Tim Adams in The Observer:

Daniel Dennett has something of the look of those seventeenth-century puritan preachers who would talk for hours about the sins of the flesh. The gospel he has spent most of his life spreading, however, has nothing to do with supernatural vengeance; quite the opposite. His full white beard is worn more in homage to Charles Darwin than the Almighty.

When I went to see him at the little office in the corner of a quadrangle at Tufts University he has occupied for 30 years, he was examining on his computer screen the cover of his new book, Breaking the Spell. His book seeks to demonstrate that religion, chiefly Christianity, is itself a biologically evolved concept, and one that has outlived its usefulness. In America, these days, that is the most virulent form of fighting talk.

More here.

Luke Harding in The Guardian:

They are questions that would test the mettle of even the most ardent German patriot. Name three German philosophers, a poem by Goethe, a German Nobel prize winner and the doctor who discovered the cholera virus.

Stuck? Then you would struggle to qualify for German citizenship under new plans by authorities to test would-be citizens on their German cultural knowledge.

The state of Hesse wants to introduce the values and knowledge test for all those applying for a German passport. Other sample questions are to list three German composers, including the creator of the “Ode to Joy”; name a work by Friedrich Schiller; list three mountains in middle Germany and describe the famous “motif” painted by the 19th-century German artist Caspar David Friedrich. There are also questions on the constitution.

More here.  [Thanks to Michael Blim.]

Chapter 2, Part 2 Spiritualism and Nihilism: The Second Decade

Just as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 made Matisse’s Portrait of Mme Matisse of 1905 seem passé, so Kandinsky’s First Abstract Watercolor of 1910 made Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon seem outmoded.

What was innovative and unique just a few years earlier — the trend-setting last word in advanced art — instantly became an old idea of art, indeed, that fatally ironic thing, a cliché of radicalism. Kandinsky’s First Abstract Watercolor was much more daring and imaginative than Matisse’s bold use of a green gesture to define the line of his wife’s nose — it made her face radiantly fresh — and Picasso’s schematized abstract figures and African masks, with their own peculiar kind of freshness and “greenness.” Both were strident, triumphant invasions of barbarism into high art — the brutal take-over of civilized culture by uncivilized expression. But Kandinsky’s First Abstract Watercolor was not simply another avant-garde shock administered to a reluctant public, another deliberate production of avant-garde difference, another mischievous manipulation of the known: It was an artistic leap into the unknown, inviting the public to a new kind of experience. (Whether made in 1910 or 1913, as some scholars think, it carries Kandinsky’s ideas about art to a consummate extreme.)

more from Donald Kuspit at artnet Magazine here.

Though the cultural climate of southeastern Pennsylvania has surely changed in the two-and-thirty years between my boyhood and Kidd’s, the soil must still be fertile for the young homebody and media maven, “for all of us”, as Kidd wrote in his epic album Peanuts: The Art of Charles M Schultz (Pantheon, 2001), “who ate our school lunches alone and didn’t have any hope of sitting anywhere near the little red-haired girl and never got any valentines and struck out every time we were shoved to the plate for Little League”.

In a field, book-jacket design, where edge, zip and instant impact are sine qua non, Kidd is second to none. Can he draw? Presumably, yet the mark of his pen or pencil rarely figures into his work. His tool is the digital computer, with its ever more ingenious graphics programs. In the ever-expanding electronic archives of scannable photographic imagery, he is a hunter-gatherer.

more from The Guardian Unlimited here.

Federico Fellini was great with people, terrible with money. He adored his wife and was flagrantly unfaithful. He loved whiling away the hours in cafés, but was a workaholic. He was a scamp, a victim, a victimizer. And he was a great director. “He believed in chance meetings, in love affairs, and in friendships,” writes his biographer Tullio Kezich, a film critic and a friend of Fellini for more than 40 years, “all of which came to him with incredible speed, and were like constant revelations that tended to endure. He lived inside of things with indomitable curiosity and unflappable openness. He abandoned himself to what Dostoevsky called ‘the river of life.’”

more from the NY Observer here.

From Harper’s:

Percentage of Americans who say that fighting terrorism should be one of the nation’s top two priorities: 6[Harris Interactive (Rochester, N.Y.)]

Number of people whom Coalition forces have imprisoned in Iraq at some point since March 2003: 48,526[Detainee Operations, Multi-National Force—Iraq (Baghdad)]

Percentage of these who have been convicted of a crime: 1.5[Detainee Operations, Multi-National Force—Iraq (Baghdad)]

Margin by which total votes for Democrats in the last three Senate elections exceeded those for Republicans: 2,900,000[Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives]

Number of seats won by Democrats and Republicans, respectively: 46, 56[Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives]

More here.

