From Scientific American:

Nine countries could kill many people on a moment’s notice by launching missiles carrying nuclear warheads. A 10th, Iran, may be weaponizing uranium. The U.S., Russia and China can bomb virtually any country with long-range ballistic missiles and, along with France and the U.K., could do the same using submarines. The effects of even one bomb could far exceed the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“People came fleeing…. One after another they were almost unrecognizable.
The skin … was hanging from their hands and from their chins; their faces were red and so swollen that you could hardly tell where their eyes and mouths were.”
—Hiroshima survivor in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes

“I have been hospitalized 10 times by radiation diseases, three times … my family called to my bedside. I have to admit I am getting bored with death.”
—Hiroshima survivor Sanao Tsuboi, quoted by Torcuil Crichton in “Hiroshima: The Legacy,” U.K. Sunday Herald; July 31, 2005

More here.

From BBC News:

The Science Museum has cancelled a talk by American DNA pioneer Dr James Watson after he claimed black people were less intelligent than white people. Dr Watson, who won a Nobel Prize in 1962 for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, was due to speak at the venue on Friday. In an interview with The Sunday Times, the 79-year-old said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. He went on to say he hoped everyone was equal but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.

More here.

From Science:

Earth’s rocky crust, or lithosphere, is made up of 14 massive plates that float atop the planet’s semimolten mantle and make up the major landmasses and ocean basins. Five of these tectonic plates are the progeny of one–a giant plate known as Gondwanaland, which began to break up about 140 million years ago and eventually gave rise to Africa, Antarctica, India, Australia, and South America. Most of these fragments moved away from one another at about 5 centimeters per year, taking millions of years to arrive at their present locations. But the Indian plate raced along at 20 centimeters per year and eventually slammed into southern Asia with so much force that the collision gave rise to the Himalayas, the highest mountain range on dry land.

What enabled the Indian plate to move so fast? An Indian-German team may have discovered the answer: The plate is considerably thinner than its Gondwanaland siblings.

More here.

Justin Smith at n+1:

I’ve just arrived in Berlin to begin a year-long research fellowship at a well-known Institute for Philosophy. All the really smart philosophers left here in the 1930s, but Berlin retains an unmistakable luster. Come here as a philosopher, and you are assumed to be thinking some very profound thoughts.

 

Day 1

I’ve rented a furnished apartment in Kreuzberg, and it came equipped not only with the usual couches and tables and IKEA dishware, but also with a Terminator 2: Judgment Day pinball machine. Digital samples of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice bellow you missed, and get out, and of course Hasta la vista, baby. I recovered long ago from the absurdity of Schwarzenegger’s governorship in my home state – that he was vastly less qualified than Ronald Reagan or even Gary Coleman for the same position, that his father was a Nazi, that he himself has been caught on film gleefully doing the Hitler salute. But when, here in the shadow of the Reichstag, the digital message beneath his grim, sunglassed image flashes “Los Angeles, July 11, 2029: Judgment Day,” it is different. Everything is different.

Unlike the pinball machines of my youth, in arcades, where one was required to insert coins to make them work, here at home in Kreuzberg, as an adult, I can simply stick my hand inside the machine and set it for as many credits as I like. I pump it up to 20 credits at a go. Already today I’ve done this 6 times, which means that I’ve played 120 games of pinball. At 3 balls per game, I’ve shot the ball into action 360 times. I only stopped when I realized I was out of crème de cassis and would have to go out for more. If I had played this much in an arcade in my youth (when I did not need crème de cassis), I would have spent $30 in quarters. If you had shown me $30 in quarters when I was 10 I would have had a grand mal seizure on the spot.

Over at bloggingheads.tv, John Horgan and Robert Wright discuss the issue.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, over at Princeton University Press:

ON A VISIT to a small Latin American country a few yearsback, my colleagues and I paid a courtesy visit to the minister of finance.The minister had prepared a detailed PowerPoint presentation on his economy’s recent progress, and as his aide projected one slide after another onthe screen, he listed all the reforms that they had undertaken. Trade barriers had been removed, price controls had been lifted, and all public enterprises had been privatized. Fiscal policy was tight, public debt levels low,and inflation nonexistent. Labor markets were as flexible as they come.There were no exchange or capital controls, and the economy was open toforeign investments of all kind. “We have done all the first-generation reforms, all the second-generation reforms, and are now embarking on third-generation reforms,” he said proudly.

Indeed the country and its finance minister had been excellent students of the teaching on development policy emanating from internationalfinancial institutions and North American academics. And if there were justice in the world in matters of this kind, the country in question wouldhave been handsomely rewarded with rapid growth and poverty reduction.Alas, not so. The economy was scarcely growing, private investment remained depressed, and largely as a consequence, poverty and inequalitywere on the rise. What had gone wrong?

