Fareed Zakaria has this to say about the rest of the world these days:

“[I]n recent elections in Brazil, Germany, Pakistan, Kuwait, and Spain, the United States became a campaign issue. In all these places, resisting U.S. power won votes. Nationalism in many countries is being defined in part as anti-Americanism: Can you stand up to the superpower?”

I think that anti-Americanism is in fact plural. French anti-Americanism sounds more a judgment on culture and civilization, a lament of a telos lost, whereas those of others such as Latin Americans appear much more a criticism of policies, unadorned and unframed by grand evaluations of the prospects for world-history. Similarly, the role anti-Americanism plays in European nationalisms (and whatever embryonic European supra-nationalism exists) is very different from the one it plays in say Latin American nationalisms. In the former, I personally hear echoes of resentiment, even when I agree with Europe. Only Germany and the Netherlands have majorities which are opposed to increasing defense expenditure in order to become a military superpower. It’s this sort of stuff that makes European anti-Americanism irritating.

But there are greater worrisome trends. Eastern Europe has generally not embraced anti-American sentiment. Instead, it had been a bastion of support for the United States. And given their own experiences of occupation and subjugation, they were largely enthusiastic about the invasion of Iraq, seeing in it a wish that the US had done likewise and overthrown Eastern European dictatorships in earlier decades. But that appears to have changed as this survey taken by the German Marshall Fund and the Compagnia di San Paolo suggests. (Via politicaltheory.info.) Taking a close look at the details of the findings, one is surprised to find that Poland, once the most pro-American of European states, is now least supportive of having troops in Afghanistan. Poles are also the most likely to believe that European should spend more on their militaries in order to “protect” their interests separately from the United States. All of this is a mere 2 years.

A pregnant Sara Dickerman wonders about why she can’t eat what she isn’t allowed to eat.

I’m in my eighth month of pregnancy, and so far I have sheepishly eaten several slivers of air-dried Serrano ham, a few crumbles of blue cheese, and one shimmering piece of yellowtail nigiri. Then, there’s the red wine. It started with furtive thimblefuls (just to taste a new wine at the restaurant where I work!) but has spiraled out of control into a biweekly half-glass. All of these items are on the do-not-consume list for pregnant women, but no one seems to be able to tell me how much of a risk occasional lapses like mine pose to my baby.

That history, culture and religion are being tortured in schools across South Asia is disputed only by those who design and endorse the curriculum. Most of the focus is, of course, on the madrasses in Pakistan, especially following 9/11 and the renewed interest in the Taleban. (Here’s a fairly detailed look at madrasses in Pakistan.) Much less attention has been paid to the 20,000 Vidya Bharati schools run by the Sangh parivar. This review of D. N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow by Susan Watkins published sometime ago in The New Left Review may help people become aware of the neglected side of indoctrination in the subcontinent.

“That Jesus roamed the Himalayas, absorbing Vedic wisdom from the gurus he encountered; that the human race originated in Tibet; that the gods reside in the body of the cow, mother of us all—all this has long been taught as established fact in the 20,000 Vidya Bharati schools run under the auspices of the Sangh parivar, the hardline Hindu-nationalist network that lies behind India’s ruling party, the BJP. The Vidya Bharati agenda has already been introduced into primary and secondary schools in BJP-run states, where education policy is often a pawn in coalition deals with regional parties. In 2001, the Sangh-dominated National Council of Educational Research and Training began deleting and rewriting sections of the history textbooks—removing, among other things, any reference to Indian traditions of eating beef. In January 2002, NCERT produced a new history syllabus, founded on its ‘value-based’ national curriculum framework for the country’s schools, which had proposed introducing courses on Vedic mathematics and a ‘spirituality quotient’ as a form of academic assessment.”

Via politicaltheory.info, here’s a review of The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans by Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker.

“Here is a book that gives new meaning to the old saying, ‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.’ Its authors, one a psychiatrist and the other a psychologist and philosopher, have teamed up to tackle the momentous question of how humans developed language. Fearing not to challenge some of the heavyweights of modern science, from Jean Piaget to Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, they present their own theory: The development of language is connected primarily with affect rather than cognition, with the emotional learning that occurs in infants in the arms of those who love them. That is, language is rooted not in genes, not in the wiring of brains, but in behaviors we have learned over millenniums.”

