Michelangelo Antonioni was obsessed with distraction. No other artist focused on inattentiveness to the degree of intensity on display in his best films. His subject was the alternately bored and viscerally excited modern human being, but he had the extraordinary discipline to keep himself from becoming such a person. His characters often broke down, losing sight of each other, their own desires, their barest needs; through it all, Antonioni would retain his trancelike alertness. He indulged long takes, luxuriating in static images and masterfully sustained tracking shots of characters flitting aimlessly from excitement to crushing boredom and loneliness. The extravagant tension in his extravagantly composed films derives from this crucial difference between sensibility and subject.

more from n+1 here.

When Gustave Courbet’s painting “The Origin of the World” went on permanent display at the Musée d’Orsay in 1995, it was emerging from what must be one of the longest periods of visual quarantine in the history of art. Painted sometime in 1866, for the better part of 130 years it had been cordoned off in private collections, its existence known only to a small group of people, few of whom left any record of the work. Even Courbet, with his swashbuckling disregard for convention, seems for once to have erred on the side of caution. Neither signed nor dated, the picture was never mentioned by him in writing, and it is only on the strength of two small contemporary documents (the report of a dinner at which the painter, never more fulsome than when singing his own praises, likens his little figure to the nudes of Titian and Veronese, and a description by Maxime du Camp so slapdash that one doubts whether he had actually seen the picture with his own eyes) that we can be sure Courbet painted it at all.

Everywhere you turn in the painting’s history, you meet with the same pattern of secrecy and obfuscation.

more from the TLS here.

From Nature:

The way in which antidepressants exert their effects on brain cells has been revealed by two separate teams of researchers working independently of each other.

Antidepressants work by preventing neurons in the brain from importing certain chemicals, such as dopamine and serotonin, which are used to pass messages from cell to cell. The route by which these chemicals are imported depends on passageways in the outer membrane of the cells called transporter proteins, and it is on these passageways that the antidepressants exert their influence. But how exactly they hold up the process has remained a mystery since the drugs were discovered 45 years ago, says Les Iversen, a pharmacologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The passionate romance that proved that ardour can survive Britain’s grimmest landscape and weather has beaten countless steamy successors in a poll of the greatest love stories of all time.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, recounting the doomed affair between sweet Cathy Earnshaw and the brutal outsider Heathcliff, has seen off Shakespeare, Gone With the Wind and everything by Barbara Cartland in a survey which shows the lasting power of classic works.

Almost all the entries in the top 20 choices of 2,000 readers are major works of English literature, with Jane Austen pipping Shakespeare as runner-up and Emily’s sister Charlotte coming in fourth with Jane Eyre.”It’s really heartening to see how these stories, written so long ago, retain the power to captivate 21st century audiences,” said Richard Kingsbury, channel head of UKTV Drama, which commissioned the study.

More here.

Matthew Power in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

In a decade of living in New York City, time and again I would run into Brad in the middle of the action, whatever that action happened to be: a street protest at the Republican National Convention, a guerrilla dance party on the subway, a crowd of thousands fleeing the collapse of the Twin Towers. I once saw him, while being chased by the police among hundreds of bicyclists on a protest ride through Times Square, shoulder his bicycle and run right over the top of a taxi to freedom. He always gravitated toward the conflict and conflagration, loved getting close enough to touch before leaping back. He was fearless, and he usually got away with it, coming back with stories of how the cops were just inches from grabbing him, how the railroad bull walked right by his hiding place without spotting him. And later, as he went further, to countries where tectonic social conflicts rumbled just below the surface, drawn by that same impulse, some junk-craving of conscience and adrenaline, he spoke of how the bullets whizzed by without hitting him.

So when a friend of ours called me one morning in late October 2006, her voice cracking in that tone that conveys the worst news: it’s Brad . . . I already knew, but still didn’t believe. Everything else was mere detail, whens and wheres, unmoored fragments of fact: Oaxaca. Filming a street demonstration during the teachers’ strike down there. Twice in the chest. Never made it to the hospital.

He filmed his own assassination.

More here.

[Thanks to Asad Raza.]

I’ve been reading this absolutely fascinating book by Gabrielle Walker over the last couple of days and couldn’t recommend it more highly. In the review that I post an excerpt from below, William Grimes unnecessarily tries to balance his overall-very-favorable opinion with a few petty gripes, like:

Like Dava Sobel in “The Planets,” Ms. Walker writes for a general audience and seems to assume something close to scientific illiteracy in her readers. There is plenty of gee-whiz and tee-hee in her merry tale, a colorful blend of anecdote, personality and pure science explained in the simplest terms.

