From The Washington Post:

An angry President Pervez Musharraf defended imposing a state of emergency on Pakistan and blamed the Western media for many of his problems — from increased attacks by Islamic extremists to lawyers who have taken to the streets to protest his suspension of the constitution and firing of the country’s chief justice. In an interview with Newsweek-Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth, the Pakistani president reiterated that he would lift the state of emergency Saturday but will not reinstate judges who opposed him. Despite his opponents’ doubts, Musharraf insisted he will ensure a free and fair election in January. But he refused to say whether he would endorse a constitutional amendment to allow former prime minister Benazir Bhutto to serve a third term.

Interview here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Kindlon is a clinical psychologist and adjunct lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health. The more he coached his youngest daughter’s team, the more he understood he was observing a new generation of girls and young women. “People who say that girls aren’t competitive and don’t enjoy winning have never gone to a game and watched!” he says with a laugh. “My own daughters are so different from the girls I grew up with, in terms of the things they think they can do.” Linking those observations with accumulating data that show girls outperforming boys in grades, honors, and high-school graduation rates—and with the historic reversal in U.S. college enrollments (58 percent today are women, the 1970 percentage for men)—convinced Kindlon that today’s American girls are profoundly different from their mothers. “They were born into a different world,” he says of girls and young women born since the early 1980s. He began to think of them as “alpha girls.”

These girls—Kindlon uses the term because his research focuses on female development up to age 21, the period covered by pediatric medicine—were not the self-loathing, melancholic teens at risk portrayed in such former bestsellers as Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap (Peggy Orenstein), Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls (Myra and David Sadker), and Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (Mary Pipher). Girls today “take it for granted that it is their due to get equal rights,” Kindlon says. “They never had to fight those battles over fertility control, equal educational and athletic access, or illegal job discrimination.” As a result, “girls are starting to make the psychological shift, the inner transformation, that Simone de Beauvoir predicted” in 1949 when she wrote, in The Second Sex, “sooner or later [women] will arrive at complete economic and social equality, which will bring about an inner metamorphosis.”

More here.

David Grinspoon in Seed (via Political Theory Daily Review at bookforum):

Alexander Zaitsev, Chief Scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, has access to one of the most powerful radio transmitters on Earth. Though he officially uses it to conduct the Institute’s planetary radar studies, Zaitsev is also trying to contact other civilizations in nearby star systems. He believes extraterrestrial intelligence exists, and that we as a species have a moral obligation to announce our presence to our sentient neighbors in the Milky Way—to let them know they are not alone. If everyone in the galaxy only listens, he reasons, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is doomed to failure.

Zaitsev has already sent several powerful messages to nearby, sun-like stars—a practice called “Active SETI.” But some scientists feel that he’s not only acting out of turn, but also independently speaking for everyone on the entire planet. Moreover, they believe there are possible dangers we may unleash by announcing ourselves to the unknown darkness, and if anyone plans to transmit messages from Earth, they want the rest of the world to be involved. For years the debate over Active SETI versus passive “listening” has mostly been confined to SETI insiders. But late last year the controversy boiled over into public view after the journal Nature published an editorial scolding the SETI community for failing to conduct an open discussion on the remote, but real, risks of unregulated signals to the stars. And in September, two major figures resigned from an elite SETI study group in protest. All this despite the fact that SETI’s ongoing quest has so far been largely fruitless. For Active SETI’s critics, the potential for alerting dangerous or malevolent entities to our presence is enough to justify their concern.

Salim Muwakkil in In These Times:

In Chicago, black protesters regularly ring the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push headquarters, contesting his role, as well as his style of leadership. One of their signs reads: “He’s pimping our community.” Many of those demonstrating against Jackson are jobless former inmates who argue that the civil rights leadership does little to ameliorate their plight. These ex-offenders consider themselves victims of the prison-industrial complex and are becoming increasingly aggressive in their attempts to be heard.

Bill Cosby’s campaign to bring attention to the behavioral deficits of lower-income members of the black community is another signpost of this growing class tension. Cosby made remarks in 2004 at an NAACP dinner in Washington, D.C. that castigated “the lower-income people” for not “holding up their end of the deal.”