Meanwhile, there were a number of other countries—mostly butnot exclusively in Asia—that were undergoing more rapid economicdevelopment than could have been predicted by even the most optimisticeconomists. China has grown at rates that strain credulity, and India’s performance, while not as stellar, has confounded those who thought that thiscountry could never progress beyond its “Hindu” rate of economic growthof 3 percent. Clearly, globalization held huge rewards for those who knewhow to reap them. What was it that these countries were doing right?

In openDemocracy:

You can’t be involved for long with openDemocracy – or with any serious new-media publication – without soon needing a reply to the “cheap-talk” challenge: “what’s all this debate for anyway?” Are we just doing fire-drill, waiting for the day when holding power to account will be a matter of saving civilisation? Or does all this talk do more? Does it define who we are, and, in pervasive ways we hardly notice, change our behaviour, our beliefs of what is possible and our impact on those around us?

These are the big questions of “why debate?” But the answers will also inform all the everyday decisions that a web publication needs to make. Should commenters be registered? Is anonymity allowed? Does reputation grow? Should the debating community moderate itself? Should different areas have different levels of “openness”? Should articles be commissioned to fit into well-conceived debates, or should editors rely on unprompted submissions to create debate? Why should philanthropists or public bodies fund the sort of conversation that we make?

Johann Hari in the New Statesman gives a positive review.

How can Naomi Klein top No Logo, the most influential political polemic of the past 20 years? Her first book forensically studied the bloodstains that have splashed from the developing world’s factories and “export processing zones” on to our cheap designer lives – and it spurred the creation of the anti-globalisation movement. Today, she has produced something even bolder: a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built. She takes the central myth of the right – that, since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have skipped hand in hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history – and shown that it is, simply, a lie.

In fact, human beings consistently and everywhere vote for mixed economies. They want the wealth that markets generate, but they also want them to be counterbalanced by strong government action to make life in a market economy liveable. (Even Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were not permitted by their electorates to tinker with anything but the outer fringes of social regulation and the welfare state.) The right has been unable to accept this reality, and unable to defeat it in democratic elections. So in order to achieve their vision of “pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions”, they have waited for massive crises – when the population is left reeling and unable to object – to impose their vision.

For all ex-Yugoslavs, but particularly for the Serbs, the Kosovo Albanians used to be simply “our negroes.” Nowadays, however, they are cast as Serbia’s arch-enemies – a myth ruthlessly exploited by nationalist politicians, even as negotiations take place over the future of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, which has been under UN administration since 1999. If anyone in Western Europe asks how all this could have happened, I can tell them, for I have watched and listened to this story unfolding in my country.

The country that used to be mine, the former Yugoslavia, was ethnically and culturally extremely diverse. Marshall Josip Broz Tito used to call this diversity our Yugoslavian “melting pot.” In reality, though, it was never that. After Tito’s death the country’s diversity was tragically instrumentalized; it became socially divided, split ethnically and culturally into sub-groups and economically into a hierarchy of better-off and worse-off regions. Post-Tito Yugoslavia thus became a proverbial European vertical.

more from Sign and Sight here.

It must be tough to be a British architect these days if your name isn’t Norman Foster or Richard Rogers. The most famous British architects since Christopher Wren are filling the world with so many sleek glass-and-steel buildings that it can be hard for their compatriots to get noticed. All the more reason to enjoy the rise, in recent years, of Will Alsop. Alsop, now fifty-nine, is the anti-Foster. His buildings are startling, but also whimsical, gentle, colorful, and modest. Alsop’s playfulness makes him unusual—wit is in short supply among architects today—but his work, on closer inspection, is just as notable for the commonsensical attitudes it embodies.

The building that has done most to establish Alsop as an international figure is a bizarre structure in Toronto, the Sharp Center for Design, at the Ontario College of Art & Design. It is a slab, two hundred and seventy feet long and raised nine stories into the air on huge, slanted legs. The legs—red and yellow and black and blue and purple and white—look like a bunch of gigantic colored pencils, or pick-up sticks mid-fall.

more from The New Yorker here.

That great art critic Rudolph Giuliani, then moonlighting as mayor of New York, first made Chris Ofili famous in America when, in 1999, he tried to evict the Brooklyn Museum for displaying the artist’s magnificent Holy Virgin Mary, a painting that Rudy felt sullied its religious subject matter with sexual imagery. Ofili’s blasphemous Black Madonna was one of a series of sparkling works combining such materials as beaded oil paint, map pins, collaged porn images, and elephant dung, a series that won him Britain’s Turner Prize in 1998. His new work—compiled in “Devil’s Pie,” Ofili’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery—is no less perverse or disturbingly beautiful.

