3quarksdaily

The Economic Costs of Fear

Brad DeLong in Project Syndicate:

The S&P stock index now yields a 7% real (inflation-adjusted) return. By contrast, the annual real interest rate on the five-year United States Treasury Inflation-Protected Security (TIPS) is -1.02%. Yes, there is a “minus” sign in front of that: if you buy the five-year TIPS, each year over the next five years the US Treasury will pay you in interest the past year’s consumer inflation rate minus 1.02%. Even the annual real interest rate on the 30-year TIPS is only 0.63% – and you run a large risk that its value will decline at some point over the next generation, implying a big loss if you need to sell it before maturity.

So, imagine that you invest $10,000 in the S&P index. This year, your share of the profits made by those companies will be $700. Now, imagine that, of that total, the companies pay out $250 in dividends (which you reinvest to buy more stock) and retain $450 in earnings to reinvest in their businesses. If the companies’ managers do their job, that reinvestment will boost the value of your shares to $10,450. Add to that the $250 of newly-bought shares, and next year the portfolio will be worth $10,700 – more if stock-market valuations rise, and less if they fall.

CommentsIn fact, over any past period long enough for waves of optimism and pessimism to cancel each other out, the average earnings yield on the S&P index has been a good guide to the return on the portfolio. So, if you invest $10,000 in the S&P for the next five years, you can reasonably expect (with enormous upside and downside risks) to make about 7% per year, leaving you with a compounded profit in inflation-adjusted dollars of $4,191. If you invest $10,000 in the five-year TIPS, you can confidently expect a five-year loss of $510.

CommentsThat is an extraordinary gap in the returns that you can reasonably expect. It naturally raises the question: why aren’t people moving their money from TIPS (and US Treasury bonds and other safe assets) to stocks (and other relatively risky assets)?

Turning Scientific Perplexity into Ordinary Statistical Uncertainty

Cosma Shalizi in American Scientist:

D. R. Cox published his first major book, Planning of Experiments, in 1958; he has been making major contributions to the theory and practice of statistics for as long as most current statisticians have been alive. He is now in a reflective phase of his career, and this book, coauthored with the distinguished biostatistician Christl A. Donnelly, is a valuable distillation of his experience of applied work. It stands as a summary of an entire tradition of using statistics to address scientific problems.

Statistics is a branch of applied mathematics that studies how to draw reliable inferences from partial or noisy data. The field as we know it arose from several strands of scholarship. The word “statistics,” coined in the 1770s, originally referred to the study of the human populations of states and the resources those populations offered: how many men, in what physical condition, with what life expectancies, what wealth and so on. Practitioners soon learned that there was always variation within populations, that there were stable patterns to this variation and that there were relations between these variables. (For instance, richer men tended to be taller and live longer.) Another component strand was formed when scientists began to systematically analyze or “reduce” scientific data from multiple observers or observations (especially astronomical data). It became obvious from this research that there was always variation from one observation to the next, even in controlled experiments, but again, there were patterns to the variation. In both cases, probability theory provided very useful models of the variation. Statistics was born from the weaving together of these three strands: population variability, experimental noise and probability models. The field’s mathematical problems are about how, within a probability model, one might soundly infer something about a given process from the data the model generates, and at the same time quantify how uncertain that inference is.

Applied statistics, in the sense that Cox and Donnelly profess, is about turning vexed scientific (or engineering) questions into statistical problems, and then turning those problems’ solutions into answers to the original questions. The sometimes conflicting aims are to make sure that the statistical problem is well posed enough that it can be solved, and that its solution still helps resolve the original, substantive dilemma—which is, after all, the point.

Rather than spoiling any of Cox and Donnelly’s examples, I will sketch one that recently came up in my department.

More here.

Shadows Meet The Clouds, Gray On Gray, Like Dusty Charcoal On An Ashen Brow, Nation's Poets Report

From The Onion:

According to a growing consensus of U.S. poets, shadows—inky sharp as a raven's beak—meet the sullen bloat of clouds, their hues a pallid loam, each a dancer, each alone, like dusty charcoal on an ashen brow.

Citing both the ageless gloom of morning and a weary sun, its astral luminescence wrapped in arid gauze, the nation's poets told reporters this week that doubt lingers in the frail minutes of a young dawn, adding that said doubt was a heathen doubt—a father's doubt—untouched by faith.

Multiple verse-writing sources also confirmed vapors, milky white vapors of shallow breath from a child's lips.

"I take the cloth of fog, I drape it over—gently, like a midwife—the memory of one broken holy Friday," poet K. Martin Echols said during a press conference Tuesday. "Hallowed be regret, and hallowed be my hands across the table where we ate, where we wept, where we fought the laws of bliss like lovers."

"For what is the sound of hope? For what is the mind's moment of fulfillment?" added poet Willow Marks. "For what is—?"

Coming just weeks after  U.S. poets announced that poplar leaves, heavy with the dread of autumn's looming song, danced in trembling half-step—one two one two—an overwhelming majority of verse writers affirmed to reporters Tuesday that Michael /Michael / there is a quickness in the dreaming of the bird, Michael / the bird that plucked your silver ring from the moss and kept it bright through passing storms.

More here.

Questioning Willusionism

Eddy Nahmias interviewed by Richard Marshall, in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re thinking about free will and you argue that we need to be careful about what we think free will is and what it entails. To some, determinism is the opposite of free will, and it seems to be a bad thing. Determinism seems to imply the end of responsibility and stops us from being able to make our own choices. But you think that folk don’t always think determinism is a bad thing. You say they make a distinction between determinism and reductionism, epiphenomenalism and/or fatalism, which people think is threatening, and determinism that doesn’t imply these things. So can you say what your evidence is for saying that people don’t always think determinism is a bad thing?

EN: As you say, determinism is often presented as the opposite of free will (if that’s what ‘determinism’ meant, it’d be silly to debate whether it is compatible with free will). But people understand ‘determinism’ in many ways, and it’s not always clear how it is meant to threaten free will. In my dissertation I used a metaphor of a many-headed monster - if we can distinguish, and take on, the various heads one by one, we can see more clearly what the threats are supposed to be and how they might each be confronted (hopefully, it is not a hydra that will grow back two heads for each we cut off). We also learn more about free will and responsibility by seeing more clearly what exactly it contrasts with- what we are free from (hint: it does not really make sense to say we are free from determinism).

Determinism is sometimes presented to mean that the past and laws control us or that our actions are pre-determined, as if someone planned them. But it should not be anthropomorphized in these ways. The Big Bang did not plan our lives, and it didn’t really cause what we do in any useful sense of ‘cause’. Determinism should also not be confused with fatalism, the idea that certain things (like your actions, or Oedipus’ sleeping with his mom) will happen no matter what - that is, no matter what you want or try to do (or no matter what Oedipus tries to do to avoid his fate). Quite the opposite - determinism suggests that what happens in the future depends on what happens in the past and what we do in the present. Finally, determinism should not be confused with what I call bypassing - the idea that our conscious mental activity is not causally relevant to our decisions and actions. Determinism does not mean that our minds don’t matter.

Science is Not About Certainty: A Philosophy of Physics

A conversation with Carlo Rovelli in Edge:

We teach our students: we say that we have some theories about science. Science is about hypothetico-deductive methods, we have observations, we have data, data require to be organized in theories. So then we have theories. These theories are suggested or produced from the data somehow, then checked in terms of the data. Then time passes, we have more data, theories evolve, we throw away a theory, and we find another theory which is better, a better understanding of the data, and so on and so forth.

This is a standard idea of how science works, which implies that science is about empirical content, the true interesting relevant content of science is its empirical content. Since theories change, the empirical content is the solid part of what science is. Now, there's something disturbing, for me as a theoretical scientist, in all this. I feel that something is missing. Something of the story is missing. I've been asking to myself what is this thing missing? I'm not sure I have the answer, but I want to present some ideas on something else which science is. This is particularly relevant today in science, and particularly in physics, because if I'm allowed to be polemical, in my field, in fundamental theoretical physics, it is 30 years that we fail. There hasn't been a major success in theoretical physics in the last few decades, after the standard model, somehow. Of course there are ideas. These ideas might turn out to be right. Loop quantum gravity might turn out to be right, or not. String theory might turn out to be right, or not. But we don't know, and for the moment, nature has not said yes in any sense.

I suspect that this might be in part because of the wrong ideas we have about science, and because methodologically we are doing something wrong, at least in theoretical physics, and perhaps also in other sciences.

