New political understandings are being launched each day, it seems. From one quarter comes what we might call Praetorian Realism, an acknowledgment of Samuel Huntington’s scenario for the military disciplining of civil chaos in modernizing lands.1 From another comes Matrix Realism, emphasizing the army’s role in the institutional order of the Arab countries.2 In this expansive intellectual climate, with its growing range of options, perhaps there’s room for one more entrant. Let’s call it Tribal Realism, the aim being to bring anthropological insights to bear on our political prospects abroad. Tribal Realism might have a number of practical applications, but its immediate goal would be to vet Western political speeches to delete all references to “the people” of Libya, or Iraq or Afghanistan. It will then try to decompose this popular collective noun into its actual constituent parts. Admittedly, removing such a warmly democratic term as “the people” will leave a sizeable hole in the prevailing rhetoric, exposing speechwriters for assorted presidents and prime ministers to a pressing need for workable replacements, but the benefits should outweigh the costs.

For one thing, it will expose the enemy, too. From his Bedouin tent, Colonel Muamar Qaddafi has said he would not dream of harming “his people”, let alone shooting and shelling them, and he undoubtedly means it. Correctly understood, however, Qaddafi’s people are, first, his family, consisting of his wives and children; next, his clan; then, his tribe; and finally, by a no doubt deplorable process of geographical attenuation, those tiny insignificant figures in the direction of Benghazi, who hardly count at all. Once we grasp this meaning of the term “people”, we will see that Qaddafi is telling the truth. In the colonel’s ethical universe those who deserve his exclusive concern are the men and women he regards as kin. In contrast, that unruly rabble to the east may legitimately be hunted down and mercilessly killed. That is what desert chieftains have historically done when they could. That is what men like Qaddafi see as their duty to do, and that is what his numerous dependents—“his people”—expect him to do.

via The American Interest Magazine.

We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science. Science in Muslim societies already lags far behind the scientific achievements of the West, but what adds a fair amount of contemporary angst is that Islamic civilization was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. What's more, Islam's "golden age" flourished while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages.

This history raises a troubling question: What caused the decline of science in the Muslim world?

Now, a small but emerging group of scholars is taking a new look at the relationship between Islam and science. Many have personal roots in Muslim or Arab cultures. While some are observant Muslims and others are nonbelievers, they share a commitment to speak out—in books, blogs, and public lectures—in defense of science. If they have a common message, it's the conviction that there's no inherent conflict between Islam and science.

via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Last month, nearly a dozen scholars gathered at a symposium on Islam and science at the University of Cambridge, sponsored by the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Programme in Science & Religion. They discussed a wide range of topics: the science-religion dialogue in the Muslim world, the golden age of Islam, comparisons between Islamic and Christian theology, and current threats to science. The Muslim scholars there also spoke of a personal responsibility to foster a culture of science.

One was Rana Dajani, a molecular biologist at Hashemite University, in Jordan. She received her undergraduate and master's degrees in Jordan, then took time off to raise four children before going to the University of Iowa on a Fulbright grant to earn her Ph.D. Now back in Jordan, she is an outspoken advocate of evolution and modern science. She has also set up a network for mentoring women, and she recently started a read-aloud program for young children at mosques around Jordan.

As if that weren't enough, Dajani helped organize a committee to study the ethics of stem-cell research, bringing together Jordanian scientists, physicians, and Islamic scholars. (The traditional Muslim belief is that the spirit does not enter the body until 40 days after conception, which means many human embryonic stem cells can be harvested for research.)

"Being a Muslim, living in a Muslim world, Islam plays a big role in our everyday lives," she says. "We need to understand the relationship between Islam and science in order to live in harmony without any contradictions."

For these scholars, the relationship between science and Islam is not a dry, academic subject. Many of the hottest topics in science—from the origins of the universe and the evolution of humans to the mind/brain problem—challenge traditional Muslims beliefs about the world.

"Remember, these are human issues," says Nidhal Guessoum, an Algerian-born astrophysicist at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, who was also at the Cambridge symposium. "It's not an experiment in the lab. I'm talking about my students, my family members, the media discourse that I hear every day on TV, the sermons I hear in the mosque every Friday."

Actor Peter Falk reportedly died last night at age 83, at his home in Beverly Hills. According to his daughter, reports USA Today, Falk had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

As an actor, Falk was a performer who was more than he at first seemed: he had a famously raspy, tough-guy manner of speech, but performed subtly in a wide range of roles, from comedy to gangster movies to the art films of John Cassavetes and Wim Wenders. His most beloved role, though, and the one for which he's immortalized on TV, was as a cigar-chewing, trenchcoat-wearing detective on NBC's Columbo—who was, himself, the very definition of a character who was more than he looked like, and used it to his advantage.

