THE PERFECT FIASCO
While Vicki Huddleston, head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, resolves an argument over her prize-winning Afghan (the dog was banned from entering this year's Cuban dog show, then reinstated), various members of the Kennedy administration, old CIA hands, and five members of the guerrilla brigade that sought to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961 have met their Cuban adversaries to discuss the Bay of Pigs. Tomorrow, the group heads to the ill-chosen landing site of the CIA-backed invasion—a scrappy and narrow beach, Playa Hiron, that borders an alligator- and snake-infested swamp, the Zapata. In the course of the talks, and contrary to the post mortem conducted by the Inspector General of the CIA, the Cubans merely say that the best side won. As the Washington Post reports, "U.S. historians have long concluded that the invading force failed for two key reasons: the CIA's bungled planning and Kennedy's refusal to provide air support. Today, Cuban officials insisted there was another reason: The Cuban military was well-trained, effective and loyal. The invaders didn't lose, they said, the Cubans won." The meeting is a first for the members of Brigade 2506, whose last journey to Cuba proved so disastrous. As Tim Weiner writes in the New York Times: "In 1961, 'we disembarked as Cubans, as men who loved our country,' said Alfredo Durán, a former president of the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association, who was expelled by the group for his decision to return to Cuba. He came back, he said, to learn, to share his thoughts, to make sure that 'never again will Cubans take arms against Cubans.' "

THE FLAT-FACE REVELATIONS
In this week's New Yorker, John Seabrooke searches for his cousins and the remains of his ancestors and assesses the impact of both the laboratory and the Internet on genealogy. In the latest issue of Nature, Dr. Maeve Leakey of Kenya's National Musuems introduces Flat Faced Man—Kenyanthropus platyops. The significance of Leaky's discovery is immense. As the Telegraph explains: "Until a few years ago only three genuses of hominin—species more closely related to humans than chimps—were known to anthropologists. One, Australopithecus, was living between four and three million years ago. Humans are thought to have evolved from an early member of Australopithecus afarensis, the species made famous by the fossil Lucy, who, it now seems, may have been sharing the woods and grass plains of prehistoric Africa with a rival." Or, as the New York Times, puts it: "[T]he family tree, once drawn with a trunk straight and true, is beginning to look more like a bush, with a tangle of branches of uncertain relationship leading in many directions." According to the Los Angeles Times, "the find is further evidence that humanity emerged from an evolutionary maze of false starts, dead-ends and competing adaptations to its African homeland. … 'This is both a very welcome and at the same time extraordinarily intriguing fossil find,' said Donald Johanson of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, who discovered the Lucy fossils in 1974." Leakey, as the Washington Post reminds its readers, "is the wife of Richard E. Leakey and daughter-in-law of Louis and Mary Leakey, a family renowned for its anthropological work in East Africa." Whether John Seabrooke is related to Lucy or to Flat Face will be ascertained shortly.

EAST VERSUS WEST?
In the summer of 1995, Michael Lind told readers of the New Republic about the supremacy of the South in American politics (though some time later Lars-Erik Nelson dismissed such a notion in the New York Review of Books, arguing there was rather more of the North in the South than Lind had imagined). Close watchers of the magazine wondered whether Lind's article reflected the bifurcated political scene at the publication itself. The New Republic is famously a magazine of two halves—a political front and a literary-political rear. Was Lind's article, which appeared firmly in the front section, meant in some way to address the question of who ruled supreme at the magazine—south or north, front or rear, editor Andrew Sullivan or literary editor Leon Weiseltier? Now appearing on the TNR's Web site is an article by editor Peter Beinart (charged with marshalling the front half), who argues that American political debate can be defined as Good West versus Bad East. In the latest issue of the magazine, however, and at the beginning of a long article about citizenship by Alan Wolfe, the back half expresses its own views about the Good West. "From an economic standpoint," Wolfe writes, "as well as a moral standpoint, there can be few more unattractive sights than apathetic Californians born on one side of the border turning their backs on hard-working Mexicans born on the other side." Let's hope war hasn't broken out on 19^th Street all over again.

FOREIGN EXCHANGE
On March 9, the Guardian published an article by Luke Harding on how the Indian city of Bangalore has become the phone bank center of the world. "With the industry doubling in size every couple of months, India is well on the way to becoming the call center capital of the world—with a turnover, analysts predict, of $3.7bn by 2008." In today's New York Times, Mark Landler has written about much the same subject, though he uses American, not British examples. " 'India is on its way to being the back office for the world,' said Shriram Ramdas, one of the founders of Bangalore Labs, which manages Web sites and other information networks for companies from a futuristic office in the International Tech Park on the outskirts of Bangalore. "But call centers are only the low end of a much larger industry of Indian software developers, transcribers, accountants, Web site designers and animation artists. … By 2008, such assignments will generate 800,000 new jobs and $17 billion in revenue for India, according to the consultants McKinsey & Company."