Andromeda on Collision Course with the Milky Way

It's headed straight for us: Ron Cowen in Nature:

It’s a definite hit. The Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way about 4 billion years from now, astronomers announced today. Although the Sun and other stars will remain intact, the titanic tumult is likely to shove the Solar System to the outskirts of the merged galaxies.

Researchers came to that conclusion after using the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2010 to painstakingly track the motion of Andromeda as it inched along the sky. Andromeda, roughly 770,000 parsecs (2.5 million light years) away, is the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way.

Roeland van der Marel and Sangmo Tony Sohn, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, announced the findings today at a NASA press briefing in Washington DC. The results will be reported in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal1–3.

“We’ve been able to extract dynamical information about Andromeda that has been hidden from astronomers for a century,” says van der Marel.

For decades, scientists have known that Andromeda is falling towards our home Galaxy at a rate of 110 kilometres per second and that the two might eventually collide as a result of their mutual gravity. But because astronomers could easily measure Andromeda’s velocity only along the line of sight to Earth, no one could be sure whether the future encounter would constitute a major merger, a near-miss or a glancing blow.

Friday Poem

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

by Gary Snyder
1992

Just Herself

From Science:

Nergis Mavalvala, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, can check off a whole lot of boxes on the diversity form. She isn't just a woman in physics, which is rare enough. She is an immigrant from Pakistan and a self-described “out, queer person of color.” “I don’t mind being on the fringes of any social group,” she says. With a toothy grin, the gregarious mother of a 4-year-old child explains why she likes her outsider status: “You are less constrained by the rules.” She may still be an outsider, but she's no longer obscure; her 2010 MacArthur Fellowship saw to that. In addition to the cash and the honor, the award came with opportunities to speak to an interested public about her somewhat esoteric research. “That is the best part,” she says.

Mavalvala and her collaborators are fashioning an ultrasensitive telescope designed to catch a glimpse of gravitational waves. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these ripples in spacetime nearly a century ago, but they haven’t been observed directly yet. Theoretically a consequence of violent cosmic events—the collisions of black holes, the explosive deaths of stars, or even the big bang—gravitational waves could provide a brand new lens for studying the universe. When she became a MacArthur fellow, former female students wrote to her saying that she was a model for what was possible for women. At different points in her scientific career, lesbian and gay students and colleagues mentioned something similar: They had been inspired by the example she had set for them. She embraces her role as role model. Something important is happening, she believes. “I am just myself,” she says. “But out of that comes something positive.” By being just herself, she is a source of inspiration for a wide range of individuals from groups underrepresented in the physical sciences.

More here.

The 10 Things Economics Can Tell Us About Happiness

From The Atlantic:

Last week, I shared the OECD's brand new rankings of happiest countries on earth. This week, let's pull back the lens and consider the most important lessons about well-being from the mountainous piles of economic research distilled by the New Economics Foundation's excellent review. All caveats about the messiness of research bias and the usefulness of self-reported happiness surveys apply.

1) Generally speaking, richer countries are happier countries (see above). But since many of these rich countries share other traits -- they're mostly democracies with strong property rights traditions, for example -- some studies suggest that it's our institutions that are making us happy, not just the wealth. More on that in a second.

2) Generally speaking, richer people are happier people. But young people and the elderly appear less influenced by having more money.

3) But money has diminishing returns -- like just about everything else. Satisfaction rises with income until about $75,000 (or perhaps as high as $120,000). After that, researchers have had trouble proving that more money makes that much of a difference. Other factors -- like marriage quality and health -- become more relatively important than money. It might be the case that richer people use their money to move to richer areas, where they no longer feel rich. Non-economists might chalk this up to the "keeping up with the Jones'" principle.

More here.

AP 'napalm girl' photo from Vietnam War turns 40

For Tariq Jehangir Khan:

In this June 8, 1972 file photo, crying children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc, center, run down Route 1 near Trang Bang, Vietnam after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places as South Vietnamese forces from the 25th Division walk behind them. A South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped its flaming napalm on South Vietnamese troops and civilians. From left, the children are Phan Thanh Tam, younger brother of Kim Phuc, who lost an eye, Phan Thanh Phouc, youngest brother of Kim Phuc, Kim Phuc, and Kim's cousins Ho Van Bon, and Ho Thi Ting.

 

Phan Thi Kim Phuc snuggles her son Thomas, 3, as her husband Bui Huy Toan looks on in their apartment in Toronto, Canada, May 25, 1997. Kim Phuc's left arm shows evidence of the burns she suffered on June 8, 1972, when her village in Vietnam was hit by napalm bombs dropped by South Vietnamese warplanes acting on U.S. orders.

 

This undated file photo shows Vietnam veteran John Plummer with Pham Thi Kim Phuc. Pham was the little girl screaming and running naked from a napalm attack in Vietnam in the famous 1972 photo that won the Pulitzer Prize for AP photographer Nick Ut. Plummer was the officer who ordered the napalm strike.

More here in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Review of ‘Our Lady of Alice Bhatti’ by Mohammed Hanif

Lorraine Adams in The Daily Beast:

American drones kill Pakistani children. Pakistani military harbors Osama bin Laden for years. Most Pakistani women are illiterate. Pakistani corruption isrampant. The word from America’s frenemy seems uniformly bleak. The problems run deep.

Perhaps. Yet much of Pakistan comes to the West through the unsatisfactory filter of mass media. The dynamic culture that lies beneath news accounts remains unavailable to Americans, who, for example, know little of Pakistan’s revered poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz or its short-story master Saadat Hasan Manto. Even more hidden from view than Pakistan’s literary icons are the everyday lives of its desperate poor. Some authors from the newly acclaimed generation of fiction writers in English have explored the codependency of the impoverished and elite—Daniyal Mueenuddin is an especially talented example. But now with Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Mohammed Hanif is the first to devote an entire novel to the downtrodden. In it, grim headlines and social problems give way to an improbable radiance. It’s an enthralling successor to his first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, about the still unsolved 1988 assassination of President Zia ul-Haq.

Hanif has followed that much acclaimed book with a novel that’s a savage chronicle somehow hilarious, a love story entrancingly doomed, and an acerbic free-of-cliché portrait of Pakistan’s largest city. Part of its genius lies in Hanif’s shrewd understanding that what makes the disadvantaged unforgettable is not their crushing predicaments but how they invent ways to cope with them.

More here.

Carlin Romano's America the Philosophical

William Giraldi in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

You've probably heard the news: We Americans are a mob of dipshits. In our nation's emporium of "ideas," the madcap and maniacal sell like batteries in a blackout. We can't help it, apparently. We've been dullards since our inception — Boobus americanus in H.L. Mencken's unkind coinage — and so relish our pop-pundits and their orangutan ilk in Washington, our searing rabblement of the religious, our creationists, cranks, crackpots, or any wide-eyed witch in the street. In the slothful spirit of fairness, we like to give the scientist and the voodoo priestess equal measure, and then applaud the voodoo. That we are also a sub-literate breed is probably obvious, and probably the problem in the first place, since quality reading builds antibodies against bullshit. Mention Fernando Pessoa to a Portuguese — any Portuguese — and prepare yourself for an afternoon's colloquy. Toss a pebble into a crowd of Germans and the first person it touches will be pleased to pontificate on the importance of Goethe. Now go say "Walt Whitman" to the next American you run into and you'll be confronted with the vacant countenance of the over-medicated.

But forget the poor plebe — even some of last century's distinguished scholars and writers held American literature to be an anemic enterprise unworthy of serious account. Van Wyck Brooks enjoyed exclaiming the calumny that American artists and intellectuals had no "tradition" to build upon (then he let posterity know precisely who he was when he dubbed Mark Twain a fraud). Mencken, in an uncharacteristic break with discernment, thought Emerson an oaf with no influence, despite the fact that Mencken couldn't look on anything without wearing Nietzsche's eyeglasses; he must have missed those parts in Nietzsche — in the letters, journals, and Twilight of the Idols — extolling Emerson's genius. If you'd like to dine at a banquet of boorish inanity, see Theodore Dreiser's essay "Life, Art and America," in which he castigates our nation for a famine of consequential writers and poets while inexplicably forgetting the existences of Dickinson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James. And Mr. James didn't help, either, when in his biography of Hawthorne he claimed that American air didn't have enough oxygen to let big ideas breathe properly. He sailed for England as soon as he could, and a generation later some of the best minds born on American soil — Eliot, Stein, and Pound for starters — followed in his huffy wake.

