Stephen Marche in the Toronto Star:

For Him Magazine, and the other lad mags like Maxim and Umm, occupy a strange, liminal place in the territory of contemporary male desire. They exist to allow men to look at women’s bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn’t pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They’re all white. They all have long hair and they’re almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on – her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

More here.

To open one of Charles Simic’s collections of poetry — this is, incredibly, his 19th — is to enter with renewed delight an instantly familiar neighborhood. Delight may not be the first word you’d associate with his shabby rooming houses, seedy movie theaters, empty restaurants on lonely side streets, dusty stores about to go out of business, bare trees. But if the scenery comes out of Edward Hopper, complete with the aura of loneliness and of ordinary things made strange by odd slants of light, the people who live there are nothing like Hopper’s doughy American depressives. They’re characters from Eastern European folk tales or Kafka, boiling with energy, nicely poised between the comic and the sinister and prone to metamorphosis: an opera singer keeps “a monkey dressed in baby clothes,” a woman “turned into a black cat / and I ran after you on all fours.” Even Grandmother — and Simic’s poems are full of grandmothers — “knitted / With a ball of black yarn.” The fun — and Simic’s poetry is nothing if not amusing — comes from the way he puts together the whimsical, the earthy, the banal and the transcendent. There are a lot of chickens in his poems and a lot of angels, too.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From The Daily Mail:

Yasmin Hai is an acclaimed journalist who has worked on BBC2’s Newsnight and Channel 4 documentaries. In a wonderfully honest new book, she describes the challenges of growing up as the daughter of Pakistani parents – and a father who yearned for her to be accepted as English.

Grasping the door handle, I steadied myself against the walls of the moving railway carriage.

“Now!” my father called out. “Squeeze it hard, go on, squeeze it!”

Despite the urgency in his voice, I held back. The train didn’t look as if it had dropped enough speed for me to open the door.

The faces of the passengers standing on West Hampstead station platform were still fuzzy blurs.

“What are you waiting for?” my father shouted impatiently. “Come on, come on.”

This time, I clasped hold of the lock and with gentle pressure attempted to slide it to the right. Despite my clammy hands, it gave way.

I had done it – the train door was open! A small achievement, but for me, at the age of 11, a significant one.

This was the third day in a row that my family had made the train journey from our home in Wembley across London to Camden.

The mission: to familiarise me with the new school journey that I would be making from next Monday. Nothing could be left to chance.

More here. (Note: I just finishes reading this moving book and recommend it).

From Nature:

The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong. Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics, quantum mechanics creates several paradoxes that still make some physicists uncomfortable, says Valentini. So far it’s been impossible to pick apart quantum mechanics from bohmian mechanics — both predict the same outcomes for experiments with quantum particles in the lab. But Valentini thinks that the stalemate could be broken by analysing the cosmic microwave background — the relic radiation left behind after the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background contains hot and cold temperature spots that were generated by quantum fluctuations in the early Universe and then amplified when the Universe expanded.

Using the principles of quantum mechanics, cosmologists have calculated how these spots should be distributed. However, Valentini’s calculations show that the hidden-variables theory might give a different answer. “Any violation of quantum mechanics in the early Universe would have a knock-on effect that we could see today,” says Valentini. Almost all measurements of the cosmic microwave background seem to fit well with the predictions of quantum mechanics, says Valentini. But intriguingly, a distortion that fits one of Valentini’s proposed signatures for a failure of quantum mechanics was recently detected by Amit Yadav and Ben Wandelt at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That result has yet to be confirmed by independent analyses, but it is tantalizing, Valentini adds.

More here.

///

Turtle Soup
Marilyn Chin

You go home one evening tired from work,
and your mother boils you turtle soup.
Twelve hours hunched over the hearth
(who knows what else is in that cauldron).

You say, “Ma, you’ve poached the symbol of long life;
that turtle lived four thousand years, swam
the Wet, up the Yellow, over the Yangtze.
Witnessed the Bronze Age, the High Tang,
grazed on splendid sericulture.”
(So, she boils the life out of him.)

