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The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - Jun. 10 (News Analysis) - Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a

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Flu Warning: Beware the Drug Companies

Fri, 27 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Helen Epstein - May. 27 (Investigative Report) - During the ten years leading up to the pandemic declaration of 2009, scientists associated with the companies that were to profit from the WHO’s “pandemic preparedness” programs, including Roche and GlaxoSmithKline, were involved at virtually every stage of the development of those programs. The companies funded the documents giving guidance on preparing for the influenza pandemic, in which the WHO recommended the stockpiling of Tamiflu and Relenza. Consultants drafted parts of these documents and joined WHO officials in fund-raising for the Tamiflu stockpile. Industry-supported scientists were also on the committee that issued the “pandemic emergency declaration.”49 That announcement caused developing countries to request assistance from the WHO’s Tamiflu stockpile fund, and these requests contributed to a tripling of the drug’s sales in 2009.

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Disappearing Ink

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:52:30 -0700

The New York Review of Books - Nov. 01 - Luc Sante Benoit Pailley Hans Haacke: News, 1969/2008 I left the New Museum’s “The Last Newspaper”—a show that sets out to explore the relation between newspapers and art at the end of the print era—with my fingers black from printer’s ink, just as they used to be years ago when I read the Times every morning on the subway. I can’t remember when they were last begrimed that way, and don’t know whether that is more reflective of the fact that newspapers today use higher-quality inks, or that I tend to read the news online more often than on paper, or that I no longer ride the subway to work. Some of the museum’s ink came from the two newspapers that are published at the exhibition itself and constitute works in the show: the broadsheet New City Reader (edited by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis) and a tabloid, edited by the Barcelona-based curatorial office Latitudes, that has been variously called The Last Post, The Last Gazette, and The Last Register. The broadsheet is concerned with “architecture, public space, and the city” and its poster-size dimensions (15�” x 23” folded) and epic layouts are intended for wall display. The tabloid, which focuses on newspapers, as well as on the show itself, is rather more puckish. The Last Gazette includes, for example, a record of a quixotic attempt by Ines Schaber to approach the underground facility in western Pennsylvania where the photo agency Corbis keeps its archive of some 70 million pictures. The story evokes the cold-war espionage genre—an unremarkable setting masks a culture of such militant secrecy that the best the author could manage is a murkily distant photo of the facility’s parking lot. Its meandering text and bland snapshots, on the other hand, evoke the whimsical record-keeping of 1970s conceptual art, which is rather more in keeping with the spirit of the show. There were, indeed, many aspects of the New Museum exhibit that reminded me of Information, the 1970 show at the Museum of Modern Art, conceived by Hans Haacke and curated by Kynaston MacShine, with its polls, suggestion boxes, and works in which text dominated the visual content, all of which had alternately beguiled and frustrated me as a 16-year-old. The Box Judith Bernstein: Are You Running With Me Jesus?, 1967 The exhibit’s third-floor entry appears to be a hive of activity. A jumble of tables hold the two in-house newspapers’ minimal editorial offices, interactive installations by the Center for Urban Pedagogy and by StoryCorps, the compilers of oral history for public radio, and a station where visitors are encouraged to tear up newspapers and creatively pin the resulting scraps on a board—”Create your own news stories!” On the day I visited, the board held a handful of ragged items, the tables hosted a number of people clicking on laptops, and Urban Pedagogy’s set-up entertained a few children with its brightly colored plastic bricks, meant to illustrate either zoning or the affordability of housing. But many of the show’s participatory ambitions appeared unfulfilled. No one was discussing the issues of the day on the large blue circular rug provided for the purpose on the fourth floor, and, three weeks into the show’s term, no one had yet taken advantage of the free advertising offered by the two papers. Clearly, such stabs at eliciting dialogue, as well as the piles of newsprint given out for free (which also include Old News, a project the Swedish artist Jacob Fabricius has been spearheading since 2004, in which artists from various countries are asked to compile stories and photographs from their local newspapers, the results of which are then reprinted), nod to the theme of potlatch that has been prominent in the art world since the late Cuban artist Félix Gonzàlez-Torres invited gallery visitors, in 1991, to take candies from an enormous pile. Many of the interactive features of this show, however, suggest a setting other than a museum exhibit—a three-day conference, perhaps, or a permanent installation in some public space, in any case someplace that bears repeated visits, rather than a show costing $12 per ticket. Walker Art Center Adrian Piper: Vanilla Nightmares #9 The conceptual pedigree of the exhibit is illustrated by its key historical work, News (1968) by the artist and