More here.

From Bauhaus to Bollywood

Aditya Dev Sood in Design! Public:

I spent Sunday morning at the Barbican, a curious London cultural institution that dates from the 1970s. Its heavy and brutalist architecture could have been featured in A Clockwork Orange. The Barbican was hosting a widely acclaimed exhibition on the Bauhaus. I went in there with my friend Sarah not expecting much — what was there about the Bauhaus, I wondered, that I had left to learn?

But the exhibition was a comprehensive curation, not only of the themes and preoccupations of the Bauhaus at various stages of its development and peripatetic movement around Germany to increasingly large urban centers, but also of its historical development and shifting, evolving priorities: now arts and crafts, now total-art-work, now industrial support, now architecture. There was even a brief section of the future legacy of the Bauhaus, which documented the movement of different students and teachers from the school to centers in other parts of Germany and the United States. I was surprised to learn that the Ulm School of Design, of which we have heard so much from M. P. Ranjan in the last couple of Design Public events, was set up by a Bauhaus student after the war, in 1953.

I had spent my entire college years in thrall to the lost but resilient legacy of the Bauhaus, studying its personalities from the point of view of painting, sculpture, theater — and even design pedagogy. Like all architects and designers, my foundational education also included a kind of recreation of the Bauhaus, and I too was therefore steeped in their lore. When I looked up, from the art books, posters, and gelatin prints through which Bauhaus culture continues to be transmitted, I found the rest of the world odd and strange.

More here.

Nerves of Steel

Freaks, Geeks and Microsoft: How Kinect Spawned a Commercial Ecosystem

Rob Walker in the NYT Magazine:

At the International Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, used his keynote presentation to announce that the company would release a version [of Kinect] specifically meant for use outside the Xbox context and to indicate that the company would lay down formal rules permitting commercial uses for the device. A result has been a fresh wave of Kinect-centric experiments aimed squarely at the marketplace: helping Bloomingdale’s shoppers find the right size of clothing; enabling a “smart” shopping cart to scan Whole Foods customers’ purchases in real time; making you better at parallel parking.

An object that spawns its own commercial ecosystem is a thing to take seriously. Think of what Apple’s app store did for the iPhone, or for that matter how software continuously expanded the possibilities of the personal computer. Patent-watching sites report that in recent months, Sony, Apple and Google have all registered plans for gesture-control technologies like the Kinect. But there is disagreement about exactly how the Kinect evolved into an object with such potential. Did Microsoft intentionally create a versatile platform analogous to the app store? Or did outsider tech-artists and hobbyists take what the company thought of as a gaming device and redefine its potential?

This clash of theories illustrates a larger debate about the nature of innovation in the 21st century, and the even larger question of who, exactly, decides what any given object is really for. Does progress flow from a corporate entity’s offering a whiz-bang breakthrough embraced by the masses? Or does techno-thing success now depend on the company’s acquiescing to the crowd’s input? Which vision of an object’s meaning wins? The Kinect does not neatly conform to either theory. But in this instance, maybe it’s not about whose vision wins; maybe it’s about the contest.

Fantastic Voyage

Emily Nussbaum on Community, Doctor Who, and fan cults, in the New Yorker (h/t: Amanda Marcotte):

The NBC series “Community” was created by Dan Harmon, a mad scientist of sitcoms—so divisive a figure that he was just run out of town by his own studio. (The show was re-upped for a fourth season, but Harmon was replaced with new showrunners.) Even amid the brutality of network TV production, this was a pretty shocking event, since “Community” is Dan Harmon, the way “Mad Men” is Matt Weiner. Set at a community college that is really a stage for wildly inventive genre experiments, it’s a comedy that’s at once alienating and warm, a sitcom lover’s sitcom that attracts the kind of fans that the media scholar Henry Jenkins once described, with admiration, as “frighteningly ‘out of control,’ undisciplined and unrepentant, rogue readers.”

In other words, not everyone. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that “Community” ’s excellent third season, which ended two weeks ago, featured a season-long meditation on the pains and pleasures of cult fanhood, structured around an homage to one of the greatest science-fiction shows: “Doctor Who.” The key to this exploration was the character of Abed Nadir, played by Danny Pudi with the gaze of an amused basilisk. Abed, who has Asperger’s syndrome and dreams of making documentaries, is in one sense a familiar sitcom character, the gentle alien observer—like Latka, in “Taxi.” But with each season he has drifted closer to the show’s center, replacing its ostensible hero, the smart-ass Jeff, and injecting “Community” with his super-fan enthusiasms, which range from Batman to “My Dinner with André.”

As Abed emerged, “Community” became a bit of a science-fiction show itself, the kind of series in which, in the season’s signature moment, a tossed die splits a dinner party into six alternate realities. In another plot this season, Abed and his best friend, Troy, constructed a Holodeck-like space in their apartment, which they called the Dreamatorium. Inside that green-and-yellow grid, Abed and Troy played out imaginary plots of their favorite show, “Inspector Spacetime,” which stars an “infinity knight” in a bowler hat, and his associate, Constable Reginald (Reggie) Wigglesworth. “Inspector Spacetime” is, of course, an affectionate tribute to “Doctor Who,” the long-running series that helped create our modern breed of Abeds and Dan Harmons—the sort of difficult obsessives who make original things and then get fired. “Doctor Who” débuted on the BBC in 1963, three years before “Star Trek” (and the day after Kennedy was assassinated). The show’s eponymous hero was (and is) a Time Lord, capable of jumping through time and space. He does so in the whirling TARDIS, which looks like a bright-blue phone booth but is as large as a mansion once you step inside. When near death, he generates a new body, conveniently played by a new actor (something NBC surely wishes were a tradition for showrunners). There have also been many “companions,” often plucky females—most famously Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen)—as well as enemies, like those Nazi-ish pepper pots the Daleks. The show used the shabbiest possible effects, plus a fly-by-night attitude toward narrative logic, although its low budget was as much a feature as a bug: it made something out of nothing, much the way Abed and Troy constructed their Dreamatorium engine out of cardboard tubes and a funnel.

Reality Hunger: On Lena Dunham's "Girls"

Jane Hu in the LA Review of Books:

In the promotional trailer for the series, Dunham's character Hannah Horvath sits before her parents and proclaims: "I think I may be the voice of my generation," only to retreat instantly behind the modification: "or at least a voice … of a generation." This line, tagged as the catchphrase of Girls in the lead up to its pilot, was received almost as a dare. Someone, finally, was going to take on the challenge of speaking the real and raw truth for recession-era youth! For all its overwhelming narcissism, though, the line also anticipates the mix of recklessness and reluctance that the show cultivates. Girls wants to have it both ways: it wants to be both brash and unsure of itself, universal and specific, speaking (when it wants to) for a generation but reserving the right not to specify which one.

Based on the internet chatter, there seems to be a voracious desire to find oneself in Girls, implying an urgency to locate a voice for this generation, a generation that understands itself to be diverse. As The Hairpin's Jenna Wortham says about these girls: "They are us but they are not us. They are me but they are not me." The show's representations of race, class, and gender have generated an expansive range of reactions, not least because of the show's monolithic middle-class whiteness. It seems like the one thing anyone can agree on is that, unlike Hannah Horvath, they don't eat cupcakes in the bathtub.

But if we're looking for what's truly universal in Dunham's depiction of young, white, upper-middle-class life in New York City, then maybe the cupcake isn't such a bad place to start. Eating is, after all, about as universal as it gets. The overwhelming excitement about and immediate backlash to Dunham's show both seem to suggest a profound hunger on the part of its audience for something nourishing, sustaining, and nutritious, prepared especially for them. This is fitting, because hunger, in all its manifestations, drives Girls. As with all lost generations, there seems to be a profound sense of lack among Hannah's friends. Hannah showcases her appetite for attention, sex, and food, none of which prove exclusive to one another.

Red Plenty Seminar

Crooked Timber is hosting a seminar on Francis Spufford’s novel about the socialist calculation debate, Red Plenty, with posts by Carl Caldwell, Antoaneta Dimitrova, Felix Gilman, Kim Stanley Robinson, George Scialabba, Cosma Shalizi, and Rich Yeselson. (Cosma's Yakov Smirnoff-titled entry, "In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You," made me laugh out loud.) Antoaneta Dimitrova:

Red Plenty is a book for social scientists in more ways than one. First because it draws on history and uses a great amount of documentary material, economic and social history of the Soviet Union to tell the story of the communist dream of abundance for all. And second, and perhaps more important, because its evidence driven narrative aims to answer several typical social science questions, especially for a social scientists interested in communism’s rise and fall. How could the Soviet planning economy be so successful in producing serious economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, how could the Soviet system produce the science and innovation that led to space exploration and many other scientific achievements? And why did it then fail to continue doing so, to keep the pace of economic growth and scientific discovery?

