Peter Hallward in the London Review of Books:

In the mid-1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Port-au-Prince. He became the spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse in 1986 of the Duvalier dictatorship. In 1990 he won the country’s first democratic presidential election, with 67 per cent of the vote. He was overthrown by a military coup in September 1991 and returned to power in 1994, after the US intervened to restore democratic government. In 1996 he was succeeded by his ally René Préval. Aristide won another landslide election victory in 2000, but the resistance of Haiti’s small ruling elite eventually culminated in a second coup against him, on the night of 28 February 2004. Since then, he has been living in exile in South Africa.

According to the best available estimates, around five thousand of Aristide’s supporters have died at the hands of the regime that replaced the constitutional government. Although the situation remains tense and UN troops still occupy the country, the worst of the violence came to an end in February 2006, when after an extraordinary electoral campaign, René Préval was himself re-elected in a landslide victory. Calls for Aristide’s immediate and unconditional return continue to polarise Haitian politics. Many commentators, including several prominent members of the current government, believe that if Aristide was free to stand for re-election he would win easily.

This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006.

More here.

Howard Kissel in the New York Daily News:

A few years ago, taking relatives on a walking tour of the West Village, I was struck by how many playgrounds there were. Mentioning it to a friend, I was surprised to learn they were created by Robert Moses.

Until that moment, like many New Yorkers, I had thought of Moses as The Great Satan.

I viewed him through the prism of Jane Jacobs, the author of 1961’s seminal “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Jacobs’ idea of the city – based on streets that mixed residential and commercial uses, all on a human scale – was the direct opposite of his.

He was the proponent of huge apartment complexes with large expanses of grass between them – which, Jacobs correctly observed, remained largely unused.

He was the man who destroyed the South Bronx and many Manhattan neighborhoods to accommodate the automobile.

The demonic view of Moses was reinforced in 1974 by Robert Caro in “The Power Broker,” who stressed the ruthlessness with which he achieved his goals.

Thirty-three years later, Moses is again in the spotlight, this time viewed far more favorably.

More here.

Stuart Derbyshire reviews the book by Gezim Albion at Spiked Online:

Mother Teresa is arguably the most famous religious icon of the late twentieth century. Her legacy and work continue to generate huge levels of debate and interest. Gezim Alpion’s book Mother Teresa: Saint or Celebrity?, which seeks to address the nature of her fame, celebrity and devotion to faith, is unique in locating the appeal of Mother Teresa within today’s broader celebrity culture. He also provides previously unknown and quite striking information about her personal life.

For Alpion, celebrity culture is a modern form of religion and Mother Teresa was the ultimate religious celebrity of the modern era. Unlike the many saints recognised by the Catholic Church, Mother Teresa’s apparent sanctity took root and flourished during her lifetime. Her beatification in 2003, just six years after her death, propelled her further towards actual sainthood. Alpion points out that the beatification of such a contemporary figure was as much a consequence of her growing stardom as it was of her devoted religious practice.

More here.

From the New York Times Book Review:

How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few. Like all romantic conceits, it fails to acknowledge the grubby reality of mortal life, in this case the dedicated, often torturous labor a writer or dancer or sculptor invests in what he or she makes. Among the lucid and often delightful observations Joan Acocella makes in her new collection of critical essays, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” none is more important than this: “What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite … ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.” In fact, Acocella suggests, the remarkable and sustained career of a prodigy like George Balanchine, to name one of her subjects, proves this artist “not an example, but a freak, of ego strength.”

Which doesn’t make the creative process any less mysterious. What emerges from a reading of “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” is Acocella’s — and through hers our own — respect and in certain cases even reverence for the dogged faith on which an artistic career is built. We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos: these are the promises art makes.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

In the New Statesman, Chris Hedges on evangelism:

The engine that drives the radical Christian right in the United States – the most dangerous mass movement in American history – is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manu facturing jobs, their families and neighbourhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference. They eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centres, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker’s paradise, liberté-égalité-fraternité, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance that they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

During the past two years of work on the book American Fascists: the Christian right and the war on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast-food restaurants and dollar stores, I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centres such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded-up storefronts, dilapidated houses, potholed streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.

In the NYT’s Sunday Book Review, a look at two books by Paul Muldoon.

Paul Muldoon’s poetry, suspicious of sanctimony and sentimentality and frankly addicted to puns, dares us to ask: is he serious? Although his previous book of poetry, “Moy Sand and Gravel,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, and Muldoon served from 1999 to 2004 as professor of poetry at Oxford (his august predecessors include Matthew Arnold, W. H. Auden and Muldoon’s friend and fellow Northern Irishman Seamus Heaney), readers new to his poetry are likely to wonder if he’s really serious, and others will already have decided that no, he isn’t: his poetry is too full of games, too obscure, too clever.

