In Scientific American:

In February 2003 a Sudanese militia began targeting tribes in Darfur, a region in western Sudan. The militia killed and displaced vast numbers of people in what would later be called genocide. Early surveys by the World Health Organization (WHO) found a two-month death rate of 10,000 a month, and later estimates simply extended the death toll based on that rate, up to 180,000 after 18 months. In the spring of 2005, however, the U.S. Department of State reported its own figure, including a lower estimate of 63,000 to 146,000. Some news organizations still cite the lower number, stating that tens of thousands have died.

In an attempt to form a more accurate assessment, sociologists calculated death rates and total deaths during a 19-month period using what they consider the seven best primary surveys from camps in the state of West Darfur. Together the surveys, conducted by the WHO and the humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières, document pre-camp violence in five camps and in-camp mortality throughout the state. Projecting their data to 31 months, or about three quarters of the conflict’s duration, they estimated that between 58,000 and 85,000 died in West Darfur alone. Assuming the same ratios of death and displacement in adjoining North and South Darfur, they arrive at a conservative estimate of 170,000 to 255,000 deaths.

(For those with access to Science, the study can be found here.)

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Don’t eat your spinach.

That’s the word coming today from the FDA: they want everyone to avoid bagged spinach until they can get to the bottom of a nasty outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7, a virulent strain that infects an estimated 70,000 people in the United States and kills about 60. A number of people have gotten sick in the new outbreak, apparently from eating contaminated spinach, and there’s been a report of one death in Wisconsin.

There’s a fascinating–albeit gruesome–backstory to this outbreak, which I’ve been researching for my next book, a portrait of Escherichia coli. Escherichia coli is regular inhabitant of the human gut (not to mention the guts of mammals and birds). You carry about a trillion harmless E. coli. E. coli has also become the model par excellence for understanding the nuts and bolts of life. Lots of Nobel Prizes were awarded for research on these fascinating bugs.

Over the twentieth century, scientists began to discover that some strains of Escherichia coli are not so nice. A group of strains called Shigella cause diarrhea, for example, killing over a million people a year. And new virulent strains keep turning up.

More here.

Susan Okie in the New England Journal of Medicine:

In a world with many celebrities but few heroes, Bill Gates has attained heroic status by committing much of his enormous fortune to the advancement of global equity. He and his wife have targeted the causes of health disparities between rich and poor, and their foundation has become a driving force in international aid and in research on AIDS and other diseases. In June, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s likely impact on global health was amplified when Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest man, announced plans to give most of his fortune to the foundation established by the richest one. 

Buffett’s gift, worth about $37 billion, will double the foundation’s endowment from $29 billion to approximately $60 billion, making it by far the world’s largest charitable foundation. The gift will also increase the foundation’s annual giving from $1.36 billion last year to about $3 billion, or approximately $1 per year for every person in the poorer half of the world’s population. By comparison, the World Bank estimates that total health-related aid to developing countries in 2004 (from governments, international organizations, and private sources) was about $12.7 billion (see graph).

More here.

David Crossland in Spiegel:

A new book about humor under the Nazis gives some interesting insights into life in the Third Reich and breaks yet another taboo in Germany’s treatment of its history. Jokes told during the era, says the author, provided the populace with a pressure release.

Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn’t saluting.
“Why aren’t you saluting like the others?” Hitler barks.
“Mein Führer, I’m the nurse,” comes the answer. “I’m not crazy!”

That joke may not be a screamer, but it was told quite openly along with many others about Hitler and his henchmen in the early years of the Third Reich, according to a new book on humor under the Nazis.

But by the end of the war, a joke could get you killed. A Berlin munitions worker, identified only as Marianne Elise K., was convicted of undermining the war effort “through spiteful remarks” and executed in 1944 for telling this one:

Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin’s radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. “Why don’t you just jump?” suggests Göring.

A fellow worker overheard her telling the joke and reported her to the authorities.

More here.

C. J. Chivers in the New York Times:

The forest stands overhead in the dusty mountain air, a dense composition of fir trees on a slope, planted by labor gangs decades ago.

Its right angles are sharp and clear, forming a square cross with an upraised arm on one side and a turned-down arm on the other. Viewed from this remote village, the effect strongly suggests a living swastika, a huge and chilling symbol, out of place and time.