FAREWELL TO NEW YORK
The population of New York City, widely discussed in editorials and magazines, has lost Luc Sante to the charms of Upstate. In the current issue of Metropolis the former Slate contributor and the author of Lowlife explains why he has left the city for the hill. "The city is riding a high roller at the moment. It's a seller's market and filled to capacity. For all of that, it's no boomtown—not anymore. Prices are excessive, but not too much else is. The appetite for novelty has given way to a craving for security. Hedonism and licentiousness have been banished by official order. … It costs so much to live in New York that few people have the time or energy to do much besides work, absorb various media, and possibly mate. The city's population—always self-consciously exclusive even in its times of penury—is these days being vetted by the moral equivalent of nightclub bouncers who turn away anyone not either born lucky or seriously committed to collecting dollars. … But sooner or later the city will half-rise from its crouch, stick out a back leg, and get to scratching its current itch. And at that point all bets, as ever, will be off." Read Luc Sante's contributions to Slate on art and photography.

FROM LEBANON TO VIENNA
Edward Said, who was attacked by his political and intellectual enemies for throwing a stone at an abandoned Israeli guard house last September and whose lecture at Vienna's Freud Institute and Museum has been canceled, replies to his critics in Al-Ahram Weekly. In his article, Said explains what happened in southern Lebanon last summer. "During our 10-minute stop I was photographed there without my knowledge pitching a tiny pebble in competition with some of the younger men present, none of whom of course had any particular target in sight. The area was empty for miles and miles. Two days later my picture appeared in newspapers in Israel and all over the West. I was described as a rock-throwing terrorist, a man of violence, and so on and on, in the familiar chorus of defamation and falsehood known to anyone who has incurred the hostility of Zionist propaganda."

POLISH CRIMES
A few weeks ago, The New Yorker published an extract from Jan Gross' forthcoming book about the massacre of Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne, Neighbors. (The magazine posted an interview with Gross on its Web site.) The book has provoked a public outcry in Poland (and elsewhere) because the perpetrators of the 1941 massacre were Poles, not Germans. Adam Michnik writes about Gross' book in the New York Times: "I don't believe in collective guilt or collective responsibility or any other responsibility except the moral one. And therefore I ponder what exactly is my individual responsibility and my own guilt. Certainly I cannot be responsible for that crowd of murderers who set the barn in Jedwabne on fire. Similarly, today's citizens of Jedwabne cannot be blamed for that crime. When I hear a call to admit my Polish guilt, I feel hurt the same way the citizens of today's Jedwabne feel when they are interrogated by reporters from around the world. But when I hear that Mr. Gross's book, which revealed the truth about the crime, is a lie that was concocted by the international Jewish conspiracy against Poland, that is when I feel guilty."

CROP CIRCLE
Aventis CropScience is the manufacturer of the genetically modified corn called StarLink. As the Washington Post reports, although StarLink is not intended for human consumption, the corn has found its way into the food supply and led to allergic reactions in certain people. As the Post says, "allergic reactions have been viewed for years as the primary threat to human health posed by genetically engineered foods, which typically have proteins from other organisms spliced into them for various reasons. But the health complaints about StarLink are the first lodged by consumers against an engineered food." President Bush wants to appoint Professor John Graham of Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—the executive office that will, among other things, assess the risks of genetically modified food. As the Boston Globe points out, however, the appointment will be opposed. Consumer advocate groups claim Graham's credentials are tainted because his Harvard center has accepted large sums of money from companies, such as Monsanto, that would like to see their genetically modified food stuffs approved by the federal government.

RAISING THE DEAD
The remains of famed atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who vanished in 1995, were found at a Texas ranch at the end of January. The formal identification of the body was made yesterday. David Waters, who once worked as an office manager for O'Hair's American Atheists organization, is the man believed to have planned the kidnappings and murders of O'Hair, her son Jon Garth Murray, and her granddaughter, Robin Murray. As the New York Times explains, he "pleaded guilty in January to conspiracy charges and agreed to lead investigators to the bodies, officials said. As part of his plea bargain, Mr. Waters will reportedly get immunity for his role in the killings but receive a 20-year sentence for the conspiracy charges." The mystery of O'Hair's disappearence is therefore over, but as the Austin American-Statesman reports, the story is not at an end: "'There's a small war going on over who gets the body,' U.S. Attorney Bill Blagg said. 'That will be decided by the Texas courts.' O'Hair's only surviving relative, son William Murray, wants to bury his family in what he promises will be a private, nonreligious ceremony with no prayers. … But Murray, a Christian evangelist, was a harsh disappointment to his mother, and fellow atheists will make their own claims to the bodies. 'He doesn't deserve the remains,' said Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists, which O'Hair founded in Austin." In 1965, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in her favor and argued that prayer was not an essential part of the American classroom, O'Hair was asked by Playboy to explain her atheism. "Because religion is a crutch, and only the crippled need crutches. … Atheism is a very positive affirmation of man's ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. … It's about time the world got up off its knees and looked at itself in the mirror and said: 'Well, we are men. Let's start acting like it.' "

AGAINST CRITICISM
In the introduction to his forthcoming book, The War Against Cliché—Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, Martin Amis says that today's critics do not even pretend to be interested in literature. "Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth's poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics—his attitude to the poor, say, or his unconscious 'valorisation' of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, at the other end of the business, everyone has become a literary critic—or at least a book-reviewer."