From MSNBC:

A computer scientist has developed a method to weave stringy DNA molecules into nanometer-scale, two-dimensional patterns ranging from smiley faces to a map of the Americas. Experts say the “DNA origami” procedure laid out by Paul Rothemund of the California Institute of Technology could be adapted to create nano-computers, new drug delivery systems or even molecular-scale chemical factories. “We are arriving at a new frontier in our pursuit of ever-smaller structures,” Lloyd Smith, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, where Rothemund’s research was published.

More here.

Via Politcal Theory Daily Review, Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader examine inequality and gender, in the Journal of Social History.

Throughout American history, male/female has defined an enduring binary embodied in access to jobs, income, and wealth. Women’s economic history shows how for centuries sex has inscribed a durable inequality into the structure of American labor markets that civil and political rights have moderated but not removed. This economic experience of women reflects the paradox of inequality in America: the coexistence of structural inequality with individual and group mobility. Women, like African Americans, have gained what T.H. Marshall labeled civil and political citizenship. No longer are they legally disenfranchised, and discrimination on account of race and gender is against the law. They have also increased their social citizenship, as represented by access to jobs and education, and women, in particular, benefit from many programs of the welfare state. Yet, they remain unequal. On the whole, they earn less than men, end up in occupational ghettos, bump up against glass ceilings, and find themselves, in relation to men, as poor as ever.

The process of internal differentiation characteristic of the history of groups defined by sex, race, or ethnicity provides the key to understanding how the paradox of inequality works. As a group, women, like blacks, experienced mobility that disrupted the processes which had systematically excluded them from access to jobs and income. But their assaults on durable categorical inequalities had their limits. Men/whites re-drew category boundaries, retaining their hold on economic advantage while women/blacks assimilated into and reproduced existing economic and occupational hierarchies among themselves. In the United States, group mobility did not challenge structural inequality—instead, it reinforced it. This process of differentiation—the key to the paradox of inequality—is very important to understand. It is one of the primary ways that inequality works in America, and it poses serious issues and dilemmas for public policy.

The Research Unit on Political Economy (Mumbai) looks at “India’s Place in the U.S. Strategic Order” and related issues. (Hat tip: Richard Rubin.)

While the US government is always interested in securing large contracts for American arms manufacturers, that does not explain its decision, as Condoleezza Rice put it, to “make India a global power”. That decision is dictated by broader strategic considerations.

First, the US is not worried by India’s ambitions: it knows that India is unable to project power across Asia independently. For example, India’s plans for a rapid-reaction force which could be deployed immediately in countries along the rim of the Indian Ocean cannot be pursued without fast long-range aircraft with aerial refueling capabilities, Airborne Early Warning and Command aircraft, attack helicopters, and a carrier in addition to the INS Virat. A significant share of this would have to be imported from the US. Any drawn-out intervention abroad would require even greater infrastructure, which India lacks. (In fact, even the European Union countries are not equipped with the infrastructure for sustained projection of military force independent of the US. This was demonstrated during the Balkans crisis, when they were forced at last to turn to the US to intervene.)

Moreover, given the balance of military strength, India’s attempts to project power cannot be sustained in the face of US opposition. Indeed, Vajpayee reportedly confessed that strategic partnership with the US was essential to his 20-year programme to attain great-power status; “otherwise India’s ability to project power and influence abroad anywhere would be greatly compromised.”

The second reason for the US to promote Indian ambitions is that it suits US interests to do so. This is spelled out with brutal candour in at least three important US sources.

Nir Rosen explores the origins of sectarian violence in Iraq, in the Boston Review.

Political parties didn’t overtly begin to speak in the name of sectarian groups until 2005. For Shias, it wasn’t necessary: after the war Iraq’s Shia triumphalism was shared by all Shia parties; Iraq was now theirs and could not be taken away except by the Americans. There was no threat of Sunnis retaking the country because they had never taken it before: they had been given it, first by the Ottomans and then by the British. Iraq’s Sunnis, unsurprisingly, felt intimidated, and they increasingly came to view Shias as Iranians or Persians, refusing to recognize that Shias were the majority or that Shias had been singled out for persecution under Saddam. Sunnis were the primary victims of American military aggression and viewed Shias as collaborators. As Shias became the primary victims of radical Sunni terror attacks against Iraqi civilians, they came to view Sunnis as Baathists, Saddamists, or Wahhabis. Yet Shias showed restraint amid daily attacks meant to provoke a civil war; they knew the numbers were on their side.