Lt. Columbo, hero of the show that began airing in 1971, was a role that seemed tailor-made for Falk (though other actors originated it, beginning with a TV movie in 1960), if you can credibly use the phrase "tailor-made" and "Columbo" in the same sentence. (It is, I believe, a constitutional requirement that Lt. Columbo be described as "rumpled.") He looked like he might have just rolled off a park bench or stumbled out of a bar in early-morning light. He was sheathed in wrinkles and looked like a cigar smelled. (He was, as Falk describes him in the documentary clip below, "a schlepper.") He had a roughed-up style, a working-class accent and a pleasantly addled aspect—thanks, partly, to the fact that Falk had a glass eye from age three, because of a tumor.

All of which led his quarry, the criminals that he investigated, to underestimate him—which, of course, was the entire point of Columbo. It was a whodunit in which the audience knew who did it; so the thrill came in seeing how Columbo would outwit his targets and catch them up in their lies. He did it with dogged determination, genius and a cheerful willingness to be underestimated. Also, with persistence: his signature move was to turn from an interrogation, letting the suspects think they had outfoxed him, and then turn back to ask "Just one more thing..." which would be their undoing.

via TIME.com.

AT FIRST GLANCE, this could be Italy—the promenade, the sidewalk cafés and ice-cream parlors, the streetscape of conjoined little apartment houses in mustard, terra-cotta, ocher, olive, or beige. Even the name of the place, Lavasa, sounds vaguely Italian.

But look again, and this clearly isn’t Italy. It’s too clean, too new. There are too few tourists. There are hardly any people at all, actually. Which only makes it all the more improbable that Lavasa is, in fact, in India—land of auto rickshaws and slum dogs, of sweat and dust and litter. With only a handful of residents, Lavasa is a city-in-waiting. But its corporate backers believe it will soon represent nothing less than a new model of urban development and governance in India—a country where the phrase city planning has long been a contradiction in terms.

Lavasa sits in the Western Ghats, some 130 miles southeast of Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital, and 40 miles west of Pune, a growing hub for software programming and computer animation. If all goes according to its master plan, Lavasa will eventually house more than 300,000 people in five distinct “towns.” It will also have a world-class medical campus, luxury hotels, boarding schools, sports academies, a Nick Faldo–designed golf course, a space camp, and, its developers hope, animation and film studios, software-development companies, biotech labs, and law and architectural firms—in short, all of the knowledge industries at the heart of the “new India.” Those industries have yet to buy in, but residential sales have been brisk: in Dasve, the first of Lavasa’s five towns, scheduled to be completed this year, the houses are almost sold out.

via The Atlantic.

via xkcd

When the health department in Columbia, Missouri nixed a new flavor of ice cream laced with cicadas in early June from a local shops menu board, it wasnt because its actually illegal to serve the winged insects in food to the public. "Its not really regulated," says Gerald Worley, the departments manager of environmental health, who adds, "I dont claim to be an expert on this." Nonetheless, Worley says he discouraged Sparkys Homemade Ice Cream proprietor Scott Southwick from selling the surprisingly popular flavor because Southwick "didnt really have a plan for how he would cook them," and Worley worried that the critters, which were collected from the ground, might make people sick. "We suggested that it would not be a good idea," says Worley. The first batch, in which the boiled bugs were covered with brown sugar and milk chocolate, then mixed in with a brown sugar and butter flavored ice cream base, had promptly sold out after the shop pre-announced the flavor on its Facebook page.

As it turns out, cicadas have a long culinary history, and the emergence this spring of the noisy, 13-year cyclical cricket-like insect in the Southeast and Southern Midwest has brought a concurrent resurgence in cicada cuisine. Ashlee Horne of Nashville, Tennessee likes her cicadas sauted in butter and garlic. Jenna Jadin of Washington, D.C., bakes them into banana bread, chocolate chip cookies and rhubarb pie. Others like them dipped in chocolate for a sweet, crunchy snack. The inch-long bugs are widely consumed around the world, especially in East Asia, and are considered a delicacy among the Iroquois people right here in the United States. Even the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle gobbled them up: In his fourth-century B.C. text Historia Animalium he noted that the young nymphs are tastier than mature bugs, which have a harder exoskeleton, and that among adults, the egg-laden females are best.

via TIME.