In “Horse Latitudes,” Muldoon’s most recent collection, there is plenty of serious feeling (particularly anger, nostalgia and grief) and a subtle historical awareness of civil conflict and military violence. These are grave moods and subjects. Yet he approaches those moods and subjects by means of his trademark verbal play.

Take the title poem. The expression “horse latitudes,” the book jacket explains, “refers to those areas 30 degrees north and south of the Equator where sailing ships tend to stand becalmed in midocean, where stasis (if not stagnation) is the order of the day, and where sailors … would throw their live cargo overboard to lighten the load and conserve food and water.” The poem consists of 19 sonnets, each named for a battle site beginning with “B” (Bosworth Field, Bull Run and so on), from which Muldoon derives gruesome anecdotes and curious stories.

From Time:

CBS News released a poll last night focused on Giuliani vs. McCain. Here are the particulars among Republican primary voters:

Head to Head Match Up
Giuliani 50
McCain 29
Niether 13

Giuliani wins 55-37 among self-described “moderate” Republicans, but he also wins 48-21 among those who label themselves “conservative” Republicans.

Favorable Rating
Among Republican voters only
Giuliani 60/7 (+53)
McCain 30/17 (+13)

Another interesting question: Republican voters were asked whether they would label Giuliani and McCain “liberal,” “moderate,” or “conservative.”

McCain
Among Republican voters only
Liberal 16
Moderate 38
Conservative 28
Don’t Know 18

Giuliani
Among Republican voters only
Liberal 20
Moderate 48
Conservative 18
Don’t Know 15

More here.

From Accidental Blogger:

China’s booming economy has made its citizens dizzy at the prospect of striking it rich. The Chinese can barely wait to get their share of lucrative deals.  Gone is the communist era austerity – people are unashamedly pursuing wealth. This year particularly, Chinese optimism is at an all time high in anticipation of the coming “year of the pig,” traditionally associated with wealth and prosperity.  2007 is not just any ordinary porcine year. It is the “Year of the Golden Pig” which comes about once every sixty years according to the Chinese zodiac calendar.

BEIJING – Forget duck; Peking has been overrun by pigs.

As the Chinese New Year approaches, heralding the auspicious Year of the Pig, porkers are everywhere. Fifteen-foot-high inflatable pigs beckon shoppers into electronics stores; fluffy pink pig snouts enliven winter ear-muffs; corkscrew tails and round piggy faces decorate Ikea kitchen aprons

Wherever you look, happy hogs are rearing up on their hind trotters advertising this or that, or simply waving banners emblazoned with the new Chinese credo, for which the coming year is believed to be especially favorable: “Get Rich.”

Pigs are especially popular in the Chinese mind, summoning images of good-natured generosity and good fortune. So closely are the animals linked to human life here that the Chinese character for “home” includes the symbols for both roof and pig – all you need for a traditional Chinese household.

This year, moreover, is being proclaimed the Year of the Golden Pig, a doubly propitious period thanks to a combination of animals and elements in the Chinese zodiac that matches pigs and gold only once every 60 years.

More here.

Thanks Ruchira Paul.

More here.

From Science:

Astronomers say they can now compute with great confidence which asteroids pose a threat to our planet. The problem, they told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes ScienceNOW), is that preventing a collision would require mounting a not-yet-planned space mission by a not-yet-identified governmental body.

The next known close encounter with an asteroid will occur, somewhat ominously, on Friday the 13th of April 2029. Then, Near-Earth Object 99942–also known as Apophis (Greek for “The Demon of Darkness”)–is expected to miss the planet by a mere 30,000 kilometers. The real sweating begins soon after, when astronomers must determine whether Earth’s gravity has steered Apophis onto a course for impact seven years later. Current calculations place the chance of that happening at about one in 30,000.

At 250 meters wide, Apophis is five times larger than the object that hit Earth 50,000 years ago and blew out the 1200-meter-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona. It’s also six times larger than the Tunguska object, which grazed Earth’s atmosphere before exploding over Siberia in 1908, flattening 2100 square kilometers of forest.

More here.

Jeanna Bryner at LiveScience:

Ocean currents can whisk tiny larval fish a long way from home. Turns out, the little ones follow their noses back to their native reefs.