investigative provocateur Hans Haacke, which consists of a teletype machine spitting out the latest stories from the wire services, its ribbonlike paper piling into a small mountain on the floor. No one consulted the feed while I was there—and why should they, since they could obtain the same information with less trouble from their phones? In 1968 the piece may have had a raw immediacy that bridged the gap between a sacrosanct museum space and a turbulent outside world, but in the present day its obsolete technology reduces it to the status of historical curiosity. Few other works date back to the time when newspapers were vital. A pair of collages by Judith Bernstein from 1967-68, including race-war photos and scrawled rants, evoke the angry layouts of the underground press. Sarah Charlesworth’s 1979 series, concerning the death of an American TV cameraman at the hands of Somoza’s forces in Nicaragua, isolates blurry photocopied news items on acres of gray background and looks at once agitated and modish in a very 1979 way. Adrian Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares, which dates from 1986, is a series of drawings of angry African-American figures done directly on Times front pages that feature race-relations stories. But this is not a historical survey of newspaper art. There are no Cubist collages or Warhol tabloid pages or Rauschenberg wire-photo assemblages. The show is primarily about the present day, which means that the pieces are more concerned with appearance than with substance. One of the few exceptions to this rule is Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center, which occupies yet another set of tables on the third floor. It is an ongoing, intermittently updated work in which Tillmans juxtaposes cut-out news items with his own photographs and lays them out under glass, addressing a variety of political issues—human rights, religious violence—in a way that is genuinely provocative. Yet the display that stayed with me was a single item that covered a whole table, Naomi Wolf’s “Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps,” published in The Guardian in 2007. Elsewhere, Thomas Hirschhorn covers evening gowns with a variety of newspaper headlines and photographs—some current and others unplaceable. Pierre Bismuth reprints various front pages with the lead photo doubled, apparently to suggest its intensity. Nate Lowman, who describes himself as an “image thief”—as who isn’t nowadays?—makes attractive silkscreens from sundry clipped-out bits and bobs. The late Dash Snow framed a series of hyperventilating New York Post front pages on the subject of Saddam Hussein, having first crumpled them and covered them with glitter. Aleksandra Mir makes oversized copies of Post front pages in a cartoonish freehand style—which actually manage to look barely more cartoonish than the actual Post front pages. Pierre Bismuth: It is Sarah, It is Murder. Evening Standard, 18 July 2000, 2000 Perhaps a more focused show might simply have let a selection of artists run amok with the Post, and in fact you could probably populate a fairly substantial exhibit with works on that subject going back to when Rupert Murdoch first bought the paper. If the show also included all the band flyers, record jackets, and T-shirt designs that have been filched from the Post over the years, it might fill the entire museum. “The Last Newspaper” wants to be urgent, immediate, and democratic at the same time as it is chic, cutting-edge, and art world-savvy. While it may have enough of the right names to satisfy the second part of this ambition, its attempt at the first is no more successful than the regular efforts made by whoever curates the Whitney Biennial. For all that numerous artists and curators genuinely believe themselves to be engaged, the art world is too rich, too hermetic, and too pleased with itself to have any more rapport with what is happening “on the street” than did the art establishment Hans Haacke and cohorts were trying to overturn circa 1968. But then, in taking on the lame-duck medium that is the newspaper, the show is even further insulated from actuality. Newsprint still manages to connote urgency, at least in the way that Che Guevara’s stenciled face persists in connoting revolution, but the connotation here stands bereft of real context. While the show conveys an appreciation for the newspaper as object, as texture, as semiotic marker, most of the works on display are so far from engaging with the idea of the newspaper as vital carrier of immediate information that the exhibit might as well date from a time long after the final passing of the medium. The show’s primary message seems to be that since the flavor of the newspaper—so piquant, so gritty, so salt-of-the-earth—is on the verge of disappearance, it may be the last time that an aesthete can experience the bouquet of printer’s ink: ash, black pepper, cordite, with a hint of brimstone. The Last Newspaper is on view at the New Museum in New York through January 9, 2011.

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The Elections: How Bad for Democrats?

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 10:45:05 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Michael Tomasky - Oct. 11 (Opinion) - It is generally assumed in Washington these days that in the November 2 elections the party will lose control of the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate (although this is less likely). If the Republicans take control of one or both chambers, they and conservative commentators will proclaim that the voters have rejected “socialism” and will begin planting in earnest the idea that Barack Obama will be a one-term president.

