From The New York Times:

THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina. By Frank Rich.

The author, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, has his liberal views, which are not strikingly original. I happen to agree with him that Karl Rove and George Bush manipulated public fear and wartime patriotism to win elections, and that Dick Cheney and his neocon cheerleaders favored a war in Iraq long before 9/11 “to jump-start a realignment of the Middle East.” Whether Rich is right to say that this has “little or nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda is debatable. The neocons may well have believed that an American remake of the Middle East was the best way to tackle terrorism.

They were almost certainly mistaken. But the point of Rich’s fine polemic is that the Bush administration has consistently lied about the reasons for going to war, about the way it was conducted and about the terrible consequences. Whatever the merits of removing a dictator, waging war under false pretenses is highly damaging to a democracy, especially when one of the ostensible aims is to spread democracy to others. If Rich is correct, which I think he is, the Bush administration has given hypocrisy a bad name.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In an essay last week to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Martin Amis hit out at the virulence of Islamism. Here, writer Pankaj Mishra lambasts Amis’s ‘moral superiority’ and takes issue with the intellectual arrogance of political elites in the West who fail to understand the Muslim world. He argues that an out-of-touch US administration is repeating the fatal errors of the Vietnam War, resulting in a war on terror that is a political, military and intellectual fiasco.

Martin Amis’s essay on Islam and Islamism goes on for more than 10,000 words without describing an individual experience of Muslim societies deeper than Christopher Hitchens’s acquisition of an Osama T-shirt in Peshawar and the Amis family’s failure to enter, after closing time, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

‘The impulse towards rational inquiry,’ Amis asserts, ‘is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.’ There are countless other startling claims (according to Amis, the army was on the Islamist side in the Algerian civil war) in his essay, whose pseudo-scholarship and fanatical conviction of moral superiority make it resemble nothing more than one of bin Laden’s desperately literary screeds.

Such a bold and hectic display of prejudice and ignorance invites the dinner-party frivolity of Amis’s genitals-centric analysis (constipation and sexual frustration) of radical Islam. But what forces us to take it seriously is not only that its author is one of our leading novelists, but also that his cliches about non-western peoples (they are all very irrational out there) and strident belief in ‘Western’ rationality are now commonplace in elite liberal-left as well as conservative circles in the government and media.

More here.

Jaffer Kolb in Metropolis Magazine:

Known for his energetic and globe-trotting ways, Rem Koolhaas finally admitted to being exhausted on July 29th. He was speaking in the pavilion he designed on the lawn of London’s Serpentine Gallery. In the twentieth hour of a 24-hour interview marathon session which featured internationally-known artists and intellectuals, he said, “Chantal [Mouffe, a political scientist], at this point you have to help us out. We are exhausted. At this point we cannot hope to equal you. We happily surrender as your inferiors.”

He was referring to himself and to Hans Ulrich Obrist, the art historian and author, with whom he had been in conversation since 6:00 p.m. the previous day, at the event which the two of them organized. It was now 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, and the interviewers, organizers, and many of the spectators who had not left the scene since the talks began were showing the signs of overload. But the bright and fantastically articulate Mouffe easily fell into talking about agonistic pluralism in democracy and the generation of democratic spaces.

The event, which was segmented into eight three-hour sections with short breaks between, began with some of the most well-known participants including London-based architects Zaha Hadid and David Adjaye, architectural theorist Charles Jencks, musician Brian Eno, author Hanif Kureishi, filmmaker Ken Loach, and artist Yinka Shonibare.

More here.  And even more on this marathon interview at ArtForum here.

Jolene Craig in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel:

A cardiac surgeon from Harvard Medical School performed a technique new to the Mid-Ohio Valley Friday with live video to other doctors in St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Dr. Lawrence H. Cohn, Virginia and James Hubbard Professor of Cardiac Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., performed mitral valve repair on a female patient with live video feed to a conference room to allow for cardiac surgeons to ask questions during the procedure, said Jill Parsons, vice president of St. Joseph’s Hospital…

“St. Joseph’s Hospital lead cardiac surgeon Dr. Syed Tasnim Raza trained with Cohn and talked him into coming to Parkersburg,” Parsons said.

