The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution remain his most troubling. Foucault welcomed the “spiritual politics” ushered in by the revolution.

In a 1978 Nouvel Observateur article on Khomeini and an Islamic state, he wrote:

“One thing must be clear. By ‘Islamic government,’ nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clergy would have a role of supervision or control. . . . It is something very old and also very far into the future, a notion of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience.”

The piece was attacked at the time, notably by the Left. A leftist Iranian exile denounced the choice between “the SAVAK and religious fanaticism”. Maxine Rodinson, the great Marxist historian of the Middle East who saw in the Iranian revolution the beginnings of “a semi-archaic fascism”, practically called Foucault ignorant.

This brief article tries to make sense of the episode and see what lessons it holds for today.

“Two questions for today emerge from Foucault’s Iran writings. First, were these writings aberrations, largely the product of his ignorance of Iranian history and culture?. . . [The second] concerns the whole issue of religious fundamentalism, more important than ever to debates over the crisis of modernity since September 11, 2001.”

(Via politicaltheory.info.)

Andrew Sullivan thinks that this interview with Daniel Dennett shows Dennett admitting that evolution has a larger purpose (higher than the propagation of genes to succeeding generations, that is). I didn’t see it that way, although I did see Robert Wright talking far more than he was conducting an interview.

Wright: “Is it inconceivable to you that . . . there is some larger purpose unfolding or that natural selection is the product of design? . . . that there was a designer of natural selection . . .”

Dennett: “I can imagine that in some loose sense? I don’t know if that’s a coherent idea, but it’s not obviously incoherent.”

Wright: “But you certainly don’t buy it, in any sense.”

Dennett: “I don’t buy it.”

Also check out the interviews with Freeman Dyson, John Maynard Smith, Steven Pinker, Robert Pollack, Francis Fukuyama, and others.

UPDATE: Dennett’s sent an email to Sullivan objecting to the characterization. I can’t find it on Sullivan’s website, but here’s a segment.

“Wright misinterprets his own videoclip (I am grateful that it is available uncut on his website, so that everybody can see for themselves). All I agreed to was that IF natural selection had the properties of embryogenesis (or “an organism’s maturation”), it would be evidence for a higher purpose. But I have always insisted that evolution by natural selection LACKS those very properties. And I insisted on that in the earlier portions of the videoclip.”

Sullivan does, however, provide a full link to Wright’s reply. Here’s the link to Wright’s original account of the interview, in which he begins, ” I have some bad news for Dennett’s many atheist devotees. He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose.”

For a site called 3quarksdaily it would be remiss not to mention that quarks look more and more like they are composed, as is everything else, of strings. It is all strings baby. The five (maybe six) versions of string theory continue to look more and more like arms of a single unified theory of everthing. Right now people are calling it M-Theory. ‘M’ for mysterious maybe. Anyway it is amazing stuff. Brian Greene’s book, The Elegant Universe is a very very worthwhile read especially for those who can’t browse through Witten’s latest paper or follow the more insane permutations of Calabi-Yau mathematics. This is cutting edge mind-blowing science.

Every October, old publishing/editing types shack up at the Frankfurter Hoff for a week and deal in foreign book rights, taking the first step in the decisive process of what foreign literature we get to see over here in culturally isolated America. These are people for whom cross-cultural communication is paramount, people who believe in a kind of utopian global culture of writing and reading (and selling books). How strange, then that the Fair has bizarrely decided to cite “the Arab World” as their guest of honor at this year’s fair. And has then decided to implement greatly increased security measures over those of the last few years. Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt’s nobel-laureate literary ambassador to the Western world, offered an anemic challenge to the idea of lumping some 20 countries and their distinct literatures under the same name while previous “guests of honor” have traditionally been single nations. “Did the West need to feel its security threatened so that it would engage in a rediscovery of Islamic civilization and Arab culture?” he asked. Probably. And as Edward Wyatt in his NY Times piece implies, the rediscovery of such non-specific, nebulous “culture” looks a lot more like an enlightened “fuck you” from a European nation to the US than it does a genuine literary nod.

More here.

“Austrian feminist writer Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy said Thursday, citing her “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays.”

The decision to award the prize to a woman, and a poet, was the first since 1996, when Wislawa Szymborska of Poland won. Since the prize first was handed out in 1901, only nine women have won it.” (Read on.)

Tomorrow, the Nobel prize for literature will be announced. The rumor mill has the Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) as the frontrunner. But then, the rumor mill had him as the frontrunner last year as well. (Adam Shatz’s article on Adonis from a while ago in the New York Times is worth a read.) See here, here, and here.

“The Academy is secretive, leaving pundits to guess the winner based on whether the prize recently went to a novelist, poet or playwright and what was their gender, language and race.