Here’s an eye opener:

“A RECENT story that didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved was the New York Daily News report that 46,000 registered New York City voters are also registered to vote in Florida. Nearly 1,700 of them have had absentee ballots mailed to their home in the other state, and as many as 1,000 have voted twice in the same election. Can 1,000 fraudulent votes change an election? Well, George W. Bush won Florida in 2000 by just 537 votes.”
Writes Jeff Jacoby in today’s Boston Globe, who goes on to say:

” … I registered my wife’s cat as a voter in Cook County, Ill., Norfolk County, Mass., and Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and then requested absentee ballots from all three venues. My purpose wasn’t to cast illegal multiple votes but to demonstrate how vulnerable to manipulation America’s election system has become.

It was a simple scam to pull off. “Under the National Voter Registration Act — the `Motor Voter Law’ — states are required to accept voter registrations by mail,” …

… The drift toward Third World-caliber elections in the most advanced democracy in the world is scandalous. Then again, if Americans can’t be bothered to scrub the voting rolls or to make sure that voters are properly ID’d, maybe they’ve got the election system they deserve.”

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber points to this paper by Dan Hunter at Wharton on the open source movement. (The comments to Farrell’s post are worth considering as well.)

Hunter sees in the open source movement the specter of Karl Marx.

“[M]uch of copyright and patent has come under attack from those who suggest that capture by private interests has had a pernicious influence on public policy. In the related areas of telecommunication spectrum management and internet regulation there have emerged strong arguments for not allocating private property interests, and instead considering these domains as commons property. I suggest that, together, these developments form part of a culture war, a war over the means of production of creative content in our society. I argue that the best way to understand this war is to view it as a Marxist struggle. However, I suggest that copyright and patent reform – where commentators have actually been accused of Marxism – is not where the Marxist revolution is taking place. Instead I locate that revolution elsewhere, most notably in the rise of open source production and dissemination of cultural content.”

Hunter is not the only one who sees a different mode of production based on a type of common property. Of course, it does help that software, unlike say oil or land, is not exhausted in its use and for which consumption is not rival (my use of the good doesn’t come at the expense of your use). In effect, software is sort of “super-abundant”.

I’m not sure how useful Marxism is here. Copyright has always posed a problem for Marxian theory. As a product of law, copyright is a superstructural effect that is determined by the forces of production (and the imperative of its development). The problem is that for intellectual property, copyright enables its development by provding an incentive to develop (the development comes at the expense of optimal use). Developers can capture much if the value of their intellectual effort. The law, part of the “superstructure”, to use Marxian terminology, determines part of the “base”, the productive force, and does not merely stabilize it. The “effective power” over the property here is produced by law, and not vice versa.

But something is clearly going on. There are nearly 4,000 free software programs (some very sophisticated at that) at gnu alone, all of which have been copylefted. (See also Brad de Long and Michael Froomkin’s thoughts on open source in this paper.)

What motivates people to provide these goods is a huge question. Of course, between state and market are a host of social formations with complex incentive structures–family, community and even the individual with his/her own psychic gratification in producing things, to take three. Economics is trying hard to integrate the phenomenon and answer the question. Those interested can find possible answers here, here, here, here and here.

“When Matthew Blakeslee shapes hamburger patties with his hands, he experiences a vivid bitter taste in his mouth. Esmerelda Jones (a pseudonym) sees blue when she listens to the note C sharp played on the piano; other notes evoke different hues–so much so that the piano keys are actually color-coded, making it easier for her to remember and play musical scales. And when Jeff Coleman looks at printed black numbers, he sees them in color, each a different hue. Blakeslee, Jones and Coleman are among a handful of otherwise normal people who have synesthesia. They experience the ordinary world in extraordinary ways and seem to inhabit a mysterious no-man’s-land between fantasy and reality. For them the senses–touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell–get mixed up instead of remaining separate.

Modern scientists have known about synesthesia since 1880, when Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, published a paper in Nature on the phenomenon. But most have brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity. About four years ago, however, we and others began to uncover brain processes that could account for synesthesia. Along the way, we also found new clues to some of the most mysterious aspects of the human mind, such as the emergence of abstract thought, metaphor and perhaps even language.”

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard write about synesthesia here in Scientific American. (See also my earlier post about V.S. Ramachandran here.)

“First things first, I poppa, freaks all the honeys
Dummies – playboy bunnies, those wantin’ money
Those the ones I like ’cause they don’t get nathan’
But penetration, unless it smells like sanitation
Garbage, I turn like doorknobs
Heart throb, never, black and ugly as ever
However, I stay coochied down to the socks
Rings and watch filled with rocks

As a general rule, I perform deviant sexual acts with women of all kinds, including but not limited to those with limited intellect, nude magazine models, and whores. I particularly enjoy sexual encounters with the latter group as they are generally disappointed in the fact that they only receive penile intercourse and nothing more, unless of course, they douche on a consistent basis. Although I am extremely unattractive, I am able to engage in these types of sexual acts with some regularity. Perhaps my sexuality is somehow related to my fancy and expensive jewelery.”

