail campaign denouncing Gandhi in abusive language.) Hitler is revered as a hero in school textbooks in Gujarat. In Modi, those who worship at that shrine seem to have found the type of leader they seek. Let’s hope that the nation as a whole does not embrace his charismatic call to hate.

More here.

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian:

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated – according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.

“It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House,” said one yesterday.

More here.

The final aspect of truth is pragmatic: that which is true is that which ‘works’ for us, in the broadest possible sense of the word. In the case of certain beliefs which are not accessible to empirical testing – for example, religious beliefs or secular ideologies – ‘truth’ is almost entirely assimilated to what the William James called pragmatic ‘cash value’, and which evolutionary theorists would call ‘survival value’. We cannot, however, reduce the difference between all truths and all falsehoods simply to the difference between what works and what doesn’t. If we did, we would still have to explain why some things do and some things don’t work. While beliefs may feel true because they ‘work’, ultimately, most of our beliefs that work do so because they are true. And ultimately that means corresponding to a state of affairs, or a range or pattern of states of affairs.

In short, truth is far from empty, as Davidson claimed; and the theory of truth is not “a set of truisms,” as J.L. Austin said scornfully. Truth is rich, and the theory of truth complex. This is precisely what we might expect, as the nature of truth touches on what is most distinctive about us. Of all the creatures in the universe who experience what is the case, we are the only ones who make explicit what is the case, and assert that it is the case. We are explicit, or truth-bearing and falsehood-bearing animals, and to see truth truly is to see ourselves truly.

more from Philosophy Now here.

It all began one summer morning many years ago in the Florentine hills. The date was June 7, 1981, a Sunday. Mario Spezi, then thirty-five, was covering the crime desk at La Nazione, Florence’s leading paper, when a call came in: a young couple had been found dead in a quiet lane in the hills south of town. Spezi, who lived in those same hills, hopped into his Citroën and drove like hell along back roads, arriving before the police.

He will never forget what he saw. The Tuscan countryside, dotted with olive groves and vineyards, lay under a sky of cobalt blue. A medieval castle, framed by cypress trees, crowned a nearby rise. The boy seemed to be sleeping in the driver’s seat, his head leaning on the window. Only a little black mark on his temple, and the car window shattered by a bullet, indicated that it was a crime scene. The girl’s body lay some feet behind the car, at the foot of a little embankment, amid scattered wildflowers. She had also been shot and was on her back, naked except for a gold chain, which had fallen between her lips. Her vagina had been removed with a knife.

more from The Atlantic here.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love — take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa.

more from Granta here.

///
“The whole (global warming) thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.” –Jerry Falwell
…..
“The ignorance of imminence doesn’t change a thing.” –Gustave Jones

The Niagara River
Kay Ryan

As though
the river were
the floor, we position
our tables and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore.  We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.
…………..
…………….
…………………………………………….
…………………………………………….

///

From The Telegraph:

Maths pedants may disagree, but this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, which began in 1969. The celebrations continue on Thursday, with the announcement of the Best of the Booker: the novel that in the opinion of the public has been the greatest of all the prize’s winners – although in these democratic times, anybody can vote whether they’ve read the books or not. Less democratically, the shortlist of six was chosen by a panel of three, and duly led to several news stories about startling omissions – from Possession to Life of Pi. Personally, though, I found myself in the pleasingly smug position of having read all but one of them. As a result, I decided not just to fill in the gap, but also to break the habit of a lifetime by spending a recent holiday re-reading the other five. (I appreciate that, according to Vladimir Nabokov, “a good reader… is a re-reader”, but there are so many other books out there.) The experience provided plenty of welcome reminders of how good these novels are, as well as plenty of shaming ones of how much you forget about what you’ve read.

And later:

As things stand, though, it’s not easy to see anything beating the far more famous Indian novel on the list – which might be more of an injustice if Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie weren’t also the best book of the lot. Nearly 30 years – and at least three more classic Rushdies – later, Midnight’s Children should, in theory, have lost its power to astonish. In practice, rereading it instantly returned me to that original state of awed disbelief that so much exhilarating stuff can be packed into a single novel. (Rushdie, you feel, could have knocked off the entire plot of Oscar and Lucinda in one chapter here.) At times, the unstoppable commitment to storytelling seems almost pathological. Yet, in the end, the book is so thrilling that wishing Rushdie had trimmed it into something less wild would be as futile as asking a hurricane to tone it down a bit.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“House of Wits” seems an odd title, suggesting elegant repartee and playful badinage — more Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward — for what is billed as an “intimate portrait” of the James family. Certainly they could be witty (Alice, the only daughter, was especially sharp); they competed as children at the family dinner table to tell the best stories, jumping from their chairs and gesticulating passionately; and two of them, the two geniuses of the family, grew up to live on their wits. But “wits” is not how I think of them, either before or after reading this book. “House of horrors” would be nearer the mark, in this version. Paul Fisher refers to the James home as a “chamber of horrors,” a “plague ship” and “the James family bog.” His big project is to tell the James family story as a traumatic saga of dysfunction, competition, anxiety, aspirations often thwarted, confusion, repression, breakdown and sadness, of lifelong struggles to get away and an inexorable pull back to the powerful family bond. The lives of all the children are shaped by the father’s peculiarities: “The young Jameses grew up borne on the shifting currents of Henry’s emotions and desires, and buffeted by them.” Resenting or hating the home, driven away from it by wanderlust, ambition and desire for independence, yet always locked into it and haunted by what Alice James called “ghost microbes,” the Jameses were doomed, in Fisher’s words, to be “always running away from Jameses only to collide with Jameses again.”