Fredrik Lind of Hedengren’s book store in Stockholm is known for predicting whose works to have in stock. His tip this year is Ali Ahmed Said, the Syrian-Lebanese poet known as Adonis.

‘Arabic poetry is a tradition that has never got any prize and he is the greatest living Arabic poet,’ said Lind.”

Adonis is controversial in the Arab world. He’s been an opponent of Arab dictatorships (not that controversial), a reformer, and has raised the question of Arab attitudes towards Jews (controversial), while remaining critical of it. At once he’ll condemn Zionism and also indict Arab treatment of Jews.

“What is the difference between the position of the Serbian militias which ostracize the Muslim and annihilate him for being Muslim, and this ‘position’ which ostracizes the Jew for being Jewish?”

His near-pagan views of Arab poetry also elicit alarm. For example:

“For in its original, pre-Islamic sense, poetry is inspiration — which is to say prophecy — but without commandments, institutions or norms. However, starting with Islam — and this also deserves a separate study — poetry in Arab society has languished and withered precisely insofar as it has placed itself at the service of religiosity, proselytism and political and ideological commitments.”

We’ll see tomorrow.

Other contenders mentioned in the rumor mill of Nobel watchers include Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Transtromer, Doris Lessing, Hugo Claus, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, Ismael Kadaré, Ko Un, Don DeLillo, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

I subscribe to a well-run and totally free service, Powell’s Book-a-Day at Powells.com, which sends me a book review every day. The reviews come from The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The New Republic, Salon.com, and the TLS. Powell’s does a good job selecting them. Yesterday I received an excellent review by Clive James about a new translation of Madame Bovary. (James had his problems with the book.) The review was originally published in The Atlantic. Out of curiosity, I went to see if I could find the essay in its original context on the Atlantic site. No such luck; you had to pay to see it ($2.95 per article). But at Powell’s, it is available for free.

What a curious state of affairs. The Atlantic is hoping it can sucker readers into paying for web content that it makes available for free elsewhere to promote itself. But the promotion backfires because the only thing I learn from this process is that I can get good book reviews every day from Powell’s for free.

What is the web for, anyway? I’d like it to be a kind of new 21st century encyclopedia, where information is exchanged freely, and where digital archives of great writing can endure. The Atlantic wants it to be an advertisement, essentially, for their “real” product. I think that in the end magazines like The Atlantic and The New Republic will lose out on their internet strategy, at least with readers like me. One reason why: savvy readers know that writers are not ever, ever paid a dime more for a story that is published online as well as in the print version of a magazine. So there is no guilt about not paying.

Obviously, magazines could not long endure if they made all their content available for free online and everybody stopped subscribing as a result. But would this really happen? If a magazine is worth subscribing to, it is worth having around the house; it is worth supporting and paying for. Did the e-book kill the book? I think the system of The New York Times makes a good compromise. Most everything it publishes is available via a free online registration while it is current, and then on a paying basis after its topical relevance has expired. I haven’t noticed that The Times has collapsed financially as a result. The Atlantic – and the most arrogant offender, The New Republic – should follow suit or risk losing increasingly web-savvy younger readers over the long haul. At any rate, the system of internet magazine archiving has not reached its philosophical bedrock yet.

“The information technology firm IBM says it has developed the world’s most powerful computer.

The Blue Gene/L system performed just over 36,000 billion calculations a second during tests at IBM’s Rochester office in Minnesota, the company announced on 29 September. Although the claims are unlikely to be independently verified until November, when the next worldwide supercomputer league-table is published, experts have long predicted that Blue Gene/L was destined for the top spot.”

More here from Nature.

“Every year it gets more difficult to separate Web wheat from chaff and pick a handful of sites out of billions to receive the Scientific American.com Science and Technology Web Awards. The Web is no longer just a tool for finding the occasional fact or trivium–it’s a necessity, an integral part of our daily lives, and the sheer amount of information available can be overwhelming. But somehow, once again, we have winnowed the best sites from the rest. We think you’ll agree that the 50 science and technology sites listed here are indeed worthy of high praise.”

More here from Scientific American.

“Kirkus Reviews has long prided itself on being a sort of Consumer Reports for the book publishing industry, proclaiming its independence by steadfastly refusing to accept advertising and producing early, plain-spoken reviews that can amplify or smother a new book’s early buzz.

Now, however, Kirkus is embracing a new spirit of commercialism. This fall, it is starting two new online publications with the Kirkus name: for $350 Kirkus Discoveries will review a new book from any publisher; for $95, Kirkus Reports will recommend a selected lifestyle title in a listing. And for the first time in its 71 years, the company is considering selling advertising in its flagship publication.”

