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<h1><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/" accesskey="1">3quarksdaily</a></h1>
<h2>An Eclectic Digest of Science, Art and Literature</h2>
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<h2>April 17, 2007</h2>



<a id="a0033009772"></a>

<h3>The End of Export-Led Democratization?</h3>


<p>In <em>Dissent</em>, Daniele Archibugi, Ofra Bengio, Seyla Benhabib, Paul Berman, Mitchell Cohen, Thomas Cushman, John Lister, Shibley Telhami on <a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=770">what Iraq implies for the idea of "exporting" democracy</a>.  Paul Berman:</p><blockquote><p>The question seems to me wrongly put in one aspect. To hurl curses and insults at the Bush administration is a worthy, right, and just thing to do; and yet there is no reason to trip all over ourselves in acknowledging that Bush and his administration did sincerely desire to achieve a democratic outcome in Iraq. For some sixty years before the Iraq War, American policy in the Middle East had nothing to do with democracy. American policy was based on a principle of malign stability, conducted in the belief that stable dictatorships would guarantee American interests.</p><p>The pursuit of malign stability governed America’s Iraq policy over the decades, and the results were unusually hideous, given that Baathism is a kind of fascism, and Baathist Iraq was an exceptionally murderous totalitarian state. The pursuit of stability led the United States to abandon the Iraqi Kurds in the mid-1970s; to support Saddam against the Iranians in the 1980s; to follow a policy of hands-off, see-no-evil serenity, even in 1988, when Saddam was once again massacring Kurds, this time at a more gigantic level than before, sometimes by means of poison gas, no less. And, in keeping with this same malign policy, the United States decided to leave Saddam in power after the 1991 war, even while applying sanctions and conducting a permanent mini-war, in order to prevent the dictatorship from starting up yet another war. The policy of malign stability grew, in short, ever more malign, until, in the years after 1991, we ourselves were inflicting damage on the Iraqi people with our sanctions. Iraqi society fell into a dreadful downward spiral, and the results were ghastly.</p> </blockquote></p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:45 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/the_end_of_expo.html">Permalink</a>
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<a id="a0033008998"></a>

<h3>Rethinking Free Trade</h3>


<p>In <em>The Nation</em>, William Greider looks on <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070430/greider">some revisions</a> of thought on free-trade by mainstream economists.</p><blockquote><p>Ralph Gomory, on the other hand, is a gentle-spoken technologist, trained as a mathematician and largely apolitical. He does not set out to overthrow the establishment but to correct its deeper fallacies. For many years Gomory was a senior vice president at IBM. He helped manage IBM's expanding global presence as jobs and high-tech production were being dispersed around the world.</p><p>The experience still haunts him. He decided, in retirement, that he would dig deeper into the contradictions. Now president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, he knew something was missing in the "pure trade theory" taught by economists. If free trade is a win-win proposition, Gomory asked himself, then why did America keep losing?</p><p>The explanations he has developed sound like pure heresy to devout free traders. But oddly enough, Gomory's analysis is a good fit with what many ordinary workers and uncredentialed critics (myself included) have been arguing for some years. An important difference is that Gomory's critique is thoroughly grounded in the orthodox terms and logic of conventional economics. That makes it much harder to dismiss. Given his career at IBM, nobody is going to call Ralph Gomory a "protectionist."</p><p>He did not nail his "theses" to the door of the Harvard economics department. Instead, he wrote a slender book--Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests--in collaboration with respected economist William Baumol, former president of the American Economic Association. Published seven years ago, the book languished in academic obscurity and until recently was ignored by Washington policy circles.</p></blockquote></p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:23 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/rethinking_free.html">Permalink</a>
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<a id="a0033008610"></a>

<h3>Human Development Foundation (HDF): 10th Anniversary</h3>


<p>Adil Najam in <em>All Things Pakistan</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>I&nbsp; believe that HDF is a vanguard example of Pakistanis in and out of Pakistan - one amongst many (e.g., DIL, Citizens Foundation, Edhi Foundation, etc.) - who have decided that it is not only that they <em>can</em> do something, but that they <em>must</em>.</p>

<p>On their <a onclick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/outbound/article/ww.hdf.com');" href="http://ww.hdf.com/hdf/newasp/"><span style="color: #00248f;">10th anniversary</span></a>, HDF hopes to celebrate that which they have done in the last ten years but they also hope to discuss that which they and all of us can and should do in the next 10. It would be good for the ATP fraternity to also think about this question - <strong>what can we do</strong> - both here and, hoepfully, at the <a onclick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/outbound/article/www.hdf.com');" href="http://www.hdf.com/hdf/newasp/default.asp"><span style="color: #b34700;">HDF Convention</span></a> in May.</p>

<p>Here is a video clip of the beginning of the <strong>PBS documentary on HDF</strong> in their series called <em>‘<a onclick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/outbound/article/www.youtube.com');" href="http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=visionaries+series+hdf&amp;search=Search"><span style="color: #b34700;">Visionaries</span></a>.’</em> The rest of the documentary is available on <a onclick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/outbound/article/www.youtube.com');" href="http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=visionaries+series+hdf&amp;search=Search"><span style="color: #b34700;">YouTube</span></a>.</p>

<p><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/WwMdw9lpOVg" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">Much more <a href="http://pakistaniat.com/2007/04/14/human-development-foundation-hdf-10th-anniversary/#more-657">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Abbas Raza at 01:13 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/human_developme.html">Permalink</a>
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<a id="a0033007530"></a>

<h3>The Stem Cell Controversy</h3>


<p>Bertha Alvarez Manninen reviews <em>The Stem Cell Controversy: Debating the Issues</em> by Michael Ruse and Christopher A. Pynes (Editors), in <em>Metapsychology</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=148,height=222,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/17/stemcellrevised.jpg"><img title="Stemcellrevised" height="222" alt="Stemcellrevised" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/17/stemcellrevised.jpg" width="148" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>Now in its second edition, <em>The Stem Cell Controversy</em> has been an invaluable anthology for my own personal research, and in my teaching as well. I should say, right away, that in my experience this is one of the best books available for introducing the issue to students and really discussing the scientific, ethical, and religious implications of embryonic and adult stem cell research. One of the main reasons that this book is so helpful and accessible is that it is broken down into five distinct sections that provide comprehensive overview of the different aspects of this current and divisive issue. I will mostly deal with the contents of the second edition, since this is the one currently available, but will refer back to the first edition if I believe that it was superior to the second edition in any respect.</p>

<p>The book begins with the full text of President George W. Bush's August 9, 2001 speech, where he announced his decision to allow federal funding for stem cell research only on existing stem cell lines derived from embryos prior to that point in time, but that no new embryos were to be killed for the research using tax-payer dollars. I like that the students, and readers in general, are able to read exactly what Bush's reasoning was when he made this decision, and I usually go through it carefully with them, extracting some philosophical arguments from the speech and then critically evaluating them.</p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://mentalhelp.net/books/books.php?type=de&amp;id=3590">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Abbas Raza at 12:59 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/the_stem_cell_c.html">Permalink</a>
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<a id="a0033006998"></a>

<h3>BBC accused of censorship after cancelling short story broadcast</h3>


<p>Owen Gibson in <em>The Guardian</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=135,height=178,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/17/screenhunter_09_apr_17_1249.gif"><img title="Screenhunter_09_apr_17_1249" height="178" alt="Screenhunter_09_apr_17_1249" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/17/screenhunter_09_apr_17_1249.gif" width="135" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>The author Hanif Kureishi accused the BBC of censorship last night, after it dropped a radio broadcast of his short story describing the work of a cameraman who films the executions of western captives in Iraq. </p>

<p>Radio 4 cancelled a reading of Weddings and Beheadings, one of five nominations for the National Short Story prize due to be broadcast this week, after concluding the timing &quot;would not be right&quot; following unconfirmed reports that kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston had been killed by a jihadist group. </p>

<p>Kureishi, whose work includes The Buddha of Surburbia, Intimacy and the screenplay for the film My Beautiful Launderette, said he was angry at the decision, which he described as a result of &quot;stupid thinking&quot; on the part of BBC executives.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2058727,00.html">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Abbas Raza at 12:50 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/bbc_accused_of_.html">Permalink</a>
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<a id="a0032994028"></a>

<h3>Almost Human, and Sometimes Smarter</h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>The New York Times:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=196,height=502,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/17/chimp_1_2.190"><img title="Chimp_1_2" height="384" alt="Chimp_1_2" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/17/chimp_1_2.190" width="149" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Observed in the wild and tested in captivity, chimpanzees invite comparison with humans, their close relatives. They bear a family resemblance that fascinates people, and scientists see increasing evidence of similarities in chimp behavior and skills, making some of them think on the vagaries of evolution. Chimps display a remarkable range of behavior and talent. They make and use simple tools, hunt in groups and engage in aggressive, violent acts. They are social creatures that appear to be capable of empathy, altruism, self-awareness, cooperation in problem solving and learning through example and experience. Chimps even outperform humans in some memory tasks.</p></blockquote><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Jane Goodall, a young English woman working in Africa in the 1960s, began changing perceptions. At first, experts disputed her reports of chimps’ using tools and social behavior. The experts especially objected to her references to chimp culture. Just humans, they insisted, had “culture.”</p>

<p>Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a Kyoto primatologist, described a young chimp watching as numbers 1 through 9 flashed on the computer screen at random positions. Then the numbers disappeared in no more than a second. White squares remained where the numbers had been. The chimp casually but swiftly pressed the squares, calling back the numbers in ascending order — 1, 2, 3, etc.</p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17chimp.html?_r=1&amp;ref=science&amp;oref=slogin">here.</a></p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:33 AM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/almost_human_an.html">Permalink</a>
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<a id="a0032993920"></a>

<h3>Drugs may boost your brain power </h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>BBC News:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=203,height=152,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/17/pill.jpg"><img title="Pill" height="149" alt="Pill" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/17/pill.jpg" width="200" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>The Department of Health has asked the Academy of Medical Sciences to assess these so-called &quot;cognition enhancing&quot; drugs, some of which are already being widely used in the US. In the 1960s the self styled guru, Dr Timothy Leary, urged American youth to &quot;tune in, turn on and drop out&quot;. Now a new generation of so-called designer drugs are becoming available. But instead of fuelling a new drop-out culture, they are being used by people who think they will help them do better at school and work. </p>

<p>One of these drugs, Modafinil, was developed to treat people who involuntarily fall asleep. The drug is among a new class of cognition enhancing drugs. Professor Gary Lynch, from the University of California, Irvine, helped invent another class called Ampakines. Professor Lynch designed them specifically to increase memory and cognition. And he claims that animal experiments suggest that the drug enables the brain to rewire itself or make neural connections between different regions that normally people cannot make. This rewiring, he claims, may enable people to &quot;build thoughts that are a little bit beyond the normal brain&quot;. </p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6558871.stm">here.</a></p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:26 AM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/drugs_may_boost.html">Permalink</a>
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<a id="a0032991972"></a>

<h3>Questions for Mohsin Hamid</h3>


<p>Deborah Solomon in the <em>New York Times</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><span class="bold"><strong><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=306,height=204,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/17/306_mohsin_photo_1.jpg"><img title="306_mohsin_photo_1" height="204" alt="306_mohsin_photo_1" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/17/306_mohsin_photo_1.jpg" width="306" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>Q: Your new novel, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” ascended to No. 1 on the Barnes &amp; Noble best-seller list virtually the moment it was published in this country. What do you make of that?</strong></span> Now perhaps I can quit my job. Three days a week, I do some consulting for a little branding firm in London.</p>

<p><span class="bold"><strong>Is it fair to describe your second novel as a Muslim’s critique of American values?</strong></span> That’s oversimplifying. The novel is a love song to America as much as it is a critique. </p>

<p><span class="bold"><strong>I didn’t find it so loving. It takes place on a single evening at a cafe in Lahore, as a charming, well-educated Pakistani in his 20s recounts his life story to an unnamed American stranger, who seems suspicious of him.</strong></span> The American is acting as if the Pakistani man is a Muslim fundamentalist because of how he looks — he has a beard.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnQ4.t.html?_r=1&amp;ref=magazine&amp;oref=slogin">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:43 AM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/questions_for_m.html">Permalink</a>
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<h2>April 16, 2007</h2>



<a id="a0032986326"></a>

<h3>Dispatches: Eagleton versus Dawkins</h3>


<p>As comments continue to roll in on Abbas's excellent <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/monday_musing_t.html">&quot;Taking Sides in the Recent Religion Debates&quot;</a> of last week, I thought I'd zero in on a particular conflict between two of the figures he discusses:&nbsp; Richard Dawkins and Terry Eagleton.&nbsp; As he noted while framing the debates over religion, there is something puzzling about the degree of subjective animosity that attended Eagleton's <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html">excorciating review</a> of <em>The God Delusion.</em>&nbsp; We can add to that the fact that the review has been one of the most popular things Eagleton has written recently - it is the second thing that comes up if you Google Eagleton's name.&nbsp; Anecdotally, I can confirm this: when the review was published, several friends wrote to me approvingly about it, with the implication that finally Dawkins had gotten his comeuppance.&nbsp; At the time, this confused me, as it seemed to me the two figures should be fellow travelers, or at least denizens of the same region of sympathies.&nbsp; So it now seems worth unpacking their differences, as a gauge of our current intellectual atmosphere.</p>

<p>I should also note something at the start: I don't intend, at all, to revisit this debate for what it all-too-often threatens to turn into: a proxy for an argument between believers and non-believers.&nbsp; That particular aspect of this issue is probably its least interesting feature.&nbsp; (If you must know, I am an atheist, though one who regularly speaks to people I knew who are now dead.)&nbsp; My personal eccentricities aside, what is much more telling about the Eagleton-Dawkins relation is the fact that Eagleton so clearly regards much of Dawkins' project in <em>The God Delusion</em> with contempt (though, to be fair, he is equally, uh, vigorous in his LRB reviews of his disciplinary colleagues Stanley Fish and Gayatri Spivak).&nbsp; Eagleton's contempt conceals another conflict which is periodically renewed in academia, that between the humanities and the sciences.&nbsp; &nbsp;We can begin by observing that one of Dawkins' foundational moves in his book belongs to just this conflict: he argues that the existence of God &quot;is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analyzed as skeptically as any other.&quot;&nbsp; <br /><br />This move, more than any other, licenses Dawkins' method in the book, which is to set about debunking various claims of religion as though they were microcosmically representative of the whole: did Jesus have a human father, etc.&nbsp; (Note the lack of specificity attaching to the term.)&nbsp; It comes as no surprise that here Eagleton makes a stand on this issue, defending theological debates as a realm of the humanities, and not necessarily subject to the positivist scrutiny of a Dawkins.&nbsp; In Eagleton's view, Dawkins flattens or elides what is complex about religion.&nbsp; This is not a new argument for Eagleton.&nbsp; For instance, here he is in his 2003 book <em>After Theory</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Much atheism today is just inverted religion.&nbsp; Atheists tend to advance a version of religion which nobody in their right mind would subscribe to, and then righteously reject it.&nbsp; They accept the sort of crude stereotypes of it that would no doubt horrify them in any other field.&nbsp; They are rather like those for whom feminism means penis-envy, or socialism labor camps.</p></blockquote><p>In this case, Eagleton was prescient: there's no doubt that at times Dawkins&nbsp; treats causation in the social world in a facile way, laying much evil and no good at religion's doorstep.&nbsp; For instance, Dawkins opens the book by expressing his satisfaction with a billboard advertising a TV show he presented, which shows a picture of the New York skyline with the World Trade Center intact and the caption: &quot;Imagine a world without religion.&quot;&nbsp; I don't think you need to flock with the faithful to find this sentiment a little absurd.&nbsp; Imagining a world without religion is a little more difficult than that - as though the removal of this irrational abstraction, religion, would correspondingly and magically remove only massacres, honor killings, and telesales.&nbsp; </p>

