Ruby Chishti. My birth will take place a thousand times no matter how you celebrate it. 2001.

Cast fabric, stitched and stuffed with straw, yarn.

More on this quirky, wonderful Pakistani artist and her work here, here and here.

When Jones writes (in “The Work of Poets”) “Willie Cooper, what are you doing here, this early in your death?” he’s written a perfectly intelligible English sentence and described a perfectly intelligible human sentiment; yet he has also, at the same time, echoed some of the most affecting lines in all of Rilke, from that poet’s “Requiem fur eine Freundlin.” I won’t quote the Rilke, but I will say that, as with all really effective allusions, the predecessor text becomes our algebra, our way out of mere esteem. You feel esteem everywhere in Jones—for phrases (the engine of an old truck hung “from a rafter like a ham”), for cadences (“The hackberry in the sand field will be there long objectifying”), for turns of thought:

My rage began at forty. The unstirred person, the third-
person,
void, the you of accusations and reprisals, visited me.
Many nights we sang together; you don’t even exist.
—From A Defense of Poetry

more from Poetry Magazine here.

In Second Nature, Nobel ­Prize–­winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman proposes what he calls ­“brain-­based epistemology,” which aims at solving the mystery of how we acquire knowledge by grounding it in an understanding of how the brain ­works.

Edelman’s title is, in part, meant “to call attention to the fact that our thoughts often float free of our realistic descriptions of nature,” even as he sets out to explore how the mind and the body interact. He favors the idea that the brain and mind are unified, but has little patience with the claim that the brain is a computer. Fortunately for the general reader, his explanations of brain function are accessible, buttressed by concrete examples and ­metaphors.

more from the Wilson Quarterly here.

Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, Fridays at 9 p.m. ET), now entering its third season, is not science fiction—or “speculative fiction” or “SF,” or whatever you’re supposed to call it these days. Ignore the fact that the series is a remake of a late-’70s Star Wars knockoff. Forget that its action variously unfolds on starships and on a colonized planet called New Caprica. And never mind its stunning special effects, which outclass the endearingly schlocky stuff found elsewhere on its network. Sullen, complex, and eager to obsess over grand conspiracies and intimate betrayals alike, it is TV noir. Listen to Adm. William Adama (Edward James Olmos) gruffly rumble along as a weary soldier in a crooked universe. Check out the way that Hitchcock kisses lead seamlessly to knives in the gut. Just look at the Venetian blinds.

more from Slate here.

Read the title carefully; then read it again. Just about everything in this marvelous book has been weighed and assessed more than is usual. William Mann doesn’t settle for the obvious, the given, the rubber stamp. And so, it seems to me, we’re being gently guided before the book begins. For if there was a phenomenon, a storm, a force or a myth that would be called “Hepburn” long before her death (and for how long afterwards we do not know), then is it possible that “Kate” was the girl, the woman, the body that bore up under the legend? There’s something rare and frightening about actors and actresses. It amounts to a kind of religious worship in which these figures are experienced, “known” by millions of strangers, “loved” by those who will never meet them, when they—the person inside, the person wearing the name and the legend—may sometimes realize, “Well, there’s not much left for me, is there?” You may remember that Katharine Hepburn called her own book (published in 1991, and emphatically not ghostwritten) Me, as if she had always had the fear of being left out. I can only add that if she’d lived to face Mr. Mann’s book, I think she would have put it down, dry-eyed but full of tears, and admitted, quietly: “me.”

more from the NY Observer here.

From Edge:

Edge was recently in Venice for the 2nd World Conference on the Future of Science which was held on September 20th-23rd 2006, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the Isle of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Daniel C. Dennett, who took on Cardinal Ratzinger in his book Breaking the Spell, had hoped some day to confront him personally on his own turf, but due to a sudden promotion, Ratzinger was unavailable and sent his deputy, Monsignor Sanchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Vatican. Dennett, was on his game when he delivered the final talk of the conference on “The Domestication of the Wild Memes of Religion” in front of the packed audience. Later, back at Hotel Monaco and Grand Canal, Dennett, Michael Gazzaniga, the Monsignor, among others, were relaxing around the bar, when a posse of Italian paparazzi suddenly stormed through the bar heading to the dock outside. Two speedboat taxis pulled up and deposited Paris Hilton and her entourage on the dock. In one Fellini moment: end of discussion of natural selection, of Charles Darwin, of the Pope, of Daniel C. Dennett. The Edgies went tabloid for the rest of the evening.