Among Spufford’s many achievements in this book is that he provides some direct and some indirect answers to these questions. Even though he leads us to the answers by telling the stories of characters that are convincing and fully capable of engaging the reader’s interest in their destiny, he manages somehow to explore mechanisms that are structural and not personal. Despite the attention for Khrushchev and other historical figures from the Soviet Union, the personal vignettes are embedded in a narrative in which science, even more so than the idea of plenty – is the hero. This is perhaps best represented in by the prominent and fairly convincing character and the fate of the mathematician and economist Kantorovich. Other Red Plenty characters remain, as the planner Maksim Mokhov, ‘a confabulated embodiment of (the) institution’ (p. 395).

In contrast to many other books written about the Soviet period and especially about Stalinism, Spufford’s account is not emotional, grim and dramatic, does not aim to show the suffering of ordinary people or their disillusionment with the system as has already been done with unrivalled mastery by the classical works of Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak or Bulgakov, to name but a few. Instead, he shows the various characters influenced not so much by the cruel decisions, but by the dreams of the communist leaders. The leaders who, in accordance with Marxist dogma, pretended (Stalin) or hoped (Khrushchev) that they were social scientists and in Spufford’s interpretation harbored dreams of achieving abundance for all – Red Plenty.

The genome that keeps on giving

From Smithsonian:

Only one thing we can say with certainty: As much as we now know about the human genome, we still have a lot to learn about how we’ll use that knowledge.

Code read

Here’s more of the latest news about genetic research:

• Jack and Jill went on The Pill: Now that Scottish scientists have identified a gene that’s critical for sperm production, the chances look better that we’ll someday have a male birth control pill.
• Bad influences: A team of researchers at Imperial College London found that the danger of a woman getting breast cancer doubled if her genes had been changed by exposure to smoke, alcohol, pollution and other factors.
• When mice age better than cheese: For the first time, Spanish scientists have been able to use gene therapy to lengthen the lives of adult mice. In the past, this has been done only with mouse embryos.
• Head games: Should high school kids be tested to see if they have an Alzheimer’s gene before they’re allowed to play football? Two scientists who study both Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injuries to football players have raised that pointed question in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
• Forget about his feet, send his hair: Researchers at Oxford University in London have put out a call to anyone holding Bigfoot hair or other samples from the creature. They promise to do genetic testing on anything that comes their way.

Video bonus: Richard Resnick is CEO of a company called GenomeQuest so he definitely has a point of view about how big a role genome sequencing will play in our lives. But he does make a good case in this TED talk.

More here.

Smells Like Old Spirit

From Science:

Older folks give off a characteristic scent that's independent of race, creed, or diet. The Japanese even have a name for it: kareishu. Most people say they find the smell disagreeable, typically describing it as "stinky-sweet." But in a new study, participants in a "blind sniff test" found the body odor of older people less intense and more pleasant than that of the young or middle-aged. Sensory neuroscientist Johan Lundström has been familiar with old-person scent since his childhood in Sweden, where he sometimes accompanied his mother to her job at a nursing home. Decades later, as the head of his own lab at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he gave a talk at another nursing home. "The same smell hit me again," he says. Lundström wondered if there really are specific age-related odors that the human sense of smell can detect. Although research shows that animals can distinguish the ages of other animals based on their odor, no comparable studies had been done in humans.

So Lundström and colleagues recruited 20 men and 21 women between the ages of 20 and 30 to be sniffers. All were healthy nonsmokers who didn't take drugs or medications. Meanwhile, a group of "donors" who were young (20 to 30 years old), middle age (45 to 55 years old), and old (75 to 95 years old) went to bed for five consecutive nights wearing T-shirts with absorbent pads sewn into the armpits. To make sure they gave off only their natural scent, the donors washed their hair and bodies with odorless shampoos and soap before going to bed each night. They also refrained from smoking, drinking alcohol, or eating spicy food. The volunteers sniffed the pads worn by the variously aged donors and grouped the smells by age. They classified the smells of the older donors with 12% greater accuracy than would be expected by chance, compared with 8% better than chance for the younger and middle-aged donors, the researchers report online today in PLoS ONE. According to Lundström, the real surprise came when the sniffers were asked to rate the smells by intensity and unpleasantness. Even though the volunteers compared the smell of old people to stale water or old basements, when they encountered the smell amid those of the other age groups, they consistently rated the old person odor as the least intense and least unpleasant of the three.

More here.

Thursday Poem

A Swan from Prague

I was making my way in halfsteps across a bridge
In that city of bridges, and met coming my way,

Looking head-on like a fat white ham with wings,
A swan in flight, waist high, at the bridge crest.

I was inching along as the swan with its yard-long neck
Towed its floating midriff in air speeding past.

Lost, it wanted back to the city’s river,
A river with two names in opposing tongues.

I looked ahead and saw some police laughing
At the wings going mad and the paddle-feet tucked.

I could not remember not being in pain,
Not being a man with bone spurs gouging his hip.

In that city of memorials, among memorials
Of immolation and metamorphosis,

I thought about this place in history—
I’d seen the altered road signs from ’68,

I’d seen the thugs in videos of ’89—
And knew for this span of time there was no place.

The police saw me leaning and halting
And turned to watch the swan, as I did,

All of us grateful to be distracted.
And I was sure that they, the laughing police,

Imagined that whatever my trouble was—drunkenness,
Disability—it would take care of itself,

And that the bird would come to rest again
On the river, the river of clashing names.

I told my wife this story, and as a memento
She gave me a solid bubble of Czech crystal,

A lovely blue-headed swan which rides
Now on a shifting river of paper.
.

by Mark Jarman
from Blackbird, Fall 2011, Vol. 10 No. 2
.

no frumpy old bird woman

Imagine being the kind of person who finds everything provocative. All you have to do is set out on a walk through city streets, a Rolleiflex hanging from a strap around your neck, and your heart starts pounding in anticipation. In a world that never fails to startle, it is up to you to find the perfect angle of vision and make use of the available light to illuminate thrilling juxtapositions. You have the power to create extraordinary images out of ordinary scenes, such as two women crossing the street, minks hanging listlessly down the backs of their matching black jackets; or a white man dropping a coin in a black man’s cup while a white dog on a leash looks away, as if in embarrassment; or a stout old woman braced in protest, gripping the hands of a policeman; or three women waiting at a bus stop, lips set in grim response to the affront represented by your camera, their expressions saying “go away” despite the sign behind them announcing, “Welcome to Chicago.” Welcome to this crowded stage of a city, where everyone is an actor—the poor, the rich, the policemen and street vendors, the nuns and nannies. Even a leaf, a balloon, a puddle, the corpse of a cat or horse can play a starring role. And you are there, too, as involved in the action of this vibrant theater as anyone else, caught in passing at just the right time, your self-portraits turned to vaporous mirages in store windows, outlined in the silhouettes of shadows and reflected in mirrors that you find in unexpected places.

more from Joanna Scott at The Nation here.

The House That Doe Built

A concrete mansion sits empty on the edge of Zwedru, the capital of Liberia’s Grand Gedeh county. Its tall balustrades are unpainted; its window frames lack glass. Liberia is strewn with buildings abandoned in the course of its wars, but this one was never finished. The mansion was scheduled for completion in the summer of ’91, after it was commissioned by Samuel Doe, the young army sergeant from Grand Gedeh who wrested power from William Tolbert in the 1980 coup. For his thirty-ninth birthday, President Doe planned a party at his new home–dinner in the blue room followed by dancing around the pool, lined with a mosaic of the Liberian flag. Four months before the celebrations, Doe was captured and hacked to death–ear by ear, limb by limb–in a grisly show of violence orchestrated by the former rebel chief Prince Johnson, a presidential candidate in October’s presidential race, and a former ally of the ex-President Charles Taylor, convicted on 11 counts of war crimes at The Hague last month.

more from Kate Grace Thomas at Guernica here.

