In the NYT, a profile of Tino Sehgal, who’s most recent situation, entitled “This Situation”, opens November 30th at the Marian Goodman Gallery.

ART can be defined, provocatively, as an intangible quantity that transforms an ordinary object — a urinal, a soup can, an unmade bed — into something worth many times more than its material value. Tino Sehgal seeks to isolate precisely that intangible quantity. His art is completely immaterial; it can be bought and sold without involving any objects whatsoever.

Mr. Sehgal, 31, who lives in Berlin, creates what he calls “staged situations”: interactive experiences that may not even initially declare themselves as works of art. Take “This Is New,” in which an attendant quotes a museumgoer a headline from that day’s papers: only the visitor’s response can trigger an interaction that concludes with the work’s title being spoken. Or “This Success/This Failure,” in which young children at play in an empty room attempt to draw visitors into their games, and after a certain time decide themselves whether the result has been a success or a failure. Or “This Situation,” a more complex piece, with six adult players, which opens at the Marian Goodman Gallery on Friday and is Mr. Sehgal’s first New York show.

Part of the point is to free art from the glut of material overproduction. But Mr. Sehgal, unlike many performance artists, is not protesting the art market itself. His work is specifically conceived to function within the art world’s conventions: it is lent and exhibited, bought and sold.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

For many years, Orlando Figes observes, the memoirs of intellectual dissidents, like Eugenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “were widely greeted as the ‘authentic voice’ of ‘the silenced,’” telling us “what it had ‘been like’ to live through the Stalin Terror as an ordinary citizen.” Their books did indeed reflect the experience of people like themselves, who were “strongly committed to ideals of freedom and individualism.” But they did not represent what happened to millions of other people who were not opponents of the regime and did not engage in any kind of substantial dissent, but were still dispatched to labor camps, to exile in remote settlements or to summary execution. As Figes, a leading historian of the Soviet period, concludes in “The Whisperers,” his extraordinary book about the impact of the gulag on “the inner world of ordinary citizens,” a great many victims “silently accepted and internalized the system’s basic values” and “conformed to its public rules.” Behind highly documented episodes of persecution, famine and war lie quieter, desperate stories of individuals and families who did what they could to survive, to find one another and to come to terms with the burden of being physically and psychologically broken. But it was not only repression that tore families apart. The regime’s reliance on “mutual surveillance” complicated their moral burden, instilling feelings of shame and guilt that endured long after years of imprisonment and exile.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Peter Gay opens his survey of the culture of Modernism with a discussion of Baudelaire’s call to artists to draw their inspiration from contemporary urban realities, and closes it with some sort of ironic ne plus ultra, as Damien Hirst roars with laughter after a ‘pile of organised chaos representing the detritus of a painter’s studio’ that he presented as an installation is mistakenly swept into a bin bag by an innocent cleaner assuming it to be bona fide rubbish.

In between, Professor Gay travels through 150 years of the history of the visual arts, literature and music. It must have been an exhausting journey for this distinguished Yale-based chronicler of the Enlightenment and German intellectualism, now in his mid-eighties. Yet nothing fazes him: he confronts this maelstrom of artistic activity, much of it the product of extreme neurosis and persecution, with calmly measured lucidity and authoritative accuracy (the only significant errors I spotted were a confusion of Virginia Woolf’s The Years with The Waves and the entirely false notion that Wagner ‘ ultimately did not challenge traditional tonality’.)

more from The Spectator here.

Charles Bukowski may be a Los Angeles icon, but reading “The Pleasures of the Damned” — the new volume of his selected poetry edited by John Martin, his longtime benefactor at Black Sparrow Press — it’s impossible not to ask some hard questions about his status and whether it is deserved. I’ve often thought his place in this city’s literary pantheon was more a matter of opportunity than of talent; when he started writing full-bore, in the mid-1950s, few people were creating an authentic local literature, which, for better or worse, is what he did.