Not bad, huh? From an Oakland high-school student’s ebonics translation assignment, posted in its amusing entirety here (scroll to the bottom) at the infomative hipster blog www.ephemeroi.com. The Oakland interpreter has a good feel for the Shakespearean figural density and bemused pomposity that made B.I.G. ‘not only a client, but the player president.’

“In India, when the release of a film is accompanied by riots, it’s not so much a spontaneous measure of outrage as it is the hallmark of certain groups’ official disfavor–like Ebert and Roeper’s ‘two thumbs down,’ only rowdier. So when the opening of Karan Razdan’s Girlfriend this June was met with two days of rioting in five Indian cities, with windows smashed, cinemas forcibly closed, and billboards set afire by angry mobs of young men in the street, it was only the Hindu traditionalist vigilantes of the Shiv Sena handing in their verdict. It was not, by any stretch, a full showing of the spectrum of people in India who hate this film.

Girlfriend is Bollywood’s first extended foray into Sapphic eroticism (alas, to call it the industry’s first film ‘about lesbianism’ would be too generous). It is also a movie that has managed to offend India’s fledgling lesbian and gay community every bit as deeply as it offends the Hindu right–making these two factions strange bedfellows.”

More here from The New Republic (free registration required).

Almost all of us are mindreaders to the extent that we can judge other people’s emotions just by looking at them, but this ability is lost or severely attenuated in autistic people. Partly because autism is much more common among men than women (who tend to be better at reading others), psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen believes that the disorder should just be considered an extreme form of maleness. In other words, autism exists on a continuum: some have extreme cases, while others are mildly inattentive to the emotions of others. Find out where you stand by taking this test for the Autism-Spectrum Quotient that he has developed.

“Last month my students and I took a field trip to a small forest reserve a couple of miles from our university campus in Malaysian Borneo. Slip-sliding down a steep jungle path, clutching the soggy stems of wild yams in a futile attempt to stay upright, we collapsed into a pebbly streambed. As we regained our composure and began to look around the steep-sided valley cluttered with the mossy logs of fallen rainforest giants, one of the students, Sharifah Ibrahim, suddenly pointed upward: “A Rajah Brooke!” We all looked, and down came the graceful butterfly, gliding on its long emerald and black wings and settling at a puddle to drink.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Alfred Russel Wallace must have stood in similar awe when he first saw this spectacular birdwing butterfly in Sarawak, a few hundred miles down the coast from where we were hiking. Having arrived in Borneo in November 1854, the naturalist struck up a friendship with the legendary Sir James Brooke, the first “white rajah” of Sarawak. It was Brooke who gave him a specimen of the as-yet-unnamed species. Wallace immediately dispatched a note to the Entomological Society of London, naming the species Ornithoptera brookiana after his new friend…”

Menno Schilthuizen reviews two biographies of the man who came up with natural selection independently of Darwin: The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace by Ross A. Slotten, and An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace by Martin Fichman, here in Natural History Magazine.

“While families gathered at ground zero on Saturday to read out the names of lost loved ones, an artist and a team of riggers uptown at Rockefeller Center were just beginning to place seven climbing life-size human figures on a slanted pole soaring 100 feet in the air.

As a lone American flag flew at half-staff behind him, the artist, Jonathan Borofsky, repeatedly told curious passers-by that his work, ‘Walking to the Sky,’ had nothing to do with 9/11.

Yet its theme – a portrait of humanity rising up from the earth and heading into the unknown in a collective search for wisdom – seemed eerily poignant.”

More here from the New York Times.

Jonathan Corum runs a web site of brilliant visual aids, style.org. Have a look at his beautiful diagrams of birds in flight, county breakdowns of the Democratic Iowa caucuses, his Mars panoramas, or, most recently, his graphical depiction of the nationalities of enemy combatants held at Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay.

Anyone who fully understands what is going on in Russia these days is more sophisticated than I. A site where you can learn just how much you don’t understand about the Russian mind is Pravda.ru. And what to make of this story about the direction of time? Finally, as you read about time’s reversals, at the bar to the left you can find out more about what constitutes a ‘Fun Story’ on the Volga.

It’s nice to know that there is still a Pravda newspaper, even if nowdays the Russian truth-machine reads more like Fortean Times than “workers of the world unite.” David Gassaway forwarded me this madness about putative Russian time-travel experiments:

“In August 2001, a new model of the time machine meant for a human was set in a remote forest in Russia’s Volgograd Region. When the machine even operated on car batteries and had low capacity, it still managed to change the time by three per cent; the change was registered with symmetrical crystal oscillators.”