Do you know how Galileo first figured out how much air weighs? How Torricelli first measured air pressure? How Robert Boyle came upon his eponymous law? How Priestly helped Lavoisier discover oxygen? Do you know how all these people are connected, one to the next? If not, then like me, and presumably unlike William Grimes, I suppose you are scientifically illiterate. Don’t believe Grimes. There is endlessly enchanting information here for the scientifically well-informed, as well as for others. (All the stuff I point out above is from just the first fifth of the book!) Get it. And read it.

William Grimes reviews An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere, by Gabrielle Walker, in the New York Times:

As a metaphor for absence and nothingness, air has performed admirably for centuries. It has pulled off one of the great con jobs in human history, concealing endless complexities behind its bland, transparent facade. Layer by layer, from the ionosphere to the Earth’s surface, Gabrielle Walker exposes the Earth’s atmosphere for what it is, a restless, electrically charged, dynamic superhero, entrusted with the sacred mission of protecting our planet, nurturing life and even, when looked at from a certain angle, making love possible.

Ms. Walker, a chemist by training and a science journalist by profession, finds that angle in “An Ocean of Air,” her perkily popular take on air, wind, atmosphere and the scientists who unraveled their mysteries, from Galileo onward. It starts with oxygen, creator and destroyer, foundation of the atmosphere, the revolutionary element that quickens life and hastens death through its ferocious reactivity, and requires two sexes. Oxygen-burning, ever-aging mitochondria from the male expend energy seeking out cool, unaged mitochondria in the female egg, which guarantee that the human embryo’s biological clock starts at zero. Romance is in the air.

More here.  [Thanks to Anna Suknov.]

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

Of course, there’s an army of ideologues and lobbyists who will depict the push for universal coverage as a nefarious effort to undermine the free enterprise system. Witness President Bush’s recent rejection of pleas from even a majority of fellow Republicans to compromise with Democrats on renewing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) that gives health coverage to millions of children whose parents don’t qualify for Medicaid, yet can’t afford private insurance.

This popular decade-old program, which would cost between $7 billion and $10 billion more dollars per year to retain (financed by increases in tobacco taxes), will expire at the end of September if it’s not renewed. True to the politics of nope, Bush has threatened to veto it if it passes Congress.

The incongruities are almost too painful to note. Spending $1 trillion ($1,000 billion) on the utter debacle that is Iraq has not made us safer from international terror. Spending a few billion dollars on a children’s insurance program that has worked will make us safer from the domestic terror of facing life-threatening illnesses without medical care.

More here.

From BBC News:

If you’ve worked your way to the top in a university maths, physics or engineering department – you’re very unlikely to be a woman. But why should this be?

Despite changing attitudes, there are still very few women at the highest levels in certain fields. In 2005/6, while more than half of all UK students in higher education were female, just 3% of maths and 2% of civil engineering professors were women, a recent study revealed. Professor David Geary, of the University of Missouri in the US, suggests there are two key difference between the sexes that might account for the disparity in numbers. The first is a difference in spatial abilities – the capacity to visualise things, particularly in three dimensions. The second is an increased interest in objects and how things work. According to Dr Cronin, who studies evolutionary theory and sex difference at the London School of Economics, it’s the numbers of men at the extremes of ability that are most telling: “For males, the difference between the worst and the best is far, far greater. “This is a very important aspect of male-female differences.

“One way of looking at this is that among males there are more dumbbells, but there are also more Nobels.”

More here.

The Style section of the NYT baffles me again (for HMN):

[R]ed meat on a date has become such an effective statement of self-acceptance that even a vegetarian like Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Random House, sometimes longs to order a burger.

“Being a vegetarian puts you at a disadvantage,” Ms. Crosley said. “You’re in the most basic category of finicky. Even women who order chicken, it isn’t enough.” She said she has thought of ordering shots of Jägermeister, famous for its frat boy associations, to prove that she is “a guy’s girl.”

“Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson,” Ms. Crosley, 28, said.

Not all red meat, apparently, is equal in the dating world. The mediums of steak and hamburger each send a different message. Dropping into conversation the fact that steaks of Kobe beef come from Wagyu cattle, but that not all steaks sold as Wagyu are Kobe beef, demonstrates one’s worldliness, said Gabriella Gershenson, a dining editor at Time Out New York. It holds the same currency today that being able to name Hemingway’s four wives held in an earlier era.

Hamburgers, she added, say you are down-to-earth, which is why women rarely order those deluxe hamburgers priced as high as a porterhouse.

“They’re created for men who want to impress women, so they order the $60 burger, then they let the woman taste it,” Ms. Gershenson said. “The man gets to show off his expertise and show that he can afford it.”

