From The New York Times:

The Overachievers By Alexandra Robbins. I was sick of college talk. Sick of reciting the names of the schools my 16-year-old has visited, which ones she liked best, and why. Sick of listening to other parents do the same. Sick of discussing the finer points of the new SAT, class rank and recommendation letters. Sick of the chatter about Opal Mehta, the fictitious Harvard applicant and heroine of a recent plagiarized novel. So sick of it all that I was considering a ban on extrafamilial college talk from now until spring, when my daughter will finally belong to someone’s class of 2011.

Then I read “The Overachievers,” which is almost nothing but college talk. Alexandra Robbins profiles eight students at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., in-depth over three semesters in 2004 and 2005; they talk about college. She pans wide to include overachievers across the country; they talk about college. She consults experts on college. She surveys the literature about college. She calls for new ways of thinking about college, preparing for college, and applying to college. I couldn’t get enough of it.

More here.

From Al Ahram: The late Eqbal Ahmad interviews Hassan Nassrallah in 1998:

Inside the Imam Al-Mehdi School in Ouzai, a Lebanese village near the Israel-Lebanon border, seven coffins lay in a row. Outside, men were preparing for their burial when a small convoy of cars arrived bearing among others the secretary-general of Hizbullah, the largest armed party which has for 15 years resisted Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. In the coffins lay the Hizbullah fighters who had fallen in past battles. They were among the 40 Lebanese “prisoners”, dead and alive, who came home on that day, 26 June 1998, in exchange for the remains of an Israeli soldier.

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah entered the hall in solemn dignity accompanied by Jawad, his teenage son. He stopped before each coffin and offered the Fatiha (the Muslim equivalent of the Lord’s Prayer) until he reached the one marked 13. He beckoned an aide and spoke to him in a whisper. The aide summoned two workers of the Islamic Health Association, a Hizbullah outfit. They opened the coffin exposing a body wrapped in a white shroud. Sheikh Nasrallah’s eyes closed, his lips trembled as he offered the Fatiha. Slowly, he bent over and tenderly stroked the head of Hadi Nasrallah, his eldest son who was 18-years-old when he died in battle on 13 September. Jawad, the younger son stood still and pale next to his father. A deep silence fell on the room while his right hand rested on his son’s chest. It was broken by the clicking of a reporter’s camera but promptly returned when Sheikh Nasrallah looked up in cold surprise.

Our primary objective has been resistance to Israeli occupations. I993 was a watershed of sorts as Israel’s invasion then, and our resistance to it, brought us national legitimacy that made even Christians accept Hizbullah as an authentic national force. As for our ideological mission, to be Islamic in Lebanon entails the Islamisation of the Muslim individual and community, its values and way of life.”

Given the centrality of resistance against Israel to Hizbullah’s programme and party structure, we raised a question about the scope and future of armed resistance. What will happen when Israel withdraws from Lebanon which, in view of its recent demarche, may in fact occur? “We shall not accept a withdrawal based on Israeli conditions. Liberation cannot be conditional. Israel committed aggression, it occupies our land, it is our sacred right to resist, and this resistance shall continue until it withdraws.”

Does this principle apply to Palestine also, and to the Golan Heights? “The strategies of Syria and Lebanon are linked. As for the Palestinians, if their leaders compromise there is little we can do. We cannot substitute for their leadership. If they decide to resist we shall be on their side.”

What then is your vision of Palestine? “We wish for the liberation of the Palestinian people among whom we count Jews, Muslims and Christians.”

More here. (Thanks to Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy).

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times Magazine:

Mothers with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, pass it along to their newborns at birth 25 to 30 percent of the time, and in poor countries, some half a million babies a year are born with H.I.V. But the rate of transmission can be cut to 14 percent with a simple and cheap program: H.I.V.-positive mothers take a single pill of an antiretroviral called nevirapine when they begin labor, and their newborns are given nevirapine drops.