Fortunately for Edge readers, Professor Dennett, who bonded with the paparazzi, was there with his digital camera to capture the moment.

More here. Picture on the left shows Paris Hilton Arriving at Hotel Monaco [photo by Daniel C. Dennett].

From The Hindu:

IN the tribal belt of Orissa, in the infamous Kalahandi district, there is a village, Dasi, where the people live in extreme poverty and deprivation. Hunger and malnutrition are a way of life here, and the future seems bleak. In such conditions, in 2000, the Ma Thakurani Self Help Group was formed by Parivartan, a development organisation working with the poor in Kalahandi for more than a decade. The purpose was to bring poor women together; and to practise credit and thrift activities. In the village lies a bhatti, a parlour for illicit liquor consumption where many men-folk consume alchohol, get drunk, become violent and create havoc.

The Ma Thakurani Self Help Group consists of 13 women. Together, they save, borrow, meet and discuss issues. Together, they make a difference in each other’s lives. One day, after their monthly SHG meeting, the members of the Ma Thakurani SHG group passed by the bhatti. The men as usual were inebriated; they foul mouthed the women, and accused the SHG of ruining the village. The women had already had enough. For 15 years, they had borne the brunt of the drunken men and the bhatti. They decided to do something about this situation in the village; they decided to take charge. They called a Village Committee meeting and expressed that something needed to be done about the bhatti; it had to be shut. They received a lot of support from other villagers, and under pressure, the bhatti owner, committed that he will shut the liquor shop.

The members accepted the challenge, much to the ward official’s surprise and everyone else’s too.

More here.

Ruth Pavey reviews the novel by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari, in The Independent:

The novel is set in 1979, a time of reckless political upheaval in Afghanistan just before the Soviet Union’s vain attempt to impose order by invasion. Using a technique of total immersion, Atiq Rahimi plunges the reader straight into the pain and bewilderment of a character thinking in the first person, so wounded by a brutal attack that he hardly knows whether he is awake or asleep, alive or dead, as he lies in a roadside sewer, hearing a child’s voice calling him “Father”. This is a short novel, and the reader is a quarter of the way through before learning that the confused thoughts we are sharing are those of Farhad, an educated young man who has been out drinking with a friend and forgotten the curfew.

More here.

Kevin Purday reviews Why We Love by Helen E. Fisher, in Metapsychology:

This book is an ambitious attempt to map the physiological basis of what we call love. The author is an anthropologist but in this work she cooperates with specialists in several fields, most notably specialists in brain scanning, to try to gain a genuinely comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of love. She is currently a research professor at Rutgers University and is already well known for her books The First Sex, and Anatomy of Love.

The book is a melange of anthropology — stories of falling in love from cultures all over the world, history — numerous historical accounts of love, literature — many quotations about love from poetry and novels, animal biology — analogies between human love and ‘love’ in many different species of animal, and human biology/psychology — in-depth accounts of the physiology and psychology of love. It is a heady mixture.

More here.

Jack Shafer in Slate:

That Michael Bloomberg, who now presides over New York City as mayor, created in a little over two decades a news and information giant worth $5 billion-plus speaks as much to his enterprise as it does to the sloth and myopia of the conventional press. Better than anyone, Bloomberg perceived in the early 1980s an untapped need for instantly transmitted, market-moving news for traders of stocks and bonds. He understood that with new and affordable computer technologies he could leapfrog the old guard at Reuters and Telerate (once owned by the Wall Street Journal‘s parent, Dow Jones). A 10-second advantage over a competitor on a market-moving morsel of data could easily translate into substantial profits. Stock and bond traders rushed to rent the pricey Bloomberg Terminal, which now costs users about $1,425 a month. It not only delivered data but allowed customers to assemble elaborate, software-powered “what-if?” scenarios, and spat out useful analytical charts and graphs. One testament to Bloomberg’s power is that every major American newspaper business page now has a terminal or two doing heavy lifting for its reporters who cover the markets.

