From The Sydney Morning Herald:

British author Salman Rushdie and his wife Padma Lakshmi, host of the TV show Top Chef, are getting divorced, the couple have announced, just two weeks after he was awarded a controversial knighthood. Rushdie, 60, is best known for his novel The Satanic Verses, which outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats that forced him to live in hiding for nine years. He married Lakshmi, 36, a former model born in India, in 2004. She was his fourth wife and the couple had no children.

“Salman Rushdie has agreed to divorce his wife, Padma Lakshmi, because of her desire to end their marriage,” said spokeswoman Jin Auh in a statement on his behalf. “He asks that the media respect his privacy at this difficult time.” Lakshmi’s publicist issued a similar statement that added, “After an eight-year relationship including over three years of marriage, Lakshmi regrets that their mutual efforts failed to make the marriage work.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

For the last month, a deep, almost mournful, silence has hovered over New York publishing circles. After eight years and 86 episodes, The Sopranos is finished. No longer will it be acceptable to veer mid-conversation from Don DeLillo into David Chase’s fictional New Jersey, where Cadillac-driving mobsters hack at each other with Homeric style. No more will we speculate on where Carmela Soprano buys her teal pantsuits.

From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking – even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the New York Times called upon Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly to resurrect the serial novel in its Sunday Magazine, critics were calling Chase the Dickens of our time. The final episode roped in some 11.9 million viewers. One major question, though, remains. Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel?

More here.

In the NYRB, an excerpt from J. M. Coetzee’s upcoming novel, Diary of a Bad Year:

The law protects the law-abiding citizen. It even protects to a degree the citizen who, without denying the force of the law, nevertheless uses force against his fellow citizen: the punishment prescribed for the offender must be condign with his offense. Even the enemy soldier, inasmuch as he is the representative of a rival state, shall not be put to death if captured. But there is no law to protect the outlaw, the man who takes up arms against his own state, that is to say, the state that claims him as its own.

Outside the state (the commonwealth, the statum civitatis), says Hobbes, the individual may feel he enjoys perfect liberty, but that liberty does him no good. Within the state, on the other hand

every citizen retains as much liberty as he needs to live well in peace, [while] enough liberty is taken from others to remove the fear of them…. To sum up: outside the commonwealth is the empire of passions, war, fear, poverty, nastiness, solitude, barbarity, ignorance, savagery; within the commonwealth is the empire of reason, peace, security, wealth, splendor, society, good taste, the sciences and good-will.[1]

What the Hobbesian myth of ori-gins does not mention is that the handover of power to the state is irreversible. The option is not open to us to change our minds, to decide that the monopoly on the exercise of force held by the state, codified in the law, is not what we wanted after all, that we would prefer to go back to a state of nature.

Sixty years ago, on February 25, 1947, the Allied Control Council in Berlin decreed: “The state of Prussia, which from its earliest days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has de facto ceased to exist.” Behind this decision stood the conviction that the origins of National Socialism were located in the Prussian tradition and the extinction of one should accompany that of the other.

“The Iron Kingdom” by Christopher Clark, which came out in Germany this year (and in England in 2006), shows how drastically this image has altered. There is no hint here of blanket Prussia-bashing; instead the book is permeated by an almost strained attempt to do justice to the Hohenzollern state. Naturally – as the British historian of Australian origin emphasizes in his introduction – one must ask how exactly Prussia was implicated in the catastrophes of German 20th century history. Yet the focus should not be restricted to 1933 or 1871. “The truth is that Prussia was a European state long before it became a German one. Germany was not Prussia’s fulfilment, but its undoing.”

more from Sign and Sight here.

J. Hoberman on the CIA’s film version of Animal Farm, also in the LRB:

The trade press reported that de Rochemont financed Animal Farm with the frozen British box-office receipts from his racial ‘passing’ drama Lost Boundaries; in fact, Animal Farm was almost entirely underwritten by the CIA. De Rochemont hired Halas and Batchelor (they were less expensive and, given their experience making wartime propaganda cartoons, politically more reliable than American animators) in late 1951; well before that, his ‘investors’ had furnished him with detailed dissections of his team’s proposed treatment. Animal Farm was scheduled for completion in spring 1953, but the ambitious production, which made use of full cell animation, was delayed for more than a year, in part because of extensive discussion and continual revisions. Among other things, the investors pushed for a more aggressively ‘political’ voice-over narration and were concerned that Snowball (the pig who figures as Trotsky) would be perceived by audiences as too sympathetic.

