I was sitting for maybe half an hour in the main room of the plantation house watching an old green and white painted door swing lazy in the gusts of ocean breeze. The door was too heavy to slam. It was creeping open slowly of its own weight and then another gust of wind would blow it back. I knew the gust was coming because I could see it in the trees through the crack in the door. I was watching those trees and I could see the branches shake and the bits of green would start dancing around. And then, I knew that the door would begin to swing closed again. Every time, for half and hour, I braced myself for the inevitable slamming of the heavy painted door. But it never slammed. The door was too heavy, the rusted hinges offered too much resistance. The gust would catch the door in a moment of promise and then give up, indifferent to the door, indifferent to the stubbornness of the door, indifferent to the wobbly frame of the old plantation house and the scraggly grounds with intermittent explosions of bougainvillea and the softer pink of the orchids; orchid, I’m reminded by my wife, meaning testicle in Greek, no doubt referring to the root of the orchid, which dangles off the stem and terminates in a couple of wrinkly little sacs that are normally hidden under the earth, the secret source and sustenance for the vulvic spread of the furry flower above.

***

At around 10:00 AM every morning a small bird that we have named Shelly flies down to the veranda. He is a hopper. He also likes to perch on things, the rim of a cup of coffee, the edge of a book, the screen of a computer. He has a friend we call Fatty but Fatty keeps his distance. Shelly is the guy who engages the world. On the second day, we discovered that Shelly is particularly fond of small containers of jam and if you open one and leave it on the table he’ll eventually make his way over, stick his sharp little beak into the container, and dart his tongue out ten or fifteen times in rapid succession.

Heidegger once said that animals are poor in world. It is a step up, I suppose, from the viewpoint of someone like Descartes, for whom animals were at an infinite remove from human beings, the latter having souls. Still, Heidegger’s comment is more about finding the distinction between animals and men then seeing the lines of continuity. I say this only because I’ve gotten to know Shelly. It is not difficult to say that he has a personality and it differs from that of his dour pal, Fatty. Fatty, I have come to realize, fears rejection and it has made him bitter. Shelly is open to the world, intoxicated by experience, you can see it in the way he pokes his head into the coffee cup and cranes his bird neck back up to look at you and then takes off in the other direction to inspect new developments around the base of the aloe plant.

I suspect that, like many things, it all has its roots in Christianity and the problem of theodicy. We needed to explain how there could be evil in the world since God is good. We hit on the solution of man’s free will. To be good, man needed also to have the capacity to do evil. But this solution left the animal world in an odd and uncomfortable position. Not capable of free will, they none-the-less were fated to suffer in man’s world. They were condemned with no possibility of redemption. That strange problem has been carried over into contemporary discussions about consciousness and philosophy of mind. More often than not, the basic premise is that the problem of consciousness is a human one, and that there is an infinite gap between the way we experience the world and the way that other creatures do. We’re uncomfortable about the way that our own modes of experience overlap with those of creatures like Shelly, who is currently trying to figure out a way to force his entire body into a green bottle sitting along one of the garden walls.

***

May I reveal to you that there is a secret city hidden inside the city of Willemstad, Curaçao? There is only one picture of Willemstad, reproduced thousands and thousands of times. It is taken from Otrobanda looking across the inlet toward Punda. A row of Dutch colonial buildings make Willemstad look like it is just emerging from the seventeenth century. Otrobanda and Punda are at the Southernmost section of a road that is known simply as The Ring. But what does The Ring, ring? That is the secret of Willemstad. I will tell you that this inner city burns and belches. At night it throws strange flames into the air that can be seen for miles. Its color is the dull grey of tankers and silos. Its infrastructure is pipes, little pipes, massive pipes, intertwined pipes, networks of pipes, whole families of pipes, generations of pipes, a universe of pipes onto itself in which one could find, no doubt, pipes whose sole function is to pipe things from one kind of pipe to another kind of pipe. These pipes have forgotten of the world of man and nature and live in an ontology of pipeness where the only kind of being is to-be-an-enclosure and to-be-flowed-through day and night. Inside this planet of pipes and metal husks? Oil. The secret Willemstad is a city of oil. It is my favorite city.

***

The Dutch Caribbean would not be the Dutch Caribbean without the specific combinations of sounds that make it so. There is color, of course, a certain look, and there is feel, primarily the heaviness in the air of heat and the sea but always also there is sound. Typically it comes in the rushes of the wind that sweep across the islands of their own volition paying little heed to the insignificant patches of raised land that make up the landscape of the Dutch Caribbean. And then there is the twittering of the birds who jump around in the swaying branches of the trees and bushes that catch the wind and make of it a rich and fulsome rushing sound, almost like water and the pounding of the tide such that, at the sea, one constantly hears the rushing of the ebbing and flowing of the tide and further inland, one constantly hears the rushing and flowing of the wind. The point is, there is always some kind of rushing. Then there is the sound of one solitary car. You start to hear it from far away and then the sound grows, passes you and slowly fades away. There will always be that one car and no part of any of the islands is really far enough away from any road not to hear it. The car will come and the car will fade. And then the birds will twitter. Birds twitter everywhere, but in the Dutch Caribbean they twitter in mysterious syncopation with the rushing noises of the sea and the breeze that is itself constantly punctuated by the sound of the one car, approaching and passing. These three sounds weave together into one interrelated thing; the lengthy crescendo of the one passing car layered over by, the shorter burst of rushing sound from sea and breeze layered over by, the staccato punctuation of the twittering of the birds. You could graph it something like this:

Gggrgrgrgrgrggrggrgrrrrgrgggggrgrgrgrgrgrggrggrgrgrgrrgrgrggrgrgrggrgrgrg
Sssshhhhhh ssssshhhhhhh ssssshhhhhhhh ssssshhhh
Pip pip pipipip pip pip pip pipip pip

***

A thesis: The Caribbean is terrible and sad. That’s why it is so beautiful. If the people were happy here it would be unbearable. These happy islands would mock the nations of the earth. Nothing would make sense anymore; our daily toils and strife would be stripped of whatever faint meaning we are foolishly able to attach to them. We would all give up, find a lonely niche somewhere to go die in. Luckily, the people of the Caribbean are not happy. They are a wreck. There is something brutal here that will not go away. Plunder, murder, slavery, the basest things, the slow progress of evil that worked its way across every island. There is nothing abstract about this. To cast your eyes around the Caribbean is to see plunder still in progress, the legacy of slavery right there in the racial divides along axes of wealth and power. Let us be honest friends, the Caribbean is a nightmare and because of that we can enjoy it. Merely a thesis.

***

I haven’t told you of the secret within the secret, the ring inside the ring. In the fifteenth century the Catholic Church in Spain decided that it was a good time to get more serious about Christianity. The Jews, sensing that this new direction boded rather ill for them, cast their eyes about the globe once more, looking for safe haven. The Dutch were a good prospect. A basic premise of toleration seemed to govern their internal affairs. And as time went on the Dutch began to establish their colonies, the Dutch Caribbean being one example, Curaçao in particular. And so they came. The Jews sailed the high seas to Curaçao. They lived and died in Willemstad and in the smaller towns, on the beaches and in the craggy coves. They ended up with names like Chaim Aron Henriquez. Linguists say that the language of the Dutch Caribbean, Papamiento, has its roots in the Ladino of the Sephardim and thereby can be traced directly back to the Jews who fled the Inquisition. As they lived and died they built a cemetery. They put it in a place outside the city of Willemstad. And then the city grew. And it continued to grow until, in 1919, Shell came to town. There was oil beneath the waters of Curaçao, and a deep water port in the center of Willemstad where it could be processed. There was also a Jewish cemetery dating back to the seventeenth century.

Today, you can take a turn onto a little used road off the northern section of The Ring. A drive of a couple hundred yards brings you into the heart of the city of pipes. The smell of oil and burning gases is overwhelming. There is a sound that can only be described as a deep mechanical belching. Giant chimneys and exhaust pipes stretch high into the sky letting out a thick white smoke. Here is the final resting place of the Jews of Curacao. Thousands of wind swept graves on which the names and stories of the deceased can barely be discerned. They are being wiped away here a second time, in what seems almost like the concerted effort of man and nature to obliterate this place of memory.

As a postscript, the early modern philosopher Spinoza lived in Amsterdam and was from a family of Marrano Jews who fled Spain. He could easily have ended up in Curaçao. Indeed, his half sister did, and she is buried in the cemetery at the center of The Ring. We know almost nothing of Spinoza the man, and it seems that he wanted it that way. We have only his writings, some of the most powerful and lucid thoughts of their time, any time. In his Ethics, Spinoza wrote, “a free man thinks of nothing less than death.”

In most countries secularism is positively correlated with support for welfare, but does welfare make people more secular? Anthony Gill of the University of Washington says yes; in 2004, he and grad student Erik Lundsgaarde published a paper arguing that welfare provides a substitute for church attendance, making people less likely to attend church.

The full theory goes as follows: in the 19th century, the power of Christian churches came from their ability to provide social services such as charity, education, and health care. As the state started providing the same services without requiring or expecting church attendance, it became less economic for people to attend church, and less economic for church leaders to focus on welfare activities.

This theory has a lot of holes in it, but the study has some empirical backing. There’s a statistically significant relationship between a Christian country’s welfare spending as a percentage of GDP and the percentage of people in it who report attending church weekly, even when controlling for such variables as education and whether the country is Catholic or not. The weakness of the study comes not from its lack of data, but from flaws in how the variables are defined, failure to look for alternative explanations, and problems with individual case studies.

First, the study doesn’t explicitly say how welfare spending is measured. This is significant because it right off the bat fails to control for key factors. Most importantly, the most expensive part of the welfare state is social security, whose cost increases with the old age dependency ratio. But more religious states have higher population growth rates, leading to younger demographics and lower social security costs.

It’s possible to get around that by looking at states that buck the trend and are both relatively religious and relatively old. The best case study here is Poland, which is simultaneously the most religious nation in Europe and one of the oldest. Additional examples include Spain, Portugal, and to some extent Italy. The only one of the four that appears in the scattergram plotting church attendance and welfare spending is Spain, which is considerably more religious than the regression line predicts.

In addition, even when one controls for old age pensions, not all governments spend welfare the same way. The USA prefers targeted tax breaks, making its welfare system appear stingier than it actually is. In addition, some benefits can be distributed either as welfare or as spending on health care and education, which the study doesn’t account for. A good example in the US would be free lunches in schools, a welfare service that adds to the education budget.

Second, the omission of education spending is crucial. A church often thrives by having its own set of parochial schools. The standard British joke about catechism is that religious education only secularizes people, though the more common sensical effect is the opposite, namely that greater availability of parochial schools will make the population more religious. Education spending is correlated to welfare spending via the mediating variable of economic liberalism or socialism. As such, Gill and Lundsgaarde commit a grave sin of omission by overlooking it.

Likewise, a more direct political mediating variable could account for much of the correlation. In a followup paper, Gill notes that the correlation between welfare and religosity holds within US states, too. But within the US, both welfare and secularism fall under the rubric of liberal politics, contrasted with the welfare-busting and religiosity of conservative politics.

This in fact holds true in Europe and Latin America, which comprise all countries in the study but two, the US and Australia. Throughout Europe and Latin America, even more so than in the US, there is a strong tradition of anti-clerical liberalism. It’s likely that all Gill’s motivating example of Uruguay shows is that Uruguay has a long history of domination by the left-liberal Colorado Party.

Third, the main measure used for religiosity, reported church attendance, is deeply flawed. The USA’s real church attendance rate is half its reported rate. The church attendance variable tracks not how many people attend church, but how many would like pollsters to believe that they attend church. This variable has some value, but is overall less important than data based on actual church attendance.

The other figure used, the percentage of people who declare themselves nonreligious, is flawed as well. There are two dimensions to religious affiliation – one’s choice of religion, which tracks culture, and one’s position along the religious-secular spectrum. More plural areas, especially those with strong connections between religion and culture, will have a lower percentage of people calling themselves nonreligious than less plural areas.

Fourth, many of the assertions in the study admit too many inexplicable case study exceptions. Ireland and the Philippines’ unusually high levels of religiosity are attributable to the role the Catholic Church played in pro-independence and anti-Marcos politics respectively; I presume Poland could be similarly explained away, were it in the study. But other exceptions require seriously modifying the theory.

For example, the study would predict an increase in American church attendance rates after the welfare reforms of the 1990s. The American study only finds a slightly less significant correlation between welfare and religion in 1995; meanwhile, there was a measurable increase in church attendance in the two months following the 9/11 attacks.

For another example, the case study of Britain goes in almost the opposite direction as the one the study predicts. Britain hasn’t had a serious welfare system since Thatcher’s economic reforms. And yet, in the 1990s, religious belief crashed, and while children of secular parents always grew up to be secular, children of religious parents had only a 50% chance of growing up to be religious. Levels of belief crashed even among Muslims, who Britain forces a religious identity on in many respects.

And fifth, there are alternative explanations that the study should look at but doesn’t. First, it’s legitimate to ask why support for welfare correlates so nicely with secularism in Western politics. It could be an ideological accident that modern liberalism is secular and pro-welfare and modern conservatism is religious and anti-welfare; after all, in turn-of-the-18th-century Britain, it was the Tories who were more supportive of extensive Poor Laws and the Whigs who favored a libertarian economic policy.

Or, equally well, it could be the realpolitik version of what the study is trying to say: welfare is a substitute for religion. As such, religious organizations are likely to ally themselves with political groups that oppose welfare. It holds to some extent for modern conservatives, though by no means for all. In 1900, the US populists were both pro-religion and pro-welfare, and would only embrace prosperity theology in the 1960s and 70s.

A good way of gauging such political explanations is seeing if the same trends hold for non-Western countries. Muslim organizations provide the same welfare Christian ones do; in fact, one of the main power sources of Islamist movements is their strong performance in disaster relief. Of course, Islamism has an entirely different dynamic to it – its main promise isn’t charity but change – but it’s useful to examine this dynamic and see how it can apply to the West. How relevant is the promise to change the morally uncertain status quo to the rise of American Dominionism?

I should stress that except perhaps for the problematic definitions of the variables, this study is not shoddy. A data set comparing religiosity and welfare is always useful. The study’s downfall is in using the data to confirm a theory that has no other evidence to it. Although the study seems to satisfy the falsification criterion in that Gill intended for it to highlight the failure of the theory, in fact it does not falsify the statement “welfare does not cause a decline in religiosity.” All it does is superficially confirm the statement that welfare does in fact cause religiosity to fall.

Of the many different angles the study could take, the one about a direct effect of welfare on religiosity is one of the most obvious two, which is probably why Gill went with it. The other, that religious groups lobby against welfare, is more empirically plausible than the converse direction of causation, but does not fit well into Gill’s theory. But more indirect links, for example with education or political liberalism as a mediating variable, look far more fruitful. The study’s ultimate downfall is not so much that it is wrong as that it is woefully incomplete, concentrating on perhaps the least enlightening theory available.

On a winter’s night in Paris long ago, I ducked into the Grand Vefour – then a charmingly approachable temple of gastronomy, free of the rather strained merriment that signals too much money being spent – and, as one of seven guests of a rich man, sat down to a dinner that would leave me not as I was before. 

To my right was Diarmuid C.-J., an elderly esthete of some renown living among dusty art objects a stone’s throw from the restaurant.  He was well used to ordering without regard to the menu, and he did so this night.  While others were calling for appetizers, a fish course and an entrée, Diarmuid commanded a dish of eight lightly sautéed whole fresh truffles.  A little salt and pepper, a splash of cream whisked into the pan juices – that would suffice for his dinner. 

But, what were truffles?  Rare mushrooms, the man on my left quickly whispered to me. Rare, and black and growing underground.  They were the cost equivalent, I later determined, of ordering five or six personal lobsters while others in your party struggled with choices less pricey and less pure.  But cost was only part of the story.

Dinner began to arrive, the unexcitingly superb starter items of the era: delicate pike terrines, mussels steamed with shallots and Chablis.  Who isn’t happy with such?  But it all fell away when, in a footed, lidded Limoges dish, Diarmuid’s golf ball-sized truffles were borne to the table by a sly-looking servitor who uncovered them and swanned off.  The others, including our imperturbable host, smiled faintly but intently, like Etruscans at bull games.  They were in the know.  Silently, I sniffed the truffle aroma, nothing if not a decisive fragrance, but I lacked the right referent. The grassiness of the cream — cream had never smelled so grassy — called up woods and moon and dew.  The odor I might later describe as “earthy” and “musky” and many other things to do with cheese was then but deeply portentous.  An agreeable fright overtook me: it was Pan, I understood – it was Pan!  Beneath the cool weight of napery, my knees knocked slightly.  I shot Diarmuid a meaning glance, all but nudged him as he plied his knife and fork, and opened my mouth to receive a truffle. For was I not still a baby bird, the whole world’s pleasure to feed me? The saurian flicker of his cold pale eye should have warned me to desist, but it did not. 

And so, my first truffle. Tuber melanosporum, unearthed not a day earlier by a caveur who knew a secret place in the oak groves of Perigord, who had gone out after nightfall with his muzzled, truffle-ardent sow or his keenest bitch – for the female of the species is by far the better finder – and, kneeling where the unerring animal pressed its snout among the roots and panted and grunted and stamped, had angled his small trowel into the soil and sifted his way down to the prize.  My prize.  Oh, I could wish it had been fed me by an unbegrudging man, but that might only have crowded the sensation.

Not a sensation that I particularly had words for, either, looking back on the almost convent-bred purity of my food vocabulary that year.  Best just to liken it to the entrance into the room, naked, of that person whom you know will make all the difference.  Time passed — I’m not sure how much — and as I licked my lips and refocused on the table I saw that people — all but one — were smiling those faint, intent smiles not at the truffles but at me. 

Having been admitted, in any case, to the 4,000 year-old company of those who know the truffle firsthand, I was hardly astonished when, a few years later, a Parisian banker, discovering that his cook had served his only truffle to two of her friends, made television news by shooting her. The investigating magistrate refused to bring the banker to trial for what was “obviously a crime of passion, completely understandable and completely forgivable.”

Yes, I understood. And if, wedged among his dusty curios, Diarmuid caught the news and untenderly remembered me, then I spared a thought for him too.

It Started with Desert Truffles in the Axial Age

The Pharaoh Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, is the one of the first truffle eaters whom history names, although truffles were prized still earlier in the palaces of ancient Mesopotamia, where their remains have been found in special baskets.  The Egyptians inventoried their edibles, making papyrus records of who ate them, but the Sumerians left recipes.  The truffles beloved of Khufu and the Sumerians, well known both to the writers of the Mishna and the Hadiths, and greedily imported by the Greeks and Romans, are not the same as T. melanosporum, however, but desert truffles, of the Terfezia and Tirmania genera, comprising about 30 varieties.  And, although they are in flavor terms if not in pedigree far humbler cousins, any consideration of the truffle must begin with them.

Terfezia taste nutty and delicate, with flesh that is white or creamy or even rosy in color, and they need cooking – either simmering in milk and honey or roasting in the embers of a fire. While T. melanosporum imparts unmistakable flavor to other foods, the mild Terfezia will take on the flavor of whatever it is cooked with. It can also be ground into flour for poultices, its cooking juices saved as a treatment for eye infections. In the Tirmidhi Hadith, No. 1127, Mohammed recommends the latter use. There is even an intriguing etymological case that the self-replenishing manna from heaven sustaining the Israelites in the Book of Genesis was in fact Tirmania nivea, the aristocrat of desert truffles.