Cosby’s major point was that African Americans’ negative behavior is more responsible for their misery than white racism. The famous funnyman’s comments sparked such an explosion of controversy that Cosby took his act on the road. He has since been making the rounds of the macaroni-and-cheese circuit of black churches and other venues of middle-class propriety.

Last year he upped the ante with a book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, that frames his hectoring broadsides in the comforting theme of cultural therapy. The softening of Cosby is probably due to the influence of his co-author, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a Harvard psychiatrist with a history of progressive activism.

But the book, essentially, is a glorified advice manual.

Slate writers and editors pick the best books of the year:

Robert Pinsky, poetry editor

I second Ann Hulbert’s nomination of A Free Life, Ha Jin’s first book set in the United States, which tells the story of a Chinese family remaking themselves as Americans. But it’s way more interesting than that may sound: If this cunning work is an “immigrant novel,” it transforms the genre. The narrative unfolds on such an intimate, domestic scale, with such urgent, character-driven interest—like a supersubtle, Chinese-American telenovela—that it takes a while to realize that this is also an epic.Ha Jin’s previous novels have been epic in more obvious ways: War and politics disrupt and govern human lives in Waiting, War Trash, The Crazed. In A Free Life, the Tiananmen Square massacre propels the fate of the central character Nan and his family, but the subject is culture itself. In a quiet, yet audacious style—maybe it should be called “magical plainness”?—Ha Jin transforms his account of the family’s tribulations, rises, and conflicts by including a thread of artistic ambition. Nan becomes a poet, struggling to write in English, with poems supplied and written by his creator: compelling, flawed, sometimes comical works, slipped in as effectively as plot elements of sex, money, migrations, and returns. The hunger to make art is made so compelling, and so convincingly embedded in the American immigrant experience that poetry, in this story, seems somehow, mysteriously—I swear—to embody American life itself, amplifying the ironies and promises of the words “a free life.“

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues – or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules. Rules are essential in the classic detective story. In 1929 Ronald Knox drew up the Solemn Oath of the Detection Club. His injunctions included mentioning the criminal in the first five chapters, not revealing the criminal’s thoughts, making sure that the detective – and his “Watson” – revealed all their clues, and not making the detective the criminal.

Three of the Queens of Crime – Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – also seem to have felt that the form demanded that the detective should be an aristocratic younger son, disdaining a life of leisure in order to use his good mind and fine moral sense.

more from The Telegraph here.

For better or worse, ours is historically a Christian culture, and children who grow up ignorant of biblical literature are diminished, unable to take literary allusions, actually impoverished. I am no lover of Christianity, and I loathe the annual orgy of waste and reckless reciprocal spending, but I must say I’d rather wish you “Happy Christmas” than “Happy Holiday Season”.

Fortunately, this is not the only choice: 25 December is the birthday of one of the truly great men ever to walk the earth, Sir Isaac Newton. His achievements might justly be celebrated wherever his truths hold sway. And that means from one end of the universe to the other. Happy Newton Day!

more from The New Statesman here.

Have you heard of the filmmaker, Henry Jaglom? He’s not well known because he wouldn’t appeal to that large demographic, the teenage boy, for whom most movies are made nowadays. I myself am conflicted about Jaglom. Is he a genius or a jerk? And are these categories mutually exclusive? A thought to be pondered.

Henry Jaglom is one of those quirky filmmakers who seems to have forged a career without ever developing a profile. He began, as far as I can see, by knowing some of the right people. The Internet Movie Database states that “he was a frequent escort of Natalie Wood.” He befriended Orson Welles toward the end of his life and snagged that legendary figure for a movie (Someone to Love, 1987). This must have gone some way to establishing his artistic credentials.

Jaglom’s distinctive style was forged in three `80s films: Always (1985), Someone to Love (1987), and New Year’s Day (1989), which chronicle the break-up of his first marriage and subsequent search for love and companionship.

more from The Smart Set here.