Jelle Atema, a sensory biologist at Boston University, and Gabriele Gerlach of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., analyzed small gene units called microsatellite markers in three species of reef fish, including the cardinal fish, spiny damsel fish and the neon damsel fish, living on five reefs within Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The markers indicated that more returned to their home reef than random chance would predict. The most obvious was the cardinal fish [image], which showed clear genetic differences from one reef to another.

“Even though the [cardinal fish] larvae are dispersing out in the ocean, there are distinct differences between reefs as if they were not dispersing,” Atema explained. “That means they either have to, by great majority, all go home every generation, or those that do go to other reefs die off and they don’t reproduce.”

To find out what was steering the cardinal fish home, the scientists placed individual fish larvae into a flume containing “lanes” of water samples collected from different reefs. The cardinal fish larvae preferred water from their home reefs and spent more time in that part of the flume compared with water from other reefs [video].

The researchers suggest the young creatures sniffed out familiar scents dispersed in the water to guide them home.

More here.

Rich Bowden at Worldpress:

The viability of harnessing waves as a lucrative renewable energy source received a boost last week following the announcement that the world’s first commercial wave energy project will begin delivering wave-generated energy to the north of Portugal later this month.

The first stage of the European Union-funded program, the result of two decades of research at Lisbon’s Superior Technical Institute, will bring the first 2.25 megawatts ashore at Aguçadoura, in northern Portugal, and will power 1,500 homes through the national state run electricity grid system according to an Inter Press Service (IPS) report.

Funded by a consortium headed by leading Portuguese renewable energy company Enersis, the venture uses groundbreaking Pelamis wave devices manufactured by Edinburgh firm Ocean Power Delivery, considered the world’s leading wave technology.

“This project, begun in 2003, is now in the world vanguard,” said Rui Barros, Enersis director of new projects, to IPS.

“Of all the varieties of renewable energy, perhaps harnessing the waves is the only one where Portugal might have a real future,” he said.

More here and here.

US photographer Spencer Platt made the winning photograph for the World Press Photo of the Year 2006. The photo could not have been staged better — it is so absolutely real and surreal at the same time. These are our times, like it or not.

More here.

In an extraordinary art performance, the internationally-renowned controversial British performance artist Mark McGowan will dress up as the President George Bush and crawl on his hands and knees for nonstop for an incredible 72 hours. He will be covering an amazing 36 miles on the streets of New York.  McGowan will have a sign on his posterior saying ‘KICK MY ASS’. He will be inviting members of the public, New Yorkers and allcomers to kick the sign. The event will start at Scope Art Fair on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 3pm, and circumnavigate New York. McGowan will be wearing knee pads and a cushion will be placed inside his pants.

McGowan says that he is “offering the people of America, New York and visitors a service…a kind of theraputic engagement. Hopefully people will be able to come and kick me (the President, George Bush) as hard as they like, and gain some comfort in the fact that they can say I kicked George in the ass. On a more serious note this is a protest against George Bush and his policies and i am expecting injuries, i just hope not to severe.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

The Janelia Experiment:

Great scientific research organizations, of the rare variety that produce multiple Nobel Prize-caliber breakthroughs, share common traits that can be imitated. This is the precept behind the creation of Janelia Farm, the new biological-research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In November, scientists from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute visited the new campus, where everything from architecture to organization to social culture has been planned to nurture an optimal environment for scientific discovery. What the visitors saw may offer ideas for Harvard, which is planning an ambitious science-research campus in Allston and working to ensure that the organizational structure of the sciences, as well as the architecture of new buildings, will promote a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration.

In creating Janelia Farm, the planners relied heavily on historical precedent. “Every idea we have here, I can tell you who we stole it from,” says molecular biologist Gerald M. Rubin, the director of the facility, with a laugh. A former Howard Hughes investigator himself, Rubin has been involved since 2000 in planning the new campus (pronounced ja-NEE-lia, it is named for a former estate). HHMI, which has a $16-billion endowment, already provides $470 million a year to more than 300 top scientists at universities and research institutions throughout the country as part of its investigator program. Janelia Farm, with an annual budget of $80 million, was created to fill a perceived gap in the spectrum of research taking place in the United States. As Rubin wrote in the journal Cell, the domestic research portfolio has “shifted too far to the conservative.” Largely missing, he feels, are research organizations equipped to tackle extremely difficult problems in biology that may require long-term interdisciplinary collaborations to solve—perhaps 15 or 20 years, a time horizon far longer than that of any government grant.