This is the so-called Eki Naryn swastika, a man-made arrangement of trees near the edge of the Himalayas. It is at least 60 years old, according to the region’s forestry service, and roughly 600 feet across.

More here.

From The London Times:

SUBJECTIVITY and passion are characteristics not always conducive to successful journalism. But Oriana Fallaci made them her watchwords and combined them with a brutal honesty. It was as much her fiery and unforgiving personality that made her Italy’s best-known and most controversial exponent of her trade as her record of revealing interviews with the likes of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Henry Kissinger.

It was her abundant rage and pride that in the last years of her life brought her both her widest readership and led to her being charged by an Italian court last year with the crime of denigrating Islam.

Fallaci’s sense of mission sprang from a childhood spent under Mussolini, and specifically in German-occupied Florence, where her father was one of the leaders of the Resistance. Thereafter she became preoccupied with power, its abuse and those who wielded it. She saw herself principally as a representative of the voiceless and repressed — especially women — and used her interviews fearlessly, even recklessly, to challenge those in authority.

Her articles did not read as dialogues, much less as a coolly objective profile of her subject, but as abrasive statements of her position on matters such as the Cold War or Islam’s teaching on women. This peculiarly Italian directness — what her race sees as an avoidance of the Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy of false politeness — she once justified thus: “I am the judge. I’m the one who decides. Listen, if I was a painter and I was doing your portrait, have I or haven’t I the right to paint you as I want?”

More here.

From Nature:

It’s an effort to pool the knowledge of university professors and students around the globe and produce 1,000 university textbooks using wiki technology. The books will span undergraduate subjects from biology to literature to computer science. There are millions of university teachers around the world and tens of millions of students, whose knowledge could be put to greater use, says project instigator Rick Watson at the University of Georgia in Athens. Well, it’s not an entire free-for-all. Anyone will be able to contribute to the new textbooks, true — but unlike wikipedia, the online, user-made encyclopedia, only an editor will be able to approve contributions. Otherwise the texts risk being wrong, long and hard to follow, with students being able to fall back on the old “but it’s in the text, sir” excuse for wrong answers in their essays.

The particular goal of this project is to create free books for those students in developing countries who cannot afford traditional textbooks, which can cost $100 or more.

More here.

Noted journalist, grandstander, and bigot Oriana Fallaci is dead.

Oriana Fallaci, one of Italy’s best-known writers and war correspondents who goaded the world’s great and issued a vitriolic assault on Islam after the September 11 attacks on the United States, died on Friday aged 77.

Fallaci died in her home town of Florence after battling cancer for several years, a hospital official said.

Aggressive and provocative to the end, Fallaci made her name as a tenacious interviewer of some of the most famous leaders of the 20th century.

She quarreled with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, provoked U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger into likening himself to a cowboy, and tore off a chador (enveloping Islamic robe) in a meeting with Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

(Hat tip: Alta Price.)

Sunday, September 17th is Global Day for Darfur.

The Global Day for Darfur was originally conceived by a group of NGOs working on Darfur and concerned about the slow response of the international community to the crisis.

September 17 th, 2006 will see organisations and individuals around the world involved in peaceful demonstrations, rallies, marches, exhibitions and concerts.

September 17 th will mark the one year anniversary of the signing of the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome Document.

Within which the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ was enshrined as an international doctrine.

The document pledges “to take collective action …if national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

In addition, the September 17 th events will coincide with the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

(In New York, there will be performances and a rally at Central Park, East Meadow, beginning at 2:00 p.m. Speakers include Madeline Albright, who appears to be doing what she can to make up for her most shameful behavior in the wake of the Rwandan genocide when she was UN ambassador.)

Kay S. Hymowitz in The City Journal:

Time passes, and we get old. Our faces wrinkle, our hair goes gray and MIA, our teeth yellow, our knees ache, we forget the names of people we said hello to just yesterday on the way to pick up the Geritol, and there are days when a nap sounds real nice.