At the Alexandra Health Center and University Clinic in South Africa, pregnant women can get nevirapine free. The antenatal clinic is a complex of low brick buildings on a pretty hospital campus in the middle of the township of Alexandra, a bleak neighborhood on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The clinic has a doctor only on Thursdays, but an advanced midwife and two nurses attend a crowd of patients every day. I had been in South Africa for four days when I visited the clinic, and I had already seen the stigma that AIDS still carries in the country — those dozens of funerals every Saturday in the townships? Oh, say family members, it was asthma, or tuberculosis, or “a long illness.” I thought I understood how powerful denial could be. But I was unprepared for what Pauline Molotsi, a registered nurse at the clinic, told me.

About twice a week, a woman who has tested H.I.V.-positive begins labor at the clinic but refuses to take the nevirapine that might save her baby’s life. “She says, ‘Oh, no, I’m not positive,”’ Molotsi told me.

More here.

Jonathan Yardley reviews And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails by Wayne Curtis, in the Washington Post:

“Rum has always had a distinctly American swagger. It is untutored and proud of it, raffish, often unkempt, and a little bit out of control. The history of rum tends toward the ignoble, many times pleasingly so. . . . Rum, in short, has been one of those rare objects in which America has invested its own image. Like moonglow, the life of America is reflected back in each incarnation of rum.”

This may seem a strange claim for a nation with as strong a history of militant temperance and Prohibition as ours, yet there's more than a little truth to it. Rum was invented in the Americas — probably, though not certainly, in Barbados — and quickly became an important part of the diet in the American colonies, where consumption of alcoholic beverages was very high. Rum and slavery were intertwined, both in the slave trade and on plantations where rum was made. “Demon Rum” became a shibboleth of the temperance movement, and rum itself became one of the most widely consumed alcoholic drinks once Prohibition forced drinkers into speakeasies or onto ships bound for Cuba. During World War II, rum and Coca-Cola “became the de facto national drink of many of the troops,” and now the mojito is one of the most popular drinks among the fashionable young people who are bringing new life into the country's old cities.

More here.

This is from a blog which collects To-Do lists. They are going to be published as a book in 2007 by Simon and Schuster. Some of them are very funny. I reproduce two below:

I guess the To-Do part in this one is meeting this perfect guy (click to enlarge):

Many more lists here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

John Noble Wilford has a long, interesting article in today’s New York Times on the rehabilitation of the alchemist. Once the icon of the bad old days before the scientific revolution, alchemy has been emerging in recent years as more of a proto-science. Indeed, a fair number of the heroes of the scientific revolution were dyed-in-the-wool alchemists. Robert Boyle, one of the founders of chemistry, wanted to reform alchemy, not destroy it. He chased after the philsopher’s stone for his whole life. Many of his papers were destroyed in the eighteenth century because they were loaded with discussions of alchemy–which by then had acquired its bad reputation. Boyle’s legacy had to be protected.

Wilford reported from a recent meeting of historians of chemistry in Philadelphia. From his report (as well as this one from the New York Sun and this one from Chemical and Engineering News), it seems as if the meeting neglected one of the most interesting sides of alchemy: its role in the history of bio-chemistry. Alchemists believed that the life was the greatest transmutation of all, and they believed that the philsopher’s stone would serve as the ultimate medicine. While a lot of alchemists dealt in Kevin-Trudeau-style hogwash, some did important work.

More here.

Joshua Roebke, who, while scolding others for sensationalizing Einstein’s romantic life, was unable to restrain himself from giving his article the title “Einstein in Lust,” in Seed Magazine:

On July 10th, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem made nearly 3,500 sealed pages of Albert Einstein’s personal correspondence public. Some of the more salacious content in the letters—once deemed “too private for release”—has generated a maelstrom of coverage on blogs and newspapers worldwide.

“Phys-sex Genius” wrote the headline wizards at the New York Post. Fox News, another Murdochian outlet, posted a story by on-air personality Neil Cavuto to its website, titled, “Albert Einstein: Genius, Stud Muffin.” “E = Einstein, the galactic womanizer,” quipped The Sunday Times, UK. “Albert Einstein, sex-fiend” wrote the popular blog Boing Boing. Even a member of the extended Seed family, the ScienceBlog Pure Pedantry, included a post with the title, “Scientific Pimp.”