…

Because the primary building material at Janelia Farm is glass, there is a strong sense of connection with nature and its cycles nearly everywhere you go. Group leader Karel Svoboda, Ph.D. ’94, says the building is very functional in key aspects, such as on rainy days when “the light is extraordinary. We don’t always appreciate how much of an effect good light has on us.” Many interior walls are glass as well, creating a transparency that makes it easy to find people. Not everyone would be comfortable in such an environment, Rubin acknowledges, but then he wants to hire people who are comfortable with the collaborative environment that transparent walls seek to promote.

More here.

Francis Fukuyama in Prospect Magazine:

Modern identity politics springs from a hole in the political theory underlying liberal democracy. That hole is liberalism’s silence about the place and significance of groups. The line of modern political theory that begins with Machiavelli and continues through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the American founding fathers understands the issue of political freedom as one that pits the state against individuals rather than groups.

Modern liberalism arose in good measure in reaction to the wars of religion that raged in Europe following the Reformation. Liberalism established the principle of religious toleration—the idea that religious goals could not be pursued in the public sphere in a way that restricted the religious freedom of other sects or churches.

Freedom, understood not as the freedom of individuals but of cultural or religious or ethnic groups to protect their group identities, was not seen as a central issue by the American founders, perhaps because the new settlers were relatively homogeneous. In the words of John Jay (in the second “Federalist Paper”): “A people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles.”

More here.

From Guardian:

With her scenes of village life, Amrita Sher-Gil dedicated herself to painting the ‘true’ India. Strikingly attractive, outspoken and intelligent, she died suddenly at only 28. Salman Rushdie on the inspiration for his flamboyant heroine in The Moor’s Last Sigh.

“In the mid-1990s, when I began to think about my novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, I soon realised that it would contain an account of the character (and also the work) of an entirely imaginary 20th-century Indian woman painter. I thought about my friendships and acquaintanceships with a number of fine contemporary artists – Krishen Khanna, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulam Mohammad Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Anish Kapoor – and of others I did not know personally but whose work I admired – Pushpamala, Navjot, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel, Dhruva Mistry, Arpana Caur, Laxma Goud, Ganesh Pyne. The work of all these painters helped me think about the pictures my fictional Aurora Zogoiby might create. But the figure that, so to speak, “gave me permission” to imagine her personality, to invent a woman painter at the very heart of modern art in India – to believe in the possibility of such a woman – was an artist I never met, who died tragically young, and whom I first encountered in a luminous painting by Vivan Sundaram, her nephew. That artist was Amrita Sher-Gil.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

The late 50s in Cuba were so rich with glamour and conflict it’s a wonder more stories haven’t been set there. Such a time, such a place, and all these elements in a long, slow collision: the sordid glory of casino culture, the last crest of old-school Hollywood splendor, the vicious florescence of the Italian and Jewish mafias, the worldly style of the Cubans themselves and the gathering rumble of the Revolution, all playing out in a gorgeous city. And here is Mayra Montero, a Cuban woman now living in Puerto Rico, and “Dancing to ‘Almendra,’ ” her ninth novel, lovingly translated by Edith Grossman: a flawless little book with a deceptively light touch, that covers exactly those years.

Montero’s novel is narrated by a man named Joaquín Porrata, a 22-year-old reporter living in Havana during the last days of Batista, who shows up for work one morning and finds he’s been assigned the story of a hippopotamus that has escaped from the zoo and been shot to death. As it happens, that same night the mafia capo Umberto Anastasia was murdered in a hotel barber’s shop in New York City, and from a rather strange little zookeeper named Juan Bulgado (or Johnny Angel, or Johnny Lamb: in Havana even a zookeeper can dream), Porrata discovers that the two killings are related.

More here.

From New York Magazine:

Thomas (his middle name) is a fifth-grader at the highly competitive P.S. 334, the Anderson School on West 84th. Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child. When he applied to Anderson for kindergarten, his intelligence was statistically confirmed. The school is reserved for the top one percent of all applicants, and an IQ test is required. Thomas didn’t just score in the top one percent. He scored in the top one percent of the top one percent.

But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ”

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Morbidly obese men tend to have more breathing difficulties than morbidly obese women, partly because they have much larger waistlines, a new study suggests.

Dr. Gerald S. Zavorsky from McGill University Health Center, Montreal, and colleagues examined the effect of the so-called “waist-to-hip ratio” on breathing in 25 morbidly obese adults scheduled for bariatric (stomach) surgery.

As the name implies, the waist-to-hip ratio is a calculation of a person’s waist circumference divided by their hip circumference. People with a high ratio have an “apple-shaped body,” whereas people with a low ratio have a “pear-shaped body.”

More here.