Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books:
During the last year, momentum has finally begun to build for taking action against global warming by putting limits on carbon emissions and then reducing them. Driven by ever-more-dire scientific reports, Congress has, for the first time, begun debating ambitious targets for carbon reduction. Al Gore, in his recent Live Earth concerts, announced that he will work to see an international treaty signed by the end of 2009. Even President Bush has recently reversed his previous opposition and summoned the leaders of all the top carbon-emitting countries to a series of conferences designed to yield some form of limits on CO2.
More here.
From Wired:
Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project (and onetime atheist), rejects the notion that science is sufficient to disprove the existence of God. Biologist Richard Dawkins, aka Darwin’s Rottweiler, insists that anyone who believes in an omnipotent creator is suffering a “delusion.” Can the gloves of God defeat the punch of proof?
Go here for more, and to vote.
From the Oxford University Press blog:
Thanks to the wonderful folks at Jonesin’ Crosswords we have a fun way for you to discover the new words in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. To learn more about the SOED check out Ben Zimmer’s columns here and here.
“In the Language”–*New entries from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Sixth Edition.
by Matt Jones
Solve the puzzle here. [Thanks to Rebecca Ford.]
Recent parliamentary elections have cast doubt on whether Morocco is the model of Middle East reform the United States is hoping for.
Shadi Hamid and Jeb Koogler in The American Prospect:
Earlier this month, Morocco — one of America’s closest Arab allies — held national elections. Touted as a bold step toward democracy, the vote was closely watched in the West. But the elections, rather than proving a success, have raised difficult questions about the future of Moroccan democracy and highlighted the flaws in America’s approach to democracy promotion. In the lead-up to the polls, analysts painted the contest as a test of political Islam’s strength. Islamists had risen to power in Iraq, Palestine, and Turkey; many wondered whether Morocco would be next.
The main Islamist organization in the country — the Justice and Development Party (PJD) — was widely expected to win the largest number of seats, following the lead of religious-based groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the similarly-named Justice and Development Party in Turkey. But instead of securing a projected 70 – 80 seats, the PJD won only 47, coming in second to the secular Istiqlal Party. This is the first time an Islamist party has disappointed after an unprecedented series of electoral gains for Islamists throughout the Middle East.
But the story here is not about the impending failure of political Islam.
More here.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
I head off to Europe as the dollar’s role as reserve currency becomes precarious:
Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.
“This is a very dangerous situation for the dollar,” said Hans Redeker, currency chief at BNP Paribas.
“Saudi Arabia has $800bn (£400bn) in their future generation fund, and the entire region has $3,500bn under management. They face an inflationary threat and do not want to import an interest rate policy set for the recessionary conditions in the United States,” he said.
The Saudi central bank said today that it would take “appropriate measures” to halt huge capital inflows into the country, but analysts say this policy is unsustainable and will inevitably lead to the collapse of the dollar peg.
As a close ally of the US, Riyadh has so far tried to stick to the peg, but the link is now destabilising its own economy.
The Fed’s dramatic half point cut to 4.75pc yesterday has already caused a plunge in the world dollar index to a fifteen year low, touching with weakest level ever against the mighty euro at just under $1.40.
There is now a growing danger that global investors will start to shun the US bond markets. The latest US government data on foreign holdings released this week show a collapse in purchases of US bonds from $97bn to just $19bn in July, with outright net sales of US Treasuries.
[H/t: Alex Cooley]
Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:
On August 15, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that America’s senior intelligence authorities were preparing to vastly expand access to classified satellite reconnaissance and other remote sensing data.
Initially, the National Applications Office (NAO), a newly created office within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), will confine itself to homeland security and traditional civil applications. Officials will be able to request satellite data to enhance border security, defend critical infrastructure and coordinate disaster response. Next year, the department plans to give satellite data to state and local law enforcement agencies.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is a major force behind the creation of the NAO. According to the Journal, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell officially authorized the project in a May 25 memo to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.
When DHS first announced the creation of the NAO for disseminating classified information from America’s spy satellites on August 15, it hadn’t bothered to notify the House Committee on Homeland Security beforehand.
At this point one may ask: is Plato’s critique still valid today, and if so, what are the practical consequences of ignoring it? Let us try to apply this critique to an overarching problem of modern Western Civilization, namely the principle of sustainable development. This principle would require that we change the way we live our lives. We should distinguish what we truly need from what we want, as Aristotle teaches in The Nicomachean Ethics. In other words, we the people would have to democratically agree to place a greater value on the future quality of the environment than on our present comfortable life-style. This is particularly true in the developed countries, the so called first world, such as the US and the EU.
This moral concept creates obligations not only for the common good of the present inhabitants of the world, but also toward future generations. There is a problem however: in a free market there is no normative standard of what constitutes a need and what constitutes a want. The only standard is one’s desires, as Madison Avenue well knows and as Plato intimated when he said that poverty is not measured by how little one possesses but by how big are one’s desires. In effect the idea that the majority of the people in a democracy would deprive themselves of their wants is redolent of one of Eco’s hyper-reality fantasies.
more from Ovi here.
This is a grumpy old man’s book. Specifically, it’s a grumpy old lefty’s book. The right wing will dismiss it as the paranoid ravings of a madman (as they dismiss Harold Pinter, quoted with approval here). But they will be wrong. First because history has a way of showing that the most shocking ideas were right after all; and secondly because Diary of a Bad Year is much more than just ideas.
The ideas belong to C, a distinguished South African writer living in Australia. He has been invited to contribute to a book called Strong Opinions, in which six eminent writers pronounce on what’s wrong with today’s world. Evidently C is a well-known and practised moaner; he accepts with alacrity, and lays about him with a will.
more from Literary Review here.
Matthew Barney has been called the American Damien Hirst. You may be surprised at the level of fame this implies because you have probably barely heard of him.
Whatever media excitement has been whipped up around his first major British exhibition, which opens today at London’s Serpentine, Barney is only really famous among curators, critics and other artists. The most pop-cultural thing about him is being the boyfriend of the Icelandic singer Björk. Barney’s 2005 film Drawing Restraint 9, on which most of the works are in some way parasitic, portrays the two of them dismembering one another in a deathly consummation of love aboard a whaling ship. It’s best enjoyed as an extended Björk video: a bit of a comedown for an artist whose audacious, epic series of symbolist films, The Cremaster Cycle, was one of the most striking works of art to come out of America in recent times.
more from The Guardian here.
From MSNBC:
Once sea-turtle hatchlings hit the surf, they vanish for up to five years. Where the half-dollar-size tots spend these “lost years” while ballooning to the size of dinner plates has been a mystery, until now.
New research, published in the online edition of the journal Biology Letters, indicates the green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) hide out in the open ocean, where they feast on jellyfish and other marine creatures. Not only did the researchers spot their short-lived sea homes, but they discovered that these reptiles, thought to be lifelong vegetarians, are actually meat eaters as juveniles.
More here.
From Lensculture.com:
The huge international photography fair at Paris Photo is at once exhilarating, inspiring, and an epicenter for visual overload and happy exhaustion.
From November 15 to 18, 2007, visitors to Paris Photo will have the unique opportunity to see the work of some 500 international photographers and artists from every continent. The 105 selected exhibitors come from 16 countries, with the special thematic spotlight on Italian photography. The festival’s organizers say, “This will be a rare occasion to enjoy Italy’s exceptionally rich photographic history and view the latest work from one end of the peninsula to the other.”
More here.
William Dalrymple on V.S. Naipaul’s new book, in Outlook India:
Naipaul was once a penetrating and unpredictable literary critic, but here criticism has been reduced to a series of spiky provocations (“personal prejudice can be amusing in the autobiographical mode,” he writes) interspersed with brisk assassination attempts on every one of the perceived rivals who he writes about: A Passage to India has “no meaning”; Walcott grew “stagnant” after his first book (“his inspiration had gone and he was now marking time”); Waugh is “mannered (and) flippant… with nothing to write about, except, in the end, his own breakdown”; Anthony Powell’s writing is “over-explained… there was no narrative skill” and his characters are “one-dimensional”; Nirad Chaudhuri is “vain and mad”; Henry James writes only “sweet nothings”; Philip Larkin is “a minor poet”; Flaubert after Madame Bovary descended into “artificiality” and wrote “bad nineteenth century fiction”. And on it goes.
More here.
Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:
While I, like everyone else, remain fully engrossed in the political circus of Pakistan and the shenanigans of messers Musharraf, Bhutto, Sharif, Rahman, and Co., there is, as we have suggested before, a real war – a terrible war – that Pakistan is involved in right now.
The bigger crisis in Pakistan today is the increasing assault of the Talibal-like extremists on the very fabric of Pakistan society. They are using the unpopularity of the government, of the military, and of USA as a camouflage to attack and kill Pakistanis. These murderers and criminals have no interest or allegience to Pakistan and are the true and real enemies of Pakistan. What is truly frightening is how many Pakistanis are willing to defend or ignore these thugs and murders either because they themselves do not like the government, the US or the military or just because these murderers are supposedly acting in the name of Islam and therefore should be ignored. Such attitude – which is becoming widespread – is deeply worrisome.
More here.
Paul S. Sutter in American Scientist:
In “Odyssey,” an essay from his posthumously published masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold traced the fictive histories of two atoms, pulled from parent rock and sent into ecological circulation at two different moments in North American history. Atom X, coaxed from limestone into the world of nutrient flow by a burr oak root when Native Americans ruled the prairies, meandered along a complex path through a fine-functioning ecosystem before haltingly descending the watershed to the sea; by contrast, atom Y, born from bedrock into a settler land of wheat and cattle and corn, moved downstream much more rapidly before being lost to the muck of the ocean floor. These two journeys seem intended to illustrate a basic ecological lesson about interconnection and complexity. But in the hands of Julianne Lutz Newton, they become parables of Leopold’s own intellectual journey and his contributions to ecological science.
As Newton notes in her superb new book, Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey, Leopold began his career as a forester, studying the world of atom Y and its ilk and striving to make short-circuited systems of resource production more efficient. But over the course of four decades, as he came to see the land as a complex biotic community, he argued that land managers needed to respect the goodness of atom X’s inefficient, diverse journey. Indeed, he came to realize that the integrity, stability and beauty of natural systems should be measured not by how efficiently they produced wood fiber, game animals or crops, but by how diverse and attenuated were the paths of the atoms flowing through them. That journey from atom Y to atom X, according to Newton, was the essence of Aldo Leopold’s odyssey.
More here.
Our own Morgan Meis at The Smart Set:
H.L. Mencken was a bastard. He had a core meanness that showed itself in his writing and in his personal life. Without that meanness, though, his writing might never have gotten so startlingly good. Lots of people need lots of things to do what they do. Mencken simply needed to be hard.
In the early part of the 20th century, America needed Mencken. We needed him to wash away some of the Emersonian/Whitmanian enthusiasm that had started to clog up the collective joint. Not that Emerson and Whitman didn’t have their place. As Mencken himself notes in his essay “The National Letters,” it took Emerson and then Whitman, among others, to stand up and defend the possibility of an American Mind and an American Voice. They did so with boldness and with prose falling over itself in its excitement about itself. Sometimes with Whitman it seems that we’re but one or two orgasms away from the final utopia of ecstatic democracy. This newfound confidence, speaking out, proclaims that America has finally figured out what it is. An American literature of the late 19th century was coming out of the Wilderness with something to say.
Mencken wasn’t so sure.
More here. See also this article about Menken, also at The Smart Set. And also read their very funny Ombudsman’s piece here.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Joseph Epstein in The New Criterion:
My essay of twenty-five years ago featured the attenuation, the thinning out, of literary culture. Criticism had become professionalized in the universities, with French theory beginning to make heavy incursions into the old common-sense American tradition, not at all to criticism’s gain. Poets continued solemnly to scribble away under the ever-diminishing illusion that they had an audience. Through the agency of interviews and television appearances flogging their books, writers came to seem to be making larger contributions to the history of publicity than to that of literature. Politics in literature—which Stendhal likened to “a gunshot in the middle of a concert, something uncivilized to which, however, it is not possible to turn your back”—had begun to play a larger and more divisive role in literary culture. Europe, as a place American writers could look to in the hope of discovering models of literary courage and pertinence, was no longer supplying them in impressive numbers, if at all. Such, such, were among my grim findings of a quarter century ago.
Has much changed over the past twenty-five years? Many things have, and in ways whose consequences cannot be known. For example, theory in academic literary criticism seems to be playing itself out by the sheer force of its deep inner uselessness.
More here.
For all his efforts to know the world, Kapuscinski seems not to have known many people, at least in the literary sense. I can think of only a handful of memorable characters in all his books. The fawning attendants of Haile Selassie, in awe of the emperor’s power. Carlotta, a daring, doomed soldier who escorts Kapuscinski to the front in Angola. Mahmud Azari, an Iranian translator who returns home from London in the last days of the Shah and ends up participating in the revolution, though not before being forced into superficial collaboration by some sinister men from the ruling party. As Colin Thubron pointed out recently in The New York Review of Books, Azari’s experience of authoritarianism could be taken to stand for Kapuscinski’s own. And it seems to me that, in fact, all of his characters–whether or not they really existed–could be seen the same way, as reflections of the author’s personality. His true journey may have been an inward one.
But what a fascinating trip it was.
more from The Nation here.
Scott Saul in the Boston Review:
I’m drawn to ponder the singular music of the cuíca, the drum that is no mere drum, as I reflect on the expansive career of Chico Buarque, an intellectual who is no mere intellectual. Arguably Brazil’s most cherished living artist—in 1999 he was voted the country’s “musician of the century” by a Brazilian newsweekly—Buarque remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, perhaps because our culture has too little imagination to accommodate a composer-lyricist who is also a playwright and novelist of note, no frame of reference for an artist who has learned equally from Carnival and Kafka, bossa nova and Brecht. In Brazil, his first name is synonymous with works that offer an improbable amalgam of wit and integrity—with a body of music that ranges between self-questioning sambas, lushly melodic love songs, and topical songs circling around the fate of the working poor; with plays that rewrite the Western repertory (Medea, The Threepenny Opera) in a Brazilian key; and with novels that, drawing upon Kafka’s parables of entrapment, marry existential seriousness with a playful affection for exposing the devices of narrative. Faced with an oeuvre that encompasses over 300 songs, four plays, four novels, and a few films to boot, the aspiring Chico-ologist in the United States would do well, ironically, to begin with his fiction, which not only is easier to find in translation but also offers revealing clues about the unforgiving yet dream-like world his art evokes.
More here.
