3quarksdaily

Thursday Poem

.
you receive a letter
which is so flat
that it’s nearly
empty

so white
and flat
that it cuts
itself into you
unread

into your eye
tightens your throat
turns your stomach inside out

stop,
says the child

I don’t want
this letter

yes, I say
it’s already written

it’s already on its way
into your eye


by Monica Aasprong
from Et diktet barn
publisher: Cappelen Damm, Oslo, 2010
translation: May-Brit Akerholt

Simple molecule prevents mole rats from getting cancer

From Nature:

The same molecules that endow naked mole rats with springy, wrinkled skin also seem to prevent the homely rodents from contracting cancer. Research published on Nature's website today identifies a sugary cellular secretion that stops the spread of would-be tumours¹. Naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber), which are more closely related to porcupines than rats, are freaks of nature. The short-sighted creatures spend their lives in subterranean colonies in the service of a single breeding queen — H. glaber is one of only two 'eusocial' mammals ever discovered. The rodent doesn’t feel the sting of acids or the burn of chilli peppers, and seems to be the only mammal that is unable to regulate its body temperature.

However, the animal's longevity and impunity to cancer are the reason why biologist Andrei Seluanov keeps around 80 naked mole rats in a special facility near his lab at the University of Rochester in New York state. The rodents have been known to live for up to 32 years, and scientists have never seen one with cancer. Mice, by comparison, rarely live past the age of four and do often die of cancer. In 2009, Seluanov’s team reported that the naked mole rat's fibroblasts (a cell type found in connective tissue) are sensitive to the presence of other cells, and in Petri dishes they grow less crowded than mouse fibroblasts do². To the annoyance of his lab workers, the broth they used to nurture the cells often turned so viscous that it clogged the drains. “Our lab technician was unhappy because she needed to disassemble the system and clean all this gooey stuff,” Seluanov recalls. “I told my graduate student that we have to find out what the gooey substance is — it should be related to their cancer resistance. Of course, at that time it was just a wild guess.” The team soon discovered that the plumbing problem was the result of a sugar called hyaluronic acid (HA). Fibroblasts ooze HA and, along with collagen and other chemicals, it forms the extracellular matrix that gives tissues their shape and makes skin elastic. Naked mole rats, Seluanov’s team discovered, produce large amounts of long chains of HA.

More here.

Why Shouldn't I Work for the NSA?

4 Quarks Daily

Devin Powell in Nature:

Physicists have resurrected a particle that may have existed in the first hot moments after the Big Bang. Arcanely called Zc(3900), it is the first confirmed particle made of four quarks, the building blocks of much of the Universe’s matter.

Until now, observed particles made of quarks have contained only three quarks (such as protons and neutrons) or two quarks (such as the pions and kaons found in cosmic rays). Although no law of physics precludes larger congregations, finding a quartet expands the ways in which quarks can be snapped together to make exotic forms of matter.

“The particle came as a surprise,” says Zhiqing Liu, a particle physicist at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing and a member of the Belle collaboration, one of two teams claiming the discovery in papers published this week in Physical Review Letters^1, 2.

Housed at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, the Belle detector monitors collisions between intense beams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.

More here.

Fight Clubs

Peter C. Baker reviews Napoleon A. Chagnon's Noble Savages My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, in The Nation:

In December 1919, Franz Boas, the German-born academic widely recognized as the father of American anthropology, published a letter in this magazine accusing four of his American colleagues—whom he did not identify—of having used their research positions as cover for engaging in espionage in Central America during the recently concluded war. Ten days later, the governing council of the American Anthropological Association voted 20 to 10 to censure Boas, claiming that his highly public letter was unjustified and in no way represented the AAA’s position. Boas was a founding member and former president of the association, so the censure was doubly humiliating; it essentially forced him to resign from both the AAA’s governing body and the National Research Council.

The Boas incident was the prelude to a century in which anthropology has been haunted by questions of means and ends. What sorts of alliances with power are worth it? What responsibilities (if any) do anthropologists have to the populations they study? Above all, to what extent has Western anthropology been fatally compromised by its associations—direct and indirect, public and covert—with a violent and imperial foreign policy? In several books, the anthropologist David Price has cataloged the substantial sums of money funneled from the military and intelligence community to academic anthropology over the years, as well as the contribution of American anthropologists to every significant war effort in modern US history. Most recently, ethnographers have joined the Army’s Human Terrain System program, designed to aid military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan by decoding the nuances of local culture. Price notes that although the revelation of these collaborations has often sparked heated short-term controversy, the disputes have passed without prompting broad, discipline-wide reform—or even conversation. After all, what anthropologist wants to spend time discrediting anthropology, a discipline that relies on trust, most importantly the trust of foreign governments and the subject populations that are the source of the discipline’s prized product of local knowledge? At what point are the ethical costs of doing anthropology too high, for ethnographers as well as the people they study?