<p>Of course, on the other hand, none of Eagleton's criticisms of Dawkins score direct hits on the central matter of disputation, except insofar as he tries to change the relevant genre of conversation from a scientific to a historico-theoretical one.&nbsp; But that's neither here nor there, and the debate between the two of them should not be construed as an argument conducted on one playing field.&nbsp; Each, of course, picks the ground that is most conducive to the discipline they profess: Eagleton avoids specificity when discussing the core of monotheistic faith, preferring to reiterate his quasi-Marxist version.&nbsp; In his account, Jesus and Muhammad project a God whose omnipotence is an inverted version of the powerlessness of the destitute - the Christian and Muslim God, for Eagleton, might even be said to <em>be</em> the emanation of the spirit of the powerless, a proto-Marxist reminder of the limits of capitalism.</p>

<p>For his part, Dawkins makes religion into what suits him; he avoids discussion of figures who would complicate his somewhat simplistic faith in the power of the scientific method to verify phenomenological events such as beliefs.&nbsp; Bruno Latour comes to mind as someone whose version of the history of science would cause serious problems for Dawkins in his Whiggier moments.&nbsp; Same with Paul Feyerabend, on the blindness of early adherence to Copernican theory.&nbsp; Dawkins also ignores the entire subfield known as the rhetoric of science, and its challenges to the scientific ideals of transparency and objectivity.&nbsp; Plus, Dawkins seems to reify, or make overly tangible, the concept of religion while giving the institutional nature of the apparatus short shrift.&nbsp; Religion is not so easily isolated - if it were, the Islams of Akbar, Ghalib, and Qutb wouldn't seem quite so incommensurable.&nbsp; It is both social and personal, not a &quot;natural phenomenon&quot; in any simple way.</p>

<p>But my interest here is in the rift that so obviously lies between these two ostensible members of the academic left, even though each probably regards the other as a benighted secret rightist.&nbsp; United in their opposition to hate-mongering, torture, poverty, and human suffering, why should they be antagonists at all?&nbsp; The word &quot;respect,&quot; repeated several times in Eagleton's essay, has something to tell us: the claims of each, for the primacy of empiricism and cultural theory, respectively, starkly divide them.&nbsp; It offends Eagleton that complexly articulated histories of debate should be swept aside so churlishly by Dawkins.&nbsp; Whose epistemology goes all the way down?&nbsp; </p>

<p>Slavoj Zizek, responding recently to an attack by Ernesto Laclau, remarks:</p>

<p>&quot;In academia, a polite way to say that we found our colleague's intervention or talk stupid and boring is to say, &quot;It was interesting.&quot; So if, instead, we tell a colleague, &quot;It was boring and stupid,&quot; he would be fully justified to be surprised and ask, &quot;But if you found it boring and stupid, why did you not simply say that it was interesting?&quot; &quot;</p>

<p>To answer this question with regard to the Dawkins/Eagleton conflict, I'd suggest that the rhetorical excess does not belong to the debate about God itself, but to their competing disciplines, which struggle for social capital and resources.&nbsp; In perhaps their most typically contemporary shared orientation, Dawkins and Eagleton each imagines himself the victim of powerful forces.&nbsp; In Dawkins' case, the forces of ignorance and religious hucksterism suppress the put-upon atheist.&nbsp; For Eagleton, those non-materialists who recognize anything other than inequity and the global world-system as the source of their troubles misrecognize reality.&nbsp; Funnily, for neither does the real problem appear to be the private beliefs of individuals.&nbsp; Why not, then, direct their vitriol at other targets?&nbsp; </p>

<p>The rest of<a href="http://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/MondayMusings.html#asad"> my Dispatches</a>.</p>



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<h3>On the Large Relatively Anonymous Office</h3>


<p>Mildly desperate, my investment in writing a loss, I decided to get a job.</p>

<p>I was 27. The last person I had worked for, a lawyer, was (long story, I had zero to do with the mess) under indictment. My prior work experience was patchy, cash jobs I had taken for survival or taxable ones to satisfy around six months of a fleeting interest. I had refused to commit to the cruise ship of a discernible career and found no place on the deck of the merry and like-minded who, seeing themselves in me, would give me a chance. My friends were not far along enough in their careers to help and were weary anyway of what seemed like commitment issues on my part. I had no pedigree of any kind to fall back on. My parents were recently divorced and totally broke. I was broke and exhausted from not having enough control over whether I might be broke again. I longed for a quaint steadiness, one that I perceived as being under the governorship of a large relatively anonymous office. </p>

<p>The advice I received from the career services of my alma mater, from my mother, from friends and others, was to take my unrelated experiences as connected by skill sets within each that pointed towards a type of office place I could make a case for having always wanted and long prepared for. I chose law.</p>

<p>(Inevitably, suggestions of law school followed to which I demurred. Many a decent, restless brain grew tired of being alone and set off to law school. Some found a home, others a crematorium. Understanding of the law is useful for practical, social hermeneutics, but as a science it is far broader then it is profound and I disagree with the average lawyer’s only tenet—that all narratives are arguably equal. Besides, I needed money, pronto, not loans.)</p>

<p>I scoured the search engines, met with recruiters and alumni, fine tuned the list of specials called a resume, repeated and repeated my personal pitches and after two months received one offer, which I took.</p>

<p>For $41,500 (I scoffed at the original proposition of $40K), dental and all the overtime I could get, I became a paralegal at a Midtown law firm of some 40 lawyers that specialized in litigation and real estate. I was given a desk and existence as email address and phone extension. Not much happened the first week. I even asked the guy who hired me when I was going to get some work. Shortly thereafter I was swimming in recyclables.</p>

<p>Because our hours were all billed to clients and because I had to keep track of all my hours, I know that out of 125 days at the law firm, 96 were spent filing, 50 were spent indexing and over 25 were spent copying, entering data or running one word searches of pdf files with tens of thousands of pages to them, with considerable overlap of tasks over the course of the day. Occasionally, I was sent out of the office to deliver documents, usually to a court (on 27th and Madison is a tiny marble and wood galleon of a courthouse, free to the public and superlative), once to a kosher steakhouse to get a signature from a couple:</p>

<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; Wife, “Why’s he interrupting dinner?”<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; Husband, “He has something for us to sign.”<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; Wife, “Will it get me in trouble?”<br />&nbsp; &nbsp; Husband, “Just sign and keep eating.”</p>

<p>The trips out of the office were billed by my co-workers as the major perk to my role; I would be the only one who could get away from the office; I would be the only one who would not always have to engage in dreaded work. I never bought the idea behind this supposed perk, that work inherently sucks and by extension nothing is better than to leave work. The tasks I was given sucked big time for sure, and I did not have to step far back to think of much worse jobs (most of these have to do with killing or jerking off animals, to say nothing of the expedited death that comes with much of the developed worlds forced upon endeavors. My personal soft spot for worst job has always been with the weathered model who poses provocatively with shawarma, white sauce smeared on lamb shreds with gusto, on deli posters; wherever you are, babe, I got an acre on my wide heart waiting for you.). Still, averse as I am to the environment, I have never been convinced that to be in an office was to hand over an essential part of oneself for the duration of the time one spends under florescents. Cubiclitis, in my experience, was never a degenerative disease but a cold most everyone caught.</p>

<p>I did not make any major friends at the law firm, but I got along well enough. Denise from accounting told me about her daquiri infused weekends. Marcus, a fellow paralegal, a neocon with a flaccid Masters in German literature, was good for political talk in a two North ends of a magnet meet kind of way. I got a workplace nickname from a lawyer who trusted my efficiency, Alexcelente.&nbsp; I had my water cooler conversations, was pulled into some important projects and emailed silly forwards. My workplace enthusiasm was drenched after I followed loud laughter to a cubicle with three people around a screen watching what turned out to be cat bloopers. This, the cat bloopers, happened a number of times, with different people, at all hours, cat bloopers. I bore the machine gun fire of the cultural epitaphs, “you’re fired”, “that was easy” and quotes from Goodfellas. I was condescended to more then I care to be and regularly kept late, far far past my tolerance for my dull tasks.</p>

<p>The lawyers were hardworking and generally cordial, with one requisite jerk screamer who, outside of his office, was pretty contained. They were almost all men and all white except for one black lawyer who lived with his door shut and a well-aged blond who was the sole member of their booming divorce practice and always had her door open. The secretaries were almost all women and fell into two categories: young mamacita’s surrounded by pictures of their kids and faded Mediterranean beauties consoled by pictures of their grandkids. A good portion of them kept candy I lived off of on their desks and almost all of them were nice as well.</p>

<p>For most, the community seemed to be the major draw of the office. Where the repetition of tasks and conversations stunted me and made me anxious, most were comforted by the familiarity of their roles and the personalities around them. Even many of the cases I worked on followed formulas so pervasive—fighting over a dead relative’s house, one brother ruins a family business but keeps all the money, the building of malls—and central to human nature that it was hard to tell them apart sometimes. This community seemed a decent enough attraction for the employees. On its best days the large office was a cousin of, two or four times removed, the kind of personalized neighborhood whose looming extinction people often point to but rarely offer winning solutions for. The office had policemen and mailmen, sports leagues and boards and local representatives, drunks and idiots. The Mom n’ Pop store was the old secretary who helped with the copy machine and in passing compared the easy-to-handle-once-you-get-used-to-them pitfalls of the machine with navigating a long life. This community, complaints of Monday aside, the general longing for a vacation or just taking in how emotionally engorged people would become with a long weekend on the way, kept the majority of my co-workers contented, if not quite fully so.</p>

<p>I was nowhere near content and in my entire time there learned only two things, both on the same occasion, one month into the job. On that occasion I attended a commercial real estate closing for a lawyer who could not be present or did not care to be. My assignment was to deliver checks and wait until the money went through. People have told me that residential real estate closings can be exciting, touching—a young couple buying a bigger apartment or, not long ago, flipping one for the money afforded by our faded housing boom. Commercial closings are bureaucratic affairs. One waits, hands over a check and waits some more; $50 million might be exchanged, but it could just as well be $50.<br />So, I was sitting in this conference room, checks in hand, on the 38th floor of a Midtown office building, with a long wait on the way and everyone else jibber-jabbering on their phones about what they were doing the next hour and the hour after that and thereafter, and I was looking out at all the tall buildings around me and I realized.</p>

<p>I realized what architects are getting at when they design these tall buildings and how New York never ceases to provide engaging angles from which to be viewed. Any space can be observed from an infinite number of angles, but life quickly teaches us that the majority of these angles are quite similar to each other. Except in New York, where the viewing experience rarely repeats itself, is often new and generally wonderful. And, I realized that I would never make it to the surface of the sea I had willfully decided to start at the near bottom of.</p>

<p>Five months after my thoughts in the conference room on the 38th floor, I left the firm to incredibly little fanfare. Writing a book for a combined two hours a week while being stuck at an office wasn’t cutting it. Ten months later the novel’s far from done. I’m still broke. I squatted for some time at a girlfriend’s. That ended. I stay at my mother’s. Some days I get a bunch of writing done. Some days I get a blissful amount of writing done. Some days I wonder at the purpose of writing a stupid book and wonder at what I am trying to achieve, devoted to a wilting form. Some days I set aside an hour to masturbate, turn it into three, read through several newspapers and a handful of, ehem, good blogs, and have meandering conversations with friends, some at an office, doing quite well (what was a sea to me is for them more like one of those knotted ropes hanging from the ceiling in gym class. They are scaling the rope quickly). <br />Which brings me to the trouble-free point of this here break from my writing. Do not take on a job that does not challenge you, no matter what your impression is of how the world works. This applies as much to the individual plying at a desk as to the idealist spinning like Samson in his mill around an art form he or she might be better served leaving for an engaging office. And if you do pick an unchallenging affair, your reasons for doing so must be very strong. In my case they were not.</p>



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<h3>perceptions: the essence of home</h3>


<p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=95,height=96,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/these_cities_blotted_into_teh_wilde.jpg"></a></p>

<p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=574,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/shabnam_loo_etc.jpg"><img title="Shabnam_loo_etc" height="520" alt="Shabnam_loo_etc" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/shabnam_loo_etc.jpg" width="580" border="0" /></a> </p>

<p>Zarina Hashmi. Morning, Stillness, &quot;Loo&quot; (hot afternoon wind), Dew, Afternoon, Dawn. 1999.</p>

<p>Woodblock prints.</p>

<p>More on this New York based artist <a href="http://www.newsline.com.pk/NewsMar2004/artlinemar2004.htm">here</a> and <a href="http://www.philamuseum.org/press/releases/2001/277.html">here</a>. </p>



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<h3>France: As the Left Falls Apart, Will the Center Hold?</h3>


<p>by Ruth Crossman</p><p>The first round in the French presidential election is less than a week away, and the top contenders are still running hard. The neo-Gaullist Interior Minister Sarkozy enjoys a commanding lead in the polls, but the fate of Socialist Ségolène Royal is less certain; she has spent the last several months trailing behind third-party candidate François Bayrou in the polls. Bayrou’s performance was been the surprise of the campaign season. The self styled outsider and Third Way maven has superseded the radical populist Jean-Marie Le Pen as the official ‘Third Man’ of French politics.  But the question is whether voters truly prefer Bayrou’s policies, or if they have simply bought into his packaging.</p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/061216_nextroyal_xtrawide_2.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=624,height=254,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="061216_nextroyal_xtrawide_2" title="061216_nextroyal_xtrawide_2" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/061216_nextroyal_xtrawide_2.jpg" width="374" height="152" border="0" style="float: left; margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;" /></a><p>Bayrou comes from the center-right UDF (Union for the Defense of France,) the faction associated with the liberal policies of former President Valery Giscard D’Estaing, in opposition to the RPR (Rally for the Republic,) the party of neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac. The relationship between the two parties is been complex. In general, they compete during presidential elections and ally during legislative elections. The RPR was dissolved in 2002 (after the indictment of party leaders on corruption charges)  and replaced by the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement), which was established as an electoral vehicle for Chirac, before succumbing to a friendly takeover at the hands of his former protégé, Nicolas Sarkozy. Bayrou, who garnered only 6% of the vote in 2002, has used the ascension of Sarkozy to reinvent himself. Historically, one of the defining splits between the UDF and the Gaullists was the economic role of the state. But Sarkozy has completely effaced this cleavage by running on a platform of aggressive neo-liberalism. This has allowed Bayrou to run to his left, positioning himself as a ‘Third Way’ candidate in the mold of Clinton and Blair. By promoting economic reform coupled with continuing social protection, Bayrou attracts those (and there are many) who feel that Sarkozy is too extreme.</p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/sarkozy_edited_2.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=285,height=384,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="Sarkozy_edited_2" title="Sarkozy_edited_2" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/sarkozy_edited_2.jpg" width="156" height="211" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" /></a><p>Given the historical rivalry between the UDF and the RPR, Sarkozy’s loss of support to Bayrou is understandable. What is more remarkable, and more telling, is the level of defection from the left. On February 22 the left-leaning newspaper <em>Libération</em> carried an endorsement of Bayrou penned by 30 high ranking Socialist functionaries. Even schoolteachers, who have historically been a bed rock of support for the Socialists, are now split, with 45% supporting Bayrou.  Royal now faces the possibility of being the second Socialist candidate in a row to be eliminated in the first round. </p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/images_2.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=121,height=120,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="Images_2" title="Images_2" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/images_2.jpg" width="133" height="132" border="0" style="float: left; margin: 0px 5px 5px 0px;" /></a><p>The general consensus in the French media is that Royal ran her campaign badly. It is true that she has made several gaffes (such as calling for Québécois independence during a visit to Canada,) and has suffered from her association with Socialist “elephants” such as Jack Lang and Lionel Jospin. But many of her problems are actually structural. Politics in France have undergone a series of realignments, and the ‘Old Left’ has become more and more irrelevant. The Socialist Party itself is becoming increasingly fractured over questions of economic policy, and the presidential campaign only highlighted the lack of party unity. In February, Party Secretary Eric Bésson resigned his post after a public dispute with Royal over the cost of her social proposals. Royal refuses to discuss specific figures, a strategy which has only deepened the public’s suspicion that she is either economically irresponsible or politically disingenuous. At this point in time, hard core leftists are likely to opt for smaller and more extreme parties in the first round (as they did in 2002), while moderates are increasingly likely to support Bayrou. If it continues to bleed votes from the left and the right, the Socialist Party will be doomed. </p><p>It is still unclear what Bayrou’s popularity signifies. Are the French finally willing to quit treating ‘liberalism’ like a dirty word? Does Bayrou’s promise of a balanced budget carry more weight than Sarkozy’s nationalism and Royal’s appeal to equality? If Bayrou defeats Sarkozy in the second round, a scenario which is becoming increasingly likely, will the government finally be able to carry out economic reforms without triggering protests? Or is Bayrou merely a highly polished and processed protest candidate? </p></p>