Among nomadic peoples, folklore about the truffle abounds — it is a highly nutritious “found food” for which relish, gratitude and even awe are well demonstrated.  Singing to the truffles, Bedouin girls forage at dawn, when the first rays of light create telltale shadows on the still damp sand, and the truffles swell not far below the surface. Bedouins claim that truffles will grow where lightning strikes, appearing without seed or root, loosened from their beds by thunder. These beliefs go back thousands of years, at least as far back as Theophrastus, the favored pupil of Aristotle and father of taxonomy, who described truffles in the 3rd Century B.C.E. as “a natural phenomenon of great complexity, one of the strangest plants, without root, stem, fibre, branch, bud, leaf or flower.” Three hundred years later Pliny the Elder wrote that “among the most wonderful of all things is that anything can spring up and live without a root. These are called truffles.” The Babylonian Talmud, compiled in Iraq in the 5th Century C.E., records the rabbis concluding after discussion that truffles “emerge as they are in one night, wide and round like rounded cakes.”

In the desert as elsewhere, outlandish explanations for tuber growth have stubbornly attached to the truffle. But the necessary reciprocal relationship between truffle and host obtains in the desert as in the forest. Shrubs of the Helianthemum genus – relatives of the North American rock rose – can be a tip-off to desert truffle presence, for Terfezia and Helianthemum are symbionts.  Filaments of the truffle penetrate the roots of the shrub, obtaining nourishment from it, in turn producing a substance that inhibits the growth of competing plants. In the absence of Helianthemum, the desert truffle can make do with other shrubs.  It’s all a bit mysterious, as desert truffles grow in locations that are closely guarded secrets, and they utterly resist cultivation.

Usually no more than a few centimeters across but occasionally the size of a fist, desert truffles are found in the spring and sold in the souk, from North Africa to the Negev to easternmost Iraq.  A good truffle year depends on adequate rainfall in the autumn – about 8 to 10 inches.  In a middling year, desert truffles can cost about $100 a kilo, the price fluctuating wildly with supply. 

In the past few years, European interest in whether desert truffles flourish has increased along with the size of Europe’s Middle Eastern population. Traditional European fanciers of T. melanosporum and its lordly white Italian counterpart, T. magnatum, are also looking to Africa and the Middle East for truffles, the supply of their most highly prized indigenous ones being egregiously threatened, down twentyfold from 100 years ago, rarer and pricier and more sought after with every passing season. A good time, in short, to take after the Romans and import Terfezia from Africa, thereby nabbing — it is surely hoped — some of that same old razzle-dazzle if not the peerless and shocking taste.

Food of the Devil, Fit Only for Saints and Popes

If one of the defining characteristics of Late Antiquity was its excessive devotion to banqueting, with the inclusion in banqueting protocol of emetics and special chambers – vomitoria – where diners would rid themselves of surfeit the better to take on still more surfeit, then with the Fall of Rome the elaborate truffle dishes of the era would go the way of the stewed cygnet’s tongues, leopard’s marrow cooked in goat’s milk, almond-fed geese, and conger eels fattened with live slave-meat fetishized by the later, briefer Roman emperors. The Middle Ages were dark indeed for the abused and maligned truffle, whether because, with the rise of Christian Europe the devil was presumed afoot in the kitchen as he never was in less sober times, or because food preparation to some end beyond sustenance – cuisine, that is — took centuries to regain sway after being made repulsive by decadence and impracticable by the breakdown of trade routes.

In these years, there occurred also a shift in the thinking about exactly what a truffle was, and where it came from.  It was the devil’s own food, and it was black.  Though occasionally it was white, tasting of honey and garlic, a Manichean reading of this difference would never obtain.  Any way you sliced it in the Dark Ages, a truffle was a degenerate thing, and it came not from Africa but from secret pockets of Europe.  T. melanosporum and T. magnatum had been found, and found to be potent aphrodisiacs, conferring unholy sexual prowess on their eaters.  And so they were banned from kitchens – most kitchens, that is.

Ambrose, the famously ascetic 4th Century Bishop of Milan who became after death a saint, received a gift of truffles from the Bishop of Trevi.  No one can say whether he ate them, but he certainly recorded his gratitude for them.  Pope Gregory IV, who reigned in the mid-9th Century, let it be known that he positively needed truffles “to strengthen him in the battle against the Saracens.” Around this time there was philosophical speculation as to whether the truffle was truly a plant.  Folk wisdom still held that it was a fusion of water, heat and lightning, but deeper thinkers asked whether it might not be some kind of animal.  One of the salient mysteries enshrouding all love foods began to pertain to the truffle — in particular, the question of how food that debauches the weak-willed and the sinful serves yet to fortify the strong-willed and the saintly, nourishing them towards victory in their fitting and strenuous tasks.

By the late 14th Century, however, the truffle had made a comeback from the demonic hypothesis.  Petrarch dedicated a sweet sonnet to it, and its ungodly reputation burned off like ground fog in the clear light of more rational times.

Back with Bells On, This Time for Women

During the Renaissance, the absence of truffles from the tables of the mighty would have been an inadmissible embarrassment, and their chefs were under relentless pressure to present them with ingenuity and élan. The custom of the truffle tribute arose.  In 1502, the nobles of the Marchigian region of Aquamagna made a gift of stupendous black truffles to Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI.  The redoubtable  Lucrezia, for whose golden tresses long curly pastas were named, was very well pleased indeed, and lost no time incorporating the truffles into her beauty routine – history does not say exactly how. 

But it was Catherine de Medici who outdid all other comers in securing the hold of the truffle on the European imagination.  The late-born daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Catherine was the child bride of Henry II of France.  Forsaking Florence for grim cold Paris could not have delighted the 13-year old royal girl, and she brought with her cooks, and forks, and artichokes, and truffles and high heels, thinking to subdue the gaucheries of the French.  That would become the gayest achievement of Catherine, who for lack of love grew into a dour and grasping queen, not averse to poisoning her political rivals. By the time she died in 1589, however, the French court was used to the sight of ladies of high birth openly eating love foods such as artichokes and truffles. This was unexampled in the Florence of her distant youth, so full of gorgeous perks for men only.  It is worth remembering that until Catherine de Medici became Queen of France, aphrodisiacs were the prerogative of men, at least officially. The truffle tribute received by Lucrezia Borgia would not have been intended for her to eat – as perhaps she did not – but to serve to male guests to good effect.

A century and a half later, things had become ever so much more relaxed. Madame de Pompadour chatted freely with her maid about amatory matters.  Hoping to hold onto the affections of the king, Louis XV, she lived for days at a time on an aphrodisiac regime of vanilla and celery and truffles. “My dearest,” she confided to her maid, “the fact is I am very cold by nature.  I thought I might warm myself up, if I went on a diet to heat the blood, and now I’m taking this elixir which does seem to be doing me good.”

Sipping at truffle juice, Pompadour had no call to give the king heirs; when, one evening, she and Louis XV sat down to a dinner of truffled ram’s testicles, they were unbothered by thoughts of the succession.

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I had the perfect weekend planned. Although I rarely manage to visit my hometown, the occasional irresistible event does come along. This past weekend that event was a memorial service for Russell Thorn Blackwood, a philosopher, one of my father’s college professors, and one of my own mentors from about the age of four. As you might guess from this opening, the weekend didn’t quite go as planned, but was nevertheless perfect, in its own way.

When my early-morning flight from JFK was delayed and then cancelled (about five minutes prior to the rescheduled departure), I knew that the cushion of four hours I’d set between my arrival and the memorial service wouldn’t suffice. Resigning myself to spending the day at the airport between various lines, cancellations, and standby lists, I decided to get some work done. As often happens when I’m inclined toward such solid resolve, it rapidly dissolves as soon as I find the choicest reading material at hand. On this sunny Saturday it was the current issue of Bookforum, a magazine that typically lets me enjoy only one or two articles before hitting me with the next issue, equally full of great stuff I’ll never get the time to read. I could’ve easily responded to the delay with anger—so many people clearly did, shouting profanities at no one, verbally abusing the ticket-counter staff—but just didn’t feel it, and besides, it would’ve been inappropriate, don’t you think, to get angry while en route to a philosopher’s memorial service, not to mention at the results of a nice storm brought on by dear Mother Nature, who’s merely trying to keep Old Man Winter alive despite the impact of lifestyles aimed at creating an eternal summer here on earth.

The subtitle for today’s piece might be “Seeing Through Things, or Photographing and Writing Through Them,” so as to play with both the physical and temporal possibilities of that special adverb/preposition/adjective, but I’m a bit ambivalent today, and that’s a bit drawn out. So, sitting down in my funereal garb next to a glamorously-shoed woman reading Glamour in terminal three, I set about a near cover-to-cover reading of this issue, with some delightful reviews and some specious judgments, and soon came across this: Mark Twain, in an 1877 interview in the Boston Globe, when asked “what are you now politically, Mr. Twain?” replied “Politics have completely died out within me. They don’t take to me or I don’t take to them. Since I have come in possession of a conscience I begin to see through such things.” His use of this phrase “to see through such things,” took me back to the night before, when in a talk about his work from 1969 to 1973 for a book launch Vito Acconci mentioned wanting to take pictures that “photograph through things” and actions, just as words allow you to see through themselves to the idea behind them. Earlier this month I had come across Acconci’s more recent architectural work in an interesting book, No. 1: First Works by 362 Artists, where supposed artists write about what they consider their first work. I say supposed artists because many people in the book are rather insistent that they are not artists, or don’t identify as such, and Acconci was one of the most adamant. In this talk he reiterated his realization that he actually wanted nothing at all to do with art, but also did an excellent job of clarifying how his earlier performances (think of his poetry, writings and involvement with words—think perform, reform, transform) developed into the spatial work he’s now doing.

At Friday’s talk Acconci was introduced by Gregory Volk, who I mention here only because he (unintentionally?) said “ephemerable,” which is now my favorite new non-word (okay, okay, my favorite neologism, is that better? Maybe it is a word; Google honors “ephemerable” with approximately 61 strange hits, and it admittedly has a lot of potential…). Skipping over the talk itself—you really just have to be there when a poet-cum-artist-cum-architect credits an involvement with art to the coining of the term “Contemporary Art,” which, being about ideas rather than craft or end product, gave him the license to think, “well, maybe I can have vague ideas”—one of the audience members then predictably asked what he thought of Marina Abramovic’s reinterpretation of his 1972 Seedbed in late 2005. He had understandably little to say, and was fine with her riffing on his idea, which then led me to another tenuous connection, aside from the one by which everyone relates each artist’s work to the other’s.

The book No. 1 had also included a spread of Abramovic’s first work, and I’d seen her a couple weeks earlier at a tribute to Susan Sontag at the 92nd Street Y. She was the most striking of the six presenters that evening, who according to the press were to read passages of Sontag’s posthumously published book At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Luckily the author’s six friends did nothing of the sort, and instead talked about memories and things of their own choosing, with mixed results.

Judith Thurman read some of the quotes Sontag had jotted down in various journals, including: “Love is, to me, that you are the knife that I turn within myself” (Kafka); “Relax, there’s no shortcut to tragedy” (a friend, regarding the beginning of a love affair); “Liebe, Mut und Phantasie” (graffiti from the Austrian city of Graz); “Mary McCarthy can do anything with her smile—she can even smile with it” (a note by Sontag herself); and “my library is an archive of my longings” (also Sontag).

The most interesting contribution from Richard Howard was his mention of a three-hour televised interview with Kissinger that Sontag did for PBS, and his plea for it to become available again (hint, PBS or anyone who has access to the recording). Continuing Thurman’s point of her love for epigrams and aphorisms, he read her inscription in a book she once gave to him, “For Richard, whom I want to talk to all my life.” James Fenton focused on the importance of style, and her style, and curiously remarked that the preface is one of the few literary forms where writers still have a fair amount of freedom. Darryl Pinckney was concise, “Yes, it’s a drag not to have her.”

In the initial presentations and following discussion Marina Abramovic had some amusing—dare I say sweet?—recollections. The two had met at a 2002 birthday party, where Abramovic was one of four guests, and bonded by telling jokes about the war and the UN’s botched interventions in her homeland. Sontag then quietly attended one of her multi-day performance pieces and at the end replied by leaving a napkin that read, “this was good, let’s have lunch, Susan Sontag,” with the museum guard. Her lemon meringue pie anecdote particularly hit me, as it’s my favorite dessert as well; when splitting a pie with Sontag she remarked that she’d never liked eating the crust and had always wanted to just eat the filling, but there were rules and etiquette to contend with, and she’d always held back. Watching Sontag agree and proceed to eat all but the crust she learned the valuable lesson that, sometimes, you really can just do whatever you want. A remark the author made to the artist during her illness was particularly striking, “I am not alone, but I feel lonely.”

So, how does any of this relate to my being stuck at JFK all day Saturday and missing a friend’s memorial service? The delay, plus the fact that its location prevented me from otherwise filling my time with studio or other work, afforded me time to reflect on this recent overdose of stimulating things. While sitting in the terminal and taking breaks between articles I overheard a man on the phone who was much worse off than I; booked on four successive flights, each of which had been cancelled, he’d been there for over two days. After he’d hung up the phone we began discussing strategies in such situations, and on a tangent I learned he’d flown in from Jordan, where he’d been working independently to help regional development under the aegis of some US government-related organization. He’d been in Macedonia before that, and the government had always sent a group of interpreters to facilitate the collaborations, but this time they’d not sent any—either forgetting or just assuming that everyone in the Middle East does or should speak English…. When my name came up before his on the standby list I felt terrible, and hoped there would be more space and he would be next, but I also wasn’t ready to give up my spot. As I walked down the ramp and across the tarmac to the puddle jumper awaiting the last lucky standbys I was overcome with guilt, and my mind explored all possible implications this moral dilemma had for my conscience, humanity, and simple impatience. After a few minutes the guy boarded, much to my relief.

On the return flight I was faced with yet another dilemma when I was third in a taxi line that hadn’t moved for over ten minutes, with not a taxi in sight. When one pulled up and whisked away the first person in line, the ground transportation agent stopped the next one to pass, a taxi with the ”off duty” light on. The gentleman ahead of me in line let me take it, and I soon found out why—the cabbie was furious at being stopped like that, had been going home to study for his nursing exam the next day, and told dispatcher he was headed toward the Bronx, not southern Queens. I felt terrible and told him to just circle round and drop me off, I could wait for the next car. After venting for a few minutes and stopping for gas (kindly stopping the meter as well), he soon dropped me off after chatting all the way about his immigration from Africa, studies, love of James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and his hope never to be forced out of this country.

It seemed quite a coincidence to hear the taxi driver mention Baldwin, because I’d just reread a phrase of his in an old book of mine rediscovered while home. The phrase appeared in my high school English teacher’s inscription in a biography of Marcel Duchamp she gave me: “The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.” It all came together here—Duchamp started a change that later let Acconci’s work become art, his work in turn let Abramovic go somewhere else entirely, her work brought me a new look at Sontag, who’d included Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel in one of her novels (I’d walked under a commemorative plaque for Pimentel on via di Ripetta just days before), and so on. All of them, in their own way, have heeded Baldwin’s words.

Right below the Twain excerpt I mentioned earlier was one from Dorothy Parker: “INTERVIEWER: How do you name your characters? PARKER: The telephone book and from the obituary columns.” If she were still writing, perhaps a Professor Blackwood might make an appearance in one of her yarns.

I gave blood recently, and the barrage of questions asked of all donors reminded me that I’d been meaning to write this article since June of last year.  At that time, Art Caplan wrote that it’s time to let gay men donate blood, but he did not present much solid evidence for that position.  As it happens, we can be pretty sure he is in command of considerable evidence, having served as Chair of the HHS Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability for four years, but the article was presumably written as an exercise in persuasion and contained just enough information to make me curious.

In trying to decide for myself whether Caplan is right, I found myself in something approaching the position in which I imagine legislators must regularly find themselves: I was trying to find answers to policy questions (“should gay men be accepted as blood donors?”), without being able to rely on a personal background in the relevant science.  Policy decisions have to be made, but science will rarely give you a hard-and-fast answer even to those questions on which it has something to offer — and it becomes important to identify which questions those are, and which are not scientific questions at all.

The FDA bans blood donation by any man who has had sex with another man, even once since 1977 (the probable date of the first clinical AIDS case in the US), and by anyone who has been paid for sex during the same time period; donors are also deferred who have had sex in the last 12 months with anyone who qualifies for the since-1977 ban.  This policy was most recently formally revised in 2000, at which time the decision was made to stick with the 1998 recommendation (the even-once-since-1977 ban), which in turn was based on policy implemented in the late 1980s at the height of the “AIDS scare”.

One way of looking at the question is this: what change in risk could we expect to see if we changed the policy from a lifetime ban for men who have sex with men (“MSM”) to the same 12-month deferral that applies to women who have had sex with such men, or men who have had sex with prostitutes (both high-risk behaviours)?  Here’s where it starts to get complicated, because the risks are already so low that there is essentially no direct way to measure them, and current estimates of risk are derived from sophisticated mathematical models.  It’s tempting to do something like this:

1. MSM = approximately 2-3% of the general population
2. Of persons living with HIV/AIDS, approx 40-50% are MSM
3. expected increase in donations from the policy change = approx 1%
4. relative risk increase = (45/2.5) x 1 = 18%

Unfortunately, though, (1)-(3) are fairly well accepted estimates taken from the references listed below, but (4) is something I just made up, and it’s nonsense.  Intuitively appealing, maybe, but nonsense.   Inter alia, what makes it nonsense is the relationship between transfusion risk and screening methods.  The primary issue here is what’s known as the “window period”, the time that can elapse between infection and detectable levels of virus. The FDA says:

Studies have shown that up to 2 months may elapse between the time of infection and the time the HIV antibody test is reactive. This period of time is often referred to as the “window period.” Accepting men who have had sex with other men since 1977 as blood donors increases the likelihood for the collection of HIV-positive window period blood, because epidemiologic studies have documented higher incidence and prevalence rates in these populations. On March 14, 1996, FDA recommended donor screening with a licensed test for HIV-1 antigen, which has succeeded in further reducing the window period.

In fact, blood collection agencies now test every donation for HIV and Hepatitic C virus (HCV) by nucleic acid testing (NAT). This is an exquisitely sensitive test for viral genomic material; it is more sensitive than the antibody-based test for viral antigen, and unlike the antibody test, does not rely on the host response and is not subject to the resulting delays. According to the Red Cross:

Since 1987, the [HIV] window period has been reduced from 42 days to approximately 12-16 days following the implementation of the HIV antigen test in March 1996.

A variety of expert presentations at a March, 2006 FDA workshop on behaviour based donor deferrals indicated that, with the advent of NAT, the window period for HIV infection is less than 12 days.  In the US, the residual risk of transmission of HIV or HCV by blood transfusion is estimated, by a variety of models, to be around 1 in 2,000,000 donations.  This is clearly a very conservative estimate, since there are around 15 million donations every year and I could only find mention of four authenticated transfusion-related transmissions of HIV since NAT was implemented in 1999 (none of which involved MSM). At the same FDA workshop, Celso Bianco re-ran an earlier prediction using risk and other estimates that were getting general agreement at the workshop and came up with a figure, which he called conservative, of one infected unit per 32 years.