Read the whole article, “Time Can Be Turned Back,” published in Pravda’s science section, here. The top science story on Pravda’s website is currently “UFO Clouds Abduct Humans.” The header reads: “Probably, the phenomenon of mysterious ‘reasonable’ clouds represents an independent form of life.” Probably not. And it is worth noting that, strictly speaking, Pravda isn’t even Pravda anymore.

One of the most talented young painters in New York is a woman named Shahzia Sikander. Named one of 20 “Artists for the New Millenium” by the New York Times, Shahzia has a new show coming up at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. “I am very excited about it. There is a live performance too (a collaboration between dancer Sharmilla Desai and myself) at 5pm,” says Shahzia in an email.

Look at some of Shahzia’s work here and here.

There’s more about the show here, and more about Shahzia here, and a conversation between Shahzia and Homi K. Bhabha can be found here. Oh, and here is an interview of Shahzia and Nilima Sheikh by Vishakha N. Desai of the Asia Society.

Art Spiegelman told the assembled audience at Cooper Union on September 10 that he couldn’t get a major American media outlet (besides the Forward) to serialize “In the Shadow of No Towers,” the artist’s depiction of September 11, 2001. Instead the panels appeared mostly in Europe. At his lecture and slideshow, the chain-smoking Spiegelman described his famous black-on-black New Yorker cover after the terrorist attacks, as well as his increasing suspicion that the magazine’s “monocle” was a far too reasonable lens for his September 11 work. Michiko Kakutani has reviewed the book here, which is now available from Pantheon. There has been an outpouring of work about the attacks, of course, but, to my knowledge, nothing on this scale from a major artistic or literary figure that attempts to encompass the whole of September 11.

“This week has seen protests around Canada—and at Canadian Embassies worldwide—as citizens grapple with an issue that blurs the boundary between religious tolerance and oppression. The Ontario government is considering a proposal to allow certain family law matters—including divorce, custody, and inheritance—to be arbitrated by panels of Muslim clerics. Supporters of the proposal say that Canada’s commitment to cultural diversity requires that Muslim law be accorded the same respect as other legal systems. Opponents say Muslim law inherently conflicts with the basic freedoms guaranteed Canadians.” More here from Slate. (Thanks to A. Kynikos for sending this along.)

Musings has a post on perhaps the geekiest and most clever help-wanted ad ever. It’s brief and worth a look. To tease, it begins with:

www.{first 10-digit prime found in the consecutive digits of e}.com

Brad de Long points to an interesting paper by Nathan Nunn of the University of Toronto on African economic development and the slave trade. The paper, “Slavery, Institutional Development, and Long-Run Growth in Africa, 1400-2000”, seems pretty impressive. I’ve only glanced through it, but the reconstruction of the data for the exports of slaves over a 600 hundred year period is quite an accomplishment. The claim in a nutshell:

Can Africa’s current state of under-development be partially attributed to the large trade in slaves that occurred during the Atlantic, Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades? Evidence from the historical literature suggests that the answer to this may be yes. This study attempts to answer this question empirically. Combining shipping data with historical records reporting slave ethnicities, I construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa between 1400 and 1913. Using this measure, I find the number of slaves exported from a country to be an important determinant of economic performance in the second half of the 20th century. To address the potential problems of measurement error and unobservable country characteristics, I instrument slave exports using measures of the distance from each country to the major slave markets around the world. I also find evidence that the channel through which the slave trade affects development today is through the slave trade’s past impact on the formation of domestic institutions.

Nunn controls for ethnic fractionalization, Islam, Christianity, and primary resource extraction. He also shows that the effects of the slave trade are channeled through their institutional effects: political stability, the quality and accountability of the government, property rights. This of course makes sense in so much as we can expect huge and regular demographic upheavals to disrupt the ability of societies to solve collective problems in ways that benefit all and to open themselves up to predation by opportunists and marauders, inside and outside the state. For those interested, here’s another paper by Nunn outlining this mechanism (in game-theor-ese).

Despite the existence of empirical studies linking Africa’s current underdevelopment to its history of exploitation, a formal theoretical explanation of this link has yet to be made. How could these past events have had apparently lasting impacts? I provide a game-theoretic model that explains how extraction during the slave trade and colonial rule resulted in a permanent increase in rent-seeking behavior and a permanent decrease in the security of private property, both of which have helped foster Africa’s current underdevelopment.

The finds aren’t startling, but we do live in a world in which many have a tendency to downplay the hugely negative consequences of slavery for today and not merely for the past. As with all interesting work, more questions, I expect, will flow from these answers.