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<h2>April 15, 2007</h2>



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<h3>More on Belief and Reason, A Believer's Response</h3>


<p>In the <em>Harvard Divinity Bulletin</em>, <a href="http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/35-1_joyner.html">Will Joyner its editor</a>:</p><blockquote><p>In the previous issue of the bulletin (autumn 2006), I commented that the tension between religious belief and the often overloaded, or inappropriately loaded, concept "reason" is, in effect, at the core of every edition of the magazine that we produce. As we have prepared this Winter 2007 edition, that comment has echoed through my mind in a way that's frankly dispiriting (it's tempting to see the spate of "new atheism" best sellers as so misrepresentative of religion as to be laughable, fleeting, ignorable) but also constructively troubling. Hence, the "continued" tag on the headline above.</p><p>The God Delusion, by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, has come to represent most loudly, and crudely, the notion that religion is the primary root of evil in the world today. There have been several thorough critiques of this book that have exposed the willful flaws of Dawkins's disingenuous line of argument—the best of these, in my view, was written for a recent issue of The New York Review of Books by H. Allen Orr, a biology professor at the University of Rochester, and I urge everyone to read that essay at the NYRB website. The Dawkins book itself, though, is not as troubling to me as responses such as that of a well-educated, agnostic friend of mine who, without having read The God Delusion, said to me, "Well, I'm sure Dawkins exaggerates, but he does have a point about religion—look at Iraq."</p><p>What the Bulletin can do best in this increasingly skewed, Alice in Wonderland-like atmosphere is at least three-fold.</p></blockquote></p>



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<h3>A Book Event Over at The Valve On Amanda Claybaugh's <em>The Novel of Purpose</em></h3>


<p><a href="http://www.thevalve.org/">The Valve</a> is having a book event, this one on Amanda Claybaugh’s <em>The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World</em>.  From <a href="http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/ithe_novel_of_purpose_i/">Miriam Burstein's entry</a>:</p><blockquote></p>Amanda Claybaugh’s <em>The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World</em> yokes transatlantic criticism to one of literary history’s great warhorses:  the history and theory of literary realism. The nineteenth-century “novel of purpose,” Claybaugh argues, works on the assumption that “transforming readers was a necessary step in transforming the world” (34); to that end, then, the novel of purpose necessarily crosses paths with realism.  Claybaugh’s interest lies less with the novel of purpose’s contents, however, and more with its narrative structures.  Irrespective of their own political beliefs, realist novelists appropriate reformist narratives in order to tame (or at least clarify) otherwise recalcitrant plot elements.  Thus, Claybaugh finds Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers making off with the temperance plot’s “disciplined structure” and “the license it provides for verisimilar detail,” even as Dickens pokes jovial fun at both the temperance plot’s actual subject matter and the moral character of its tellers (63)</p></blockquote></p>



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<h3>Battle Over the Banlieues</h3>


<p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=602,height=367,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/screenhunter_07_apr_15_1743_2.gif"><img title="Screenhunter_07_apr_15_1743_2" height="365" alt="Screenhunter_07_apr_15_1743_2" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/screenhunter_07_apr_15_1743_2.gif" width="600" border="0" /></a></p>

<p>David Rieff in the <em>New York Times Magazine</em>: </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>“If I could get my hands on Sarkozy, I’d kill him.” I had asked Mamadou, a wiry young man wearing gray camouflage pants and a tank top, what he thought of France’s former minister of the interior, who is also the right’s standard-bearer in this spring’s presidential elections. “I’d kill him,” he continued and then paused as if savoring the thought. “Then I’d go to prison. And when I got out, I’d be a hero.”</p>

<p>We were in Les Bosquets, one of the impoverished housing projects that are scattered across the banlieues, the heavily immigrant working-class suburbs that surround Paris. I asked Mamadou’s friend Ahmad if he felt the same way. He said he would not go that far. “I wouldn’t kill him, no,” he said. “But I hate him. We all hate him.”</p>

<p>A lot of this was bravado, of course, friends showing off for friends in the disaffected, hyperaggressive macho style that now predominates among France’s disenfranchised suburban young. As a group, their unemployment rate stands at around 40 percent. Seen from the Paris familiar to most foreigners or, for that matter, to most native Parisians, Les Bosquets seems like another country. And yet it takes only about an hour to get there from the Place de la Concorde.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15elections.t.html?ref=magazine">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>Animated versions of classic New Yorker cartoons</h3>


<p>From <em>The New Yorker</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=242,height=586,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/screenhunter_06_apr_15_1735.gif"></a></p>

<p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=242,height=586,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/screenhunter_06_apr_15_1735_2.gif"></a><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/screenhunter_06_apr_15_1735_3.gif"></a><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=237,height=380,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/screenhunter_08_apr_15_1750.gif"><img title="Screenhunter_08_apr_15_1750" height="380" alt="Screenhunter_08_apr_15_1750" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/screenhunter_08_apr_15_1750.gif" width="237" border="0" /></a>  </p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">Watch the animated cartoons <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/humor/cartoons/daily/animations">here</a>. </p>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>Google Earth maps out Darfur atrocities</h3>


<p>Elise Labott at <em>CNN</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=234,height=230,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/screenhunter_05_apr_15_1729.gif"><img title="Screenhunter_05_apr_15_1729" height="230" alt="Screenhunter_05_apr_15_1729" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/screenhunter_05_apr_15_1729.gif" width="234" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>If you Google the word Darfur, you will find about 13 million references to the atrocities in the western Darfur region of Sudan -- what the United States has said is this century's first genocide.</p>

<p>As of today, when the 200 million users of Google Earth log onto the site, they will be able to view the horrific details of what's happening in Darfur for themselves.</p>

<p>In an effort to bring more attention to the ongoing crisis in Darfur, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has teamed up with Google's mapping service literally to map out the carnage in the Darfur region.</p>

<p>Experts estimate that 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million more have been displaced since the conflict flared in 2003, when rebels took up arms against the central Sudanese government.</p>

<p>The new initiative, called &quot;Crisis in Darfur,&quot; enables Google Earth users to visualize the details in the region, including the destruction of villages and the location of displaced persons in refugee camps. (<a href="javascript:CNN_openPopup('/interactive/tech/0704/popup.google.darfur/frameset.exclude.html','770x576','toolbar=no,location=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,width=770,height=576');"><span style="color: #000099;">Interactive: See how the new technology works</span></a>)</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/04/10/google.genocide/index.html">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>Is Biology Reducible to the Laws of Physics?</h3>


<p><span style="color: #000000;">John Dupré reviews <em>Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology</em> by Alex Rosenberg, in <em>American Scientist</em>:</span></p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Alex Rosenberg is unusual among philosophers of biology in adhering to the view that everything occurs in accordance with universal laws, and that adequate explanations must appeal to the laws that brought about the thing explained. He also believes that everything is ultimately determined by what happens at the physical level—and that this entails that the mind is &quot;nothing but&quot; the brain. For an adherent of this brand of physicalism, it is fairly evident that if there are laws at &quot;higher&quot; levels—laws of biology, psychology or social science—they are either deductive consequences of the laws of physics or they are not true. Hence Rosenberg is committed to the classical reductionism that aims to explain phenomena at all levels by appeal to the physical.</p>

<p>It is worth mentioning that, as Rosenberg explains, these views are generally assumed by contemporary philosophers of biology to be discredited. The reductionism that they reject, he says,</p><blockquote><p>holds that there is a full and complete explanation of every biological fact, state, event, process, trend, or generalization, and that this explanation will cite only the interaction of macromolecules to provide this explanation.</p></blockquote><p>Such views have been in decline since the 1970s, when David Hull (<em>The Philosophy of Biological Science</em> [1974]) pointed out that the relationship between genetic and phenotypic facts was, at best, &quot;many/many&quot;: Genes had effects on numerous phenotypic features, and phenotypic features were affected by many genes. A number of philosophers have elaborated on such difficulties in subsequent decades.</p>

<p>The question then is whether Rosenberg's latest book, <em>Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology,</em> constitutes a useful attack on a dogmatic orthodoxy or merely represents a failure to understand why the views of an earlier generation of philosophers of science have been abandoned.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/55122">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>By a Dead Lake</h3>


<p>Joel Agee in the <em>New York Times Book Review</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=514,height=450,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/agee450.jpg"><img title="Agee450" height="315" alt="Agee450" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/agee450.jpg" width="360" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>When Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the <a title="More articles about Nobel Prizes." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/nobel_prizes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><span style="color: #004276;">Nobel Prize</span></a> in Literature in 2004, the response of the international press and literary world was wildly mixed. Many commentators were surprised and puzzled (“who?”); others expressed shock and outrage; a few gave their enthusiastic endorsement. One member of the Swedish Academy resigned in protest. The predominant tone was one of cautious approval.</p>

<p>Much of the controversy had to do with Jelinek’s politics. She had been a member of the Austrian Communist Party from 1974 to 1991, was a fierce critic of her country’s middle class and the American war in Iraq, and espoused an extreme form of feminism based on the conviction that, under male hegemony, heterosexual relations are inherently violent and that women are scripted for self-extinction.</p>

<p>In the English-speaking countries, Jelinek’s work is still relatively unknown, even though four of her novels have long been available in translation, all of them issued by a small British publisher, Serpent’s Tail Press. Now Seven Stories is coming out with “Greed,” Jelinek’s 10th and most recent novel. The German edition was published in 2000, so it formed part of the oeuvre for which its author was honored by the Swedish Academy.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/books/review/Agee.t.html?_r=1&amp;ref=books&amp;oref=slogin">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>Euler's Beautiful Equation on His 300th</h3>


<p>Today is the 300th birthday of the great mathematician Leonhard Euler. Julie J. Rehmeyer discusses his <a href="http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070414/mathtrek.asp">beautiful equation</a> in Science News:</p><p><blockquote><blockquote>"Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth." —Benjamin Pierce, a Harvard mathematician, after proving Euler's equation, e^[i(pi)] = –1, in a 19th-century lecture.</blockquote></p><p>Sunday, April 15, is the 300th birthday of Leonhard Euler (pronounced "oiler"), one of the most important mathematicians ever to have lived. His works help form the foundation of nearly all areas of mathematics, including calculus, number theory, geometry, and applied math.</p><p>One of the many discoveries for which he is famous is the equation eip = –1 . In a 1988 poll, readers of the journal Mathematical Intelligencer chose this equation as the single most beautiful equation in all of mathematics. The equation weaves together four seemingly unrelated mathematical numbers, e, p, i, and –1, in an astonishingly simple way.</p><p>But what does eip = –1 really mean?</p></blockquote></p>



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<h3>God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut</h3>


<p>John Leonard in <em>The Nation</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=374,height=383,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/vonnegut.jpg"><img title="Vonnegut" height="256" alt="Vonnegut" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/vonnegut.jpg" width="250" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>&quot;I used to be funny,&quot; Kurt Vonnegut informs us in <em>A Man Without a Country (Seven Stories)</em>, &quot;and perhaps I'm not anymore.&quot; This last bit is untrue, of course. In these essays from the pages of the radical biweekly <em>In These Times</em>, he is very funny as often as he wants to be. For instance: &quot;My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.&quot; And if you don't smile for at least a week at the friendly notion of the corner mailbox as a &quot;giant blue bullfrog,&quot; you ought to have your license revoked. </p>

<p>But like Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, even when he's funny, he's depressed. His has always been a weird jujitsu that throws us for a brilliant loop. As much as he would like to chat about semicolons, paper clips, giraffes, Vesuvius, and the Sermon on the Mount--&quot;if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake&quot;--his own country has driven him to furious despair with its globocop belligerence, its contempt for civil liberties, and its holy war on the poor: &quot;Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club... and kiss my ass!&quot; The novelist/pacifist/socialist/humanist who has smoked unfiltered Pall Malls since he was twelve is suing the tobacco company that makes them because, &quot;for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.&quot;</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070423/leonard">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>Women Qawwali Singers</h3>


<p>In the comments to my <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/saturday_qawwal.html">posting yesterday</a> of several qawwali videos, John left a comment asking &quot;Where are the women? Are they barred from singing this kind of music? Who are the great women qawwali singers?&quot; Srijith appropriately replied that, &quot;Qawwali has been traditionally a male art form. I would say one of the most famous female exponents is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abida_Parveen" rel="nofollow">Abida Parveen</a>.&quot; So here's an Abida Parveen video:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/UHUhd0PR590" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">And my friend <a href="http://www.project-lifeline.org/">Shabbir Kazmi</a> responded by reminding us that many Indian and Pakistani movies of yesteryear used to stage qawwali competitions between male and female qawwali parties, and by sending this lovely video of a qawwali from the film <em>Barsaat Ki Raat </em>(do check it out, and wait a couple of minutes into the video for the women to come in):</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-hWNe9BeErU" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed></p></blockquote>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>Daphne's unruly passions</h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>The Guardian:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=128,height=128,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/daphne1.jpg"><img title="Daphne1" height="250" alt="Daphne1" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/daphne1.jpg" width="250" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again', the opening of Rebecca, is Daphne du Maurier's most quoted line. And from 10 May, the centenary of her birth, we should all be prepared to revisit Manderley repeatedly, as in a recurring dream. For du Maurier is about to be comprehensively celebrated. The BBC plans a double helping: a new drama, Daphne, by Amy Jenkins and a documentary by Rick Stein, The Road to Manderley. In Fowey, Cornwall, where she spent most of her writing life, there will be a Daphne du Maurier festival between 10 and 19 May that will include talks, concerts and guided walks. There will also be a literary conference in which her son, Kits Browning, will take part. Justine Picardie has chosen this moment to reconstitute du Maurier in fiction, as a detective in her thriller Daphne, and Virago is about to publish The Daphne du Maurier Companion.</p>

<p>Why is it that du Maurier still has such a hold? Why do so many women writers (with the exception of PD James, who voted Rebecca as 'worst' novel) want to write about her? After spending the past weeks submerged in the novels, I can volunteer one thing, and it is not an answer, more the beginning of a question. Du Maurier was mistress of calculated irresolution. She did not want to put her readers' minds at rest. She wanted her riddles to persist. She wanted the novels to continue to haunt us beyond their endings. And several of them do. </p>

<p>According to her biographer, Margaret Forster, du Maurier used to make lists of what she hoped to achieve. 'Number one was atmosphere. </p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2056937,00.html">here.</a> (For Sheherzad and Sara, two &quot;Rebecca&quot; fans I know).</p>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>Testing the Authenticity of Organic Foods</h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>Scientific American:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=200,height=230,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/15/organic.gif"><img title="Organic" height="287" alt="Organic" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/15/organic.gif" width="250" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>There is a growing market for organic foods that are supposed to be free of pesticides, hormones and synthetic chemicals before they can be labeled as such. Consumers, eager for chemical-free products, plunk down close to $14 billion annually for organic fare, according to the Organic Trade Association, a North American organization dedicated to promoting organic farming. But how do they know that the food they're getting—and paying a premium for—is really organic? British scientists have come up with a new test that determines the organic pedigree of products on store shelves by measuring the amount of nitrogen they hold. </p>

<p>To be considered organic, crops must be grown without the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides on a farm that has passed a rigorous certification process. </p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=F1856AA5-E7F2-99DF-3D96F7FC7243D857&amp;chanID=sa003">here.</a></p>





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<h2>April 14, 2007</h2>



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<h3>nussbaum interview</h3>


<p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/14/nussbaum_martha.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=180,height=270,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="Nussbaum_martha" title="Nussbaum_martha" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/14/nussbaum_martha.jpg" width="150" height="225" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" /></a></p>

<blockquote>In your reflections on human capacities, you underline the importance of a correct and harmonic physical and psychical development and of the possibility for the individual to express his ideas and emotions in a free and open way. Well, if even in the rich West women suffer from restrictions of different kind, don’t you think that these rights are systematically denied to women in the Islamic world?