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He Was Tortured, But He Can’t Sue

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:58:43 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By David Cole - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - On Monday, June 14, the Supreme Court declined to hear Maher Arar’s case, conclusively shutting the door on the Canadian citizen’s effort to obtain redress from US officials who stopped him in September 2002 while he was changing planes on his way home to Canada and shipped him instead to Syria, where he was tortured and imprisoned without charges for nearly a year. In so ruling, the Court refused to reconsider the decision of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, sitting en banc, which had ruled in November 2009 that Arar’s case raised too many sensitive issues of national security and confidential information to permit its adjudication in a court of law. If he is to obtain any remedy now, it must come from Congress and the President. The courts have washed their hands of the affair, but that does not mean that it is resolved.

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Peter Beinart vs. the ADL

Sat, 29 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Abraham H. Foxman, Peter Beinart - May. 29 (Comment) - Israelis, to a large extent, and this is shared by many in the American Jewish community (another of Beinart’s targets), feel frustrated that all their efforts toward changing the dynamic have been met with rejection and/or violence. Most Israelis understand that continuing to sit in the West Bank is not good for the country. So at Camp David in 2000 they tried a solution of ending the conflict, which included withdrawing from 90 percent of the territories and eliminating the majority of settlements. They got a big no and suicide bombs.

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The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Peter Beinart - May. 17 (Opinion) - In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.

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The Tea Party Jacobins

Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Mark Lilla - May. 10 () - The American public, meanwhile, was having no trouble accepting both revolutions and reconciling them in everyday life. This made sense, given that they were inspired by the same political principle: radical individualism. During the Clinton years the country edged left on issues of private autonomy (sex, divorce, casual drug use) while continuing to move right on economic autonomy (individual initiative, free markets, deregulation). As I wrote then, Americans saw “no contradiction in holding down day jobs in the unfettered global marketplace…and spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties.” Democrats were day-trading, Republicans were divorcing. We were all individualists now.

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They Fled from Our War

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Alisa Roth, Hugh Eakin - Apr. 27 (Review) - what was once a middle-class society without democracy may for some time to come be a democracy without a middle class

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Publishing: The Revolutionary Future

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By Jason Epstein - Mar. 01 (Special Report) - The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago.

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A Deal with the Taliban?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By Ahmed Rashid - Feb. 10 (Opinion) - For thirty years Afghanistan has cast a long, dark shadow over world events, but it has also been marked by pivotal moments that could have brought peace and changed world history. One such moment occurred in February 1989, just as the last Soviet troops were leaving Afghanistan. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had flown into Islamabad—the first visit to Pakistan by a senior Soviet official. He came on a last-ditch mission to try to persuade Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the army, and the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to agree to a temporary sharing of power between the Afghan Communist regime in Kabul and the Afghan Mujahideen. He hoped to prevent a civil war and lay the groundwork for a peaceful, final transfer of power to the Mujahideen.

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In the World of Facebook

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By By Charles Petersen - Feb. 04 (Review) - Facebook, the most popular social networking Web site in the world, was founded in a Harvard dorm room in the winter of 2004. Like Microsoft, that other famous technology company started by a Harvard dropout, Facebook was not particularly original. A quarter-century earlier, Bill Gates, asked by IBM to provide the basic programming for its new personal computer, simply bought a program from another company and renamed it. Mark Zuckerberg, the primary founder of Facebook, who dropped out of college six months after starting the site, took most of his ideas from existing social networks such as Friendster and MySpace. But while Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.

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Afghanistan: What Could Work

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By Rory Stewart - Jan. 07 (Opinion) - A legion of arguments almost drove Obama away from this new moderate position over the last ten weeks of discussion. There was our general fear in Afghanistan and Pakistan of the modern demons, which policy experts dub "insurgency, terrorism, civil war, human rights–abusing warlords, narcotics, weapons of mass destruction, and global jihad" and the spawn of "safe havens, rogue, fragile, and failed states." There was our developing sense, over the last eight years, that the status quo was unacceptable.

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Iraq on the Edge

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Joost R. Hiltermann - Oct. 29 (Opinion) - For the occasional visitor such as myself, various methods exist to measure America's standing in Iraq, Iraqi suspicions and aspirations, and progress in the transfer of power, but none prove as illuminating as the checkpoints into and throughout Baghdad's Green Zone, that diminishing symbol of the Bush administration's ambitions.