The press and public latched onto the letters’ scant mentions of Einstein’s infidelity like it was the last branch on a long fall.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

Laurie Cumbo first stumbled into the BAM battle at a public meeting in October 2002, held to address the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s plans for a new “mixed-use cultural district” in Fort Greene, on the edge of Downtown Brooklyn. Cumbo had heard that BAM’s Local Development Corporation planned to lure various arts organizations into their proposed district with offers of subsidies. She was interested in what this venerable performing-arts institution might offer her fledgling museum, the Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts (MOCADA).

The cultural district was originally envisioned as an area larger than Manhattan’s Lincoln Center that would cut a 10-by-three-block zigzag through Downtown Brooklyn and the heart of Fort Greene. BAM and the BAM LDC are formally separate entities, but the LDC is chaired by Harvey Lichtenstein, who was BAM’s executive director for 32 years before founding the LDC in 1998. In 2001, he secured a $50 million matching grant from ex-mayor Giuliani. But initial meetings between Lichtenstein and Bloomberg’s deputy mayor, Dan Doctoroff, were held behind closed doors. According to community activist Patti Hagan, “[Residents] thought that the BAM LDC was just one of these government entities that was remaking Fort Greene without any input from the people who live there— basically white people coming in and saying to a black community, ‘We know what’s best for you.’ ”

More here.

From The Guardian:

Amartya Sen had a parallel experience, when as a child he witnessed an unknown man stumbling into the garden of his parent’s house, bleeding heavily and asking for water. Sen shouted for his parents, and his father took the man to a hospital, where he died of his injuries. The victim was a Muslim day-labourer who had been stabbed by Hindus during the riots that occurred in Bengal in the last years of the British Raj. Sen continues to be not only horrified but also baffled by the communal violence he witnessed at that time. As he puts it in Identity and Violence: “Aside from being a veritable nightmare, the event was profoundly perplexing.” Why should people who have lived together peaceably suddenly turn on one another in years of violence that cost hundreds of thousands of lives? How could the poor day-labourer be seen as having only one identity – as a Muslim who belonged to an “enemy” community – when he belonged to many other communities as well? “For a bewildered child,” Sen writes, “the violence of identity was extraordinarily hard to grasp. It is not particularly easy for a still bewildered elderly adult.”

Identity and Violence is his attempt to overcome that bewilderment.

More here.

“As Robert Pirsig has his second novel Lila reissued, John Freeman meets the author who for decades has been a thorn in the side of academic philosophers.”

From the London Times:

Robert Pirsig has a bone to pick with philosophers. As his era-defining memoir Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance levitated up the bestseller lists in 1974, all he heard from them was grumbling.

This story of a father-son motorcycle trip across America was just a skeleton of a philosophy, they said. What exactly was this “metaphysics of quality” he kept talking about? And who was he to tell them about it? Seventeen years later Pirsig gave his answer and it came in the form of a 500-page novel, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. Now, at last, the thinkers of the world had something to tinker with. Their response? “Silence. They have just given me zero support and great hostility,” Pirsig says on the eve of the novel’s reissue in Britain.

“It’s just they don’t say anything.” Now, Pirsig believes that he has one last shot at explaining his philosophy to the public, and if it means coming out of seclusion, so be it.

More here.

Amit Chaudhuri reviews Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta, in the London Review of Books:

Like Suketu Mehta, I was born in Calcutta, a city ‘in extremis’, in Mehta’s words, and, like him, grew up in Bombay. His father, who worked in the diamond trade, and mine, then a rising corporate executive, probably moved to Bombay from Calcutta for the same reasons; to do with the flight, in the 1960s, of capital and industry from the former colonial capital in the east to the forward-looking metropolis in the west, in the face of growing labour unrest and radical politics in leftist Bengal – the troubled context that ‘in extremis’ presumably refers to.