New Spanish Finance Horrors

Spain is an unhappy federal structure held together by subsidies and crooked accounting. The drive of Catalans and Basques and others for independence has been checked by a system in which the regions of the country have gained more and more fiscal and policy autonomy. That worked pretty well when Spain was booming, the markets were as bubbly as a glass of champagne, money was cheap and credit was good. But now the music has stopped. Spain’s new European paymasters want the country to march in lockstep. They want the central government to sign austerity agreements that will bind the Catalans, the Basques, the Galicians and everybody else. Essentially, they are demanding that Spain recentralize, and that the national government set out tight national budgets that tell the ‘autonomous’ provinces what they can and can’t do. This may not work at all, and it cannot work for long. Spain is a democracy. People vote. Sometimes they vote for regional parties, sometimes they vote for the big national ones. If the central government is imposing tough fiscal limits on the provinces, it’s likely that over time — and not much of it — support will shift away from the national parties to the provincial ones. The Catalans will be sure that they are getting cheated by the poorer provinces; others will also believe that they aren’t getting their ‘fair share’.

more from Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest here.

Sean Carroll to Judge 4th Annual 3QD Science Prize

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

We are very honored and pleased to announce that Sean M. Carroll has agreed to be the final judge for our 4th annual prize for the best blog and online writing in the category of science. (Details of the previous science prizes can be seen by clicking on the names of their respective judges here: Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Lisa Randall).

I have to admit that I was especially and extraordinarily pleased when Sean agreed to judge this prize for a number of reasons:

1. Sean is a practicing scientist at the forefront of his field, which is physics.
2. Sean is also one of the foremost science communicators of our time (I extremely highly recommend his last book From Eternity to Here) and he was one of the early science bloggers with Preposterous Universe and has continued with the ever excellent Cosmic Variance.
3. Sean was an early supporter of 3QD and drove much traffic to us in our early days when we were basically unknown. Thanks again, Sean! :-)
4. I am honored and happy to count Sean and his very distinguished (and former 3QD columnist) science-writer wife, Jennifer Oullette, as friends.
5. Sean is a past winner of a 3QD prize himself.

Sean, as many of you may already know, is a physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University. His research focuses on theoretical physics and cosmology, especially the origin and constituents of the universe, and he has contributed to models of interactions between dark matter, dark energy, and ordinary matter; alternative theories of gravity; and violations of fundamental symmetries. Sean is the author of "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time," "Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity," and the upcoming "The Particle at the End of the Universe."  He blogs at Cosmic Variance, hosted by Discover magazine, and has been featured on television shows such as The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. You may follow him on Twitter here.

As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm EST on June 9, 2012. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Sean Carroll.

The first place award, called the "Top Quark," will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the "Strange Quark," will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the "Charm Quark," along with a two hundred dollar prize.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)

Details:

The winners of this prize will be announced on June 25, 2012. Here's the schedule:

May 30, 2012:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win. (Do NOT nominate a whole blog, just one individual blog post.)
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are strongly discouraged, but we might make an exception if there is something truly extraordinary.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been written after May 29, 2011.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 200 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.

June 9, 2012

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
• The public voting will be opened soon afterwards.

June 16, 2012

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

June 25, 2012

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Guilty, but Not Responsible?

Rosalind English in The Guardian:

The US neuroscientist Sam Harris claims in a new book that free will is such a misleading illusion that we need to rethink our criminal justice system on the basis of discoveries coming from the neurological wards and MRI scans of the human brain in action.

The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated in the 1980s that activity in the brain's motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move. Subjects were hooked up to an EEG machine and were asked to move their left or right hand at a time of their choosing. They watched a specially designed clock to notice what time it was when they were finally committed to moving their left or right hand. Libet measured the electrical potentials of their brains and discovered that nearly half a second before they were aware of what they were going to do, he was aware of their intentions. Libet's findings have been borne out more recently in direct recordings of the cortex from neurological patients. With contemporary brain scanning technology, other scientists in 2008 were able to predict with 60% accuracy whether subjects would press a button with their left or right hand up to 10 seconds before the subject became aware of having made that choice (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet).

Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one's actions. The discovery that humans possess a determined will has profound implications for moral responsibility. Indeed, Harris is even critical of the idea that free will is "intuitive": he says careful introspection can cast doubt on free will. In an earlier book on morality, Harris argues

Thoughts simply arise in the brain. What else could they do? The truth about us is even stranger than we may suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion (The Moral Landscape)

But a belief in free will forms the foundation and underpinning of our enduring commitment to retributive justice. The US supreme court has called free will a "universal and persistent" foundation for our entire system of law.

On Julian Assange's The World Tomorrow, Slavoj Zizek and David Horowitz, Believe It or Not

Warning: watching it in one go may make your head explode:

Climate Armageddon: How the World's Weather Could Quickly Run Amok

Fred Guterl in Scientific American:

The true gloomsters are scientists who look at climate through the lens of "dynamical systems," a mathematics that describes things that tend to change suddenly and are difficult to predict. It is the mathematics of the tipping point—the moment at which a "system" that has been changing slowly and predictably will suddenly "flip." The colloquial example is the straw that breaks that camel's back. Or you can also think of it as a ship that is stable until it tips too far in one direction and then capsizes. In this view, Earth's climate is, or could soon be, ready to capsize, causing sudden, perhaps catastrophic, changes. And once it capsizes, it could be next to impossible to right it again.

The idea that climate behaves like a dynamical system addresses some of the key shortcomings of the conventional view of climate change—the view that looks at the planet as a whole, in terms of averages. A dynamical systems approach, by contrast, consider climate as a sum of many different parts, each with its own properties, all of them interdependent in ways that are hard to predict.

More here.

 

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking That We Know

Andrew C. Revkin in the New York Times:

The National Academy of Sciences did a great service to science early this week by holding a conference on “The Science of Science Communication.” A centerpiece of the two-day meeting was a lecture titled “Thinking That We Know,” delivered by Daniel Kahneman, the extraordinary behavioral scientist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics despite never having taken an economics class.

The talk is extraordinary for the clarity (and humor) with which he repeatedly illustrates the powerful ways in which the mind filters and shapes what we call information. He discusses how this relates to the challenge of communicating science in a way that might stick.

Please carve out the time to watch his slide-free, but image-rich, talk. It’s a shorthand route to some of the insights described in Kahneman’s remarkable book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (I’m a third of the way through).

Here’s the video of the talk (which is “below the fold” because it’s set up to play automatically):

Continue reading "Daniel Kahneman: Thinking That We Know"

The descent of Edward Wilson

Richard Dawkins in Prospect Magazine:

When he received the manuscript of The Origin of Species, John Murray, the publisher, sent it to a referee who suggested that Darwin should jettison all that evolution stuff and concentrate on pigeons. It’s funny in the same way as the spoof review of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which praised its interesting “passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways of controlling vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper” but added: “Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book can not take the place of JR Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.”

I am not being funny when I say of Edward Wilson’s latest book that there are interesting and informative chapters on human evolution, and on the ways of social insects (which he knows better than any man alive), and it was a good idea to write a book comparing these two pinnacles of social evolution, but unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory. In particular, Wilson now rejects “kin selection” (I shall explain this below) and replaces it with a revival of “group selection”—the poorly defined and incoherent view that evolution is driven by the differential survival of whole groups of organisms.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

Tattoo

My body is a palimpsest
under your hands,
a papyrus scroll
unfurled beneath you,
waiting for your mark.
I clean my skin,
scrape it back to
a pale parchment,
so that your touch
can sink as deep
as the tattooist’s ink,
and leave its tracery
over the erased lines
of other men.

You are all that’s
written on my body


by Nuala Ní Chonchúir
from Tattoo : Tatú
Publisher: Arlen House, Galway, 2007

In the original after the jump

Continue reading "Wednesday Poem"

Teenager reportedly finds solution to 350 year old math and physics problem

From PhysOrg:

In Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica published in 1687, the man many consider the most brilliant mathematician of all time used a mathematical formula to describe the path taken by an object when it is thrown through the air from one point to the next, i.e. an arc based on several factors such as the angle it is thrown at, velocity, etc. At the time, Newton explained that to get it completely right though, air resistance would need to be taken into account, though he could not figure out himself how to factor that in. Now, it appears a 16 year old immigrant to Germany has done just that, and to top off his work, he’s also apparently come up with an equation that describes the motion of an object when it strikes an immobile surface such as a wall, and bounces back.

