It’s like something out of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Once upon a time in northeastern Argentina there was a village of grape and almond farmers and goat breeders. This place, called Aicuña, also known as “the town of the Ormeños,” or later “the mysterious albino town,” remained isolated for more than three centuries, two hundred and fifty years longer than García Márquez’s Macondo. Inbreeding was punished in Macondo by the birth of a boy with a pig’s tail. In Aicuña, say some vicious people in neighboring villages, the punishment is colorless children. Forty-six of them, to be precise, in little more than a century.

However, it seems that Aicuña’s isolation has something to do with those same villages that now spread rumors about its strangeness. Some say that the animosity and subsequent estrangement all began with a disagreement over property. Who owned what land. Or who wanted to take over what land. But that is another story—another taboo—which almost no one here wants to talk about.

more from VQR here.

When people look at abstract paintings and say, “My kid could do that,” they’re right—up to a point. Given the right materials and a little bit of coaching, any kid—or elephant or chimpanzee—can produce something that looks like art, or at least something that looks like Abstract Expressionism. In the 1950s, artists like de Kooning and Pollock proposed a radically new way of thinking about painting: as the direct trace of the artist’s physical engagement with the materials. Harold Rosenberg, the critic who first coined the term “action painting,” put it like this: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” The Ab-Exers were great formal innovators, but even more important than Pollock’s drips or de Kooning’s arabesques was their revolutionary insight that a painting can represent nothing other than the process of its own creation.

more from Slate here.

Ancient Greek women lived lives that would be far more recognizable to the women of Iran or Saudi Arabia today than to the women of the modern West. Their skin was pale from a life in the shadows. When they were not indoors they covered up with a veil. Hence part of the preparations of the cross-dressing, coup-plotting women of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae consists of letting their skin get tanned by secret exposure to the unaccustomed rays of the sun. Men kept well away from women they were not related to, and even husbands and wives often slept in different, sex-separated, parts of the house. Decent women were not supposed even to be spoken of in the public world of men, according to the funeral speech penned for Pericles by Thucydides. For a woman even to allow herself to be seen at a window or leaning over the sill of a Dutch door was dangerous for her reputation, and eulogists at weddings were advised to preface their praise of the beauty of the bride with an “I have heard”. In Crete the fine an adulterer had to pay was halved if the woman was seduced in a house that was not her home, and in Athens no charges at all could be laid against a man who seduced a woman who went to and fro “showingly”; as if by the very fact of appearing in public she was announcing that she was anybody’s.

more from the TLS here.

Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Republic:

It is rather uncontroversial to call Osama bin Laden an anti-Semite. He is the easy case. But since many people in the West are queasy about attaching the label of anti-Semitism to almost anybody, regarding the charge of anti-Semitism as itself proof of prejudice, let me begin by describing bin Laden’s view of history less inflammatorily — not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric. He believes that Jews exercise disproportionate control over world affairs, and that world affairs may therefore be explained by reference to the Jews. A Judeocentric view of history is one that regards the Jews as the center of the story, and therefore the key to it. Judeocentrism is a single-cause theory of history, and as such it is, almost by definition, a conspiracy theory. Moreover, Judeocentrism comes in positive forms and negative forms. The positive form of Judeocentrism is philo-Semitism, the negative form is anti-Semitism. (There are philo-Semites who regard the Jews as the inventors of modernity, and there are anti-Semites who do the same; but the idea that Spinoza, Freud, and Einstein are responsible for us is as foolish as the idea that their ideas are judische Wissenschaft.) In both its positive and negative forms, Judeocentrism is always a mistake. Human events are not so neatly explained.

In the inflamed universe of negative Judeocentrism, there is a sliding scale of obsession. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, seems at times to view the world entirely through the prism of a Jewish conspiracy, and he regularly breaks new ground in the field of state-supported Holocaust denial.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Good news for your Viagra-using hamster: On his next trip to Europe he’ll bounce back from jet lag faster than his unmedicated friends. The researchers who revealed that bizarre fact earned one of 10 Ig Nobel prizes awarded Thursday night for quirky, funny and sometimes legitimate scientific achievements, from the mathematics of wrinkled sheets to U.S. military efforts to make a “gay bomb.” The recipients of the annual awards, handed out by the Annals of Improbable Research, were honored at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.

Best (and worst) of the rest
Other winners include:

• A Dutch researcher who conducted a census of all the creepy-crawlies that share our beds.
• Spanish scientists who found that rats sometimes could not distinguish between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards.
• An Australian woman who documented the indexing problems caused by the word “the.”
• A Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla flavoring from cow dung.
• A Taiwanese man who patented a Batman-like device that drops a net over bank robbers.