More here.

Daniel Mendelsohn reviews Jonathan Franzen’s new collection of essays in the New York Times:

Like the hero of some Greek play, Jonathan Franzen — apparently motivated, as so many tragic characters are, by an excessively lofty sense of himself — caused his moment of greatest triumph to disintegrate into public humiliation. The triumph, of course, was his National Book Award-winning novel, “The Corrections,” an acerbic and often searingly painful dissection of one Midwestern family’s disintegration as its stodgy values were put to the test by the go-go avidity of American culture in the 1990’s. The public humiliation (of course) was the fracas that ensued after Franzen expressed disdain for Oprah Winfrey’s choice of his novel for her book club; as he put it, his work belonged to the “high-art literary tradition,” whereas Oprah’s picks had tended, in his opinion, to be “schmaltzy.” As with Greek heroes, fervid adherence to principle did not come cheap: Oprah’s invitations, it is said, can increase sales of a given book by more than half a million copies.

Unlike Oedipus or Hippolytus, however, Franzen seems to have learned nothing from his fall. Or so you’re forced to conclude after reading “The Discomfort Zone,” an unappetizing new essay collection that makes it only too clear that the weird poles between which the author seemed to oscillate during l’affaire Oprah — a kind of smug cleverness, on the one hand, and a disarming, sometimes misguided candor, on the other; a self-involved and self-regarding precocity and an adolescent failure to grasp the effect of his grandiosity on others — frame not only the career, but the man himself.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Water runs downhill—we all know that. As a rule, it follows the path of steepest descent, seeking out the shortest and fastest route from top to bottom. So how can we make sense of meandering rivers, which wiggle-waggle down the valley, prolonging their journey to the sea and greatly lengthening their course? Why doesn’t the flowing water—acting under the tug of gravity—just carve out a shortcut across all those loops?

I first encountered the mysteries of meanders in an article by Luna B. Leopold and Walter Langbein, published 40 years ago in Scientific American. They gave a lucid account of how meanders form and why they assume their characteristic sinuous shapes. I was a student at the time, and the article made a lasting impression. Not that I was inspired to go off and pursue a career in potamology, but the Leopold-Langbein theory of meanders was an eye-opener all the same. It brought home to me the curious fact that the world is a comprehensible place: You can look at a landform, say, and expect to understand what you see. The patterns of nature make sense, if you know how to read them.

More here.

Noam Scheiber of The New Republic recognizes the problem, arguing that it’s impossible for liberals to invoke the common good whenever it’s convenient and ignore it when it’s not. It would be better for Democrats not to bring the idea up in the first place, he says, rather than go to the voters as the party fervently dedicated to advancing the common good—except when they aren’t. National health insurance, for example, can’t be mandated by the common good if abortion remains solely a question of inviolable privacy rights. But the latter position, clearly, is not open for discussion among liberals. At a recent forum of the liberal Center for American Progress, Rachel Laser, an abortion rights activist, said that 1.3 million abortions in America each year is too many. She reports that when she asked how many people in the room felt the same way, “It was only me and maybe one other who raised our hands.”

Ultimately, a public philosophy based on the common good won’t work unless it can make useful distinctions about what is and isn’t common, and what is and isn’t good. As it stands, common-good liberalism is just case-by-case liberalism on stilts. In the fight between those who say big ideas are indispensable to the resuscitation of liberalism and those who say big ideas are incompatible with the essence of liberalism, the scorecard shows that, so far, both sides are right.

more from Claremont Review here.

In the winter of 1776, John Adams read “Common Sense,” an anonymous, fanatical, and brutally brilliant seventy-seven-page pamphlet that would convince the American people of what more than a decade of taxes and nearly a year of war had not: that it was nothing less than their destiny to declare independence from Britain. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind” was its astonishing and inspiring claim about the fate of thirteen infant colonies on the edge of the world. “The sun never shone on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom; but of a continent—of at least one-eighth part of the habitable globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.” Whether these words were preposterous or prophetic no one could say for sure, but everyone wondered: Who could have written such stirring stuff?

more from The New Yorker here.