The attacks against Shia civilians did nothing to weaken their increasing power in Iraq, validated by the January 2005 elections. With many Sunni leaders boycotting the elections in protest of the occupation, the new government and the constitutional committee emerged with a large Shia majority. Throughout the region, sectarian tensions began to increase, and Sunnis in Jordan and Saudi Arabia were feeling threatened by the Shia renaissance in Iraq.

More here.

In openDemocracy, K.A. Dilday looks at the anti-discrimination lawsuit against craigslist.

In the United States, a lawsuit has been filed against the internet ad site Craigslist for violating fair-housing practices. Cited in the lawsuit were ads for roommates that said such things as “African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won’t work out”, and “Requirements: Clean Godly Christian Male”. Craigslist began as a personal project in San Francisco, a way for people to look for and advertise employment. It now has sites for people in London, Johannesburg, Paris and many other cities around the world.

In the United States, most of the articles about the lawsuit against Craigslist have focused on the questions of regulating the internet, of making it conform to the same standards and laws as other media. But I wonder what we are really accomplishing…

“Discriminatory housing advertisements contaminate the housing market, stigmatize the people who are discouraged or excluded from housing, and mislead people into thinking that it is normal and acceptable to select tenants on the basis of race, gender, religion or family status”, wrote Laurie Wardell, one of the attorneys filing the lawsuit against Craigslist.

Yet what these laws do is perpetuate an illusion. They do not protect people. Early in the days of Craigslist I remember reading a question posted by a frustrated black man who was looking for a room to rent in New York. He felt that when he went to view apartments to share, people of other races changed their minds about him when they met him because they didn’t want to live with a black man. His question was, should he put his race in his ad and replies to ads or not? My instinct would have been to tell him not to, but I was swayed by the blunt wisdom of one man who replied succinctly: “Yes, put your race in. Why waste your time going to meet bigots?”

Slobodan Milosevic will not be much mourned across the former Yugoslavia that he tore apart. His vision of Serb nationalism brought bloodshed from Croatia to Bosnia and then Kosovo, first through the tanks of the Yugoslav National Army, then through Belgrade-backed Serb paramilitaries and, finally, through the police squads of the Ministry of the Interior. In a few brutal years, more than a quarter-of-a-million people died in Milosevic’s failed wars.

But while Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb ciphers – Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic – must bear the bulk of the responsibility for the killing, an assessment of the career of Europe’s last mass murderer poses uncomfortable questions for a world that let him prosecute his crimes.

more from The Observer here.

Monuments maybe every sculptor’s dream, but they can be a mixed blessing. They communicate beyond the artworld with a big public, and put the sculptor in a line from Stonehenge, the Gothic Cathedrals, Rodin. But they consume disproportionate energies to their aeshetic return.

A sculptor can have any number of new ideas in the maquette studio for the time and energy, usually demanding assistance, needed to realise a single piece at a monumental scale. A maquette, thanks in part to the dollshouse effect, inspires a natural empathy: literally issuing from the hand, it conveys tangible emotion, a felt quality, that will inevitably get lost when transformed into a relatively depersonalized monolith. The biggie is seen by more people, but people who are rushing to catch a train, or sit with their backs to the piece to enjoy a sandwich, or delinquent kids looking for a surface on which to skateboard or graffiti. Alienation, starting with the production process, is felt all around.

more from Artcritical here.

From Scientific American:

An international team of scientists has discovered a massive new planet thanks to an effect described by Einstein 70 years ago. Microlensing–which occurs when a star crosses in front of another star and bends the light from the more distant star, magnifying it like a lens–predicted extra brightness for a red dwarf star roughly 9,000 light years from Earth. Based on the more than 1,000 images from the MDM Observatory in Arizona, team leader Andrew Gould of Ohio State University and his fellow astronomers calculate that this new planet has roughly 13 times the mass of Earth–making it about the size of Neptune–and orbits its star at about the distance of the asteroid belt in our own solar system.

More here.

From Nature:

One of the world’s most powerful supercomputers has conjured a fleeting moment in the life of a virus. The researchers say the simulation is the first to capture a whole biological organism in such intricate molecular detail. The simulation pushes today’s computing power to the limit. But it is only a first step. In future researchers hope that bigger, longer simulations will reveal details about how viruses invade cells and cause disease. Klaus Schulten at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and his colleagues built a computer model of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a tiny spherical package of RNA.

More here.

“Lost Cosmonaut, a darkly humorous, haphazard tour around Russia’s dreariest republics has turned out to be a surprise hit for its author, Daniel Kalder. On a stop off in London between trips to the emptiest corners of the world, the anti-travel travel writer talks to Sarah Crown, the editor of Guardian Unlimited Books, about dead end towns and his search for Mikhail Kalashnikov.”