<p>I think that there is no such thing as “the Islamic world,” and thus no such thing as “a way” to be a woman in it. There are many types of Muslims, and, like Christians and Jews, they find many different ways to be women within their traditions. My Muslim friends in India do not fit any single stereotype – and why should one expect them to? – any more than do my Buddhist or Hindu friends. I think that in all religions there are people who want to live a traditional life and people who want to be part of modernity, and we ought to make room for both and show both equal respect. When I go to the traditional Jewish neighborhood of Boston, called Brookline (as I have recently done, to buy Passover gifts), I see many women living a traditional Orthodox life (and that does not mean that they are not lawyers and doctors and so forth, more or less everyone in Brookline is a lawyer or a doctor!), but of course there are also people like me, whose version of Judaism is Enlightenment-based and modern. We can respect one another, and we do.</blockquote></p>

<p>more from Reset DOC via (<a href="http://www.philosophersnet.com/">TPM</a>) <a href="http://www.resetdoc.org/EN/Nussbaum-interview.php">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>CHRISTOPHER hitchens visits ST. MARGARET'S SCHOOL FOR YOUNG WOMEN, WHERE HE DISCOVERS LITTLE GIRLS AREN'T FUNNY, EITHER.</h3>


<p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/14/christopherhitchens.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=150,height=190,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="Christopherhitchens" title="Christopherhitchens" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/14/christopherhitchens.jpg" width="150" height="190" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" /></a></p>

<blockquote>Mrs. Garvey's Sixth-Grade Class

<p>If you ever desire to see a large group of dour young girls staring humorlessly at you, go to Mrs. Garvey's sixth-grade class during sex ed and make a vagina joke. But don't do the one about the very hungry caterpillar, because Mrs. Garvey will make you stop halfway through. Not that it matters, as these girls were entirely preoccupied with asking the most obvious questions about their biology. How badly do cramps hurt? How long does a period last? Should they have gotten theirs yet? Who the fuck cares, when surrounded by the hilarity of the reproductive system? When Mrs. Garvey, pressed for time, asked if they could "handle doing the male anatomy" tomorrow, no one even batted an eyelash, even with my prompt and loud guffaw. They seemed distant with me whenever I tried to liven up the afternoon by displaying my own knowledge of both the female anatomy and humor. I'd like to believe it was due to their age, but because Mrs. Garvey simply stared at me when I attempted to verbally illustrate to the girls why menstrual blood was nature's Astroglide, I am sad to say that it is more universal than that. Like I said, women just aren't funny.</blockquote></p>

<p>more from McSweeney's <a href="http://mcsweeneys.net/2007/4/11kershner.html">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>Remembering Primo Levi</h3>


<p>20 years ago last Wednesday, Primo Levi died.  I went to a <a href="http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/pep/pepdesc.cfm?id=2673">lovely memorial</a> the week prior at the New York Public Library, which you can listen to by clicking the link "Listen to the Program" on the event page.  <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2163783?nav=tap3">Ruth Franklin</a>, who spoke at the NYPL event, in Slate, on the new collection of Levi's short stories:</p><blockquote><p>It is a curse of those who write about the Holocaust that they are eternally identified with their horrific, unapproachable subject, even when they try to take their lives in other directions. Elie Wiesel has written numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, but he will always be thought of first as the author of Night. Twenty years after its publication, Paul Celan's audiences were still pestering him to recite "Deathfugue," his canonical poem about the camps ("Black milk of daybreak we drink you at evening …").</p><p>Primo Levi, whose memoir Survival in Auschwitz (its American title) has become one of the defining testimonies of the Holocaust, has suffered a similar injustice. Returning from the camp in 1946 at age 25, Levi went on to have a successful career as an industrial chemist while simultaneously rising to prominence as one of postwar Italy's most beloved writers. His memoir, first published in 1947, initially sank into obscurity, but his essays and short stories ran in some of the country's best-known periodicals, and his fiction won numerous literary prizes. Yet in the English-speaking world, he has been defined solely through his works about the Holocaust, which also include The Periodic Table (1984), his autobiography through chemistry, and The Drowned and the Saved (published posthumously in 1988), his final and most brutal meditation on evil.</p><p>It is tempting to greet A Tranquil Star—a selection of 17 of Levi's short stories appearing in English for the first time—as a source to be mined for additional clues about his experience at Auschwitz and its effects on his life afterward. But this impulse is misguided—not least because the stories in this book, the first significant work of Levi's to be published in America in nearly two decades, offer very little in the way of such clues.</p>  </blockquote></p>



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<h3>A man for all ages</h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>The Guardian:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=128,height=128,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/14/shakes_2.jpg"><img title="Shakes_2" height="150" alt="Shakes_2" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/14/shakes_2.jpg" width="150" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><span face="Arial">According to many critics of his time, Shakespeare was vulgar, provincial and overrated. So how did he become the supreme deity of poetry, drama and high culture itself, asks Jonathan Bate, editor of the first Complete Works from the Folio for 300 years. </span>In the spring of 1616, Francis Beaumont and William Shakespeare died within a few weeks of each other. Beaumont became the first dramatist to be honoured with burial in the national shrine of Westminster Abbey, beside the tombs of Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare was laid to rest in the provincial obscurity of his native Stratford-upon-Avon. </p>

<p>We now think of Shakespeare as a unique genius - the embodiment, indeed, of the very idea of artistic genius - but these two very different burial places are a reminder that in his own time, though widely admired, he was but one of a constellation of theatrical stars. How is it, then, that in the 18th and 19th centuries Shakespeare's fame outstripped that of all his peers? Why was he the sole dramatist of the age who would eventually have a genuinely worldwide impact? There are two answers: availability and adaptability.</p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,,2056701,00.html">here.</a></p>



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<h3>Mozart doesn't make you clever</h3>


<p dir="ltr"><span class="articletext">From <em>Nature:</em></span></p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><span class="articletext"><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=180,height=201,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/14/motzart.jpg"><img title="Motzart" height="223" alt="Motzart" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/14/motzart.jpg" width="200" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> Passively listening to Mozart — or indeed any other music you enjoy — does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child's IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music and intelligence, which was published last week by the German research ministry.</span><span class="articletext">The ministry commissioned the report — surprisingly the first to systematically review the literature on the purported intelligence effect of music — from a team of nine German neuroscientists, psychologists, educationalists and philosophers, all music experts. The ministry felt it had to tackle the subject because it had been inundated with requests for funding of studies on music and intelligence, which it didn't know how to assess.</span><br /><br /><span class="articletext">The interest in this scientific area was first sparked by the controversial 1993 <em>Nature</em> report<sup>&nbsp;</sup>in which psychologist Frances Rauscher and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, claimed that people perform better on spatial tasks — such as recognizing patterns, or folding paper — after listening to Mozart for 10 minutes. </span></p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070409/full/070409-13.html">here.</a></p>



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<h3>Saturday Qawwali Special</h3>


<p>After a conversation with my friend <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/MondayMusings.html#husain">Husain Naqvi</a> earlier tonight (at whose valima in Karachi I enjoyed one of the best live <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qawwali">qawwalis</a> of my life--and who touchingly actually shed tears in my presence upon learning of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nusrat_fateh_ali_khan">Nusrat</a>'s death!), I thought it would be a good thing to present here at 3QD what are probably the three most famous qawwali singers of all time for the nostalgic enjoyment of those of us who are dedicated to this beautiful genre of music (we listened to it on weekends, especially, in Pakistan), and also, of course, as an introduction to the form for the rest of you.</p>

<p>This first qawwali by master singer <a href="http://nusrat.info/">Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan</a> (the young boy who often matches Nusrat note-for-note here, but in a much higher key, is his brother Farrukh's talented son Rahat Fateh Ali Khan) is dedicated to my friend <a href="http://ahtisaari.typepad.com/moia/">Marko Ahtisaari</a> who is a huge Nusrat fan, and himself, among so many other things, a supremely accomplished musician:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/VHjkNoN6H3A" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">This second qawwali by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aziz_Mian">Aziz Mian</a> is dedicated to my dear friend <a href="http://www.project-lifeline.org/">Shabbir Kazmi</a>, a New York City architect, and a great fan, like me, of Aziz Mian:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/trmVlMEo7UI" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">And last, but by no means least, the third qawwali is dedicated to my brother, Javed, who turned me on to, and shared his love of, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabri_Brothers">Sabri Brothers</a> (and so much else!) when I lived with him in Kamra, Pakistan, so many eons ago:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/g52g1dlewdk" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">Oh, and if you want some extra-credit, here is a bonus longish Nusrat video containing a couple of songs (the part <em>between</em> songs where Nusrat, Farrukh, Rahat, Nusrat's fivish-year-old daughter, and even an unidentified infant, simply sing &quot;aaaaeeaaaeeaaaaaa...&quot; is really what you need to understand if you are going to get this music!), courtesy, once again, of Husain Naqvi. Notice the incredible grace and authority of Nusrat's physical movements, especially his hands. Notice also the uncanny, inexplicable and really ultimately ineffable <em>warmth</em> of Nusrat's voice. And once again, there is video here of Nusrat's nephew Rahat (who's father, Nusrat's brother Farrukh, can almost always be seen sitting just next to Nusrat's left hand, playing the harmonium and backing him up vocally) who succeeded Nusrat in leading the troop after Nusrat's far too-early death. (I stood and sadly swayed next to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Glass">Philip Glass</a> at the last Rahat concert I went to in Manhattan.) </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr"></p>

<div><embed src="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/7JqZSJXgRYPEX7hyh" width="425" height="325" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true"></embed><br /><strong><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x117bt_nusrat-fateh-ali-khan">Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan</a></strong><br /><em>Uploaded by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/ploukkk">ploukkk</a></em></div></blockquote><p dir="ltr"></p>



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<h2>April 13, 2007</h2>



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<h3>Kurt Vonnegut</h3>


<p>Verlyn Klinkenborg in the <em>New York Times</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=206,height=334,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/13/screenhunter_04_apr_13_1644.gif"><img title="Screenhunter_04_apr_13_1644" height="334" alt="Screenhunter_04_apr_13_1644" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/13/screenhunter_04_apr_13_1644.gif" width="206" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young. It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust. </p>

<p>Not that Vonnegut is mainly for the young. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think he is entirely unsuitable for readers under the age of disillusionment. But the time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is the indispensable footnote to everything everyone is trying to teach you, the footnote that pulls the rug out from under the established truths being so firmly avowed in the body of the text. </p>

<p>He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end. He says not only what no one is saying, but also what — as a mild young person — you know it is forbidden to say. No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut. In his world, decency is likelier to be rooted in skepticism than it is in the ardor of faith.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/opinion/13fri4.html?_r=1&amp;oref=slogin">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>China is Moved to Shift its Line on Darfur, by Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg!</h3>


<p>An interesting case of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/washington/13diplo.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1176491869-AMHklOfP15uGCsd2O/C8EA">conflict resolution and non-state, ahem, actors</a>, in the NYT. </p><blockquote><p>For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.</p><p>But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.</p><p>So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.</p></blockquote></p>



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<h3>The Flow</h3>


<p>Paul Myerscough in the <em>London Review of Books</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>‘One night in Miami,’ Raymond Williams wrote in 1973, ‘still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial “breaks”.’ Things didn’t get any easier for him. Trailers for two other movies began to appear as inserts; the one he’d started with, about a crime in San Francisco, was interrupted not only by advertisements for cereal and deodorant, but by a romance set in Paris and then the roar of a prehistoric monster laying waste to New York. ‘I can still not be sure,’ Williams reflected, ‘what I took from that whole flow’ – aside, presumably, from a sharp urge to lie down.</p>

<p>‘Flow’ was the term Williams introduced in his column for the <em>Listener</em> at the turn of the 1970s to describe the rhetoric peculiar to television, the ceaseless rush of unrelated fragments that presents itself when we ‘watch TV’. ‘Flow’ always contained a tension, suggesting the smooth progression of something essentially discontinuous. But it has come to seem more, not less, appropriate as the years have passed. The increased speed, fragmentation and disconnectedness associated with the rise of MTV in the early 1980s is now the norm, and we have no trouble assimilating it: the discontinuity is so complete that the fragments flow like sand through your fingers.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n07/myer01_.html">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>More on Guest Workers in the Gulf Coast</h3>


<p><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/15/1352225&mode=thread&tid=25">DemocracyNow!</a> also has a piece on guest workers across the Gulf Coast.  It consists of interviews of Sabu Lal "one Indian guestworker who tried to commit suicide after he was fired", Nestor Vallero a "Mexican guestworker who says his Louisiana employer confiscated his passport and subjected him to humiliating conditions and treatment", and "Saket Soni, spokesman for the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity."  Oddly, instead of bringing democracy to the Middle East, the administration seems to have enabled the US to import immigrant labor practices from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.</p><blockquote><p>NESTOR VALLERO: [translated] They had told us that they promised $10 an hour, but it turned out when we got here they would only pay us $6.50 an hour. And they threatened us, and they said, “Well, if you don't like it, you can go home.” And when we asked for our passports, they said, “Oh, you want your passport back? Well, I’m only going to give it to you if you’re going to go home.” After all of this, we were just forced to take whatever job they were offering us, because we didn’t have any money to go home or do anything else.</p><p>But that wasn't all. They started to discount the cost of our housing from our wage. And we had to pay $1,200 a month for housing. And out of a $300 check that we received for two weeks work, they would take, discount almost $200 off that check. So, they’re really, you know, raking in the profits with our work. It’s really just a money-making scheme, this whole guestworkers program.</p><p>I think it's time that we modify the laws. They need to be overhauled, because we’re not the only ones that are suffering from this. There are many, many people who are suffering this injustice. Here in New Orleans, many contractors are paying $13 or $10 an hour to do cleanup work from the Katrina disaster. However, the contractors have figured out that they can import people from other countries and pay them half that to do the cleanup work. So this is really a contradiction. And this is creating tensions, racial tensions between the African Americans who are local to New Orleans and the Latin Americans who are being imported to work here.</p></blockquote></p>



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<h3>Venice and ‘Orientalism’</h3>


<p>From <em>The Art History Newsletter</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=121,height=160,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/13/0300124309_01_mzzzzzzz.jpg"><img title="0300124309_01_mzzzzzzz" height="160" alt="0300124309_01_mzzzzzzz" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/13/0300124309_01_mzzzzzzz.jpg" width="121" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>Is it possible to publish 300+ pages on a theme such as “Venice and the Islamic World: 828-1797″ without once footnoting Edward Said’s 1978 book <em>Orientalism</em>? Is it even possible for scholars, post-Said, to speak of “the Islamic world: 828-1797″? (Imagine a show titled “Baghdad and the Christian World.”) Apparently it is. This <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/store/st_family_viewer.asp/familyID/%7BC9732230-A57F-473F-95DE-87C4EB97E7AE%7D/FromPage//SpecialPermFlag/S/familyNo/1/catID/%7B23C39CE2-8D07-4472-A41F-01C5D2E7114E%7D" target="_blank">exhibition catalogue</a> was edited by Stefano Carboni; in his lead essay, he makes oblique reference to Said’s book and its adherents, writing that “the present exhibition and catalogue intend to emphasize [Venice’s] different and unique approach to, and understanding of, a world that has too often been described as ‘the other,’” later arguing that “it sounds incorrect or at least misleading to read about an ‘Orientalist’ curiosity towards the Ottomans on the part of the Venetians, at least in the 15th and 16th centuries, or to view the presence of well-observed Mamluk and Ottoman characters in the religious paintings and facade decorations for the Venetian <em>scuole</em> and <em>scuolete</em> as the inescapable representation of the fear-provoking Muslim enemy after the fall of Constantinople.” Are we witnessing a wave of anti-<em>Orientalism</em> sentiment? Recall last year’s publication of Robert Irwin’s 2006 book <em>Dangerous Knowledge, Orientalism and Its Discontents</em> (reviews available by <a href="http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2929" target="_blank">Michael Dirda</a> and <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/02/26/boirw19.xml" target="_blank">Noel Malcolm</a>).</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=505">here</a>.&nbsp; [Thanks to Jon Lackman.]</p>



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<h3>The best usher I ever knew</h3>


<p>Robert Duncan in <em>News By Us</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=432,height=558,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/13/kurtvonnegut.jpg"><img title="Kurtvonnegut" height="322" alt="Kurtvonnegut" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/13/kurtvonnegut.jpg" width="250" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>Nearly 18 years ago friends suggested we make the relatively short trip from Nampa, Idaho to the big capital of the state, Boise - the occasion being the yearly Hemingway Conference. Besides thinking of Hemingway in terms of my future move to Spain, in this case the event was especially attractive since the author Kurt Vonnegut was to be the main speaker.</p>

<p>As things would have it we arrived late after having lost our way in the big city. After dashing about like only hicks on a big-town-university campus can do, we reached a large auditorium – only to see that it was packed tight. If I remember correctly there were some heated words, when suddenly a gentleman in a tan corduroy jacket came up behind us and made some comments about how filled the place was. After a bit of banter to the respect, he told us to follow him.</p>

<p>He led us past the entire audience, then grabbed two chairs from off the stage, placed them firmly in the front row and told us to sit down … and then walked to the center of the stage and began to speak. It was only then I realized that it had been none other than Kurt Vonnegut who had been our usher. </p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://newsbyus.com/more.php?id=7863_0_1_0_M">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>Making barometric pressure the new black</h3>


<p>Troy Patterson in <em>Slate</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=400,height=309,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/13/city_lightning_400pxw.jpg"><img title="City_lightning_400pxw" height="278" alt="City_lightning_400pxw" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/13/city_lightning_400pxw.jpg" width="360" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>Wonya Lucas, the head honcho at the Weather Channel, has declared it her goal &quot;to expand the definition of weather by taking advantage of all its dimensions.&quot; Part of the job is to make weather fun, feisty, glamorous—to make barometric pressure the new black. Thus does <strong><em>100 Biggest Weather Moments</em></strong><em>&nbsp;</em>(this Sunday through Thursday at 8 p.m. ET) apply the countdown-special formula to the elements.</p>

<p>The host, somehow aptly, is Harry Connick Jr. The guests are superstars, scientists, cult heroes, kitsch figures, celebrity weatherpersons, and fabulous cranks who file in to chat, as Connick says, about &quot;the moments that inspired the human spirit, changed the way we think about our world, and, yes, even broke our hearts.&quot; No, his producers aren't shy about overreaching, which is only to be expected from a special whose bold logo and martial theme music are appropriate to a Super Bowl broadcast.</p>

<p>In fact, the countdown kicks off on the gridiron: At No. 100, football coach Don Shula laments his Dolphins' 3-0 loss to the Patriots during a blizzard on Dec. 12, 1982.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2164056?nav=tap3">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Abbas Raza at 02:27 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/making_barometr.html">Permalink</a>
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<h3>H2B Guest Workers, A Closer Look</h3>


<p>Lindsay Beyerstein and Larisa Alexandrovna report on some <a href="http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Human_trafficking_of_Indian_guest_workers_0412.html">H2B guest workers</a> in the Gulf Coast, in the <em>Raw Story</em>.</p><blockquote><p>A month ago Monday, a group of guest workers from India placed a frantic 3:00 am phone call to Saket Soni, lead organizer for the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. The workers said that armed security guards were holding some workers prisoner in the TV room of the Signal International Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the company's 290 welders and pipe fitters live.</p><p>The men told Soni that Signal International – a sub-contractor for mammoth defense contractor Northrop Grumman – had staged a pre-dawn raid and that six Indian workers had been detained in the “TV room,” flanked by security guards, one of whom carried a gun. About 200 other Indian employees at Signal were standing outside the room.</p><p>Signal says they detained the guest workers at the advice of US immigration officials, in an attempt to forcibly deport them following a labor dispute. Though the workers were later released into the custody of community groups, the incident has shed light on a longstanding immigration problem – the vulnerability of guest workers who travel to the United States on H-2B visas, and their exploitation at the hands of so-called “recruiters” and the companies they work for.</p><p>Indian workers Joseph Jacob and Sabu Lal believe the Mar. 9 raid was initiated as Signal’s reaction to worker complaints, while the company says the workers were fired for performance-related issues.</p><p>But the bigger story is in the details: These 290 Indians paid upwards of $15,000 each to travel to America, lured by the promises of a Mississippi sheriff’s deputy.</p></blockquote></p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:21 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/h2b_guest_worke.html">Permalink</a>
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<h3>Dred Scott reargued</h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>The Harvard Gazette:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=225,height=164,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/13/dred3450.jpg"><img title="Dred3450" height="145" alt="Dred3450" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/13/dred3450.jpg" width="200" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>You don’t have to be a lawyer or historian to have that name conjure up feelings of horror and injustice. Scott was the American-born slave who lent his name to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the legal case leading to an infamous 1857 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, generally regarded as a legal and moral low point for American jurisprudence. Among other things, the decision held that no black American, slave or free, was a U.S. citizen, or had rights protected by the Constitution. Its harsh language about “that unfortunate race,” and its uncompromising stand in favor of slavery, drew the final battle lines for the Civil War, which erupted only four years later. </p>

<p>The Dred Scott decision has had legal and cultural reverberations in the 15 decades since, continuing a debate about the nature of citizenship that echoes today. So much so that Harvard Law School (HLS) marked the decision’s 150th anniversary with a conference April 6 and 7. “We are at once so far from, and so close to, that moment” in 1857, said Civil War historian Drew G. Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Lincoln Professor of History, and president-elect of Harvard University. In remarks opening the event, Faust called the Dred Scott decision “of central importance to the dissolution of the Union” as well as a vivid marker of “the burden of Southern history.” </p>

<p>Within dozens of pages of inflammatory language, the decision — penned by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney —held that neither Congress nor any territorial governments had the right to ban slavery in the territories. Moreover, Dred Scott — who had lived for long periods of time in the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory — was still a slave, an object of property, and had no right to sue in a court of law. </p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/04.12/11-dred.html">here.</a></p>



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<h3>Sperm made from human bone marrow </h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>Science:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=203,height=152,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/13/sperm_cells203.jpg"><img title="Sperm_cells203" height="149" alt="Sperm_cells203" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/13/sperm_cells203.jpg" width="200" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Normally these stem cells from the bone marrow would develop into the different cell types in muscle tissue. But the researchers induced a small number of them to develop into what appeared to be spermatagonial cells - cells found in the testes which would normally develop into mature sperm cells. This is the first time human spermatagonial cells have been made artificially in this way. And lead researcher Professor Karim Nayernia, now at the North-east England Stem Cell Institute based at the Centre for Life in Newcastle upon Tyne, said he hopes his investigations will mean he might one day be able to treat young men rendered infertile by chemotherapy. </p>

<p>He said: &quot;We're very excited about this discovery. &quot;Our next goal is to see if we can get the spermatagonial cells to progress to mature sperm in the laboratory and this should take around three to five years of experiments.&quot; He acknowledged that the law may be a stumbling block. </p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6547675.stm">here.</a></p>



<p class="posted">
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</p>


<h2>April 12, 2007</h2>



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<h3>Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?</h3>


<p>Gene Weingarten in the <em>Washington Post </em>(via <em><a href="http://www.annemone.com/blog/">Annemone</a></em>):</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?</p>

<p>&quot;Let's assume,&quot; Slatkin said, &quot;that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.&quot;</p>

<p>So, a crowd would gather?</p>

<p>&quot;Oh, yes.&quot;</p>

<p>And how much will he make?</p>

<p>&quot;About $150.&quot;</p>

<p>Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.</p>

<p>&quot;How'd I do?&quot;</p>

<p>We'll tell you in a minute.</p>

<p>&quot;Well, who was the musician?&quot;</p>

<p>Joshua Bell.</p>

<p>&quot;NO!!!&quot;</p>

<p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=458,height=259,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/12/screenhunter_02_apr_12_2220.gif"><img title="Screenhunter_02_apr_12_2220" height="259" alt="Screenhunter_02_apr_12_2220" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/12/screenhunter_02_apr_12_2220.gif" width="458" border="0" /></a></p>

<p>A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?hpid=multimedia3">here</a> (including great video of Bell's performance).&nbsp; [Thanks to Douglas Nerad.]</p>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>A Resurgence of 9/11 Conspiracy Theories</h3>


<p>"The conspiracy theory of society…comes from abandoning God and then asking 'Who is in his place?'"--Karl Popper</p><p>Via Crooked Timber, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, <a href="http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i42/42a01001.htm">9/11 conspiracies</a> are making a comeback.</p><blockquote><p>In recent months, interest in September 11-conspiracy theories has surged. Since January, traffic to the major conspiracy Web sites has increased steadily. The number of blogs that mention "9/11" and "conspiracy" each day has climbed from a handful to over a hundred.</p><p>Why now?</p><p>Oddly enough, the answer lies with a soft-spoken physicist from Brigham Young University named Steven E. Jones, a devout Mormon and, until recently, a faithful supporter of George W. Bush.</p><p>Last November Mr. Jones posted a paper online advancing the hypothesis that the airplanes Americans saw crashing into the twin towers were not sufficient to cause their collapse, and that the towers had to have been brought down in a controlled demolition. Now he is the best hope of a movement that seeks to convince the rest of America that elements of the government are guilty of mass murder on their own soil.</p><p>His paper — written by an actual professor who works at an actual research university — has made him a celebrity in the conspiracy universe. He is now co-chairman of a group called the Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which includes about 50 professors — more in the humanities than in the sciences — from institutions like Clemson University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Wisconsin.</p></blockquote></p>



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<h3>Kurt's canon</h3>


<p id="deck">In this entry from &quot;The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors,&quot; Dave Eggers summarizes and notates Vonnegut's literary output.</p>

<p>Dave Eggers in <em>Salon</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=300,height=409,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/12/kv.gif"><img title="Kv" height="409" alt="Kv" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/12/kv.gif" width="300" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>Kurt Vonnegut is one of the few writers in this guide that I can be sure that everyone has already read (unless &quot;everyone&quot; includes people who cannot read, or do not read, or are very young, or speak a language into which his work as not been translated). So. Vonnegut is a science fiction aficionado, WWII vet, lover of women, pitier of the poor, cranky luddite, fun-loving doomsayer, sometime postmodernist. His books -- very personal novels disguised as allegories disguised as science fiction -- nearly always take the entire world (or more) as their canvas. Usually there is a world war, or some catastrophic event, or often genocide, or a scientific or political innovation that threatens to, or has succeeded in, destroying all that we hold dear. </p>

<p>Because of this, Vonnegut could be dismissed as a cranky pessimist. Because his prose is frank and uncomplicated and often very funny, he could be passed off as a &quot;humorist.&quot; Gore Vidal once called him &quot;America's worst writer.&quot; But despite Vidal (did you know he's related to Al Gore? <em>And</em> the Kennedys?) and other critics, for some inexplicable reason, Vonnegut is taken seriously (by many at least), and he is loved by millions -- even the superintellectuals like yourself.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/04/12/eggers_on_vonnegut/">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:59 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/kurts_canon.html">Permalink</a>
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<h3>Provocative, harrowing and funny to the end</h3>


<p>Karen R. Long in the <em>Cleveland Plain Dealer</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=432,height=558,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/12/kurtvonnegut.jpg"></a><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=275,height=420,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/13/birdcage.jpg"></a><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=277,height=514,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/13/screenhunter_03_apr_13_1431.gif"><img title="Screenhunter_03_apr_13_1431" height="514" alt="Screenhunter_03_apr_13_1431" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/13/screenhunter_03_apr_13_1431.gif" width="277" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>When Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday night in Manhattan, he had a drawing ready, a simple doodle really, of a bird cage standing empty, its door flung open. </p>

<p>Underneath the image is a simple &quot;Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007,&quot; the only post Thursday on the writer's official Web site. His quick sketch amounted to the perfect exit line -- accessible, playful, a hint of giving death the slip. </p>

<p>Like some of Vonnegut's writing, in fact. The topic of mortality supplied Vonnegut with endless lines -- from his jokes about having the bad taste to live until he was 84 to his famous refrain whenever a character dies in &quot;Slaughterhouse-Five&quot;: </p>

<p>&quot;So it goes.&quot; </p>

<p>That funny, harrowing book, published in 1969, quickly became an anti-establishment coda on the absurdities and horrors of war. Vonnegut took his acrid memories of surviving the 1945 Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, as a prisoner of war, and turned them into a semi-autobiographical riff, a science-fiction-fueled work of art.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://blog.cleveland.com/entertainment/2007/04/kurt_vonnegut_provocative_harr.html">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:34 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/provocative_har.html">Permalink</a>
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<h3>So it goes.</h3>


<p>From <em>This Divided State</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=468,height=614,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/12/vonnegut.jpg"><img title="Vonnegut" height="498" alt="Vonnegut" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/12/vonnegut.jpg" width="380" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>I wrote Kurt Vonnegut three letters. I never sent any of them. And when I was busy not sending them, I knew that eventually his time would come and I would regret not sending them.<br /><br />Truly, I regret not sending them.<br /><br />In the letters I told him that he didn't need to fear so much about the generations of kids after him. That people like me still do care about things like Abraham Lincoln and Sacco and Vanzetti and Eugene Debs. Kids like myself (although I suppose I'm not much of a kid anymore) really did learn and care to learn from people as wise as he.</p>

<p>More importantly, he taught me how important it is to care about my fellow man better than all my years studying dogma inside an organized religion and that I didn't have to believe in God to do it. He taught me the value of Christianity and the teachings of Christ without having to fall into the trap of all of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo that went with it. He taught me the optimism to see the essential decency in pretty much any human being.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://thisdividedstate.blogspot.com/2007/04/in-memoriam_6550.html">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:23 PM | <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/so_it_goes.html">Permalink</a>
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<h3>Sitting Up Mud Lies Down</h3>


<p>“God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, &quot;Sit up!&quot;...And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud...I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night.”<br />--The Last Rites of the Bokononist faith (Written by Kurt Vonnegut, jr. - RIP)</p>

<p>Kirsten Anderberg:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=310,height=410,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/12/kilgore.jpg"><img title="Kilgore" height="410" alt="Kilgore" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/12/kilgore.jpg" width="310" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>It is with sadness I eulogize Kurt Vonnegut, jr. today. He was an impressive sitting up mud! I used to cut classes in high school, to go sit under a tree and become engrossed in Vonnegut’s wonderful novel, “Cat’s Cradle.” I have used lines from “Cat’s Cradle” and “Breakfast of Champions” as life references since the 1970’s. Terms such as “karass,” “sitting up mud,” “bad chemicals,” and “Bokononism” have become commonplace in my life, due to my exposure to Vonnegut at an early age. My father gave me “Cat’s Cradle” to read, and I handed it to my teenaged son to read as well. I normally do not enjoy fiction, but Vonnegut was an exception for me. I delighted in his plots and twists, all heavily laden with sarcasm and political angst. “Cat’s Cradle” is a fictional story about what scientists and their families did the day America dropped the A-Bomb on Japan. I love the dark humor throughout “Cat’s Cradle.” And the child’s game “cat’s cradle” has never seemed the same after reading that book! In the book, the father who rarely speaks to his children, walks up to his son and leans into the kid, in a frightening manner, and holding a cat’s cradle made of strings in his fingers, says, “See the cat? See the cradle?!” Yes, that in a nutshell, is the madness and beauty of Vonnegut’s writing style.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/04/12/18396316.php">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>What a writer. And what a man.</h3>


<p>I can't believe Kurt Vonnegut is dead. I don't want to believe it. I cannot remember being this saddened by the death of a man that I did not know personally. I wish I had met him. I wish I had just seen him once. Beajerry has said something lovely in a comment to Robin's post below: &quot;Kurt's death is a stroke to the world's imaginitive mind. We shall now all limp.&quot; Indeed. And also in the comments to that post, Storey brings to our attention this nice video tribute:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/atABhlMLYvU" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed></p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">I expect we'll have much more to say about Kurt Vonnegut in the coming days. Do take a look at the video of an interview with John Stewart that Robin has linked to below. At the end of the documentary about Muhammad Ali, <em>When We Were Kings</em>, George Plimpton simply says: &quot;What a fighter. And what a man.&quot; That's where I got the title for this post. I'm off to dig up my copy of <em>The Sirens of Titan</em> for my wife, who has never read it. I envy her: what a delicious feast of savory ideas and beautiful language awaits her!</p>

<p dir="ltr"></p>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007</h3>


<p>Very sad news: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/books/12vonnegut.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin">Kurt Vonnegut is dead</a>.   In the <em>NYT</em>:</p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/12/vonn190.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=190,height=193,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="Vonn190" title="Vonn190" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/12/vonn190.jpg" width="190" height="193" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" /></a><blockquote><p>Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.</p><p>Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.</p><p>Mr. Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.</p><p>Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?</p></blockquote>John Stewart said in the introduction to his <a href="http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=18090">Daily Show interview</a> of Vonnegut, "As an adolescent, he made my life bearable." I'd add that he continued to deliver insights to adults as well.</p>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>Fish pollutants' link to diabetes </h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>BBC News:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=203,height=159,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/12/fish.jpg"><img title="Fish" height="156" alt="Fish" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/12/fish.jpg" width="200" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>An international team found high levels of persistent organic pesticides (POPs) in the blood correlated to insulin resistance, a precursor to diabetes. POPs are stored in fatty tissues - the study suggested this may be why obese people are more vulnerable to diabetes. However, experts have said that the study published in Diabetes Care is far from conclusive. </p>

<p>Patients resistant to the hormone insulin are unable to remove excess glucose from their blood, and this is normally an important step in the onset of type two diabetes. The new research therefore suggests that POPs act critically at a very early stage in the development of diabetes. In 2005 researchers in Sweden found people exposed to high levels of POPs were more at risk of developing type two diabetes. They found higher levels of POP residues were present blood samples of men and women who had diabetes than in those who did not. The authors of the current research, based at Kyungpook National University and the University of Minnesota, also previously found blood concentrations of POPs were linked to the prevalence of diabetes. </p>

<p>Obese patients with low POP levels had an unexpectedly low incidence of diabetes. </p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6544709.stm">here.</a></p><blockquote dir="ltr"></blockquote>



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<h3>How to stop cancer from spreading</h3>


<p dir="ltr"><span class="articletext">From <em>Nature:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=180,height=265,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/12/mice.jpg"><img title="Mice" height="294" alt="Mice" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/12/mice.jpg" width="200" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </span></p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><span class="articletext">Breast cancer has been prevented from spreading in mice with a simple cocktail of drugs, some of which are already approved for human use. </span><span class="articletext">The spread, or metastasis, of cancer is the most dreaded aspect of the disease: tumours formed this way are responsible for 90% of cancer deaths. But the process has been difficult to fathom — two tumours may by all appearances be identical, yet one will spread and one will not. And a tumour may shed hundreds or thousands of cells into the bloodstream every day, of which only a tiny fraction will successfully lodge in a new site and start to proliferate into a new cancer.</span><br /><br /><span class="articletext">In 2005, Joan Massagué at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York identified a roster of genes that seem to help breast cancer cells to metastasize to the lung. Now Massagué's team has shown how four of these genes specifically work in concert to fuel metastasis. Addressing these four genes with drugs, they show in mice, has a dramatic effect.</span><br /><br /><span class="articletext">Massagué hopes that this approach will work better than existing treatments, because it is targeted against genes now proven to fuel tumour growth and metastasis. And, he notes, two of the drugs are already in clinical use, which should speed clinical trials. &quot;You couldn't have it better,&quot; he says. Other researchers say they would like to see data from human patients before getting too excited.</span></p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070409/full/070409-6.html">here.</a></p>



<p class="posted">
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</p>


<h2>April 11, 2007</h2>



<a id="a0032777562"></a>

<h3>Against National Poetry Month As Such</h3>


<p>Charles Bernstein at the <em>University of Chicago Press</em> website:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote><p>And they say<br />If I would just sing lighter songs<br />Better for me would it be,<br />But not is this truthful;<br />For sense remote<br />Adduces worth and gives it<br />Even if ignorant reading impairs it;<br />But it's my creed<br />That these songs yield<br />No value at the commencing<br />Only later, when one earns it.<br />&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;—translated from Giraut de Bornelh (12th century)</p></blockquote><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=144,height=216,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/bernstein_charles.jpg"><img title="Bernstein_charles" height="216" alt="Bernstein_charles" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/bernstein_charles.jpg" width="144" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>April is the cruelest month for poetry. </p>

<p>As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People. </p>

<p>The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: &quot;Poetry's not so bad, really.&quot;</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html">here</a>.</p>



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</p>





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<h3>The Mystery of Easter Island</h3>


<p><em>New findings rekindle old debates about when the first people arrived and why their civilization collapsed.</em></p>

<p>Whitney Dangerfield in <em>Smithsonian Magazine</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=353,height=235,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/easter2statues.jpg"><img title="Easter2statues" height="235" alt="Easter2statues" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/easter2statues.jpg" width="353" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>Hundreds of years ago, a small group of Polynesians rowed their wooden outrigger canoes across vast stretches of open sea, navigating by the evening stars and the day's ocean swells. When and why these people left their native land remains a mystery. But what is clear is that they made a small, uninhabited island with rolling hills and a lush carpet of palm trees their new home, eventually naming their 63 square miles of paradise Rapa Nui—now popularly known as Easter Island.</p>

<p>On this outpost nearly 2,300 miles west of South America and 1,100 miles from the nearest island, the newcomers chiseled away at volcanic stone, carving moai, monolithic statues built to honor their ancestors. They moved the mammoth blocks of stone—on average 13 feet tall and 14 tons—to different ceremonial structures around the island, a feat that required several days and many men.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2007/april/easter.php">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>High-risk air routes for invasive species revealed</h3>


<p>Catherine Brahic in <em>New Scientist</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=640,height=258,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/dn115741_842.jpg"><img title="Dn115741_842" height="145" alt="Dn115741_842" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/dn115741_842.jpg" width="360" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>A new study of how the global airline network connects far-flung regions with similar climates may help pinpoint flights most at risk of unwittingly importing invasive species. </p>

<p>Andrew Tatem at the University of Oxford in the UK and Simon Haye at the Centre for Geographic Medicine in Nairobi, Kenya, mapped the routes of all 3.2 million flights scheduled between 1 May 2005 and 30 April 2006. </p>

<p>They looked at temperature, humidity and rainfall at the flights' origins and destinations to gain an idea of how similar the climates were at each end of a plane journey. </p>

<p>&quot;Species that are very sensitive to climate, such as mosquitoes and midges, will stand a better chance of being successful invaders if the climate at their new location is as similar as possible to the climate in their native habitat,&quot; Tatem explains.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn11574-highrisk-air-routes-for-invasive-species-revealed.html">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
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</p>





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<h3>Culture Flows Through English Channels, but Not for Long</h3>


<p>Momus (Nick Currie) in <em>Wired</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=192,height=192,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/1035f1997e.jpg"><img title="1035f1997e" height="192" alt="1035f1997e" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/1035f1997e.jpg" width="192" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>At UNESCO's glamorous Cold War spy-thriller headquarters in Paris, Koïchiro Matsuura, the Japanese diplomat running the organization, is pushing to protect and promote the diversity of cultural expressions.</p>

<p>Yep, he's trying to keep English from muting out every other language, and that's certainly nothing new. But unlike others, Matsuura <a href="http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=37221&amp;URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&amp;URL_SECTION=201.html">comes off</a> like an airline executive talking about routes, planes, hubs, spokes and flow. That's because culture flows.</p>

<p>There are two basic route models in the <a href="http://ostpxweb.dot.gov/aviation/airlinebusinessmodel.htm">aviation business</a>. Airlines either fly point to point or hub and spoke. Point-to-point flights move from one city to another, while hub-and-spoke transit goes through connections via the airline's base city. Now, let's contemplate that in relation to cultural flows. With books, films and the internet, which kind of world do we live in, point to point or hub and spoke? If culture were an airline model, in other words, would Poles be able to fly to Tokyo without having to transfer at LAX?</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/commentary/imomus/2007/04/imomus0410">here</a>.</p>



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</p>





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<h3>The Countless Achievements of a Math Master</h3>


<p>David Brown in the <em>Washington Post</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><em>You should approach Joyce's &quot;Ulysses&quot; as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.</em></p>

<p>-- <em>William Faulkner</em></p>

<p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=232,height=305,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/screenhunter_01_apr_11_1414.gif"><img title="Screenhunter_01_apr_11_1414" height="305" alt="Screenhunter_01_apr_11_1414" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/screenhunter_01_apr_11_1414.gif" width="232" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>Let's approach Leonhard Euler and his work the same way. It will make things a whole lot easier.</p>

<p>If one is not a mathematician (and except for a few of you out there, who is?), it's going to be impossible to actually understand why Euler was such a great man. Other people will have to tell us, and we should probably believe them.</p>

<p>In 1988, the journal Mathematical Intelligencer asked its readers to list the most beautiful equations in mathematics. Of the top five, Euler, who was born in Basel, Switzerland, 300 years ago next Sunday, discovered three of them, including No. 1:</p>

<p>e<sup>i(pi)</sup> + 1 = 0.</p>

<p>(The other two were from Euclid, who worked in the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C.)</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">More <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/08/AR2007040800745.html">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
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</p>





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<h3>Jeff Wall acknowledges the meaningless truth . . . what a relief</h3>


<p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/wall.gif" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=122,height=187,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="Wall" title="Wall" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/wall.gif" width="150" height="229" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" /></a></p>

<blockquote>There is nothing unique or even special about the phenomenon of artists who write with distinction about art generally and their own practices in particular. History provides numerous examples—Leonardo's great notebooks, Reynolds's Discourses, Vasari's Lives, and Delacroix's journals and letters among them. The twentieth century, with its enthusiasm for manifestos and credos, proves almost embarrassingly rich in this regard, from Gleizes and Metzinger to Peter Halley. But the publication of Jeff Wall's Selected Essays and Interviews by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on the occasion of the artist's retrospective there, is an especially valuable contribution to this literature, even a singular one. For while the postwar neo-avant-gardes have been extraordinarily prolific in terms of literate and rhetorically persuasive artist-writers—Allan Kaprow, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Marcel Broodthaers, Art & Language, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, and Mike Kelley, to name but a passel—Wall's art-critical writing (and his concomitant interviews) bear the stamp of his formal art-historical training. He spent several years in the 1970s pursuing a postgraduate degree in the field at London's Courtauld Institute, and this background left an indelible mark on his art production proper, as well as on its critical reception.</blockquote>

<p>more from Bookforum <a href="http://www.bookforum.net/rimanelli.html">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
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</p>





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<h3>a war-weary Pentagon master seeking refuge to wring the blood from his hands?</h3>


<p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/070409_r16049_p233.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=233,height=357,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="070409_r16049_p233" title="070409_r16049_p233" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/070409_r16049_p233.jpg" width="150" height="229" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" /></a></p>

<blockquote>The Selimiye Mosque, in Edirne, a city in northwest Turkey, is a magnificent stone edifice, with four minarets and an austere, octagonal-shaped body supporting a large dome. Built for Sultan Selim II in the sixteenth century, it has withstood numerous earthquakes and can accommodate more than five thousand kneeling worshippers. One evening at the end of January, I visited the mosque with Paul Wolfowitz, the president of the World Bank, and a half dozen of his aides and colleagues. Two years have passed since President Bush nominated Wolfowitz, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense and one of the architects of the war in Iraq, to head the sprawling multinational lending institution that has as its official goal “a world without poverty.”</blockquote>

<p>more from The New Yorker <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/09/070409fa_fact_cassidy">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
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</p>





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<h3>To Apollo: His Music, His Missiles, His Muses</h3>


<p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/neon256.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=128,height=256,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="Neon256" title="Neon256" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/neon256.jpg" width="150" height="300" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" /></a></p>

<blockquote>There he was, surrounded by urban noise and crowds, patiently inscribing grey stone. "To the unknown Roman girl", said the brand new epitaph. I had come to 30 St Mary Axe in the City of London - the Gherkin - to see a poem that is written on benches around Norman Foster's tower, by the Scottish conceptual artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. And here was another man, carving a memorial to a Roman skeleton to be reburied here this week. It was an encounter with the ancient world as unexpected as the one I'd just had in an exhibition of neon wall texts.</blockquote>

<p>more from The Guardian <a href="http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2053444,00.html">here</a>.</p>



<p class="posted">
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</p>





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<h3>UP CLOSE WITH DR. HAWKING </h3>


<p dir="ltr" style="CLEAR: both; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">From <em>MSNBC: </em></p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr" style="CLEAR: both; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=298,height=212,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/hawking_hmed_5p_2.jpg"><img title="Hawking_hmed_5p_2" height="177" alt="Hawking_hmed_5p_2" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/hawking_hmed_5p_2.jpg" width="250" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> World-famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking was in the Seattle spotlight Monday night to explain the big questions: Why does time seem to move always forward but never backward? Why does he think running time backwards the only way to solve the universe's biggest mystery? But the small questions can be just as intriguing: For example, how does Hawking “autograph” a book? When he composes a sentence on his gesture-controlled computer, does he blink or does he sneer?</p></blockquote><blockquote dir="ltr"><p style="CLEAR: both">Here are some insights into those questions, great and small, gleaned during a close encounter with Cambridge University's frail genius: The title of Hawking's advertised talk was &quot;The History of the Universe Backwards,&quot; but he actually delivered two lectures - one looking back at his own career in physics, and another focusing on his latest theories about a &quot;top-down&quot; approach to cosmology.</p></blockquote><p style="CLEAR: both">More <a href="http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/04/10/129538.aspx">here.</a></p>



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</p>





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<h3>Respect for Wordsworth 200 years on with daffodil rap</h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>Guardian:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=128,height=64,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/11/daffodils1.jpg"><img title="Daffodils1" height="125" alt="Daffodils1" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/11/daffodils1.jpg" width="250" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Two hundred years after wandering through drifts of spring flowers in the Lake District, William Wordsworth has been given a pop video and rap version of his famous poem on daffodils. Read by a zany red squirrel in a series of dramatic mountain and lakeside locations, the hip take on the 24 lines of verse aims to lure more young people to the national park this summer. </p>

<p>Bouncing past tearooms and hotel discos, as well as the bay on Ullswater where the poem was inspired, the rapping rodent - a local busker in red fur - marks the bicentenary of the poem's publication. &quot;Wordsworth's Daffodils poem has remained unchanged for 200 years,&quot; said a spokeswoman for Cumbria tourist board. &quot;To keep it alive for another two centuries we want to engage the YouTube generation who go for modern music and amusing video footage on the web.&quot;</p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2054283,00.html">here.</a></p>







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</p>


<h2>April 10, 2007</h2>



<a id="a0032735168"></a>

<h3>blackburn on baudrillard</h3>


<p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/10/jeanbaudrillard788372.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=350,height=361,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="Jeanbaudrillard788372" title="Jeanbaudrillard788372" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/10/jeanbaudrillard788372.jpg" width="149" height="154" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" /></a></p>

<blockquote>French postmodernism may be passing, but it had a point. Even if engagement with the world is the cure, the respite it gives may be short-lived. No sooner has the real moment gone than the work of memory begins, once more selecting, massaging, suppressing and spinning. That moment is like a glimpse of the naked king, or the politician’s one-day dash into the war zone: it may be a glimpse of truth, but even if we are honest enough to see anything we do not want to see, that in turn may just reinvigorate the work of disguise. That can’t have been the real Louis XIV, or the real Iraq. And heaven forfend that people see them like that—otherwise it might really destroy our legacy, or at any rate the bit that counts: its representation in self-image, story and picture.</blockquote>

<p>more from Prospect Magazine <a href="http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=8354">here</a>.</p>



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<a id="a0032735016"></a>

<h3>art should be a form of energy made visible</h3>


<p><a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/10/20070426tintoretto.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=200,height=243,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false"><img alt="20070426tintoretto" title="20070426tintoretto" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/10/20070426tintoretto.jpg" width="150" height="182" border="0" style="float: right; margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" /></a></p>

<blockquote>The paintings of Jacopo Tintoretto come as a revelation. According to standard opinion Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael were the supreme artists of the sixteenth century; yet often during the last four hundred years, viewers have gazed in awe and surprise at works by Tintoretto, and wondered if he might be the greatest painter of all. Thus John Ruskin during his first visit to Venice wrote:

<p>    <blockquote>I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today before Tintoret. Just be so good as to take my list of painters, and put him in the school of Art at the top, top, top of everything, with a great big black line to stop him off from everybody.... As for painting, I think I didn't know what it meant till today.</blockquote></blockquote></p>

<p>more from the NYRB <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20111">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>The Beginning of Mugabe's End?</h3>


<p>Zimbabwean human rights activist Mary Ndlovu in<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/40499"> Pambazuka</a>:</p><blockquote><p>The past weeks have indeed brought a qualitative change to Zimbabwe, with a significant shift in the balance of power between the forces which keep Mugabe in power and those which wish to remove him. Ultimately a government’s endurance rests on its success in maintaining a productive and healthy economy which delivers at least subsistence to the population. Mugabe has failed spectacularly in this sphere, with the economy in a state of contraction for the past seven years, and in free fall for the past year.</p><p>This collapse has effects which undermine his political support. Firstly, it makes it more difficult for him to dispense the largesse necessary to buy the continuing loyalty of the political and security elite, and to keep the lower ranks of the forces in line. Second, it makes the population, which has remained largely quiescent and submissive in the face of oppression, restive and prepared to risk more in confronting a hugely unpopular government which has destroyed their lives. And thirdly it has spill-over consequences in the region which are beginning to annoy and frustrate neighbouring governments.</p><p>Perceiving a weakening in Mugabe’s power base, opposition leaders in political parties, civil society organisations, student movements and churches, have taken their cue and demonstrated greater determination and willingness to come together to push him out.</p></blockquote></p>



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<h3>On the Robert Moses Exhibits</h3>


<p><a href="http://www.nplusonemag.com/moses.html">In n+1</a>:</p><blockquote><p>Last season’s series of museum exhibitions (the Queens Museum’s “Road to Recreation,” the Museum of the City of New York’s “Remaking the Metropolis,” and the Wallach Gallery’s “Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution”), seeking, quite openly, to recover Robert Moses’s reputation and legacy, did not emphasize this particular antagonism, between many of Moses’s built structures and the current spatial ambitions of the city’s real estate interests. The Moses of the exhibits, which were unusual both for the artfulness of their display and for the openly opinionated quality of their explanatory plaques, was not the Moses whose expressways and housing projects are currently preventing New York City from gentrifying as thoroughly as, say, central London or Paris. Instead, it was the “middle-class” Moses—the builder of middle-income housing complexes like Morningside Gardens and Washington Square Village, of Lincoln Center and the United Nations, of soaring suspension bridges leading to suburban parkways, of Jones Beach, the Astoria Pool, and two world’s fairs.</p><p>Such a Moses, of course, did actually exist. Moreover, this particular Moses, this mighty champion of middle-class values, has more often been the source of commentators’ collective condemnation than he has of their esteem. Jane Jacobs was already criticizing this Moses, in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, for importing suburban spatial norms into her city of sidewalks, stoops, and corner shops. By this time, Lewis Mumford, an admirer of Moses during the 1930s and 40s, and usually an adversary of Jacobs’s, was attacking Moses on similar grounds. He found infuriating the “car culture” Moses built for so exclusively, and, along with many other city-planning advocates of the time, Mumford derided the great bureaucrat for neglecting mass transit.</p></blockquote></p>



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<h3>Iraq and Ambivalence</h3>


<p>There are parts of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tish-durkin/iraq-a-place-of-ambivale_b_45145.html">this piece</a> by Tish Durkin I disagree with, but the following I have seen at times, and it does leave a bad taste. I hoped my predictions of disaster were wrong from the get go, and that my sporadic predictions that things would work out for Iraq would be right.  Shadenfreude over this is, well, not just a broken joy but a deformed one. (via normblog)</p><blockquote><p>[W]hat depresses me, and makes me despise so much war criticism even when I agree with it, is that so many of those positing it seem so happy about what's gone wrong. They seem to relish the probability that Iraq will get worse and worse so that they can be righter and righter.</p><p>This isn't new.</p><p>I remember an anti-war activist who was staying in our hotel in Baghdad, who had not come to Karbala for that first ashura. A good person trying to do good things, she had stayed behind to prepare a media alert on the horrors of the occupation -- which, especially at a time when the coverage out of Iraq was largely very upbeat, was a very worthy thing to be doing. Still, one thing really bothered me about her. When, upon everyone's return from Karbala, the activist heard that the day had actually been free of violence, and full of jubilation, she looked as if she had tasted a bad olive, and spit out her response: "Oh, fuck."</p><p>How she must be gloating now. Reality has made sages of the most dire prophets. It's perfect: Iraq really has gone to hell, and the demon neocons are the ones that sent it.</p><p>Like liberals - and thinking conservatives, and sentient beings -- everywhere, I gravely doubt that the troop surge - so little so late -- will do anything to save Iraq. But for the sake of the Iraqi people, I sure hope it does - even if that helps the Republicans.</p></blockquote><p>But I'm not sure how widespread it is. While a few I've met do seem to feel glee at Iraq's slide into the abyss (in an echo of the crisis mongering of old Commies, who thought a protracted depression would save the world!), most don't.  The opening of Paul Krugman's April 11th 2003 NYT column seems me to be representative on this front:</p><blockquote><p>Credit where credit is due: the hawks were right to say that a whiff of precision-guided grapeshot would lead to the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. But even skeptics about this war expected a military victory. (''Of course we'll win on the battlefield, probably with ease'' was the opening line of my start-of-the-war column.) Instead, we worried -- and continue to worry -- about what would follow. As another skeptic, Michael Kinsley of Slate, wrote yesterday: ''I do hope to be proven wrong. But it hasn't happened yet.''</p><p>Why worry? I won't pretend to have any insights into what is going on in the minds of the Iraqi people. But there is a pattern to the Bush administration's way of doing business that does not bode well for the future -- a pattern of conquest followed by malign neglect.</p></blockquote></p>



<p class="posted">
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<h3>Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It</h3>


<p dir="ltr">From <em>The New York Times:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=395,height=277,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/10/desire395.1"><img title="Desire395" height="245" alt="Desire395" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/10/desire395.1" width="350" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Sexual desire. The phrase alone holds such loaded, voluptuous power that the mere expression of it sounds like a come-on — a little pungent, a little smutty, a little comical and possibly indictable. Everybody with a pair of currently or formerly active gonads knows about sexual desire. It is a near-universal experience, the invisible clause on one’s birth certificate stipulating that one will, upon reaching maturity, feel the urge to engage in activities often associated with the issuance of more birth certificates. Yet universal does not mean uniform, and the definitions of sexual desire can be as quirky and personalized as the very chromosomal combinations that sexual reproduction will yield. Ask an assortment of men and women, “What is sexual desire, and how do you know you’re feeling it?” and after some initial embarrassed mutterings and demands for anonymity, they answer as follows:</p>

<p>“There’s a little bit of adrenaline, a puffing of the chest, a bit of anticipatory tongue motion,” said a divorced lawyer in his late 40s.</p>

<p>“I feel relaxed, warm and comfortable,” said a designer in her 30s. </p>

<p>“A yearning to kiss or grab someone who might respond,” said a male filmmaker, 50. “Or if I’m alone, to call up exes.” </p>

<p>“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.” </p>

<p>At the same time, the researchers said, it is precisely the complexity of sexual desire, the depth, richness and tangled spangle of its weave, that call out to be understood. </p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/science/10desi.html?_r=1&amp;ref=science&amp;oref=slogin">here.</a></p>





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<h3>A single gene could explain much of the size difference between dog breeds</h3>


<p dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">From <em>BBC News:</em><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=203,height=217,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/10/dog.jpg"><img title="Dog" height="213" alt="Dog" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/10/dog.jpg" width="200" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a> </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Researchers studied 3,000 dogs from 143 breeds and found small dogs all shared a mutation in a gene that influences size in other animals. This form of the gene was almost absent in large dog breeds, an international team reported in Science journal. The 14 small dogs in the sample, such as Portuguese water dogs, chihuahuas, fox terriers and pomeranians, share a specific sequence of DNA that includes the gene for making a hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). The scientists also looked at DNA from nine large breeds including Irish wolfhounds, St Bernards and Great Danes. </p>

<p>The IGF-1 gene has been known to influence size in other organisms, including mice and humans. These results suggest that while there are invariably differences among breeds - even in genes for size - IGF-1 has played an important role in the evolution of many small breeds by being a gene that consistently affects body size. The new research suggests that a mutation in this gene led to the appearance of small dogs more than 10,000 years ago. </p></blockquote><p>More <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6531049.stm">here.</a></p>



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<h2>April 09, 2007</h2>



<a id="a0032693152"></a>

<h3>A Case of the Mondays: Books About Decline</h3>


<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Environmentalists have
been writing apocalyptic books for decades, but in recent years, more
mainstream figures have written about the possible decline of current
civilization. Jared Diamond's Collapse concentrates on environmental
pressure; Jane Jacobs' Dark Age Ahead (largely motivated by the same
work as Collapse—Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel) is more
economic. Yet other works moralize about the fact that Western
civilization may be heading the way of Islamic and Chinese
civilizations in the late Middle Ages.</p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">When you come right down
to it, the main issues are not overarching narratives about
population pressure or economics, but concrete social problems. Not
coincidentally, Jacobs and Diamond, who proceed from almost
diametrically opposite approaches, end up talking about very similar
pathologies in American society: specific failures of government
responsibility, failure to adapt to changing conditions, bad economic
planning.</p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Jacobs starts by listing
five problems in American society, corresponding to the erosion of
five basic pillars: family/community, higher education, science,
governmental responsiveness, and self-regulation of expert
organizations. As it turns out, none of the five is really the
problem. Rather, Jacobs applies her work on cities and economic
growth to all of those factors. For example, when talking about the
decline of the family and of communities, she never goes into any of
the problems mentioned in any number of books moralizing about the
future of the American family; instead, she writes about how car
culture constricts economic development.</p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">When talking about higher
education, she identifies the problem as one of &quot;credentialing
versus educating&quot;—that is, university education is more about
getting a degree than about learning. That in itself, she says, is
really just a problem of flooding universities with people who aren't
serious about learning, partly because of the GI Bill. Her complaint
about science is that engineers and social planners aren't practicing
it seriously, so for example traffic controllers talk about road
closures by analogizing them to blocking the flow of water rather
than by gathering real-world evidence. Her complaint about
governmental responsiveness boils down to mistreatment of city
resources. And her comments about self-regulation are most applicable
to Enron.</p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">So in fact, what she says
is that the United States has a large supply of incompetence, greed,
corruption, and bad government. Essentially, that's exactly what
Diamond says. Collapse is largely about why societies decline—they
can fail to adapt to changing climate conditions, or deplete their
natural resources, or promote decision-making procedures that
encourage the elites to ignore the people, or increase their
population beyond what is sustainable—but Diamond can't resist
concluding by evaluating the United States and the world based on the
same criteria. Globally, he talks about environmental damage in the
standard terms that are climate change, habitat loss, overpopulation,
and so on. But within the US, the social problems he identifies are
almost the exact same ones Jacobs' boil down to. For example, when
talking about the way the American upper class segregates itself into
gated communities he is basically repeating Jacobs' points about
self-regulation and responsiveness.</p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Now, you could make a
convincing case that the US is indeed in decline. But such a case
would necessarily have to involve new problems, rather than problems
that didn't prevent the country from keeping ascending in the robber
baron era and that it ultimately weathered in the 1970s. For example,
take a recent example neither Jacobs nor Diamond uses: the breakdown
of public health in the US, exemplified by the e. coli outbreak in US
spinach products. That indicates that the US is falling behind the
rest of the world, even regressing to third-world status (in the
normal sense of lack of social and economic progress, as in Delhi,
rather than in Jacobs' sense of economic passivity, as in rural areas
everywhere), but not that it's about to collapse or go into a dark
age.</p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">A distressing number of
the books I've looked at try to interpret decade-long trends in
modern times in terms of centuries-long ones in history. To some
extent it makes sense, insofar as things are happening a lot more
quickly lately than they used to. But still, a trend isn't something
that happens on a ten-year scale—at least, not on a scale that
determines a civilization's fate. Between 1500 and 1800, China
clearly fell behind Europe, in a gradual process that bears little to
no resemblance to what Jacobs and Diamond describe. It just happened
that technological advancements helped Europe more, and in the very
long run, Europe's fractured political system and inhospitable
environment proved more conducive to growth than China's unified
government and good climate.</p>
<p align="justify" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I tend to have little
trust in people who extrapolate from short-term trends. A good system
of predicting civilizations' fates should at least be good enough to,
for a start, retrodict the Soviet Union's collapse. And yet so far I
haven't seen anyone tackle what must be the greatest failure of the
modern prophets.</p>



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<h3>Monday Musing: Taking Sides in the Recent Religion Debates</h3>


<p>Look, no matter whether you are religious or an atheist or some other thing, no matter <em>what</em> you believe, I expect you'll agree with me about the importance of this question: why do so many people believe the <em>wrong</em> thing? The reason I can be fairly sure that this is a question which has deep meaning for you, as well as for me, is that none of even the religions with the greatest number of adherents (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) comprises anything even close to a majority of the world's human beings (and atheists, of course, are no more than a drop in the bucket of humanity). So, as long as you have some sense of curiosity about other humans, you probably wonder why most people don't share your correct beliefs. (And this is not even to take into account the many rifts within each religion: Catholic v. Protestant, Shia v. Sunni, etc.) Atheists and the faithful are alike in this: they all hope, sometimes rather desperately, that one day everyone will share their own salutary views. But we'll come back to this question a little later.</p>

<p><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=155,height=190,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/09/harris.gif"><img title="Harris" height="183" alt="Harris" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/09/harris.gif" width="150" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=250,height=300,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/09/daw.jpg"><img title="Daw" height="180" alt="Daw" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/09/daw.jpg" width="150" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a><a onclick="window.open(this.href, '_blank', 'width=225,height=328,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=0,top=0'); return false" href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/09/dennett01_3.jpg"><img title="Dennett01_3" height="218" alt="Dennett01_3" src="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/images/2007/04/09/dennett01_3.jpg" width="150" border="0" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 5px 5px" /></a>Today, I would just like to set down a few loosely related observations about the debates that have recently raged around the publication of several very high-profile books attacking religion. The most prominent of these have been Daniel Dennett's <em>Breaking the Spell</em>, Richard Dawkins's <em>The God Delusion</em>, and Sam Harris's <em>The End of Faith</em>, as well as his <em>Letter to a Christian Nation</em>. (Yes, I've read all of them.) What has been remarkable to me is the degree of harshness of the polemic that has been directed at these books by eminent intellectuals as well as journalists and laypeople. Many of these criticisms seem to me to fall roughly into three broad categories, each of which I'd like to examine a little more below:</p>

<ol><li>These views of religion themselves exhibit a sort of fervid faith (in rationality, in science, etc.). </li>

<li>These are theologically naive views of religion from individuals unqualified to examine it. </li>

<li>These views of religion miss the important political underpinnings of recent religious resurgence.</li></ol><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>-----***-----</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p><strong>Rationality as a Sort of Religion</strong></p>

<p>This is perhaps the least damaging of the objections but, not only is it very common, it betrays a very basic philosophical confusion endemic to our postmodern era which I want to try and dispel here. But, first, a quick example of what I am talking about taken from the comments section of a post right here on 3QD about the <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/religion_sam_ha_1.html">Harris/Sullivan debate</a> on religion:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>...there are several unexamined &quot;faiths&quot; at the bottom of Harris's rationalism. That the world is rational, for one thing. That ontology and epistemology overlap. That all that is &quot;real&quot; is material, and vice versa. That a thing can be known from the sum of its parts. And many more.</p>

<p>Reason works very well once it has been lifted up to a functional level by foundational assumptions. To attribute the &quot;rationalist&quot; perspective to someone like Harris, allows us to make these assumptions transparent, which goes a long way toward making someone like Andrew Sullivan look awfully silly. It's a charlatan's game, and we shouldn't fall for it.</p>

<p>--Deets, <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/religion_sam_ha_1.html#comments">April 5, 2007</a></p></blockquote><p>Here's the foundational problem that Deets brings up, stated simply: there is no neutral perspective from which science or even rationality itself can be defended or deemed superior to anything else. This is uninterestingly and tautologically true (but leads to much mischief!), as one must be scientific, or at least rational, to show anything at all. In other words, it is not possible to convince anyone of the truth of anything, unless they share certain background beliefs. This means that if someone tells you that AIDS is caused, not by the HIV virus, but by evil spirits whom we must appease by ritually sacrificing cats, for example, there is no way to convince them otherwise without using science, and presumably, a belief in the overall correctness of the scientific method is not something that one shares with one's interlocutor in this case. So Deets is technically correct in pointing out the &quot;foundational assumptions&quot; here, but there is no need for the sophomoric conclusion that this makes Harris's arguments a &quot;charlatan's game.&quot; Indeed, Deets's line of reasoning could be used to make any- and everything a charlatan's game. The Earth is not flat, but round, I say. Nope, says Deets, this requires an unwarranted assumption of scientific method. Potassium cyanide is a poison, I say. Maybe, maybe not, says Deets. Sodium metal and chlorine gas can combine to form table salt, say I. I don't think so, says Deets. I nervously ask, does the sun rise in the east? Says Deets (and I ain't makin' this up!):</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>As you well know, the sun only &quot;rises&quot; in the &quot;East&quot; ... from a particular perspective, which our culture long ago rejected as illusory. There is no East, and there is no rising.</p>

<p>--Deets, <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/04/religion_sam_ha_1.html#comments">April 6, 2007</a></p></blockquote><p>What can one say to Deets? Nothing. One can't say anything because if Deets is responding in this way, then one does not share enough beliefs with Deets to make communication with him (or her) possible. After all, even just using language to communicate requires that the other agree on what &quot;sodium&quot; is, what &quot;chlorine&quot; is, and even what &quot;is&quot; is. Presuming that we agree on what all these things are, I could try to show Deets that I can repeatedly bring sodium and chlorine together and reliably end up with salt, but that would assume that Deets is impressed with the scientific method, an assumption which I am not allowed to make. (Of course, context is always important to meaning, and therefore to truth, so of course there are contexts in which &quot;The Earth is flat&quot; will be true and others where &quot;The Earth is round&quot; will seem a gross over-simplification or false, which is why there is always an element of good faith in communication.) There is really no point in having such a conversation. There is, literally, nothing one could say. (Okay, I apologize to the real-life Deets for turning him/her into a bit of a caricature for the purposes of my argument, but this really is the outcome of his/her line of thinking.)</p>

<p>The good news is that as human beings we share a huge set of background experiences and beliefs that do make communication possible, and we do agree on many things, and most of us can talk to each other. Even Deets actually has rationality in plentiful supply in his (or her) comments, and carefully follows accepted lines of reasoning in constructing clever arguments. Technical and foundational issues in epistemology or even ontology needn't keep us from making everyday judgments of truth about all sorts of matters, including whether, say, smoking is bad for one's health, or whether HIV causes AIDS or evil cat-loving (or hating?) spirits do. (One of the things that human beings all over the planet agree on to a remarkable degree, is science itself. It is a truly shocking--and pleasing--thing to me, that for the most part, scientists in Japan, Malawi, Pakistan, Sweden and Indonesia essentially agree on a huge volume of knowledge and even the methods by which it is produced.) So what is the point of debate about anything, you might ask. It is this: what our project becomes, at least with those people with whom we share a basic understanding of logic and enough background beliefs about the world to be able to assert things like &quot;sodium metal and chlorine gas can combine to form table salt&quot; and have them assent, is an attempt to convince them of something by getting them to be <em>coherent</em> about their beliefs. So if someone says &quot;I agree that sodium and chlorine combine to form salt, but I don't believe that hydrogen and oxygen gases can be combined to produce water,&quot; I can perhaps try to show that the same beliefs this person shares with me which lead her to believe that sodium and chlorine combine to produce salt, also entail that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to produce water. In other words, all of us share so large a number of beliefs, that it is not possible to be aware of all the logically possible statements that they entail, so the purpose of argument and debate is (often) to show someone that they are holding contradictory beliefs, one of which should be given up; this is how, despite Deets's reservations, it is possible to have useful discussion.</p>

<p>You might by now have lost track of what this has to do with the &quot;rationality as a sort of religion&quot; objection. What I've tried to explain is that while it is logically true that certain assumptions of rationality or even agreement with the methods of science, etc., need to be made, these are not unreasonable assumptions. It is perfectly legitimate of Harris or Dawkins or Dennett to make an argument of the following sort to a religious person, &quot;Since you agree that sodium and chlorine combine to produce salt, and you agree that X, and you agree that Y, and you agree that Z, ... and you agree that such and such is a good method of deciding these things, and this thing, and that thing, and... <em>then</em> you should also agree that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old.&quot; What if they don't agree that sodium and chlorine combine to produce salt, or even that the sun rises in the east? In that case, yes, there isn't much to say.</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>-----***-----</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p><strong>Theologically Naive Examinations of Religion</strong></p>

<p>This, for some reason, is the objection most dear to the more sophisticated critics of Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris. There are two related ideas here: there is the standard cheap-shot of &quot;What made X an expert in Y?&quot; (As if only astrologists should ever be allowed to judge the claims of astrology!) And then there is the more credible, at least at first blush, idea that important and serious theological ideas and arguments have been completely ignored by these writers. Once again, first some examples. Here's the very first paragraph of renowned Marxist-and-psychoanalytic-literary-theorist Terry Eagleton's review of Dawkins (gently entitled &quot;<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html">Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching</a>&quot;) in the <em>London Review of Books</em>:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the <em>Book of British Birds</em>, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">Much of the Eagleton review continues in this vein, getting more hysterical, if anything:</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr">What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">And this is H. Allen Orr, also reviewing Dawkins, in the <em><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775">New York Review of Books</a></em>: </p><blockquote dir="ltr"><p><em>...The God Delusion</em> [is] a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins's book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they're terminally ill?).</p></blockquote><p dir="ltr">These gentlemen do protest far too much, but before I get to them let me say another thing: the problem with arguing with a religious person, say a Christian, or to be even more specific, say a Catholic, is that you have no idea what she actually believes. If I tell you that I believe science is correct, you can be pretty sure about a lot of my very detailed beliefs. You can be sure, just to beat this example to death, that I believe that sodium and chlorine can combine to form table salt. You know that I believe that the Earth is close to four billion years old, that the sun is a star, etc., etc. You can be fairly certain that I don't pick and choose my beliefs in some arbitrary fashion: &quot;Yes, sodium is real, but uranium is just a figure of speech!&quot; On the contrary, as soon as one begins to corner a religious person about one of their more egregiously silly beliefs, they weasel out with some version of &quot;Oh, but I don't take that <em>literally</em>!&quot; Transubstantiation may be literally true to some, and only a metaphor to other Catholics. Same with pretty much everything, so it is just not possible to examine every way to conceptualize even just the concept of God, which is just <em>one</em> of the things that theology has spent centuries doing. Religious concepts tend to be slippery as they need not cohere even with each other, much less experience, or dare-I-say-it, reality. The constraints (if any) on how one conceptualizes God, or the afterlife, or hell, or sin, are very loose. No one can be expected to argue with every single one of these conceptions that an army of theologians may have produced over millenia.</p>

<p dir="ltr">But maybe they <em>have</em> produced some particularly significant arguments or ideas worth grappling with. Yeah, sure, maybe they have. What are they? It is remarkable that for all the times this objection, that writers such as Dennett and Dawkins and Harris are ignoring sophisticated theologians, is raised, <em>not a single</em> actual idea or argument due to these theologians is <em>ever</em> mentioned. Why not just say, Mr. Eagleton, what exactly in Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Eriugena, Rahner, and Moltmann refutes Dawkins's arguments? Unless this is an empty and desperate display of erudition, why not bring up how these subtle examinations of grace and hope might confute Dawkins? Orr can scarcely believe that Dawkins has written a whole book about religion without bringing up William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example. Well, Professor Orr, he chose not to, but you are certainly free to show us how James and Wittgenstein weaken Dawkins's case. Why don't you? No, really, just think about it: suppose you are trying to argue that astrology is nonsense, and someone keeps piping up that you haven't read this or that work by this or that astrologer (especially if there are millenia worth of output from &quot;astrologians&quot;). What will you say? I would say, <em>you</em> bring it up. Show me how what someone wrote weakens my case.</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr">-----***-----</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p dir="ltr"><strong>It's All About the Politics, Stupid</strong></p>

<p dir="ltr">Actually, this is the only objection to Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris to which I am at least somewhat sympathetic. Roughly, it is really a set of related ideas which go something like this:</p>

<ol dir="ltr"><li><div>I am smart and well-educated enough to know what you are trying to tell me about religion.</div></li>

<li><div>Only people like me will read your book, and you are not telling us anything new, so at the least, your book is boring.</div></li>

<li><div>The only reason you have written this book now, is that many in the West are fearful of a resurgence of a highly politicized, dangerous, terroristic, and fundamentalist Islam and the infamously imminent &quot;clash of civilizations&quot;, and this is therefore an opportune time to attack religion in general and sell books.</div></li>

<li><div>Your examination of religion ignores the victory in the West of an economic system which has resulted in such a skewed distribution of not only wealth, but even opportunity for education, access to healthcare, etc., that to ease their noisy lives of desperation, more and more people turn for solace to religion.</div></li>

<li><div>And similarly, your focus on the violent and evil acts of a minority of religious extremists, for example, in the Islamic world, with no mention of the systematic political and economic violence done to their societies in the name of strategic considerations, oil, spreading the shining light of democracy, etc., allows your readers (at least the less religious ones) in the West to ignore these latter political considerations and blame everything bad happening in, for example, the middle-east, on the evil irrationality of religion. [This doesn't apply only to the middle-east or Islam, but anywhere there is religious conflict. The idea is that even if religion were to disappear, there are underlying political injustices that would need to be addressed, and too great a focus on religion allows us to ignore these.]</div></li></ol>

<p>I do not agree with items 1, 2, or 3 of this list, but feel that there is something to the last two. The first step is wrong because there <em>is</em> much new material in these books (more on that below), and there are new ways of thinking about familiar problems. The second step is clearly not true, as the books have been on best-seller lists and it is clear that a lot of religious people have read them, to their benefit (even if not with full agreement) I am sure. The third step is just silliness, and anytime is a good time to fight irrationality! As for steps four and five, although one cannot dictate to people what their books should be about, given the demographics of religion (at least in America) and the overall salience of religion in the current geopolitical mess, one wishes that these authors would have had something to say about the factors that have produced a resurgence of such hypocrisies as evangelical Christianity, such odious forms of faith as jihadist-fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam, etc., or at the very least acknowledged that religion does not exist in a vacuum, but is shaped and exploited in reaction to political and other realities. Their not addressing this <em>at all</em> leaves one with the uneasy feeling that an elephant in the room has been ignored.</p><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><blockquote dir="ltr"><p>-----***-----</p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p dir="ltr"></p>

<p>So, we come back now to the question with which I started these brief observations: why are so many people wrong? We tend to agree with humans everywhere about most things, after all. This is not just true in the realm of knowledge (because of which science is the same everywhere, as I mentioned earlier), but the other two classical realms as well: the moral and the aesthetic. Leaving religion aside, we find the same things morally repugnant: incest, murder, rape, dishonesty, theft, etc., and we even find the same things beautiful: sunsets, poetry, music, Angelina Jolie, whatever. Why then is religion the exception? Well, because religion can be seen as just one more phenomenon in the natural world, this, I believe, is properly a scientific question, and the greatest value of the books I have been discussing has, at least for me, been to present new scientific work in anthropology, in psychology, in neuroscience, and many other fields, which bears on this question and is suggestive of possible answers. I wrote a short account giving a flavor of some of these developments <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2005/11/the_rationality.html">here</a>, if you are interested.</p>

<p>My previous <em>Monday Musings</em> can be seen <a href="http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/MondayMusings.html#abbas">here</a>.</p>

<p>UPDATE: In all fairness to Deets, he has a post at his own blog about his views on all this <a href="http://underverse.blogspot.com/2007/04/sides.html">here</a>.</p>



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<h3>THOUGHT UNDONE: A Tale of Two Dictators: Musharraf, Mugabe and the Dangers of Absolute Power</h3>


<p>It's often best to reflect on certain issues once the storm is over and the dust has settled. I'm going to try it on the recent events surrounding two dictators and their dictatorships, much in the news recently: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan.</p>

<p>Both have much in common. Nothing perhaps more significant than the hope and optimism the two generated for their people on coming to power. Mugabe overthrew the colonial British, while Musharraf overthrew the colonial locals (corrupt, decadent, feudal democrats). Both promised freedom and development to their nations. Both glowed and basked in the glory of their place in the sun, until things began to unravel. And with no checks and balances on their power, the unraveling took on a more dangerous form. And their lies the danger of absolute power, never mind the benevolent smokescreen.</p>

<p>Governance is a difficut art and often even the best tend to come up short. Dictators are no different. Except that we can't change them. Dictators tend to be liberal as long as you agree with them. Any serious opposition, and they tend to want to crush it, never mind the democratic intent. Mugabe hasn't turned violent or suppressive recently vividly depicted by the press photographs of the battered face of Morgan Tsvangirai. He crushed a revolt by the Ndebele speaking people of Matabeleland way back in the 1980s. Musharraf too has gone about ruthlessly suppressing regional opposition, most famously in the state ordered assassination of prominent Baloch leader Nawab Bugti. </p>

<p>Freedom of the press, or other institutions of the state, like the judiciary for instance, is another sham in these regimes. Freedom is about the same as for an animal in a zoo, okay in confined spaces. Mugabe feels free to expel, intimidate or even kill the press reporters he doesn't fancy. Musharraf while not so bad (but then he's been around for less time), too doesnt think highly of independent opinion. The Chief Justice of Pakistan recently found out the hard way, earning the sack for questioning the military regime on its human rights record. The media which backed the judge saw their offices vandalised, and freedom clamped down upon. One of the more subtle methods being the slow withdrawal of government advertisements from prominent anti-government newspapers, thus choking their resources. The state can also put pressure on other private actors like industrialists to follow their N<em>o-Ad</em> byline in such a system. </p>

<p>Oh, and lets not forget the false enemies, the straw men which keep the likes of Mugabe and Musharraf going, well past their 'best before' dates. It would be the 'white man' or the long gone British for Mugabe, or India and its intentions to nuke Pakistan, for Musharraf. The trouble is that they ignore the trouble within, and deflect attention towards the irrelevant. Yet, some people buy it, I wonder why?! Or maybe it isn't such a wonder. Its just simple self-interest. Those small groups who profit from the regime within the country are collaborators, and the rest suffer from the age old problem of collective action: who's going to organise them cohesively? Important actors outside the country are relevant too. Powerful countries back these regimes for their own self-interest. Nigeria and South Africa continue to prop up Mugabe fearing an improbable but possible backlash on their domestic politics, while the US and the West does it with Pakistan, allegedly fighting terror together, more likely like dosuing a fire with oil and then fighting it with more fire. The rest, like in the UN are vetoed, and some like in teh Commonwealth are simply impotent. </p>

<p>So the regimes survive and prosper as the people suffer. Yet the dictator's unshakable belief in themselves ( hubris if you ask me) to be seen as the 'true democrats' doesn't seem to blinker. The only instrument to prove the point seems to be a sham election ,or a ridiculous referendum, which give people no real choices, either because their is no opposition (or they have tapes on their mouths), or because the questions are so cleverly phrased (in referendums) that they have only two answers: yes and yes! </p>

<p>So don't ever be fooled by a dictator because he'll get you by the throat later, if not sooner. It's only a matter of time before the whole edifice of state begins to crumble. It has already happened in Zimbabwe. One feels that it may be a matter of time in Pakistan.</p>

<p>The only rays of hope: civil society groups. Let's everyone back the Catholic bishops of Zimbabwe who have taken the lead in calling for free and fair elections in that country (or alternatively for the incumbent regime to face a mass revolt). Let's everyone back the lawyers of Pakistan who have taken to the streets demanding greater freedom and accountability for the judiciary and for the rest of the country, from the military regime in Pakistan. A utopian hope probably. They should actually demand that the military return to the barracks or that the people will push them there. </p>

<p>It isn't all wishful thinking. Nepal has rid itself of an autocratic and dictatorial king through a popular uprising. Ukraine had its Orange Revolution. Georgia had its own Rose revolution. The people must rise, and they must be backed politically across the globe, to restore democracy. Despite its many flaws, it is still the best political system. And despite their many mirages, dicatorships are really an unending desert of hopelessness. </p>

<p>It's time everyone recognised that. Don't even spare a second to praise Mugabe, Musharraf, and the like. You give them a hand, they will take your arm, then your limbs, and then everything.</p>



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