Shouryya Ray, a modest student who just four years ago was living in Calcuta, has been on an accelerated learning course and is taking his Abitur exams two years early. His math equations won him first place in a state science competition and second place in the national Math and IT section at finals. He’s told the press that figuring out how to come up with his formulas was more due to school-boy naivety than genius, which the German press has been suggesting. Ray moved with his family to Germany when his father landed a job as a research assistant at the Technical University of Freiburg. He has apparently shown great aptitude for math from an early age, learning calculus from his dad when he was still just six years old. He’s told the press that he got the idea of trying to develop the two formulas after visiting Dresden University on a field trip where he was told that no one had been able to come up with equations to describe the two dynamics theories.

More here.

Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich

If HHhH nonetheless doesn’t feel like a postmodern novel, it is because Binet does not revel in the freedom and indeterminacy of fiction. On the contrary, because he is writing about real historical events, whose gravity he himself feels very deeply, Binet is always trying to close the gap between invention and truth. This is clear from the very first sentence of the book: “Gabcik—that’s his name—really did exist.” Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, we learn soon enough, were the secret agents parachuted into Czechoslovakia by the British to carry out the assassination of Heydrich. The whole motive for writing HHhH, Binet explains, is to honor these men, their courage and sacrifice: “So, Gabcik existed. … His story is as true as it is extraordinary. He and his comrades are, in my eyes, the authors of one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history, and without doubt the greatest of the Second World War. For a long time I have wanted to pay tribute to him.” The inspiration of HHhH is not ironic, then, but deeply earnest. And in this context, the novelist’s power to shape and invent feels less like a privilege than a curse. For every time Binet makes something up, it is a reminder that he doesn’t know all the facts. “My story has as many holes in it as a novel,” he writes, “but in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur.”

more from Adam Kirsch at Tablet here.

norman manea and "the terror which rules our moral situation"

For most of the writers we love and admire, it is possible to say something comprehensive. One reader says of Saul Bellow that “throughout his life” he searched “for some ultimate and invisible spiritual reality,” and we think, yes, that is true, that is one good way of conferring upon a life like Bellow’s a sort of splendid coherence. Or we agree that the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard sought, in everything he wrote, to “be misunderstood,” reviled, alienated, the better to exempt himself from the judgment he directed at a world he considered stupid and meaningless. But what comprehensive statement will we dare to make about Norman Manea? For one thing, we who know his writing only in English translation, and thus have not read many of the titles included in the collected Romanian edition of his work, are somewhat reluctant to sum him up as if we were fully equipped to do so. And yet we have more than enough to proceed, to begin at least. Consulting what is already out there we find, inevitably, that the established line on this writer is at once useful and misleading. Ought we to think of him as a writer defined by the exercise of “conscience”? That is one of those misleading suggestions you can read even on the dust jackets of his books. Is he, in the end, one of the many gifted contributors to what is called “the literature of totalitarianism”? Or is he, as has been said, one of “the great poets of catastrophe” and thus fit to stand alongside predecessors like Kafka or Bruno Schulz, or even Paul Celan?

more from Robert Boyers at Threepenny Review here.

cowtown

Calgary looks ever forward and often moves as fast as a prairie storm; its official motto, adopted in 1884, is a single propulsive word: “Onward.” It can seem, at a glance, like a place with no past at all. By world standards, and even by Canadian ones, this isn’t much of an overstatement. To say that it is a young city is accurate demographically — its median age, 35.8, is the lowest in Canada, and its population has grown faster than any other in the country since 2001, as legions of young job seekers poured in by the tens of thousands from Regina and Mississauga and St. John’s — but it is equally true on a historical scale. In 1882, the year Sir John A. Macdonald founded the Albany Club in Toronto, Calgary was a collection of tents and shacks in the shadow of a North West Mounted Police outpost, still waiting on the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Montreal built its first skyscraper, the New York Life Building, fifteen years before Calgary got its first telephone. At the end of World War I, Winnipeg was a booming industrial city of 165,000; Calgary would not reach that benchmark until ten years after World War II ended.

more from Chris Turner at The Walrus here.

Gandhi's Letter to Hitler

Over a month before the outbreak of WW2, Mahatma Gandhi writes his "dear friend" Adolf Hitler.

From here.

A Bookforum Conversation with Tom Bissell

With Morten Høi Jensen in Bookforum:

We’re fortunate to live in a time where a handful of enormously gifted writers are revitalizing the essay form. One example is Tom Bissell, whose new collection, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, adds up to a kind of narrative of contemporary culture, weighing in on video games, underground literary movements, bad movies and the fates of great writers. Before his recent reading with his friend and fellow writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus at KGB Bar in New York, I spent an hour with Tom Bissell at his cousin’s apartment in Manhattan, where he and his girlfriend were staying while they were in town. Looking out on an unseasonably hot midtown afternoon, we drank scotch and chatted about the publishing industry, the resurgence of the essay form, and our mutual love for the Australian writer Clive James.

Bookforum: Do you miss New York?

Tom Bissell: Desperately. When I’ve lived in Portland and California and I wake up, Pacific Time just seems like the wrong time to me. Events in America happen on Eastern Standard Time, and knowing when you wake up at 9 in the morning—or, if you’re a writer, 9:30—that it’s already after lunch in the heartbeat of America—it’s just something I’ve never gotten used to.

BF: How long did you live in New York?

Tom Bissell: I lived here from 1997 to 2006.

BF: I enjoyed reading in Magic Hours about your experience here as an editorial assistant. You called it a “thankless but intensely interesting job.” I was wondering if it influenced your early work as a journalist in any way.

TB: I think what it did for me was make me much less hostile to the editorial apparatus once I became a writer. I’ve always been way more willing to empathize with editors than my other writer friends who didn’t have that experience. Without the editorial experience, I would have never have had so many myths about book publishing shattered before I even wrote a word. And I think the most insidious myth among writers is that publishers just get books lined up before them, pick the ones they want to sell, and then push them out the door. Now, in some sense of course they do that, but the really important thing that writers seem to forget is that just because publishers pick books that they want expend resources on doesn’t guarantee that the books will succeed. Good publishers are the ones who, when something’s not working, are capable of redirecting their focus onto the stuff that is working, and choose to support the stuff they maybe initially thought didn’t have a good shot. Bad publishers are the ones who just double down on a bad choice and throw good money out the window. I’ve been lucky enough to work with good, smart publishers, and though I don’t claim to know how exactly publishing works, I do often get the heebie jeebies when I hear my writer friends talk about book publishers in a needlessly hostile tone.

BF: That was the strength of your essay about the Underground Literary Alliance. You took them to task for that hostility—and not just them, because I think that hostility is actually quite common—and for not understanding that the majority of the people who work in the publishing industry hold literature just as sacred as they do. But that doesn’t automatically give them the resources or the privilege to publish everything.

TB: Right. And the other thing is that the publishing industry is much smaller than it was in, say, 1999, when I was a young editor, so I think the representative spectrum of taste is much smaller. It’s just so much harder to be a young writer right now, especially if you’re a fiction writer. I wouldn’t wish being a fiction writer right now on my worst enemy. I wouldn’t wish that on Osama Bin Laden’s children.

 

Tuesday Poem

More Than Enough

.

The first lily of June opens its red mouth.

All over the sand road where we walk

multiflora rose climbs trees cascading

white or pink blossoms, simple, intense

the scene drifting like colored mist.

The arrowhead is spreading its creamy

clumps of flower and the blackberries

are blooming in the thickets. Season of

joy for the bee. The green will never

again be so green, so purely and lushly

new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads

into the wind. Rich fresh wine

of June, we stagger into you smeared

with pollen, overcome as the turtle

laying her eggs in roadside sand.

by Marge Piercy
from Colors Passing Through Us
publisher Knopf, 2003

The Music's Over

Prospero's obituary for Donna Summer and Robin Gibb, in The Economist:

AS A genre, disco gets a rotten press. It tends to conjure up images of hairy chests and medallions, and the worst kind of dad-dancing: a roll of the hands and a finger thrust from the floor to the sky. It was, said Bethann Hardison, a black runway model in the 1970s, “created so that white people could dance”.

Such a caricature does it no justice. The beat might be the simplest 4/4, but the origins are more complex. To understand where disco came from, and why it should be considered culturally important, one must first place oneself in dysfunctional, dangerous 1970s New York. If punk rock, born of a similar time and place, and hip-hop, a little younger, are the musical styles that define that city’s disaffected youth, then they have a sibling in disco. “Disco was born, maggot like, from the rotten remains of the Big Apple”, wrote Peter Shapiro in “Turn the Beat Around” a history of the genre.