So, while it seems intuitively likely that including a high-risk group (as judged by increased prevalence) in the donor pool would increase overall risk, calculating — or rather, estimating — that increase is far from straightforward.  The only numbers I could find were presented by Andrew Dayton to the same FDA workshop:

The 5-year [deferral, instead of a lifetime ban] would result in possibly a 25 percent increase in the current residual risk, and the 1-year would be 40 percent.

So, worst case scenario: 1.4 transmissions per 2 million donations, instead of 1.0 — or about three extra cases per year (and remember that, to date, the observed level of transmission is much lower than the estimate).  I’m not familiar with what sorts of risks are considered acceptable in public policy formation, but I can say outright that I would be prepared to accept that risk to my own person as the cost of allowing MSM to participate on a more equal footing in a profound act of community altruism. (To say nothing of a 1% increase in a critical health resource that is often in short supply.)

Furthermore, given that the window period is less than two weeks and you can only donate every eight weeks, there is an obvious method for reducing the risk even further.  According to the AABB, red blood cells can be stored cold for 42 days or frozen for ten years, and plasmaand cryoprecipitated antihemophilic factor can be frozen for at least a year; of the fractions into which whole blood is routinely divided, only platelets have a shorter effective storage life, about five days.  It is clearly possible to hold (at least most of the fractions of) any first-time donation until the donor returns and can be re-tested; two clear tests eight weeks apart are definitive proof of HIV-negative status.

This brings us, though, to the reason I said “more equal footing”, not “equal footing”, above.  While MSM (as defined by the current even-once-since-1977 FDA exclusion) includes a great many men who have not had sex with another man for more than eight weeks, it also includes gay men for whom a 12-month deferral, or even an eight-week deferral, represents a discriminatory barrier.  Somewhat ironically, when the Public Health Service issued its first formal recommendations in 1983, they offered a partial solution: sexually active homosexual and bisexual men with multiple partners should refrain from blood donation.  While this leaves room for improvement in behaviour based deferral, since sexually active heterosexuals with multiple partners are also at increased risk, it would at least allow gay men in stable monogamous relationships to enter the blood donor pool.

Did you notice that we are no longer debating the science?  Now we are talking about public policy, social justice and what sorts of risks we are willing to endure.

In that light, here’s another way to look at the question: according to the CDC, African Americans make up approximately 13% of the US population but accounted for 49% of new HIV/AIDS diagnoses in 2005 and 61% of people under the age of 25 whose diagnosis of HIV/AIDS was made during 2001–2004; over the same period, black women were more than twenty times as likely to be diagnosed with HIV/AIDS as white women.  I think it goes without saying that we are not going to ban African Americans from donating blood on the basis of their ethnicity.

The FDA “believes that there is scientific justification for screening out all potential donors who are men who have had sex, even once, with another man since 1977”.  After all that, I agree with Art Caplan: the FDA is wrong.

———-
Some references:
FDA Workshop on Behavior-Based Donor Deferrals in the NAT Era
Epidemiology of HIV/AIDS — United States, 1981–2005
Twenty-Five Years of HIV/AIDS — United States, 1981–2006
CDC Basic Statistics on HIV
CDC>HIV/AIDS>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports from 2006
CDC>HIV/AIDS>Fact Sheets
AABB Blood FAQ
AABB: Whole Blood and Blood Components
ARC: 50 quick facts about blood
ARC: Blood information

P.S. World Blood Donor Day is June 14, and you can find your nearest blood donation center here or here.

….

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

A lot of the problems in the debates over the Israel-Palestinian conflict stem from a truncated political gamut. The real gamut ranges from more anti-Israeli than Islamic Jihad to more anti-Arab than the settlers in the West Bank. That allows people who favor one side strongly to present their views as moderate and the views of people who want peace on both sides as extreme.

A debate about strategy is inherently one-sided. Debates about Democratic party strategy are intra-Democratic, so the gamut in them runs from very liberal to centrist, rather than from liberal to conservative. Debates about war are the same: international forums like the UN don’t matter much, and intranational ones are similar to partisan ones. Debates about strategy in American foreign policy in the US are always about how to make the US more powerful; Americans aren’t any likelier to be anti-American than Chinese are likely to be anti-Chinese.

Although the debate about Israel and Palestine is ostensibly one of morality—the quintessential question is, “Which side is acting more morally?”—in fact it’s a very strategic one. Serious left-wing Israelis talk mostly about the good peace will do for Israel; the suffering of the Palestinians is only a side issue. Any Palestinian who will talk about the need for nonviolence because terrorism is inherently wrong will be laughed at.

Obviously, there could be a separate political debate divorced from strategy, just as there are political debates between liberals and conservatives. But there are several disanalogies here that in fact favor the intranational debate. First, as I already mentioned, international forums aren’t meaningful enough to be decisive. In the UN it could be possible to strike a balance, but the UN’s authority on any issue, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict, is murky at best.

Second, in those countries that do matter, either there is no public debate, or political prejudices go exclusively one way. In the US, the political elite is strongly pro-Israeli. It’s not because there are no pro-Palestinians in American politics—for example, almost every isolationist in the US harbors some sympathies for the Palestinians—but they are far less influential than the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. European countries have a more balanced mix of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian views, but the people holding them tend to self-segregate into their own newspapers, academic circles, political parties, and so on, and the issue isn’t important enough to the public to force an open debate. In the Arab world, pro-Israeli views are typically censored, except when the country in question hates the Palestinians more than the Israelis and has nothing to gain from claiming to support the Palestinian cause.

Roughly, on the pro-Palestinian side, the gamut runs from Fatah, to the party-less Palestinian center, to Hamas, possibly with Islamic Jihad on the fringe. On the pro-Israeli side, it runs from Peace Now to Labor/Kadima to Likud/Israel Beitenu, with the settlers on the fringe. Israeli groups left of Peace Now, like the refuseniks, tend to be mostly in accord with Fatah, while Palestinian groups left of Fatah tend to be very much like Peace Now.

On that gamut, I suspect most people who don’t have a nationalist stake in either side will be somewhere between Fatah and Peace Now. That’s the view everyone pays lip service to, at least: negotiations between Israel and Palestine should resume, the Palestinians deserve self-determination, the occupation should end, Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorism, and Palestine should crack down on armed groups other than what will become the state. The exact details differ, but that’s what most people at least pretend to support.

On both sides, the situation has gotten to the same point the African-American civil rights movement did in the early 1960s. Nobody claims to be for terrorism or for continuing the occupation, except a few people in the minority on both sides. But nobody will do anything about either; the Palestinian center has no political party to turn to, leaving only Hamas and Fatah to clash with each other, and the Israeli center is both too spineless to try to end the occupation and too politically weak lately to succeed even if it tried.

Naturally, people on both sides will object to including each other in the entire gamut. To Israelis, including a party that calls for the destruction of Israel is repugnant. Likewise, to Palestinians it’s unacceptable to consider seriously people like Avigdor Lieberman, who has called for bombing civilian targets in Palestine and believes Arab-Israelis are traitors, or settlers who believe it’s their God-given right to stay in the West Bank and to oppress the Palestinian inhabitants of the area.

From a more idealistic centrist point of view, those views can be safely excluded, just as such extremes as fascism and communism are excluded from political considerations nowadays. However, from a realist point of view, democrats never excluded fascism and communism while they were politically alive. It so happens that large numbers of people are taking seriously ideologies that call for massacres or even wholesale exterminations. People rarely take other views seriously because they want to; usually they do because they have to without appearing irrelevant. In the current political climate of the debate over the Arab-Israeli conflict, anyone who doesn’t consider the reality of views ranging from those of Islamic Jihad to those of the most militant settlers is engaging in some form of preaching to the choir.

I wrote an essay a few years ago that contained, in the opening sentence, the phrase ‘fuck you, Roger Angell’. It wasn’t out of any deep animosity toward Roger Angell, simply a momentary rage brought on by his preface to E.B. White’s wonderful book, Here Is New York. Some of the things Mr. Angell says in that preface are perfectly fine, actually. But then he dips into a form of nostalgia that I find intolerable, especially when it is directed at New York City. New York has many problems and it isn’t hiding them, just walk down the street. But if nothing else, it is a city that has never succumbed to the nostalgists—just the opposite. It runs them down, runs through them, runs past them and keeps going and that’s always been the best way to refute nostalgia.

Maybe it has something to do with The New Yorker and the identity it thinks it is trying to foster and protect, but a thought came to mind while reading a recent ‘Talk of the Town’ and that thought was thus: ‘fuck you, Adam Gopnik’. Gopnik’s piece is sensible in many respects but, in the end, it can’t help dipping into the same vein of nostalgia that Roger Angell mines and which, I’d like to suggest, misunderstands something fundamental about New York City.

When Angell writes about New York City he writes in the tone of elegy, of something that ‘once was’. He imagines people living in New York and saying things like “remember when…?” and “wasn’t this where…?”. His sense of E.B. White’s book is that it is lament for what has been lost and for what New York City used to be. This is how Angell describes E.B. White’s mood: “Even as he looked at the great city, he was missing what it had been.” The culmination of Angell’s analysis is that the title of E.B. White’s book should have been Here ‘Was’ New York. As Angell puts it, White “wanted it back again, back the way it was.”

I submit, though, that this is not at all the mood in which White wrote his book. Witness E.B. White’s own Forward to Here is New York:

“This piece about New York was written in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell. The reader will find certain observations to be no longer true of the city, owing to the passage of time and the swing of the pendulum. I wrote not only during a heat wave but during a boom. The heat has broken, the boom has broken, and New York is not quite so feverish now as when this piece was written. The Lafayette Hotel, mentioned in passing, has passed despite the mention. But the essential fever of New York has not changed in any particular, and I have not tried to make revisions in the hope of bringing the thing down to date. To bring New York down to date, a man would have to be published with the speed of light—and not even Harper is that quick. I feel that it is the reader’s, not the author’s, duty to bring New York down to date; and I trust it will prove less a duty than a pleasure.”

That is the mood in which E.B. White wrote his brilliant little piece on New York City, and it is notable in two of its aspects. One, in that New York is characterized by its essential fever. And Two, in that New York cannot be ‘brought down to date’ but by those who are living in it at any specific moment. And I don’t think anyone who ever wrote a Forward like that can also be said to want New York ‘back the way it was’.

Now, on the face of it, Adam Gopnik’s ‘Talk of The Town’ from January 8th, 2007 is less overtly nostalgic than Roger Angell’s preface. Gopnik is commenting on Mayor Bloomberg’s speech about the future of New York City and its infrastructural needs looking forward to 2030. While lauding the mayor’s farsightedness, Gopnik notes that the speech did not address the issue of New York in terms of its ‘soul’, in terms of the ‘kind’ of city that we want New York to be. As Gopnik says, “New York, as generations have been taught by the late Jane Jacobs, is a self-organizing place that fixes itself. But let the additional truth be told that though the life of the block is self-organizing, the block itself that lets life happen was made by the hand of a city planner. As the mayor said, and knows, what we want the city to look like in 2030 will depend on the rules we make now.”

That’s true and we do need to think about what we want the city to be. Cities don’t happen simply by mistake, they need to be planned for. City government is something. It does something. Gopnik is right about that. But he also says, “For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theater becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.”

Forget the fact that Mr. Gopnik reveals himself to have a pitifully small radius for New York experience (I suspect the man has never been to Queens). More fundamentally, he, like Angell, has misunderstood the essential thrust of White’s point about New York and the essential fever. It is as if Angell and Gopnik have a snapshot of New York in their memory and then they go about judging New York according to that snapshot. The degree to which New York approximates that snapshot is the degree to which it has preserved its soul. The degree to which it is indistinguishable from that snapshot is the degree to which it has lost it.

But this is the wrong way to conceptualize the essence of New York. New York City is ruthless and depressing. It destroys itself and remakes itself without pausing long enough to reflect on the consequences (just think of Penn Station). As Gopnik suggests, we could all stand to think more about what makes New York work and what doesn’t. On the other hand, that is the cost of the ‘essential fever’. New York is not a museum of itself, at least not yet. The corner store might turn into a massive development tomorrow. Maybe there is a limit, a point at which New York loses its soul in the tumult. But I don’t think we know what that is. The problem with Angell and Gopnik is that they think they do. They think they have the snapshot of New York in their mind’s eye that defines the limits and contours of its soul. They think they know New York as such. They think they know what it is supposed to be.

In the end, I prefer the trust of E.B. White. He knows there is something special about New York but he doesn’t know the specifics. He knows that New York runs in cycles of boom and bust but he doesn’t pretend to know where it will go next. For the moment, he believes in the essential fever and he is willing to admit that that essential fever will always move farther and faster than anything he could track. He assumes that the future will simply be an update of where the essential fever has gone for the next decade, the next generation, the next era.

The saddest thing, perhaps, is that we can’t really legislate or plan for the essential fever. We don’t really know what it is that makes New York what it is. We just know that here it is, here is New York.

The trek to downtown Boston from Jamaica Plain, the city neighborhood where I live and where once lived the mighty maestro Serge Koussevitzky and the mendacious James Michael Curley, is a rather mundane affair. Thanks to Michael Dukakis and his far-sighted technocratic flair, a subway line now serves us instead of a broken-down trolley line. Actually the subway line consists of an extension of an older line that used to end in Roxbury, the home of the largest African-American population in the city and the birthplace of Malcolm X. It passes that way no more, heading instead to where the city’s white people live or to where people of various colors are gentrifying neighborhoods like mine.

I arrived at the Stony Brook station, a brick and steel structure wearing its twenty years well, and what to my irritated eyes should appear but four cops and a dog set up to stop and search the bags of passengers of their choosing. As befits a true American, I averted my eyes and slinked by, but it got my Irish up, as my Grandmother used to say. So I turned to assay the situation once I had safely passed the turnstile. They had nabbed a suspect, a young college student with scruffy hair and a menacing book bag over his shoulder. It was all very low key. One of the cops was the local greeter and diverter. The other three, festooned in black jodhpurs, black boots, black shirts and black jackets with “Transit Police” written in big white letters on their backs, all of which I take to be a new police high fashion statement for maximum intimidation or simply the product of a Versace-jaded uniform maker, stood by the explosives residue sniff machine with Fido, a reassuring golden Labrador on a leash. If the dog had been a German shepherd… well I am sure by now you get the idea.

I got off at Back Bay Station, and this time, there were six cops standing by the entrance to the subway, conveniently located 75 feet from the Dunkin’ Donuts stand. Half of them were in the ersatz Versace outfits; the other three were in regular Boston police garb. No Fido, no sniff machine. They were just watching when I passed.

Suspicion-less Searches Are Legal

Welcome to America, where all of this is now right and proper. Yes, indeed, it is constitutional to stop and search persons entering or on mass transit without any reasonable suspicion that they are concealing something illegal like an explosive device. It started in New York City. Boston simply copied New York City’s guidelines, which had been declared constitutional by the federal 2nd circuit court of appeals, and at the former Governor Mitt Romney’s imperial demand, instituted a local stop and search process.

You can refuse to have your bag searched. But then you must leave the station, or suffer arrest for trespassing. The logic of the federal appeals court is quite interesting for what it reveals about our new Orwellian world. Because everyone is searchable without any judgment of suspicion on the police’s part, it is legal. The 4th amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure that in many areas of law restricts police searches to those whom they suspect of a crime or who arouse suspicion of criminal intent no longer applies to subway and bus riders. Any city that wants to conduct “suspicion-less” searches on their mass transit can. The judicial trick is that because no one is under suspicion, everyone can be under suspicion. Anyone’s rights can be violated so long as everyone’s rights can be violated. Call it equal opportunity rights violation.

Why can “the state” do this? Another extraordinary piece of legal legerdemain: who is the state if not the representative of the citizens? Well, guess again. The state, like the corporation, that other brilliant piece of Philadelphia lawyering, is a legal person with “interests.” It also has “special needs.” When the state decides it needs to violate our rights to protect us, in this case from terrorism, so it can, as long as it does so indiscriminately. The Appeals Court in Brendan MacWade versus Raymond Kelly (460 F.3d 260 U.S. App.) found the fact that New York’s and now Boston’s suspicion-less stop and search operations are made to seem “random, undefined, and unpredictable,” so that the terrorists won’t catch on, an attractive feature of the policing at whatever subway station where the police find themselves. Now that would a first – color-blind justice in America. I don’t believe it. Further the court seems unaware of the fear such tactics create in ordinary persons feel when they find cops in their face unexpectedly, dressed in black and equipped with guns, a machine, and a dog, and demanding that they surrender their bags.

What’s good for courts is bad for people. You are not even permitted to develop a normal expectation, as in airports, that you will be searched. It is the perfect counter-terrorism. Like they used to say about slavery, the key is to make them stand in fear.

The suspicion-less stop and searches don’t even have to work. Don’t bother us with details, the Appeals Court says in MacWade. Quoting from a 1990 Supreme Court decision, the Appeals Court says that the decision to stop and search without suspicion of wrongdoing should be left up to the state whose agents “have a unique understanding of, and responsibility for, limited public resources.” It concludes that it is not part of the Court’s charge to assess the effectiveness of a program. It only passes on whether a program is a reasonably effective means of addressing the problem at hand, and then, the presumption is that the state knows best.

This notion really sets the mind in motion. Suppose a city is facing a drought, and the water commissioner decides that the most reasonably effective way of preserving the water supply is turning off everyone’s water. Why not? He is the commissioner after all, an agent of the state. Who know best the problem and the solution? Suppose a police commissioner determined that the most reasonable way to catch a posse of drug pushers was to barricade them in their houses until they gave up. Should they die of starvation, would the court go after the police commissioner or decide that state’s special needs entitled the commissioner take action as s/he thought fitting? Or as once was the case in Philadelphia with the group called Move, when police decided in May 1985, that they couldn’t serve them with a warrant. They bombed the house, killing eleven people inside, and set a neighborhood afire. Public safety, the city argued, demanded it. The city paid restitution to sixty-two families burned out of their homes, and even compensation to two Move survivors, but no police officer, or mayor, was ever brought to trial.

Measures for Social and Self-Defense

In suspicion-less searches, remember the state too asserts its special needs, and they are of the best kind: terrorist threats to public safety and national security. The appeals court in MacWade took the state’s agents in the New York case, including former White House anti-terrorism expert Richard Clarke, as the authorities best able to judge what is necessary. And, aside from requiring a formal showing that the solutions fit the problems that threaten the state’s special needs, the courts will set aside usual constitutional scruples, and not even ask whether the actions work or not. And you thought the Sun King and his kind were dead.

It turns out that in Boston at least, it is a good thing for the Commonwealth that it doesn’t have to prove effectiveness. According to reporter Mac Daniel in the January 31,2007 Boston Globe, the cops have stopped and searched 2500 people between October 10, 2006 and December 31, 2006. No explosive devices and no weapons. Of the 27 positive initial hits, between the sniff machine and the sniffing dogs, they were sorted out as benign. Among the things that make you sniff-positive, it turns out, are hand crème and asthma medication. Did you ever think your 4th Amendment rights could be violated for using Vaseline Intensive Care?

