Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

A pilot program to embed anthropologists on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan has sparked major controversy in the anthropological community. The program, known as the Human Terrain System (HTS) project, reflects a much larger trend in the national security establishment, with the military increasingly hungry for cultural expertise to fight counterinsurgencies and sustain long, low-intensity conflicts. Anthropologists are struggling to come to grips with the ethics of research on the front lines.

The Human Terrain System project is a joint undertaking by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) and U.S. Army Training and Doctrine command (TRADOC) in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Headed by Col. Steve Fondacaro, HTS assigns five-person teams of social scientists and intelligence specialists to forward-deployed combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan. These Human Terrain Teams (HTT) serve as cultural advisors to the brigade commander and his senior staff. HTTs in the field are supported by a team of U.S.-based social scientists. The FMOS serves as a central clearinghouse for cultural information and maintains a network of subject area experts in the Defense Department and academia.

Noah Shachtman in Wired:

The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers. General Tommy Franks, leader of both invasions, was even more effusive than Rumsfeld. All the new tech, he wrote in his 2004 memoir, American Soldier, promised “today’s commanders the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods.”

And yet, here we are. The American military is still mired in Iraq. It’s still stuck in Afghanistan, battling a resurgent Taliban. Rumsfeld has been forced out of the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of general staff and net-centric advocate who led the largely unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, has been fired, too. In the past six years, the world’s most technologically sophisticated militaries have gone up against three seemingly primitive foes — and haven’t won once.

How could this be? The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory’s many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren’t enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.

Over at the SSRC, Richard Dowden an Tim Allen, author of Trial Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Lord’s Resistance Army debate the ICC. Dowden:

[T]here are three major problems for the Court in Uganda. First, consider the timing of the announcement of the LRA warrants. For at least ten of the war’s twenty appalling years, sporadic peace talks have been going on between the government, rebels and local leaders. Early last year, they began to get serious. With peace in southern Sudan where the LRA had its bases, a deal did seem possible. But the announcement that the LRA leaders were about to be arrested and sent to The Hague was hardly an incentive to the rebels to put down their weapons and make peace. The Court argued that it made its announcement when sufficient evidence had been gathered. Being judicial, not political, it could not – would not – take into account what was happening on the ground. President Yoweri Museveni, who in late 2003 had originally invited the Court to deal with the LRA, now asked it to suspend the citations, but it refused.

Allen:

Essentially Richard Dowden’s position is that holding people to account for heinous actions is not how things are done in Africa. It is a deeply pessimistic point of view: Africans have learned to live with dreadful events, and have found a way of living with them, so they should be left to get on with it. There is a suggestion in the article that all Africans think much the same way, and are unlike other people in the world in that they don’t need or want conventional judicial mechanisms. We are told that “the ICC aims to hand out justice in Sudan as if it were Surrey.” At one level I have to agree with this. A very large number of Africans have not had much choice about it. But does that mean things have to stay that way?

Over at the NYT blog Tierney Lab, he points to a new debate about clitoridectomy:

Dr. Ahmadu, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, was raised in America and then went back to Sierra Leone as an adult to undergo the procedure along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group. She has argued that the critics of the procedure exaggerate the medical dangers, misunderstand the effect on sexual pleasure, and mistakenly view the removal of parts of the clitoris as a practice that oppresses women. She has lamented that her Westernized “feminist sisters insist on denying us this critical aspect of becoming a woman in accordance with our unique and powerful cultural heritage.” In another essay, she writes:

It is difficult for me — considering the number of ceremonies I have observed, including my own — to accept that what appears to be expressions of joy and ecstatic celebrations of womanhood in actuality disguise hidden experiences of coercion and subjugation. Indeed, I offer that the bulk of Kono women who uphold these rituals do so because they want to — they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over against men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority and particularly the authority of their mothers and grandmothers.

You can read more about this in Dr. Ahmadu’s essays or in this critique of the global campaign against female genital mutilation, written by another participant in Saturday’s discussion, Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago.

For the older one, see Yael Tamir’s “Hands Off Clitoridectomy”, responses by Martha Nussbaum, Jessica Neuwirth, F. M. Kamm, and Robert P. George, as well as Tamir’s rejoinder.

It is indeed striking how one activity can be conducted practically within eyesight of the other with such apparent casualness. How easily madness can be dressed up as normality. During the short summer of Oslo it became a bit more difficult. For a short time the standards of normality changed. Normality suddenly prescribed that endless occupation was an impossibility and peace with the Palestinians a possibility. During the long winter that has followed, normality has again come to prescribe that peace with the Palestinians is an impossibility and endless occupation a possibility.

