Ali Smith in The Guardian:

… Beasts of No Nation, a first novel by Uzodinma Iweala, who is 23 and a Harvard graduate and has worked with Nigerian child soldiers in rehabilitation. This is the live underbelly of such a situation, in a novel so scorched by loss and anger that it’s hard to hold and so gripping in its sheer hopeless lifeforce that it’s hard to put down. In the writing, Beasts of No Nation is totally and shockingly alive from its very first paragraph. “It is starting like this. I am feeling itch like insect is crawling on my skin, and then my head is just starting to tingle right between my eye, and then I am wanting to sneeze because my nose is itching, and then air is just blowing into my ear and I am hearing so many thing: the clicking of insect, the sound of truck grumbling like one kind of animal, and then the sound of somebody shouting TAKE YOUR POSITION RIGHT NOW! QUICK! QUICK QUICK! MOVE WITH SPEED! MOVE FAST OH! in voice that is just touching my body like knife.”

This novel is winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction, the Sue Kaufman prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York Public Library Young Lions fiction award.

Thanks to Anjuli Raza Kolb for giving me this very powerful book.

More here.

Catherine Wigginton in The Village Voice:

In Defending the Community College Equity Agenda, researchers point out that community colleges are key in providing higher education and can serve as a bridge to the middle class for immigrants, people of color, and those in the lowest income brackets. But achieving that mission has been difficult, say the book’s authors. Although four-fifths of the students entering community colleges say that their goal is to earn a bachelor’s degree or higher, only 18 percent actually do that within eight years of their enrollment date.

That’s not only very low but very troubling, considering that nearly 50 percent of all credit-earning undergraduates in the United States are enrolled in community colleges. “I think people are often surprised at that number,” says Thomas Bailey, co-editor of the new volume and director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “These are institutions that aren’t on the radar.”

Besides having half of all students nationwide, community colleges enroll a disproportionate share of the country’s poorest students.

More here.

London Sun from the Little People blog:

More here.

Robert Weintraub in Slate:

Beckham’s role has never been that of a scorer, even though his skill at curling free kicks into the far reaches of the net earned him immortality on the movie marquee. Beckham’s game is passing—he has the ability to put the ball on a sprinting teammate’s foot from half a field away.

Now on the dark side of 30, Beckham’s game, dependent as it is on vision and timing, has seen some slippage. Upon taking over the English National Team after the World Cup, Steve McClaren’s first order of business was to strip Beckham of his place on the squad. And this season, Beckham has started for Real Madrid all of five times in 17 matches. In fairness, he was solid in his first two seasons for los Galácticos, but he hasn’t fit into new manager Fabio Capello’s plans.

Since the words 250 and million will be appended to Beckham’s name in virtually every media mention, American fans will likely expect to see a player as dominant as the great Pelé. Forget putting up hat tricks—between his deteriorating skills and the mediocre talent he’ll line up next to, merely getting onto the score sheet might prove a challenge. But even if Beckham does play well, his presence stateside will likely do more harm than good for American footy.

More here.

Paul Craig Roberts in CounterPunch:

Over time the occupied lands have been appropriated by Israeli settlements and now by a massive wall and special roads on which no Palestinian can travel. Palestinian villages have been cut off from water, from their fields and groves, from schools and hospitals, and from one another. Essentially, what was once Palestine has become isolated ghettos in which the Palestinian inhabitants cannot enter or depart without Israeli permission.

Israel’s policy is to turn Palestinians into refugees and to incorporate the West Bank into Israel. Slowly over time the policy has been implemented in the name of fighting terrorism and protecting Israel. Had Israel tried to achieve this all at once, opposition would have been great and the crime too large for the world to accept. Today Israel’s gradual destruction of Palestine has become part of the fabric of everyday affairs.

Many people, including intelligent Israelis, believe that peace in the Middle East cannot be achieved through military coercion and that peace requires Israel to abandon its policy of stealing Palestine from Palestinians. Jimmy Carter, whose long involvement with the issue makes him very knowledgeable and credible, is one of these people.

More here.