More here.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a series of inventions — the Conté pencil, “wove paper,” and hard-cake watercolor paints — resulted in the rapid spread of a revolutionary art form, which we call watercolor. The portability of the medium promoted plein air painting, while the use and superimposition of colored washes fed artists’ fascination with atmospheric effects rendered subtly and with optical precision. The medium at once dared artists to take risks, yet demanded of them a control without which simple mistakes could corrupt hours of intensive work, unlike painting in oils in the studio, where such mistakes could be reversed. The watercolor revolution marks a great moment in Western art. While the early innovations took place in England and France, and great British watercolorists — Turner, Girtin, Blake — tower over the first half of the 19th century, the medium took off at the time American art began. With their love of landscape, Americans created a body of watercolor that stands as one of our nation’s proudest artistic triumphs.

more from The NY Sun here.

The k43-t69 train that follows China’s great northern steppes and the legendary Silk Road could be dubbed “the desertification train.” Travelling from east to west, from Beijing to Urumqi, it cuts through 3,343 kilometres of dusty grasslands, dried-up riverbeds, threatened oases, and deserts both ancient and new. A few hours after the train leaves Beijing, a lunar black mountain range welcomes passengers into a vast arid landscape.

Deserts cover 18 percent of China today. Of those, 78 percent are natural, while 22 percent were created by humans. Almost all of them lie along the k43-t69’s route through the provinces of Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu, and finally Xinjiang, at the edge of Central Asia.

more from The Walrus here.

Berlin’s essay on Montesquieu is a good candidate for the most resonant piece he ever wrote about anything, but even then he stopped short conceptually of the conclusions he was on the point of reaching by instinct. He gives a detailed account of how Montesquieu’s pluralism valued all cultures; and then a further account of how Montesquieu, seeing the danger, wanted to leave room for some cultures being more valuable than others; but he made comparatively little of the device by which Montesquieu furthered the concept of an absolute morality that would apply even in the world of relative values that he had done so much to celebrate. Yet the device was right there in Montesquieu’s prose, and Berlin actually quoted it. “Justice is eternal, and doesn’t depend at all on human conventions.” Berlin thought Montesquieu had merely deepened his problem by saying that there could be universal laws in a relative world. But Montesquieu wasn’t saying that there were universal laws instinctive to all men. He was saying that there were eternal laws instinctive to some of them. Montesquieu argued that it didn’t matter who says torture might be necessary: our better nature, if we have one, tells us it is wrong. He was, in other words, a good man by instinct. The implication is that there were good men among the first men, and bad men too. If Berlin had faced the likelihood that his own goodness, like the evil of Stalin and Hitler, stemmed from a time when there was no idea in mankind’s head except where the next meal was coming from and how to kill it, he might have been better equipped to deal with modern malevolence in its full horrific force. There was an Isaiah Berlin in the cave. He just had less to talk about at dinner, and the food was terrible.

more from clivejames.com here.

Put off by his controversial words on Israel, the University of St. Thomas snubs a Nobel Laureate.

Matt Snyders in the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages:

Back in April, when University of St. Thomas staffer Mike Klein informed his colleagues in the Justice and Peace Studies program that he’d succeeded in booking Archbishop Desmond Tutu for a campus appearance, the faculty buzzed in anticipation. For a program dedicated to fostering social change and nonviolence, there were few figures who embodied that vision more aptly than the world-renowned civil rights activist and Nobel Laureate.

Tutu’s appearance—slated for the spring of ’08—was made possible by the university’s partnership with PeaceJam International, a youth-centered project that taps Nobel Laureates to teach young adults about peace and justice. For four straight years, the Catholic university’s St. Paul campus had played host to PeaceJam festivities featuring Nobel Peace Prize winners such as Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Shirin Ebadi.

But in a move that still has faculty members shaking their heads in disbelief, St. Thomas administrators—concerned that Tutu’s appearance might offend local Jews—told organizers that a visit from the archbishop was out of the question.

More here.

Ethan Nadelmann in Foreign Policy:

A “drug-free world,” which the United Nations describes as a realistic goal, is no more attainable than an “alcohol-free world”—and no one has talked about that with a straight face since the repeal of Prohibition in the United States in 1933. Yet futile rhetoric about winning a “war on drugs” persists, despite mountains of evidence documenting its moral and ideological bankruptcy. When the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on drugs convened in 1998, it committed to “eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008” and to “achieving significant and measurable results in the field of demand reduction.” But today, global production and consumption of those drugs are roughly the same as they were a decade ago; meanwhile, many producers have become more efficient, and cocaine and heroin have become purer and cheaper…

Demand for particular illicit drugs waxes and wanes, depending not just on availability but also fads, fashion, culture, and competition from alternative means of stimulation and distraction. The relative harshness of drug laws and the intensity of enforcement matter surprisingly little, except in totalitarian states. After all, rates of illegal drug use in the United States are the same as, or higher than, Europe, despite America’s much more punitive policies.