The Massachusetts ACLU notes that the number of searches is “infinitesimally small,” and calls suspicion-less stops and searches “a pretend security measure.” An odd position, it seems to me. Would they prefer that more persons be stopped and searched and have their constitutional rights violated?

The Massachusetts chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, according to Jeffrey Feuer, is eschewing a direct court challenge until or unless a really favorable case comes along. Why precipitate at this point a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that holds suspicion-less stops and searches constitutional, seems the reason. Instead they are working with state legislators on a law requiring the transit authority to show what there are doing, whether it technically can catch dangerous explosives, and how much it is costing. They hope that the transit authority will be forced to abandon the program on the grounds that it is both ineffective and very costly.

In the meantime, the Massachusetts ACLU website offers advice as to what to do if you are stopped by the police. They are good for any occasion, so keep them on the refrigerator with the picture of your Fido:

o Think carefully about your words, movement, body language, and emotions.
o Don’t get into an argument with the police.
o Remember, anything you say or do can be used against you.
o Keep your hands where the police can see them.
o Don’t run. Don’t touch any police officer.
o Don’t resist even when you believe you are innocent.
o Don’t complain on the scene or tell the policy they’re wrong or that you’re going to file a complaint.
o Do not make any statements regarding the incident.
o Ask for a lawyer immediately upon your arrest.

The Lawyer’s Guild adds a practical touch. Go to their website and download a sheet containing handouts that can be cut into little, business-size cards. They read:

“To Whom It May Concern: I am handing you this card because I choose to exercise my right to remain silent and to not answer your questions. If I am detained I request to immediately be allowed to contact an attorney. I will exercise my right to refuse to sign anything until I am allowed to speak with my attorney.”

Carry this card at all times. You never know when you’ll get lucky and be the tenth person hustling after that train. Random and indiscriminate, it can happen to you two or more times on the same day. Do keep multiple cards handy. Of course, do not touch them with hand crème or put them next to your asthma inhalator.

It goes without saying that shouldn’t pet Fido, or, according to the ACLU, the police officer. For those of you who are opposed to losing your constitutional rights, have authority issues, or just have a thing about uniforms, keep your head down, keep walking, and don’t get aroused.

by Waleed Hazbun

February 4, 2007
Beirut, Lebanon

Last week, after much delay, I finally landed in Beirut where I spend 2007 teaching at the American University of Beirut.

Walking down the streets of the Hamra district of Beirut I think to myself that more cities across the Arab world should feel this way. Even as the city is re-dividing itself politically and police and security forces stand watch over public spaces, key buildings, and the residences of leading politicians, Beirut remains a urban, cosmopolitan environment. By invoking this term I do not refer to the fancy shopping districts with Euro-American name brand shops, the haut-hipsters hanging out a Starbucks (or even the much cooler De Prague), or the late night dancing parties going on at the trendy clubs. Beirut is a costal Levantine city that has never been cut off from other Mediterranean cities and trade routes nor fully isolated from its Arab/Islamic hinterland. It is not a show case ‘modern’ city built next to a museumfied medieval era ‘madina,’ like Tunis nor an artificial metropolis emerging out of a desert landscape due to royal patronage or the flows of petrodollars. It is more like Istanbul and how cities on coast of Mandate Palestine might have developed in some alterative reality.

I’m not exactly an expert on the topic but Beirut’s urban form seems to be a heterotopic mosaic in which each neighborhood developed from an interactive fusion between particular local features and ties to other places near and far. The Hamra district is located near the 140+ year old American University of Beirut (AUB). It is packed with bookstores and cafes and a few stores and restaurants that cater to its staff and faculty. The campus itself its beautifully located on a hill near the edge of the water which sparkles deep blue and makes a stunning site from many locations on its treed campus. Through the AUB the Hamra district has maintained ties to universities and intellectual centers across the world including a legacy of ties with Princeton. While less diverse than in the past, AUB’s students still come from all parts of the Lebanon as well as many parts of the Arab and developing world. Until the summer 2006 war, as the Provost recently explained, it even had a few dozen students from the United States. Its graduates are spread across the globe. Ironies of ironies, maybe, the new US representative to the UN is and AUB graduate, where he will work with Lebanon’s newly appointed representative who happened to be the chairman of the AUB department (Political Studies and Public Administration) where I will begin teaching next week.

These days Hamra is also being shaped by the current political standoff between the ‘March 14’ forces that control the government and the ‘March 8’ opposition that is seeking to bring down the PM and/or force him to create a ‘unity government’ that gives forces like Hezbollah (allied with some populist and pro-Syrian forces) a veto power of major political decisions. The ‘March 14’ forces are a motley crew (that includes right wing Christians, centrist Sunni Muslims, and a few democratic leftists) cobbled together in the large shadow of the assassinated former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri who used his own personal wealth and business ties to help rebuilt this city destroyed by a the 1975-90 civil war. While a diverse district, Hamra is also historically a Sunni Muslim neighborhood where the current Prime Minister Fuad Sinora and the home of the late Hariri (where his family continues to lead the political movement he built) live. You can easily tell where they live by the concrete barricades and roadblocks that limit traffic near them and are manned by security forces from the interior ministry controlled by members of the ‘March 14’ coalition.

Other security forces and units from the national army (viewed as closer to the pro-Syrian politicians and dominated by Shia who are generally aligned with oppositions parties such as Amal and Hezbollah) are watching guard over the opposition-constructed tent city surrounding the Prime Minster’s downtown headquarters. These guards are spread across the city, having taken to the streets after the disturbing riots that took place at the Beirut Arab University, quite a long ways south from the Hamra district but still on the Western side of town bordering the shia dominated neighborhoods at the southern end of Beirut. In the wake of those riots a one night curfew was announced in an effort to defuse the tensions between rival political movements who find active supporters and cadre on the various campuses. The government even declared that all educational institutions had to shut down for a few days, delaying the start of the spring term at AUB.

I haven’t been over the ‘Christian’ East Beirut (the home of much of the fancy restaurant and night club scene), where they have their own tensions and fears due to the long string of assassinations and small scale bombing that followed the mass moving in the spring of 2005 to send the Syrian troops and intelligence networks back home. At the same time the Christian community is currently divided between followers of the March 14 forces and the populist former general Aoun who says he represents an alterative to the currupt, sectarian elites and has aligned himself with Hizballah in a effort to become the next President of the country (who must be a Maronite Christian).

The other night I read a profile of President John Waterbury in a recent issue (Jan 24) of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. It’s written by a Beirut/Damascus-based youngish Princeton grad who is a stringer for the NY Times. She often files culture/society/human interest stories. It’s not such a great piece in that it doesn’t really cover some angles, such as that some AUB students were not happy that JW suspended the counting of the student election results because there were protests outside the University gates. Some viewed this action as a suspension of democracy on campus, though the article gives him credit for defusing the situation where political protests by rival parties were taking place just outside the University gates. After the recent riots (which happened weeks after the essay was written) we are all the more sensitive to the issue, but who knows what policies would best prevent riots past and future. Internal security forces now cluster in front of the AUB Main Gate and help provide gate security. This might also be because Prime Minister Sinora lives across the street from campus. We also discovered, while getting Michelle a campus ID, that AUB has written a new policy for guests on campus. Not clear what it is, but I guess its a sign that the administration is working the situation.

The best part of the PAW article is that JW notes that every AUB class has its ‘war’ stories, some lived through wars, others riots, some student protests and sit-ins etc… (Remember we are making the 50th anniversary of the high-water era of Nasserist and Arab nationalist mobilization of the Arab street.) JW makes the point of saying that dealing with these events is part of his job and part of the AUB experience, in a sense they don’t react as if each represents a crisis, but an recurrent, almost expected sort of event that plans exist for. He notes that EVERY year ‘come hell or high water’ AUB has graduated a class. They deal with situations one day at a time. If they must close, they will for just the days they need, then they expect to get back open because its the duty of the place. In what I think is the best line of the interview, he notes ‘This show goes on.’

As I begin to sense the political tensions, that the political crisis will not likely be over soon, I have watched some of Hezbollah’s al Manar TV, complete with its slick American political campaign style negative ads mocking the achievements of Hariri (noting the corruption and massive debt that were endemic to his mode of operation)..and its pretty clear they have a critique of the govt that wont just go away, let alone their ability to gain outside support that in terms of effectiveness may match the $1 billion of so that the US is throwing behind the current govt. Who knows if regional tensions and the a New Arab/Middle Eastern cold war will tear it apart as it have other parts of the region. It will not stand isolated like the Gulf states under the security umbrella of the 7th fleet bolstered by the abundant petrodollars and financial returns.

Nevertheless, while I fear the implications of the coming Bush admin confrontation with Iran and the continuing fallout of its disastrous regional politices, the local political situation in Lebanon doesn’t seem to bother me, it only really saddens me. Maybe it’s the Baltimore still in me, the appreciation of the dwellers, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals who make their lives in that scrappy, rundown, post-industrial ruin of a formerly grand 19th century city that had its last peak, like Beirut, in the 1950s. This all leads me to fear the effects of over-gentrification, of global finance remodeling an urban space for tourism and hyper-consumerism. I have heard people mention, and seem to fear, Beirut becoming over-shadowed by the Gulf where they can buy whole libraries and museums and build “global cities” out of artificial islands, petrodollars, and imported labor and technology. Beirut might have lost some of its shine built in the last few years before its was dulled and scraped by the war and the resulting political turmoil. But it seems to me, that everything that is really interesting about this city, Hamra, and AUB are still here and will go on. It need not become again the ‘Paris, or Geneva etc.. of the Middle East.’ It likely won’t. Rather, what the Middle East needs now, and it needs it to survive out the current crisis, is a ‘Beirut’ with its difficult pluralism, intellectual debate, always inventive entrepreneurialism, and often splinted contradictory cosmopolitism.

Waleed Hazbun is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

Apparently Patrick White used to build himself up into a state about bad crits of his books. However, the vegetation in his garden, and across the road in Centennial Park, did not turn yellow from an excess of spleen, and Patrick kept on writing. White knew bad crits were inevitable but, after dragging The Tree of Man out of his asthmatically-wracked body back on the farm that Kylie Tennant once called Frog Hollow, I don’t guess he was exactly ecstatic to read A. D. Hope’s final reference to his prose style, in a now notorious review, as ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’. White often had this kind of reception. Later success only encouraged some to thwack away even more. Hal Porter described White’s autobiographical Flaws In The Glass as ‘high-camp mysticism and low-camp waspishness’. White returned the favour, calling Porter ‘a sac of green pus throbbing with jealousy’. Fun in its way, and a predictable stoush of the kind familiar to literature the world over. [See Angela Bennie’s Crème de la Phlegm Unforgettable Australian Reviews The Miegunyah Press 2006, from which the above examples are taken, for more examples of Australian arts criticism.]

The old, old story. Artists make the art and put it out into the world. Its fate is indeterminate, whether well received, given the silent treatment or scorned. Anyone who gets into a life in art and thinks it is going to be any different for them is being hopelessly naive.

Marbeck Valerian is my imaginary name for all the critics one is going to come across who will misunderstand work, misrepresent it, or land on it like an Exocet missile and proclaim it the best thing since sliced bread, probably the worst fate of all.

Eduard Hanslick, origin of Wagner’s Sixtus Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, doyen of music critics in nineteenth-century Europe, simply could not connect with the contemporary masterpieces that were set before him. All the learning in the world can’t help a critical sensibility out of the impasse that comes when a mind thinks itself attuned to the spirit of the times. Which in Hanslick’s case meant Brahms. Wagner, Bruckner and Tchaikowsky were beyond him—Bruckner 8: ‘At long last, the Finale—which, with its baroque themes, its confused structure and inhuman din, strikes us only as a model of tastelessness . . .’ I suppose you can get some entertainment value out of this kind of criticism. But when your reading audience starts looking forward to seeing who, say, to take two names from the past, Kenneth Tynan or Auberon Waugh are going to eviscerate in their weekly column, something has gone askew in the relationship between artist, critic and audience. Part of the problem arises from the thinning dividing line between reviewing—one person’s opinion—and criticism, which is meant to be a more considered and analytical overview of cultural product.

Hanslick was wrong from the start, to quote someone who got into troubled waters through pride. However, this is really the way it must be. And why should art have an easy time of it? The teacher, the nurse, the miner and the police constable are not going to have an easy time of it. No. The poor and the oppressed are certainly not going to have an easy time of it either, pace the look-at-how-I’m-suffering-unlike-the-rest-of-the-world tone of some confessional verse. What is so special about artists that they should be given a dispensation from the vexations others encounter, when journalists can be murdered for simply trying to write the truth? The history of art is prolix with attacks on great works of art and grotesque misreadings of its nature. It would be the shortest of perspectives to expect anything else. The ideal, the aesthetically beautiful, must have swum through muck before it has a chance of landing on calmer historical shores. Metaphorically, art is always swimming the Hellespont in its Byronic aspiration towards the sublime, or the nihilist’s sublime denied. Carping criticism is just one of the many hurdles to be faced along the way, hurdles that change the perspectives with which we look at the art we admire, or the art we do not like, or do not understand.

There is a problem specific to poetry: mistaken thinking about poetry by the general public. Misuse of the word ‘poetic’ is so common as to be beyond repair. Proper poetry dives into the world, takes in its multifariousness, its roughnesses and tragedies, its joy at beauty, even as the poet grabs on to the broken glass shards of the Muse’s patchy visitations. ‘Poetic’ is not another word for nice, kind, sedate, palatable. Between top-heavy pronouncements from various spots around the publishing globe and the general public’s indifference to the real poetic, falls the shadow, Cynara, of the individual writer’s efforts to get him or herself understood on a proper footing.

It’s true, as Robert Hughes has said—a critic has to have a harsh side, otherwise all you get is blandout. That apart, critics will come in many guises. One will behave like Stalin, casting the unchosen to outer darkness. Another will gather in a sheaf of sensibilities with an almost creative zeal. A few imply they have read everything and therefore their commentaries come with an air of supernal wisdom. Nothing of the kind, of course. Then there are zealous attenders of conferences on Bakhtin and Benjamin who duly proceed to force-feed any perceptions they might have through the mindset of their heroes. More than a few may as well come with ‘agenda approaching’ branded on their foreheads for all the subtlety used to spruik friends or pet theories. Some see it as their solemn duty to spend a lifetime rubber stamping status quo fodder. What to say about the opaque wall of French deconstructive criticism that towered briefly across the literary landscape. So-called New Criticism, Pound’s boosterism, Leavis’ purple prose about Lawrence . . . and so on, and on. Personally, I can’t think of any critics with whom I am in general agreement about literature or art. When reading all these people you can get an interesting perspective, learn new things about art and artists, enjoy the erudition, if worn lightly.  However, in art, it is essential not to let others do the thinking for you. Perhaps that’s even more important with artists you admire and who write on art too. I often disagree with some of my favourite artists. Wagner seems misguided on all manner of subjects. ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ and ‘All art is quite useless’ are two statements from Auden and Wilde that irritate me.

So, merrily we roll along, as the musical has it. Well, good criticism is important. We must have it, along with the self-serving or blinkered kind. The rare piece of literary criticism that proclaims the arrival of something important is notable only for its scarcity. Poets who write poetry criticism—and there are a lot who have, or do—are on difficult ground. In The Undiscovered Country Poetry in the Age of Tin [Columbia University Press 2005, 343] William Logan calls John Berryman ‘a brilliant critic’—which might very well be true—but I would much rather Berryman wrote less criticism and worked on his poetry more.

Just as well art finds its own timeline, which is not criticism’s.

Marbeck Valerian may be your long-term friend. His/her misunderstandings are the seeds from which art begins its proper journey through time’s unpredictable mangle.

                                                                     *

          The Artist’s Agony Aunt Replies

Brobdingnag into Lilliput doesn’t go—
Work that out early if you want to keep
Your gold estate
From predations by those CEOs and phonies
Who’ve risen to the level of baloney.

Art is more important than their blather,
But only you and the happy few will know
Why you’ll be intransigent and stroppy
When they’re expecting parrot words to serve
For beauties and their furies here conferred.

Art cannot wait for being understood
When blood has, by the Muse, been dispossessed.
They’ll want you to sell short your better part
For slaps on the back and lower ranks of things
Where they have dumped their burden without wings.

For all the money, politics and kudos
Others have for meaning in their lives,
When summing up a goodness that survives,
The gift of art, however hard or strange,
Is worthy of a life none with you may change.

Written 1996

If you are thinking the United States and George W. Bush you are right too, but I am thinking of something closer to my home in India, which may not be that dissimilar. The felling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in central Baghdad and the proclamation of victory in the war against Iraq seems a distant memory. What Bush and his advisers forgot was to be ready to manage the empire after the conquest. Sadly they forgot to take their clothes, and were completely exposed, caught rather embarassingly with their pants down. Three years on George Bush stands as the emperor with no clothes as anarchy reigns in Iraq and the costs of war to his own people rise, be it the loss of life or the drain on resources. The superpower humbled by its own incompetence.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with happenings in India? Well, something unusual happened last week: an ageing Indian company, no less than a hundred years old took over a much younger and bigger company in Europe. The Tata Steel takeoever  of the Anglo-Dutch behemoth Corus Steel was greeted with a chorus of euphoria in India, not dissimilar to the euphoria in America after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. India, some claim, is now a superpower spreading its economic might and empire, while the Tata’s are the army, leading the triumphant charge. A scratch below the surface of triumph conceals a reality check which all in the euphoric chorus would be well advised to take heed of.

Can India possibly claim to be superpower, the new emperor, just because some of it’s corporates are taking over firms abroad. Corporate might hasn’t turned into well-being for the majority of the people who still languish in poverty, illiteracy, hunger: basically dismal human conditions. Even possessing a few nuclear weapons doesn’t change this fact. And if half a country’s population cannot read, feed or cloth itself, what does that say about the empire? Even the American empire seems hollow when it is estimated that one in six people in the US is functionally illiterate, a large number of them live in poverty, where poverty is often a function of race, and where hurricanes like Katrina leave the mighty government fumbling for solutions.

But let’s return again to to the Indian empire. What of the valiant army, the foot soldiers, the Tata Group in this case. Are they creatings trong empires or merely those in name but no substance? A closer examination of some of the facts about this takeoever and takeovers in general may shed some light.

To begin, creating an empire, whether corporate or political costs money. And someone has to pay. The Tata’s have paid $12.1 billion for Corus. Money that is borrowed and has to be paid back, with interest. Will the new conglomorate be profitable enough to make their investment worthwhile?

One may argue that Tata Steel is now a giant, the fifth largest steel company in the world. But giants aren’t always profitable or successful. Look what happened to Corus. Look elsewhere at what is happening to other gigantic firms: General Motors is struggling, so is Ford. And these are legendary firms, which we were told, have sales in excess of the GDP of many developing countries.