Beth Ann’s experience with a craigslist scam makes the New York Daily News:

The phone calls kept coming, all from people interested in renting her upper West Side apartment.

The only problem: Beth Ann Bovino wasn’t renting it out.

She discovered that someone pretending to be her had placed a real-estate ad on Craigslist using her name, address and even an accurate picture of her brownstone.

The too-good-to-be true ad asked for $1,500 for the one bedroom with a fireplace – utilities included.

So the real Beth Ann Bovino responded to the ad, hoping to put an end to the sham.

“I probably should have gone straight to the cops but I thought I would be Nancy Drew,” said Bovino, 41, an economist at Standard & Poor’s. “That didn’t quite work out.”

[H/t Aaron Showalter & James Owens.]

From Guardian:

The former US president Jimmy Carter was facing a revolt from some of his own supporters yesterday after 14 members of the advisory board of his human rights organisation resigned in protest at his view on Israel and the Palestinians. Mr Carter has faced a backlash to the argument in his latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, for a renewed effort to kick-start the Middle East peace process. The book has been denounced by some commentators as anti-Israeli.

The most vociferous attacks on Mr Carter have come from the pro-Israeli Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard law school. In a series of articles published on a Boston website under the title Ex-President For Sale, Prof Dershowitz has accused Mr Carter of having been in hock to Arab leaders in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The spat between the two men led to further controversy within Brandeis, a Massachusetts university founded by the Jewish community in America. Mr Carter declined an invitation to speak there because he would have had to debate with Prof Dershowitz. Yesterday, Mr Carter announced that he would speak at the university this month, but only after the law professor had been taken off the ticket.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Perhaps all the time spent furiously hunting for the red- and white-stripe-wearing hider Waldo could have been avoided if his eventual spotter just glanced and pointed to the page. At least that is what is indicated by the findings of a new study conducted by researchers at University College London, which appears in the January 9 issue of Current Biology. Psychologist Zhaoping Li presented 10 subjects with a matrix of more than 650 lines leaning at a 45-degree angle, like slashes, with one object somewhere in the array reversed, like a backslash. The participants had to determine within seconds whether “the odd one out” resided on the left- or right-hand side of the screen in front of them. The subjects chose most accurately when they had little to no time to scrutinize the matrix.

More here.

V. S. Ramachandran at Edge.org:

What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the “turning inward” aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.

It has been suggested by Horace Barlow, Nick Humphrey, David Premack and Marvin Minsky (among others) that consciousness may have evolved primarily in a social context. Minsky speaks of a second parallel mechanism that has evolved in humans to create representations of earlier representations and Humphrey has argued that our ability to introspect may have evolved specifically to construct meaningful models of other peoples minds in order to predict their behavior. “I feel jealous in order to understand what jealousy feels like in someone else” — a short cut to predicting that persons behavior.

Here I develop these arguments further. If I succeed in seeing any further it is by “standing on the shoulders of these giants”. Specifically, I suggest that “other awareness” may have evolved first and then counterintutively, as often happens in evolution, the same ability was exploited to model ones own mind — what one calls self awareness. I will also suggest that a specific system of neurons called mirror neurons are involved in this ability. Finally I discuss some clinical examples to illustrate these ideas and make some testable predictions.

More here.

John Nichols in The Nation:

Newspapers may be the dinosaurs of America’s new-media age, hulking behemoths that cost too much to prepare and distribute and that cannot seem to attract young–or even middle-aged–readers in the numbers needed to survive. They may well have entered the death spiral that Philip Meyer, in his recent book The Vanishing Newspaper, predicts will conclude one day in 2043 as the last reader throws aside the final copy of a newspaper.

More here.

From Amnesty International:

On the fifth anniversary of the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, millions of Amnesty International members and supporters are mobilizing around the world in a series of demonstrations and activities calling for the US authorities to close the prison camp once and for all.

As detentions at the US Naval Base move into their sixth year, the organization also called for all detainees to be given a fair trial without further delay or to be released. Demonstrations and other events are being held in cities across the world in more than 20 countries from Washington DC to Tokyo and from Tel Aviv to London, Tunis, Madrid and Asunción.