More here.

Declan Walsh in The Guardian:

Pakistan’s tourism ministry designated 2007 as “Destination Pakistan”, the year when tourists were urged to discover the country’s sights and delights. Their timing couldn’t have been worse. A military ruler clinging to power, al-Qaida fanatics hiding in the mountains, suicide bombings booming across the cities – in 2007, Pakistan has become a byword for peril and turmoil.

But there is another Pakistan, one the majority of its 165 million people are more familiar with. It is the thrusting software entrepreneurs and brash new television stations. It is the kite flyers and partygoers and the strangers who insist you sit for a cup of tea. And it is Sehwan Sharif.

A sleepy town on the Indus river, Sehwan Sharif is on the heroin smuggling route that runs through Sindh from Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea. In summer it is a sauna – stepping from my air-conditioned car last month, the heat carried a five-knuckle wallop.

I joined about 1 million people who come to Sehwan Sharif for three days every year, to mark the death of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, an ancient Sufi mystic. It is one of south Asia’s greatest parties.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

In the NYT blog Paper Cuts, rumours about this year’s running for the Nobel Prize in Literature:

It’s a list that ignores a lot of the names that are often thrown around this time of year – Margaret Atwood, Nuruddin Farah, the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, and remember all that talk about Bob Dylan? Here’s Rudbeck:

Hot tips from Deep Throats:

Ko Un, Korean poet

Adonis, Syrian poet

Lukewarm tips:

Amos Oz, Israeli novelist

Don DeLillo, American novelist

Cormac McCarthy, American novelist

Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, Latin American novelists, to share it

Not a snowball’s chance in hell:

Jackie Collins

Adonis has, of course, been a rumoured front runner many times before. Perhaps the umpteenth time is a charm. In the meanwhile one of his short poems , “Death” (translated by Samuel Hazo), with all its paganism reminiscent of Cavafy:

“We must make gods or die.

We must kill gods or die,”

whisper the lost stones

in their lost kingdom.

Fred Halliday in openDemocracy:

I begin with two obvious, but heartfelt, observations. First, the issues being discussed in this De Balie debate, and more generally in Dutch public life over recent years, are of much broader import and context: the questions of immigration, secularism, multiculturalism, gender that the Dutch are talking about are also being debated in all other major countries of western Europe. No European Union country has a monopoly on these questions. What is urgently needed, for reasons of common political challenge and of self-critical debate, is to break out of the national confines and terms of each argument and discuss the issues at a European level. The French have no monopoly on the question of secularism, the British on that of free speech, the Dutch on those of blasphemy and apostasy.

Second, the questions Frits Bolkestein and I are debating in Amsterdam, and which in a Dutch context are framed by events of the past five years, have a much longer and wider history. Holland and some other European countries have in recent years witnessed generic denunciations of “Islam” or Islamic treatment of women, or whatever, sometimes by supposedly ou-spoken western writers (for example the late Oriana Fallaci [in Italy], Michel Houellebecq [in France], César Vidal [in Spain], Samuel Huntington [in the United States], and sometimes by people who are by origin Muslims by family or culture.

But these critics, whose sincerity is not in question, run the risk of being banal and theatrical until and unless they recognise that they are far from being the first to raise these question: for decades there have been people in the Muslim world itself – in Egypt and Turkey, Pakistan, Algeria and Iran – who have, and often at great risk to themselves, debated issues of authoritarianism, violence, dogmatism, secularism.

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

In a beautifully turned reminiscence of Alexander Woollcott published in 1943, and originally intended as a defense of that great critic against an ungenerous obituarist, Edmund Wilson managed to spin what he admitted was a slight acquaintance into a charming portrait of a man and of a moment — the moment being the time when both men’s parents were connected with a Fourierist socialist community in Red Bank, New Jersey. Recollections of Woollcott the man of the theater, intercut with reflections on the arcana of the American left, combine to make a fine profile and a nice period piece: journalism at its best. What caught and held me, though, was an episode in the 1930s, when Wilson, fresh from reporting on the labor front for the New Republic, was invited to call on Woollcott at Sutton Place:

As soon as I entered the room, he cried out, without any other greeting: “You’ve gotten very fat!” It was his way of disarming, I thought, any horror I might have felt at his own pudding-like rotundity, which had trebled since I had seen him last.