Most problematic, however, was Orwell’s pessimistic ending, in which the pigs become indistinguishable from their human former masters. No matter how often the movie’s screenplay was altered, it always concluded with a successful farmyard uprising in which the oppressed animals overthrew the dictatorial pigs. The Animal Farm project had been initiated when Harry Truman was president; Dwight Eisenhower took office in January 1953, with John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state and Allen Dulles heading the CIA. Leab notes that Animal Farm’s mandated ending complemented the new Dulles policy, which – abandoning Truman’s aim of containing Communism – planned a ‘roll back’, at least in Eastern Europe. As one of the script’s many advisors put it, Animal Farm’s ending should be one where the animals ‘get mad, ask for help from the outside, which they get, and which results in their (the Russian people) with the help of the free nations overthrowing their oppressors’.

When Dana Goodyear’s New Yorker piece on Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation appeared in March, many poets and readers felt a profound sense of gratitude to her. It came as a tremendous relief to find a writer as articulate and credible as Goodyear leveling the criticisms many of us have been developing privately for several years: that Ruth Lilly’s gift to the magazine is being squandered by managers with little imagination and no apparent sense of purpose or history; that the current editorial regime has lessened the magazine by making uninspired choices for the front of the magazine (poems) and vindictive ones for the back (reviews); and that many talented writers, whether new to publishing or well established, may smell decay between Poetry’s pages and choose as a result to send their best work elsewhere.

more from VQR here.

In the LRB, Chaohua Wang on Tianamen, 18 years after the massacre:

Two opposing interpretations of the movement of 1989 have gained ground, mainly in the West but also to some extent in China. The first is socio-economic. In early 1988, the government pushed forcefully to free prices, but the inflation that followed provoked such strong reactions throughout the country that it was compelled to reinstitute food rationing in the big cities in January 1989. Some American scholars have argued that this was a factor in the massive social unrest that manifested itself in the spring of 1989. In China itself, thinkers on the New Left have taken this argument a step further, seeing the military crackdown of 4 June as essentially paving the way for the marketisation of the economy, by breaking resistance to the lifting of price controls (they were removed again, this time successfully, in the early 1990s). According to this view, the driving force behind the mass movement, even its inspiration, was the refusal of reforms that would deprive the population of established standards of collective welfare. What the gunshots in Beijing shattered were the last hopes for the ‘iron rice bowl’ of socialism, clearing the way to a fully-fledged capitalism in China.

Another school of thought turns this argument upside down. In this account, the mass movement, far from clinging to the socialist past, looked boldly ahead to a liberal future. The growing number of banners written in English, and the styrofoam statue of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, modelled partly on the Statue of Liberty, erected on Tiananmen in the last days of May, all show that America was the demonstrators’ real dream: not the iron rice bowl, but the market and the ballot box. Last month, George Bush presided over the erection in Washington of a monument to the Victims of Communism, in the form of a scaled-down bronze replica of the styrofoam goddess.

Although he insists that there is nothing metaphorical or symbolic in what he does, Long drops hints as to how he wants us to experience his work. For example, he has mentioned that the mud he likes to use is tidal – that is, mud made by the movement of water over stones due to the attraction of the moon, over centuries. I don’t think this is essential to viewing the work, but for me it adds to its poetic resonance.

Then, too, Long’s titles often tell us the exact source of the mud he uses in a work, and this specificity becomes part of how we experience it. And so in the pieces made of mud from the Firth of Forth, Long wants you to know that he arrived in Edinburgh empty-handed, and made art out of local materials.

Richard Long has become the Ol’ Man River of British art. He just keeps on rolling along, using utterly simple materials and methods to make a seemingly endless stream of art works that feel eternal and yet change constantly, like nature itself.

more from The Telegraph here.

t has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology. Two facts about the coming century are agreed on by almost everyone. Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century. Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.

These facts raise an interesting question. Will the domestication of high technology, which we have seen marching from triumph to triumph with the advent of personal computers and GPS receivers and digital cameras, soon be extended from physical technology to biotechnology? I believe that the answer to this question is yes. Here I am bold enough to make a definite prediction. I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

more from the NYRB here.

EVERY time you turn around these days, another golden age is being celebrated. Nostalgia gilds the past, bad hairdos and all, and the present, to which we are wedded for better or worse, never quite seems equal to the glorious times we keep compulsively half-remembering.

Some sentimental journeys, however, are justified — even vital, if we’re ever to benefit from traditions inarguably richer than our current efforts. Such is the case with the era celebrated in “The House That George Built,” Wilfrid Sheed’s bouncily written, impressionistic history of American songwriters from the first half of the 20th century. These are the composers, lyricists and composer-lyricists who found their sound in the Jazz Age and spread it from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway to Hollywood and the Hit Parade.

more from the LA Times here.