For Bhaisaheb:

From lensculture.com:

Photographs and text by Nathalie Mohadjer

The combination of the literal words Blood+Honey in Turkish means Balkans. The Balkans have always been a region of borders and wars, the “Backyard” and the “Problem Child” of Europe. The war in BiH (Bosnia – Herzegovina) from 1992 until 1995 took a great toll on human life and infrastructure. In 1998, the administration of the BiH Federation counted 242,330 deaths, 36,470 missing and 175,286 wounded. More than 12,000 corpses have been exhumed from around 250 mass-graves in BiH after the end of the war. The total number of refugees is 2,200,000. The financial damages have been estimated by the World Bank to lie between 15 to 20 billion dollars.

Countless cultural artifacts, such as the old bridge of Mostar, the Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka and the National Library in Sarajevo were either completely destroyed or badly damaged.
The consequences of the war are, however, much more extensive than the damage that can be observed. In the long term, the ideology of war from ethnic and spatial perspectives is the costliest mortgage that future generations will have to bear. Near the city of Tuzla, in the heart of Bosnia, around 100 refugee camps can be found today. One of these camps is Grab Potok. It was possible to visit Grab Potog for four weeks in November 2004 via the support of the Non-Governmental Organization Snaga Zéne.

More here.

From Slate:

Everyone knows that classic cookbooks like The Joy of Cooking and How To Cook Everything make great gifts for aspiring chefs. But what if you want to give a cookbook to an adventurous baker with a passion for popovers? Or to your cookbook-fanatic cousin who already seems to own every title known to man? Slate asked notable food writers, chefs, cookbook bookstore owners, and food editors to share their current favorites—offbeat cookbooks they’ve loved for ages, or gems they’ve discovered among the hundreds published more recently. Dan Barber, Barbara Fairchild, Ming Tsai, Mimi Sheraton, Ethan Becker, and many more offer their thoughts on inspiring cookbooks and reference books that can be relied upon for great recipes and clearly explained techniques. Their responses are printed below.

More here.

From Nature:

A component found in semen can enhance HIV transmission by as much as 100,000-fold, researchers have found. The results, if verified in a clinical setting, could identify a new way to help prevent the spread of the disease. “I think this is tremendous,” says Christopher Pilcher, an HIV researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not affiliated with the study. “It raises a lot of really fundamental questions about how HIV is transmitted.”

Over 80% of HIV infections are acquired through sexual intercourse, primarily via semen from HIV-positive men. Pilcher says that researchers have been studying the role of semen in HIV transmission, but have focused primarily on the quantity and type of virus contained in semen. “We’ve looked at everything except the semen itself,” he says.

More here.

Nassir Ghaemi reviews Peter D. Kramer’s Sigmund Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind in Metapsychology Online Reviews (via Sci Tech Daily):

Freud’s main vice was his dogmatism.  The man would not brook disagreement, at least about his main ideas.  In fact, letters exist between Freud and Stanley Hall (president of Clark University who had invited Freud to the US in 1909) in which Hall takes Freud to task about this habit (the letters were exchanged in the 1920s after the excommunication of Jung) and Freud defends his strict attitude.  Indeed, the virtuous flipside here is that Freud knew how to take a stand; he was courageous and clear about his ideas, a wonderful quality when one is right, a massive weakness when one is wrong.  The level of dogmatism that Freud bequeathed to psychoanalysis as a tradition was deadly from the start: So certain that their truth was the only one, or at least better than all the rest, psychoanalysts took over psychiatry (in the US at least) as if they were enlightened colonizers sent to the bush to save the natives.  As later psychiatric critics put it, case conferences became intolerably boring in the hands of psychoanalysts:  the end could always be predicted at the beginning, and all cases ended up in the same place – repressed unconscious sexual instincts, the Oedipus Complex or some variation thereof, and infantile wishes.  (Kramer cites a parody in a play by Moliere:  “If the patient loved his mother, it is the reason for this neurosis of his; and if he hated her, it is the same reason for the same neurosis.  Whatever the disease, the cause is always the same.  And whatever the cause, the disease is always the same.  And so is the cure: twenty one-hour sessions at 50 Kronen each.” p. 110))

Vice number two (Kramer brings this out clearly): he was extraordinarily ambitious.  Kramer describes how Freud seemed to go from idea to idea in his early medical career, seeking to hit a lottery ticket for fame; it did not seem to matter if the magic numbers alighted on the id or on cocaine: whatever made for fame was what Freud wanted. Now there is nothing wrong with wanting fame; we all dream of such acclaim (at least in adolescence).  But there are some risks, too, in sacrificing to what William James called “the bitch-goddess, Success.” 