And herein lies the madness; endless occupation is not a possibility, and military superiority is not a possible strategy, and a policy for locking the Palestinians out will increasingly also lock the Jews in.

more from Eurozine here.

Only one of those last efforts, the title piece in “Music for Chameleons,” appeared in the magazine, and in many ways it’s a distillation of earlier themes and images: absinthe, ghosts, a mysterious mirror, a Carnival parade, a whiff of violence and homosexuality. In many ways the Capote of this book is not the heroic reporter of the two recent movie versions of his life but, rather, a Gothic, fin-de-siècle kind of writer who would have fitted right in with Beardsley, Wilde and Ernest Dowson. You don’t read him here so much for character (most of his people are types) or for vivid description as for atmosphere and filigreed prose. In a 1946 sketch of New Orleans, he says the atmosphere is “like Chirico,” and a year later he writes the same thing about Hollywood: “Here where no one walks cars glide in a constant shiny silent stream, my shadow, moving down the stark white street, is like the one living element of a Chirico.” Capote loved tropical shadow and the spooky half light, just as he loved Venetian mists, rooming houses, cemetery statuary. From his descriptions, it’s sometimes hard to tell one place from another — Capote’s Brooklyn is practically indistinguishable from New Orleans — and that’s because all his landscapes aspire in a way to the remembered South of his childhood. Even when he describes the present, many of the pieces feel nostalgic, and there hangs over almost all of them a scent of overripeness, of blooms beginning to fade.

more from the NY Times here.

Henry James (1843-1916) presents a special set of problems to the biographer. On the face of it, his life was uneventful — no wars fought in, no fortune made or lost, no marriages or children or interruptions to the work. He wrote and wrote and wrote. In addition to James’ own continuous and inward-facing reportage, Leon Edel’s five-volume biography might seem to have sufficed. Those books appeared from 1953 to 1972, and in recent years more information has emerged. A critical industry has been established whose raw material is that of the artist’s notebooks and correspondence; more than 10,000 of his letters are preserved. And little would seem left to say.

“James’s surviving letters are now open to all scholars, however, and many contemporaneous accounts have been identified and published,” writes Sheldon M. Novick in his new book, “Henry James: The Mature Master.” “A new generation of scholars has been at work in these fertile fields and has portrayed James as the active, passionate, engaged man his contemporaries knew. The picture that is emerging is essentially that which James himself seems to have tried to convey and is quite different from the canonical account to which we all had grown accustomed.”

more from the LA Times here.

From The New York Times:

The story of paperback advertising started innocently enough: with babies, in fact. In 1958, the Madison Avenue adman Roy Benjamin founded the Quality Book Group, a consortium of the paperback industry heavyweights Bantam Books, Pocket Books and the New American Library. Despite the lofty name, the group’s real purpose was to sell advertisements in paperbacks, and its first target was the biggest success of them all: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.” A 1959 Pocket Books print run of 500,000 included advertisements by Q-Tips, Carnation and Procter & Gamble. By 1963, a 26-page insert in Spock was commanding $6,500 to $7,500 per page, and ads were spreading into mysteries and other pulps as well.

The bulk of paperback advertising came from tobacco companies, which were looking for new places to push their products after a federal ban on cigarette advertising on television and radio passed in 1969. Beginning in 1971, the Lorillard Tobacco Company began buying into print runs of tens and even hundreds of thousands of copies apiece at the astounding rate of 125 titles a month, often in pulpy volumes like “Purr, Baby, Purr” and “The Executioner #8: Chicago Wipeout” — not to mention the poetically if unintentionally matched “I Come to Kill You” and “Unless They Kill Me First.”

More here.

From Science:

What makes an ideal man? For some women, it’s a charming personality; others just want to see a nice set of abs. Things aren’t quite so complicated in the rest of the animal kingdom. In most species, every female prizes the same trait in a male, whether it be bright plumage or a pretty song. So researchers have been surprised to discover that female yellowthroats don’t always agree on what turns them on–a finding that may offer a window onto speciation.

Male yellowthroats sport large black masks and bright yellow bibs. Vibrant colors result from pigments called carotenoids, which are also antioxidants and thus a sign of health. So it was little surprise when biologist Corey Freeman-Gallant of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and colleagues found in 2001 that local female yellowthroats preferred males with the most vivid yellow bibs. But in the same year, biologist Peter Dunn of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, published something different about his local population of yellowthroats: Females seemed to be targeting the size of males’ black masks to determine whether they were worth a fling. That didn’t make sense, because the black masks are generated from melanin, which has no connection to health. “I was taken aback,” says Dunn.

More here.

There were several categories; here are some examples that I liked:

People. Paint-splattered Ugandan Boy:

Landscape. Santa Monica Oceanfront Houses:

Animal. Male Gorilla:

There are many more photographs here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Over at three-toed sloth:

[L]et me back up a minute to the bit about relying on “peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue”. There are two problems here.

One has to do with the fact that, as I said, it is really very easy to find the rebuttals showing that Rushton’s papers, in particular, are a tragic waste of precious trees and disk-space. For example, in the very same issue of the very same journal as the paper by Rushton and Jensen which was one of Saletan’s main sources, Richard Nisbett, one of the more important psychologists of our time, takes his turn banging his head against this particular wall. Or, again, if Saletan had been at all curious about the issue of head sizes, which seems to have impressed him so much, it would have taken about five minutes with Google Scholar to find a demonstration that this is crap. So I really have no idea what Saletan means when he claimed he relied on published rebuttals — did he think they would just crawl into his lap and sit there, meowing to be read? If I had to guess, I’d say that the most likely explanation of Saletan’s writings is that he spent a few minutes with a search engine looking for hits on racial differences in intelligence, took the first few blogs and papers he found that way as The Emerging Scientific Consensus, and then stopped. But detailed inquiry into just how he managed to screw up so badly seems unprofitable.

The other problem with his supposed reliance on peer review is that he seems confused about how that institution works. I won’t rehash what I’ve already said about it, but only remark that passing peer review is better understood as saying a paper is not obviously wrong, not obviously redundant and not obviously boring, rather than as saying it’s correct, innovative and important. Even this misses a deeper problem, a possible failure mode of the scientific community. A journal’s peer review is only as good as the peers it uses as reviewers. If everyone, or almost everyone, who referees for some journal is in the grip of the same mistake, then they will not catch it in papers they review, and the journal will propagate it. In fact, since journals usually recruit new referees from their published authors or people recommended by old referees, mistakes and delusions can become endemic and self-confirming in epistemic communities associated with particular journals. To give a concrete example, the community using Physica A is pretty uniformly (and demonstrably) mistaken about how to tell when something is a power-law distribution, so what that journal publishes about power laws is unreliable, and those who derive their training and information from that journal go on to propagate the errors. It would be easy to find even more extreme examples from the physical and mathematical sciences (especially, I must say, among journals published by Elsevier), but it would take too long to explain why they are wrong.

Ange Mlinko examines the poetry of John Ashbery, in The Nation:

The one way Ashbery’s poems may always be fruitfully read is as sheer ear candy. Just glancing through his titles will confirm this (my favorite: “Yes, Dr. Grenzmer, How May I Be of Assistance to You? What! You Say the Patient Has Escaped?”). Yet where literature is concerned, we’re ardent believers in the instrumental: how else to explain why the poorest art in the world, with the least influence on American culture, is routinely made the scapegoat of all art’s sins? Rock and roll halts no wars; therefore let us stone poets, goes the logic. Meanwhile, the fact that visual artists become millionaires in an art market fueled by a hedge-fund bubble fazes no one.

Caution: Ear candy may segue shockingly into the sublime, as in these lines from “Chinese Whispers”:

The trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once.

Always they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them

without noticing. We, too, are taller,

our ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured

with telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vaguer,

according as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out,

a secret thread.

Peace is a full stop.

And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade,

now only time will consent to have anything to do with us,

for what purposes we do not know.

Exactly 100 years ago, Gustav Klimt’s iconic portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, now enthroned in the Neue Galerie and possibly the most famous painting in New York, was exhibited in Vienna between two soulful and sinewy sculptures by the Belgian artist George Minne. Today, after a tumultuous century of world wars and totalitarian regimes, the two sculptures have turned up on the Upper East Side at the Neue Galerie. There, once again, they flank the ethereal Frau Bloch-Bauer.

more from the NY Sun here.

“I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” This is the opening line of David Shulman’s powerful and memorable book, Dark Hope, a diary of four years of political activity in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is a record of the author’s intense involvement with a volunteer organization composed of Israeli Palestinians and Israeli Jews, called Ta’ayush, an Arabic term for “living together” or “life in common.” The group was founded in October 2000, soon after the start of the second Palestinian intifada.

“This book aims,” Shulman writes,

at showing something of the Israeli peace movement in action, on the basis of one individual’s very limited experience…. I want to give you some sense of what it feels like to be part of this struggle and of why we do it.

Struggle with whom? Shulman explains:

Israel, like any society, has violent, sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven, complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise. Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach, and Hebron, they have, in effect, unfettered freedom to terrorize the local Palestinian population; to attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill—all in the name of the alleged sanctity of the land and of the Jews’ exclusive right to it.

His diary proceeds to show how this happens.

more from the NYRB here.

Via NoUtopia:

Surviving
Betty Lockwood

Okay, woman,
lying here grieving,
tasting tears;
blow your nose;
get out of bed.
Resume yourself.
Pattern the day.

Remember.
Remember with love.
Dance jigs of joy
in your versatile
imagination.
Sing love songs,
even if off-key.

Memorize living.
Morning pills,

3 with a glass of water.

Vision new scenes.
Rehearse laughing.
The curtain stays up.
You’re still on stage.

David W. Farmer in American Scientist:

Symmetry is a fundamental concept pervading both science and culture. In popular terms, symmetry is often viewed as a kind of “balance,” as when Doris Day’s character in the 1951 movie On Moonlight Bay insists that if her beau kisses her on the right cheek, then he should kiss her on the left cheek too. But in mathematics, symmetry has been given a more precise meaning. In his new history of mathematical symmetry, Why Beauty Is Truth, Ian Stewart gives this definition: “A symmetry of some mathematical object is a transformation that preserves the object’s structure.” So a symmetrical structure looks the same before and after you do something to it. A butterfly looks the same as its mirror image. The (idealized) wheel of a car may look the same after being rotated on its axle by 90 degrees (or possibly by 72 or 120 degrees, depending on the particular design).

Although mathematical symmetry may bring to mind a regular polygon or other geometric pattern, its roots (pun unavoidable) lie in algebra, in the solutions to polynomial equations. Thus Stewart begins his account in ancient Babylon with the solution to quadratic equations. The familiar quadratic formula gives the two roots of the degree-two polynomial equation ax ² + bx + c = 0. The Babylonians didn’t have the algebraic notation to write down such a formula, but they had a recipe that was equivalent to it.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Several years ago, Edward Ball took possession of an ancient family desk and discovered something in a locked compartment that to him must have seemed almost predestined. He found a collection of carefully labeled and dated locks of hair from nine of his 19th-century relatives, the oldest specimen dating from 1824. Ball was uniquely qualified to explore the implications of such a trove: His 1998 book Slaves in the Family was a National Book Award-winning investigation into his white ancestors’ dealings with their African slaves. Now he held in his hands the means to take that exploration a giant step further. Perhaps modern DNA analysis of his ancestors’ hair could provide evidence of unsuspected liaisons, redraw the tree of genetic relationships, and deepen Ball’s understanding of his family’s story and his own identity.

The Genetic Strand is the tale of Ball’s efforts to extract truth from these preserved hair specimens, and of what he learned about the power and pitfalls of DNA testing as a tool for exploring ancestry. The book engagingly switches back and forth between history and science, alternating anecdotes from the lives of the family members with visits to the labs of the various biologists who assist Ball with his genetic quest.

More here.

Faye Flam in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Neurobiologist and anthropologist Michael Platt of Duke University is studying differences in how the sexes respond to pictures in general. On average, his research shows, men will pay to see images of women. But you have to pay women to look at images of men!

Platt started with similar studies in monkeys. While most animals are indifferent to photos even of individuals in their own species, monkeys and apes respond to pictures much as humans do.

Rhesus macaques that Platt studied, for example, easily recognized the faces of familiar monkeys. And they liked some faces more than others, though the face wasn’t always the favorite part.

Platt found that male macaques strongly preferred to look at pictures of females’ rear ends and dominant males’ faces. They liked them enough to pay, by sacrificing a chance to get a treat. But you had to bribe those same monkeys with treats to persuade them to look at female macaque faces or the faces of subordinate males.

More here.

From Scientific American:

If, as many scientists believe, life can readily emerge under the right environmental conditions, it is possible that life arose on Earth more than once. Researchers are now seeking evidence of a second genesis by searching for exotic microbes that are biochemically different from all known organisms. In this image, artist Adam Questell has imagined an alien cell that carries its genetic material in twin nuclei.

More here.