At least that’s the way it’s been for most of humanity. But rumors that boomers will be joining the great biological stream turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Boomers—especially feminist-influenced women of a certain class who are now publishing their philosophy of life after 50—will not be growing old. And it seems equally inaccurate to say that they will mature. They are going to season, as Gail Sheehy puts it in her most recent book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman. They will “develop”; they will “grow.” Sheehy and her sister scribes have come forward to tell you that today’s older women are a new breed. They’re busy, busy, busy! They go to the gym! They work in animal shelters! They travel! They get divorced! And yes (Yes! Yes!), they have orgasms!

And in their own inimitably modern, American, follow-your-bliss, self-absorbed way, they want to tell you all about it.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The oldest civilization of ancient Mexico and Central America has finally yielded solid evidence of a writing system. Researchers who analyzed a stone block covered in a sequence of faint symbols have declared it the oldest conclusive writing sample from the New World, dating to around 900 B.C. or earlier and belonging to the region’s oldest complex society, the Olmec. “Imagine if you will this extraordinary civilization that we’ve known about for 100 years suddenly to become literate. It gives them a voice in a way that’s not directly accessible through artifacts alone,” says one of the analysts, anthropologist Stephen Houston of Brigham Young University. He and his colleagues report their conclusions in the September 15 Science.

The Olmec, who are famous for having carved heads up to eight feet tall out of rock, held sway in so-called Mesoamerica (central Mexico to Costa Rica) from 1400 to 400 B.C. They constituted a major civilization, having several large cities and outposts as well as irrigation, iconography and a calendar. Signs of writing were strangely lacking, however, except for some controversial claims based on limited imagery.

More here.

Google may be about to change the face of philanthropy.

The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.

But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes.

One of its maiden projects reflects the philanthropy’s nontraditional approach. According to people briefed on the program, the organization, called Google.org, plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.

(Hat tip: Misha Lepetich.)

John Cassidy looks at neruoeconomics, in the New Yorker. Now if only Cosma Shalizi would tell us more about econophysics.

Acknowledging that people don’t always behave rationally was an important, if obvious, first step. Explaining why they don’t has proved much harder, and recently Camerer and other behavioral economists have turned to neuroscience for help. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, neuroscientists, using MRI machines and other advanced imaging techniques, had developed a basic understanding of the roles played by different parts of the brain in the performance of particular tasks, such as recognizing visual patterns, doing mental computations, and reacting to threats. In the mid-nineties, Antonio Damasio, a neurologist at the University of Iowa, and Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at N.Y.U., each published a book for lay readers describing how the brain processes emotions. “We were reading the neuroscience, and it just seemed obvious that there were applications to economics, both in terms of ideas and methods,” said George Loewenstein, an economist and psychologist at Carnegie Mellon who read Damasio’s and LeDoux’s books. “The idea that you can look inside the brain and see what is happening is just so intensely exciting.”

In 1997, Loewenstein and Camerer hosted a two-day conference in Pittsburgh, at which a group of neuroscientists and psychologists gave presentations to about twenty economists, some of whom were inspired to do imaging studies of their own. In the past few years, dozens of papers on neuroeconomics have been published, and the field has attracted some of the most talented young economists, including David Laibson, a forty-year-old Harvard professor who is an expert in consumer behavior. “Natural science has moved ahead by studying progressively smaller units,” Laibson told me. “Physicists started out studying the stars, then they looked at objects, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, and so on. My sense is that economics is going to follow the same path.

Rob Edwards in New Scientist:

IT IS the biggest contributor to climate change. Now chemists are hoping to convert carbon dioxide into a useful fuel, with a little help from the sun.

If they succeed, it will be possible to recycle the greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels. The work could also lead to a way for future Mars missions to generate fuel for their return journey from carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere.

Chemists have long hoped to find a method of bringing the combustion of fuel full circle by turning CO₂ back into useful hydrocarbons. Now researchers at the University of Messina in Italy have developed an electro-catalytic technique they say could do the job. “The conversion of CO₂ to fuel is not a dream, but an effective possibility which requires further research,” says team leader Gabriele Centi.

The researchers chemically reduced CO₂ to produce eight and nine-carbon hydrocarbons using a catalyst of particles of platinum and palladium confined in carbon nanotubes. These hydrocarbons can be made into petrol and diesel.