“All our ancestors have been fools.
Remember Uncle Wu who rode ten thousand miles
to kill a famous Manchu and ended up
with his head on a pole? Eat, child,
its liver will make you strong.”

“Sometimes you’re the life, sometimes the sacrifice.”
Her sobbing is inconsolable.
So, you spread that gentle napkin
over your lap in decorous Pasadena.

Baby, some high priestess has got it wrong.
The golden decal on the green underbelly
says “Made in Hong Kong.”

Is there nothing left but the shell
and humanity’s strange inscriptions,
the songs, the rites, the oracles?

///

from The Pheonix Gone, The Terrace Empty

///

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer gives a top 10 list of events at the World Science Festival so that I don’t have to:

So, yesterday I was chatting with my pal Lee Kottner (personal stylist to Jen-Luc Piquant, and an occasional guest blogger at the cocktail party), who lives in New York City, and I asked her which of the myriad of events she was planning to attend at the upcoming World Science Festival. Her response: “Festival? There’s a science festival?”

Hell, yeah, there’s a World Science Festival! It takes place May 29 through June 1, and it is going to be teh awesome. It worries me that Lee, of all people, hadn’t yet heard of it, because she’s pretty plugged into that sort of thing. Time to get the word out people! Alas, I will not be able to attend the festival personally, but here’s my Top Ten list of the events I would be attending, if I lived anywhere within easy driving (or Amtrak/subway/bus) distance of NYC (and could split myself into multiple clones since many of them directly conflict with each other). You can see a complete schedule of all events here; there’s even a blog.

1. Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, Thursday, May 29th, 6 – 8:30 PM, The Paley Center for Media. Any fans of the multiverse out there?

Sebastian Gießmann in Atopia:

Having moved from downtown Paris to the forest ridges of the pastoral Ménilmontant in 1832, a group of young men under the name of Saint-Simonians sets out for new goals. Their name derives from the Earl of Saint-Simon (1760–1824), who tends to be recognized mostly as an economist by now. His biography, however, is abundant with twists and turns. The royalist soldier who fights in the independence wars of North America and Mexico in the 1770’s turns into a carpetbagger after the French Revolution of 1789, earning a fortune through deals with the former church estates. Saint-Simon then becomes a patron of art and science, squandering all his money between 1795 and 1805.

He decides to conduct his own research, starting mostly with physiological thoughts. Those already included a philosophy of sociability and community. Treatises like A Letter of an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries (Lettres d’un habitant de Genève à ses contemporain, 1802) and Treatise on the Science of Man (Mémoire sur la science de l’homme, 1813) were often distributed in handwritten copies only. After the downfall of Napoléon, he manages to get a post as a librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. After a slow recovery from poverty, Saint-Simon earned success by publishing articles and newspapers. By focusing on political economy from then on, he became a preacher of industrial progress and peace in a capitalist Europe. Within that framework, social justice (not equity) is the main reference point. Saint-Simon’s final years bring a last and definitive turn to religion—a New Christianism—that was going to be continued by his adversaries.

Edward Miguel in The Boston Review:

While rising demand for commodities is one way that Asia’s economic boom helps to raise African living standards, China’s economic involvement in Africa now goes far beyond arms-length imports and exports. Chinese firms have begun investing directly in African oil and mineral producers and in roads, dams, and telecommunications infrastructure. It is estimated that annual Chinese foreign direct investment in Africa surpassed the one billion dollar mark in 2005 and has continued to rise since. Shuttered factories and mines have been brought back to life and severed roads restored. The spread of cell phone technology has allowed rural African grain markets to function more efficiently, probably improving the lives of consumers, farmers, and traders alike.

No one knows the exact figures, but hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers and entrepreneurs have also migrated to Africa in search of their fortunes. This new Afro-Chinese community—from telecom engineers to owners of small Asian restaurants and medicine shops—has been a striking new presence in my own recent travels in both West and East Africa.

Why have Chinese individuals and firms dived in when European and U.S. investors have largely shied away?