Back then, most L.A. writing was the work of outsiders, with a small indigenous poetry scene, leftist and oddly formal in its aesthetics, centered around such journals as Coastlines and the California Quarterly. Although Bukowski published in such venues, he stood against all that; a loner, avowedly apolitical, he focused on the small degradations of daily life. “there is a loneliness in this world so great / that you can see it in the slow movement of / the hands of a clock,” he wrote in “The Crunch,” describing “the terror of one person / aching in one place / alone / untouched / unspoken to / watering a plant.” He was trying to articulate a vision of Los Angeles as an urban landscape, not exotic but mundane, where we not so much reinvent ourselves as remain unreconciled.

more from the LA Times here.

When we started The New York Review in February 1963 we asked some of the writers we admired most to send us book reviews within three weeks, for no payment, in order, as we said, “to suggest the qualities that a literary journal should have.” Norman, whom we all had known in New York, was among the first we turned to, and he soon delivered a review of Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris, which he found to be “a modest bad dull book which contains a superb short story about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Callaghan.” And by telling that story, about how Fitzgerald, acting as timekeeper in a boxing match, had allowed Callaghan extra time to knock out Hemingway, Norman made a brilliant review out of what he called Callaghan’s “dim writing.”

more from the NYRB here.

From Powell.com:

Already a hit in England (according to the jacket blurb, anyway), The Book of General Ignorance is now available in the US. It is ostensibly a book of factoids, but with a twist: these are facts many people have a mistaken knowledge of. Famously, George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth (they were mostly made from hippopotamus teeth). The factoid format makes this a perfect bathroom or coffee table book.

Some interesting tidbits at random: most tigers in the world live in the US (in zoos and as pets); Napoleon’s troops didn’t shoot the Sphinx’s nose off (it came off long ago and has never been found); there was no curse on King Tut’s tomb; Thomas Crapper invented the manhole cover but not the flush toilet; Thomas Edison may have invented the word hello (before Edison it was halloo or hullo); and Columbus thought the world was pear-shaped and much smaller than it is. Some “it didn’t originate where you think” bits: haggis is from Greece; kilts are Irish; chicken tikka masala comes from Glasgow; champagne is an English invention (as is baseball); Panama hats are from Ecuador; and, the guillotine was invented in Yorkshire.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Tom Brokaw’s sprawling new book about the 1960s has a striking cover, and it includes interviews with 50 people, many of them recognizable names from the era, like Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Andrew Young and Gloria Steinem. Combining oral history with the author’s own memories, this 662-page tome touches on nearly all the major events of that extraordinary time. Unfortunately, it tells us nothing new about any of them.

The main leitmotif is that it’s too early for anyone to judge the impact of this remarkable period. Brokaw writes, “The evidence is still coming in and the jury is still out — and forty years later we don’t seem anywhere near being able to render a verdict,” and “for the rest of my days, when my mind wonders back to the Sixties, I will probably think: Boom! what was that all about?”

More here.

Speaking of secularism, over at Princeton University Press, chapter 1 of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s The Politics of Secularism in International Relations:

RELIGION IS A PROBLEM in the field of international relations at two distinct levels. First, in recent years religious fundamentalism and religious difference have emerged as crucial factors in international conflict, national security, and foreign policy. This development has come as a surprise to many scholars and practitioners. Much contemporary foreign policy, especially in the United States, is being quickly rewritten to account for this change. Second, the power of this religious resurgence in world politics does not fit into existing categories of thought in academic international relations. Conventional understandings of international relations, focused on material capabilities and strategic interaction, exclude from the start the possibility that religion could be a fundamental organizing force in the international system.

This book argues that these two problems are facets of a single underlying phenomenon: the unquestioned acceptance of the secularist division between religion and politics. Standard privatization and differentiation accounts of religion and politics need to be reexamined. Secularism needs to be analyzed as a form of political authority in its own right, and its consequences evaluated for international relations. This is the objective of this book. My central motivating question is how, why, and in what ways does secular political authority form part of the foundation of contemporary international relations theory and practice, and what are the political consequences of this authority in international relations? I argue, first, that the secularist division between religion and politics is not fixed but rather socially and historically constructed; second, that the failure to recognize this explains why students of international relations have been unable to properly recognize the power of religion in world politics; and, finally, that overcoming this problem allows a better understanding of crucial empirical puzzles in international relations, including the conflict between the United States and Iran, controversy over the enlargement of the European Union to include Turkey, the rise of political Islam, and the broader religious resurgence both in the United States and elsewhere.