Three gherkin stumps are looking at a pile of carpets, while a dealer advises them. (Actually, they’re not carpets but slices of Mortadella and Lyon sausage, and the dealer is a piece of radish.) Is this a snapshot taken by a drunk looking at the remains of a smorgasbord at four in the morning? No, it’s Peter Fischli and David Weiss in 1979, staging and photographing miniature incidents for Wurstserie (Sausage Series). Just what kind of artistic partnership is this? Who comes up with this kind of mind-expanding silliness? A 30-minute film from 1981 provides something of an answer: it’s a rat and a bear. Shot on 8mm blown up to 16mm, Der Geringste Widerstand (The Least Resistance) features the two Swiss artists dressed in furry brown rat and panda bear costume roaming around a Los Angeles reminiscent of a third-rate buddy-cop flick. Meeting on a bridge over a busy motorway, they discuss the latest developments in the art world: ‘Any work?’ ‘No, but some money.’

more from Frieze here.

Davies’s big idea goes back to the Big Bang. According to the standard picture, the laws of physics were already in place at the explosive origin of the universe. But he contends that perhaps the universe and its laws emerged together in malleable form: “We would expect that these laws were not infinitely precise mathematical statements, but they would have a certain sloppiness or ambiguity that could lead to observable effects from the earliest universe, when these laws were still congealing.”

So how did compatible life and mind come into being? Davies’s explanation, involving quantum mechanics and something called backwards causation, is impossible to compress without sounding “ludicrous”, he confesses. He’s right: it’s impenetrable.

But this scenario requires an act of faith as great as that of any religious believer. So hasn’t he sidestepped the God question? Science can meet religion on middle ground, he says, but a superbeing who intervenes in events is anathema to most scientists. “You have to understand that science deals with hypotheses that can be tested, and religion proceeds from acts of faith that can’t be tested.”

more from The Sunday Times here.

One wants, post-apartheid, to be able to frame South Africa more cohesively. But what exists now doesn’t feel diverse, it feels schizophrenic. The sweep of the view from Silvermine; famous farm-stall fig preserves; a man left for dead on the shoulder of the road, having been robbed of his prosthetic leg; it won’t, it cannot, cohere. The splitting going on now is not so much about race or public disclosure as it is about time: the newness of this democracy vs. the welter of memory, and its bitterness, fueling what V. S. Naipaul called “the depth of that African rage.” Mandela deferred this schism for a while. He acted as a stopgap, a magical hybrid, his promises of a gorgeous future sound because of his ancient face. His national nomens, Madiba and Mkhulu, remind everyone of what he has weathered: Madiba is the title conferred on honorary elders of his clan, and Mkhulu means grandfather.

In his novels, J. M. Coetzee returns, over and over, to the problem of forming a national identity in the midst of a crippling allegory, a prewritten, prefigured narrative borne from the rape of the past. (He now lives in self-exile in Australia.) If the new South Africa first needed a grandfather, now it needs veritable Indigo Children – or at least, a generation of young people who believe in transparency even as they behave creatively, as risk-takers and iconoclasts. Give them (another) ten years. Things change, says a Sesotho proverb. Matsatsi a loyana: Days are not the same.

more from n+1 here.

You’re a Grand Old Flag

You’re a grand old flag,
You’re a high-flying flag,
And forever in peace may you wave.
You’re the emblem of
The land I love,
So fuck Puerto Rico. Fifty stars is a nice round number,
and it’s hard enough to memorize all the capitals as it is.

God Bless America

God bless America.
We basically just kick ass.

America the Beautiful

O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.
I probably won’t vote when I’m finally 18.
My older brother is a gay libertarian
From sea to shining sea.

more from McSweeneys here.

Some traditional philosophical problems, though unfortunately not very many, can eventually receive a scientific solution. This actually happened with the problem of what constitutes life. We cannot now today recover the passions with which mechanists and vitalists debated whether a “mechanical” account of life could be given. The point is not so much that the mechanists won and the vitalists lost, but that we got a much richer conception of the mechanisms. I think we are in a similar situation today with the problem of consciousness. It will, I predict, eventually receive a scientific solution. But like other scientific solutions in biology, it will have to give us a causal account. It will have to explain how brain processes cause conscious experiences, and this may well require a much richer conception of brain functioning than we now have.

more from the NY Review of Books here.