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.

From The Cincinnati Review:

The rocking chair looked comfortable enough when I decided to sit here and read, but I find myself shifting, distracted. I keep looking up to watch people passing on the sidewalk, following them until they disappear from sight. I seem to be looking for distractions, looking for ways to avoid what I should be doing –reading. The book on my lap is Herzog, by Saul Bellow. I know it’s a good book, an important book, one that I want to read, should read, but I’ve been struggling to finish it for a week now, trying to find a way into it, around it, through it.

It’s here on the porch that I realize why I am putting it off, putting it down, putting it away. The book, not the rocking chair, is making me uncomfortable. It’s not the discomfort of a novel poorly written, but the opposite. My discomfort is that of a child holding the pieces of a broken vase in front of his mother. Of a woman standing nearly naked in a dressing room and asking a salesperson on the other side of the door for a larger size. It’s the uneasiness of someone driving alone with the gas gauge light on and no service station in sight. Herzog is making me nervous.

More here.

From BBC News:

A study in Nature magazine suggests the species may have lived in Gorham’s Cave on Gibraltar up to 24,000 years ago. The Neanderthal people were believed to have died out about 35,000 years ago, at a time when modern humans were advancing across the continent. The new evidence suggests they held on in Europe’s deep south long after the arrival of Homo sapiens. The research team believes the Gibraltar Neanderthals may even have been the very last of their kind.

Though once thought to have been our ancestors, the Neanderthals are now considered an evolutionary dead end. They appear in the fossil record around 230,000 years ago and, at their peak, these squat, physically powerful hunters dominated a wide range, spanning Britain and Iberia in the west to Israel in the south and Uzbekistan in the east. Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa, and displaced the Neanderthals after entering Europe about 40,000 years ago.

More here.

IN 1922 WALTER LIPPMANN PUBLISHED HIS BEST selling book Public Opinion. He was only thirty-three years old, but already well on his way to becoming mid-century America’s preeminent public intellectual. His argument in Public Opinion was radical, and disturbing. Democracy did not work as it was commonly thought. In theory humans-as citizens-act rationally. They inform themselves on the issues of the day, weigh the evidence, discuss it with their fellow citizens, and then vote to maximize their interests. Democracy in practice, Lippmann claimed, resembles nothing like this. Citizens-as humans-act upon evocative symbols, evaluate according to feelings, consult their desires, and vote to fulfill their fantasies. Leaders who realize this can control democracy through the “manufacture of consent.”1

Today, Lippmann, while certainly not forgotten, is not exactly celebrated. His conclusions are too unsettling and his recommendations too pessimistic for mainstream political consumption. Among progressives he’s recalled, if at all, as the whipping boy of the well-known left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky, who regularly condemns him-with some justification-as the architect of modern technocratic rule. This neglect and censure is a shame, for lost with Lippmann is the knowledge of how politics works in an age of fantasy.

more from Radical Society here.

Frayn is the kind of philosopher who can’t quite believe that what he believes is mostly true; that, by and large, things are much as we all suppose them to be, and that we suppose them to be that way mostly because that’s the way they are. And yet, on the face of it, that’s surely the view that has much the most to recommend it. As a matter of fact, there’s no competition; it’s the only story that anybody has a glimmer of how to tell. It’s one thing to remark that there could be other stories; it’s something quite else actually to tell one that is remotely plausible. No doubt, there’s plenty to worry about at the fringes of what we believe; quantum entanglement really is hard to swallow, and I, for one, can’t get my head around black holes. But Bossie? And the car in the garage? What’s the likelihood that we’ve got it all wrong about them? How could we have? What on earth would conceivably explain Bossie being in my story if not Bossie being in the world?

I will tell you a philosophical joke. Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he began, ‘there are exactly 12 philosophical positions.’ A voice called from the audience: ‘Thirteen.’ ‘There are,’ the lecturer repeated, ‘exactly 12 possible philosophical positions; not one less and not one more.’ ‘Thirteen,’ the voice from the audience called again. ‘Very well, then,’ said the lecturer, now perceptibly irked, ‘I shall proceed to enumerate the 12 possible philosophical positions. The first is sometimes called “naive realism”. It is the view according to which things are, by and large, very much the way that they seem to be.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice from the audience. ‘Fourteen!’

more from the LRB here.

The establishment of scientific discourse during the period known as the Enlightenment magnificently illustrates the vicissitudes of imposing linguistic order on the world. Early scientists not only struggled to control an indomitable nature that refused the strict parameters of a systematizing logic, but also fought among themselves to assert their own personal schemes of how nature actually works. The career of François Péron (1775-1810) is a case in point. This young soldier-turned-naturalist and his most important object of study-the misunderstood jellyfish-became central figures in a taxonomic battle that raged for more than a hundred years, and is still not quite over.

more from Cabinet here.