Kenneth Roth in Foreign Affairs:

These days, it seems, everyone wants to close Guantánamo. In January 2002, the Bush administration created a detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba to imprison what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called “the worst of the worst” terrorism suspects. The facility has since become an embarrassing stain on the United States’ reputation. With some inmates now having endured more than six years of detention without charge or trial, and with no end to their ordeal in sight, Guantánamo has come to symbolize Washington’s flouting of international human rights standards in the name of fighting terrorism. Now, even President George W. Bush says he wants to shut it down.

Rumsfeld’s claim notwithstanding, more than half of the 778 detainees known to have passed through Guantánamo have been released, and many others deserve to be. But there is a hard-core group — the Bush administration speaks of some 150 — who have allegedly plotted or committed acts of terrorism or would do so now if they could. Shuttering Guantánamo would force the government to decide what should be done with these allegedly dangerous individuals. Should they be given criminal trials? Or should they, as a growing number of lawyers and scholars suggest, be subjected to a system that permits detention without charge or trial because authorities believe they might pose a future threat — a system known as administrative, or preventive, detention?

Over at Seed, Errol Morris and Marc Hauser discuss game theory, Stanley Milgram, and whether science can make us better people.

MH: Now take the Milgram experiments. About a year ago, there was a study done that replicated Milgram’s experiment. So you may think how is that possible? Aren’t those now deemed unethical?

Well they are but we can do them if they’re in virtual reality space. This group in London—led by Mel Slater—created the Milgram experiments in virtual reality. So you’re the subject and while you’re in the experiment, you’re hooked up to skin conductance gizmos, which look at the sweatiness of your palms and heart rate and track how revved up you’re getting.

EM: Right.

MH: And what you find is that all of the factors that Milgram uncovered in his original experiment—how close you are to the individual, how much you’ve interacted with him before, how dominant the experimenter is in pushing you forward—all of those get mapped onto the physiological response of the subject in exactly the same way as they did in the original experiment. And they know it’s not real. It’s like, why do men look at Playboy or Penthouse? It’s just a magazine. But the mind goes on automatic pilot in some cases, blind to reality.

So the interesting thing is that, of course, people know they’re in a completely fake environment, it’s virtual reality. And yet there are parts of the brain that don’t get it. To use a term from cognitive science, there’s a sense of encapsulation or insularity, so even though I know this is a visual illusion, I don’t give a hoot.

EM: I don’t care.

MH: Right. And that says something very important about the moral domain because there are parts of the brain that are just going to see the world in a particular way independently of rich belief systems.

///
Love
Rukimin Bhaya Nair
….

my son, not quite seven, said

        It was a bad day at school

        Six children cried

Why? Were they sick? Did teacher scold?

Which six?

        Trinanjan

        Ishita – two times Ishita!

        Arjun

        Jatin

        Actually, three times Ishita!

        I can’t tell you about it

Why not?

        Neha started it

        Rahul and I ran away

        It was a madhouse!

A madhouse? Viraj, tell Amma, please.

        You’ll scold me. It was in the break

        Teacher wasn’t there

Read more »

From The New York Times:

If some of these passages reverberate with echoes of “The Great Gatsby” and its vision of New York — “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes,” the “fresh, green breast of the New World,” which nourished its hero’s belief “in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us” — the reader can only surmise that they are entirely deliberate, for, like Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel, “Netherland,” provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream. In this case it’s the American Dream as both its promises and disappointments are experienced by a new generation of immigrants in a multicultural New York, teeming with magical possibilities for self-invention, as well as with multiple opportunities for becoming lost or disillusioned or duped.

Like “Gatsby,” “Netherland” is narrated by a bystander, an observer, who makes the acquaintance of a flamboyant, larger-than-life dreamer, who will come to signify to him all of America’s possibilities and perils. Mr. O’Neill’s narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a “reticent good egg” who works as an equities analyst for a large merchant bank. Hans grew up in the Netherlands; lived in London, where he married an Englishwoman named Rachel; and since the late 1990s has lived in TriBeCa with Rachel and their young son, Jake. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 pummel their neighborhood, Hans and his family relocate to the Chelsea Hotel; a month or so later Rachel announces that she is moving back to London with their son.