In the LRB:

In American Gangster the plot doesn’t stagnate but it does go soft, and this is where Scott loses control of his balancing act, where the fantasy of self forgets about the social reality, and Denzel Washington escapes into pure charm. He grins like his old screen image, and the hard fierce face he has been displaying disappears completely. Crowe, similarly, whose character has now, through diligent hours at night school, become a lawyer, abandons all his anger about the drug trade and smiles in sheer admiration of Lucas’s resilience and ingenuity. We are told that Roberts, as a lawyer, became a defence attorney and represented . . . Frank Lucas. It was a buddy movie all along.

Part of what is happening here has to do with race and class politics. The stern black Lucas and the driven working-class Roberts are different from everyone else: the corrupt cops, the time-serving government officials, the doped-up soldiers, the Italian gangsters. They are different not because they are honest (in their way) but because they are scorned and they are rocking the boat.

Jeremy Scahill on Blackwater’s role in the 2008 campaign, in The Nation:

Blackwater is deep in the camp of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Cofer Black is Romney’s senior adviser on counterterrorism. At the recent CNN/YouTube debate, when Romney refused to call waterboarding torture, he said, “I’m not going to specify the specific means of what is and what is not torture so that the people that we capture will know what things we’re able to do and what things we’re not able to do. And I get that advice from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism in the CIA for some thirty-five years.” That was an exaggeration of Black’s career at the CIA (he was there twenty-eight years and head of counterterrorism for only three), but a Romney presidency could make Blackwater’s business under Bush look like a church bake sale.

In short, Blackwater is moving ahead at full steam. Individual scandals clearly aren’t enough to slow it down. The company’s critics in the Democratic-controlled Congress must confront the root of the problem: the government is in the midst of its most radical privatization in history, and companies like Blackwater are becoming ever more deeply embedded in the war apparatus. Until this system is brought down, the world’s the limit for Blackwater Worldwide–and as its rebranding campaign shows, Blackwater knows it.

Sarah Kofman had something to say, about philosophy, about psychoanalysis, about art, about women. She found her voice in the 1960s, and the language she came to speak was deferred and delivered—articulated—through the lexicon of her generation. It was a time that prized radicalism of thought and often of deed. Impetuousness was rewarded; extravagance in interpretation became an odd norm. Some of the writing from this period, and some of its dramatic political gestures, now look like mere antics; the invitation to easy irony was a slippery slope and could easily be co-opted by commercial culture. And it was.

But Kofman had something to say, and her writings still command attention for their insight, their adventurousness, and their attentiveness to the philosophical traditions with which she so productively wrestled. She was one of the great readers of Freud in the twentieth century, and she brought the same caring intelligence to her interpretations of Nietzsche. In his memorial address for Kofman (reproduced as the introduction to this volume), Jacques Derrida called her love for these thinkers “pitiless,” by which I think he meant that she gave herself to them, and tried to find what they had to offer, without restraint.

more from Bookforum here.

Is it just me, or have the Old Masters got younger lately? If so, it may be because present anxieties about the state and the fate of Western civilization echo past ones, when artists were energized around big issues, such as clashes of modernizing and medievalist mind-sets, which may never have been completely settled. Consider a rousing retrospective of the German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), which has opened at the Städel Museum, in Frankfurt, and will travel in the spring to the Royal Academy, in London. There are contemporary tangs to this most bewildering paragon of a cohort which included the Leonardoesque Albrecht Dürer and the dazzling Hans Holbein the Younger. Cranach was a sometime religious revolutionary and a full-time entrepreneur. In his work, early strains of late-Gothic blood and guts give way first to courtly high styles, then to pictorial propagandizing for the new theology of his friend Martin Luther—even as, strangely, Cranach continued to oblige Roman Catholic clients. (Those were intricate times.) He rivalled Dürer and Holbein in portraiture, and he developed product lines of delirious erotica and hilarious genre scenes. Buyers seemingly couldn’t get enough of his “ill-matched couples”: fatuous geezers or crones acuddle with gold-digging babes or young bucks. With a prolific workshop, so well coached that its authorship can be hard to distinguish from his own, and with businesses in real estate, publishing, and a liquor-licensed pharmacy, Cranach became one of the richest men in the Lutheran stronghold of Saxony. He was three times the mayor of Wittenberg. As an artist, he siphoned his era’s chaotic energies into wonderments of style. His re-visionings of humanity are philosophically resonant and lots of fun.

more from The New Yorker here.