From The Washington Post:

World War II made for great myths and great mythmakers. Consider this one, from Winston Churchill: “Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda.”

In fact, from May 25 to 28, 1940, while the entire British Expeditionary Force was threatened with destruction at Dunkirk, Churchill and his war cabinet engaged in an intense debate over whether to seek detente by approaching Adolf Hitler through Italy’s Benito Mussolini. Would a negotiated end to the war be possible? The foreign minister, Lord Halifax, forcefully advocated exploring the possibilities; Churchill passionately argued to the contrary and won, with crucial support from Neville Chamberlain, not often associated with such steadfastness. Even then, the war cabinet “did not rule out the possibility of an approach to Mussolini ‘at some time,’ though it explicitly did so in the current situation,” writes Ian Kershaw in Fateful Choices, his ambitious history of the war’s most important decisions. “It is not easy to imagine, in the light of later events, how insecure Churchill’s position was in the middle of May 1940. His hold on authority, soon to become unchallengeable, was still tenuous.”

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker:

Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. As the recent experience of Iraq proves, elections in a country where the rights and responsibilities of secular and democratic citizenship are largely unknown do little more than crudely assert the majority’s right to rule. British-supervised elections in 1937 and 1946, which the Hindu-dominated Congress won easily, only hardened Muslim identity, and made partition inevitable.

This was a deeper tragedy than is commonly realized—and not only because India today has almost as many Muslims as Pakistan. In a land where cultures, traditions, and beliefs cut across religious communities, few people had defined themselves exclusively through their ancestral faith. The Pashto-speaking Muslim in the North-West Frontier province (later the nursery of the Taliban and Al Qaeda) had little in common with the Bangla-speaking Muslim in the eastern province of Bengal. (Even today, a Sunni Muslim from Lahore has less in common with a Sunni Muslim from Dhaka than he has with a Hindu Brahmin from New Delhi, who, in turn, may find alien the language, food, and dress of a low-caste Hindu from Chennai.) The British policy of defining communities based on religious identity radically altered Indian self-perceptions, as von Tunzelmann points out: “Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.”

More here.

Roger Boyes in the London Times:

An author leafing through a newspaper comes across tantalising details of a murder so grisly that he becomes obsessed, and imagines the events into a novel. Or a murderer, so self-satisfied with the brilliance of his perfect crime, pens an account to pass off as fiction and enshrine it in literary history.

Where reality ends and fiction begins in the stomach-turning novel Amok is the central task before the jury in Poland’s trial of the decade. Four years after he published his bloody bestseller, Krystian Bala has found himself on trial for the same torture and murder that he detailed in his novel.

More here.

Gadi Taub in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The future of the state of Israel is once again a topic of heated public debate. For good reasons: The possibility of a nuclear threat from a hostile Iran is one; deadlock in the peace process in the region, and the chance of a gradual shift into chronic civil war between Israelis and Palestinians, is another. But it has become common in some circles to ask not only whether Israel can survive, but also if it has a right to.

Some commentators believe that “the Jewish Question” that has been buzzing around in the West for some three centuries — the question of how this ancient people, the Jews, should fit into a modern political order — should be reopened. National self-determination for Jews in a state of their own, such critics say, can no longer be part of a morally acceptable answer. That is a telling development. As in the past, Western attitudes to the “Jewish Question” are reliable indications of larger political moods and of the shifting meanings of political concepts.

More here.

From The Economist:

Geoffrey Miller is a man with a theory that, if true, will change the way people think about themselves. His idea is that the human brain is the anthropoid equivalent of the peacock’s tail. In other words, it is an organ designed to attract the opposite sex. Of course, brains have many other functions, and the human brain shares those with the brains of other animals. But Dr Miller, who works at the University of New Mexico, thinks that mental processes which are uniquely human, such as language and the ability to make complicated artefacts, evolved originally for sexual display.

One important difference between peacocks’ tails and human minds, of course, is that the peahen’s accoutrement is a drab affair. No one could say the same of the human female psyche. That, Dr Miller believes, is because people, unlike peafowl, bring up their offspring in families where both sexes are involved in parenting. It thus behoves a man to be as careful about choosing his wife as a woman is about choosing her husband.

Both sexes, therefore, have reason to show off. But men and women will have different criteria for making their choices, and so the sexual-display sides of their minds may differ in detail.

Testing this hypothesis will be a long haul. But in a paper he has just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in collaboration with Vladas Griskevicius of Arizona State University, Dr Miller goes some way towards it. He, Dr Griskevicius and their colleagues look into two activities—conspicuous consumption and altruism towards strangers—to see if these support the “mating mind” hypothesis, as Dr Miller has dubbed his idea. Their conclusion is that they do.

