Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times Magazine, had a different take on the pictures. She thought the "torture photographs" of Abu Ghraib were typical expressions of a brutalized popular American culture, coarsened by violent pornography, sadistic movies and video games, and a narcissistic compulsion to put every detail of our lives, especially our sexual lives, on record, preferably on public record. To her the Abu Ghraib photos were precisely the true nature and heart of America. She wrote:

Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.

Many liberal-minded people would have shared instinctively not only Sontag's disgust but also her searing indictment of modern American culture. One of the merits of Errol Morris's new documentary on the Abu Ghraib photographs, and even more of the excellent book written by Philip Gourevitch in cooperation with Morris, is that they complicate matters. What we think we see in the pictures may not be quite right. The pictures don't show the whole story. They may even conceal more than they reveal. By interviewing most of the people who were involved in the photographic sessions, delving into their lives, their motives, their feelings, and their views, then and now, the authors assemble a picture of Abu Ghraib, the implications of which are actually more disturbing than Sontag's cultural critique.

Ghosts - The New York Review of Books

While we are still far from a full understanding of the nature of memory, perception, and meaning, it is nonetheless because of the work of scientists such as Changeux, Edelman, and Rizzolatti that we have a better grasp of the complexity of subjective experiences. Perhaps in the future, questions about higher brain functions will be better understood because of new genetic and neurophysiological discoveries and brain imaging. An unexpected scientific discovery can give us a new insight into something we thought we had always known: mirror neurons, Rizzolatti tells us, "show how strong and deeply rooted is the bond that ties us to others, or in other words, how bizarre it would be to conceive of an I without an us."

How the Mind Works: Revelations

Hendrik Hertzberg:

Interesting how different things can look from inside a bubble. Or a bunker.

The Lady Doesn’t Vanish

On the stairs Natasha ran into her neighbor from across the hall, Baron Wolfe. He was somewhat laboriously ascending the bare wooden steps, caressing the bannister with his hand and whistling softly through his teeth.

“Where are you off to in such a hurry, Natasha?”

Natasha, by Vladimir Nabokov

FREUD, DORA (NO, NOT THAT DORA), AND SURFING’S SECRET AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN ROOTS

DISCUSSED: Surfing’s Premier Nihilist, Yet Another Papa-Centric Tale, Double-Secret-Crypto Jews, Something You Buy vs. Something You Do, Weimar on the Pacific, A Man Named Tubesteak, Hitchcockian Voyeurs, Sexual-Coming-of-Age Novels, Teaching Sally Field to Surf

The Believer - Gidget on the Couch

In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the experience of travelling through the fourth dimension is cinematic: the Time Traveller sits like a film-goer, watching the accelerated passage of time, as the time machine’s dials spin ever faster. The effect is of rapid cutting and slow fade-out: “The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter.” As Keith Williams says, time in the novel becomes a “movie reel, speeded forwards and backwards, or stopped at will”. Remarkably, The Time Machine was written before Wells had seen a film. It was published in 1895, the very year the cinematograph was invented by the Lumière brothers. As film historian Ian Christie has said, their invention “quite literally made time travel a spectator sport”.

Williams’s scholarly study argues convincingly that Wells’s early fiction anticipates the “cinematisation” of culture, both in his narrative technique and in his description of the technology. Wells – dubbed the “Realist of the Fantastic” by Conrad – is, says Williams, “the unjustly neglected precursor of High Modernist interest and influence on both avant garde and popular aspects of the new medium.” Wells’s prescience is, of course, legendary and today we live in a Wellsian world. He coined the phrase “atomic bomb” before World War I, anticipating the age of nuclear proliferation and terrorists armed with suitcase nukes.

Kafka’s mouse | Science and the cinema | PD Smith

When Nassim Nicholas Taleb said the world’s economy was heading for disaster, he was scorned. Now traders, economists, even NASA, are clamouring to hear him speak.

The prophet of boom and doom

Experts discuss tips and tricks to let loose your inner ingenuity

How to Unleash Your Creativity

Modern video games mean big business, and big controversy. Yet most of the charges levelled against games—that they stunt minds and spark addiction—are based on an outdated understanding of what gamers do when they sit down to play

Rage against the machines

Last month a controversial op-ed by Slavoj Žižek was published in Le Monde diplomatique. Around the same time, Žižek also wrote a similar letter to the London Review of Books. In the current issue, LRB has published some of its readers' responses.

As someone who was brought up in Tibet, I found Slavoj Žižek’s regurgitation of the Chinese Communist Party line mind-boggling.

This assessment is consistent with Jello's reaction that Žižek's argument "reads exactly like Chinese propaganda."

No Shangri-La | Letters to the LRB