Christmas is coming in Alsace, and the in-flight magazine promises wonderful markets in quaint half-timbered towns. It’s that time of year when masterpieces of western art twinkle alongside the tinsel. The stable, the star, the wise men bearing gifts, painted by Botticelli, Veronese, Jacopo Bassano – they all did a nativity or 10. Great art gives Christmas cards a touch of class – and who’s complaining?

But there is a niggle, of course. Like playing Bach cantatas as background music to Christmas drinks, snipping out details of Christian paintings to illuminate our seasonal greetings is a debasement of their true meaning. Religion is a serious business, a fact of 21st-century life that should make us look twice at those cute angels, that dumbly innocent donkey. The most “Christmassy” paintings are often deeply disturbing when you look a bit harder: the lovely, intensely hued visionary scene on the previous page of the Madonna and Child serenaded by a choir of angels is no exception. But this cheery scene actually comes from one of the most terrifying and visceral works of art ever painted – a religious masterpiece that is harrowing to the core.

more from The Guardian here.

For 44 days in the fall of 1977, West Germany’s Red Army Faction (RAF) held captive Hanns Martín Schleyer, a leading German industrialist. In exchange for letting Schleyer go, the RAF—a left-wing urban guerrilla organization—demanded the release of ten imprisoned members, including their leaders, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.

From its founding in 1970 to its dissolution in the 1990s, the RAF robbed banks, assassinated prominent politicians, and bombed U.S. military bases, under-construction prisons, and the offices of the tabloid press. Its stated goal was to bring revolution from the third world to the first and overthrow the “fascist” Federal Republic in favor of an undefined socialist state. After the first wave of terror in the early 1970s, most of the RAF’s founding generation— including Baader, Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof—were behind bars, their successors acting on orders smuggled out through lawyers and paroled comrades.

more from Boston Review here.

Beena Sarwar in Himal Southasian:

…political darkness is nothing new for Pakistan and Pakistanis. For most of the country’s 60-year history, it is the men in uniform and jackboots who have governed. For most of the country’s history, the executive and judiciary have been ranged against the ordinary people. Pakistanis won independence from the British colonists in 1947, but the rulers never stopped colonising their own people. Pakistan’s ‘smaller’ nationalities, bitter at the promise of a federation, are alienated from the Centre. Ordinary Pakistanis had to continuously resist the tyranny and attempted hegemony of religion and nationalism that the state, and the rightwing non-state actors, have sought to impose. Crucially, amidst the sea of disenchantment, over the last three decades a small but vocal civil-rights community has developed.

Pakistanis have long seen the promise of democracy being dangled before them, though usually far out of reach, precluded by the military’s stranglehold. (As someone once famously said, “Most countries have an army, but in Pakistan the army has a country.) But over the last year, this promise finally seemed to be coming within grasp, particularly with the country’s judiciary finally standing with the people rather than with the establishment. But now the dream of democracy seems set to remain just out of reach. The caretaker government installed to oversee the upcoming elections is comprised of Musharraf loyalists, and has no credibility. The general has manoeuvred in such a way that he is back firmly in the saddle: mandated not by the people of Pakistan but by hand-picked judges.

Nevertheless, the struggle will continue. Lawyers are refusing to accept the ‘PCO judges’. Ordinary citizens are honouring the ‘real’ judges, visiting their homes and presenting them with flowers and notes of appreciation. Journalists have vowed to continue their struggle for media freedom. The political parties, some discredited less than others, are getting back into the fray. One way or another, Gen Musharraf is certainly going to have a tough time stuffing the democratic genie back into the bottle.

More here.