But Tata Corus may be different. Possibly. Note, however, the fact that Tata Steel has acquired a firm which is much less efficient than itself, both in terms of profit margins which are about half of Tata’s and in terms of costs, which are much higher especially the costs of labour. Thus, the immediate outcome for the combined entity is a fall in profitability and efficieny from the level of Tata Steel. Think the outcome for Germany after the more prosperous West united with the less prosperous East, and you’ll get the picture. Thus, a lot of hard work is needed to pull Tata Corus up. Is Ratan Tata’s homework ebtter than George W. Bush’s, or is it an act of bravado based more on hope than on hard economic calculus? Have the Tata’s over-stretched themselves in order to ‘ win their battle’ (prompted by a jingoistic nation and it’s over enthusiastic media) for Corus, against CSN from Brazil? Groege Bush and his army are certainly over-stretched in Iraq, and feeling the heat. Even the highest quality steel can melt under extreme temperatures.

What makes things even more complicated for the Tata’s with Corus is that steel is a sunset industry in the West. The demand for steel and the production of steel in the UK, which is the home of Corus, has fallen steadily over the last thirty years. Steel in a sunrise industry in emerging markets. So it makes sense acquiring firms in say China and Brazil but does it make the same sense acquiring an Anglo-Dutch firm which basically services small and shrinking markets. Again, time will tell, but the outcome is far from certain.

An investigation into the technical side reveals evidence from economic literature on the subject suggesting that mergers and acquisitions do not always lead to higher profits for the new company, or indeed higher share prices. In fact, a lot of evidence from the industrialized countries, where a majority of mergers and acquisitions have hitherto occurred, shows the opposite. What does happen for certain is a downsizing of jobs.

Acquiring a firm in a different country brings its own adjustment problems. A probable clash of managerial and worker cultures. A resistance to control by a firm seen to be from the developing world. Again the analogy with what the Americans are facing in Iraq is obvious.

If this is sounding very pessimistic, let it not. It is not meant to be. The Tata’s have achieved a lot, both in India and abroad, especially under the able stewardship of Ratan Tata. In fact, some of their earlier acquisitions of steel firms in Thailand and Singapiore  made good sense. As did their takeoever of the bankrupt Daewoo Commercial Vehicles at a very reasonable price. India as a country, too, has made great strides over the last sixty years. But proclamations of conquest, and of empire, or of superpower status seem premature. Almost like hubris before a fall. Just like Iraq 2003. Caution is the better part of valor, and the enthusiasts would do well to temper their emotions, and let those in charge do their homework dilligently, without the pressure of jingoism and nationalism. The outcomes, in that case, are likely to be way superior.

It would seem wiser to be in a situation where one is all dressed up with nowhere to go, than to rush towards an empire with no clothes.

Last week, Abbas posted a little video I made of a journey to Karachi’s Burns Road to have one of my very favorite foods, nihari.  So I thought I would supply some more information about this gastronomic epiphany.

Nihari is a dish of spiced, braised meat that has achieved sentimental status for many Pakistanis and Indians.  Shanks, which can be beef, lamb, or goat, are simmered overnight in a broth flavored with red pepper, black pepper, garlic, mace, coriander, and other spices.  Often they are left to braise in a pot covered in embers to maintain an even and low temperature.  After six to eight hours of simmering, when the shanks have tenderized, the cooking liquid is thickened and flavored with fried onions, and the finished stew is served with chopped coriander, minced green chilies, slivered ginger, lime wedges.  It is eaten with plain fresh naan, usually for breakfast or brunch – especially after long nights for its restorative qualities.  I think its combination of deeply flavored, earthy meat, the fresh zest of the toppings, and the perfection of a proper tandoori naan is one of the greatest bites there is to eat.

The nihari shops of Karachi and Lahore do bustling business, but mention it to many expatriate Pakistanis and you will hear consecutive sighs.  (I hold that Pakistani nihari is better.  Why?  Because Pakistan is better.  Kidding.  It’s because it’s best made with beef, which is uncommon in India.)  Good nihari is not commonly available in this country.  The great wave of Indian restaurants that colonized the US and Britain, mostly run by Bangladeshi entrepreneurs starting in London’s Brick Lane and New York’s Sixth Street, denatured a group of regional dishes into a standardized scale of chili heat: vindaloo, jalfrezi, do piaz, madras, etc.  Nihari, a much more singular dish, didn’t make it into this list, and is thus only found in restaurants catering to South Asian immigrants, and even then usually only available as a weekend special.

The number of cultures that have restorative dishes made from long-simmered, gelatinous cuts of meat served with fresh seasonings makes one wonder about the possibility of a universal index of deliciousness.  In Mexico, so similar to the subcontinent in ingredients and general approach to cuisine, there is goat’s head stew as well as  the great hangover cure, posole (hominy corn in pork and chicken broth topped with fresh radishes, lime, and salsa).  In Italy, osso buco combines braised lamb shanks with gremolata, or lemon zest mixed with chopped parsley.  In Turkey, tripe soup is a weekend brunch special.

The shanks, or lower legs, of cows, lambs and goats have richly marrowed bones surrounded by a ring of stringy, tough meat.  Opposite in texture to more usual star cuts such as tenderloin, shanks require long cooking to become edible and also contain large amounts of gelatin.  That’s why they are usually used in luxury Western cooking for stock.  But shanks, like many humble cuts of meat, have enjoyed a popular renaissance with the vogue for peasant foods.  So maybe it’s time for nihari to take its place alongside osso buco and barbecued ribs in the list of foods considered by gastronomes as honest and authentic regional delicacies.  As Abbas mentioned, I bet Anthony Bourdain would love it.  For many Pakistanis and Indians, it occupies that place already: its rarity in restaurants only contributes to its aura.  You might say that in the social imaginary it represents the streets of home themselves, in all their remembered specificity.  Taste, memory.

With most such foods, the genius of the place supposedly cannot be transported – if you’re meant to taste authenticity, you can’t take it with you.  Here is the point in the story where I’m supposed to admit that my grandmother cooked the greatest nihari, or that I fondly remember youthful trips to the nihariwallahs of Burns Road.  That would go along with the mythologizing impulse that we often give in to when talking about such talismanic foods.  I’d rather use the example of nihari to rebut that idea.  Actually, I tasted it for the first time at the age of about twenty at my aunt’s house, in Baltimore.  I was immediately hooked, and started cooking it for both my family and anyone else who expressed an interest in trying it.  Surprisingly, it was quite easy, and the results were always good.  There were a few early periods where I ate it every day for a week.

It was only in 2004, when I visited Pakistan for the first time in ten years, that I had the chance to try the real deal.  And so I toured the famous specialist shops (in case you’re going, I especially love Zahid’s of Saddar, Karachi and the little shop outside the Lahore’s Lahori gate, where my mother and I had a memorable lunch).  So for me the dish doesn’t hold the kind of retrospective nostalgia it does for many people.  So just as I think it’s a bit silly to wait in line for two hours with a bunch of trainspotting foodies to have a slice of Di Fara’s admittedly delicious pizza, I think one shouldn’t overly romanticize a foodstuff’s most legendary purveyors when you can have it in your own home.  This is also because I know that nihari is not hard to make, and so you can have it anytime.  Here’s how:

NIHARI

4 tablespoons oil
4 lbs. beef shanks (I think beef provides the best flavor for this dish)
6 garlic cloves, minced
4 tablespoons nihari masala (you can use a packet of Shaan, or use the one below)
2 onions, halved and sliced
1/2 cup flour
naan, made yourself or from a good restaurant (no butter!)
for garnish: chopped coriander, limes wedges, minced bird’s eye chilies, slivered ginger

Heat the oil in a large pot over medium heat and brown the meat in two batches.  Then fry the garlic until just coloring, return the meat and add the masala to the pot and add ten cups of water.  Bring to a boil, then cover and turn down to the lowest simmer.  Go to sleep.  When you wake up, or about six to eight hours later, test the meat for doneness – it should be fork-tender and the marrow should have melted out of the bones, leaving them as clean white rings in the broth.  Remove a teacup of the broth and whisk the flour into it, removing lumps.  Reintroduce the floured broth to the pot.  Now fry the onion until browned with a little more of the masala, then pour this mixture into the broth.  Turn the heat up and boil rapidly with the cover off until you reach a slightly thickened texture, though still a bit watery.  Taste for salt.  Serve with fresh naan (if bought, ride your bike back from the restaurant quite fast to maintain their heat) and small bowls with the garnishes.  Make sure to squeeze plenty of lime juice into your serving.  You won’t be sorry.

NIHARI MASALA

2 tbl red pepper
5 tsp salt
2 tbl of paprika (for redness)
2 tbl ginger powder
1 tsp powdered nutmeg
2 tsp black peppercorns
2 tsp fennel seeds
1tsp black cumin seeds
1 tsp kalongi (um, either onion or nigella seeds, can’t remember)
4 bay leaves
1 tbl whole mace

Grind the last six ingredients into a powder, then mix with the above.  This will make more than you need for one dish.

All my dispatches.

Here we go again! The white house contenders are piping seductive music to our ears: the loud techno-heavy metal clatter about the Iraq war and the gospel-soul music for the healthcare. And we know it well — they will play only the doleful blues after the election.

Barack Obama has promised to provide health coverage for all Americans in next six years, which means 47 million uninsured would get some kind of coverage. Obama is certainly not the first candidate to garner electoral support by espousing liberal health care. In 1883, Otto Bismarck of Germany enticed labor support by passing the health insurance bill for the factory workers and he succeeded in severing the support of labor to the social democrats. On august 6, 1912 Theodore Roosevelt called for compulsory health insurance for the industrial workers, to outwit the liberal platform of Woodrow Wilson.

The health-care-for-all rhetoric tugs your heart — the uninsured suffer unduly from denied care. The truth always lies buried in the details.

The uninsured have extremely limited access to outpatient and preventive care. They rely on the hospital emergency rooms for their needs from where the seriously sick are admitted to the hospital and others go home after treatment. The hospitals shift the cost of their care to the other insured and paying customers. It is not that the uninsured don’t get health care but they are compelled to access it deviously and often in desperation. The ER visit is free but suffused with contempt.

The annual cost of providing the care to the uninsured is approximately 250 billion dollars. The current 1.7 trillion dollar system already carries this load. Obama should not tax and spend extra 250 billion dollars but squeeze it out from the current health care expenditure and make it visible and available. The current system is morbidly obese, with redundant flab. Even the cost of administering the current system sucks up at least 25% and some believe it to be even more. Canada administers its health system at less than half the US cost. And then there are layers of clever businesses cannibalizing the system without adding to consumer health.

Obama should fulfill his promise and also differentiate himself from other candidates. Here is a five-point plan for Obama:

1. Unified Payer System

No, this is not another single payer system attempt, which will again face fierce opposition from the entrenched. In 1993, Clinton health reform exercise collapsed because the American public did not trust a government controlled single payer or a nationalized health insurance, which denied local participation.

In the early 1970s Kennedy and Mills (Chairman of Ways and Means Committee) proposed a bill, which would have created a single national indemnity insurance plan based on fee for service with co-payments. The opposition from all quarters killed the bill in the congress. The medical establishment feared it as ‘socialized medicine”, labor complained of its inadequate benefits; republicans frowned on it as expensive and Wilbur Mills, the cosponsor of the bill found amorous relief in the arms of Fanny Foxe, a night club stripper.

Currently, every insurance payer insists on its own unique processes of fixing rates for medical services, prior authorization process, credentialing health providers, prescription plans and myriad other procedures. Health insurance industry is an inefficient behemoth probably beyond repair. The system is so dysfunctional that one wonders at the wisdom of financing the health care through indemnity coverage.

Obama should propose a unified standardized payment system with multiple payers. While the insurance companies can still sell the individual products, a unified standard payment system is likely to save enormous administrative costs.

This will differentiate him from Hillary Clinton who is likely to rehash the failed 1993 attempt.

2. Health Savings Account

Market system does not work in health care because of insurmountable asymmetry of information between the physician (seller) and the patient (buyer). The seller decides what the patient should buy. Add to this the vulnerability of the ailing consumer at the point of purchase and an assurance that some third party (insurance) will pick up the tab.

The indemnity model has built in flaws: moral hazard and inducement of demand: the consumer considers the insurance a free ride and demands more services, which the economists call, ‘moral hazard.’

In a landmark study by RAND, the investigators analyzed the magnitude of moral hazard over a period of three to five years by the health care utilization behavior of six thousand individuals in six locations. The participant consumers differed in the amount of co-payments they made and were grouped in five categories: one group got completely free care and the other four had varied co-payments from 25% to 95% of the charges. The results were revealing: while co-payments decreased the utilization, free care increased the utilization by 30%; and there was no difference in the outcome health status between groups. Co-payment decreased the threat of moral hazard.

The physician also plays the system. In order to preserve or enhance his income, the physician induces demand for more services. Victor Fuchs studied the correlation between the supply of surgeons and the demand of operations. (Journal of Human Resources, 1961) He found that 10% increase in the number of surgeons in a community would increase the demand of surgeries by 3%.

Hospitals also induce demand. Roemer, an economist, described a hospital in upstate New York, which had 139 beds and average occupancy of 108 beds in 1957.The hospital increased its size to 197 beds in a new building in 1958 and the occupancy increased to 137. Though there was no inappropriate care, yet there was no health enhancing benefit to the community either.

The traditional health insurance has responded to moral hazard and demand inducement by creating managed care, capitation, HMOs and other innovations. These organizations work on the principle of curtailing the seemingly unnecessary care and resource utilization. The proponents of these organizations claim that in 2005 the system spent 300 billion dollars less because of their intervention. But it is unlikely that the whole health system benefits much, because the cost saving shows up in the profit column of these organizations and insurance companies. The previous income of health provider now becomes the revenue of the middle meddlers.

That is why Obama must encourage the ‘Health Savings Account’ where the consumer saves money regularly in this account and pays for her care from the savings. The unspent money belongs to her. Coverage for major medical catastrophe supplements the savings account. The consumer has incentives to spend her money wisely, which may partially curtail moral hazard and the demand inducement.

3. Import Drugs

Every one knows by now, that the drugs are more expensive in the US compared to Canada, Europe and other countries. Obama should create mechanisms of approving, accrediting and inviting a selected few reputed foreign drug manufacturers to sell their products in the US at a negotiated cost similar to their home countries. The USA is in a strong negotiating position as it is the largest market for foreign drug manufacturers. An FDA approved accreditation and licensing process of the manufacturer will eliminate the fear about the quality and efficacy.

Under Mr. Clinton’s global initiative, some reputed foreign pharmaceutical companies are already selling drugs for AIDS in the rest of the world at a fraction of the US cost. There is no reason why it can’t be replicated here.

Obama will win the wrath of the US pharmaceutical industry and the votes of the senior citizens. Both are laudable goals.

4. Health IT

All health care facilities in the nation should be connected on an interoperable Internet platform. Each citizen should have a secure access to her life long health record and should be able to authorize its use to care providers of her choice. The technology is already here; what we need is a legislative push to expedite the process. This single important step will benefit the patients and decrease excessive testing, redundant procedures, length of hospital stay and medical errors. The electronic billing and payment will cut the fraud and abuse.

While considerable progress in this direction has occurred lately, Obama should encourage a time bound plan with an end point in next six years.

5. Liability Reform

It would be good for Obama to suggest caps on punitive damages to differentiate himself from John Edwards who made a fortune as an injury lawyer. He will endear himself to the medical establishment whose support he will need to push other reforms.

Barrack Obama needs neither a magnifying glass to search the glaring faults nor a hearing aid for the screaming inefficiencies of the current system. While some wisdom is desirable, mere common sense will suffice for the most part. His chances of achieving the reform in health are brighter than retreat from Iraq. There is enough money in the current system to cover the uninsured. Let the gospel-soul music play for long this time.

Remember the ‘Slinky’—the children’s toy born of an accident in World War II research? How did the myriad vibrations of that single coil get it moving? It was gravity, of course, but how gravity failed to enchant my childhood mind.

Another mysteriously undulating mechanism, the United Nations, doubtless qualifies as the public global entity with the most moving parts. Like the Slinky, the higher purpose of its incessant undulating is unconvincing to some. Ostensibly animated by a Charter of guiding principles it is, like the Slinky, bound by the gravity of its 191 member states and their infinitely competing interests.

Quite unlike the Slinky, however, the UN is not remote from the world’s current crises, nor is it beyond the realm of our individual lives. Unless you live in Antarctica, Palestine, Western Sahara, or Vatican City—which do not qualify for membership because of their ambiguous sovereign status—your taxes fund the meanderings of this megalithic millipede. Although the EU, the US and Japan contribute 82% of its budget, the more numerous poor member states can dominate voting referenda. Their obstruction of sweeping UN reform efforts, initiated in 2004 by former Secretary General Kofi Annan to improve UN efficiency and impact, is a case in point.

The buildup to Annan’s declaration of the proposed reform lasted years, even decades; the supporting evidence exhaustive. Support among member states, however, was far from unanimous. Apparently the common criticism of the UN as little more than a ‘hiring agency for the Third World’ is not shared by those member states who oppose its reform.

During the Cold War, the UN was blocked from acting on the interventionism enshrined in its Charter, and fell back on useful humanitarian and monitoring missions. It also took refuge in passing resolutions that had little bearing on actual world politics.

The Middle East is an example of this impotence. It failed to stop wars in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. Its key Security Council resolution 242, outlining a solution for the Israelis and Palestinians along the lines of land for peace, has been only partially fulfilled. In the Middle East partially has meant hardly enough.

It did send troops to the Congo in the early 1960s when the country began to fall apart after the precipitatous departure of the Belgians. The breakaway province of Katanga was brought back under central control, but the experience was not a happy one for the UN, symbolized by the death in an air accident of its Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.

In more recent years it has been slightly more successful. Its sanctions helped persuade white South Africans to hand over power to majority rule. Its quiet diplomacy helped bring an end to the Iran-Iraq War, and it played useful roles in winding up conflicts and developing democracy in Namibia, Mozambique, Cambodia, El Salvador, Sierra Leone, East Timor and, for a second time, DR Congo.

Yet it failed in Bosnia, where intervention was led by the US and its Nato allies, and Kosovo where Nato acted against Serbia (not the UN). Most spectacular, however, was its paralysis in Rwanda where it failed to prevent genocide. When Annan announced plans, subject to the approval of UN member states, for a “bold and far-reaching” reform agenda, the institution was deep in criticism over its management of the Iraq oil-for-food program and allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in the DR Congo.

Fundamental changes in three main areas of the UN mission and Charter– development, security and human rights–were proposed. “We will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights,” Annan said at the time.

The general reform package promised to:

§         Enlarge Security Council from 15 to 24 members

§         Streamline General Assembly agenda

§         Introduce new guidelines for authorising military action

§         Replace Commission on Human Rights with Human Rights Council

§         Introduce zero tolerance policy on abuses by UN peacekeepers

§         Improve coordination of environment and development aid agendas

Since then, many have commented on UN reform efforts, particularly the vaunted makeover of the much-contested Human Rights Council, which replaced the old Commission on Human Rights. Last October the Washington Post argued of the newly minted Commission:

For all its faults, the previous U.N. commission occasionally discussed and condemned the regimes most responsible for human rights crimes, such as those in Belarus and Burma. China used to feel compelled to burnish its record before the annual meeting. The new council, in contrast, has so far taken action on only one country, which has dominated the debate at both of its regular meetings and been the sole subject of two extraordinary sessions: Israel.