More here by Edward Wyatt in the New York Times.

“Right after you’ve had a superb dinner out, you often want to recommend the restaurant to friends. But sometimes when you later reflect on your experience, you realize that the service was slow and the room stuffy, and your enthusiasm wanes.

That’s my situation in reviewing How Users Matter, a collection edited by sociologists Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch. I’m delighted by their central thesis: that technology analysts need to give more thought to how people use computers, telephones, cars, medicines and consumer appliances. Oudshoorn and Pinch powerfully and convincingly promote paying more attention to ‘how users consume, modify, domesticate, reconfigure, and resist technologies.’ The unifying notion of the ‘social construction of technology’ (SCOT) that they put forth is a powerful idea, one that should have a strong influence on academic researchers and professional developers. In this approach, users are viewed as a social group that helps shape technologies. Technologies in turn are observed to have different meanings for different social groups (for example, a device that’s safe for young people may be dangerous for the elderly). The SCOT approach provides an important counterweight to the technology–centered strategies that guide many managers, entrepreneurs and innovators.”

More here from Ben Shneiderman’s review of How Users Matter: The Co–Construction of Users and Technology edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, in American Scientist Online.

Continuing on the theme of the Internet, 411blog.net

“[is a] service [that] exists to create a constructive, symbiotic relationship between blogging and traditional forms of journalism.

Reporters: Use 411blog.net to quickly authenticate highly technical or specialized story elements with subject-matter experts drawn from the best the blogosphere has to offer. Simply contact one or more of the bloggers listed by subject area, pose your question(s), and have a small army of experts begin defining and/or explaining the significance of details that could take days (or longer) to elucidate otherwise! You may also arrange to interview subject-matter experts directly. Each listing includes ways to contact a source so you won’t miss getting the information you need before deadline.

Authentication and expert judgment by bloggers (and their readers) is a significant but under-used force in improving journalistic quality. Put it to work for you with 411blog.net!

Bloggers: Use 411blog.net to nominate subject-matter experts, build trust with traditional media, and increase your standing in the blogosphere.”

Take a look around.

The whole Dan Rather-Bush national guard forgery episode appears to have brought the blogosphere into a new prominence. (Though, check out Matthew Yglesias’ objections to all the self-congratulation.) In some ways, it does appear to be an instance of collective problem solving.

As the recent and peculiar embarce of the masses (all the rage these days thanks to James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, but see this review by Daniel Davies) implies, if for a pool of people who are to come to a collective decision, each individual has, say, a 51% of being correct, as the number of people grows, the chances that the collective decision will be right is significantly greater than 51%. For a group of three people, each of whom has, say, a 2/3rd (67%) chance of being right, the chances that a collective decision is right is significantly greater, nearly 75%.

When the chances that an individual is right is greater than his or her chances of not being right, majorities are very likely, more likely than any individual, to produce the correct decision. This is the upshot of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem.

(Of course, if each individual’s chance of being right is less than half, y < .5, the chance that a majority will right will be less than y, by symmetry.)

Add to this the fact that for reasons of Bayesian rationality, we should weight what majorities believe heavily, unless we have good reasons. (I’m discussing empirical issues, and not disagreements about values.) If the Jury Theorem gives us reasons to believe that the outcome is correct, we should adjust (update) our beliefs to what the majority has thrown up as the correct answer, submit, as it were, to a tyranny of the majority’s ontology, as Robert Goodin suggested as a set up to his argument.

With the advent of, not simply blogs, but large scale collective problem solving enabled by new technologies, is there the chance that we receive better information and better answers? (Again, none of this stops value conflict.) The experience of wikipedia.org, in which, incorrect information is corrected quickly, seems to suggest “yes”.

I don’t live in Korea, nor do I speak Korean, but the case of OhMyNews—a South Korean news service in which “citizen reporters”, ordinary people, call in news–may over time prove the extent to which the involvement of “crowds” improves information, though strictly speaking the number of people who report any single story isn’t clear, and neither is how stories are corrected. The stories are ranked according to credibility. But the reception of OhMyNews in Korea does suggest that the logic holds.

“When some Yonsei University students recently met with a visiting reporter to discuss the future of news, one psychology major put it simply: ‘How can you ever get truth from one source? The Internet allows us to check multiple sources, to explore message-board postings, to debate issues with others—that is the only way to find truth. And besides, what good is information if you can’t react to it?’ ‘We’re not stupid,’ added a business student. ‘We know that there is a difference between a message board, a traditional journal and OhmyNews. But by putting them together, our understanding is better. We can piece together truth.’