Dazzlingly studded with ornament, at once easy and erudite, the dung paintings re-imagined what a painting could be; they threw open a door to the future.

more from The Village Voice here.

From The Guardian:

Against all the odds, and seeing off competition from favourites Ian McEwan and Lloyd Jones, rank outsider Anne Enright was tonight awarded the Man Booker prize for her “powerful, uncomfortable and even at times angry book” The Gathering. Howard Davies, chair of the panel, described it as “an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language”. No picnic, it was described by the Observer’s critic as “a story of family dysfunction, made distinctive by an exhilarating bleakness of tone”. Davies said: “It’s accessible. It’s somewhat bitter – but it’s perfectly accessible. People will be pretty excited by it when they read it.”

The Gathering is narrated by Veronica, as she prepares for the funeral of Liam, one of her many larger-than-life, unruly siblings. The novel casts back down the generations as Veronica – apparently leading a calm, stable, successful life as a well-off wife and mother – attempts to make sense of her turbulent, fragile history and that of her dysfunctional clan.

More here.

From MSNBC:

U.S. and Philippine scientists may have discovered new marine species in the world’s most biologically diverse region, their expedition leader said Tuesday. Larry Madin, who led the Inner Space Speciation Project in the Celebes Sea south of the Philippines, said scientists had been to one of the world’s deep-ocean basins in search of organisms that may have been isolated there for millions of years.

Madin, of the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, or WHOI, said the Celebes Sea is at the heart of the “coral triangle” bordered by the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia — a region recognized by scientists as having the greatest degree of biological diversity of the coral reef community of fish and other marine life.

More here.

Yves Gingras in openDemocracy:

I am arguing here that this prize [the Nobel prize in economics] does not exist: and moreover, that this so-called ‘Nobel prize’ is an extraordinary case study in the successful transformation of economic capital into symbolic capital, a transformation which greatly inflates the symbolic power of the discipline of Economics in the public mind.

The confusion can be traced back to 1968 when the governor of the Central Bank of Sweden decided to mark the tercentenary of that institution by creating a new award. It could have been named after a well-known ancestral economist, such as Adam Smith, or more simply, though unimaginatively, ‘The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics’. After all, every discipline has its own ‘prestigious’ prize. Their number grows every year. However, the problem is that all these prizes, though well known within the microcosms of their discipline, have little public appeal. Only the Nobel prizes have a real public impact. But they are limited to five fields: physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, literature and, finally, peace.

Moreover, the enormous symbolic capital of the very name ‘Nobel prize’ has been accumulated over the years by a careful selection of prizewinners. Like every new prize, by definition unknown, the Nobel faced the problem of what we can call (invoking Pierre Bourdieu’s apt concept) the ‘primitive accumulation of symbolic capital’. This obstacle was overcome by giving the prize early on to already renowned scientists who would bring the prize real credibility. The idea was that, over the years, this symbolic capital would surely accrue to such an extent that it could in turn bring recognition to the chosen winners.

The organisers, conscious of this conundrum and wishing to endow the discipline of economics with as much public credibility as possible, decided to call the prize: ‘The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’. Curiously then, it was the memory of Nobel, not that of an economist, that was being recalled. This mystery can be explained if we unpack the process crystallised in that bizarre and awkward name.

While there are problems with the interview, van Bakel in the libertarian Reason magazine seems to be one of the few that’s not letting Hirsi Ali so easily off the political hook (via Crooked Timber):

Reason: Explain to me what you mean when you say we have to stop the burning of our flags and effigies in Muslim countries. Why should we care?

Hirsi Ali: We can make fun of George Bush. He’s our president. We elected him. And the queen of England, they can make fun of her within Britain and so on. But on an international level, this has gone too far. You know, the Russians, they don’t burn American flags. The Chinese don’t burn American flags. Have you noticed that? They don’t defile the symbols of other civilizations. The Japanese don’t do it. That never happens.

Reason: Isn’t that a double standard? You want us to be able to say about Islam whatever we want—and I certainly agree with that. But then you add that people in Muslim countries should under all circumstances respect our symbols, or else.

Hirsi Ali: No, no, no.

Reason: We should be able to piss on a copy of the Koran or lampoon Muhammad, but they shouldn’t be able to burn the queen in effigy. That’s not a double standard?

Hirsi Ali: No, that’s not what I’m saying. In Iran a nongovernmental organization has collected money, up to 150,000 British pounds, to kill Salman Rushdie. That’s a criminal act, but we are silent about that.