“No individual can be placed outside the protection of the rule of law, and no government can hold itself above the rule of law. The US government must end this travesty of justice,” said Amnesty International’s Secretary General Irene Khan.

More here.  And go here to see what you can do.

Carole Angier reviews Greed by Elfriede Jelinek, in Literary Review:

If you have read Elfriede Jelinek’s most famous novel, The Piano Teacher, you’ll know what to expect from Greed. First of all, pathological characters, rendered with glassy fury: traditional Austrian self-hatred, like that of Kraus, Canetti and Bernhard, but – I know it’s hard to imagine – even more hateful. Second, something you don’t find even in them: a great deal of violent, sado-masochistic, four-letter sex. In sum, a horrifying vision of human nature (‘friends, that is, greedy beasts’) and nature itself (‘fundamentally evil’), in which human beings are objects, and objects are human – days stretch their limbs, valleys grin, handkerchiefs ‘are quite stiff from everything they’ve had to swallow in their lives’.

Get the flavour? (Sorry, the rub-it-in style is catching.) Disgusting, despairing, but undeniably intriguing, and not just because of the porn. That last quote is a clue: Jelinek’s pages pullulate with weird but wonderful lines that only she could have written.

More here.

From Neatorama.com:

In some parts of the USA, BBQ is not just food, it’s a religion. The fastest way to start a fight is not to talk politics, but to argue about the virtues of wood vs. charcoal vs. gas. Even the word itself is kind of controversial: is it barbecue, barbeque, bar-b-q, or BBQ? Just don’t bring it up with a purist (or the one cooking your burger!)

There’s no argument, however, about the popularity of BBQ. The Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association (yes, it’s a real organization – actually it is just one of many dedicated to barbecuing) did a study called “The State of Barbecue Industry Report”. The 2005 study[pdf] stated that 4 out of every 5 US households own a grill – in fact, 1 in 5 own more than one grill. And not surprisingly, “the primary griller (male) in the majority of households considers themselves to be average or above in terms of cooking skills”.

More here.

From The Economist:

The role of emotions in decisions makes perfect sense. For situations met frequently in the past, such as obtaining food and mates, and confronting or fleeing from threats, the neural mechanisms required to weigh up the pros and cons will have been honed by evolution to produce an optimal outcome. Since emotion is the mechanism by which animals are prodded towards such outcomes, evolutionary and economic theory predict the same practical consequences for utility in these cases. But does this still apply when the ancestral machinery has to respond to the stimuli of urban modernity?

One of the people who thinks that it does not is George Loewenstein, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. In particular, he suspects that modern shopping has subverted the decision-making machinery in a way that encourages people to run up debt. To prove the point he has teamed up with two psychologists, Brian Knutson of Stanford University and Drazen Prelec of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to look at what happens in the brain when it is deciding what to buy.

More here.

Chet Raymo at Science Musings:

Which of the following works would you choose to be lost, if only three could be saved: Michelangelo’s Pieta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, or Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity.

French microbiologist Antoine Danchin asked this question in his book, The Delphic Boat: What Genomes Tell Us.

The answer is easy, he says. Trash Einstein’s paper.

Not because Einstein’s theory of relativity is any less creative or any less important than the works of Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Mozart. In the long run, relativity may have vastly more significance for human life than the work of any single artist.

However, if Einstein had not invented relativity, someone else would have done so. The idea was in the air in 1905. Sooner or later, every detail of Einstein’s work would have been reproduced by someone else, or by a group of people.

The same is true of most big breakthroughs in science. Newton’s theory of universal gravitation was probably inevitable in the late-17th century, if not from Newton then from Robert Hooke, say, or Gottfried Leibnitz. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was conceived simultaneously by Alfred Russel Wallace.

But if Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Mozart had not lived, the works of their particular geniuses would be lost forever.

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Lennard J. Davis in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

What does it mean to be “not deaf enough”? In Fernandes’s case, the accusation meant that she was not a native signer of American Sign Language (ASL). Fernandes learned to sign later in life; she is best described as a user of Pidgin Signed English (PSE), a blend of English and ASL. So she cannot speak with the “accentless” signs that would read, to a native signer, as the most elegant ASL. In effect, she would be speaking sign language the way that Henry Kissinger, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or perhaps Borat speak English.

