From Scientific American:

Two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population could be gone by midcentury if predictions of melting sea ice hold true, the U.S. Geological Survey reported on Friday. The fate of polar bears might be even more imperiled than that estimate, because sea ice in the Arctic might be vanishing faster than the available computer models predict, the geological survey said in a report aimed at determining whether the arctic bear should be classified as a threatened species.

More here.

David Oshinsky in the New York Times Book Review:

For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader’s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (“utterly untranslatable”), Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It’s Poland and the rich Jews again”), Anaïs Nin (“There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic”), Sylvia Plath (“There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice”) and Jack Kerouac (“His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so”). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (too racy) and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (“hopelessly bad”).

More here.

Richard Dawkins reviews Christopher Hitchens’ book, in the Times of London:

There is much fluttering in the dovecots of the deluded, and Christopher Hitchens is one of those responsible. Another is the philosopher A. C. Grayling. I recently shared a platform with both. We were to debate against a trio of, as it turned out, rather half-hearted religious apologists (“Of course I don’t believe in a God with a long white beard, but . . .”). I hadn’t met Hitchens before, but I got an idea of what to expect when Grayling emailed me to discuss tactics. After proposing a couple of lines for himself and me, he concluded, “. . . and Hitch will spray AK47 ammo at the enemy in characteristic style”.

Grayling’s engaging caricature misses Hitchens’s ability to temper his pugnacity with old-fashioned courtesy. And “spray” suggests a scattershot fusillade, which underestimates the deadly accuracy of his marksmanship. If you are a religious apologist invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline. His witty repartee, his ready-access store of historical quotations, his bookish eloquence, his effortless flow of well-formed words, beautifully spoken in that formidable Richard Burton voice (the whole performance not dulled by other equally formidable Richard Burton habits), would threaten your arguments even if you had good ones to deploy. A string of reverends and “theologians” ruefully discovered this during Hitchens’s barnstorming book tour around the United States.

With characteristic effrontery, he took his tour through the Bible Belt states – the reptilian brain of southern and middle America, rather than the easier pickings of the country’s cerebral cortex to the north and down the coasts. The plaudits he received were all the more gratifying. Something is stirring in that great country.

More here.

Richard Dawkins in the Times of London:

The hardback God Delusion was hailed as the surprise bestseller of 2006. While it was warmly received by most of the 1,000-plus individuals who volunteered personal reviews to Amazon, paid print reviewers gave less uniform approval. Cynics might invoke unimaginative literary editors: it has “God” in the title, so send it to a known faith-head. That would be too cynical, however. Several critics began with the ominous phrase, “I’m an atheist, BUT . . .” So here is my brief rebuttal to criticisms originating from this “belief in belief” school.

I’m an atheist, but I wish to dissociate myself from your shrill, strident, intemperate, intolerant, ranting language.

Objectively judged, the language of The God Delusion is less shrill than we regularly hear from political commentators or from theatre, art, book or restaurant critics. The illusion of intemperance flows from the unspoken convention that faith is uniquely privileged: off limits to attack. In a criticism of religion, even clarity ceases to be a virtue and begins to sound like aggressive hostility.

A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would, in other contexts, sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a shrill rant. My nearest approach to stridency was my account of God as “the most unpleasant character in all fiction”. I don’t know how well I succeeded, but my intention was closer to humorous broadside than shrill polemic. Restaurant critics are notoriously scathing, but are seldom dismissed as shrill or intolerant. A restaurant might seem a trivial target compared to God. But restaurateurs and chefs have feelings to hurt and livelihoods to lose, whereas “blasphemy is a victimless crime”.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Michael Pollan’s bestseller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has gotten people all riled up about farmers again. The last time this happened was when the first Farm Aid concerts reminded America that we have strong feelings about the family farm and its economic viability. The new round of farmer feelings is more directly related to issues of trade and the impact of globalization. As Pollan writes:

“I’m thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing your community, or country, can feed itself; the beauty of an agricultural landscape; the outlook and kinds of local knowledge the presence of farmers brings to a community; the satisfactions of buying food from a farmer you know rather than the supermarket; the locally inflected flavor of a raw-milk cheese or honey. All those things—all those pastoral values—free trade proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth.”