David Hockney is relaxing after lunch. The house feels full as his friend John, who made the meal, and assistant Jean-Pierre, an accordionist – true: I’ve seen the accordion – move around. “I remember seeing a Sargent in the Chicago Art Institute,” he says, “and thinking, fucking good, you know, great, and even the bravura slickness, I admire it. And then I went round the corner and there’s a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it’s not the level of Van Gogh.” The house is a brilliant succession of different coloured rooms, a kind of benign House of Usher. Like his London home, it transports you into a generous roving space. I have to admit this was not how I imagined it when I was on a dank train from Doncaster to Bridlington, looking over at a woman reading a book called The World’s Greatest Serial Killers. It was a dismal late-summer day as I headed north towards the Yorkshire seaside town where Hockney has been spending much of his time painting the local landscape.

more from The Guardian Unlimited here.

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer’s alter-ego Jean-Luc Piquant discusses paranoia over high energy physics experiments.

Be afraid! Be very afraid! Those evil particle physicists are at it again with their massive high-energy colliders, and if they’re not closely monitored, their high-falutin’ “experiments” might put an end to the universe as we know it. This could be doomsday, people, the ultimate Apocalypse! At least that’s what an average citizen might think if they happened to stumble on this little item on Slashdot, which Jen-Luc Piquant found courtesy of the mystery blogger behind Angry Physics. It resurrects the rumor of universe-destroying mini-black holes that could be created once CERN’s Large Hadron Collider goes online in — is it 2008? I haven’t been keeping up with the official start date.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the item appeared on the five-year anniversary of those infamous terrorist attacks on NYC and DC. Nonetheless, the smell of fear — or at least of fear-mongering — was still lingering in the air as various members of the Bush administration capped off a pre-election week of stumping across the nation, telling us why we should still be absolutely terrified of innocent-seeming items like bottled water and shampoo, which MIGHT EXPLODE ANY MINUTE. However, in fairness to the White House, concerns over continuing terrorist threats are much, much more valid than the worry that the LHC will end Life As We Know It On Earth — almost infinitely so. Terrorist attacks have actually happened, and our country is still a major target of extremist groups, so a certain degree of caution should appropriately be exercised. (I still say the whole liquids and gels ban on flights is ludicrous, however.)

Even in physics, one shouldn’t dismiss a potential risk outright, particularly since the LHC will achieve unprecedented energies that will hopefully lead to exciting new physics. “New physics” implies that scientists could find something surprising, or revolutionary, which could in turn be potentially dangerous. After all, Wilhelm Roentgen never dreamed in 1898 that his newly discovered x-rays could be fatal in large doses — the proverbial double-edged sword. But in case people have forgotten, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about mini-black holes being produced in colliders. Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) generated all kinds of world-ending rumors when it fired up in 1999, prompting the Sunday Times of London to print an hysterical article with the headline, “Big Bang Machine Could Destroy Earth!”

In Prospect Magazine, Danny Kruger meditates on the Left, the Right and the fraternity in Britain’s political future.

[Gordon] Brown is following the advice of David Goodhart, editor of Prospect, who has called in a recent Demos paper for the left to embrace the concept of “progressive nationalism.” Goodhart’s thesis is that multiculturalism threatens the basis of the egalitarian settlement. He argues that “national identity may be the best way to preserve the left’s collective ideals.” And so he encourages an extension of the concept of citizenship and a rallying of loyalty around the rights and services provided by the state.

Ironically, this approach reflects late Hegel, the Hegel who adapted his philosophy to the reactionary climate of post-Napoleonic Prussia. In the brief interlude between the French defeat of Prussia in 1807 and Waterloo in 1815, the idea of the nation had emerged as the ally not of the state, but of the individual. As Karl Popper, albeit uncomprehendingly, put it, “Modern nationalism, strangely enough, was in its short history before Hegel a revolutionary and liberal creed. By accident it had made its way into the camp of freedom.” That was no accident: freedom and nationalism—liberty and fraternity—are allies. Yet after 1815, and thanks to the use which the Prussians made of Hegel, nationalism was co-opted into the service of the state: the loyalty that individuals felt to the nation was translated into submission to the government. In Bismarck’s day the outlines of the modern left’s domestic programme emerged. Anticipating Brown and Goodhart, Bismarck decided that one way to bind the German nation together was “progressive” state welfare (the other was militarism).

It is a staple of the left’s ideology that, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, tradition is an invention, an imposition of collective false memory by the ruling class. True to this analysis, the left is determined to invent its own tradition, its own idea of fraternity, and impose it through cultural conquest. National identity, says the Labour MP John Denham, must be “created, not discovered.” Brown’s “Britishness” is not the Britishness that the British people know: it is an artificial one, which must be brought into law by statute and regulation.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t work.