From The Guardian:

I first encountered Daniel Kalder over a year ago, under extremely odd circumstances.

When an email entitled ‘From Moscow: A Very Unusual Request’ dropped into my inbox in January 2005, my first instinct was to delete it (the phrase “unusual request” shouts spam and scams). The reference to Moscow was just intriguing enough, however, to persuade me to open it, on the off-chance that it might be genuine.

And genuine it was. In a lengthy email, Kalder introduced himself as the author of a forthcoming “anti-travel” book in which he explores four of Russia’s most mysterious ethnic republics. As part of the research for a subsequent book, he explained, he was in the process of applying for a visa for another ex-Soviet republic which is notoriously wary about admitting foreigners. Acting as a barrier to his application, it seemed, was a mention of his real name (he normally writes under a pseudonym) on Guardian Unlimited Books, in a feature on books to look out for in the next year. His “unusual request” was that we help him disappear by removing his name from the article until after his visa was granted. Normally, of course, we wouldn’t dream of tweaking the site to oblige an author, but these were exceptional circumstances. We took down the mention of his name, and a few weeks later Kalder got in touch again to say that his visa request had been granted. He thanked us for our help and promised to send a copy of his book when it came out.

More here.

From The Economist:

Journalism is like making beer. Or so Glenn Reynolds says in his engaging new book. Without formal training and using cheap equipment, almost anyone can do it. The quality may be variable, but the best home-brews are tastier than the stuff you see advertised during the Super Bowl. This is because big brewers, particularly in America, have long aimed to reach the largest market by pushing bland brands that offend no one. The rise of home-brewing, however, has forced them to create “micro-brews” that actually taste of something. In the same way, argues Mr Reynolds, bloggers—individuals who publish their thoughts on the internet—have shaken up the mainstream media (or MSM, in blogger parlance).

More here.

Carl Zimmer, one of the best, and most interesting, science writers around, in his blog, The Loom:

Natural selection can favor genes that allow children to grow up healthy. But in order to grow up healthy, they need nurturing from their mothers, both before and after birth. If a baby’s development puts a strain on a mother, she may end up having fewer children. That means she may spread fewer copies of her genes to later generations . That creates conditions in which natural selection may also genes that allow mothers to restrain their children. Our particular way of having kids puts genes in conflict.

I have an article in tomorrow’s New York Times on these conflicting genes, focusing on the visionary work of David Haig of Harvard University. As I explain in the article, Haig first wrote about his theory in the early 1990s. He made a number of predictions about pregnancy and fetal growth, many of which have only been tested in recent years. Many of them bolster his argument.

In articles such as this one, I usually have to struggle over which examples to include and which to leave out. Sometimes extemely cool ones demand a lot of explanation which would swamp the whole piece. In this case, I had to leave out a couple striking examples of how genes in conflict may create some of the most mysterious birth disorders around.

More here.

Radio Program at the BBC, via Clifford at Cosmic Variance:

In 1759 the British mathematician Francis Maseres wrote that negative numbers “darken the very whole doctrines of the equations and make dark of the things which are in their nature excessively obvious and simple”. Because of their dark and mysterious nature, Maseres concluded that negative numbers did not exist, as did his contemporary, William Friend. However, other mathematicians were braver. They took a leap into the unknown and decided that negative numbers could be used during calculations, as long as they had disappeared upon reaching the solution.

The history of negative numbers is one of stops and starts. The trailblazers were the Chinese who by 100 BC were able to solve simultaneous equations involving negative numbers. The Ancient Greeks rejected negative numbers as absurd, by 600 AD, the Indians had written the rules for the multiplication of negative numbers and 400 years later, Arabic mathematicians realised the importance of negative debt. But it wasn’t until the Renaissance that European mathematicians finally began to accept and use these perplexing numbers.

Why were negative numbers considered with such suspicion? Why were they such an abstract concept? And how did they finally get accepted?

More here.

Maggie Wittlin in Seed Magazine:

Darwin’s primary legacy, the theory of evolution, has robustly withstood years of scientific challenges. But now a team of Stanford researchers has published a paper in Science claiming they can top Darwin’s second monster: sexual selection theory.

The Stanford group says sexual selection theory wrongly models interactions between the sexes as competitive. The group has a new theory, social selection, which models mate selection as a cooperative game where parties seek to maximize group welfare.

Darwinian sexual selection is a theory of conflict: It asserts that men and women have different goals in terms of what they look for in a partner. Males want to have sex with several females in order to create as many offspring as possible, while females want to have sex with very few, high-quality males, who will give their eggs the best genes.

More here.