My general feeling about farmers is that they can go fuck themselves. Perhaps this is strong. But farmers also come on strong in their own sort of farmer way. They take a homespun approach but they often wrap themselves up in a hell of a lot of self-righteousness. It all has to do with the land, I suppose, the importance and simplicity of the land. Americans love the simple even if we’ve been destroying it for generations. A few pithy sayings and we’re eating out of their hands. The farmers.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

School begins again, and we read more about the intrusion of pseudoscience into school science curricula in this country, particularly into the study of biology and evolution.

The motive, despite the claims of proponents of intelligent design and other bogus “disciplines,” has been religious. Although some of the creation scientists’ arguments presented have a probabilistic flavor, the mathematics curriculum has seemed somewhat resistant to this trend. Recently a number of readers have sent me course descriptions from various schools that suggest otherwise, however.

The issue is complicated (perhaps too complicated for a column), but I’ll also briefly discuss the relevance of evolution to a more defensible, but still flawed argument relating religion and mathematics.

Consider first a Baptist school in Texas whose description of a geometry course begins:

Students will examine the nature of God as they progress in their understanding of mathematics. Students will understand the absolute consistency of mathematical principles and know that God was the inventor of that consistency. They will see God’s nature revealed in the order and precision they review foundational concepts while being able to demonstrate geometric thinking and spatial reasoning. The study of the basics of geometry through making and testing conjectures regarding mathematical and real-world patterns will allow the students to understand the absolute consistency of God as seen in the geometric principles he created.

I wonder if the school teaches that non-Euclidean geometry is the work of the devil or at least of non-Christians.

More here.

Via the NYT’s blog Paper Cuts, the short list:

The judges of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007 have announced this year’s six shortlisted novels.

The six titles shortlisted are:

* Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)

* The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)

* The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)

* Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)

* On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)

* Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

The shortlist of six was announced today at a press conference at Man Group plc in London.

Do the creative industries of New York drive it more than finance, insurance and real estate? Elizabeth Currid, in The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, argues that it does. Chapter 1 of her book:

Most students of New York see it as a center of finance and investment and understand the city’s economy as evolving from industrial production to the FIRE industries (finance, insurance, and real estate) that form its foundation today. And yet, for the better part of the twentieth century and well before, New York City has been considered the world’s authority on art and culture. Beginning with its position as the central port on the Atlantic Ocean, New York has been able to export and import culture to and from all parts of the globe. By the middle of the twentieth century, New York was the great home of the bohemian scene, beat writers, and abstract expressionists and later, to new wave and folk music, hip-hop DJs, and Bryant Park’s Fashion Week. As Ingrid Sischy, editor-in-chief of Interview magazine, remarked, “Before Andy [Warhol] died, when Andy led Interview you’d run into people who would say, ‘I came to New York because of Interview. I read it when I was in college, lonely and alienated and it made me feel not alone. I wanted to come there and be a part of that world’.” High-brow, low-brow, high culture, and street culture, New York City’s creative scene has always been the global center of artistic and cultural production.

Well, it’s New York. But what underneath that cliche´ propels the greatest urban economy in the world? New York’s cultural economy has sustained itself—despite increasing rents, cutthroat competition, the pushing out of creative people to the far corners of Queens and Philadelphia. Within its geographical boundaries are the social and economic mechanisms that allow New York to retain its dominance over other places. As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas pointed out, great cities draw people despite all of the drawbacks of living in a densely packed, noisy, expensive metropolis, because of human beings’ desire to be around each other. It is the inherent social nature of people—and of creativity— that makes city life so important to art and culture.

You can find a video interview here.

Over at Book Forum, Arthur Danto reviews Richard Rorty’s Philosophy as Cultural Politics.

In a particularly straightforward chapter in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, “Kant vs. Dewey: The Current Situation in Moral Philosophy,” Rorty raises serious doubts as to whether students of moral philosophy have anything much to tell us about making the right moral decisions in life. Professors of moral philosophy do not, he writes, “have more rigor or clarity or insight than the laity, but they do have a much greater willingness to take seriously the views of Immanuel Kant.” But can Kant really help us find answers to our moral problems? Maybe, as Martha Nussbaum has suggested, we would do better to read novels. “The advantage that well-read, reflective, leisured people have when it comes deciding about the right thing to do is that they are more imaginative, not that they are more rational,” Rorty writes. They “are able to put themselves in the shoes of many different sorts of people.” But what if taking Kant seriously consists in working out the relationship between moral and factual judgments, without attempting to answer questions about right and wrong in daily life— just as working out a theory of truth will not tell you whether it’s true that global warming, say, is something human beings have caused? What if philosophy is philosophy and not something else—a professional activity within a sphere of its own?

In The Nation:

“Since 2000 there has been an increase in xenophobia and nationalist propaganda in the media at every level. It’s created a favorable atmosphere for the development in young people of a chauvinistic worldview. For Putin the question is not how to fight racism but how to use it as a political tool without letting it slip from the Kremlin’s control.”

Indeed, it can be confusing. Officially, the Kremlin is taking an increasingly hard line against racially motivated hate speech and crimes. Some members of the ruling party in the Duma have drafted a law that would make it illegal to mention “in mass media and on the Internet any details concerning the ethnicity, race or religion of the victims, perpetrators, suspects and accused of crimes.” In theory, the law is meant to ban race-based criminal stereotypes from the media, but many fear that it will serve as just another way to manage coverage of rising hate crime or that it will be loosely interpreted to target a broad range of articles and reports unfriendly to the Kremlin. Even without the law, say observers, coverage has dropped way off. State-run Russian media have reported far less on hate crimes over the past year, even as their numbers have risen, forcing observers like Sova to rely increasingly on witness and victim accounts.

Meanwhile, the Russian government continues to play the populist race card. In recent months, nonethnic Russian migrants have been banned from selling produce and other goods in Russia’s outdoor markets–which have traditionally been dominated by immigrants from Russia’s southern border regions. A pamphlet published in June by a Moscow city government-affiliated youth group, Mestnie (or “Locals”), urged ethnic Russian women not to accept taxi rides from dark-skinned drivers (many immigrants moonlight as gypsy cab drivers).

From The Washington Post:

Spook Country by William Gibson.

He famously invented the word “cyberspace” in his 1984 novel “Neuromancer,” which has sold more than 6 1/2 million copies. This was before virtually anyone — including him — knew that something called the Internet was being born. He is also credited with inventing the idea of the “matrix,” as well as foreseeing some of the twistiest aspects of globalization.

This post-9/11 frisson fits, as it happens. “Despite a full complement of thieves, pushers and pirates,” the Washington Post book review says, ” ‘Spook Country’ is less a conventional thriller than a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist, and it bears comparison to the best work of Don DeLillo. . . . With a clear eye and a minimum of editorial comment, Gibson shows us a country that has drifted dangerously from its governing principles, evoking a kind of ironic nostalgia for a time when, as one character puts it, ‘grown-ups ran things.’ “

“Politics has, like, jacked itself up to my level of weirdness,” Gibson acknowledges. “I can work with this,” he says, thinking of recent turns of events. “I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That’s what makes it work. It’s interesting. I’d like to see it get less interesting. But I don’t know that it necessarily will.”

More here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists have found a new prime suspect in the deaths of about a quarter of America’s honeybees, a mystery that could take a multibillion-dollar toll on the nation’s agricultural industry.

Months of genetic testing have fingered a virus that was first reported in Israel just three years ago and may have passed through Australia on its way to the United States. The correlation between Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus and the mysterious bee disease — known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD — was reported Thursday on the journal Science’s Web site.

More here.

Guy Trebay in the New York Times:

“There is this suggestion that fashion is not an art form or a cultural form, but a form of vanity and consumerism,” said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton. And those, Ms. Showalter added, are dimensions of culture that “intelligent and serious” people are expected to scorn.

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” Ms. Showalter said. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid.”

When Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, declared an interest at Yale graduate school in pursuing the history of fashion, colleagues were horror-struck. “I was amazed at how much hostility was directed at me,” Ms. Steele said. “The intellectuals thought it was unspeakable, despicable, everything but vain and sinful,” she added. She might as well have joined a satanic cult.

And that, substantially, is how a person still is looked at who happens to mention in serious company an interest in reading, say, Vogue.

“I hate it,” Miuccia Prada once remarked to me about fashion, in a conversation during which we mutually confessed to unease at being compelled by a subject so patently superficial.

More here.

Stephen E. Braude at the University of Chicago Press website:

I was seated across a table from a woman, no more than three feet away. And while we were talking, a small piece of gold-colored foil appeared suddenly on her face. I knew that her hands were nowhere near her face when this happened. In fact, I was certain they were in full view on the table the entire time. I knew also that if her husband, seated next to her, had placed the material on her face, I would have seen it clearly. But nobody’s hands had been anywhere near her face. So I knew that the material hadn’t been placed there; it appeared there, evidently without normal assistance.

This was one of several similar incidents that occurred during my most fascinating paranormal investigation: the case of a woman much of whose body—not just parts of her face—would break out in what looked like gold leaf. But first, some background. We need to be clear about just how unusual and potentially important this case is.

Parapsychologists study several interesting phenomena, but they focus primarily on the evidence for extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), and survival of bodily death. Of course, many consider all of these incredible and unworthy of serious attention. Others agree that they’re extraordinary, but believe they’re both possible and worth studying. And still others consider at least some of the phenomena to be natural and part of everyday life. In fact, many would say ESP is merely a form of intuition and leave the matter there.

At any rate, everyone has a “boggle threshold,” even those who embrace the paranormal without batting an eye. Typically, believers in the paranormal draw the line at accepting conspicuous and large-scale PK, because those phenomena seem simply too weird to be true.

More here.

Musharraf approved Pakistan’s new art museum, but not its antimilitary edge.

Ron Moreau in Newsweek International:

To many people, the mere mention of Pakistan conjures up visions of bemedaled generals, gun-toting militants and perhaps the mountaintop hiding place of Osama bin Laden. But the country’s spectacular new contemporary National Art Gallery may help to banish those stereotypes. Set on a hill overlooking the capital city of Islamabad, the imposing brown-brick, for-tresslike building incorporates architectural motifs from the country’s varied cultural past: Buddhist, Hindu, Mogul and British colonial. The four-story structure features plenty of windows of varying shapes and cool Oriental courtyards. It’s topped off with a distinctly modern feature: large, curvy “scoops” of aluminum, which collect and diffuse natural light into the 14 galleries inside. “The galleries are subservient to art,” says Naeem Pasha, 64, the Pakistan-born, Penn State-educated architect who designed it. “Each has its own atmosphere and plenty of natural light.”

The art inside is as innovative as the building. Most of the more than 600 works on display are by living Pakistani artists, two thirds of them women. Much of it has an unexpected edgy quality that seems at odds with the largely conservative Muslim society. Indeed, visitors are confronted with a provocative image even before they set foot inside the museum: just outside the garden entrance, six three-meter-tall black, female figures are draped in all-encompassing burqas, hovering almost like ghosts. The towering statues by Jamil Baloch seem to convey the message that women, even in purdah, are giants, ruling the realm.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

From College Scholarships.org:

Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on.

We’re giving away $10,000 this year to a college student who blogs. The Blogging Scholarship is awarded annually.

Scholarship Requirements:

• Your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about. No spam bloggers please!!!
• U.S. citizen;
• Currently attending full-time in post-secondary education; and
• If you win, you must be willing to allow us to list your name and blog on this page. We want to be able to say we knew you before you became a well educated, rich, and famous blogging legend.

Important Dates:

• Submission Deadline: Midnight PST on Oct. 6th
• 10 Finalists Announced and Public Voting Begings: 9am EST on Oct. 8th
• Public Voting Ends and Winner Declared: Midnight PST on Oct. 28th

More information here.  [Thanks to Daniel Kovach.]

From Foreign Policy:

Who: Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at Cairo’s al-Azhar University

What: Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion issued in May 2007. He based his reasoning—which was quickly and widely derided in the Egyptian press, in the parliament, and on Arabic-language talk shows—on stories from the Prophet Mohammed’s time in which, Atiya maintained, the practice occurred. Although Atiya headed the department dealing with the Prophet’s sayings, al-Azhar University’s higher authorities were not impressed. They suspended the iconoclastic scholar, and he subsequently recanted his ruling as a “bad interpretation of a particular case.”

More stupid fatwas here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

From NoUtopia.com:

Exploring Space

by Jim Culleny

Call me nomad, but rootlessness is my routine

From where I stand space seems to beg for exploration not occupation.
Occupation of space requires a military state of mind.
Armies are trained for it
Individuals however, grow dull and lethargic just occupying space

There’s no substitute for dynamism when facing space
When I stumble upon a new chunk I like to engage it many times over
laying out alternate trajectories; bisecting circles; flying off on tangents;
or just nosing around looking for shortcuts

If the wind’s right you might catch me boogalooing along an hypotenuse
or oscillating between the foci of an ellipse. Whatever,
I go at it from all angles by any means

For example I’ve found a trampoline’s a satisfying way to explore space:
up, down, up, down.
Along similar lines (if you have the money) a space shuttle is good too:
up, down, up, down.

Read the rest here.