More here.

Via DeLong, David Rees in The Huffington Post, too funny, can’t breathe…

Hello everyone! Personal message to all the New Yorkers out there: Did you read Michael Ignatieff’s essay in the the NY Times Magazine? If so, contact me ASAP to let me know you’re OK. I put your flyer up at Grand Central Station, but have heard no response.

Myself, I’m just making my way out of the debilitating Level-Five Mind Fog that came from reading the thing. Even my “Second Life avatar” has a headache! (Hey young people, did I get that right? Hope so! See you in “Warcraft Worlds!”)

The essay is called “Getting Iraq Wrong.” And baby, if Michael Ignatieff got Iraq wrong, I don’t want him to be right! Because this essay can MAKE LEMONADE IN YOUR MIND.

I wrote a “cyber-essay” on the Huffington Post a couple years ago about Ignatieff. (Oh, sorry, you didn’t know I blog on the Huffington Post? Yeah, not to brag or nothing, but I totally do. Also, my friend has a flickr.) My cyber-essay concerned itself with a masterpiece of foreign-policy fan fiction: Ignatieff’s 2005 NY Times Magazine essay justifying the Iraq war. Ignatieff’s essay was called “Let’s All Fly Up In Space Together and Smoke Dope.” (That was the vibe, anyway.)

In that 2005 essay, you’ll recall, Ignatieff said the reason the American public wanted to invade Iraq was to spread “The Ultimate Task of Thomas Jefferson’s Dream.” (I am not making a joke. This is for real.) And, he implied, anyone who opposed the invasion of Iraq did so because they hated Thomas Jefferson– and they didn’t believe in the Ultimate Tasks of Dreams!

So far, so GREAT, right?

Ignatieff’s latest essay is what Latin people call a “mea culpa,” which is Greek for “Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made.”

The Freakanomics blog has moved over to the NYT. Levitt asks “If You Were a Terrorist, How Would You Attack?”:

I’d start by thinking about what really inspires fear. One thing that scares people is the thought that they could be a victim of an attack. With that in mind, I’d want to do something that everybody thinks might be directed at them, even if the individual probability of harm is very low. Humans tend to overestimate small probabilities, so the fear generated by an act of terrorism is greatly disproportionate to the actual risk.

Also, I’d want to create the feeling that an army of terrorists exists, which I’d accomplish by pulling off multiple attacks at once, and then following them up with more shortly thereafter.

Of course, if a terrorist cell wanted to provoke a massive retaliation in a foreign land in order to win adherents rather than inspire fear, then Levitt’s approach may not be optimal.

Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

Christy Lynn Freeman, a 37-year-old, Ocean City, Md., woman, was recently charged with murder after delivering a stillborn child under Maryland’s as-yet-untested Viable Fetus Act of 2005.

Worcester County prosecutor Joel J. Todd charged Freeman with murder and a district court judge held her without bail for allegedly performing her own late-term abortion. Though these charges were eventually dropped, Freeman’s case illustrates the coercive potential of legislation that gives fetuses rights at the expense of women.

Freeman arrived at Atlantic General Hospital by ambulance on July 26, bleeding profusely. She denied that she had ever been pregnant, but doctors found a placenta and an umbilical cord inside her body. Later, she admitted that she had given birth to a stillborn fetus at home.

Graham Usher in The Nation:

[T]hrough the Red Mosque confrontation, Pakistan’s Talibanized Islamist movements have taken on the Pakistani state, casting it in the same pit as the pro-American governments of Iraq, Afghanistan and Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

In the past five days more than 120 people have been killed by suicide attacks, mostly in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) but also, on July 17, in Islamabad, where seventeen were killed at an opposition rally for Pakistan’s suspended Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. The safe money is that the Taliban or pro-Taliban groups were behind these attacks, though in the Islamabad blast the suspicion cannot be ruled out that Pakistan’s lethal intelligence service may have been trying to rid its leader of a judge who has proved so adept at mobilizing the nation against him.

At the same time, the Taliban has announced it is scrapping a ten-month peace accord with the Pakistani government in the North Waziristan tribal agency bordering Afghanistan, invoking the specter of a full-fledged insurgency. Thousands of tribespeople are fleeing, as many soldiers are being rushed in.

Rarely has Pakistan felt so much like Iraq and Afghanistan. Is it heading the same way?

On CNN, Christopher Hitchens vs. Ibrahim Hooper on the Q’uran controversy at Pace University.

The second part can be found here.