By the early 1970s, Calcutta had ceased to be a major centre of commerce and industry. Howrah, just outside the city, where the factories were once located, became a purgatory for small enterprise, with businesses – among them my uncle’s – waiting, sometimes for years and years, to die. The lights went out in Calcutta, literally: ‘load-shedding’, or power rationing, became frequent, until, in the early 1980s, the city had occasionally to make do with only eight hours of electricity a day. Jyoti Basu, the astringent, unsmiling Communist chief minister of West Bengal, a barrister from London and a bhadralok (that is, a member of the liberal, patrician middle class), whose first name means ‘light’, began to be called Andhakaar, or ‘Darkness’. Bombay, on the other hand, began to dazzle; I have no memory of it ever not dazzling. From the 12th-floor apartment in the not altogether extravagantly named Il Palazzo where I grew up, in Bombay’s most exclusive locality, Malabar Hill, I could see the row of lights on Marine Drive known as the Queen’s Necklace, fluorescent and aquamarine (they’re now a pale golden sodium), and, further on, great neon signs saying ORWO and BOAC and other things. It was an existence remarkably open to breeze, birds and rainfall, to the arrival of daylight and evening, and it was also strangely, unselfconsciously, enclosed. It was not Suketu Mehta’s Bombay.

More here.

Ari Berman in The Nation:

On July 18, the Senate unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution “condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel’s exercise of its right to self-defense.” After House majority leader John Boehner removed language from the bill urging “all sides to protect innocent civilian life and infrastructure,” the House version passed by a landslide, 410 to 8.

AIPAC not only lobbied for the resolution; it had written it. “They [Congress] were given a resolution by AIPAC,” said former Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who addressed the House Democratic Caucus on July 19. “They didn’t prepare one.”

More here.

Carlos Rojas in The Naked Gaze:

In an Op-ed column in this past Sunday’s NY Times, Stanley Fish discussed the case of Kevin Barrett, the University of Wisconsin Ph.D. and coordinator for the “Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth,” who is scheduled to teach a course on “Islam: Religion and Culture” this fall, but who has argued that the US government was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. After he discussed these views on a conservative talk show, State Representative Stephen Nass (R) lead calls for Barrett’s dismissal from the university.

In his editorial, Fish argues that much of the ensuing controversy over whether or not  Barrett’s political opinions should be protected misses the point of what “academic freedom” does and does not cover. The point of academic freedom, Fish argues, “has nothing to do with content,” but rather “is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis.”  Therefore, he concludes,

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

Ironically, Fish’s essay advocating a clear distinction between advocacy and analysis has been roundly criticized for its implicit ideological agenda (for some of these discussions, see Long Sunday and Sherman Don).

       

I, too, will consider Fish’s editorial and the issues it raises, but will approach them somewhat indirectly, by turning first to two other recent incidents which underscore the power of speech and its implicit limits. On July 9th, Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt of Marco Materazzi was in response to verbal taunting. Although FIFA states that both parties denied that the taunting was racist in nature, they nevertheless gave Materazzi a surprisingly harsh two-game suspension. More recently, on July 28 Mel Gibson was pulled over for drunken driving, and proceeded to launch into a profanity laced, anti-Semitic tirade, saying among other things, “F—— Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”

More here.

“Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well.”

Philip E. Ross in Scientific American:

A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row.

How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? “I see only one move ahead,” Capablanca is said to have answered, “but it is always the correct one.”

He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master’s advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.

But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training?

More here.  [Thanks to Nicholas Hofgren.]

Edward B. Rackley in his excellent blog, Across the Divide: Analysis & Anecdote from Africa:

I’ve been working with child soldiers in the DR Congo most of this year. My focus has been on evaluating programs run by the usual aid agencies: UNICEF, Save the Children, International Rescue Committee, the Red Cross network, and a host of smaller Congolese groups. These actors are funded by tax revenues and private donations from people in developed countries, so directly or indirectly, you and I are paying for them. Such evaluations provide accountability to donors that they’re getting what they paid for. Anyone who says international aid is unaccountable is simply uninformed.

In previous postings I’ve explored some of the problems posed by the child soldier phenomenon, but I tend to take for granted the big picture dilemma that this sad group of victims cum perpetrators poses to our world. It’s worth mentioning here: What to do when previously accepted morals and norms prohibiting certain forms of behavior (universally shared taboos, if you like) cease to enforce the limits of barbarism? Capturing and re-programming underage youth to slaughter enemy combatants and innocents is one such taboo that no longer exists in 37 of 55 recently ended or ongoing conflicts.