More here.

Since the 1970s, New York has become, in a highly visible way, a more Asian city. We have come to the point where, for billions of people around the world, “New York” conjures images not of the Manhattan skyline but of Main Street in Flushing, Queens.

In Flushing, the dominant Asian groups are Chinese and Koreans. The terminus of the 7 train from Manhattan’s 42nd Street is Main Street at Roosevelt Avenue. Main Street runs south from Northern Boulevard, paralleling Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The principal Asian commercial center is located between Northern Boulevard and Kissena Boulevard.

In American lore, “Main Street” is as small-towny and homey as you get — a place in Bedford Falls or Mayberry. Not long ago, that’s exactly what Main Street in Flushing was like. “Flushing” was a byword for the dull, homey, comfortable outer-borough world inhabited by clerks, technicians, and city workers.

more from the NY Sun here.

“Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns?” is an early contender for Gallery Group Show of the Year. It has 22 artists — or 25, if you count those on view in reproduction. But really it has no artists at all. The show centers on a collaboration by the two impresario-organizers, gallerist Gavin Brown and artist Urs Fischer. It is all about memory, morals, redemption, tribal loyalty and railing against cozy cliché. One of its causes can be traced to February 28, 1974, the infamous day when Tony Shafrazi, a 30-year-old Iranian-born artist, entered the Museum of Modern Art, yelled, “Call the curator. I am an artist,” and spray-painted KILL LIES ALL in red letters across Picasso’s Guernica. I’d always assumed Shafrazi meant to paint “All Lies Kill.” However, he recently told me he wrote exactly what he wanted to write, and that it was meant to be read in “a Finnegans Wake way” so that it said something whichever way you read it. (It’s still gibberish to me. Whatever.) Asked about it later, Shafrazi stated he wanted to bring Guernica “absolutely up to date, to retrieve it from art history and give it life.” Regardless, the painting had a protective coating, was cleaned soon after, and now hangs at the Reina Sofía in Madrid. Shafrazi was arrested, charged with “criminal mischief,” and released on $1,000 bail.

more from artnet here.

“When we drove into Qana last year,” Joseph told me, scanning the gray concrete houses on either side of the road, “we heard flames roaring, the sound of the jets, people screaming, and the ringing of cell phones.” He looked at me and shrugged. “The relatives of people were calling to see if they were okay.” Joseph worked for the Red Cross during the 2006 war with Israel and was one of the first to enter the village after an Israeli bombardment massacred twenty-eight Lebanese civilians. Soft-spoken, slight, he was solicitous on the surface but, like many Lebanese, reserved, even wary. When I hired him as my driver and interpreter to take me south from Beirut, I knew only that he drove a taxi with his father and worked as a draftsman in an engineering firm to pay his way at Lebanese University. But then he offered to take me to Qana. He could show it to me, he said; he could tell me what he’d seen.

more from VQR here.

Intrigued (and alarmed) by the new science of “neuromarketing,” our correspondent peers into his own brain via an MRI machine and learns what he really thinks about Jimmy Carter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bruce Springsteen, and Edie Falco.

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:

My friend Bill Knapp, who is a Democratic political consultant and, as such, a man whose devotion to a coherent set of liberal-centrist policy ideas does not waver, at least in public, suggested that I have my head examined, in order to determine whether I was neurologically wired for liberalism or conservatism. My wife asked, with a disconcerting level of enthusiasm, whether this was actually possible.

“Not only is it possible, but I have the perfect person to do it,” Bill said (I’m permitted to quote him because the Goldberg seder is on the record). He told us that a neuroscientist named Marco Iacoboni, who directs UCLA’s Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Laboratory (it sounds even better in the original German), could scan my brain while showing me images of famous politicians. My brain’s response to these pictures, as recorded by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, would uncover my actual inclinations and predispositions by sidestepping the usual inhibition controls that can make focus-group testing unreliable.

I was hesitant, for two reasons. First, I believed that I already possessed a superior grasp of my brain’s division of labor: 30 percent of my brain is obsessed with the Holocaust; an additional 30 percent worries about my children; 10 percent is reserved for status anxiety; 7 percent, The Sopranos; 4 percent, Kurds; 2 percent, Chinese food; and so on. I reserve approximately 6 percent, on good days, for The Atlantic.

In addition, I think about sex, and the New York Yankees.

More here.