When Longinus, the blind soldier who pierced Christ’s side on the Cross, accidentally touched his eyes with Christ’s blood, he began to see (or so the medieval legend goes). Caroline Walker Bynum’s Wonderful Blood in turn makes us see Christ’s blood, and see it everywhere in late-medieval Christianity: it streams from his wound on the Cross; it gushes into the waiting mouth of believers meditating on the Eucharist; it cakes on his forehead in the Passion; it soaks the earth of Golgotha; it miraculously appears when Eucharistic hosts are stolen or abused; it imprints the heart of devoted Christians; it saves, washes and nourishes all; in short, it emerges as the central object of Northern European spirituality in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For three decades now, Bynum has been pivotal in drawing the attention even of non-specialists to some of the overlooked, sophisticated conceptions that late-medieval piety developed of personal identity, death, redemption, gender, asceticism and the body. She now zooms in on and brilliantly illuminates the equally complex and equally crucial issue of blood, which – as first noted by Kathleen Biddick – had been conspicuous in her medieval material and sources, but absent in her analyses.

more from the TLS here.

Asia, 10 years after the great currency crisis, in the Economist:

Ten years ago, on July 2nd 1997, Thailand’s central bank floated the baht after failing to protect the currency from speculative attack. The move triggered a financial and economic collapse that quickly spread to other economies in the region, causing GDP growth rates to contract precipitously, bankrupting companies that had overexposed themselves to foreign-currency risk, and ultimately necessitating costly and politically humiliating IMF-led bailouts in the worst-affected countries. Thus began the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Its effects, and governments’ subsequent responses to it, have defined much of the region’s economic policies and direction in the past decade. What has been learnt, and how has the region changed in the intervening period?

The financial crisis can be described as having been a “perfect storm”: a confluence of various conditions that not only created financial and economic turbulence but also greatly magnified its impact. Among the key conditions were the presence of fixed or semi-fixed exchange rates in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea; large current-account deficits that created downward pressure on those countries’ currencies, encouraging speculative attacks; and high domestic interest rates that had encouraged companies to borrow heavily offshore (at lower interest rates) in order to fund aggressive and poorly supervised investment. Weak oversight of domestic lending and, in some cases, rising public debt also contributed to the crisis and made its effects worse once the problems had begun.

In Counterpunch, Vijay Prashad on Obama and outsourcing:

Barack Obama promised to run a different campaign for the United States’ presidency. Defiantly inclusive, he wanted to avoid “negative” campaigning and to draw together this divided country around his positive image. Thrown into the national limelight after his remarkable speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama became the standard-bearer for a new politics. “Do we participate in a politics of cynicism,” he asked, “or do we participate in a politics of hope?” Then, he let loose with a flourish, “I’m not talking about blind optimism here – the almost wilful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t think about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores… . Hope – hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!” In keeping with his first name, Barack Obama was a breath of life in a political landscape torn between cynicism and ruthlessness.

Andrew Gelman (and Aleks Jakulin) from Statistica Sinica, posted over at his blog:

As a lifetime member of the International Chinese Statistical Association, I am pleased to introduce a volume of Bayesian articles. I remember that in graduate school, Xiao-Li Meng, now editor of this journal, told me they didn’t teach Bayesian statistics in China because the idea of a prior distribution was contrary to Mao’s quotation, “truth comes out of empirical/practical evidence.” I have no idea how Thomas Bayes would feel about this, but Pierre-Simon Laplace, who is often regarded as the first applied Bayesian, was active in politics during and after the French Revolution.

In the twentieth-century Anglo-American statistical tradition, Bayesianism has certainly been seen as radical. As statisticians, we are generally trained to respect conservatism, which can sometimes be defined mathematically (for example, nominal 95% intervals that contain the true value more than 95% of the time) and sometimes with reference to tradition (for example, deferring to least-squares or maximum-likelihood estimates). Statisticians are typically worried about messing with data, which perhaps is one reason that the Current Index to Statistics lists 131 articles with “conservative” in the title or keywords and only 46 with the words “liberal” or “radical.”

Like many political terms, the meaning of conservatism depends on its comparison point.

A strange but understanable history of some disregarded research, in The Guardian:

In 1943 two researchers, Schairer and Schöniger, published their own case-control study in the journal Zeitschuft für Krebsforschung, demonstrating a relationship between smoking and lung cancer almost a decade before any researchers elsewhere. It wasn’t mentioned in the classic Doll and Bradford Hill paper of 1950, and if you check in the Science Citation Index, the paper was referred to only four times in the 1960s, once in the 1970s, and then not again until 1988. In fact, it was forgotten.

It’s not hard to understand why: Nazi scientific and medical research was so bound up in the horrors of cold-blooded mass murder, and the strange puritanical ideologies of nazism, that it was almost universally disregarded, and with good reason. Doctors had been active participants in the Nazi project, and joined Hitler’s National Socialist party in greater numbers than any other profession (45% were party members, compared with 20% of teachers).

On this 4th, the unknown history of American patriotism, in The Nation:

Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by a leading Christian socialist, Francis Bellamy, who was fired from his Boston ministry for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist. Bellamy penned the Pledge of Allegiance for Youth’s Companion, a magazine for young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000.