That last question applies equally to anthropologists who may not work directly for the military or do fieldwork in areas explicitly labeled war zones. There is no better example than the career of Napoleon Chagnon, author of the bestselling anthropological text of the twentieth century, a slim volume called Yanomamö.

Can Pornography be Art?

Tabatha Leggett in New Statesman:

Lovelace, a film starring Amanda Seyfried as Linda Lovelace, a porn star who was famously abused by her peers, is coming out this August. Its release is inevitably going to prompt a whole wave of journalism debating the merits and failings of an industry that, let’s face it, is not going anywhere. Some journalists will claim that the porn industry perpetrates sexism. Others will argue that as long as no one is being abused, there’s nothing wrong with a woman choosing to be a porn star. How. Very. Boring.

A far more interesting question, which is increasingly being asked by aestheticians, concerns porn’s status as art. This debates centres around the idea that the process of making porn is not relevant to judging the artistic value of the end result. According to this logic, judging the artistic value ofDeep Throat, the profoundly unsettling film that made Linda Lovelace famous, according to how Linda was treated during its making, misses the point.

So here’s a biggie: what counts as art, and what makes it valuable? 

How Do You Describe Bad Economics Eeporting?

Clay Shirky over at Crooked Timber:

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Tamar Gendler introduced me to the the problem of easy knowledge, the notion that if you believe a particular assertion, you can produce inductive chains that lead to overstated conclusions. “I own this bike” can be seen as an assertion that the person you bought it from was its previous owner.

But of course you don’t know if that guy in the alley had the right to sell it, so an assertion that you own the bike can generate easy knowledge about whether he did. Instead, “I own this bike” should be seen as shorthand for “If the guy in the alley was the previous rightful owner, then I am its current rightful owner.” (Oddly, this also describes the question of the Elder Wand inHarry Potter Vol. 7, pp 741 ff. Tom Riddle died of easy knowledge.)

I was reminded of easy knowledge while reading Thomas Edsall’s NY Times column on
Can’t We All Be More Like Nordics? Asymmetric Growth and Institutions in an Interdependent World, a paper by the economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Thierry Verdier. (Acemoglu goes on to discuss this work in a post titled Choosing your own capitalism in a globalised world?.)

In their paper, Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier model a technologically interdependent world where countries can chose either cutthroat or cuddly capitalism (the US and Sweden being the usual avatars) and each country can be a technological leader or follower but those choices are not orthogonal.

They then examine this model, and discover that:

…interpreting the empirical patterns in light of our theoretical framework, one may claim (with all the usual caveats of course) that the more harmonious and egalitarian Scandinavian societies are made possible because they are able to benefit from and free-ride on the knowledge externalities created by the cutthroat American equilibrium. Not just the US but indeed the whole world would be worse off if we had public health care, because we have to treat poor people badly if Larry Page is to get rich, so that the Swedes can copy us. Because innovation.

Now there’s nothing too surprising in this sentiment—the headline “Neo-Liberalism Woven into Fabric of Universe, say Economists” could have run unaltered in every year since 1977. What is surprising—or at least what Tamar made me see with new eyes—is that the entire exercise is a machine for smuggling easy knowledge into public discourse.

 

Walt Whitman's American Philosophy

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

I am able to read Walt Whitman only in small doses, for fear of being overpowered by a sort of rapturous assent, tears in my eyes, unable to comprehend how it is even possible to agree so fully with someone else. I’ve only known Whitman for a few years. When I was in my twenties, it was all Dostoevsky and Kafka and Beckett and Thomas Bernhard: the period of European literature that extends from that continent’s extreme unction up through its longwinded funeral orations. (Next came several years, wasted, in which I did not read any literature at all.) Now it's all Melville and Whitman and the ecstatic birth of the American empire. But especially Whitman. Only he manages to channel this history through his own body, to make himself into the living instance of both the work he is in the process of creating, as well as of the national destiny for which he, with stunning grandiosity, believes his work is a prophecy.

More here.

How to End the Stalemate With Iran

Seyed Hossein Mousavian and Mohammad Ali Shabani in the New York Times:

The stunning election of a pragmatic former Iranian nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, has offered the Obama administration a once-in-a-lifetime chance to end the atomic stalemate with Iran.

In the West, Mr. Rowhani is widely seen as a turbaned politico from inside the establishment. One of us has worked for him directly, as his deputy in nuclear talks. The other has conducted research at the think tank he runs. We can attest that he is wary of a purely ideological approach to foreign policy and is driven by more than simple expediency in pursuit of the national interest. After seeing the nuclear deal he was attempting to negotiate with the European Union fall apart in 2005, Mr. Rowhani is now seeking to resolve the nuclear issue once and for all, and also to redeem himself politically.

Mr. Rowhani’s victory demonstrates that there is now real momentum toward the initiation of direct talks between Iran and the United States. Despite remarks he has made to appease hard-liners since his victory, Mr. Rowhani’scampaign rhetoric made clear his desire to change the hostile relationship with America. In recent months, even Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has given permission for direct negotiation — although he has not expressed optimism about its prospects.

The single biggest threat to this unique window for dialogue is misguided perceptions of each side’s respective strengths and weaknesses. To avoid squandering this opportunity, President Obama and President-elect Rowhani, who takes office in August, must resist and debunk the false impressions that have been promoted by extremists on both sides.

More here.

Rajesh Rao: A Rosetta Stone for the Indus script

in the pool

In 1978, David Hockney began work on a series entitled Paper Pools, including twenty-nine color pictures created by pressing paper pulp. As Nikos Stangos writes, the project allowed Hockney to bring “together many of the themes he most loves: the paradox of freezing in a still image what is never still—water, the swimming pool, this man-made container of nature, set in nature which it reflects, the play of light on water, the dematerialized diver’s figure under water.” Hockney recalls, “As the time had gone on and the sun wasn’t coming out as much now and the days were cloudy, the water began to look a bit different and the tones were all-over blue. It rained and when it rained the steps started with a deep blue at the top and the blue faded as the water got more opaque because of the rain, and I thought the water looked wetter, it was all wet, now it was all about wetness.” In one Polaroid picture that Hockney used as inspiration for an image entitled “Pool with Cloud Reflections,” the water is nearly indistinguishable from the sky it reflects. The clean-lined shadow of a building amplifies the bright lines of an overhead cloud, making it difficult to know whether the sky is being reflected on the water or, through the trick of glass and shadow, water is being reflected onto the sky. The picture encapsulates what must have drawn Hockney to return, time and time again, to this particular subject: “Depending on the weather, whether it was cloudy or sunny—each day was different—you could look right through it, into it, onto it.”

more from Aisha Sabatini Sloan at Guernica here.

visiting the bishop

There are thirteen addresses in Manhattan where devout readers can stalk Elizabeth Bishop’s ghost: seven hotels and six apartments. Because no historical plaques have been hung to mark them, vigilance is crucial. You could pass by any one of them without realizing one of America’s greatest poets once called it home, or some version thereof. If these locales are not enough, peruse the writer’s several thousand letters for additional jaunts. At the entrance to the public library’s main reading room, for example, you can sit on the bench where, in 1936, Elizabeth arranged to meet Marianne Moore. The city is dirty enough that a small remnant of the writer, if only the dust on her soles, might linger there. The compulsion to visit Elizabeth’s former residences is the same one that drives Shakespeare lovers to Stratford-upon-Avon and Thoreau converts to Walden Pond. Oscar Wilde’s lipstick-covered tomb proves such journeys are never simply educational field trips, but affairs of deep passion. Accordingly, I begin a pilgrimage: I will visit all these addresses.

more from Laura C. Mallonee at Paris Review here.

stumbling through

“The Principle of the Hiding Hand,” one of Hirschman’s many memorable essays, drew on an account of the Troy-Greenfield “folly,” and then presented an even more elaborate series of paradoxes. Hirschman had studied the enormous Karnaphuli Paper Mills, in what was then East Pakistan. The mill was built to exploit the vast bamboo forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But not long after the mill came online the bamboo unexpectedly flowered and then died, a phenomenon now known to recur every fifty years or so. Dead bamboo was useless for pulping; it fell apart as it was floated down the river. Because of ignorance and bad planning, a new, multimillion-dollar industrial plant was suddenly without the raw material it needed to function. But what impressed Hirschman was the response to the crisis. The mill’s operators quickly found ways to bring in bamboo from villages throughout East Pakistan, building a new supply chain using the country’s many waterways. They started a research program to find faster-growing species of bamboo to replace the dead forests, and planted an experimental tract. They found other kinds of lumber that worked just as well. The result was that the plant was blessed with a far more diversified base of raw materials than had ever been imagined.

more from Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker here.

Six Strings

Beenish Ahmed in The Morning News:

Growing up in Ohio, far from the homeland of her parents, a girl puzzles over her identity, until the strings of a sitar create a connection.

A stack of weathered National Geographics sat inviolably on the bookshelves of my childhood home. I don’t think my parents ever subscribed, and, anyway, the set was strikingly incomplete: It included only issues featuring places that bordered Pakistan, the country of their birth, and its neighbors. I remember clearly one with a photo of the Rajasthani boy tending his camel, and of course the beguiling image of the Afghan girl draped in a tattered burgundy shawl, her eyes hollowly aglow. We even kept an issue featuring Sita, a Bengal tiger, for its views of India’s jungles, women in saris squatting amid the shrubs. But I was most captivated by a cover showing a woman like a Mughal miniature brought to life, a cascade of pearls and gems hanging over her thick black hair to match the hues of her silken dress, seated amidst the sandstone columns of a palace court in Lahore. Tahira Syed sings elegiac melodies in a voice that shared the desperate and delicate dance of a butterfly caught in a jar. She is Pakistan’s most famous sitarist, but even before I heard her music, I saw her on the cover of that tattered magazine which had existed for longer than I had. I revered that single image of her the way most girls did Disney princesses.

It would be years before I discovered Syed’s voice, and many more before I could begin to understand what she was singing about. Somewhere in between, my brother began to play the tabla, a set of hand drums that sets the harmony for musical styles across South Asia. I joked with him about learning to play sitar so that we might travel the world as a brother-sister duo. It was sometime after that when I actually began to listen to the sitar and hear its range of emotions: the sounds as sultry as silk that slowly transitioned into lovers’ moans, the soft whimpering that turned into a frenzy of self-loathing. Some exposure to the sitar was natural enough, at least as the background of melodies that floated through backseat brawls on road trips, or bid sleeping passengers to wake up on flights to Pakistan. I can’t say that the instrument was the strange and seductive curiosity to me that it is to many other people. It’s music itself that has always been a little foreign to me―a language I could understand but never speak.

More here.

Gathering Emotional Intelligence

Jason Goldman in Conservation Magazine:

It was just after six o’clock in the evening on an autumn day in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve. A researcher watched a female elephant known as Eleanor collapse. She was a matriarch, an elder within female-dominated elephant society. Her swollen trunk dragged on the ground. One of her tusks was broken, evidence of another recent fall. Another matriarch, Grace, ran toward her and tried to stabilize the ailing pachyderm with her tusks. But Eleanor’s back legs were too weak to support her massive body, and she fell again. The rest of her herd had continued their journey, but Grace stayed with Eleanor as day turned into night. By eleven o’clock the next morning, Eleanor was dead. Over the next few days, no fewer than five other elephant groups visited Eleanor’s carcass. Several of these, like Grace, were completely unrelated to her. They poked at her lifeless body, sniffed it, and felt it with their feet and with their trunks. Did they know that they were touching death? Do elephants grieve? This story is well known among animal cognition researchers, and it is one that Virginia Morell beautifully—almost poetically—recounts in her book Animal Wise. “Her six-month-old calf never left its mother’s side, even after park rangers cut out her tusks to make sure they did not fall into the hands of poachers,” she writes. By the calf’s ninth month, researchers had lost track of it and assumed it was “probably killed by a predator.” Like us, elephants are lost without their mothers.

But we’ve only just come to recognize this. Comparative cognition laboratories have historically relied upon just three animals. Morell recounts a conversation with one cognitive scientist who pointed out that decades of research were built upon “rats, pigeons, and college sophomores—preferably male.” It’s laughable now, but this is the thinking that dominated the fields of psychology and cognition for so long. Cognitive scientists have since adopted other species into their research programs, examining critters more familiar to anthropologists, ethologists, or evolutionary biologists.

More here.

Why Steven Pinker Is Wrong

Stephen Corry makes the case in Truthout:

Let's start at the beginning for a perfect example of how Pinker leads us on. He takes only a single page of preamble before he tries to sell us his grisly thesis, which as far as I can understand it, is that everyone was once generally violent and horrible (tribal people still are, because apparently they are living relics of the past). Darwinian selection favored the most aggressive towards outsiders, and nicest to insiders. They had lots of children who went on to create states, which were generally nice, and imposed peace and "prosperity."(1)

Better Angels opens with a rhetorical question, "What is it about the ancients that they couldn't leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?"

Exhibit number one is the 5,200 year-old "Iceman," nicknamed "Ötzi." As Pinker breathes with Hitchcockian crescendo, "[Ötzi] had not fallen in a crevasse and frozen to death, as scientists had originally surmised; he had been murdered."  Here is Pinker's very first "Murder Most Foul."

Introducing Ötzi with a list of his kit, "ax and backpack, a quiver of fletched arrows, a wood-handled dagger… ," Pinker's deduction seems straightforward. But, although scientists have come up with dozens of guesses about how Ötzi met his end, Pinker offers us just one "reconstruction:" He thinks Ötzi "belonged to a raiding party that clashed with a neighboring tribe."(2)

I will avoid bending the facts to fit a hypothesis, and cross-examine the evidence. The Iceman had three significant wounds: a cut hand; an arrowhead in his back, and a blow to his head. It was a violent death, but did it result from a clash between tribes?

Democracy, Solidarity And The European Crisis

Jurgen Habermas in Social Europe Journal:

The European Union owes its existence to the efforts of political elites who could count on the passive consent of their more or less indifferent populations as long as the peoples could regard the Union as also being in their economic interests, all things considered. The Union has legitimized itself in the eyes of the citizens primarily through its outcomes and not so much by the fact that it fulfilled the citizens’ political will. This state of affairs is explained not only by the history of its origins but also by the legal constitution of this unique formation. The European Central Bank, the Commission, and the European Court of Justice have intervened most profoundly in the everyday lives of European citizens over the decades, even though these institutions are the least subject to democratic controls. Moreover, the European Council, which has energetically taken the initiative during the current crisis, is made up of heads of government whose role in the eyes of their citizens is to represent their respective national interests in distant Brussels. Finally, at least the European Parliament was supposed to construct a bridge between the political conflict of opinions in the national arenas and the momentous decisions taken in Brussels – but this bridge is almost devoid of traffic.

Thus, to the present day, there remains a gulf at the European level between the citizens’ opinion and will formation, on the one hand, and the policies actually adopted to solve the pressing problems, on the other. This also explains why conceptions of the European Union and ideas of its future development have remained diffuse among the general population. Informed opinions and articulated positions are, for the most part, the monopoly of professional politicians, economic elites, and scholars with relevant interests; not even public intellectuals who generally participate in debates on burning issues have made this issue their own. What unites European citizens today is the Eurosceptic mindset that has become more pronounced in all of the member countries during the crisis, albeit in each country for different and rather polarizing reasons. This trend may be an important fact for the political elites to take into account; but the growing resistance is not really decisive for the actual course of European policy-making which is largely decoupled from the national arenas. The actual course of the crisis management is pushed and implemented in the first place by the large camp of pragmatic politicians who pursue an incrementalist agenda but lack a comprehensive perspective.

The polyp comes & goes, / I can’t breave frew my effing nose.

It is very strange that a poet whose key work lies in three rather short volumes should have caused such difficulties for his editors and such controversy among his readers. But the readers pay him the tribute of a sort of possessiveness and concern: they want their poet to look his best. And it’s hard for a poet to look good in his Collected Poems, if by “collected” we mean anything like “complete.” Most poets’ collected works will include things that would make the author cringe. Presented in untidied form, such gatherings remind me of nothing so much as those yard sales characteristic of recession America, in which families set out on their front lawns the contents of their closets and dens—the Frisbees, the old scooters, the clothes neither wanted nor needed, the dreadful joke presents—all in the hope of raising a little cash. Painters are known to curate their oeuvre by means of occasional bonfires of botched canvases, and experience has taught us that the better the painter, the better advised he is to stand over that bonfire and make quite sure that what he wants burnt does indeed go up in smoke, and is not squirreled away by his admirers and assistants, whether through misguided motives of preserving the legacy, or by the thought of providing for their old age.

more from James Fenton at Threepenny Review here.

The Pleasures of Pluralism, the Pain of Offence

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Almost twenty years ago, in 1994, the Independent newspaper asked me to write an essay on Tom Paine, the eighteenth-century English revolutionary. It was the 200^thanniversary of his masterpiece, The Age of Reason, a book of which Paine said that it was a ‘march through Christianity with an axe’. ‘All national institutions of churches’, wrote Paine, ‘whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to be no more than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit.’

Few authors have so punctured the pretensions of organised religion or so savaged the claims of divine revelation as Paine. Fewer still have faced such ridicule and vilification for doing so. In England The Age of Reason was suppressed for decades and successive publishers imprisoned for blasphemy. Anyone who distributed, read or discussed the book faced prosecution. Some were arrested for simply displaying the portrait of the author. In America, where hitherto Paine had been feted as a hero for his unwavering support for independence, newspapers denounced him as a ‘lily-livered sinical [sic] rogue’ and ‘a demihuman archbeast’. The Age of Reason, as I observed in my Independent essay, became ‘The Satanic Verses of its day’. And, given that comparison, I thought it reasonable to open the essay with a quote from Salman Rushdie’s novel, satirising the divine origins of the Qur’an.

The Independent thought otherwise. There was consternation in the editorial offices when I filed my piece. Eventually one of the editors phoned me to say that I could not use the quote from The Satanic Verses because it was deemed too offensive. No amount of logic or reasoning could persuade her otherwise. The irony of having been commissioned to write an essay on Tom Paine, the greatest freethinker of his age, and then being banned from quoting from a freely available book, seemed to escape the Independent editors.

More here.

The Insanity Virus

Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person's DNA.

Douglas Fox in Discover:

Steven and David Elmore were born identical twins, but their first days in this world could not have been more different. David came home from the hospital after a week. Steven, born four minutes later, stayed behind in the ICU. For a month he hovered near death in an incubator, wracked with fever from what doctors called a dangerous viral infection. Even after Steven recovered, he lagged behind his twin. He lay awake but rarely cried. When his mother smiled at him, he stared back with blank eyes rather than mirroring her smiles as David did. And for several years after the boys began walking, it was Steven who often lost his balance, falling against tables or smashing his lip.

Those early differences might have faded into distant memory, but they gained new significance in light of the twins’ subsequent lives. By the time Steven entered grade school, it appeared that he had hit his stride. The twins seemed to have equalized into the genetic carbon copies that they were: They wore the same shoulder-length, sandy-blond hair. They were both B+ students. They played basketball with the same friends. Steven Elmore had seemingly overcome his rough start. But then, at the age of 17, he began hearing voices.

More here.

The History of Typography - Animated Short

Gezi Park

Melik Kaylan in Forbes:

One can understand why self-appointed despots might move early and hard, even semi-democratic despots of the Russian or Iranian variety, against a small, peacable protest in a public place. They fear for their legitimacy. They distrust the populace. They’ve seen the spontaneous multiplier effect of social media. But why would a duly elected leader such as Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan resort to provocative brutality so gratuitously? That is, to the extent of calling his own legitimacy into doubt by hurtling the country toward full-blown strife in a very short time. The kind of instantly extreme anti-democratic measures he has deployed can only lead to retro-prosecution of his henchmen or he can kiss goodbye all sense of future public trust in the justice system. You would think that politicians globally have learned to respect the eventual backlash of citizens abused en masse in the present.

There can be no debating the extent of the abuse, the arrest of scores of lawyers who defend the rights of protesters, doctors who treat their wounds, clerics who grant haven to the wounded in their mosques, the nation perhaps irretrievably divided, the opposition smeared publicly as terrorists, police firing tear gas into private homes, and yes into hospitals and consulates and hotels – why would a legitimately elected leader repay his populace with devastation. After all, Turkey is not Syria. Yet Erdogan has put himself in the bitter position of having Assad repeat back to him the words “listen to your own people”.

More here.

The Art of Subtraction

From Harvard Magazine:

The royal palace of Hampton Court, built on the Thames nearly 12 miles upstream from London by Henry VIII in 1514, suffered a devastating fire on March 31, 1986. A bedside candle in the room of the elderly Lady Gale, a resident who perished in the flames, probably started the blaze. Grievously, the fire also consumed or seriously damaged some of the incomparable woodcarvings in the King’s Apartments, an addition that Christopher Wren built for William III near the end of the seventeenth century. These delicate depictions of botanical subjects in wood, hung on walls and surmounting doorways and mantelpieces, were the masterworks of the final period of Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721), the Dutch-born artist widely regarded as England’s finest woodcarver, a “golden codger, almost of the order of Samuel Johnson, Thomas Chippendale, Charles Dickens or William Morris,” as David Esterly ’66 puts it in his 2012 book, The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making.

Given the British reverence for historical (and royal) heritage and the carvings’ importance, there was no question that restoration would proceed after the fire. Miraculously, most of them had survived, despite damage, but one spectacular overdoor drop, a pendant of flowers and leaves, in the King’s Drawing Room, had been incinerated. The problem was that in the nearly three centuries since Gibbons’s time, such finely detailed, high-relief carvings in limewood (the British term for linden wood) had become a lost art. There had been “sorry attempts at Gibbons revivals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: crude embarrassments, almost all of them,” Esterly writes. In 1986, a number of English carving conservators were working assiduously in limewood, but the artist to whom the British entrusted the restoration was a 42-year-old craftsman living outside Utica, New York, who had been carving limewood for about a decade: Esterly himself.

More here.

Doctor Feelbad

From The New York Times:

In her new book, “What Doctors Feel,” Dr. Danielle Ofri tells the unforgettable story of a pediatrician she interviewed, a woman she calls Eva. In taut, vivid prose, Dr. Ofri describes a tragic event that occurred during Eva’s residency. She helped deliver a baby doomed to asphyxiation within minutes of birth because of a severe lack of amniotic fluid in the womb. The traumatized parents knew the outcome in advance, and made it clear they did not want to see the baby. After the delivery, the room leaden with silence, Eva wrapped the baby in a blanket and wondered where to go. The hospital had no room set aside for this. So the young physician, consumed with sadness for a child who would never be held by anyone but her, took the dying newborn into a supply closet. There, knowing she would be reprimanded for not observing the precise moment at which the umbilical cord ceased pulsing, she gathered the baby in her arms. “In the cramped space Eva rocked back and forth,” Dr. Ofri writes. “ ‘I love you, baby,’ she whispered as the heart began its slow, cratering descent.”

In the hands of a less agile and intelligent writer, such a scene could easily grow maudlin. Indeed, calling attention to a physician’s emotional pain might be seen as distracting and self-indulgent. It is, after all, the physician’s role to ease the suffering of others. Yet as Dr. Ofri points out, how doctors feel matters. And while she does write of joy, pride and gratitude, her emphasis is on negative emotions — which exert the strongest influence on medical care, particularly when a case grows unexpectedly complicated, frustrating or unyielding. “This is where factors other than clinical competency come into play,” she writes. An unwell doctor is a bad doctor.

More here.

Syria: Inventing a Religious War

Toby Matthiesen makes the case in the NYRB blog:

Since late May, pictures of Hezbollah militants standing amid the ruins of al-Qusayr, the former Syrian rebel stronghold, have offered dramatic evidence of the extent to which foreign Shia fighters are shifting the course of the Syrian war. To many observers, the Lebanese militia’s entry into the conflict has shown definitively that it has been a sectarian war from the outset. According to this view, Syria’s Alawite sect, to which the Assad clan and its security forces belong, is “quasi Shiite,” a fact which accounts for the government’s alliances to Iran and Hezbollah; while Syrian rebel forces are overwhelmingly dominated by the country’s aggrieved Sunni majority, now backed by the Sunni governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, along with various foreign Sunni jihadis.

But Bashar al-Assad is head of an ostensibly secular Baathist regime and many Shia think that Alawites are heretics. Why exactly is Hezbollah getting involved, and is this conflict really rooted in religion? The answer to both these questions may lie in a suburb of Damascus called Sayyida Zainab, the site of an important Shia shrine and since the 1970s a haven for foreign Shia activists and migrants in Syria. Today, Hezbollah forces, along with Iraqi Shia fighters, defend the suburb. Though the story of Sayyida Zainab is little known in the West, it may help explain why what began as a peaceful uprising against secular authoritarian rule in 2011 has increasingly become a war between Shia and Sunni that has engulfed much of the surrounding region.

Political Ideology and the Avoidance of Dissonance-Arousing Situations

H. Hannah Nam, John T. Jost, and Jay J. Van Bavel over at PLOS One (via Chris Mooney):

Abstract

People often avoid information and situations that have the potential to contradict previously held beliefs and attitudes (i.e., situations that arouse cognitive dissonance). According to the motivated social cognition model of political ideology, conservatives tend to have stronger epistemic needs to attain certainty and closure than liberals. This implies that there may be differences in how liberals and conservatives respond to dissonance-arousing situations. In two experiments, we investigated the possibility that conservatives would be more strongly motivated to avoid dissonance-arousing tasks than liberals. Indeed, U.S. residents who preferred more conservative presidents (George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan) complied less than Americans who preferred more liberal presidents (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton) with the request to write a counter-attitudinal essay about who made a “better president.” This difference was not observed under circumstances of low perceived choice or when the topic of the counter-attitudinal essay was non-political (i.e., when it pertained to computer or beverage preferences). The results of these experiments provide initial evidence of ideological differences in dissonance avoidance. Future work would do well to determine whether such differences are specific to political issues or topics that are personally important. Implications for political behavior are discussed.

Quest for 'Genius Babies'?

Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Ed:

Jason Richwine swiftly resigned from the Heritage Foundation this month following revelations of his 2009 Harvard University dissertation on IQ and race, but the blogosphere continues to buzz with the story. In the aftermath, as Richwine continues to defend his research, some human biodiversity, or “HBD,” experts charge that a new generation of eugenicists may be coming of age. A recurring name is that of Stephen Hsu, the Michigan State University physicist and vice president for research and graduate studies who is researching intelligence and genetics at the world’s biggest genomics sequencing lab in Shenzhen, China.

“Richwine would probably also find a friend in Stephen Hsu, a theoretical physicist by training who is currently searching for an intelligence gene,” wrote Yong Chan, research director for the racial justice website ChangeLab. “Even though mainstream science has pretty much scrapped the notion that race has any kind of biological basis long ago, that hasn’t stopped [Hsu] from trying to link intelligence with race and getting a billion and a half dollars for research based in China.”

Michael Scroggins, a Ph.D. student at Teachers College of Columbia University, echoed Chan on Ethnography.com: “Suffice to say, [Richwine and Hsu] offer nothing new to debates over IQ, or poverty or immigration. Their innovation lies in the naked, unreflective application of a naïve sociobiology to policy debates over access to democratic institutions – citizenship and public education.”