More here.

From Science:

Black holes are just about the least friendly places in the universe. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, they’re so powerful that they warp space and time, and they’ve condensed so much matter and energy into a tiny point called a singularity that nothing, not even light, can escape. Getting sucked down a black hole should be a one-way trip. But is it? Stephen Hawking thought so. Back in the 1970s, the eminent physicist hypothesized that a black hole eventually–over time scales lasting trillions of years–would evaporate into nothingness. The problem for Hawking’s idea was that it clashed with quantum mechanics, of which one of the primary tenets is that information cannot be lost. Hawking could not reconcile the conflict, and a few years ago he recanted his position on information loss.

Now, physicists from Pennsylvania State University in State College have shown that Hawking was right to change his mind. Delving into a cousin of quantum mechanics called quantum gravity, Abhay Ashtekar and colleagues Victor Tavares and Madhavan Varadarajan calculate that singularities cannot exist. According to relativity, a singularity is essentially a frontier where spacetime ends. As such, nothing should be able to escape it. But complex calculations by Ashtekar’s team show that singularities are not allowed by quantum gravity. That means that although the center of a black hole may be very, very dense, it’s not so dense that it traps information forever. “Quantum spacetime doesn’t end at a singularity,” Ashtekar says.

The findings, reported in the 20 May issue of Physical Review Letters, are good news for quantum mechanics, because they support the idea that information cannot disappear permanently. But, by calling singularities into question, they spell trouble for relativity. If black holes are not singularities, then the continuum of spacetime described by Einstein must be only an approximation, says Ashtekar. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. “[It] opens the door to a lot of new explorations,” Ashtekar says. “They may lead to physics beyond Einstein.”

More here.

For those in the NYC area, this promises to be interesting and perhaps even fun:

The World Science Festival and WNYC Radio present You and Your Irrational Brain, a live, outdoor event (rain or shine) Thursday, May 29th at the Water Taxi Beach in Long Island City, Queens, NY.

Have you ever wondered why you might think it’s okay to steal a pen from work, but not money from the petty cash box? Ever splurged on a lavish meal, only later to clip a 25 cent coupon for a can of soup? Ever taken something FREE, knowing full well that you didn’t really want it? Why do we make these decisions that are so clearly irrational?

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, along with science writer and Radio Lab contributor Jonah Lehrer, will join Radio Lab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich to explore the often surprising factors that motivate and dictate human behavior.

The FREE event will combine discussion with live group experiments, games and demonstrations that test the ideas in Ariely’s book, followed by food, drink and music under the stars.

WHEN
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 from 7 pm to 8:30 pm, followed by music, DJ, beer and beach-side merriment

WHERE
Water Taxi Beach (Google Map)
2nd Street and Borden Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101

Lisa Levy in The Believer:

Say it’s 1958, you are the wife of a famous poet, and it is your turn to have the Partisan Review gang over for drinks and barbed conversation. Maybe the line from Delmore Schwartz’s poem (“All poets’ wives have rotten lives”) runs through your head as you finish the grunt work of the hostess: emptying ashtrays, dumping half-eaten food into the trash, piling up as many glasses as you can carry to the sink. If you are Elizabeth Hardwick, your husband, Robert Lowell, is most likely passed out drunk or off having an affair-slash-breakdown with another woman. If the situation is the latter, he has renounced you and your daughter, Harriet, for a fascinating creature he suddenly cannot imagine living without, or he’s in an institution of some sort to treat the manic depression that inspires these cyclical acts of renunciation and affirmation. Lowell or no Lowell, there is much to do before you sleep: sweeping the floors, rubbing rings off places where coasters should have been, making a cursory pass over the upholstery, opening the windows to air out the smoke of a hundred pensive and hostile cigarettes. Thus the rhyming line of Schwartz’s poem: “Their husbands look at them like knives.”

Thinking about Hardwick in the domestic context should not detract from her status, as her friend Diane Johnson put it, as “part of the first generation of women intellectuals to make a mark in New York’s literary circle.”

Jon Pareles in the NYT:

There is a new yardstick for the size of the universe. It is approximately equal to the size of Kanye West’s ego.

That’s not necessarily bad. Hip-hop runs on self-glorification, the transformation of underdogs into self-invented legends. Sooner or later someone was bound to claim what Mr. West’s show did on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden: that he’s “the biggest star in the universe.” That was not only part of the script but also a crucial plot twist for Mr. West’s headlining set on his Glow in the Dark Tour, a quadruple bill with Rihanna, N.E.R.D. and Lupe Fiasco.

Mr. West’s set was the most daring arena spectacle hip-hop has yet produced, and in some ways the best, even as it jettisoned standard hip-hop expectations. The rhymes, the beats and the narcissism were there; the block-party spirit and sense of community were not. Until the encore Mr. West had no human company on the arena stage.

Via DeLong, Charlie Stross over at his blog:

The Fermi Paradox probably doesn’t need much introduction; first proposed by Enrico Fermi, it’s one of the big puzzlers in astrobiology. We exist, therefore intelligent life in this universe is possible. The universe is big; even if life is rare, it’s very unlikely that we’re alone out here. So where is everybody? Why can’t we hear their radio transmissions or see gross physical evidence of all the galactic empires out there?

If you aren’t familiar with the Fermi Paradox, click that Wikipedia link above. Truly, it’s a fascinating philosophical conundrum — and an important one: because it raises questions such as “how common are technological civilizations” and “how long do they survive”, and that latter one strikes too close to home for comfort. (Hint: we live in a technological civilization, so its life expectancy is a matter that should be of pressing personal interest to us.)

Anyway, here are a couple of interesting papers on the subject, to whet your appetite for the 21st century rationalist version of those old-time mediaeval arguments about angels, pin-heads, and the fire limit for the dance hall built thereon:

First off the block is Nick Bostrom, with a paper in MIT Technology Review titled Where are they? in which he expounds Robin Henson’s idea of the Great Filter: 

The evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a “Great Filter,” which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Robert Rauschenberg, the man who once said he wanted to act in the gap between art and life, has departed this life, dying on Monday at the age of 82 in his home on the island of Captiva, off Florida’s Gulf coast. There are few things that the men and women who run the culture industry enjoy more than shedding some tears over the passing of a bohemian bad boy who lived a full life, and in the next few weeks, there will be many salutes to Rauschenberg and his times. We will see him as a student at Black Mountain College, in the hardscrabble downtown New York days of the 1950s, and winning a Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964. While the truth is that a lot of people who loved Pop Art never thought Rauschenberg was anywhere near as important as Johns or Warhol, for some years there was a general agreement that he was America’s unofficial avant-garde ambassador-at-large, spreading the anything-can-be-art Dadaist gospel to the four corners of the earth, teaching people all over the world that, by god, you too can make a collage, you too can act in the gap between art and life. The only trouble with all of this was that there never has been a gap between art and life. There is art. There is life. For all I know, Rauschenberg’s has been a life well lived. As for his art, it stank in the 1950s and it doesn’t look any better today.

more from TNR here.

Something in the unsavory history of al-Qahtani’s interrogation (featuring sexual humiliation, attack dogs, stress positions, and sleep deprivation) must have proved too much for Crawford, which may reveal that Crawford has some filament of legal integrity or simply that she knows when to cut her losses. Either way, it’s important that for every course correction at Gitmo from the Supreme Court, there have been many more from within the Pentagon. If the same people who joined the military in the hopes of fighting terrorism have had enough of the government’s jury-rigged apparatus of Guantanamo justice, it’s probably time to stick a fork in the whole thing.

Since the inception of the commissions, the brakes have almost always been applied when some member of the military has balked, even when going along would have been the far easier course. These refusals—some silent, some very public—have combined to stall the tribunals. The clearest sign that the military system is working is that the military itself has refused to let it go forward.

more from Slate here.