Ibogaine is back in the news, with recurring claims that it can stop an addict’s cravings and allow a trouble-free withdrawal from addiction. A powerful hallucinogen, it appears to have a cognitive effect as well, prompting an addict’s transformative reappraisal of their relationship to their drugs and their habits. People report actually taking a day-and-a-half trip and waking up afterward to realize their addiction is literally just gone. Would love to see someone sufficiently interested to bankroll reputable clinical trials of this, but the drug addict community is not much of a constituency for either public or private funding sources, and NIDA and the FDA appear scared off by the drug’s toxicity.

The Battle for Genoa. 120,000 souls of all persuasions against 1800 police in full metal jacket in “Europe’s Seattle.”

Yes, there will be violence and yes, the mass media will focus on it. The world

leaders will publicly condemn the head-bangers, but gratefully use them as an excuse to

ignore the arguments of the rest.

What should seriously concern the G8 is not so much the violence, the numbers in the

street or even that they themselves look like idiots hiding behind the barricades, but that the

deep roots of a genuine new version of internationalism are growing. This is demonizing the

global institutions and there’s not much governments can do. Common Dreams

The Webby Awards: 2001 Winners. Congratulations to the winners. Unfortunately, Dancing Paul and LiveJournal beat out Blogger in the “personal web site” category.

In animal behavior, the handicap principle, codified by Israeli zoologist Amotz Zahavi after careful observation of a social bird of the desert called the babbler, explains the counterintuitive observation that prey often ostentatiously advertise their presence to the predator stalking them, rather than keeping a low profile. Zahavi says this will dissuade the predator from wasting energy on a quarry that seems to have boundless energy to put up a good chase. Animals “signal courage by courting danger”, announcing their “readiness to entertain adversity”; they even compete in ostentation and prevent animals inferior in the hierarchy from out-babbling them. The principle may be a key to overcoming evolutionary theory’s failure to date to develop a satisfactory explanation of animal (and human) altruism. [It also strikes me as particularly apt that this principle would be formulated by an Israeli scientist!] National Post

Maybe It’s Your Platitude: Can we convey anything about art without platitudinous superlatives? Can we convey anything with them?? Washington Post

“It’s as if Hitler and Michelangelo collaborated to make a masterpiece.” Cross of Shame. “In 1981 Thomas Hoving wrote King of the Confessors, a rippling narrative of his pursuit and purchase of the Bury St. Edmunds Cross, a masterpiece of medieval sculpture for the

Cloisters Museum in upper Manhattan. Now, having uncovered new information, Hoving has rewritten his original book to reveal the controversial and disturbing truths about the history

of the cross. Hoving is no stranger to controversy. The former enfant terrible of the New York museum world, Hoving became head curator of the Cloisters in 1965 at the age of 34. By 1967 he

became the youngest director in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is today a world-renowned expert on the international art market.

“…I wrote the original book in part,” he says, “because I wanted to show people the

real art world, a world of backstabbers, sharks and con artists–not the salon world of tea-drinking esthetes.” What he didn’t realize at the time was that the Bury St. Edmunds Cross

was controversial on so many levels. More than a pretty pawn in the international chess match played between wealthy and occasionally unscrupulous acquisitors, it was a object full

of hate. Beneath its pious beauty, it is inscribed with fiery anti-Semitic invective…

Today, the cross remains in the possession of the Cloisters, which, according to Hoving, is aware of its anti-Semitic inscription but refuses to acknowledge it. ” Forbes

Two—Make That Three—Cheers for the Chain Bookstores. The author has had enough of the romanticization of the warm fuzzy independent bookstore.

In a syrupy scene in You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan lovingly

introduces one of her child customers to Maud Hart Lovelace’s

classic Betsy-Tacy series. Now, I am a Betsy-Tacy fan myself, as

are my children, and only a few weeks before seeing the movie I

had gone searching for some of the later books in the series. My

first stop was Books of Wonder, the famous Manhattan children’s

bookshop on which You’ve Got Mail’s independent appears to

have been based. The clerk there had never heard of the series,

and when she looked it up in Books in Print, she proceeded to

confuse it with another venerable series, Carolyn Haywood’s

Betsy books. The store, in any case, didn’t carry them. At Barnes

& Noble, on the other hand, I hit pay dirt on the first try: after only

a moment’s thought, the young clerk led me right to the shelf

where almost every volume in the series was stocked. Borders,

too, I soon ascertained, carried the Betsy-Tacy books. The Atlantic

Surly? They Jest. Rock stars have always glowered and sulked when photographed. Here are some theories on how this happened. Washington Post

“A temporary brain disturbance is all you need…” ‘According to Canadian scientist Michael Persinger, believing you have been

abducted by aliens or found God is the result of a “temporary brain

disturbance”.

Persinger has been tinkering with the heads of volunteers, disturbing the

electrical activity in the grey matter with magnetic fields… Persinger’s experiments could undermine thousands of years of silly love

songs.’ Spark

Artists of Resistance: “The roster of artists with social consciences is endless. I point to a few to represent

so many, because their work, their commitment, encourages and sustains me, and I

want it to encourage and sustain others.” –Howard Zinn The Progressive

A finger on the crime scene: review of Suspect Identities: a history of fingerprinting and criminal identification. “For almost a century, American courts have thought about fingerprints the way children visualize snowflakes: No two are exactly

alike. So most judges, jurors, and lawyers came to trust that fingerprints left at crime scenes match the right suspects to their

misdeeds. But in his new history of criminal identification, Simon Cole questions whether fingerprinting deserves its hallowed

reputation.” Christian Science Monitor

Thoughts and words on ones and zeroes: “Are we affecting our creative capabilities when we use

all this increasingly complex machinery? And does digital technology help

us generate ideas, or merely execute them?” Spark

In Labyrinth of Desire, Rosemary Sullivan asks why

“so many intelligent, accomplished women fall

into obsessive infatuation with men who turn out to

be shallow cads.”

The Bug Stops Here: “Bacterial scourges that plagued humanity are coming back, and our

food is partly to blame. Few people would realise that a lot of the food we eat – chicken, pork and

even some beef – comes from animals that have been pumped full of

antibiotics for most of their lives. Modern animal farming relies on repeated

and large-scale use of antibiotics as growth promoters. And yet, there is little

evidence they have any beneficial effect.

In fact, the evidence is mounting that the practice actually breeds bacteria

harmful to humans, and such wholesale use of antibiotics increases

bacteria’s resistance against them. Thus creating a nightmare scenario for

doctors: people with serious infections that don’t respond to antibiotics.”