Western human rights groups sought to focus the council’s attention on Darfur, where genocide is occurring, and on Uzbekistan, where a dictator refuses to allow the investigation of a massacre by his security forces. Their efforts have been in vain. Instead, the council has treated itself to report after report on the alleged crimes of the Jewish state; in all, there were six official “rapporteurs” on that subject in the latest session alone.

Regarding proposed expansion of the Security Council (consisting of five permanent seats–China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States—and ten temporary seats), there is widespread agreement that the five permanent members should no longer reflect the victorious powers of World War II.  Yet there is no agreement on who might join this privileged group, how big a new council should be, or how members should be selected.

In the development sector, much is at stake given the proliferation of specialized UN agencies, sometimes as many as twenty, working in a country at a time. Harnessing their collective powers while eliminating duplication and waste will prove an enormous challenge. ‘Herding cats’ comes to mind. It is essential, for attaining the Millennium Development Goals on poverty alleviation, health, education and the environment in the poorest corners of the world by 2015 is considered doubtful without significant institutional reform. A High-Level Panel on UN Reform, convened by the Annan in 2005, has gone further and proposed ‘streamlining UN agencies’ for improved efficiency and impact on the ground.

Recommendations specific to the development sector include:

• putting operations in countries under a single umbrella with overall responsibility for delivery
• better funding and co-ordination of humanitarian aid
• full funding of the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF)
• donors to commit more aid through UN programs and less to their own “pet projects”
• ongoing reform of business practices under the Secretary-General’s direction
• secure long-term funding for agencies that meet reform goals

The CERF fund, launched during last year’s World Summit, aims to create a pool of $500m in ready money allowing a quick response to natural disasters. Only half of the money has so far arrived, and NGOs in line to receive this money to respond to emerging crises have begun to issue their own reports detailing the shortcomings of the initiative. I was in DR Congo in late 2006 to evaluate a similar emergency fund, and found it useful. NGOs are highly mobile and able to operate in insecure areas generally off-limits to UN staff. The UN agencies, while administratively slow, possess massive procurement capacity for life-saving relief supplies. These are prepositioned in known volatile areas, and when crisis hits–massive civilian displacement, earthquakes or cholera outbreaks–participating NGOs are able to evaluate acute needs and distribute relief supplies in under 72 hours. No relief agency operating alone is capable of such rapid, massive response, and in places like Congo such reform initiatives are clearly bearing fruit.

The ‘single umbrella’ experiment is perhaps the most radical initiative outlined above. The ‘One UN’ initiative, currently piloted in Vietnam, was triggered in September 2005 by a Vietnam UN country team note submittted to the 2005 World Summit in New York. The objective is to ensure faster and more effective development operations by establishing a consolidated UN presence, while maintaining the distinct purposes and personalities of the six participating UN bodies—UNICEF, UNDP, UNFPA, UNIFEM, UNV and UNAIDS. 

The initiative provides a tool through which the agencies and programs can work as one team, while cutting fragmentation and duplication of efforts. UN staff expect there to be difficulties along the way as entrenched interests fight to preserve their independence; ‘One UN’ will also be piloted in six other countries, not yet announced.

Annan’s successor, Ban-Ki Moon, will continue to pursue these long-overdue reforms. 

A Note on Sex and Violence

Justin E. H. Smith

Somewhere, and I don’t remember where, Arthur Danto describes the power ‘bad words’ have of ‘bleeding out’ of any quotation marks within which one might hope to contain them. Thus in the philosophy of language it has been known for some time that if John says, “Sally said ‘wow’,” John is not really using ‘wow’ in a sentence, he is only mentioning it in connection with Sally’s use. But try the same thing with ‘fuck’ -–supposing say that John and Sally are siblings and John is reporting to his parents–, and you will find that to mention is to use. The profanity bleeds out of the quotation marks meant to separate it from the sentence in which it is contained. FCC broadcasting rules confirm this: not only vulgar rants, but even the titles of vulgar songs, are forbidden.

When it comes to these charged words, the more common way of saying without saying is not through punctuation but through euphemism: freaking, darn, gosh, shoot, etc. But these terms pose no danger of bleeding out into the language surrounding them only because they are already bloodless. Or perhaps, better, they function in language like artificial sweetener in food –giving you something for nothing, but turning out in the end to be nothing themselves–, and should be used just as sparingly. They are a worse habit than cursing. Cicero understood this. “When you speak of the anus,” he wrote, “you call it by a name [‘anus’, i.e., ‘ring’] that is not its own; why not rather call it by its own [i.e., ‘culus’]? If it is indecent, do not use even the substituted name; if not, you had better call it by its own” (Epistolae ad familiares IX xxii). While also showing that one era’s euphemisms are another’s hyper-correct orthophemisms –today ‘anus’ is the preferred term of the straight-faced and literal-minded– when followed out to its logical conclusion the orator’s observation makes a rather strong demand of us: that we eschew all allusion, all talking-around, perhaps even all metaphor. Euphemisms frequently taste artificial, but to insist on pure, direct literalism in all speech at all registers would amount to a severe impoverishment of language.

The difference between the poetic allusion, the insipid euphemism, and the blunt literal description, it seems to me, is strikingly similar to that between erotic art, idiotic softcore simulations, and porn, a three-part distinction which in turn maps onto that between epic battle scenes, cartoonish blood-splattering violence, and snuff films. I would like to consider whether Danto’s insight about profane language might thus be useful for understanding images that fall into any of these genres. Here, I am interested primarily in ontology –in particular the relation of images to reality–, and not in ethics, except insofar as our ethical judgment of the content of an image is relevant to that image’s power to jump out from behind its screen and become part of reality. It seems to me, in short, that just as certain words cannot be contained semantically within quotation marks, certain images cannot be kept morally behind the screens on which we watch them. They bleed out of the pixels meant to contain them, like ‘fuck’ bleeds out of its punctuational container. (Need I plead that I did not just say ‘fuck’, but only mentioned it? Undoubtedly, the editor of a less enlightened review would judge that I did, and ask me to garble it with dollar signs and asterisks. Fine. I confess I did use it. That is precisely my point.)

The images that seem least capable of bleeding in this way are the ones that rely, curiously, on copious quantities of fake blood. The more the red dye spills, the less infectious the image seems. It is a weighty decision to watch an Iraqi beheading video. It is not a weighty decision to watch Helloween or Child’s Play. A psychologically mature adult should be able to watch anything acted without coming away tainted. Martin Amis recounts: “As the credits rolled on Child’s Play 3, I felt no urge or prompting to go out and kill somebody. And I also knew why. It’s nothing to boast about, but there is too much going on in my head for Chucky to gain sway in there.” Child’s Play, it seems, has roughly as much to do with violence as saying “gosh” has to do with blasphemy. It is the same unreasonable fundamentalist who would attempt to supress the one and the other.

I think most of us would have the same opinion of Emmanuelle or The Story of O. These are harmless entertainments: they do not bleed out of the screen with moral consequences for the real people watching it. But isn’t ‘real’ porn more like an Iraq beheading video than it is like ‘erotica’? With few exceptions (Bruno Dumont, Nagisa Oshima, Vincent Gallo: all predictably received as enfants terribles), it is still not possible to have sex qua actor. That is, if you are an actor having sexual intercourse in your role in front of a camera, then like it or not you are also having sex in your real life. It is an action that cannot be contained within the bounds of a fiction. There are at least some actions, then, that can’t be executed in the name of artistic integrity, actions that, even if attempted in the aims of art, inevitably prove to be uncontainable within the art for which they were performed and end up constituting some small corner of reality. What distinguishes these actions –let us call them ‘radioactive’— from the safe kind? What do they say about art and its relationship to reality?

It seems that the list of such actions has no existence independently of evolving community standards. Consider for example our culture’s rapidly changing attitude towards smoking, and how this has impacted art. A New York Times article of January 28 reports: “England’s [smoking] ban, which begins July 1, allows actors to smoke only ‘if the artistic integrity of the performance makes it appropriate for them to smoke.’” Other rules in other places are stricter. Smoking, like sex, seems increasingly to be one of those activities that cannot be contained within the simulated world that hosts the other actions of characters on a stage or in front of a camera. In contrast with the world of Tennessee Williams, these days a character smoking is a person smoking.

It is worth noting that sex involves bodily fluids which may seep through pores or sores, and smoking, as its enemies have driven home ad nauseam, involves the transmission of airborne particles into the lungs and bloodstreams of all who come near the smoker. Fluids and vapors are at stake in these radioactive actions, not just sights and sounds.

Why is this distinction important? Aren’t sound waves and light rays just as much a part of reality as fluids and particles? Against those who claimed that the introduction of sound marked the end of the ‘pure’ cinematic form of the silent film, André Bazin has argued that in 1929 a dream that had run through much of the history of 19th-century technology was finally realized: the mechanical recording of a larger sliver of reality than what is given to any one of the senses individually. The 19th-century had phonographic recording, and it had photographic recording, but only with Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer were we able to have both at once.

One might reasonably ask Bazin: if what you are interested in is registering reality mechanically, why stop at sight and sound? Why not give the people smells, tastes, and feels as well? One thing to note right away is that, physically, the senses are not all analogous. Sights and sounds can be recorded, but the only way to capture a smell and to deliver it at a later time is not to record it but to capture the smell itself. It doesn’t make any sense to speak of a ‘recording’ of a smell. If you are smelling something, this is because there are particles of that thing entering your nose. If you are seeing or hearing something, this is admittedly because there are light rays or sound waves entering your ears or eyes, but in the case of recording they need not be coming from the thing of which they give you an impression. That thing may be on the other side of the world, may have ceased to exist a century ago, and what you are sensing, even if dependent on that thing, is by no means a part of it in the way that aromatic particles are literally taken from some source material. These same points may be made a fortiori for tastes. ‘Feels’ deserve their own analysis, but suffice it to say here that they are more like tastes and smells than like sights and sounds.

As a result of this physical difference, I believe there are fundamental reasons why cinema could never expand beyond sight and sound, even if John Waters experimented with ‘odorama’ cards in the 1970s. To incorporate smells or tastes or feels would not be to enhance the art form, in the way that the addition of sounds to sights no doubt did. It would be to change activities altogether: from the creation of visual art, to what is today called ‘virtual reality’. That is to say, one can watch and hear a movie as an external spectator, whereas if one is smelling and tasting and feeling, one is necessarily a participant. Movies disclose worlds to us, to speak with Cavell, whereas virtual reality would enworld us.

Yet perhaps certain sights and sounds are capable of having a physiological and psychical effect comparable in force to the vapors and fluids that penetrate the body and that consequently inspire legislation and moral concern. Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others: “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.” I take this to mean that certain images are such that the spectator/participant distinction collapses in looking at them: to watch is to be implicated, just as there is no way to experience the tastes of a meal but by joining the diners. In the case of snuff films and pornography, the power to bleed off the screen is so strong that even the time delay, even the assurance that everything you are seeing is already a fait accompli, does not seem to make a difference. The time delay does make some difference of course—to watch live webcam pornography is on many accounts morally indistinguishable from a visit to a prostitute; to watch a live snuffing online is to be an accomplice to murder, while once a snuff film is available, the deed has been done, and our decision to watch can have no retroactive influence.

But again, the time delay is somehow not enough to make all the moral difference. It’s impossible, of course, but I want to say that Iraq beheadings and gonzo porn bleed off the screen by travelling in time. Their presentness is not entirely diminished by the fact that we are watching them on playback. Consider in this connection the French verb for what audience members do at live spectacles: “assister.” To go to the theater is to “assist” in its performance, as obviously the performance would not be a performance if there were no audience. Students “assist” at lectures, and witnesses “assist” at executions. At the movies, one does not “assist,” one just “watches.” Families of the victims of Timothy McVeigh, interestingly, were satisfied to “assist” at his lethal injection by way of closed-circuit television: TV, in its original, live function is a way of circumventing boundaries imposed by space, but not by time. Film, though, is in general the medium that shows events at a remove in both time and space. Yet somehow this remove disappears in porn and snuff. To watch is for the event itself to be relived, and somehow almost to cause the real people on the screen to relive the event (even if they are now headless). To watch is to “assist”, with all the moral repercussions this verb implies in English. As Linda Lovelace testified, every time a man watches Deep Throat, she is being raped all over again. This is of course believable only if one believes Lovelace was raped in the first place, for the moral status of the time-delayed “assistance” derives from the moral status of the original event.

The two most well-known films set in Italy under the Nazi occupation, Rossellini’s Open City of 1946 and Pasolini’s Saló from 1975, both share the view that fascists are the true anarchists, but differ as to how the anarchic freedom that fascism affords the victors ought to be used. The thirty years that separate the two seem only to have strengthened the Italian view (Visconti’s Götterdämmerung is another example) of the Nazis as sexual perverts.

In Saló, a clique of top Nazis and their clerical collaborators kidnap two dozen or so local Italian teens, and take them off to a secret castle to force them into sexual slavery. The men are bored with conventional sex, of course, and as the film wears on the fantasies they act out grow increasingly exremental and bloody. They are revaluing all values, creating from scratch a world à rebours, etc.

It strikes me that satanism, sadomasochism, any sort of celebration of the dark side in the form of communal rites can’t but remain stuck in the mode of parody. They are effective in providing a kinky rush, but as a way of life they must be difficult to sustain. This for me was the (likely unintended) lesson of Saló. It is an intriguing thought experiment to envision what a total subversion of all ‘bourgeois’ values would really look like: where society says kiss your lover, strike her instead; if society serves nourishing food, we’ll serve toxic excrement (a concoction of chocolate and orange marmelade in the film), etc. A certain pessimistic view of modern morality, moreover, and one that no doubt rubbed off on Pasolini (he cites Blanchot and Klossowski in his film’s ‘bibliography’), would have it that bourgeois codes of conduct only mask the violence we are all inflicting on the other all the time, that the order subverted in Saló is a lie, while what goes on in the castle in Saló is somehow an acknowledgment of the truth about human beings.

I for my part would really rather not eat shit, and I suspect that this aversion has more to do with my evolutionary history than with my boring conventional morality. Perhaps for this reason, my experience of Saló was rather like the one Martin Amis had watching Child’s Play. I was unmoved; my view of the world and of my place in it was left unshaken. I was mildly concerned when I learned that the actors involved were, rumor had it, underage, and that for that reason the legality of the film has been disputed throughout the years. But my sense has been that the nubile young things came out of the experience intact, far closer to Dakota Fanning after Hounddog than to Daniel Pearl after his most memorable screen appearance.

Realism as the end of cinema, Bazin thinks, extends back to the discovery in the mid-19th century of the possibility of mechanical recording of sights and sounds. Today, every yokel in the first world, and a growing number in the third, can record both just by slipping that little object we still insist on calling a ‘phone’ out of his pocket and holding it up to the world. Saddam Hussein’s hanging was a far more perfect achievement of realism than The Bicycle Thief. But surely realism as an aesthetic end was not meant to come to this. Di Sica and Rossellini wanted that newsreel feel, but not to the extent that their films would be mistaken for news. Curiously, to the extent that realism is an aesthetic end, it can only be accomplished through simulation. To the extent that cinema is to be an art, it must build up an alternate world out of mechanical projections of this one, rather than simply reproducing this one. And just as good speech will slide neither into insipid euphemism nor blunt literalism, good cinema will not make too much use of fake blood, and will not forget that real blood (as well for the most part as real bodily secretions of other sorts) cannot be deployed without bleeding right through the screen.

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[For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com]

Reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate reminded me of most other polemical books I’d read that attempt to integrate some science into their works. In theory it’s a science book, a longwinded defense of both evolutionary psychology and its obvious social implications. But in practice, it’s mostly a political book; the science is provided only as a backdrop against which Pinker sets up his attacks on a host of social, political, and cultural notions that stand in opposition to crude evolutionary psychology (which I’ll abbreviate as EP in the rest of this post).

Pinker frames his view as this of modern science, represented by such tools as genetics, neurobiology, and post-Williams Revolution evolutionary biology, versus this of three closely interlinked demons. The first demon, which he focuses on the most, is the view that at birth the human mind is a blank slate to be shaped by environmental forces. The second is romantic affection for the noble savage, uncorrupted by pernicious civilization. And the third is the dualist notion that people are ghosts inhabiting the machines that are their own bodies.

The problems with the book’s thesis start right at the beginning, when Pinker claims that a) all three views are interlinked, and b) all three views were very respectable until the science of EP started to overthrow them. The best way of seeing why Pinker is wrong there is by looking at the three philosophical positions he associates with the three demons—empiricism for the blank slate, romanticism for the noble savage, and dualism for the ghost in the machine.

By and large, the philosophers who developed empiricism, romanticism, and dualism in modern times disagreed with one another. Descartes’ dualism isn’t a component of Locke’s empiricism; on the contrary, they disagree on the fundamental issue of whether all knowledge comes from experience. Romanticism developed mostly after the Enlightenment, and was only associated with empiricism or dualism when it mythologized European progress rather than the noble savage.

Zooming in on empiricism, it’s easy to see another error of Pinker’s: Lockean empiricism does not strictly speaking say the mind is a blank slate, at least not in the way that is relevant to EP. The main point of EP is that the human brain is hardwired to be prone to certain forms of learning and modes of behavior. The EP-derived view that men are on average better than women at math is not that men are born knowing more math than women but that men are born with a greater aptitude for math than women. In contrast, Locke’s main contention is that knowledge comes directly from experience. He never concerned himself with social learning, which only became a serious subject of study a century or two after his death.

More importantly, the people Pinker criticizes for distorting science by claiming that IQ is not meaningful or not hereditary, or even that the mind is indeed a blank slate, have nothing to do with the other two demons. Marxist theory, which the people Pinker labels radical scientists adhere to, is extremely anti-romantic and anti-dualist. Among all the radical ideologies in existence—libertarianism, fascism, religious fundamentalism, anarchism—it is certainly the most pro-modern. Lewontin’s politics is largely doctrinaire Marxist: in Biology as Ideology, he trumpets the triumph of progress, even as he indicates this progress should come from accepting socialism more than from ordinary capitalist improvements.

The relationship between Pinker and Lewontin is an interesting one. Pinker notes that although Lewontin claims that he thinks the dominant force in evolution is the interaction between gene, organism, and environment, in terms of social implications he ignores everything but environment. On that Pinker is certainly right: Biology as Ideology is an anti-science polemic that distorts facts to fit Lewontin’s agenda (my take on Lewontin was subsequently debated in length here). However, Pinker commits the same transgression: he says he believes in the sensible moderate view that human behavior is determined by both inborn and environmental factors, and goes on to not only ignore the implications of the environmental part but also defend racists and sexists who have used pseudoscience as cover.

For instance, he starts by ridiculing people who called Richard Herrnstein a racist for a 1970 paper about intelligence and heredity. Although the paper as Pinker describes it is not racist per se, Herrnstein was indeed a racist. The screed he published with Charles Murray in 1994, The Bell Curve, is not only wrong, but also obviously wrong. Even in 1994, there were metastudies about race and intelligence that showed that the IQ gap disappears once one properly controls for environmental factors, for example by considering the IQ scores of children born to single mothers in Germany by American fathers in World War Two.

The truth, or what a reasonable person would believe to be the truth, is never oppressive. If there is indeed an innate component to the racial IQ gap, or to the gender math score gap, then it’s not racist or sexist to write about it. It remains so even if the innate component does not exist, but the researcher has solid grounds to believe it does.