To begin with, the researchers used sunlight plus a thin film of titanium dioxide to act as a photocatalyst to split water into oxygen gas plus protons and electrons. These are then carried off separately, via a proton membrane and wire respectively, before being combined with CO₂ plus the nano-catalyst to produce the hydrocarbons.

More here.

How much does it really matter what Grass said to Bellow, or what his critics say about Grass, or what Grass says about the “white West”? In the long run, not a great deal. Grass’s intemperate pronouncements in the past few decades have scarcely driven German public opinion or foreign policy, and his best works—such as “The Tin Drum,” “Cat and Mouse,” “Dog Years,” and probably his memoir, too—will be read long after the political polemics, not to mention the current storm over his belated confession, have been forgotten. But there’s a connection between his polemical and literary work. Günter Grass is one of the last examples of a German tradition that puts poets and thinkers on a high pedestal, from which they deliver, like prophets, their verdicts on the world. There are times, certainly, when the writer can use his moral authority to good effect: Thomas Mann during the war, Grass after the war. At other times, the very things that make a man such as Grass a great novelist—the capacity to turn experience into myth, for example—can be obstacles to cogent political analysis. Grass’s role as a moralist and a scold came from the same imagination that created the fictions. But there are certain aspects of the past that should be precisely remembered, as Grass was always the first to point out, in anger, and now, one should hope, in sorrow.

more from The New Yorker here.

To many people, of course, the idea of marking up a book seems distasteful – a violation of the text, a sign of disrespect for the author’s authority. The structuralist literary theorist Roland Barthes divided readers into two categories: those who produced marginalia, and those who left the book as they found it, instead writing their glosses elsewhere. Barthes himself belonged to the second category. He copied out extracts from his reading on what looks (in the reproductions I’ve seen) like small pieces of graph paper.

No doubt Barthes developed a whole theory around the contrast -– though the distinction need not be so airtight as it might sound. Consistency in such matters is not necessary. Over time, my own attitudes and routines have certainly changed, growing ever more nuanced but also more specific to the kind of text open in front of me.

more from insidehighered.com (via TPM) here.

To keep his blessed armor hard he ate
lean meat, cruciferous greens, few
grains. He liked his instants
parceled out in reps and sets, and he was glad,
to dangle like an ape from an iron bar, admiring
his bicep bulge (amen): He worked hard
the slant board, the oblique
twist, and his own form
waxed and polished, his house a bleached vault
where he lit votive candles to the clear
persistence of his little self though no one else
showed up. He liked
the slammed door, the map’s red line, to stomp
a clutch, to clutch the black wheel, to wheel
away in steaming rage.

more from Mary Karr’s poem at Paris Review here.

The title of Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, The Shakespeare Wars, exaggerates: There may be occasional skirmishes, but real battles over the plays of William Shakespeare these days are few and far between (other than whether Shakespeare really wrote them, though this is not what interests Rosenbaum). The Shakespeare wars have in fact been over for a while. They had just begun when Rosenbaum quit graduate school at Yale in the late 1960s. Unhappy with where the profession was heading, Rosenbaum turned from teaching Shakespeare’s sonnets to a career in journalism, and in the ensuing decades he has written books, essays, and opinion pieces on everything from Seinfeld to Hitler.

It was a smart career move.

more from Bookforum here.

When the notorious British street artist Banksy invades L.A. on September 15, watch out. No, seriously. Watch out. You might just catch one of his altered thrift-store classical paintings hanging in one of the city’s art museums — hung by the artist himself — or one of his sardonic stencils mingling among the vapid billboards and gang graffiti. And you should especially keep your eyes open since the artist wouldn’t want you stepping on any of the precious livestock he might or might not coop up at his “three-day vandalized-warehouse extravaganza,” titled “Barely Legal,” at a location that won’t be revealed until the day of the opening, via his Web site (www.banksy.co.uk). More important, stay vigilant: Already this week, he’s rumored to have placed a Guantanamo Bay prisoner look-alike in the Thunder Mountain ride at Disneyland.

more from the LA Weekly here.

In the LRB, Tony Judt looks at the erosion of America’s liberal intellectuals, especially in the wake of the war on terror.

For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War on Terror and the early Cold War.[1] Neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines.