What the F***? – Why we Curse.

Steven Pinker in The New Republic

The strange emotional power of swearing–as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures– suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

More here.

Republican rats scrabble to take over the sinking ship

Gerard Baker in The London Times

This year it’s different. While the Democratic race is, as I noted last week, turning into an extended coronation for the Sun Queen, the Republican contest is a fog of competitive chaos. This is all the more striking because the polls suggest that the party is on course for a soaking next year on a scale not seen since the 1970s. Yet the number of plausible Republicans who want to be the party’s candidate is actually multiplying as they get closer to that election. It may, in fact, be the first known case in political history of rats auditioning to take the helm of a sinking ship.

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The unbridgeable gap between law and science

Steve Connor in The Independent

It is always amusing to see how the legal mind treats science given that both aspects of human activity are about the search for the truth. The trouble is, the law, like politics, is about certainties, whereas science is as much about what we don’t know as what we know for sure.

Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the case this week in which a High Court judge ruled that the Oscar-winning film about climate change by the former United States vice-president Al Gore is littered with scientific inaccuracies. Mr Justice Burton has ruled that the film – An Inconvenient Truth – is not simply a science film, but a political film, and as such it should only have been distributed to schools with a clear health warning about its politically-inspired nature.

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Gore Wins the Nobel. But Will He Run?

Eric Pooley in Time

For the past year, Al Gore has gone about his considerable business without showing much interest in running for president. While picking up an Oscar and an Emmy, publishing a very smart book and playing host at a global concert for the planet, he’s never done more than tease the idea. And yet all that time, the leaders of the Draft Gore movement have been clinging to a single fervid dream: that Gore would win the Nobel Peace Prize and use it to catapult himself to an eleventh-hour bid for the presidency.

Now the Nobel Committee has done its part, awarding Gore the Peace Prize for being “probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted” to combat climate change, according to his citation. (The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was also a joint winner of the prize.) And so, after the obligatory spasms of celebration and the equally obligatory gnashing of Rush Limbaugh’s teeth, will Americans finally get to enjoy one of the great spectacles in political history, as Gore’s ultimate honor levitates him beyond his leading rival, Hillary Clinton, and into the Oval Office?

Nope.

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What has Al Gore Done For World Peace?

Damian Thompson in The Telegraph

So Al Gore is the joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Admittedly, he has to share it with the United Nations’ climate change panel – but, even so, I think we need to declare an international smugness alert.

The former US Vice-President has already taken over from Michael Moore as the most sanctimonious lardbutt Yank on the planet. Can you imagine what he’ll be like now that the Norwegian Nobel committee has given him the prize?

More to the point, can you imagine how enormous his already massive carbon footprint will become once he starts jetting around the world bragging about his new title?

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Defining torture away

From Andrew Sullivan

Bret Stephens argued in a Wall Street Journal piece yesterday that the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that several of the techniques used by the Bush administration in interrogating prisoners do not amount to “torture”. Let us leave aside the exquisite irony that the Wall Street Journal is now invoking not American law (because they cannot) to redefine torture, nor even English law (ditto), but one ruling on appeal of the much-detested European Court to decide what U.S. law is and should be. The case is much, much less than Stephens made it out to be – and the result maintained the clear illegality of some of the mildest techniques adopted by the US to torture prisoners suspected of terrorism. All the British legal authorities and the British government and the European Court and the European commission found that the five techniques cited were illegal under British and European law – separately or in combination.

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Castro – Politics’ last superstar

Ignacio Ramonet in The Guardian

For the first time in almost 50 years, Fidel Castro is not in control of Cuba. And contrary to predictions, the system has not broken down, the population has not revolted, the revolution has not reversed. Now the analysts are asking: will it last? Is Raúl Castro going to reroute the revolution? Has the country entered a “transition”?

Whatever one thinks of Fidel Castro, he is one of the few men who have known the glory to enter history and legend in their own lifetime. He is the last “superstar” of international politics. He belongs to the generation of mythical insurrectionists – Nelson Mandela, Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Carlos Marighela, Camilo Torres, Mehdi Ben Barka – who after the second world war launched into political action with the hope of changing an unequal world. This was a generation that thought that communism promised a radiant future, and that injustice, racism and poverty could be eradicated in less than a decade.

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Turkey at the Turning Point?

Christopher de Bellaigue in The New York Review of Books

It is now clear that Turkey, a country to which Western visitors have often applied adjectives such as “timeless” and “slothful,” is changing profoundly, and with un-Oriental speed. To the many Turks who welcome this transformation, it holds out the promise of a free public culture, equally open to devout Muslims, secularists, and critics of Turkey’s past politics—something the country has never known. A smaller but nonetheless considerable number see the changes as a Trojan horse for Islamism as severe as one finds in Iran or Saudi Arabia. These two views come into sharp conflict on the subject of Abdullah Gül, whom the Turkish parliament recently elected president.

Abdullah Gül is a conscientious Muslim. He says his prayers and observes the Ramadan fast. His wife appears in public with a silk scarf wound tightly around her head. Although he was once associated with Islamism of a rather virulent kind and was a member of the Welfare Party, whose stated goal was to challenge Turkey’s secular traditions, Gül gives the impression of having mellowed. As foreign minister in the mildly Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan from 2003 until his election to the presidency, Gül directed his energies mainly at promoting Turkey’s claims to EU membership. As president, he has promised to safeguard Turkey’s secular regime.

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Looking Up From the Gutter: Philosophy and Popular Culture

Stephen T. Asma in The Chronicle Review

Philosophy has never had a good relationship with popular culture. The two domains seem like different planets, each with an atmosphere toxic to the other. Thales (625?-?547 BC), the first philosopher, is famous for being so out of touch with the mundane world that he once fell down a well because he was distracted by deep thought. Philosophy broods, analyzes, and tends toward the antisocial; pop culture celebrates, wallows, and tends toward the communal. Philosophy is for cynics, and pop culture is for bimbos.

But the recent trend in publishing, dominated by Open Court and Blackwell, has tried to undo those old stereotypes. Perhaps its chief architect, or hardest worker, is William Irwin, an associate professor of philosophy at King’s College, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Irwin was the series editor of Open Court’s “Popular Culture and Philosophy” from 2003 to 2007, generating more than 20 titles, including The Sopranos and Philosophy, Harry Potter and Philosophy, and The Beatles and Philosophy. Open Court’s series originated when the press’s editorial director, David Ramsay Steele, decided to follow up on the success of the one-off Seinfeld and Philosophy. The Open Court series is currently being edited by George Reisch, an instructor at Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies, and the ever-busy William Irwin has moved on to Blackwell, where he’s put seven new titles on the docket for 2007 alone in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series.

Philosophers, who devote much of their attention to remote texts, are seen by many as irretrievably elitist. But elitism isn’t always bad. Professional sprinters, for example, are an elite group, too, but nobody holds it against them.

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: abandoned to fanatics

Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie in the L.A. Times

As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world. The details of her story bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West. . . .

Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.

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The West should be proud of its ethical achievements

Douglas Murray in Spectator

Recognition of the superiority of our values is made with people’s feet every day in the one-way human migration to the West. It is an admission which many make in private. But we seem to have become so comfortable with our rights that we no longer acknowledge their superiority, or the superiority of the values which gave them life.

Even a couple of generations ago, assertion of the superiority of Western values — the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equalities, freedoms of expression and conscience — was uncontentious. But we have become morally lazy. If other people live under tyranny, then who are we to ‘impose’ democracy on them? If others live in benighted societies in which half their population can be treated as chattel, then why should we disturb them? Like the multicultural edifice before it, this genuine prejudice — the refusal to discern or assert moral difference — is finally collapsing. It must do, when reality comes a-knocking.

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The Historic Significance of Atlas Shrugged

Robert Tracinski in Real Clear Politics

October 10 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s classic novel Atlas Shrugged, so in the coming week we can expect to see a flurry of articles about the novel–many of which will, unfortunately, offer highly inaccurate descriptions of its meaning and significance.

That’s a shame, because Atlas Shrugged is a novel that everyone ought to discover and grapple with, because it succeeds at something too few artists and intellectuals have had the courage to do.

The purpose of art and philosophy is to show us truths about human nature, about the nature of the world and our place in it. Philosophy names these truths explicitly, in literal terms; literature dramatizes these truths in concrete terms, revealing its insights through the actions and statements of the characters created by the novelist. A philosophical novel, like Atlas Shrugged, is supposed to do both of these things.

But too often both the philosophers and the artists have simply repeated or project their own prejudices and pre-conceived notions.

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This Is Not a Bob Dylan Movie

Robert Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine

Because Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make “I’m Not There” so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be said to be true to the subject Dylan. “These so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music, I don’t feel they know a thing or have any inkling of who I am or what I’m about,” Dylan himself told an interviewer in 2001. “It’s ludicrous, humorous and sad that such people have spent so much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get a life please. . . . You’re wasting you own.” It might sound like a parlor game, or like cheating on Haynes’s part, but to make sense in a film about Dylan would make no sense. “If I told you what our music is really about, we’d probably all get arrested,” Dylan once said.

“I don’t know that it does make sense,” Cate Blanchett says of the film, “and I don’t know whether Dylan’s music makes sense. It hits you in kind of some other place. It might make sense when you’re half-awake, half-asleep, in the everyday lives in which we live. I don’t think the film even strives to make sense, in a way.”

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I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer

Ed Pilkington in The Guardian

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.

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Why Burma Was Crushed

Lindsey Hilsum in the New Statesman

An estimated 2.5 million people of Chinese descent live in Burma; several ethnic groups straddle the 2,000-kilometre border dividing the two countries. Believing the junta’s inflexibility to be inherently unstable, the Chinese government has tried to persuade the generals to come to some accommodation with the political opposition and rebellious ethnic fighters. Chinese officials have met opposition leaders in Kunming, on the Chinese side of the border, and in June they facilitated a meeting between US and Burmese government representatives. The current upheaval may have stymied that initiative, but according to the Burma specialist Larry Jagan, Beijing had hoped the contacts could herald a process similar to the six-party talks that have brought North Korean and US negotiators together.

Western leaders dream of a Burma reinvented in their image – with a little lustre from association with the revered opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi rubbing off on them. But China is still ruled by the Communist Party that shot and mowed down protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and which suppresses Buddhist monks in Tibet.

Authoritarian capitalism, not liberal democracy, has made China successful. The Beijing government’s ideal would be for the Burmese generals to allow limited political participation, so that stability could be assured and China’s supply of timber, gemstones, oil and natural gas guaranteed.

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Militant atheists are wrong

Lee Siegel in The L.A. Times

The anti-God books have appeared in the wake of two developments: the rise of Islamic fundamentalism overseas and the religious right’s enormous influence on President Bush’s policies here at home. But as responses, the secular jeremiads don’t make a whole lot of sense.

Who, exactly, are they aimed at? Who is the ideal reader of these attacks on belief in God? Not Muslim or Christian fundamentalists, obviously, because one of the engines driving religious fundamentalism today is, precisely, a hostility toward modern science. If anyone thinks that Dawkins’ book, “The God Delusion” — with its “scientific” attempts to refute the existence of God — is going to persuade today’s religious fanatics, here or abroad, to loosen up and enjoy a little MTV, you have to ask yourself just who is “deluded.” It’s hard to imagine anyone abandoning his faith after reading Harris’ condescending polemic, or the science of Dawkins and Dennett, or Hitchens’ vitriol.

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Kill the Rock Star

Chris Dahlen in Stylus Magazine

Last fall, the lads of Oasis said a funny thing about the music business. Noel Gallagher to the New Musical Express: “All the fantasy’s gone out of music, ‘cos everything is too fucking real. Every album comes with a DVD with some cunt going, ‘Yeah well, we tried the drums over there, but…’ Give a shit, man! It makes people seem too human, whereas I was brought up on Marc Bolan and David Bowie, and it was like, ‘Do they actually come from fucking Mars?’”

Gallagher has nailed the whole problem. In today’s tell-all, “behind the music” industry, he’d rather not know every thought that scraped its way through the drummer’s head, or hear every guitar solo they threw out, or listen to them talk for even a minute. He doesn’t want to think about the artists as people in any way. And this runs counter to everything the industry’s been trying, at both the major label level and the indies.

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A Death in the Family

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed “Seen This?” The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:
“Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … “

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We came so close to World War Three that day

James Forsyth and Douglas Davis in The Spectator

A meticulously planned, brilliantly executed surgical strike by Israeli jets on a nuclear installation in Syria on 6 September may have saved the world from a devastating threat. The only problem is that no one outside a tight-lipped knot of top Israeli and American officials knows precisely what that threat involved.

Even more curious is that far from pushing the Syrians and Israelis to war, both seem determined to put a lid on the affair. One month after the event, the absence of hard information leads inexorably to the conclusion that the implications must have been enormous.

That was confirmed to The Spectator by a very senior British ministerial source: ‘If people had known how close we came to world war three that day there’d have been mass panic. Never mind the floods or foot-and-mouth — Gordon really would have been dealing with the bloody Book of Revelation and Armageddon.’

According to American sources, Israeli intelligence tracked a North Korean vessel carrying a cargo of nuclear material labelled ‘cement’ as it travelled halfway across the world. On 3 September the ship docked at the Syrian port of Tartous and the Israelis continued following the cargo as it was transported to the small town of Dayr as Zawr, near the Turkish border in north-eastern Syria.

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Think Again: Drugs

Ethan Nadelmann in Foreign Policy

“Finally, a smarter drug control regime that values reality over rhetoric is rising to replace the “war” on drugs.“

A “drug-free world,” which the United Nations describes as a realistic goal, is no more attainable than an “alcohol-free world”—and no one has talked about that with a straight face since the repeal of Prohibition in the United States in 1933. Yet futile rhetoric about winning a “war on drugs” persists, despite mountains of evidence documenting its moral and ideological bankruptcy. When the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on drugs convened in 1998, it committed to “eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008” and to “achieving significant and measurable results in the field of demand reduction.” But today, global production and consumption of those drugs are roughly the same as they were a decade ago; meanwhile, many producers have become more efficient, and cocaine and heroin have become purer and cheaper.

It’s always dangerous when rhetoric drives policy—and especially so when “war on drugs” rhetoric leads the public to accept collateral casualties that would never be permissible in civilian law enforcement, much less public health. Politicians still talk of eliminating drugs from the Earth as though their use is a plague on humanity. But drug control is not like disease control, for the simple reason that there’s no popular demand for smallpox or polio.

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Euler’s Constancy

John Derbyshire in The Wilson Quarterly

Marion and Dunham were paying tribute to the mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83), one of the great yet little-known figures from Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. Euler’s discoveries continue to influence such disparate fields as computer networking, harmonics, and statistical analysis, and they did nothing less than transform pure mathematics. Children still learn Euler’s lessons in school. It was Euler, for instance, who gave the name i to the square root of –1. To mark his tercentenary, admirers are holding symposiums, concerts, and a two-week Euler tour, which will stop in St. Petersburg and Berlin, the two cities where he spent his working life, as well as Basel, Switzerland, the city of his birth. There is even an Euler comic book, A Man to Be Reckoned With, in German and English editions.

Compared to Gauss and Newton, both of whom published sparingly, Euler was prolific. This makes the assignment of precedence somewhat subjective. But Archimedes and Newton can hardly be excluded from the top ranks. For sheer breadth and quality of mathematical thought, I believe most scholars would place Gauss ahead of Euler. It is a close call, though, and nobody would disagree that Euler ranks with the crème de la crème in mathematical excellence. So who was he?

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Revisiting the Danish Cartoon Crisis

Michael C. Moynihan in Reason Online

Over a year after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published those now-infamous cartoons of Mohammad—one of which portrayed the Muslim Prophet carrying a lit bomb in his turban—the country is still noticeably on edge. When I recently visited Copenhagen, a week after a pre-dawn raid netted a handful of suspected Islamic extremists, the twin issues of Islam and integration were difficult to avoid. On television, the news and chat shows were dominated by discussions of coexistence with the country’s approximately 200,000 Muslims; newspapers were brimming with reader letters and editorials on Islamophobia, secularism and democracy; and a bookshop associated with the country’s left-leaning daily Politiken prominently displayed Norman Podhoertz’s latest book World War IV in the window, with a large stack on sale inside.

To get a sense of how this diminutive socialist country (previously famous for pork products, liberal views on pornography and Jante’s Law) was tranformed into a main front in Europe’s culture war, I sat down with the man responsible for printing the offending cartoons, Jyllands-Posten’s culture and arts editor Flemming Rose. In a wide-ranging discussion, Rose expounded on his years in the Soviet Union, free speech versus “responsible speech” and his Muslim supporters.

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The New Athiesm: An Interview with Mitchell Cohen

Mitchell Cohen in Dissent

Question: Is the debate on “the New Atheism” important for leftwing intellectuals in the U.S.?

M.C: I think this debate raises some poignant challenges to the left both in the U.S. and around the world. (The new religious aggressiveness is not just an American phenomenon). The left everywhere ought to be identified with both tolerance (this has not always been so) and with critical intelligence—the latter often means challenging religious precepts, ambitions and institutionalized power. The hard thing is to balance the tolerance and the criticism, to insist on pluralism but not to allow religion to privilege itself in the public realm. The left should always want people to think for themselves, but this cannot mean “you must be secular like me” since it also should not mean “you must be religious like me.”

Religion is a fairly broad category and leftists need to make distinctions among different types of religious behavior and religious commitments just as they would insist that “there are leftists and there are leftists.” After all, there are “leftists” who want a freer, more egalitarian world and there are Stalinists (or people who are still trapped within Stalinist mental structures, even if only implicitly). And there are religious leftists and liberals who are allies and comrades of secular leftists. While I am thoroughly secular, I know many religious people who are fine, thoughtful people—and I know many secularists who have been able to justify in left-wing language either mass murder, terror or religious fanaticism. These things are “objectively” anti-imperialist, you know, especially when they come from the Mideast. I have heard people—Americans and Europeans—throw fits about Bush’s religiosity all while they always “understand” Hezbollah or Hamas.

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Dawkins: Logical Path from Religious Beliefs to Evil Deeds

Richard Dawkins in The Washington Post

Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women and so on. It would be absurd to suggest such a thing: just as absurd as to generalize about all atheists. I am not even concerned with statistical generalizations about the majority of religious people (or atheists). My concern here is over whether there is any general reason why religion might be more or less likely to bias individuals towards all those unpleasant things in Christopher Hitchens’s list: to make them more likely to exhibit them than they would have been without religion. I think the answer is yes.

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Stephen Fry on fame

A good metaphor for fame is the magnifying glass. It makes larger (which is what magnify means) exposing flaws as well as qualities. The blackheads and dirty pores are there for all to see. Like a magnifying glass fame can distort, it can invert and it can (with the glare of publicity behind it) focus the light into a terrible heat that burns the subject until they shrivel into nothing.

In some professions fame is a by-product, an incidental, a “way of keeping score”. If you are a brilliant cricketer, one of the best in the world, then as many as two billion people might know who you are. Even more if you are a successful footballer. A maximum of a quarter of a billion will know who you are if you are a successful American footballer, but at least 5 billion will know you if you are an American footballer accused of murdering your wife and her lover. The OJ pheme buried itself deep in all of us and will, one suspects, remain in circulation for a long time. But then society thought the same of the Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle scandal which is now, if not an obscure footnote, certainly far from being the cause celebre of the century despite its seismic notoriety at the time.

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Letting World War II Unfold as a Story From the Heart, Not the Maps

During the closing months of World War II, Eric Sevareid, the CBS radio correspondent, felt dismayed at how inadequate his broadcasts had been in conveying the experience of war. He had parachuted into Burma, witnessed the fall and then the liberation of France and seen much of battle. But he was a journalist, he said, and that was a limitation: “Only the soldier really lives the war.”

“War happens,” he explained, “inside a man.”

And that is mostly where Ken Burns decides to look for it in his 15-hour documentary about the Second World War, “The War,” directed with Lynn Novick, now being broadcast on PBS (and to be released on DVD tomorrow). Invoking Mr. Sevareid, Mr. Burns says that his documentary — an “epic poem,” he has called it — is “created in that spirit.” Nearly 50 men and women talk about their wartime experiences, their testimonies punctuated by historical footage and somber narration.

he intention, apparently, was to see the war anew, to see it not from the vistas of generals’ maps and geopolitics, not from the perspective given by the doctrines of nations and the lures of ideologies, not even from the war’s context in history. The intention was to view it from the experiences of those who fought in it and those who knew them. If war happens “inside a man,” Mr. Burns wants to bring it home

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Rewriting history with the stroke of a pen

Deniz Ozdemir in Foreign Policy

Who knew that a history textbook could elicit anything more than a couple yawns from disinterested schoolchildren? On the Japanese island of Okiwana, the site of a bloody battle between U.S. and Japanese troops in 1945, a short passage in a new high school textbook brought more than 100,000 angry protesters out into the streets this past Saturday, the largest the small island has ever seen. For critics, the textbook dishonestly distorts the facts in its discussion of the several hundred Okinawa citizens who committed suicide during the U.S. invasion. The textbooks originally disclosed that the imperial army had handed out grenades to residents and ordered them to kill themselves rather than surrender, but Japan’s Education Ministry instructed publishers to delete these references from the book’s pages in March. The Ministry, reflecting the revisionism of recently ousted PM Shinzo Abe, cited divergent views of the event and said there was no real proof for either viewpoint.

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The Politics of Confidence

Roger Cohen in The New York Times

The unpopularity of George W. Bush has led many to believe global America-hating will ebb once he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2009. That’s a dangerous assumption.

It’s dangerous because the extent of American power will continue to invite resentment whoever is in the White House, and because America’s perception of the terrorist threat will still differ from that of its Asian and European allies. Asians are focused on growth, Europeans on integration: different priorities cause friction.

The Iraq-linked damage to U.S. credibility is too severe to be quickly undone. The net loss of Western influence over the world means the ability of Bush’s successor to shape events is diminished.

Still, the next U.S. leader will enjoy a honeymoon. To prolong it, several steps are essential. The most critical is a switch from the politics of anxiety to the politics of confidence.

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Religion as a force for good

Ian Buruma in The L.A. Times

It has become fashionable in certain smart circles to regard atheism as a sign of superior education, of highly evolved civilization, of enlightenment. Recent bestsellers by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and others suggest that religious faith is a sign of backwardness, the mark of primitives stuck in the Dark Ages who have not caught up with scientific reason. Religion, we are told, is responsible for violence, oppression, poverty and many other ills.

It is not difficult to find examples to back up this assertion. But what about the opposite? Can religion also be a force for good? Are there cases in which religious faith comes to the rescue even of those who don’t have it?

I have never personally had either the benefits nor misfortunes of adhering to any religion, but watching Burmese monks on television defying the security forces of one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, it is hard not to see some merit in religious belief. Myanmar, also known as Burma, is a deeply religious country, where most men spend some time as Buddhist monks. Even the thuggish Burmese junta hesitated before unleashing lethal force on men dressed in the maroon and saffron robes of their faith.

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Top Ten Ways to Make Better Records

Nick Southall in Stylus Magazine

Having spent years watching bands I love make seemingly insane decisions regarding what goes on an album and what gets left as b-sides, about what gets picked as a single, about sleeve design, production values, and a thousand and one other things integral to the process of making a record, I’ve come to the inevitable, ineffable conclusion that musicians are often fumbling in the dark during the recording and production process. It’s a well-worn cliché, but many musicians don’t know what their best material is, and even if they do, they don’t know how to make the most of it half the time anyway, and so the ostensibly simple process of making good records gets repeatedly cocked-up by people who ought to know better, if they could only remember the things they loved about records when they were just fans themselves.

I’m not an engineer or a musician, so you could easily dismiss my armchair punditry as uninformed bleatings, but as a music journalist, and more importantly as a music fan, I’ve spent a lot of time paying a lot of attention to a lot of records, researching how they’re made and talking to the people who make them, and the same things crop up time and time again as obvious mistakes and flaws in peoples approach to making records. So I’m going to offer some theoretical advice about how to make better records, from the point of view of someone who loves records, rather than someone who makes them.

List is here.

Stephen Colbert – The Man in the Irony Mask

Seth Mnookin in Vanity Fair.

Colbert’s character, which grew out of his role as the most noxious and ill-informed of Stewart’s on-air correspondents, is most definitely not the type of guy you’d want to share a beer with after work. If Colbert’s show were to succeed, it would need its fans to embrace the type of grating know-it-all they would normally disdain. One of the ways the show attempted to do this was by having its audience affect the mob mentality from which Colbert’s character drew his power. That way, viewers weren’t just in on the joke, they were part of it.

“This show is not about me,” Colbert explained his first night on the air. “No, this program is dedicated to you, the heroes.… On this show your voice will be heard, in the form of my voice.” Colbert went on to define the show’s ruling ethos as “truthiness,” an almost Nietzschean philosophy inspired by President Bush’s faith in those that “know with their heart” as opposed to those who “think with their head.” If one part of the subtext here was how terrifying “truthiness” was in a world leader, another was that having the will to bend reality to reflect your every desire actually sounded pretty cool—as Colbert’s id-driven character promised to demonstrate night after night.

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Francisco’s Money Speech

Marking 50 years since Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Capitalism Magazine reprints an important speech from the book.

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

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Liberalism is not neutral, but this is its very strength

George Crowder in Reset discusses “the dilemma of the liberal State”. Other views here.

Liberalism is not wholly neutral. But then, no political system is entirely neutral philosophically and ethically. Liberalism, nevertheless, can fairly claim to express an unusually, indeed uniquely accommodating configuration of values, within which it’s possible for many different religious and other conceptions of the good to coexist peacefully. This accommodation is not unlimited – there will be practices that liberalism cannot tolerate – but it’s the best we can do. It’s true that liberals try to prevent the state preaching particular, controversial moralities, especially religiously-based moralities. But that doesn’t mean that liberalism has no moral basis at all. On the contrary, the idea of human rights is an especially rich and inspiring moral doctrine.

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A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking

A “Master Class” By Danny Kahneman in Edge.org

While Kahneman has a wide following among people who study risk, decision-making, and other aspects of human judgment, he is not exactly a household name. Yet among many of the top thinkers in psychology, he ranks at the top of the field.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness) writes: “Danny Kahneman is simply the most distinguished living psychologist in the world, bar none. Trying to say something smart about Danny’s contributions to science is like trying to say something smart about water: It is everywhere, in everything, and a world without it would be a world unimaginably different than this one.” And according to Harvard’s Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought): “It’s not an exaggeration to say that Kahneman is one of the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has made seminal contributions over a wide range of fields including social psychology, cognitive science, reasoning and thinking, and behavioral economics, a field he and his partner Amos Tversky invented.”

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Interview with Phillip Roth

Warning – badly dubbed. Best listened to rather than watched.

Part 1

Part 2

The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville

Sean Wilentz in Oxford American

Blonde on Blonde borrows from several musical styles, including ’40s Memphis and Chicago blues, turn-of-the-century vintage New Orleans processionals, contemporary pop, and blast-furnace rock & roll. And with every appropriation, Dylan moved closer to a sound of his own. Years later, he famously commended some of the album’s tracks for “that thin, that wild mercury sound,” which he had begun to capture on his previous albums Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited—a sound achieved from whorls of harmonica, organ, and guitar. Dylan’s organist and musical go-between Al Kooper has said that “nobody has ever captured the sound of three a.m. better than that album. Nobody, even Sinatra, gets it as good.” These descriptions are accurate, but neither of them applies to all the songs, nor to all of the sounds in most of the songs. Nor do they offer clues about the album’s origins and evolution—including how its being recorded mostly in the wee, small hours may have contributed to its three A.M. aura.

Reminiscences and scraps of official information have added up to a general story line. During the autumn and winter of 1965–66, after his electric show at the Newport Folk Festival in July and amid a crowded concert schedule, Dylan tried to cut his third album inside of a year at Columbia Records’ Studio A in New York with his newly hired touring band, the Hawks. The results were unsatisfactory. Blonde on Blonde arose from Dylan’s decision to quit New York and record in Nashville with a collection of seasoned country-music session men joined by Al Kooper and the Hawks’ Robbie Robertson.

From the time he began recording regularly with electric instruments, Dylan, his palette enlarged, fixated on reproducing the sounds inside his mind with minimal editing artifice. The making of Blonde on Blonde combined perfectionism with spontaneous improvisation to capture what Dylan heard but could not completely articulate in words. It also involved happenstance, necessity, uncertainty, wrongheaded excess, virtuosity, and retrieval. One of the album’s finest musical performances, maybe its finest, unfolded in New York, not Nashville, perfected by a combo as yet not properly credited. Some of the other standout songs were compact compositions that took shape quickly during the final Nashville sessions. And what has come to be remembered as the musical big bang in Nashville actually grew out of a singular evolution that turned one grand Dylan experiment into something grander.

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The Second Annual Seed Science Writing Contest

From the Seed Magazine editors.

This spring, we invited readers to respond to the following question: What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century? How do we measure the scientific literacy of a society? How do we boost it? What is the value of this literacy? Who is responsible for fostering it?

Our panel of judges comprised Adam Bly, editor-in-chief and founder of Seed, Chris Mooney, Seed’s Washington correspondent, PZ Myers, Seed columnist and author of the popular blog Pharyngula, and the editors of Seed.

Here, we are pleased to announce the First and Second Prize Winners.

Here.

The Evolution of Language

Juan Uriagereka in Seed Magazine

Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years—an eye-blink of evolution.

Why are humans the only species to have suddenly hit upon the remarkable possibilities of language? If speech is a product of our DNA, then surely other species also have some of the same genes required for language because of our basic, shared biochemistry. One of our closest relatives should have developed something that is akin to language, or another species should have happened upon its attendant advantages through parallel evolution.

A quasi-paradox has persisted within the field of linguistics, because the sudden emergence of such a complex, limitless system in a single species is hard to rationalize in terms of standard evolution. Its rapid spread makes language seem more like a viral epidemic that swept through the human population rather than a trait inherited through the typical dynamics of evolution.

More here.

Palestinian political rights: a common-sense solution

Ghassan Khatib in Open Democracy

The last decade of the last century witnessed the first internationally-supported political attempt to address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by recognising Palestinian political rights and allowing a Palestinian leadership to negotiate for a solution. Since then there has been a constantly growing accumulation of peace efforts, political negotiations, schemes, proposals and initiatives that have all had as their one common denominator the two-state solution, i.e., giving Palestinians the right of self-determination in an independent state on the part of Palestine that was occupied by Israel in 1967.

But the first decade of this century has witnessed a series of setbacks and eventually the complete collapse of these political efforts. The international community became completely paralysed and remained on the sidelines, an almost silent witness to this deterioration and the reversal of the political efforts. Together with Israel, the international community has instead tried to compensate for its neglect of any promotion of a political solution, by attempting to deal only with the symptoms of the conflict – i.e., the economic deterioration and the worsening humanitarian conditions.

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Ireland forced to open immigrant school

Henry McDonald reports in The Guardian

Under a dank sky and with a statue of Christ, arms outstretched in welcome, it seemed like just another opening day in the life of an ordinary Irish primary school. But the school in Balbriggan, Co Dublin, which finally opened its doors yesterday morning, has been the centre of a national controversy which has highlighted how Ireland is failing to cope with the influx of tens of thousands of immigrants.

Ireland’s newest primary school is overwhelmingly black, the majority of its pupils with parents from Nigeria and some, judging by the number of mothers in head-scarves, from the Islamic faith.

The school was created out of incompetence rather than design. A huge population increase, partly due to immigration from Africa, China and eastern Europe, has put enormous pressure on the school system. The result, according to one local councillor, has been the creation of a “mini-apartheid” in the seaside town, with the new “emergency” school almost exclusively filled with the children of immigrants.

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Self-hating academics

Jeff Strabone on his blog.

A lot of obvious arguments have been rolled out against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech at Columbia University yesterday: that he’s a hatemonger, a Holocaust denier, a homophobe, and so on. These are all valid criticisms of the man, for he is all those things. He certainly did his credibility no help yesterday with these remarks, reported by the BBC:

‘Asked about executions of homosexuals in Iran, Mr Ahmadinejad replied: “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”
Reacting to laughter and jeers from the audience he added: “In Iran we don’t have this phenomenon, I don’t know who you told this.”‘

Universities have a special place in public life. They are the one place where intellectual freedom is taken most seriously. That is not to say that universities ought to invite rude individuals with bad ideas to speak, but it is understandable that they sometimes do.

Despite all of that, Columbia was wrong to allow Ahmadinejad on its campus, and it’s not because he hates Jews, gays, and men with stylish haircuts. There are surely members of the Columbia community—faculty and students alike—who hold these and other prejudices. And it’s not because he has blood on his hands. If that were the rule, it would be hard to find an important figure in world politics who qualified. Besides that, we might not agree on which international bloodletters were terrorists and which were freedom fighters. No, there is an even more fundamental reason than that: Ahmadinejad is the enemy of universities.

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Making Carbon Markets Work

Danny Cullenward and David G. Victor in Scientific American

“Limiting climate change without damaging the world economy depends on stronger and smarter market signals to regulate carbon dioxide“

The odds are high that humans will warm Earth’s climate to worrisome levels during the coming century. Although fossil-fuel combustion has generated most of the buildup of climate-altering carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, effective solutions will require more than just designing cleaner energy sources. Equally important will be establishing institutions and strategies—particularly markets, business regulations and government policies—that provide economies with incentives to apply innovative technologies and practices that reduce emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

The challenge is immense. Traditional fossil-fuel energy is so abundant and inexpensive that climate-friendly substitutes have little hope of acceptance without robust policy support. Meanwhile, for nearly two decades, negotiations on binding treaties that limit global emissions have struggled. But policy makers in Europe and other regions where public concern about climate change is strongest have already implemented significant initiatives to limit release of CO2. Lessons from these endeavors can help governments and world bodies fashion more effective strategies to protect the planet’s climate. Policy makers in the United States, which historically has produced more CO2 emissions than any other nation while doing relatively little to tame the flow, can in particular learn much about creating viable carbon-cutting markets by studying Europe’s recent experience. Based on these insights, we offer several concrete suggestions on how the U.S. should go about constructing an effective national climate policy.

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Cabury’s Gorilla and Music Criticism

Tom Ewing in Pitchfork Media

Against a light purple backdrop, we see the face of a gorilla. He looks– as gorillas often look– a little sad. His eyes are lowered, nostrils slowly flaring. Familiar music plays. The gorilla raises and drops his head as the music builds: It’s as if he’s getting ready for something. The camera moves to show that our gorilla is in an unusual place– sat at a drumkit, sticks in hand, his long limber arms at his side. The music continues to build and he suddenly raises his sticks, crashing them down on the drums and flinging his vast ape frame about the kit as he blasts the song into life.

This is a new advert for Cadbury Dairy Milk, the UK’s biggest chocolate brand. The gorilla is a man in a suit. The music is “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins. The ad is one of the most talked about in Britain, one of the most-watched on YouTube, and is also one of the year’s best pieces of music criticism.

Or at least, it does magnificently something music criticism finds desperately hard– isolating a moment in a track and communicating it effectively. “In the Air Tonight” has picked up digital sales and now sits happily back in the UK charts. This is because of the ad, but buyers aren’t getting a video download or a free gorilla mask or anything to link the music to the advert. They’re buying the song not to relive the ad but to relive the song the way the ad uses it, highlighting the entry of the drums so memorably.

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Was Alex the parrot smart?

Mary Rogan in Seed Magazine

Alex is an African Grey parrot, but in all likelihood, he wasn’t born in Africa. Like most birds in pet shops, he was probably bred as a “domestic” in North America, but that’s all we know about Alex’s early history. We don’t know how his parents are or his exact birth date. Some of this mystery was appealing to Pepperberg in her search for the perfect specimen to test her theories about avian intelligence. She didn’t want anyone thinking she’d picked a “super” bird that had been bred especially for smarts. In Pepperberg’s hands, Alex (whose name stands for Avian Learning Experiment) was going to show the world that parrots can do more than, well, parrot. Namely, they can mean what they say. If Polly wants a cracker, she really wants a cracker. Or, as Pepperberg explains it, birds can think. And not in the way you’ve seen your dog thinking when you catch him staring at the exact spot on the kitchen floor where you dropped a pot roast six months ago. According to Pepperberg, Alex his the cognitive abilities of a 6-year-old child. He can identify objects, colors, and shapes, and he’s not just repeating what he hears. This is a substantial claim, given that Alex’s brain is the size of a shelled walnut.

Twenty-five years ago this claim meant a radical paradigm shift in the study of animal intelligence—a shift that’s still happening today. In this venture, apparently, size really does matter, and until Alex came along, the study of cognition, and especially the acquisition of language, had focused exclusively on large primate brains with frontal lobes. The idea of jumping from that group to one entirely outside the mammalian class was hard for many to swallow. But to Pepperberg, that seemed a little like the guy who loses his keys in a park at night but then searches for them under the street lamp because that’s where the light is best. Sure, primate brains look a lot like ours, but why not throw the net a little wider? A parrot’s ability to speak—barring a real-life Planet of the Apes—represents a significant built-in starting point for communication. Given the opportunity, what else might these birds be capable of? To Pepperberg it was a reasonable question—but when she applied for her first NIH grant, they told her to go pound sand. When she came back the second time, she brought Alex’s first report card, which showed he was recognizing and naming objects. This time, they didn’t say no. If Pepperberg could put her money where he parrot was, Alex would be poised to crash the gates of the exclusive “frontal lobes only” intelligence club. A thinking bird would topple everything we’d previously assumed about animal intelligence.

More here.

Why is Philip Roth so great?

Stephen Amidon in The Sunday Times

Philip Roth is America’s greatest living novelist. His books are the most widely anticipated literary events on both sides of the Atlantic – no other writer working today mixes universal critical acclaim with such broad popularity. His latest book, Exit Ghost (his 28th), is due out next month, and is certain to be the most important of the season.

Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the oldest child of Herman and Bessie Roth, first-generation Jewish-Americans. He graduated from high school at the age of 16 and went on to study with Saul Bellow at the University of Chicago. His debut novel, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), earned him the National Book Award – the first of many big prizes – but it wasn’t until the raunchy, hilarious Portnoy’s Complaint, in 1969, that he became a bestseller. Although always popular, Roth’s work underwent a resurgence during the 1990s, when, over an astonishing five-year period, he won all four of America’s leading literary prizes – for four different books.

One of the keys to his success is his ability to discuss the weightiest of topics – faith, marriage, family – while at the same time being the sexiest writer in the business. Ever since Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s work has been characterised by a feverish interest in sex that occasionally teeters on the edge of the pornographic. Yet his work also remains a highly serious discussion of man’s tenuous place in an increasingly hostile world. Like so many prophets before him, Roth sees man as a fallen creature. It’s just that he usually sees man as falling into bed.

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Clinical cost of making headlines

Ben Goldacre on Bad Science

The archives at badscience.net are overflowing with just a small sample of the media’s crimes: preposterous cherry-picking, outrageous overextrapolation, startling ignorance or whitewashing of known methodological flaws and, worst of all, reporting the authors’ speculative conclusions, from the discussion section of a paper, as if they were the experimental results themselves.

The sad reality is, from the extremes of the media’s MMR scaremongering to the grind of the Daily Mail’s bizarre ongoing ontological project of dividing all the world’s inanimate objects into those that cause or cure cancer, the media commentariat has not earned privileged early access to scientific knowledge and information. And stories such as the media’s MMR hoax (as it will come to be known) have been perpetuated by the promotion of unpublished research as if it were gold-standard work.

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A Kick in the Pants: Reintroducing Henry Miller

Jim Knipfel in Context

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying, and not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off.”

In 1930, one crazy man wrote those words, and some thirty-five years later, he detonated that bomb—at least in literary terms.

In June of 1965, Henry Miller was the author of the top five bestselling books in America. There was a reason for it, of course. A tidal wave of publicity accompanied the 1963 Supreme Court decision lifting the decades-old ban on Miller’s more controversial works, and now they were available (legally) for the first time. On the downside, those five books (Quiet Days in Clichy, The World of Sex, and the three volumes of The Rosy Crucifixion)— even more than Tropic of Cancer, whose 1961 publication led to the Supreme Court case—solidified the then-73 year-old Miller’s reputation as The King of Smut. It was a grossly undeserved reputation. In fact, in one of the many ironies of Miller’s career, a number of his books had long been available in the U.S., but those travelogues, essay collections, and character sketches had generated almost no interest among American readers. No, it was his notoriety as a pornographer that would stick with him long after his death in 1980.

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Iran executes more Arabs

Peter Tatchell in The Guardian’s Comment is Free

“The west is obsessed with Tehran’s nuclear programme, but doesn’t give a damn about human rights abuses.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran has executed three more Arab political prisoners, just days after a visit from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour. In further defiance of the UN and international law, four more Arabs face imminent execution.

There have been no protests from Britain, the EU or the UN. The UN’s silence comes on top of the truly appalling vote by UN Human Rights Council to abandon its monitoring of human rights abuses in Iran.

The only thing the west seems to care about is Iran’s nuclear programme. Human rights abuses do not concern Washington, London or Brussels. Nor do they concern President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Both men have warmly embraced the tyrant of Tehran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Arab League, the supposed defender of Arab peoples worldwide, is equally indifferent. It has refused to protest to Iran about the persecution of ethnic Arabs in the south-west of the country – the oil-rich region Tehran calls Khuzestan, but which the indigenous Arab peoples call al-Ahwaz.

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The ‘Special One’ has finally cracked

Tim Black in Spiked Online

‘Chelsea Football Club and José Mourinho have agreed to part company today (Thursday) by mutual consent.’ And so it comes to an end. A man who combined sublime self-certainty with self-aware prattishness has finally ‘consented’ to a separation from Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, the Russian with the watery smile. Not that it really comes as a surprise. Mourinho’s egg-shopping analogy before Tuesday’s Champions League match, the cause of affected bemusement among some commentators, said it all and so much more besides.

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Can anyone stop it? Global warming, the book review

Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books reviews

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming by Bjørn Lomborg

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger

What We Know About Climate Change by Kerry Emanuel

and

Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren edited by Joseph F.C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman

During the last year, momentum has finally begun to build for taking action against global warming by putting limits on carbon emissions and then reducing them. Driven by ever-more-dire scientific reports, Congress has, for the first time, begun debating ambitious targets for carbon reduction. Al Gore, in his recent Live Earth concerts, announced that he will work to see an international treaty signed by the end of 2009. Even President Bush has recently reversed his previous opposition and summoned the leaders of all the top carbon-emitting countries to a series of conferences designed to yield some form of limits on CO2.

The authors of the first two books under review have some doubts about a strategy that emphasizes limits on carbon emissions, Lomborg for economic reasons and Nordhaus and Shellenberger for political ones. Since any transition away from fossil fuel is likely to be the dominant global project of the first half of the twenty-first century, it’s worth taking those qualms seriously.

More here.