However, Murray and Herrnstein had no such solid grounds. They could quote a few studies proving their point, but when researchers publish many studies about the same phenomenon, some studies are bound to detect statistically significant effects that do not exist. By selectively choosing one’s references, one can show that liberals are morally superior or morally inferior to conservatives, or that socialism is more successful or less successful than capitalism. At times there are seminal studies, which do not require any further metastudy. There weren’t any in 1994, while existing metastudies suggested that the racial IQ gap was entirely environmental. As I will describe below, the one seminal study done in 2003 moots not only Murray and Herrnstein’s entire argument but also much of Pinker’s.

To rebut claims of racism and sexism, Pinker invokes the moral argument—in other words, that to be against racism and sexism one need only vigorously oppose discrimination, without believing that without any discrimination there would be no gaps in achievement. In theory, that is correct. But in practice, that narrow view makes it impossible to enforce any law against discrimination.

Worse, Pinker invokes anti-feminist stereotypes that are born not of serious scholarship, but of ideologically motivated conservative thinking. He supports Christina Hoff-Sommers’ spurious distinction between equity feminism and gender feminism. Although there are many distinctions among different kinds of feminists, some of which track the degree of radicalism, none of the serious ones has anything to do with Hoff-Sommers’. In theory, equity feminism means supporting equality between women and men, while gender feminism means supporting a view of the world in which the patriarchy is omnipresent. In practice, the people who make that distinction, including Pinker, assign everyone who supports only the forms of equality that are uncontroversial in the United States, like equal pay laws and suffrage, to equity feminism, and everyone who supports further changes or even existing controversial ones to gender feminism.

As a case study, take family law activist Trish Wilson. Wilson’s activism focuses on divorce law; she has written articles and testified in front of American state legislatures against laws mandating presumptive joint custody, mainly on the grounds that it hurts children. In addition, she has written exposés of ways abusive men exploit legal loopholes, including presumptive joint custody, to gain custody of children. In pushing for equality in the courtroom, she is a liberal feminist’s liberal feminist. And yet, her attacks on the men’s rights movement for protecting abusive men have caused every conservative who makes distinctions between equity and gender feminism to deride her as a gender feminist.

Any reasonable distinction between a more radical feminist stream and a more conventional one would put Betty Friedan and her organization NOW on the less radical side. Friedan was anti-radical enough to devote much of her tenth anniversary afterword to The Feminine Mystique to attacking radical feminists, by which she means not Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin, but Kate Millett. NOW has focused on legal equality, primarily abortion rights and secondarily laws cracking down on employment discrimination and sexual harassment. But Pinker assigns Friedan as well as Bella Abzug to the gender feminism slot, using entirely trivial statements of theirs to paint them as radicals. Friedan he attacks for suggesting extending compulsory education to the age of 2; Abzug he attacks for saying equality means fifty-fifty representation everywhere.

To his credit, Pinker never quite claims that there is no gender discrimination. However, he makes an earnest effort to undermine every attempt to counteract it, however well founded. For instance, he claims that it’s absurd to say that women’s underrepresentation in science in the United States is due to discrimination, on the grounds that they’re even more underrepresented in math, and it’s not likely mathematicians are more sexist than scientists. Instead, he suggests, women are just not interested in math and science.

However, it is legitimate to ask why this interest gap exists. There is no EP-based argument why it should be innate. On the contrary, independent evidence from, for example, the proportion of female mathematicians who come from families of mathematicians versus the proportion of male mathematicians, suggests it is environmental. Indeed, the educational system of the United States has long encouraged women to ignore the hard sciences. Other educational systems produce near-parity: while 13% of American scientists and engineers are women, many other countries, such as Sweden and Thailand, have percentages higher than 30 or even 40.

Furthermore, one of the most important pieces of information about biases in education, the stereotype threat, receives no mention from Pinker. It’s an established fact that telling girls who are about to take a math test that boys do better will make them do worse. In fact, telling them that the test measures aptitude, or even asking them to fill out an oval for gender before the test, will hurt their performance. And yet somehow Pinker glosses over that fact in a book that purports to be about a combination of genetics and environment.

There is hardly a single thing Pinker gets right about rape in his book, except that Susan Brownmiller is wrong. His explanation of rape is that it is a male biological urge, as evidenced in the fact that in many species males rape females. However, that theory says nothing about why straight men rape other men in prison, or in general about the dynamics of male-on-male rape. He provides scant circumstantial evidence for his theory of rape; instead, he prefers to rant about how Brownmiller’s feminist theories are dominant, even though in fact the dominant view among criminologists is that rape is simply a violent crime, rather than a case of passionate sex gone awry or a mechanism of reinforcing the patriarchy.

Pinker commits not only a sin of omission in writing about rape or violence in general, but also a sin of commission, in writing that nobody really knows what causes violence. In fact, criminologists have fairly good ideas about how social ills like poverty and inequality cause crime, although they know it about murder more than about other violent crimes. Still, the rates of all violent crimes are closely correlated; the major exception is the United States’ murder rate, which is higher than its general violent crime rate predicts presumably because of its lax gun control laws.

Finally, Pinker quotes a 2001 study by Eric Turkheimer as showing that the Darwin wars ended and the gene-centric side, led by Richard Dawkins, prevailed over the more environment-based side, led by Stephen Jay Gould. Thence Pinker concludes that attempts to raise children in ways more conducive to growth are futile, since much of their future behavior is genetic, and almost all of what is not genetic is due to developmental noise rather than environmental influence.

However, in 2003 Turkheimer published another study, which sealed the questions of race and IQ and of environmental influences on children in general. Turkheimer’s starting point was that earlier studies about the heritability of IQ often focused on adopted children in middle- and upper-class families, where environmental influences might be different from in lower-class families. By examining a large array of data spanning multiple races and social classes, he saw that on the one hand, within the middle class IQ is highly genetic, with a heritability level of 0.72 and no significant environmental effects. But on the other, within the lower class, which includes most blacks and Hispanics in the US, the heritability of IQ drops to 0.1, and environmental factors such as the depth of poverty or the level of schooling predominate.

Obviously, it would be futile to blame Pinker for not mentioning Turkheimer’s 2003 study. The Blank Slate was published in 2002. However, all other facts I have cited against Pinker’s thesis and its purported social implications predate 2002. The Turkheimer study does not show by itself that Pinker’s book is shoddy; it merely shows that much of it is wrong. What establishes Pinker’s shoddiness is the treatment of social problems like sexism, racism, and crime, which is based not on examination of the available evidence or even the views that are mainstream among social scientists who study them, but on what think tanks whose views align with Pinker’s say.

Even a cursory examination of the current mainstream social scene will show that the myths of the noble savage and the ghost in the machine are nonexistent. That fringe scholars sometimes believe in them is no indication of their level of acceptability; there are fringe scholars who believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, too. Even the theory of the blank slate, at least in its most extreme form, is a phantom ideology. Lewontin adheres to it, but Lewontin is a contrarian; non-contrarian scientists do not publish books comparing modern biology departments to Medieval Christianity. Pinker likes to poke fun at theories that suggest everyone or almost everyone can succeed in life, but he never gets around to actually refuting them. All he does is attack extreme caricatures such as the blank slate and other phantom theories.

Even now, many people who hear these terms daily on the news are confused about what the real differences are between Sunni and Shia Muslims, so I, having been brought up in a very devout Shia household in Pakistan, thought I would explain these things, at least in rough terms. Here goes:

It all started hours after Mohammad’s death: while his son-in-law (and first cousin) Ali was attending to Mohammad’s burial, others were holding a little election to see who should succeed Mohammad as the chief of what was by now an Islamic state. (Remember that by the end of his life, Mohammad was not only a religious leader, but the head-of-state of a significant polity.) The person soon elected to the position of caliph, or head-of-state, was an old companion of the prophet’s named Abu Bakr. This was a controversial choice, as many felt that Mohammad had clearly indicated Ali as his successor, and after Abu Bakr took power, these people had no choice but to say that while he may have become the temporal leader of the young Islamic state, they did not recognize him as their divinely guided religious leader. Instead, Ali remained their spiritual leader, and these were the ones who would eventually come to be known as the Shia. The ones who elected Abu Bakr would come to be known as Sunni.

This is the Shia/Sunni split which endures to this day, based on this early disagreement. Below I will say a little more about the Shia.

So early on in Islam, there was a split between political power and religious leadership, and to make a long story admittedly far too short, this soon came to a head within a generation when the grandson of one of the greatest of Mohammad’s enemies (Abu Sufian) from his early days in Mecca, Yazid, took power in the still nascent Islamic government. Yazid was really something like a cross between Nero and Hitler and Stalin; just bad, bad in every way: a decadent, repressive dictator (and one who flouted all Islamic injunctions), for whom it became very important to obtain the public allegiance of Husain, the pious and respected son of Ali (and so, grandson of Mohammad). And this Husain refused, on principle.

Yazid said he would kill Husain. Husain said that was okay. Yazid said he would kill all of Husain’s family. Husain said he could not compromise his principles, no matter what the price. Yazid’s army of tens of thousands then surrounded Husain and a small band of his family, friends and followers at a place called Kerbala (in present day Iraq), and cut off their water on the 7th of the Islamic month of Moharram. For three days, Husain and his family had no water. At dawn on the third day, the 10th of Moharram, Husain told all in his party that they were sure to be killed and whoever wanted to leave was free to do so. No one left. In fact, several heroic souls left Yazid’s camp to come and join the group that was certain to be slaughtered.

On the 10th of Moharram, a day now known throughout the Islamic world as Ashura, the members of Husain’s parched party came out one by one to do battle, as was the custom at the time. They were valiant, but hopelessly outnumbered, and therefore each was killed in turn.  All of Husain’s family was massacred in front of his eyes, even his six-month old son, Ali Asghar, who was pierced through the throat by an arrow from the renowned archer of Yazid’s army, Hurmula. After Husain’s teenage son Ali Akbar was killed, he is said to have proclaimed, “Now my back is broken.” But the last to die before him, was his beloved brother, Abbas, while trying desperately to break through Yazid’s ranks and bring water back from the Euphrates for Husain’s young daughter, Sakeena. And then Husain himself was killed.

The followers of Ali (the Shia) said to themselves that they would never allow this horrific event to be forgotten, and that they would mourn Husain and his family’s murder forever, and for the last thirteen hundred years, they have lived up to this promise every year. This mourning has given rise to ritualistic displays of grief, which include flagellating oneself with one’s hands, with chains, with knives, etc. It can all seem quite strange, out of context, but remembrance of that terrible day at Kerbala has also given rise to some of the most sublime poetry ever written (a whole genre in Urdu, called Marsia, is devoted to evoking the events of Ashura), and some of us, religious or not, still draw inspiration from the principled bravery and sacrifice of Husain on that black day.

Earlier today, I took the following unlikely pictures on the ritziest road in New York City, Park Avenue:

This is the procession commemorating Ashura, or the 10th of Moharram. In front, you can see a painstakingly recreated model of the tomb of Husain. The mourners are dressed mostly in black. It is a testament to the tolerance of American society that despite the best attempts of some of its cleverest citizens to proclaim a “clash of civilizations,” it allows (and observes with curiosity) such displays of foreign sentiment.

The procession is made up of Shias of various nationalities, with the largest contingents being from Pakistan and Iran.

A young Shia holds up a banner, perhaps forgetting for a second that he is supposed to be mourning.

You can see one of the coffins with roses on it, which are ritualistically carried in the procession.

The self-flagellation is in full swing at this point. (The arms are raised before coming down to beat the chest.)

This is “Zuljana” or Husain’s horse, caparisoned with silks and flowers.

The self-flagellation, or matam, reaches a climactic frenzy before ending for Asr prayers. Later in the evening, there are gatherings (or majaalis) to remember the women and children of Husain’s family who survived to be held as prisoners of Yazid.

Slavoj Zizek once said “it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Life on earth maybe will end but somehow capitalism will go on.” One is tempted to respond, well yes of course. It is also easier to imagine blowing up a car than designing one. Destruction is a rather simple proposition. Feats of engineering are somewhat more complicated.

And yet there is something to the apocalyptic imagination. Thinking about the end of the world can perhaps tell us something about the world that is ostensibly ending. Or so it would seem from two of the more visually arresting films to appear in the last decade, both ruminating over our final days, both set, as it happens, in England. I refer here to everyone’s favorite intellectual zombie flick 28 Days Later and the more recent dystopian thriller Children of Men.

The first thing I would point to is that it is not the “world” that is ending in these movies so much as the human race that has lorded over it for the past eon or so. It is part of our species arrogance to identify the world with humanity and then to wonder if our destruction would be anything other than a good thing for the rest of “life on earth.” So then let us be clear. What we are talking about here is not exactly the globe or the planet but simply the noisome breed of animals bent on mucking it up for everyone else.

Humans. We are tiresome, aren’t we? Few could deny the beauty of the depopulated London with which 28 Days Later begins: the seraphic Cillian Murphy ambling about Oxford Circle, picking detritus off the ground, alone save for the pigeons and the gulls. Humanity has perished because the “rage virus” has been loosed from a lab and made us tear each other limb from limb. We don’t die from the virus itself. It’s the rage that kills us. And so we ought to wonder how much the virus adds to our native cruelty and rancor. Perhaps Cornelius had it right after all: “Beware the beast Man, for he is the devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates he kills for lust or sport or greed … Let him not breed in great in numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours.”

Actually, the conclusion (or at least the original one) of 28 Days Later is nowhere near as radical. It turns out the virus never got out of the country. Humanity is spared. The hero, his girlfriend, and an orphaned kid make an ersatz domestic hearth in the English countryside, all warm in their sweaters and waiting to be rescued. Rage may be conquered after all. Perhaps we can all just get along.

Humanity (nearly) perishes by anger in 28 Days Later. Sadness dooms us in Children of Men. Seventeen years after a global infertility crisis has brought a stop to human reproduction across the planet, “life” has pretty much ground to a halt. There’s no future generation in sight, so nations plunge into despair. War, chaos, and social entropy ensue. The sound of children’s voices is dearly missed.

Children of Men is a movie at odds with itself. At its core, the story is a saccharine humanist fable of a culture of life fighting to persist among one of death. A baby springs miraculously into the fallen world and suddenly there is a future to save, as if one could only live for the sake of progeny, as if a world without humans would not be left well enough alone. Amid the rubble and squalor of the end of world, life or death struggle turns to getting the baby offshore to a group of save-the-planet scientists aptly dubbed (giving the game away) … the human project.

Yet, for us much as the movie is committed at the level of story to a bland humanism, it is equally committed at the level of form to something quite different, to making us wonder, within the terms of the narrative, whether the human species ought not to become extinct after all. A great deal of attention has been paid to the six-minute long shot in a battle strewn internment camp. As with 28 Days Later, humanity’s end makes quite a spectacle. I would point also to an earlier scene at an abandoned and dilapidated schoolyard. Here we are supposed to be thinking about the despair left in the absence of children. But the camera does something else. We freeze on a deer that strides into the frame and occupies the place of the missing kids. It’s an arresting moment precisely in the species difference. A non-human animal walks on the ruins of a civilization made for human children. And perhaps that is just fine.

As with 28 Days Later, humanity ends and begins again in England and is best imagined wrapped up in a cable knit sweater while drinking Earl Gray tea (a role brilliantly played here by Michael Cain). Yet, Children of Men makes the saving of humanity look and feel like it is beside the point and a waste of time. And that is why it is most interesting in spite of its own worst ideas.

So, perhaps the lesson is that thinking about the end of the world is in fact thinking about making it a better place.

According to cliché most artists, aside from having the key characteristics of egocentricity and vanity, are also, to a certain degree, liars. I wholeheartedly agree with this, if you can read it in a positive way. Looking at it linguistically, the difference between creative, inventive, innovative, and visionary characters is mere nuance—it’s all just a question of people who, to varying degrees, like to make stuff up. Whether their audiences then believe them or not is an entirely different matter, and no responsibility of theirs.

It’s often said that pathological liars fool no one but themselves, and herein lies the difference. To counter what many historians and critics like to think, artists working with visual and verbal material (or any other medium, for that matter) usually know what they’re up to. I was in a bookstore the other day decorated with various quotes along a series of columns. Waiting at the checkout I came across a phrase from Einstein, something along the lines of “true creativity lies in knowing how to conceal your sources.” Both the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review have, over the past few months, run articles and letters discussing the growing length of author’s acknowledgements, source credits, and writer’s general fear of becoming the next J.T. Leroy or James Frey. In other countries it’s perfectly acceptable to publish a book filled with extended quotes of other works as long as the author is mentioned—the title and other information about the quote’s source are seen as superfluous, and the reader just needs to know or be willing to hunt it down. In the United States a similar approach would have one publisher’s legal department phoning the other non-stop. This obsession with full disclosure is beginning to suffocate; readers and viewers are free to trust or distrust creative types, and I’d like to think they’re bright enough to distinguish things without relying on someone else to tell them what to think. That someone else might be untrustworthy anyway.

I went to see a Piranesi exhibition at Rome’s Museo del Corso, which among copper plates, sketches, and countless prints included the over 135 etchings in his Views of Rome series. I’ve never much loved his lines, and am fairly convinced he was a sell-out, but I nevertheless can’t deny his importance. The show’s curators chose to title it Piranesi’s Rome: the Eighteenth-Century City in the Grandi Vedute. A newspaper review of the show is more accurate with its title, Piranesi, or Rome as it Wasn’t. Curiously, the museum space itself was most appropriate; there wasn’t a window in the entire place, and it was depressingly dark, completely cut off from the outside world—the world that would’ve exposed some of his embellishments.

In many etchings Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) liked to bestow the title of Architect on himself, even if—or maybe because—of his many architectural projects, only one was ever realized. That design, his renovation of the church Santa Maria del Priorato and adjacent garden on the Aventine Hill in Rome, brought him much less recognition than his obsessive, incessant print production. In a pre-photographic period he was the major promoter of ancient Rome’s grandeur, and foreshadowed the Romantics’ fancy for ruins by several decades. In 1746, six years after he’d moved to Rome from Venice, the twenty-six-year-old etcher undertook the immense task of documenting views of his adopted city. At the same time the city was being invaded by ever more foreigners on the Grand Tour; French, English, German, and people of countless other nations, primarily from northern Europe, couldn’t get enough of the decadence depicted in his work. How much the fact that he himself was a northerner at heart influenced his perspectives I can’t really say, but they can certainly be seen as propaganda. A few (and some of the most interesting) works in the show were done independently of any commission; a multi-plate plan of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli is a visual fugue stretching over nine feet. Pope Clement XIII, a member of the powerful Venetian Rezzonico family and one of his main patrons, commissioned a church renovation that was never realized for lack of funds. So these few architectural projects are utterly peripheral in comparison to the prints that sold like hotcakes both to visitors and a vast audience abroad—people who’d never have the chance to actually see the sites he portrayed. Perhaps he would’ve embellished certain scenes and buildings regardless of his audience, but I think he gained great liberty in recognizing that there wouldn’t be any fact checkers poring over his work. Hence SPQR, the acronym of Senatus Populus Que Romanus (the Senate and People of Rome), becomes something like Sabinae Populus Que Resistet (the Sabines, People that Remain/Resist/Persist) in one of his inscriptions. Over drinks the other day I was discussing this with an archaeologist who held mixed gratitude and disapproval for the Vedute—some of them are the sole depiction of important structures since destroyed, and therefore important documentation, while some are simply made up. Most fall somewhere in between. Photoshop didn’t yet exist, not to mention photography, but Piranesi managed to fool people with many of the very same techniques of today’s advertising—bits of his richly evocative scenes are the equivalent of the perfectly blue skies, radiantly blemish-free teen models, and high-gloss world in commercials for travel and just about everything else.