The release it gave was different though. While punk was like a child throwing a tantrum and hip hop was about fierce rhetoric, disco meant escaping reality. The outrageous clothes and ostentatious dance moves took the mind off of the gang violence and unemployment. For the city’s gays, who were still striving for acceptance, it was particularly liberating.

The disco beat quickly spread around the world. By the time that Donna Summer released “I Feel Love” in 1977, it was mainstream. Everyone was at it. Even the Rolling Stones released a lamentable disco attempt, “Hot Stuff”, in 1976. Nonetheless, “I Feel Love” was one of the most influential records of the decade. Produced by Giorgio Moroder, it layered Moog synthesiser tracks (until then the preserve of avant garde electronica bands such as Kraftwerk) to create one of the most compelling dance tunes ever released. It is also the exact moment that disco sprouted the branch that evolved into house music.

 

Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution

Maria Popova in Brain Pickings:

Since the dawn of recorded history, humanity has been turning to the visual realm as a sensemaking tool for the world and our place in it, mapping and visualizing everything from the body to the brain to the universe toinformation itself. Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution (public library) catalogs 230 tree-like branching diagrams, culled from 450 years of mankind’s visual curiosity about the living world and our quest to understand the complex ecosystem we share with other organisms, from bacteria to birds, microbes to mammals.

Though the use of a tree as a metaphor for understanding the relationships between organisms is often attributed to Darwin, who articulated it in his Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, the concept, most recently appropriated in mapping systems and knowledge networks, is actually much older, predating the theory of evolution itself. The collection is thus at once a visual record of the evolution of science and of its opposite — the earliest examples, dating as far back as the sixteenth century, portray the mythic order in which God created Earth, and the diagrams’ development over the centuries is as much a progression of science as it is of culture, society, and paradigm.

 

 

How Markets Crowd Out Morals

A Boston Review forum on the arguments made by Michael Sandel in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, with responses from Richard Sennett; Matt Welch; Anita L. Allen; Debra Satz; Herbert Gintis; Lew Daly; Samuel Bowles; Elizabeth Anderson; and John Tomasi. From Michael Sandel's lead piece:

We live in a time when almost anything can be bought and sold. Markets have come to govern our lives as never before. But are there some things that money should not be able to buy? Most people would say yes.

Consider friendship. Suppose you want more friends than you have. Would you try to buy some? Not likely. A moment’s reflection would lead you to realize that it wouldn’t work. A hired friend is not the same as a real one. You could hire people to do some of the things that friends typically do—picking up your mail when you’re out of town, looking after your children in a pinch, or, in the case of a therapist, listening to your woes and offering sympathetic advice. Until recently, you could even bolster your online popularity by hiring some good-looking “friends” for your Facebook page—for $0.99 per friend per month. (The phony-friend Web site was shut down after it emerged that the photos being used, mostly of models, were unauthorized.) Although all of these services can be bought, you can’t actually buy a friend. Somehow, the money that buys the friendship dissolves it, or turns it into something else.

This fairly obvious example offers a clue to the more challenging question that concerns us: Are there some things that money can buy but shouldn’t? Consider a good that can be bought but whose buying and selling is morally controversial—a human kidney, for example. Some people defend markets in organs for transplantation; others find such markets morally objectionable. If it’s wrong to buy a kidney, the problem is not that the money dissolves the good. The kidney will work (assuming a good match) regardless of the monetary payment. So to determine whether kidneys should or shouldn’t be up for sale, we have to engage in a moral inquiry. We have to examine the arguments for and against organ sales and determine which are more persuasive.

So it seems, at first glance, that there is a sharp distinction between two kinds of goods: the things (like friends) that money can’t buy, and the things (like kidneys) that money can buy but arguably shouldn’t. But this distinction is less clear than it first appears. 

 

The Faster-Than-Light Telegraph That Wasn't

David Kaiser in Scientific American:

Physicists had long known that the two flavors of polarization—plane or circular—were intimately related. Plane-polarized light could be used to create circularly polarized light, and vice versa. For example, a beam of H-polarized light consisted of equal parts R- and L-polarized light, in a particular combination, just as a beam of R-polarized light could be broken down into equal parts H and V. Likewise for individual photons: a photon in state R, for example, could be represented as a special combination of states H and V. If one prepared a photon in state R but chose to measure plane rather than circular polarization, one would have an equal probability of finding H or V: a single-particle version of Schrödinger’s cat.

In Herbert's imagined set-up, one physicist, Alice ("Detector A" in the illustration), could choose to measure either plane or circular polarization of the photon headed her way [1]. If she chose to measure plane polarization, she would measure H and Voutcomes with equal probability. If she chose to measure circular polarization, she would find R and L outcomes with equal probability.

In addition, Alice knows that because of the nature of the source of photons, each photon she measures has an entangled twin moving toward her partner, Bob. Quantum entanglement means that the two photons behave like two sides of a coin: if one is measured to be in state R, then the other must be in state L; or if one is measured in state H, the other must be in state V. The kicker, according to Bell's theorem, is that Alice's choice of which type of polarization to measure (plane or circular) should instantly affect the other photon, streaming toward Bob [2]. If she chose to measure plane polarization and happened to get the result H, then the entangled photon heading toward Bob would enter the state V instantaneously. If she had chosen instead to measure circular polarization and found the result R, then the entangled photon instantly would have entered the state L.

Next came Herbert's special twist.

 

How Bad Is It?

George Scialabba in New Inquiry:

Pretty bad. Here is a sample of factlets from surveys and studies conducted in the past twenty years. Seventy percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels. Fifty percent believe that the earth has been visited by UFOs; in another poll, 70 percent believed that the U.S. government is covering up the presence of space aliens on earth. Forty percent did not know whom the U.S. fought in World War II. Forty percent could not locate Japan on a world map. Fifteen percent could not locate the United States on a world map. Sixty percent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. Only 6 percent now read even one book a year. According to a very familiar statistic that nonetheless cannot be repeated too often, the average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, 30 seconds attending a play or concert, 25 seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television.

Among high-school seniors surveyed in the late 1990s, 50 percent had not heard of the Cold War. Sixty percent could not say how the United States came into existence. Fifty percent did not know in which century the Civil War occurred. Sixty percent could name each of the Three Stooges but not the three branches of the U.S. government. Sixty percent could not comprehend an editorial in a national or local newspaper.

Intellectual distinction isn’t everything, it’s true. But things are amiss in other areas as well: sociability and trust, for example. “During the last third of the twentieth century,” according to Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, “all forms of social capital fell off precipitously.” Tens of thousands of community groups – church social and charitable groups, union halls, civic clubs, bridge clubs, and yes, bowling leagues — disappeared; by Putnam’s estimate, one-third of our social infrastructure vanished in these years. Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45 percent; card parties declined 50 percent; Americans’ declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30 percent. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77 percent to 37 percent. Over a five-year period in the 1990s, reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50 percent — admittedly an odd, but probably not an insignificant, indicator of declining social capital.

Still, even if American education is spotty and the social fabric is fraying, the fact that the U.S. is the world’s richest nation must surely make a great difference to our quality of life?

Money and Morality

From The Guardian:

Something curious happened when I tried to potty train my two-year-old recently. To begin with, he was very keen on the idea. I'd read that the trick was to reward him with a chocolate button every time he used the potty, and for the first day or two it went like a breeze – until he cottoned on that the buttons were basically a bribe, and began to smell a rat. By day three he refused point-blank to go anywhere near the potty, and invoking the chocolate button prize only seemed to make him all the more implacable. Even to a toddler's mind, the logic of the transaction was evidently clear – if he had to be bribed, then the potty couldn't be a good idea – and within a week he had grown so suspicious and upset that we had to abandon the whole enterprise. It's a pity I hadn't read What Money Can't Buy before embarking, because the folly of the chocolate button policy lies at the heart of Michael Sandel's new book. "We live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold," the Harvard philosopher writes. "We have drifted from having a market economy, to being a market society," in which the solution to all manner of social and civic challenges is not a moral debate but the law of the market, on the assumption that cash incentives are always the appropriate mechanism by which good choices are made. Every application of human activity is priced and commodified, and all value judgments are replaced by the simple question: "How much?"

Sandel leads us through a dizzying array of examples, from schools paying children to read – $2 (£1.20) a book in Dallas – to commuters buying the right to drive solo in car pool lanes ($10 in many US cities), to lobbyists in Washington paying line-standers to hold their place in the queue for Congressional hearings; in effect, queue-jumping members of the public. Drug addicts in North Carolina can be paid $300 to be sterilised, immigrants can buy a green card for $500,000, best man's speeches are for sale on the internet, and even body parts are openly traded in a financial market for kidneys, blood and surrogate wombs. Even the space on your forehead can be up for sale. Air New Zealand has paid people to shave their heads and walk around wearing temporary tattoos advertising the airline.