This, and other aspects of the evening, make clear that Wilson understood why Woollcott’s personality didn’t appeal to everybody. But the preemptive strike on the question of girth also made me realize that there must have been a time when Edmund Wilson was thin. This absolutely negated the picture that my mind’s eye had been conditioned to summon. Wilson’s prose, if not precisely rotund, was astonishingly solid.

More here.

From Edge:

I recently paid a visit to the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London to see Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a long-time friend with whom I have a mutual connection: we both worked closely with the late James Lee Byars, the conceptual artist who, in 1971, implemented “The World Question Center” as a work of conceptual art.

I was delighted to find the walls of Obrist’s office covered with single pages of size A4 paper on which artists, writers, scientists had responded to his question: “What Is Your Formula?” Among the pieces were formulas by quantum physicist David Deutsch, artist and musician Brian Eno, architect Rem Koolhaas, and fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

Within minutes we had hatched an Edge-Serpentine collaboration for a World Question Center project, which would further the reach of Obrist’s question by asking for responses from the science-minded Edge community, thus complementing the rich array of formulas already assembled from distinguished artists such as Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Gilbert & George, and Rosemarie Trockel.

For the purposes of this collaboration, the question was been broadened to:

“WHAT IS YOUR FORMULA? YOUR EQUATION? YOUR ALGORITHM?”

More here.

Greg Miller in ScienceNOW Daily News:

Capsaicin, the compound that puts the fire in jalapeños and habañeros, has already been marketed as a balm for stiff joints and arthritis. But a new study harnesses capsaicin’s special affinity for pain-sensing neurons in a more clever way, using it to open tiny channels on the cells’ surfaces so that another drug–an anesthetic–can get inside. The work could lead to treatments that dull pain without causing numbness or temporary paralysis.

Many local anesthetics work by blocking sodium channels, pores on the surface of neurons that let ions flow into the cells to generate the electrical impulses neurons use to communicate. Blocking sodium channels blocks more than just pain, however. It also shuts down nerves carrying touch information, as well as those that control movement. That’s why people sometimes leave the dentist’s office drooling, slurring their speech, and unable to feel their tongues.

In The Nation:

Has feminism become more inclusive?

Feminism was always diverse, but the mainstream movement that got the most attention was the white upper middle class women part of it. But women were always working, always active, especially women of color and queer women. But those women weren’t being acknowledged, weren’t being called feminists publicly, weren’t having their work paid attention to. Now with younger feminists across the board, I hear all the time, oh young women aren’t doing anything, and I’m like where have you been? I could name 10 women under thirty five who are directors of feminist organizations, but it’s not like ‘NOW is inviting them anywhere..

In the Boston Review, Owen Fiss and Luis Moreno-Ocampo debate the International Criminal Court. Fiss:

Pragmatic considerations, not structural necessities, may well have led some African nations to turn to international institutions. Justice requires not only a public judgment and the imposition of some form of punishment, but also that this judgment and punishment be the product of a fair trial, indeed countless trials. Fairness requires that these trials be held on a particularized basis, focusing on the individual or group of individuals responsible for a specific event or series of events. Courts must be staffed and lawyers appointed, parties must have the opportunity to gather and present evidence and to rebut contradictory evidence, and some system must be in place for reviewing the initial verdict. As a result, human rights trials require an enormous commitment of resources—time, energy, and money—that will be diverted from other pressing projects. It is estimated that the Rwanda tribunal has already spent more than $1 billion. The Sierra Leone tribunal spends about $35 million a year. The ICC will spend more than $120 million dollars in 2007 alone.

Human rights trials not only consume enormous resources; they also challenge the power of the regime, especially when the need arises to arrest suspects, compel witnesses to testify, and inflict punishment. Those who are prosecuted are likely to resist, and if, as is often the case, they were military commanders of either rebel or government forces, they may be able to call upon the loyalty of those they once led. Sometimes the perpetrators will have fled the country. Yet international tribunals often suffer from these same deficits of power—indeed, in some cases international tribunals may have even less power (to detain suspects, for example)—although effective resistance to their work does not put the authority of the ruling regime in question.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo:

The drafters were well aware that rendering justice in the context of massive crimes or peace negotiations would present particular difficulties. Careful decisions were made: a high threshold of gravity for the jurisdiction of the court was established; a system of complementarity was designed whereby the court may intervene only as a last resort, when states are unable or unwilling to act; and the UN Security Council was given a role in cases of threats to peace and security.

Fiss ignores this development and suggests that delegating responsibility to international tribunals “qualifies the commitment of the nation-state to human rights and lessens the meaning of the human rights trial that eventually takes place. Half a loaf is better than none, but it is still half a loaf.”