Cohn said Raza worked in his lab 20 years ago and they have remained friends.

More here.  And make sure you click on the video below to see a short clip featuring Drs. Raza and Cohn. [If you have a pop-up blocker installed, try holding the cntrl-key down when you click.]

Teaching With New Technology

I myself have been “operated” on once by Dr. Syed T. Raza: he stiched up a gash over my right eye after accidentally smashing me with a squash raquet during a game. (I must have been beating him!) He did a pretty good job too (with the stiching, I mean). He is, I could not be more proud to say, my much respected and beloved brother.

Via the NYT, an open letter to the Indian government, drafted by Vikram Seth and signed by prominent Indians:

To build a truly democratic and plural India, we must collectively fight against laws and policies that abuse human rights and limit fundamental freedoms

This is why we, concerned Indian citizens and people of Indian origin, support the overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law dating to 1861, which punitively criminalized romantic love and private, consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex.

In independent India, as earlier, this archaic and brutal law has served no good purpose. It has been used to systematically persecute, blackmail, arrest and terrorize sexual minorities. It has spawned public intolerance and abuse, forcing tens of millions of gays and bisexual men and women to live in fear and secrecy, at tragic cost to themselves and their families.

From Amartya Sen’s letter in support:

It is surprising that independent India has not yet been able to rescind the colonial era monstrosity in the shape of Section 377, dating from 1861. That, as it happens, was the year in which the American Civil War began, which would ultimately abolish the unfreedom of slavery in the America. Today, 145 years later, we surely have urgent reason to abolish in India, with our commitment to democracy and human rights, the unfreedom of arbitrary and unjust criminalization.

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In the upcoming Boston Review, 6 proposals by 6 scholars, presented to members of Congress, on how to reform our democracy.

TWO: Let citizen assemblies draw districts. [Archon Fung]…

Many reformers favor independent commissions—such as those used in Arizona—as a remedy for this gerrymandering. However, it may be difficult to inoculate such commissions from partisan influence. Most of the notables who would be appointed to such blue-ribbon affairs would likely have political histories and established loyalties. Those who did not would likely be the targets of intense partisan pressure and subterfuge. Even if commissions were politically immunized, they could still be summoned to serve highly partisan ends, as in the recent attempt to initiate redistricting by California’s Republican governor. Furthermore, electoral districting is never merely a technical exercise. Ethical choices must be made. For example, is the coherence of communities more important than competitiveness and political accountability? Appointed experts have dubious democratic standing when it comes to such decisions.

Consider an alternative method of redistricting in which ordinary citizens formulate redistricting plans. The main benefits of this directly democratic alternative are:

Fairness. The formulation of electoral boundaries would be insulated from partisan and incumbent influence.

Ethical transparency. The democratic values and rationales for electoral boundaries would be transparent, explicit, and determinative.

Democratic legitimacy. Electoral boundaries created by ordinary citizens rather than political elites or independent “experts” would build democratic legitimacy for, and popular ownership of, a political system that is now regarded with justified cynicism.

The idea of citizen assemblies as an element of electoral reform is not new.

Since Leszek Kolakowski and E. P. Thompson (and Althusser) have been part of the current zeitgeist, I went back and read Thompson’s “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski” and Kolakowski’s response, “My Correct Views on Everything“. (Althusser, I never really got and thus got into. Althuserrianism struck me as the death throes of Marxist theory, with Analytical Marxism as the pallbearer in the wings.) Apart from enjoying the pieces for their style (both were remarkable stylists as well as admirable thinkers), they brought back in a sudden blast a different world in which one conflict–costing millions of lives–defined its parameters for a century.

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.