Jeffrey Sachs in Project Syndicate:

Around the world, government-run agricultural banks in poor countries once not only financed inputs, but also provided agricultural advice and spread new seed technologies. Of course, there were abuses, such as the allocation of public credits to richer farmers rather than to needy ones, or the prolonged subsidization of inputs even after farmers became creditworthy. And in many cases, government agricultural banks went bankrupt. Still, the financing of inputs played a huge and positive role in helping the poorest farmers to escape poverty and dependency on food aid.

During the debt crisis of the 1980’s and 1990’s, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank forced dozens of poor food-importing countries to dismantle these state systems. Poor farmers were told to fend for themselves, to let “market forces” provide for inputs. This was a profound mistake: there were no such market forces. 

Poor farmers lost access to fertilizers and improved seed varieties. They could not obtain bank financing. To its credit, the World Bank recognized this mistake in a scathing internal evaluation of its long-standing agricultural policies last year.

The time has come to reestablish public financing systems that enable small farmers in the poorest countries, notably those farming on two hectares or less, to gain access to needed inputs of high-yield seeds, fertilizer, and small-scale irrigation. Malawi has done this for the past three seasons, and has doubled its food production as a result. Other low-income countries should follow suit.

Ronald Bailey in Reason Online:

Where in the world can we do the most good? Supplying the micronutrients vitamin A and zinc to 80 percent of the 140 million children who lack them in developing countries is ranked as the highest priority by the expert panel at the Copenhagen Consensus 2008 Conference. The cost is $60 million per year, yielding benefits in health and cognitive development of over $1 billion.

Eight leading economists, including five Nobelists, were asked to prioritize 30 different proposed solutions to ten of the world’s biggest problems. The proposed solutions were developed by more than 50 specialist scholars over the past two years and were presented as reports to the panel over the past week. Since we live in a world of scarce resources, not all good projects can be funded. So the experts were constrained in their decision making by allocating a budget of an “extra” $75 billion among the solutions over four years.

Number 2 on the list of Copenhagen Consensus 2008 priorities is to widen free trade by means of the Doha Development Agenda. The benefits from trade are enormous. Success at Doha trade negotiations could boost global income by $3 trillion per year, of which $2.5 trillion would go to the developing countries.

More here.

Catherine Barker in National Geographic:

Two exotic-sounding ingredients have been making repeat performances on Bravo’s Top Chef this season.

Ras el hanout has shown up in beet salad with goat cheese and in a foie gras mousse with peaches.

According to Larousse Gastronomique, ras el hanout is “a complex mixture of twenty or more ground spices, used mainly in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The literal meaning is “head” or “top of the shop.” Since the mixture was traditionally made from a market’s superior spices, the name is fitting.

A call to Casablanca Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, revealed what exactly is in the mix. Chef Nadir Elhajji, who is Moroccan, explained that the combination includes paprika, ginger, black and white pepper, curry, coriander, nutmeg, and cumin. Depending on the country, ras el hanout might also include garlic, rosemary, lavender, or saffron. It’s available in some Middle Eastern stores and online, but chef Elhajji prefers to make his own from his battery of ground spices. He’s not so sure about mixing ras el hanout with beets or peaches but does like it with lamb. He’ll combine four pounds of lamb chops, a sliced onion, and two teaspoons of ras el hanout in an ovenproof pot. Coat the meat, onions, and spice liberally with olive oil and cover the pot tightly. Cook for two to six hours in a 250-degree oven. Or, if you happen to be in Marrakesh, do what the locals do and place your pot in the smoldering fire used to heat the local Turkish bath.

The other unfamiliar guest ingredient is something called yuzu.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

///
Booker T. and W.E.B.
Dudley Randall

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook.
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail.
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with
trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T. —
“I don’t agree,”
Said W.E.B.

///

From NPR’s All Things Considered:

By the end of this year, half the world’s population will live in cities, according to the United Nations, and the proportion will only increase. The way we develop our cities may determine our collective future, living standards, culture, politics, freedom — even our survival.

This is also the year that Morning Edition begins a series called “The Urban Frontier,” an occasional examination of the world’s cities.

We begin in Karachi, Pakistan. This week, host Steve Inskeep will introduce people who are trying to reinvent one of Pakistan’s historic cities. It is a place where so many people live that population estimates run anywhere from 12 million to 18 million — all of them working for their piece of real estate in this seaport city.

We meet an ambulance driver, navigating Karachi’s streets.

We meet the mayor, who’s eager to show us every new overpass he’s had built in the city.

More here.  [Thanks to Zaneb Beams.]

From The New York Times:

BALTIMORE — Mario Livio tossed his car keys in the air. They rose ever more slowly, paused, shining, at the top of their arc, and then in accordance with everything our Galilean ape brains have ever learned to expect, crashed back down into his hand. That was the whole problem, explained Dr. Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute here on the Johns Hopkins campus. A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. If they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling. “That is how shocking this was,” Dr. Livio said.

It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York. Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight. Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.

Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.

More here.

Marco Roth in the New York Sun:

“The Enchantress of Florence” (Random House, 368 pages, $26) is a “Harry Potter”-ish restoration project of great intelligence and remarkable egoism, both of which are characteristic of its author. Although he sets his novel in the Florence of the Medicis and Machiavelli, in the Mughal court of Akbar the Great, and at the height of the Ottoman Empire, Salman Rushdie hasn’t written just any pedantic, research-obsessed “historical novel.” Instead of trying to give us the past as it really was, he’s tried to produce the very kind of “historical romance” that might have been passed among French, Italian, English, and Mughal courtiers of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a book to give them hours of “much languid play … in the curtained afternoons.” There are pirates, shipwrecks, hidden princesses, lost heirs, and magic mirrors. There are giants, epic battles, and potions that “facilitate one hundred consecutive ejaculations.” “In Andizhan, the pheasants grew so fat that four men could not finish a meal cooked from a single bird,” begins one chapter, and that note of superlative excess gives the tone of the whole.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Sughra Raza. Along the Street. May, 2008.

Digital photograph, minimally embellished.

George Packer in World Affairs Journal:

Unlike Vietnam, where the arguments became truly poisonous only after a few years of fighting, the Iraq War was born in dispute. The administration’s deceptions, exaggerations, and always-evolving rationales provoked a counter-narrative that mirrored the White House version of the war in its simple-mindedness: the war was about nothing (except greed, empire, and blind folly). Once, after a trip to Iraq, I attended a dinner party in Los Angeles at which most of the other guests were movie types. They wanted to know what it was like “over there.” I began to describe a Shiite doctor I’d gotten to know, who felt torn between gratitude and fear that occupation and chaos were making Iraq less Islamic. A burst of invective interrupted my sketch: none of it mattered—the only thing that mattered was this immoral, criminal war. The guests had no interest in hearing what it was like over there. They already knew.

So the lines were drawn from the start. To the pro-war side, criticism was animated by partisanship and defeatism, if not treason. This view, amplified on cable news, talk radio, and right-wing blogs, was tacitly encouraged by the White House. It kept a disastrous defense secretary in office long after it was obvious that he was losing the war, ensured that no senior officer was held accountable for military setbacks, and contributed to the repetition of disastrous errors by the war’s political architects. Meanwhile, the fact that the best and brightest Iraqis were being slaughtered by a ruthless insurgency never aroused much interest or sympathy among the war’s opponents. The kind of people who would ordinarily inspire solidarity campaigns among Western progressives—trade unionists, journalists, human rights advocates, women’s rights activists, independent politicians, doctors, professors—were being systematically exterminated. But since the war shouldn’t have been fought in the first place, what began badly must also end badly.

In the TLS, James Gould reviews Mike Hansell’s Built by Animals:

Hansell’s primary target is cognitive ethology, and in particular the late Donald Griffin. He takes umbrage at the title of an uncited article: “Thinking about thinking”. Even as loosely defined as Griffin had in mind, apparently “thought” should be a forbidden term. Hansell’s strategy for arguing that animals are intellectually dead is three-pronged. The first step is to discount the abilities of animals on the basis of brain volume. The second is to invoke Occam’s razor (the simplest possible explanation is likely to be – or for some, is inevitably – the correct one). The last step is to describe animals that fit the mindless-builder model.

Brain size, Hansell tells us, should lead “to certain expectations” – namely, that smaller animals are simple and have limited, stereotyped repertoires. Using this simple rule of thumb, we can apparently conclude thats ince female humans have, on average, significantly smaller brain volumes than males, their behaviour should be simpler and more stereotyped – one of Darwin’s few mistaken inferences. Humans, by the same token, should be less behaviourally elaborate than whales and elephants. In fact, it is relative brain volume that seems to matter. When researchers plot brain mass against weight for warm-blooded animals, the points cluster rather tightly around an upward-slanting line. On average, an animal weighing ten times as much has a brain about five times as heavy. All other things being equal, brain mass scales with the number of sensory receptors and muscles the animal possesses, and these increase more slowly than weight. (Cold-blooded animals generate a line of the precisely same slope, though they are able to make do with one-tenth the number of neurones. Insects, because so much of their nervous system is in ganglia outside the head, fall on a different line.)

I recall a paper from a few years ago which looked at emergence of regional voting blocs for Eurovision.  It appears that the awareness of this fact is beginning to upset fans and contestants.  In Der Spiegel:

It was at last year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki that the idea of some kind of Eastern European concerted offensive first took hold. Viewers from Lapland to Lisbon saw how not one single Western European country made it through the semifinals to compete on the big night itself.

The only Western European countries that took part in the finals were the hosts and the so-called “big four,” which are always guaranteed a slot, and none of them fared well. Host Finland got off lightly, receiving 53 points and coming in 17th, while Germany was 19th but still ahead of its partners in Eurovision misery, France, the United Kingdom and Spain.

The hue and cry began almost immediately. Germany’s sole Eurovision winner, Nicole, said Germany should stop entering the competition. There was talk of countries doing each other favors and suggestions that Western Europe should start up a new competition and graciously leave Eurovision to their eastern neighbors.

One thing Western Europeans seemed to agree on: the results could only be the product of some sort of cheeky hustling for points. And if anyone was bound to be shamelessly breaking the most democratic rules of any musical contest, then surely it would be those living to the east of the former Iron Curtain. The only question is how they could be bending the rules, since viewers across Europe can call in and vote for any act they wish to, as long as it isn’t the contestant from their own country.

Fraser Newham reviews Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin, in Asia Times Online:

Stalin and Trotsky fall out early on, and in general Montefiore nicely brings out the patterns and vagaries of life as a young revolutionary. Particularly memorable are his descriptions of those long periods of exile many of them experienced from time to time, shipped upriver to the far west where it was hoped they could cause less trouble.

Conditions in these exile settlements were incredibly lax; decades later aging revolutionaries would reminisce about their times in the distant wilds, days spent reading, drinking and, far from family and moral restraints, engaged in more than a little sex. There were no fences or walls around these villages, and “escape” was all part of the game – at one point, in preparation for one such walk out, Stalin even wrote back to his mum in Georgia asking if she could send him some extra clothes.

He was exiled on at least four separate occasions; this included in the years leading up to 1917 a four-year banishment to one of the wildest corners of Siberia, inhabited largely nomadic Tungus tribesmen. Stalin took local clothes, travelled by sled and, like the locals, lived on a diet of fish and reindeer. It was an experience which he later claimed as formative, central to his steely being.

“He became the solitary hunter,” Montefiore tells us, “a role that suited his self-image as a man on a sacred mission, riding out into the snows with a rifle for company, but no attachments except his faith … For the rest of his life he regaled Politburo grandees with tales of his Siberian adventures. Even when he ruled Russia he was still that solitary hunter.”

Erika Hoff reviews Christine Kenneally’s The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language in Evolutionary Psychology:

Two developments in the later half of the 20th century changed the scientific landscape in a way that laid the groundwork for a new approach to the study of language origins. First, Noam Chomsky asserted that language was a property of the human mind, thus bringing linguistics into psychology and creating a field known as psycholinguistics, now more frequently referred to as the psychology of language. Then Leda Cosmides and John Tooby asserted that the mind, no less than the body, is the result of natural selection,  thus bringing evolution to psychology and creating the field of evolutionary psychology. Together, the premises of these two fields raised the question of how language evolved. As linguists became interested in the question, the field of evolutionary linguistics (or evolingo to insiders) emerged, and as these theoretical developments made the question of language origins legitimate, developments in related fields of science made the study of language origins potentially fruitful. Researchers in animal intelligence and communication, genetics, neurobiology, computational modeling, and developmental psychology all contributed to the enterprise. The study of how language came to be is now an active field.

In The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, Christine Kenneally describes the history and current state of this enterprise for a general audience. The task she has undertaken—describing to nonscientists the several highly technical fields that address this topic—is formidable. Kenneally does it very well, clearly supported by both her skills as a free-lance journalist and her Ph.D. training in linguistics. The first four chapters of the book focus on four researchers or research teams who have staked out different positions on the issue. The book begins, appropriately, with linguist Noam Chomsky who started the modern study of language. Chomsky has historically been associated with the position that the human language capacity is a self-contained module, separate from other cognitive abilities and unrelated to the communicative purposes to which language just so happens to be put. How this module came to be is not particularly of interest to Chomsky, and he has publicly and frequently expressed reservations about the value of considering the question.

///

Sonnet VII
John Milton

ON HIS BEING ARRIVED AT THE AGE OF 23

HOW soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,
    Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
    My hasting days fly on with full career,
    But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
    That I to manhood am arrived so near,
    And inward ripeness doth much less appear
    That some more timely happy spirits indueth.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
    It shall be still in strictest measure even
    To that same lot however mean or high,
Toward which time leads me and the will of heaven.
    All is, if I have grace to use it so,
    As ever in my great taskmaster’s eye.

///

From The New Yorker:

Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” Milton was thirty years old—his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, “Paradise Lost,” all lay before him. But the encounter left a deep imprint on him. It crept into “Paradise Lost,” where Satan’s shield looks like the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope, and in Milton’s great defense of free speech, “Areopagitica,” Milton recalls his visit to Galileo and warns that England will buckle under inquisitorial forces if it bows to censorship, “an undeserved thraldom upon learning.”

Beyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter—it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman—there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age. Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe. Milton depicted the earth hanging fixed from a golden chain, and when he contemplated the heavens he saw God enthroned and angels warring. The sense of the new and the old colliding forms part of Milton’s complex aura. The best-known portrait of his mature years makes Milton look like the dyspeptic brother of the man on the Quaker Oats box, but he is far more our contemporary than Shakespeare, who died when Milton was seven. Nobody would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work. Though “Paradise Lost” is a dilation on a moment in Genesis, it contains passages so personal that you cannot read far without knowing that the author was a blind man fallen on “evil days.” Even in his political prose, Milton will pause to tell us that he is really not all that short, despite what his enemies say. Though he coined the name “Pandemonium”—“all the demons”—for the palace that Satan and his fallen crew build in Hell, he also coined the word “self-esteem,” as contemporary a concept as there is and one that governed much of Milton’s life.

More here.