More here.

How can a nation that is so heavily militarised stop itself from becoming coarsened by violence? How can Israel keep its humanist ideals? Beneath the surface there are signs that Mr Yehoshua is deeply worried about Israel’s moral future: not just in the face of war against Hizbullah, for example, but in its very own soul. Mr Yehoshua’s warmest character is the old bakery owner, a man who ignores the need to sleep—he is aware enough to know there will be plenty of time to sleep once he is gone—yet who frets about doing the right thing before he dies. “I don’t want to apologise,” he says when he realises the calamity of having one of his employees go missing in a morgue. “I want to do penance.”

Mr Yehoshua’s “A Woman in Jerusalem” is a sad, warm, funny book about Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart—for other people as well as his own.

more from The Economist here.

A Chinese entrepreneur has registered the image of Zinedine Zidane’s notorious headbutt as a trademark for beer and hats under the name Tietougong (Iron Head Kung Fu). Zhao Xiaokai, the general manager of a sports publicity company, says he is in negotiations to sell the black and white logo to brewers and clothing companies… “I know it is illegal and violent, but the headbutt was also a positive thing,” said Mr Zhao. “It will make people remember the World Cup, it was a popular action in France – and even in China, many fans think it was justified after Materazzi insulted his mother and sister.”

But he said he would not try to register the trademark in Italy. “That would look too wicked,” he said.

more from The Guardian Unlimited here.

The sex gallery is ostensibly devoted to voyeurism—that’s to say, visual penetration. It is ironic, however, that in such a hot, sticky exhibition (literally, as PS1 is severally challenged in climate control, making the show a dubious summer destination) the cummulative effect of looking at so much biology is ultimately so unvisceral. This has to do with the fact that so many works are dreary black and white photographs and texts. There is barely any painting in the show, and what there is is limp illustration.

The thought I had, on leaving this exhausting, puerile display, is that a single painting by Francis Bacon would metaphorically fuse every sensation laid out so literally by the photographers, performers and video makers in this show, and penetrate the viewer where virtually nothing in this show does—the solar plexus. But metaphor, depictive relish and the catharsis of painting are obviously too trangressive for some.

more from Artcritical here.

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

His “terrorist” is a boy named Ahmad living in today’s New Prospect, New Jersey, for whom the immolation of 3,000 of his fellow citizens is by no means enough. For him, only a huge detonation inside the Lincoln Tunnel will do. Let’s grant Updike credit for casting his main character against type: Ahmad is not only the nicest person in the book but is as engaging a young man as you could meet in a day’s march. Tenderly, almost lovingly, Updike feels and feels, like a family doctor, until he can detect the flickering pulse of principle that animates the would-be martyr.

Once again, obesity and consumerism and urban sprawl are the radix malorum. At the seaside:

Devils. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous buttocks of the women seesaw painfully as they tread the boardwalk in swollen sneakers. A few steps from death, these American elders defy decorum and dress as toddlers.

Whereas in the schools:

“They think they’re doing pretty good, with some flashy-trashy new outfit they’ve bought at half-price, or the latest hyper-violent new computer game, or some hot new CD everyone has to have, or some ridiculous new religion when you’ve drugged your brain back into the Stone Age. It makes you wonder if people deserve to live seriously — if the massacre masterminds in Rwanda and Sudan and Iraq didn’t have the right idea.”

The speaker in this latter instance is Jack Levy, a burned-out little Jewish man with a wife named Beth (“a whale of a woman giving off too much heat through her blubber”).

More here.

From MSNBC:

NASA scientists have joined the search for the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, long thought to be extinct but recently sighted in Arkansas. NASA used a laser-equipped research aircraft to fly over the Big Woods area of the Mississippi Delta to learn more about the big woodpecker’s potential habitat. NASA’s aerial effort is part of a quest that began in 2004 after a kayaker reported spotting the woodpecker along the Cache River in Arkansas. Before that, there had been no confirmed sightings of ivory-bills for half a century.

In 2005, researchers published a report in the journal Science that at least one male ivory-bill still survived, but this finding has been challenged.

More here.