A sign of Indian progress and development, Type 2 diabetes (in the NYT):

“Diabetes unfortunately is the price you pay for progress,” said Dr. A. Ramachandran, the managing director of the M.V. Hospital for Diabetes, in Chennai (formerly Madras).

For decades, Type 2 diabetes has been the “rich man’s burden,” a problem for industrialized countries to solve.

But as the sugar disease, as it is often called, has penetrated the United States and other developed nations, it has also trespassed deep into the far more populous developing world.

In Italy or Germany or Japan, diabetes is on the rise. In Bahrain and Cambodia and Mexico — where industrialization and Western food habits have taken hold— it is rising even faster. For the world has now reached the point, according to the United Nations, where more people are overweight than undernourished.

There is disagreement here at 3QD over the value of the Euston Manifesto (some have signed it, while others have strong reasons for not doing so). Although, I’m pretty sure that most if not all of us are in pretty strong agreement with the broad values espoused in it. There in now a document in support of the manifesto from a distinctly American vantage point entitled “American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto”. (I’m unclear as to the particular value of an specifically American affirmation, and personally don’t want to touch let alone embrace the Cold War liberalism the document harkens back to. But enough editorializing…) You can read it here and add your name to the list of signatories if you wish. (Via Norman Geras.)

We are signers or supporters in the United States of the Euston Manifesto and its reassertion of liberal values. Our views range from those of centrists and independents to liberals of varying hues on to the democratic left. We include supporters of the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 as well as people who opposed this war from the beginning. However, we all welcome and are heartened by the decision of the writers of the Euston Manifesto in Britain to reassert and reinvigorate liberal values in the present context. Now we confront the issue of how to respond to radical Islamism. Some of us view this ideology and its political results as the third major form of totalitarian ideology of the last century, after fascism and Nazism, on the one hand, and Communism, on the other. Others regard it as having a history in the Arab and Islamic world that eludes the label of totalitarianism. We all agree however that it fosters dictatorship, terror, anti-Semitism and sexism of a most retrograde kind. We reject its subordination of politics to the dictates of religious fundamentalists as well as its contempt for the role of individual autonomy and rationality in politics, a rejection not seen on this scale in world politics since the 1940s. We understand that the United States must continue to take the lead with our allies in confronting this danger.

Our views in foreign policy are rooted in the traditions of Franklin Roosevelt as well as Harry Truman, who battled dictatorships of the right as well as the left respectively. For their generation, the key questions of international politics concerned totalitarianism in Europe and Asia. They led the country in war to defeat fascism, Nazism, and Imperial Japan and then founded the institutions that led to the peaceful victory in the Cold War over Communism. The key moral and political challenge in foreign affairs in our time stems from radical Islamism and the jihadist terrorism it has unleashed. We favor a liberalism that is as passionate about the struggle against Islamic extremism as it has been about its political, social, economic and cultural agenda at home. We reject the now ossified and unproductive political polarization of American politics rooted as it is in the conflicts of the 1960s, not the first decade of this century. We are frustrated in the choice between conservative governance that thwarts much needed reforms at home, on the one hand, and a liberalism which has great difficulty accepting the projection of American power abroad, on the other. The long era of Republican ascendancy may very well be coming to an end. If and when it does, we seek a renewed and reinvigorated American liberalism, one that is up to the task of fighting and winning the struggle of free and democratic societies against Islamic extremism and the terror it produces.

From Time:

A few hardcore ski bums might have awakened Tuesday morning and blinked their eyes in disbelief, but Clear Creek County, Co., where I live, ranks first in the U.S. for longevity, according to a Harvard School of Public Health study appearing in the Sept. 12 issue of Public Library of Science Medicine.

In fact, seven Colorado counties are the top seven ranked counties in the nation, all with a life expectancy of 81.3 years. And it hardly seems coincidental that all seven — Clear Creek, Eagle, Gilpin, Grand, Jackson, Park and Summit — lie either on, near or adjoining the Continental Divide and are spectacularly beautiful. Dr. Ned Calonge of the state health department told the Rocky Mountain News in Denver that there’s nothing magical about high-country air. He thinks the longevity results are because Colorado residents have active lifestyles, low smoking rates and the lowest-in-the-nation numbers for obesity.

Maybe.

More here.

From The Seattle Times:

AS we mark the fifth anniversary of that fateful day of Sept. 11, 2001, which changed our world, I remind myself once again that we cannot go back to the pre-9/11 America but we can build a better and more conscious America.

As a Pakistani-Muslim immigrant American, it is this thought that gives me hope in spite of untrustworthy political leaders, increasing racism, and the current cycle of violence around the world. It is a hope that derives from the actions of millions of Americans who have shown the willingness to look beyond wartime propaganda and often one-sided media coverage of events and extended a hand in support to fellow Americans of a different religion. I arrived in the United States as an immigrant at the young age of 13, more than 20 years ago. My parents moved us here, leaving our native Pakistan, so each of us children could have a life of peace and security, a quality education, and a chance to succeed.

For the most part, this country has given me all of that and I have appreciated the freedoms I have enjoyed here. Then, that dreadful day of 9/11 occurred and the world changed.

More here.

Candidates for the UN Secretary General will participate in a forum on the process and their agendas on September 26th at the Waldorf-Astoria. The forum is a remarkable step towards transparency in what historically has been an opaque process. The forum is being organized by UNSG.org and Bridging Nations. Contact Julio Martinez at Bridging Nations by email at [email protected] or phone at 202-741-3875 for more information on the forum.

Over at Abstract Nonsense, Alon teaches me something in just 4 short paragraphs.

Sometime in the last hour and a half I got a Google hit on integer that is both a square and a cube. Never one to fail people who read my blog, I feel I should talk a bit about it.

First, in the ring of integers Z, like in all other unique factorization domains, it’s simple: an element is both a square and a cube if and only if it’s a sixth power. Examples of integers that are both squares and cubes are then 1, 64, 729, 4096, and 15625.

However, without unique factorization, it’s more complicated. Take the ring Z[x], the ring of all polynomials with integer coefficients. That ring has unique factorization, by a theorem that says that if R is a UFD, then so is R[x]. But we can take the set of all elements in Z[x] whose x-coefficient is 0, such as 7, x^2 – 5, x^5 + x^4 – x^3, etc.; this set forms a subring of Z[x] because we can still add, subtract, and multiply in it. In that ring, we naturally have x^6 = (x^2)^3 = (x^3)^2, but since x is not in the ring, x^6 is not a sixth power.

In the Public Library of Science, a study on life expectancy by race and region finds 8 Americas, with the distance between best and worst comparable to that of the best developed nation and worst country.

The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies for race-county combinations in the United States is over 35 y. We divided the race-county combinations of the US population into eight distinct groups, referred to as the “eight Americas,” to explore the causes of the disparities that can inform specific public health intervention policies and programs…

The eight Americas were defined based on race, location of the county of residence, population density, race-specific county-level per capita income, and cumulative homicide rate. Data sources for population and mortality figures were the Bureau of the Census and the National Center for Health Statistics. We estimated life expectancy, the risk of mortality from specific diseases, health insurance, and health-care utilization for the eight Americas. The life expectancy gap between the 3.4 million high-risk urban black males and the 5.6 million Asian females was 20.7 y in 2001. Within the sexes, the life expectancy gap between the best-off and the worst-off groups was 15.4 y for males (Asians versus high-risk urban blacks) and 12.8 y for females (Asians versus low-income southern rural blacks). Mortality disparities among the eight Americas were largest for young (15–44 y) and middle-aged (45–59 y) adults, especially for men. The disparities were caused primarily by a number of chronic diseases and injuries with well-established risk factors. Between 1982 and 2001, the ordering of life expectancy among the eight Americas and the absolute difference between the advantaged and disadvantaged groups remained largely unchanged. Self-reported health plan coverage was lowest for western Native Americans and low-income southern rural blacks. Crude self-reported health-care utilization, however, was slightly higher for the more disadvantaged populations…

Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by all international standards. The observed disparities in life expectancy cannot be explained by race, income, or basic health-care access and utilization alone. Because policies aimed at reducing fundamental socioeconomic inequalities are currently practically absent in the US, health disparities will have to be at least partly addressed through public health strategies that reduce risk factors for chronic diseases and injuries.

In openDemocracy, Ehsan Masood looks at cricket in the wake of last months controversy.

In Lagaan, a Bollywood film set in British India, an experienced team of British soldiers challenge farmers from a village to a game of cricket. But this is to be no ordinary match. If the villagers win, the crippling tax (lagaan) they owe to the Raj is to be waived. If they lose, the tax is to be trebled. None of the farmers have played before, and the district’s feudal prince begs them not to become lambs to the slaughter. But the villagers, whose captain is played by actor-director Aamir Khan, feel they have little to lose as the tax is already unaffordable. For readers who may not have seen this film, I won’t spoil the ending. What I can say is that it is another example of how a global audience is reading and watching the history of India from its own perspective.

I was reminded of the film last month when a match between England and Pakistan ended abruptly amid much controversy on 20 August. As with the fictional Lagaan, this real game of cricket between a rich nation and its (former) colony offered its spectators the same mix of sport, power, colonial politics, allegations of racism and cheating, together with flashes of comedy. Its cast even included the descendant of royalty in the shape of Shahryar Khan, chair of Pakistan’s cricket-governing board and the country’s former ambassador to London; his grandmother was the queen of Bhopal in north India.