Over at the Immanent Frame, Akeel Bilgrami provides some insights in the question on modernity and secularism:

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is an inspired yet rigorously argued Wagnerian effort to analyze the distinctive anxieties of modern intellectual and social life, by one of the most important and interesting philosophers of the last five decades.

I will pick up one strand that illustrates Taylor’s central themes of religion and secularity and the conceptual and historical continuities and discontinuities between them: the process of so-called ‘disenchantment’ that is supposed to mark our modernity. And I will stress in particular the identification of a fault-line (that may seem like a tendentious expression but I believe it captures Taylor’s own view of things) in some of the intellectual and theological and social alliances that emerged in the Early Modern period in the West.

If, as Taylor thinks, our modern life is beset with distinctive anxieties, then the Early Modern period of history (and intellectual history) provides a good focus for a genealogical diagnosis of the conditions in which we find ourselves today. It is a focus that can get lost—partly because Weber’s term “disenchantment,” which in the past had so dominated our description of the distinctiveness of modernity on these matters, though not false, is too omnibus to be useful, and partly because the hectoring tomes written by our up-to-the-minute atheist bully-boys like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, pick up the thread of contemporary secularism in a much later period than Early Modernity.

Over at PBS’s NOVA, a two-hour documentary on the trial over intelligent design and its background. (Via richarddawkins.net.)

Chad Boutin in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin looks at the work of 3QD friend Thomas Gregor and his colleagues:

In the equipment-filled rooms of Princeton’s Icahn Laboratory, nearly everything in sight is advancing through some stage of development. Newly hatched fruit flies crowd each other in their glass tube nurseries; a freshly modified microscope for examining the insects exposes its wire-forested innards. A recent biology paper lies open to its last page, where the list of new questions the work has inspired beckons a future research team to probe the mysteries of life even further.

For the past five years, a quartet of Princeton researchers has undergone a development of its own, trying to resolve a tricky and timeworn issue about the first moments of life by examining the fruit fly. The effort has netted the group not only a surprising discovery and two papers in a prominent scientific journal, but plaudits from scientists at other institutions, who have hailed the work as setting a new standard for the integration of physics and biology.

“This team broke down biology until they could study it with physics, and it’s only through that kind of detailed analysis that we can see the complicated dynamics that go on in biological systems,” said Nipam Patel, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California-Berkeley. “Their work is a marriage between people who are experts in one field, but who understand and appreciate the other field. It’s a nice blueprint for these kinds of collaborations.”

Their collaboration grew out of a quest for a different sort of blueprint — the one that biologists have sought ever since they peered through microscopes to witness what physicist David Tank refers to as “magic”: a complex animal like the fruit fly developing from a single egg, seemingly from nothing.

(See also this piece in TheScientist.com.)

William Dalrymple in The Times Literary Supplement:

About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue. Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together. Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: “No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him.” He also argued for what he called “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on the marshy land of tradition”.

All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portu-gal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’Fiori. It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray, a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he “was not afraid to say the West’s values are better”, and in which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral confusion: “Decades of intense cultural rela-tivism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment,” he wrote.

More here.

Scott McLemee in the New York Times Book Review:

As the march of events has lurched in unexpected directions over the past three decades, many a political thinker has been thrown off track and hurled into confusion, if rarely into silence. But not John Gray. He has usually been a little ahead of the zeitgeist, waxing contrarian about whatever consensus is about to form. Gray has been called a chameleon. If so, he belongs to a very peculiar species: one with precognition, able to change colors before landing on whatever patch of landscape lies just around the corner.

In the early 1980s, Gray, who teaches European thought at the London School of Economics, was the most capable defender of Friedrich von Hayek as a social philosopher rather than just a propagandist for free-market policy. But he later became decidedly critical of any notion that the future belonged to liberal democracy. In 1989, as the Soviet Union was reforming itself out of existence, he wrote that this would not inaugurate “a new era of post-historical harmony” but rather “a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great-power rivalries, secret diplomacies, and irredentist claims and wars.” Over the following decade, he advanced a critique of globalization that sounded, at times, profoundly anticapitalist, if by no means Marxian.

More here.

Jim Harrison in The New York Times:

Charles Bukowski was a monstrously homely man because of a severe case of acne vulgaris when he was young. Along the way he also had bleeding ulcers, tuberculosis and cataracts; he attempted suicide; and only while suffering from leukemia in the last year of his life did he manage to quit drinking. Bukowski was a major-league tosspot, occasionally brutish but far less so than the mean-minded Hemingway, who drank himself into suicide.

It is hard to quote Bukowski because there are virtually none of those short lyrics with bow ties of closure that are so pleasant for a reviewer to quote. I will excerpt a poem evidently written quite near the end of his life:

it bothers the young most, I think:
an unviolent slow death.
still it makes any man dream;
you wish for an old sailing ship,
the white salt-crusted sail
and the sea shaking out hints of immortality

sea in the nose sea in the hair
sea in the marrow, in the eyes
and yes, there in the chest.
will we miss
the love of a woman or music or food
or the gambol of the great mad muscled
horse, kicking clods and destinies
high and away
in just one moment of the sun coming down?

More here. (For Molly Sharma)

Erin Biba in Wired:

Lene Vestergaard Hau can stop a pulse of light in midflight, start it up again at 0.13 miles per hour, and then make it appear in a completely different location. “It’s like a little magic trick,” says Hau, a Harvard physicist. “Of course, in all magic tricks there’s a secret.” And her secret is a 0.1-mm lump of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate, cooled nearly to absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) in a steel container with tiny windows. Normally — well, in a vacuum — light goes 186,282 miles per second. But things are different inside a BEC, a strange place where millions of atoms move — barely — in quantum lockstep.

About a decade ago, Hau started playing with BECs — for a physicist, that means shooting lasers at them. She blew up a few. Eventually, she found that lasers of the right wavelengths could tune the optical properties of a BEC, giving Hau an almost supernatural command over any other light shined into it. Her first trick was slowing a pulse of light to a crawl — 15 mph as it traveled through the BEC. Since then, Hau has completely frozen a pulse and then released it. And recently she shot a pulse into one BEC and stopped it — turning the BEC into a hologram, a sort of matter version of the pulse. Then she transferred that matter waveform into an entirely different BEC nearby — which emitted the original light pulse. That’s just freaky. Hey, Einstein may have set that initial speed limit of light, but he only theorized about BECs. “It’s not breaking relativity,” Hau says. “But I’m sure he would have been rather surprised.”

I seldom give special recommendations here, but you’ve gotta’ read this whole thing. I still have an adrenaline rush just from reading it. Man! Charles Graber in Wired:

And so the clock starts and the taillights flare, and they’re off again, strapped down, fueled up, and bound on an outlaw enterprise with 2,795 miles of interstate and some 31,000 highway cops between them and the all-time speed record for crossing the American continent on four wheels.

The gear is all bought and loaded. Twenty packs of Nat Sherman Classic Light cigarettes, check. Breath mints, check. Glucose and guarana, Visine and riboflavin, Gatorade and Red Bull, mail-order porta-pissoir bags of quick-hardening gel, check.

Randolph highway patrol sunglasses, 20-gallon reserve fuel tank, Tasco 8 x 40 binoculars fitted with a Kenyon KS-2 gyro stabilizer, military spec Steiner 7 x 50 binoculars, Hummer H1-style bumper-mounted L-3 Raytheon NightDriver thermal camera and LCD dashboard screens, front-and-rear-mounted sensors for a Valentine One radar/laser detector, flush bumper-mount Blinder M40 laser jammers, redundant Garmin StreetPilot 2650 GPS units, preprogrammed Uniden police radio scanners, ceiling-mount Uniden CB radio with high-gain whip antenna. Check. Check. Check.

More here.

The birthplace of Jesus is today one of the most contentious places on Earth. Israelis fear Bethlehem’s radicalized residents, who seethe at the concrete wall that surrounds them.

Michael Finkel in National Geographic:

This is not how Mary and Joseph came into Bethlehem, but this is how you enter now. You wait at the wall. It’s a daunting concrete barricade, three stories high, thorned with razor wire. Standing beside it, you feel as if you’re at the base of a dam. Israeli soldiers armed with assault rifles examine your papers. They search your vehicle. No Israeli civilian, by military order, is allowed in. And few Bethlehem residents are permitted out—the reason the wall exists here, according to the Israeli government, is to keep terrorists away from Jerusalem.