He’s a little more honest in his 1760–61 series Carceri d’Invenzione, where he admits his inventiveness in the title. He’d begun exploring this theme fifteen years earlier in a series initially titled Invenzioni Capric[ciose] di Carceri, with a nod to the fundamental caprice underlying it all. Piranesi was convinced that Rome’s grandeur came not from the Greek legacy, but from the Egyptians, via the Etruscans. This explains a lot of the simply wacky interventions he adds to buildings that would otherwise be plainly classical. My question remains: does it really matter how faithful he was to the world around him? Does it really matter if he’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes, or really was convinced of his own visions?

In 1930 Henri Focillon published Esthètique des visionnaires, an essay discussing the visionary esthetics of Daumier, Rembrandt, Piranesi, Turner, Tintoretto, and El Greco. His clearest claim in what could otherwise be dismissed as a relic of Romanticism is that visionaries don’t view their subjects, they rather envision them. He goes on to say that these visionaries possess (I’d say are possessed by) a particular virtue that doesn’t alter nature, but rather imbues it with a striking vivacity, intensity, and profundity. These are mere words—he contradicts this later on by writing that visionaries can’t be contented with the real world, and so they use it as a point of departure; “They interpret more than imitate, and transfigure more than interpret.” Fine.

Returning to the so-called Architect’s one completed building project, the  church atop the Aventine is almost impossible to visit, as it’s closed to the public, but the garden next door can be viewed through the keyhole of its door, where six or seven people were lined up as I got there late this past Saturday evening. Stooping to peer through the keyhole, your eye meets an orderly perspective, lined with well-kempt cypresses, receding to the illuminated dome of Saint Peter’s at the very center of the composition. Not only is Piranesi controlling what you see (a dome framed by dark vegetation, much more orderly than the surrounding city and most of his chaotic print compositions), but he’s also dictating how you see it; you’re limited by the keyhole’s outline, then by the trees. These limits closely relate it to Borromini’s famous colonnade perspective at Palazzo Spada, the views of ideal cities produced in Renaissance Florence, and the Olympic Theater of Palladio and Scamozzi in Vicenza. This last connection, to theater, is fascinating, and reveals a lot about our contemporary culture. Going to the theater—or cinema, for that matter—people expect to be removed from their own world; it’s entertainment, imagination, fantasy, and can appear more real than the people, places, and things we see around us each day. It’s the circus, it’s make-believe, it’s the Surrealists’ theater of cruelty, it’s a theater of the absurd, it’s a theater of war. It’s Dionysus’s thyrsus-led procession, the drunken debacle that became the origin of all theater. So why do people bring such different expectations to visual art? A few contemporary artists are venturing into theater: Kara Walker’s silhouettes, although immobile, narrate past and present characters and their often frightful histories; William Kentridge’s Black Box / Chambre Noire, a tripartite riff on the themes inherent in the black box as theater (realm of performance), airplane device (to record disaster), and camera (interior between lens and eyepiece), was shown at the Deutsche Guggenheim but not in New York; and Pierre Huyghe’s puppet shows all merge static visual arts with theatrical realms.

Infinite possible worlds exist, and coming into the theater—or peering through the  keyhole (be it Piranesi’s or Duchamp’s)—a single filtered, channeled world is presented. Such miniature theater can be sculptural object, projection, installation, print, and vice versa. The grand narrative and scale of present and past history are here reduced to small theater. Piranesi’s prints, distant relatives of later architectural follies, were both products cranked out for commercial profit and visions loftier than any debate of real vs. unreal.

At times Piranesi’s hand grew heavy, and the acid bath a bit strong, but this darkness could be read as the reverse side of the Enlightenment looking glass. The nature of shadows is key; in talking about his exploration of the black box, Kentridge describes how, while observing a solar eclipse, he became aware of the process of looking, “of being made conscious of the nature of light,” and how light diffuses mystery, making “everything immediately comprehensible.” This light can be useful, but also has the power to overexpose an image, leaving a bleached-out scene, robbed of its essence—be it actual or invented.

In Parts one and two, I talked about the scholarly practice of Open Access publishing, and about how the central concept of “openness”, or knowledge as a public good, is being incorporated into other aspects of science.  I suggested that the overall practice (or philosophy, or movement) might be called Open Science, by which I mean the process of discovery at the intersection of Open Access (publishing), Open Data, Open Source (software), Open Standards (semantic markup) and Open Licensing.

Here I want to move from ideas to applications, and take a look at what kinds of Open Science are already happening and where such efforts might lead.  Open Science is very much in its infancy at the moment; we don’t know precisely what its maturity will look like, but we have good reason to think we’ll like it.

By way of analogy, think about what the Web has made possible, and ask yourself: how much of that could you have predicted in, say, 1991, when Sir Tim wrote the first browser?  Actually, “infancy” being a generous term for the developmental state of Open Science, a better analogy probably reaches further back: how much of what the internet has made possible could anyone have predicted when ARPANET first met NSFnet?  Given that last link, for instance, would you have seen Wikipedia coming?  How about eBay, Amazon.com, RSS, blogs, YouTube, Google Maps, or insert-your-own-favorite amazing web site/service/application?

The potential is immense, and from our current perspective we cannot predict more than a fraction of the ways in which openness will transform the culture and practice of science.   Nonetheless, there are signs pointing in possible directions.

early examples: sequence data

Sequence data (such as mRNA, genomic DNA and protein sequences) have long been the leading edge of large-scale collaborative science, largely because early competition among public and private organizations resulted in a series of groundbreaking agreements on public data sharing.  (For a quick tour of the relevant history, see this article.)  Among the online tools that have been developed around openly-accessible sequence databases such as GenBank or SwissProt, the flagship effort is probably the NCBI‘s online gateway Entrez.  From Entrez I can search for information on a sequence of interest on almost thirty different interlinked databases.  I can:

• find related nucleotide and protein sequences, and make detailed comparisons between them
• map a sequence of interest onto whole chromosomes or genomes, and compare those maps across ten or twenty different species
• access expert-curated information on any connection between a query molecule and human genetic disease or heritable disorders in other species
• look for known motifs or functional sequence modules in a query molecule, or use similar sequences to build 3D models of its likely shape and structure
• compare a sequence of interest across wide taxonomies, and formulate useful questions about its evolutionary history
• look for array data regarding expression of a query sequence in different developmental, disease-related and other contexts
• access genetic mapping data with which to map a query sequence in organisms for which little or no sequence data is yet available

There’s much more — that was a very brief and incomplete overview of what Entrez can do — but you get the point.  All of this analysis is only possible because the underlying sequence data is available on Open terms (and largely machine-readable due to semantic markup), and it forms a ready-made infrastructure in which further Open information can readily find a place — as soon as it becomes available.

data and text mining

In part 2 I talked about a range of efforts to make databases of other information, including text, similarly interoperable and available for mining.  Paul Ginsparg, in a recent essay, used the interface between PubMed Central and various sequence databases as an early example of what becomes possible when databases can be read by computers as well as by humans (emphasis mine):

GenBank accession numbers are recognized in articles referring to sequence data and linked directly to the relevant records in the genomic databases. Protein names are recognized, and their appearances in articles are linked automatically to the protein and protein interaction databases. Names of organisms are recognized and linked directly to the taxonomic databases, which are then used to compute a minimal spanning tree of all of the organisms contained in a given document. In yet another view, technical terms are recognized and linked directly to the glossary items in the relevant standard biology or biochemistry textbook in the books database. The enormously powerful sorts of data mining and number crunching that are already taken for granted as applied to the open-access genomics databases can be applied to the full text of the entirety of the biology and life sciences literature and will have just as great a transformative effect on the research done with it.

Donat Agosti recently pointed to three related projects: Biotext, which builds text mining tools; EBIMed, which analyses Medline search results and presents associations between gene names and several other databases; and the Arrowsmith Project, which allows semantic comparison between two search-defined sets of PubMed articles.  The latter also maintains a list of free online text mining tools, which currently includes several dozen sites offering tools for a variety of purposes, although the majority are still focused on Medline and/or sequence databases.

These sorts of tools are not only useful, they are likely to become essential.  Even now, I can hardly imagine trying to navigate the existing sequence data without Entrez, or the research literature without PubMed.  GenBank contains more than 40 billion bases and is growing exponentially, doubling every 12-15 months.  PubMed contains nearly 17 million records as I write this, and is adding well over half a million every year.  The 2007 Nucleic Acids Research database issue lists nearly 1000 separate biological databases, up more than 10% from last year.  As Matthew Cockerill of BioMed Central has pointed out, simple text searching is not enough to keep a researcher afloat in this onrushing sea of information.

bibliometrics

Data and text mining methods stand to come into their own as discovery tools once they have a fully Open and machine-readable body of published research on which to work.  Similarly, the utility of bibliometrics, the quantitative analysis of text based information, can be dramatically enhanced by Open Access.  In particular, measures of research impact can be made much more powerful, direct and reliable.

Research impact is the degree to which a piece or body of work has been taken up and built upon by other researchers and put to practical use in education, technology, medicine and so on.  Governments and other funding bodies want to be able to measure research impact in order to provide accountability and ensure maximal return on investment, and researchers and research administrators want the same measurements in order to assess the quality of their research and to plan future directions (“how are we doing? how can we do better?”).

The most important measure of research impact currently available is citation analysis, a proxy measurement based on acknowledged use by later published work; the predominant citation-based metric in modern research assessment is the Impact Factor (IF).  If a journal has a 2004 IF of 5, then papers published in that journal in 2001-2002 were cited, on average, 5 times each in 2003.  This number is probably the most widely misunderstood and misused metric in all of science, and comes with a number of serious built-in flaws, not the least of which is that the underlying database is the property of for-profit publishing company Thomson Scientific.

Despite these flaws and considerable high-profile criticism, it is difficult to overstate the influence that the Impact Factor has had, and continues to have, on all efforts to evaluate scientists and their work.  Researchers obsess over journal choice: you don’t want a rejection, which forces you to re-submit elsewhere and wastes time, but you need to get that paper into the “best” (that is, highest IF) journal you can so as to appeal to hiring, funding and tenure committees.   And that’s not unrealistic, since quite frankly the bottom line for most such committees is “who has published the most papers in high-IF journals”.  Other factors are usually considered, but the IF dominates.  It’s a clumsy, inaccurate and unscientific way to go about evaluating research impact and researcher talent.

Happily, there is a better way just over the Open Access horizon.  Once a majority of published research is available in machine-readable OA databases, the community can get out from under Thomson’s thumb and improve scientific bibliometrics in a host of different ways.   Shadbolt et al. list more than two dozen improvements that OA will make possible, including:

• A CiteRank analog of Google’s PageRank algorithm will allow hits to be rank-ordered by weighted citation counts instead of just ordinary links (not all citations are equal)
• In addition to ranking hits by author/article/topic citation counts, it will also be possible to rank them by author/article/topic download counts
• Correlations between earlier download counts and later citation counts will be available online, and usable for extrapolation, prediction and eventually even evaluation
• Searching, analysis, prediction and evaluation will also be augmented by cocitation analysis (who/what co-cited or was co-cited by whom/what?), coauthorship analysis, and eventually also co-download analysis
• Time-based (chronometric) analyses will be used to extrapolate early download, citation, co-download and co-citation trends, as well as correlations between downloads and citations, to predict research impact, research direction and research influences.
• Authors, articles, journals, institutions and topics will also have “endogamy/exogamy” scores: how much do they cite themselves? in-cite within the same “family” cluster? out-cite across an entire field? across multiple fields? across disciplines?
• “Hub/authority” analysis will make it easier to do literature reviews, identifying review articles citing many articles (hubs) or key articles/authors (authorities) cited by many articles.

Existing metrics (which basically means Thomson’s proprietary data) are simply not rich enough to support such analyses.  There are already efforts underway to mine the available body of text for better ways to evaluate research.  Hirsch’s h-index, an alternative way of using citation counts to rank authors according to their influence, can be calculated online using Google Scholar.  Bollen et al. have proposed a method for using Google’s PageRank as an alternative to the Impact Factor, as well as their own Y-factor which is a composite of the two measures.  The Open Citation Project built Citebase, an online citation tracker which has been used to show that downloads (which are measured in real-time from the moment of upload) can predict citations (for which data one must wait years).  Authoratory is a text-mining tool based on PubMed, and is capable of co-author analysis, authority ranking and more.

As the body of OA literature expands, these and similar tools will provide a far more reliable and equitable means of comparing researchers and research groups with their peers than is currently available, and will also facilitate the identification of trends and gaps in research focus.  The downstream effects of increased efficiency in managing and carrying out research will be profound.

commentary and community

Andrew Dayton recently described another feature of the coming Open Science world, which he calls Open Discourse:

The internet is expanding the realm of scientific publishing to include free and open public debate of published papers. […] How often have you asked yourself how a certain study was published unchallenged, without the results of a key control? How often have you wondered whether a paper’s authors performed a specific procedure correctly? How often have you had the opportunity to question authors about previously published or opposing results they failed to cite, or discuss the difficulties of reproducing certain results? How often have you had the opportunity to command a discussion of an internal contradiction the referees seemed to have missed?

Stevan Harnad has referred to a similar idea as peer commentary, calling it a “powerful and important supplement to peer review“.  It’s important to note that a number of journals, such as Current Anthropology or Psycoloquy, offer “open peer commentary” which is not actually open to public contribution.  Similarly, the phrase “open peer review” is typically used to indicate that reviewers are not anonymous, rather than that review is open to the public.  Neither of these pseudo-open concepts rely on “openness” in the Open Access/Open Science sense, whereas Open Discourse as Dayton means it is, of course, utterly dependent on such openness for its subject matter.

There are a number of venues which enable fully Open Discourse as Dayton means it.  OA publisher BioMed Central offers a public comment button on every article, and Cell allows public comments on selected articles.  BMC also publishes Biology Direct, which offers both an alternative model of peer review and public commentary, and PLoS has just launched PLoS One, offering standard peer review followed by public commentary, annotation and rating.  Philica will publish anything, and provides public commentary which can also serve as a form of peer review through an authentication process for professional researchers.  JournalReview.org is set up as an online public journal club, and Naboj is a forum for public review of articles posted to arxiv.org.   BioWizard is somewhat similar, but is limited to articles accessible via PubMed and offers a number of other tools, such as a blogging platform and a rating mechanism designed to identify popular papers.  Both JournalReview and BioWizard notify corresponding authors so that they can participate in the discussion.  The British Medical Journal offers a rapid response mechanism which, having posted over 50,000 public responses to published work, sounds a cautionary note for more recent arrivals on the public commentary scene: in 2005, the journal was forced to impose a length limit and active moderation in order to avoid losing the desired signal in a flood of uninformed, obsessive noise.

Speaking of floods of uninformed, obsessive noise — what about blogs?

Of course, I’m kidding.  I actually have high hopes for the future of blogs in science, centered on three themes: commentary, community and data.  Blogs are an excellent medium for commenting on anything, and with web feeds and a good aggregator it’s pretty easy to keep track of a selected group of blogs.  If Technorati worked, it might allow interesting views of the science blogosphere; fortunately, we have Postgenomic, which indexes nearly 700 science blogs and then “does useful and interesting things” with the data.  For instance, you can see which papers and/or books are getting attention from science bloggers; there’s even a Greasemonkey script that will flag Postgenomic-indexed papers in Connotea, Nature.com’s social bookmark manager for scientists, another for PubMed and yet another for journal websites.  A new Digg-like “community commentary” site, The Scientific Debate, allows trackbacks and so can interact with regular blogs.  The discussion above about text mining applies, of course, to blogs, since they are typically openly accessible and friendly to text mining software.  For instance, Biology Direct or PLoS One could interact with the blogosphere using linkbacks, or by pulling relevant posts from Postgenomic.

Blogs also tend to create virtual communities, such as the one that centers on Seed’s ScienceBlogs collection of, well, science blogs.  This group of about 50 blogs is rapidly becoming a hub of the science blogosphere, and even gave rise to a recent meatspace conference that bids fair to become an annual event.  Such self-selected communities foster a sense of cameraderie and strongly encourage co-operation over competition, which can only favor the advance of Open Science.  (It’s not just blogs, of course, that can take advantage of community building.  The Synaptic Leap, the Tropical Disease Initiative, OpenWetWare and BioForge all provide infrastructures that enable collaborative communities to do Open Science.)

Finally, blogs (and wikis) have immense potential as a scientific publishing medium.  They are, to begin with, the perfect place for things like negative results, odd observations and small side-projects — research results for which the risk of having an idea stolen is greatly outweighed by both the possibility of picking up a collaboration and the importance of having made available to the research community information which would never surface in a traditional journal.  Most research communities are relatively small; it would not be difficult for most researchers to keep up with the lab weblogs (lablogs?) of the groups doing work most closely related to their own.  I know of a few blog posts in this category.  This and this from Bora Zivkovic are, I think, the first instances of original data on a blog. This series from Sandra Porter is earlier but involves bioinformatic analysis (that is, original experimentation, but no original data), as do this and this from Pedro Beltrao.  Egon Willighagen blogs working software/scripts for cheminformatics, and Rosie Redfield and her students blog hypotheses, thinking-out-loud and even data.  Blogs are also good for sharing protocols, like the syntheses posted by the anonymous proprietor of Org Prep Daily.

Beyond that, it’s possible to do fully Open Science, publishing day-to-day results (including all raw data) in an online lab notebook.  I know it’s possible because Jean-Claude Bradley is doing it; he calls it Open Notebook Science.  His lab’s shared notebook is the UsefulChem wiki, which is supplemented by the UsefulChem blog for project discussion and the UsefulChem Molecules blog, a database of molecules related to their work.  There is nothing to prevent Jean-Claude from publishing traditional articles whenever he has the kind of “story” that is required for that format, but in the meantime all of his research output is captured and made available to the world.  Importantly, this includes information which would never otherwise have been published — negative results, inconclusive results, things which simply don’t fit into the narrative of any manuscript he prepares, and so on.  Being on a third-party hosted wiki, the notebook entries have time and date stamps which can establish priority if that should be necessary; version tracking provides another layer of authentication.

At the moment the Bradley lab is the only group I know of that is doing Open Notebook Science, but of all the glimpses of an Open Science world I have tried to provide in this entry, Jean-Claude’s model is, I think, the clearest and most hopeful.  Only when that level of transparency and immediacy is the norm in scientific communication will the research community be able to realize its full potential.

that’s all, folks

I promise, no more obsessive posting about Open Science here on 3QD.  If I’ve managed to pique anyone’s interest, I recommend reading Peter Suber’s Open Access News and anything else that takes your fancy from the “open access/open science” section of my blogroll.  And as always, if I’ve missed anything or got anything wrong, let me know in comments.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.