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Which Way for Hamas?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Nicolas Pelham, Max Rodenbeck - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - Amid the wreckage of Gaza, Hamas's officials struggle to sound upbeat. The burly interior minister, Fathi Hamad, whose predecessor was killed by an Israeli bomb, defiantly shuns security precautions at his makeshift office in Gaza City's main police station. "Claims that we are trying to establish an Islamic state are false," says the minister, who says his preference would be pursuing a degree in media studies. "Hamas is not the Taliban. It is not al-Qaeda. It is an enlightened, moderate Islamic movement."

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The Afghanistan Impasse

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Ahmed Rashid - Oct. 15 (Opinion) - Pakistan's safe havens for the Afghan Taliban have been to a large extent responsible for their revival and growing dominance across Afghanistan and for the rising death toll among NATO forces. But the Taliban were not the major cause of the political crisis that enveloped Afghanistan after the August 20 presidential elections.

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Health Reform: The Fateful Moment

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Theodore R. Marmor, Jonathan Oberlander - Jul. 21 (Special Report) - Barack Obama has long emphasized the importance of reforming American medical care, both as a candidate in the 2008 election and as president. During the month of June, however, he dramatically increased his efforts to secure major reform legislation by the end of the year.

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'The Unencumbered Man'

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Michael Tomasky - Jun. 23 (Special Report) - After Barack Obama's victory in the presidential election last November, the question arose whether the result should be seen as a realignment—a fundamental shift in party dominance that would continue for a good many years. That the era of conservative supremacy was over seemed clear. Beyond that, observers were divided. My view, expressed in these pages, was that such talk was premature and that any notion of Democratic dominance "would depend on what President Obama and the congressional Democrats did with their power."

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Pakistan on the Brink

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Ahmed Rashid - May. 15 (Special Report) - The army has always defined Pakistan's national security goals. Currently it has two strategic interests: first, it seeks to ensure that a balance of terror and power is maintained with respect to India, and the jihadis are seen as part of this strategy. Second, the army supports the Afghan Taliban as a hedge against US withdrawal from Afghanistan and also against Indian influence in Kabul, which has grown considerably. Containing the domestic jihadi threat has been a tactical rather than a strategic matter for the army, so there have been bouts of fighting with the militants and also peace deals with them; and these have been interspersed with policies of jailing them and freeing them—all part of a complex and duplicitous game.

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The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Arlen Specter - Apr. 21 (Opinion) - In the seven and a half years since September 11, the United States has witnessed one of the greatest expansions of executive authority in its history, at the expense of the constitutionally mandated separation of powers. President Obama, as only the third sitting senator to be elected president in American history, and the first since John F. Kennedy, may be more likely to respect the separation of powers than President Bush was. But rather than put my faith in any president to restrain the executive branch, I intend to take several concrete steps, which I hope the new president will support.

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The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Mark Danner - Apr. 10 (Opinion) - What is needed is not more disclosures but a broadly persuasive judgment, delivered by people who can look at all the evidence, however highly classified, and can claim bipartisan respect on the order of the Watergate Select Committee or the 9/11 Commission, on whether or not torture made Americans safer.

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ICRC Report

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

International Committee of the Red Cross - Apr. 07 (Special Report) - [this is the leaked confidential report from the International Committee of the Red Cross]

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US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Mark Danner - Mar. 20 (Special Report) - We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase "War on Terror"—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was "a wartime president"—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.

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The Thirty Days of Barack Obama

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By Elizabeth Drew - Mar. 05 (News Analysis) - Obama takes particular care to avoid getting caught in traps (a lifetime trait)—some see this as avoiding taking a position—and as he began his presidency he was determined, as he had been in the campaign, not to refight the culture wars of the Sixties. He put off fixing the benighted "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays serving in the military that Clinton had been forced to adopt after he clumsily allowed it to come up just as his presidency began. In his first week in office, Obama lifted the restrictions on funding for abortion counseling by family planning groups working overseas—but not until the day after the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, as opposed to the day itself, so as not to seem to be rubbing his decision in the face of abortion foes. He said that it's time "to move past this stale and fruitless debate," and that his administration would initiate a "fresh conversation" on the subject. He invited labor leaders to a White House ceremony—they hadn't been there for a long time—in which he announced the revoking of several Bush anti-labor policies, buying time before taking on labor's number one demand, the highly controversial proposal to make it easier to form unions (the "card check").

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Google & the Future of Books

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By Robert Darnton - Jan. 28 (Special Report) - How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

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