Bethlehem and Jerusalem are only six miles apart (ten kilometers), though in the compressed and fractious geography of the region, this places them in different realms. It can take a month for a postcard to go from one city to the other. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, on land taken by Israel during the Six Day War of 1967. It’s a Palestinian city; the majority of its 35,000 residents are Muslim. In 1900, more than 90 percent of the city was Christian. Today Bethlehem is only about one-third Christian, and this proportion is steadily shrinking as Christians leave for Europe or the Americas. At least a dozen suicide bombers have come from the city and surrounding district. The truth is that Bethlehem, the “little town” venerated during Christmas, is one of the most contentious places on Earth.

If you’re cleared to enter, a sliding steel door, like that on a boxcar, grinds open. The soldiers step aside, and you drive through the temporary gap in the wall. Then the door slides back, squealing on its track, booming shut. You’re in Bethlehem.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

In Telos, an address delivered at Stanford University:

I first met Richard Rorty in 1974 at a conference on Heidegger in San Diego. At the beginning of the convention, a video was screened of an interview with the absent Herbert Marcuse, who in it described his relationship to Heidegger in the early 1930s more mildly than the sharp post-War correspondence between the two men would have suggested. Much to my annoyance, this set the tone for the entire conference, where an unpolitical veneration of Heidegger prevailed. Only Marjorie Green, who had likewise studied in Freiburg prior to 1933, passed critical comment, saying that back then at best the closer circle of Heidegger students, and Marcuse belonged to it, could have been deceived as to the real political outlook of their mentor.

In this ambivalent mood I then heard a professor from Princeton, known to me until then only as the editor of a famed collection of essays on the Linguistic Turn, put forward a provocative comparison. He tried to strike harmony between the dissonant voices of three world-famous soloists in the frame of a strange concert: Dewey, the radical democrat and the most political of the pragmatists, performed in this orchestra alongside Heidegger, that embodiment of the arrogant German mandarin par excellence. And the third in this unlikely league was Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations had taught me so much; but he, too, was not completely free of the prejudices of the German ideology, with its fetishization of spirit, and cut a strange figure as a comrade of Dewey.

Part 2 can be found here and part 3 here.

In Cosmos Magazine (vis Sci Tech Daily):

Some voices, including from within the IPCC itself, fear the panel’s grand report will be badly out of date before it is even printed. Others quietly criticise the organisation as being too conservative in its appreciation of the climate threat.

The document to be issued in Valencia later this week boils down a 2,500-page, three-volume assessment issued this year, the first IPCC review of climate change since 2001.

The upcoming “synthesis report,” comprising a summary for policymakers of 25 pages, and a technical document of around 70 pages, puts in a nutshell the evidence for climate change, its likely impacts and the options for tackling it.

The analysis carries huge political weight. It will be a compass for guiding action on climate change for years to come, starting with a crucial U.N. conference in Bali next month.

But some experts are worried, fearing that the IPCC’s ponderous machinery, which gives birth to a new review only every five or six years, is falling dangerously behind with what’s happening to Earth’s climate systems.

The new report notably fails to take into account a batch of dramatic recent evidence, including the shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap, glacier loss in Greenland, a surge in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and an apparent slowing of Earth’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases, they say.

Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

“If Rudy is suggesting in any way that they used torture or aggressive interrogation in New York City then he is absolutely unfit to be president,” Giuliani’s former director of emergency management Jerry Hauer told the Huffington Post in an interview published on Nov. 6. Hauer added that local officials have no jurisdiction to torture anyone.

Giuliani’s alleged exploits don’t square with the policies and practices of the New York City Police Department, either.

“We are guided by what the constitution allows,” NYPD spokesman Sgt. Reginald Watkins told In These Times. “You can’t intimidate people into talking about a crime.”

Watkins explained that suspects in NYPD custody are under no obligation to talk and that they are entitled to have a lawyer present during questioning. Under no circumstances are police allowed to coerce people into answering questions.

When asked whether the NYPD officers are ever allowed to use physical pressure, Watkins seemed genuinely appalled.

“It goes without saying,” he said, “You cannot touch someone to get them to tell you about a crime.”

So, did Giuliani put the screws to the “mafia guys” as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District?