Many hearing people would deem any prejudice against someone because of his or her accent shocking and unethical. To understand the issue, you have to know that ASL has become the armature on which the figure of deaf identity has been built. Until relatively recently, deafness was seen as simply a physical impairment: the absence of hearing. In the past, much discrimination against deaf people was based on the assumption that they were in fact people without language — that is, dumb. And “dumb” carried the sense of being not only mute but also stupid, as in a “dumb” animal.

But over the past 30 or so years, the status of deaf people has changed in important ways, as deaf activists and scholars have reshaped the idea of deafness, using the civil-rights movement as a model for the struggle to form a deaf identity. Deaf people came to be seen not just as hearing-impaired, but as a linguistic minority, isolated from the dominant culture because that culture didn’t recognize or use ASL.

More here.

Brooklyn-based David Opdyke (born in 1969 in Schenectady, right around the time that upstate New York manufacturing township began precipitously downsizing its industrial base) first studied industrial design at the University of Cincinnati, but soon gave that up (“Too dry, too much like algebra”) for painting, which, so he says, he subsequently gave up as well because, “Painting was too open-ended, you could tunnel into a canvas and never come out.” Wood and nail and hammer, he avers, are “more grounded, there are only so many ways you can put things together.” Though to watch him do so, across a masterful series of recent shows at Roebling Hall and the BravinLee gallery in New York’s Chelsea district, one begins to wonder whether here, too, the young Brooklyn-based artist isn’t still facing a certain pronounced tunneling-in-and-never-coming-out peril. For the gallery-goer, on the other hand, the attendant sense of vertigo, simultaneously harrowing and delicious, has been well-nigh revelatory.

more from Virginia Quarterly Review here.

In 1982, the year hip-hop began to make it seem like the ’60s might finally be over, oversized radios were pumping the utopian futurism of Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” and the urban neorealism of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.” Downtown darling Jean-Michel Basquiat, known on the New York streets as SAMO, painted a memorial to Charlie Parker that read: most young kings get thier head cut off. The current owner of that painting is a relatively new player in the art-world bull market named Shawn Carter, known around the world as Jay-Z.

more from The Nation here.

Unlike the Hitler book—whose discussions are inherently, if grotesquely, fascinating—The Shakespeare Wars is about scholarly quibbles that might seem insignificant to the average reader. Rosenbaum knows this, and from the beginning, he strives to sweep others into his own euphoric orbit. “I want you to care about the argument over pleasure in Shakespeare,” he declares in the preface, and then adds, “Let me begin by describing why I care.” He launches into the first chapter with a life-changing experience he had in Stratford while watching A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That 1970 production, put on by the legendary director Peter Brook, is best remembered for its avant-garde set design: stark white walls, shiny satin costumes, “trees” made of kinetic metal coils that resembled giant Slinkies. But Rosenbaum insists that the dialogue, not the images, cast the most potent spell.

more from Atlantic Monthly here.

From The Atlantic Monthly:

In The Winter of Our Discontent John Steinbeck turns for the first time in his versatile career to the East Coast for his setting and character. Bay Hampton, where on Good Friday morning his new story begins, could be any small seaport on Long Island or on the coast between New York and Boston. It is a village once famous for its Yankee skippers and sea-plucked fortunes, now being run by the new blood from Ireland and Italy. Ethan Allen Hawley, whose name echoes the past, is a gay, unaggressive spirit working as a clerk for Alfio Marullo; like his father before him, Eth has lost the acquisitiveness of his forebears, and with it what remained of family fortune. At the age of thirty-six all he has left is the old Hawley place, a couple of frankly envious children, and the nest egg of $6500 which his patient, pretty Irish wife, Mary, inherited from her brother.

The meaning of Good Friday was burned into Ethan as a boy, and it is ironic that on this day a series of small provocations — a bribe offered and rejected, a fortuneteller at her cards, a remark of Mary’s that prodded under the skin — should startle him from his rut and even launch him on a new career.

More here.