The facts themselves explain why this is something we should all probably try and see. Three kids in the 1980’s take seven years to re-shoot Raiders of the Lost Ark shot by shot. You see them get older as the movie progresses. The girl grows breasts, Indie starts to get facial hair, etc. They storyboarded all 602 scenes in the film and shot them all. What can you say?

“A spectator with an especially intimate view of human evolution is beginning to tell its story and has so far divulged two quite unexpected findings.

The human louse finds people so delicious that it will accept no substitutes and cannot live more than a few hours away from the warmth and sustenance of the human body. This devotion to the human cause means that the evolutionary history of human lice dovetails with that of their hosts and reflects several pivotal events that affected both species.

In a finding that seems bound to inspire several science fiction treatments, Dr. David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville has reached the startling conclusion that some human lice show signs of having evolved originally on a different human species.

In today’s issue of the journal PLoS Biology, he and his colleagues suggest that modern humans may have contracted this strain of lice from an archaic human like Homo erectus.”

More here by Nicholas Wade in the New York Times.

“More than half a century after the publication of his landmark study, ‘Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,’ Alfred C. Kinsey remains one of the most influential figures in American intellectual history. He’s certainly the only entomologist ever to be immortalized in a Cole Porter song. Thanks to him, it’s now common knowledge that almost all men masturbate, that women peak sexually in their mid-30’s and that homosexuality is not some one-in-a-million anomaly. His studies helped bring sex – all kinds of sex, not just the stork-summoning kind – out of the closet and into the bright light of day.

But not everyone applauds that accomplishment. Though some hail him for liberating the nation from sexual puritanism, others revile him as a fraud whose ‘junk science’ legitimized degeneracy. Even among scholars sympathetic to Kinsey there’s disagreement. Both his biographers regard him as a brave pioneer and reformer, but differ sharply about almost everything else. One independent scholar has even accused him of sexual crimes.

All of which makes the decision by the writer and director Bill Condon to place him at the center of a major Hollywood biopic – one loaded up with stars, including Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Peter Sarsgaard – rather striking.”

More here by Caleb Crain in the New York Times.

“Two American scientists who discovered how people can smell and recall about 10,000 different odors were awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in the category of physiology or medicine today.

The winners were Dr. Richard Axel, 58, a university professor at Columbia, and Dr. Linda B. Buck, 57, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington in Seattle. The two, who will share the $1.3 million award, were cited for a discovery they made in 1991 while working together at Columbia University in Manhattan.

Until publication of their fundamental paper in 1991, the sense of smell had been ‘the most enigmatic of our senses,’ the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm said in announcing the award. The two scientists’ work provides a molecular understanding of how people who smell a lilac in childhood can recognize the fragrance later in life and also recall associated memories.”

More here in the New York Times.

“Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant. But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths.

Consider the so-called Lost Continent of Atlantis, a mythic place that has been ‘found’ in so many places around the planet that one wouldn’t think there was anywhere left to look. Think again. On June 6 the BBC released a story about satellite images locating Atlantis in, of all places, the south of Spain…

Atlantis also has been ‘found’ in the Mediterranean, the Canaries, the Azores, the Caribbean, Tunisia, West Africa, Sweden, Iceland and even South America. But what if there is nothing to find? What if Plato made up the story for mythic purposes? He did. Atlantis is a tale about what happens to a civilization when it becomes combative and corrupt. Plato’s purpose was to warn his fellow Athenians to pull back from the precipice created by war and wealth.”

More here by Michael Shermer in Scientific American.

Last night I saw the moving and fascinating documentary film Lost Boys of Sudan made by Megan Mylan and John Shenk, on PBS.

“Lost Boys of Sudan is a feature-length documentary that follows two Sudanese refugees on an extraordinary journey from Africa to America. Orphaned as young boys in one of Africa’s cruelest civil wars, Peter Dut and Santino Chuor survived lion attacks and militia gunfire to reach a refugee camp in Kenya along with thousands of other children. From there, remarkably, they were chosen to come to America. Safe at last from physical danger and hunger, a world away from home, they find themselves confronted with the abundance and alienation of contemporary American suburbia.”

You can find out more about the film, as well as learn about how to help in Darfur and/or help the “Lost Boys” in America, here.

“Researchers who patented a comb-over hairstyle in 1975 were top prize winners in the engineering section of this year’s Ig Nobel awards.

Father and son team Frank and Donald Smith developed a method to cover partial baldness using only the individual’s own hair.

Award organisers, the Annals of Improbable Research publishers, say the Igs are meant to celebrate the unusual.

They also aim to encourage interest in science, medicine, and technology.

This year’s prizes were awarded at a sell-out gala ceremony at Harvard University in Massachusetts and the prizes were handed to the winners by genuine Nobel Laureates.”

More here from the BBC.