More here.

‘What Is’ Meets ‘What if’: The Role of Speculation in Science

From The New York Times:

Woody Allen once said that when you do comedy, you sit at the children’s table. The same might be said of speculation in science.

And yet speculation is an essential part of science. So how does it fit in? Two recent publications about the misty depths of canine and human history suggest some answers. In one, an international team of scientists concludes that we really don’t know when and where dogs were domesticated. Greger Larson of the University of Durham, in England, the first of 20 authors of that report, said of dog DNA, “It’s a mess.” In the other, Pat Shipman, an independent scientist and writer, suggests that dogs may have helped modern humans push the Neanderthals out of existence and might even have helped shape human evolution. Is one right and the other wrong? Are both efforts science — one a data-heavy reality check and the other freewheeling speculation? The research reported by Dr. Larson and his colleagues in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is solid science — easily judged by peers, at any rate. The essay by Dr. Shipman is not meant to come to any conclusion but to prompt thought and more research. It, too, will be judged by other scientists, and read by many nonscientists. But how is one to judge the value of speculation? The questions readers ought to ask when confronting a “what-if” as opposed to “what-is” article are: Does the writer make it clear what is known, what is probable, and what is merely possible?

More here.

Are Millennials Less Green Than Their Parents?

by Evan Selinger, Thomas Seager, and Jathan Sadowski

A highly publicized Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study depicts Millennials as more egoistic than Baby Boomers and Generation Xers. The research is flawed. The psychologists fail to see that kids today face new problems that previously weren’t imaginable and are responding to them in ways that older generations misunderstand.      

The psychological study seems persuasive largely because the conclusions are supported by massive data. Investigators examined two nationally representative databases (Monitoring the Future and American Freshman surveys) containing information provided by 9.2 million high school and college students between 1966 and 2009. Such far-reaching longitudinal analysis seems to offer a perfect snapshot of generational attitudes on core civic issues.  

Comparison makes Millennials look bad. According to the study, they aren’t just primed to consume more electricity and pass on community leadership. Overall, they’re ethically deficient: concerned less with the environment and keeping up with political affairs, while driven more by extrinsic values (money, fame, image) than intrinsic ones (self-acceptance, community, and group affiliation). The media couldn’t wait to spin these characterizations into headlines, running pieces like “Millenial Generation’s Non-Negotiables: Money, Fame, and Image” and “Young People Not So ‘Green’ After All”.

Jean Twenge, the study’s lead author, seems entitled to sit back with a told you so look on her face. For some time, she’s contested portrayals of Millennials as “Generation We.” The new study updates her anti-entitlement manifesto, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--And More Miserable than Ever Before, and she presents more damning information in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article accusing Millennials of declining empathy.

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postcards from srinagar

by Vivek Menezes

Nigeen Lake 27/05/2012

I am writing this lakeside in Srinagar, at the end of a month-long stay in this amazing, ancient city, along with my wife and three young sons (12, 8, 4). This is high season in Kashmir – the authorities expect as many as two million tourists by the time winter sets in. But with the exception of Dal Lake – certainly one of the great marvels of the subcontinent – we’ve found ourselves  just about the only “outsiders” almost everywhere we’ve gone. It has been quite a strange phenomenon, I think largely explained by the reluctance of most travel agents and tour operators to venture off a narrow beaten track that takes in Dal, the (vastly over-rated) Mughal Gardens, and day trips to trample snow in Gulmarg, etc. There needs to be more and better information about Srinagar made available for travellers, and over some time I hope to contribute some.

But right now, because connectivity is deeply intermittent here, I am going to quickly post a few images, and scribble comments postcard-style

Our first few days in Kashmir couldn’t have been more eye-opening. This is because we became immediately immersed in the fourth annual festival hosted by the Dara-e-Shikoh Centre. The initiative of Jyotsna Singh, grand-daughter of the last monarch of Jammu and Kashmir, the event was mostly held outdoors, and had a terrifically positive energy. There were art, writing and puppetry workshops, training sessions for teachers and counsellors, and terrific interactions between the overwhelmingly young audience and visiting resource people, most notably Gopal Gandhi – grandson of the Mahatma, senior bureaucrat and diplomat, and author of several books, including a play about Dara, the Sufi Prince. It was a remarkably inclusive event, with every possible viewpoint freely exchanged with an unusual spirit of acceptance. Here at the Dara Shikoh Centre, I realized that this is actually a bedrock Kashmiri virtue. This was particularly underlined during a spellbinding performance by one of the last surviving Bhand Pather (folk entertainers) groups of Kashmir, directed by M. K. Raina. It turned out that most of the almost entirely Kashmiri audience had never seen such a performance – big-shots, students, security guards, drivers, all screamed with delight together all through the show. No translations needed for my kids either, they laughed along with everyone else.

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perceptions

Yeonju Sung. Pumpkin Dress.

"In her photographs of clothing constructed from materials that could never realistically be worn, Yeonju Sung captures what she describes as a series of phantoms—temporal checkpoints depicting objects destined to decay, objects that fail in function what they seem to fulfill in appearance."

More here and here.

When the Fruit Ripens Seed Scatters: Notes towards a History of Motility

by Liam Heneghan

Quum fructus maturus semina dispergat. Linnæus, Philosophia Botanica, 1751

1. In The Beginning Was the Verb

In the beginning was the Verb, and the Verb was with God, and the Verb set all things in motion.  More than just any Word (Latin verbum, word) the God who is, was, and shall be a Verb commuted motion of an Absolute form to Relative Motion.  In the universe created of the Verb everything moves; absolutes have no meaning. 

And some things rose and other things fell.  Those which rose remained in constant motion until impeded and of those which fell some acquired spontaneous motion.  These self-moved movers, called motile, include some cells, spores, the quadrupeds, and the bipeds.  The Philosopher studied the motile keenly, since the prime mover and all that had risen remained less accessible to knowledge.  Since the self-moved require the unmoving for motion they must themselves be, he concluded, comprised of a series of both fixed and moving parts at the seat of which is an unmoved mover – the animal soul.  In this way the motile mimic the first mover.

Living things move and they share this characteristic with every other thing; stasis, that is, there can only ever be relative stasis. Movement differs from motility in as much as the latter, in its most fully expressed form, is movement where a purpose that goads, a desire that compels, and a body that advances, converge.

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Only Philosophers Go to Hell

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

The Problem of Hell is familiar enough to many traditional theists.  Roughly, it is this: How could a loving and just god create a place of endless misery?  The Problem of Hell is a special version of the Problem of Evil, which is the general challenge that a just and loving God would not intentionally create a world with excessive misery, and yet we see the excesses all around us.  Hell, on its face, seems like it is actually part of God’s plan, and moreover, the misery there far exceeds misery here.  At least the misery here is finite; it ends when one dies.  But in Hell, death is just the beginning. Those in Hell suffer for eternity.  Hell, so described, seems less the product of a just and loving entity than a vicious and spiteful one.  That’s a problem.

There are two standard lines in defense of Hell.  The first is the retributivist line, and the second is the libertarian line.  We think that if either succeeds, only philosophers could go to Hell.  This is because only someone who understands exactly what she is doing in sinning or rejecting God could deserve such a fate as Hell, and only a philosophical education could provide that kind of understanding.  So, it follows, only philosophers can go to Hell.

Retributivism with regard to Hell runs as follows: Those in Hell are sinners, and sin demands punishment.  Therefore, Hell is necessary; it is the place where that punishment is delivered.  This seems reasonable as far as it goes, and it does work as a nice counterpoint to the regular complaint that sometimes the wicked prosper in this life – they will suffer appropriately in the next.  But retributivism about Hell ultimately seems problematic.  Grant that sinners deserve punishment.  Nonetheless, the amount of punishment being visited upon those in Hell is objectionable.  Sinners can’t do infinite harm, no matter how bad they are.  But they get an eternity of torment.  Punishment is just only when it is proportionate to the wrongs committed by the guilty.  So even if Hell’s express purpose is to enact retribution on those who are guilty of sin, and even if the guilty do get what’s coming to them in Hell, making that punishment eternal is moral overkill.  Again, disproportionate punishment is morally wrong, and Hell is guaranteed to be exactly that for everyone there.

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