Reason: We are?

Hirsi Ali: Yes. What happened? Have you seen any political response to it?

Reason: The fatwa against Rushdie has been the subject of repeated official anger and protests since 1989.

Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker:

Arcade Fire’s singer and songwriter, Win Butler, writes lyrics that allude to big, potentially buzz-killing themes: guilt, rapture, death, redemption. And because, for the most part, he deals convincingly with these ideas, the band has been likened to older bands known for passion and gravitas, including the Clash. (On tour, Arcade Fire sometimes plays a cover of the Clash’s anti-police-brutality anthem “Guns of Brixton.”)

By the time I saw the Clash, in 1981, it was finished with punk music. It had just released “Sandinista!,” a three-LP set consisting of dub, funk, rap, and Motown interpretations, along with other songs that were indebted—at least in their form—to Jamaican and African-American sources. As I watched Arcade Fire, I realized that the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers. If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

There’s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn’t do; what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands’ as well—most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.

It’s difficult to talk about the racial pedigree of American pop music without being accused of reductionism, essentialism, or worse, and such suspicion is often warranted. In the case of many popular genres, the respective contributions of white and black musical traditions are nearly impossible to measure.

[H/t: Dan Balis.]

Those who love the English language will also love its throbbing formulations in my old friend Dohra Ahmad’s new anthology Rotten English. From Ian McMillan’s review in the London Times:

English can be broken, and pummelled and pulled and stretched and tickled and that’s part of the fun of it – but it can never be shattered.

This new anthology parades battalions of voices in celebration of, in the late Nigerian activist and writer Ken Saro-Wiwa’s resonant phrase, “Rotten English”.

There are poems, stories, extracts and essays that confirm the sheer glorious multitude of sounds and shapes that English is and can be – from familiar names such as Linton Kwesi Johnson to writers I hadn’t come across before, such as Zora Neale Hurston, who began writing stories in Florida in the 1920s and whose piece Story in Harlem Slang is a joyful romp through an English that doesn’t seem to need an excuse to dance: “The girl drew abreast of them, reeling and rocking her hips. ‘I’d walk clear to Diddy-Wah-Diddy to get a chance to speak to a pretty lil’ ground-angel like that’ Jelly went on. ’Aw, man, you ain’t willing to go very far. Me, I’d go to Ginny-Gall, where they eat cow-rump, skin and all.”

Hurston provides a helpful glossary to finesse the detail: Diddy-Wah-Diddy, like Ginny Gall, is a suburb of hell. Ah yes, I’ve been there. They all speak RP.

There is a wider public dimension to all this, as James Baldwin notes: “It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identity: it reveals the private identity and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger public or communal identity.”

An extract can be found here.

I’d like to continue exploring the issue of secular salvation within modern European society in the light of a recent book by the present Pope Benedict XVI. The book, published shortly before his elevation to the Papacy, is in Italian and the translation of its title is: Europe: Its Spiritual Foundations of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. It is basically the expansion of a lecture he gave on May 13, 2004 (as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) in the library of the Italian Senate, i.e., the Sala Capitolare del Chiostro della Minerva. He was invited there by Marcello Pera, who besides being the president of the Italian Senate at the time is also a professional philosopher.

The general theme of the book is this: modern Western Civilization finds itself in a crisis which many political and cultural pundits see as the crisis of the EU Constitution, or perhaps as the demise of the NATO alliance, or the war in Iraq, or global terrorism, or the entrance of Turkey in the EU. In reality the roots of the crisis lie much deeper, in the very soul and cultural identity of Europe, a continent that besides being a geographical place is also an idea which has developed over many centuries.

more from Ovi here.

According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the “Gay International” whose “discourse … produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist.” The “missionary tasks” of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the “Orientalist impulse … continues to guide all branches of the human rights community.” Massad’s intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.

more from TNR here.

Red lips and a rose nipple inflame the cool flesh of Egon Schiele’s model as she leans back and, blue eyes looking off to the side, lifts her ruffled skirt to show the artist what he wants to see.

You could not exclude Schiele from an exhibition entitled Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to the Present. Nor could you exclude his Viennese contemporary, Gustav Klimt, whose Reclining Masturbating Girl hangs nearby, nor Picasso, whose painting of himself at the age of about 20 being fellated is in the same room. And yet there’s something about that title, “art and sex”, that doesn’t quite do justice to these artists. It implies that art can sometimes be about things other than sex – and I’m not sure if Schiele or Picasso ever believed it could. I’m not sure if I believe it myself.

more from The Guardian here.