A few years earlier, the magazine had sponsored a largely successful campaign to sell American flags to public schools. In 1891 the magazine hired Bellamy–whose first cousin Edward Bellamy was the famous socialist author of the utopian novel Looking Backward–to organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools. Bellamy gained the support of the National Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program’s flag salute ceremony.

Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age, with its robber barons and exploitation of workers. Bellamy intended the line “One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all” to express a more collective and egalitarian vision of America.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

On April 6, 1994, Yehia Ayyash, one of the more elusive members of the Islamic Resistance Movement known by its Arab acronym Hamas, left an indelible mark on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The man whom former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin called “the Engineer” dispatched a Palestinian named Raed Zakarneh on what would be a historic mission. When Mr. Zakarneh blew his car up, killing himself and eight Israelis at a bus stop in the Israeli city of Afula, he became Hamas’s first suicide bomber. The attack was retribution for a massacre perpetrated by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, who threw a hand grenade into a crowded mosque, killing 29 Palestinians. And so Hamas literally exploded onto the world stage. Today, Israel and the US consider it a terrorist organization with which they refuse to negotiate. Yet neither they — nor the rest of the world — can afford to ignore Hamas, particularly since the group’s most recent historic feat: seizing control of the Gaza Strip and routing out Fatah, the main faction of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. So how did this marginal group, inspired by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, grow from its shadowy beginnings in the densely populated slums of the Gaza Strip to first win a landslide victory in the January 2006 Palestinian election and now to hold complete control over all of Gaza?

Zaki Chehab’s new book, Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement, goes a long way toward answering such questions. Chehab’s book not only explains the methodical rise of Hamas, but also offers insights into the group’s psyche that go beyond the stereotypes perpetuated by so much of today’s news coverage.

More here.

From Scientific American:

It was the small car you could park in the narrowest space on the piazza, as Italian as Prosciutto and espresso. On its 50th birthday the Cinquecento is back, and Fiat says it will become the iPod of cars. Fiat is launching a new version of the three-door Cinquecento — which means “500” in Italian — at a ceremony in its hometown of Turin on Wednesday, with the car making its comeback after going out of production in the 1970s.

Fiat’s chief executive says he wants to emulate Apple by making its cars as stylish as the U.S. company’s computers and electronic gadgets, including the mass-selling iPod portable music player.

More here.

If 1957 marked the end of Durrell’s lifelong struggle to make ends meet— publication of the Quartet permitted him to move into a house he bought with his third wife in the French village of Sommières, where he lived until his death in 1990— something else ended in that season. The eight novels he wrote after the Quartet, including an inchoate set of novels he dubbed the Avignon Quintet, were tepidly received, disappointing his hopes—and not just his—that lightning would strike a second time. Perhaps his hunger was gone, or the creative well was dry, leaving only self-caricature. It’s also possible his public lost patience. The Alexandria Quartet is a tour de force, but a little Durrell goes a long way.

Memory and distance throw light on what The Alexandria Quartet was a half century ago—a dying burst of romance in the heyday of realism, an appeal to credulity on the eve of so much skepticism, a bold experiment in form that in only a few years literary experimentalism would render almost pallid. But the books do bear rereading for the same reasons, as a sweet remembrance of things from not so long ago. “Art occurs at the point where a form is sincerely honored by an awakened spirit,” Durrell once aphorized. By his lights and mine, The Alexandria Quartet remains a work of art.

more from The American Scholar here.

Suddenly you are looking in his eyes. Officially, they’re brown, but for you they’ll always be blue. He is speaking in a soft, seductive voice. Glory if you follow, eternal shame if you don’t. Rome or Death. In a moment, your destiny shifts. Incredibly, you have volunteered. You are given a red shirt, an obsolete rifle, a bayonet. You are taught to sing a hymn full of antique rhetoric recalling a magnificent past, foreseeing a triumphant future. You learn to march at night in any weather and over the most rugged terrain, to sleep on the bare ground, to forgo regular meals, to charge under fire at disciplined men in uniform. You learn to kill with your bayonet. You see your friends killed. You grow familiar with the shrieks of the wounded, the stench of corpses. If you turn tail in battle, you will be shot. Those are his orders. If you loot, you will be shot. You write enthusiastic letters home. You have discovered patriotism and comradeship. You have been welcomed by cheering crowds, kissed by admiring young women. Italy will be restored to greatness. From Sicily to the Alps, your country will be free. Then, with no warning, it’s over. A politician has not kept faith. An armistice has been signed. Your leader is furious. You hardly understand. Rome is still a dream. Your group disbanded, you receive nothing: no money, no respect, no help in finding work. But, years later, when he calls again, you go. You will follow him to your death.

more from The New Yorker here.