Much of the controversy surrounding Hsu stems from a recent Vice article alleging Hsu's cognitive genomics project is ultimately helping China engineer “genius babies.”

“At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence,” the piece reads. “Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.”

Moving books

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Like some nervous Gnostic, I'm oppressed by matter, and I'm never as aware of it when I move. Then, more than ever, I seem to exist in a whirl of paper and clothes and small objects of no apparent purpose that all conspire to cloud my existence and subvert the clear paths of my reason. Every time I put something down I lose it. Every time I look away, matter accumulates in the interstices of my life, spills from behind me, wells up through the crevasses of my mind and wraps around my feet. Objects make me anxious. I need to consider each one carefully before I throw it away, in case I need it, and then I am relieved when it is gone. I devise organizational schemes and administrative techniques but matter is stubborn and slippery and in the absence of a neurosis-inducing constant vigilance it squirms away and will not be subdued. I think of this as I wade through all the matter that has accumulated in my life: all the stuff that I need to sort through, each object I need to sorrowfully consider and reject.

Thankfully, History is helping. I liked tapes and CDs, but I don't miss them and I'm relieved that they've vanished into pure Spirit (or whatever their ultimate end is). It was always hard to tell what music I owned and hard to find it and hard to decide what to take where, and I constantly found CDs in strange places and they have hard edges.  I hated writing by hand. It was slow and painful and brought back unpleasant memories of frantically scratching away in a school book.  I love the rapid erasure and recreating of digital writing; I love the ease of structuring information liberated from a particular physical correlate. And I especially like that I don't have to carry stacks of notes with me.

And yet, despite this progressive horror of the material, I seek out and accumulate books wherever I go, and I crave their presence. They follow me around, like expensive wallpaper that I need to feel settled in a place. They're the first thing I think of when I think of my room or what I need to move, and not having my books around me marks transience. At this point, most of what I need to pack seems to be books.  I buy more books than I need or will read. I travel with books I've already read and probably won't read again. Deciding which books to take where is a weighty matter, like constructing an intellectual and emotional landscape that will determine my journey.

In theory, I find the idea of e-books somewhat compelling. They seem brisk and efficient and the idea that a single small object can contain hundreds of books is especially enticing as I contemplate moving a room full of bookshelves. And yet I never use them.  I read fifty pages on an e-book reader once and it was pleasant, but I've never done it since.  It doesn't strike me as an imaginative possibility; it just doesn't seem part of the possible configurations that my experience allows.

It's not that I like the smell of books, or their weight, or the memories lying in bed and reading brings back, though I do like all of these things. It's not just that I like walking into someone's home and seeing their mind laid out on their bookshelves or that I like the physical act of lending a book and returning a book. It seems somehow baser, something not just pre-cognitive but pre-emotional, like that their material presence has so shaped my way of interacting with the world that their absence troubles the unity of my experience.  I imagine this is what it is to have your world determined by a certain technology in its particularity and to suddenly realize that that technology is slipping away. This seems like a common sentiment among the people I know (though it's often expressed as, and I think confused with, an aesthetic disagreement with e-books). Perhaps we're already part of an older generation that starts to find the world it's growing into dissonant. I recognize that at some point in my life I'll have to move to reading books electronically. I don't know how this moment will come or what sort of person I'll be then. I'm not even sure what I'll have left to put in my room.

Poetry in Translation

TWO STARS
 
after  Mohammed  Iqbal

As two stars approached
Each other, one said:

"If we could stay
Only could stop whirling,

If the sky were kinder
We'd shine together."

But this desire of two
Bears longing in itself.

Stars are fated to revolve
In orbits ordained.

Together is a dream
Separation the law.
 
Translated, from the Urdu, by Rafiq Kathwari. More here.

Perceptions

Bus in Pakistan. Courtesy Yasser Haider, May 2013.
Thanks, Yasser.

The Epistemology of Hatred: A Case Study of Irish Bogs

by Liam Heneghan 

If I asked you to choose from among the several notable Irish William Kings who might possibly serve as first formulator of a hypothesis on the development of bog vegetation you might choose wrongly. The three candidates: William King soldier and politician, William King, geologist and natural scientist, and William King, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin and Lord Justice…. I will give you a moment to reflect on your choices. Tick-tock.

William King, the soldier recorded nothing on bog matters. William King, geologist and naturalist, certainly had the credentials to make sage comment on the bogs and loughs of Ireland. This Mr King held the first chair of geology in Queens College, Galway (now University College Galway) and was later a professor of natural history, geology, and mineralogy. He established a place for geology in teaching across the curriculum in the arts, agriculture and the engineering faculty – an interdisciplinary teacher by any measure. He also lent his modest heft to Darwin, though apparently approving of a modified version of Darwin's thesis. An interesting and scholarly productive fellow; not uncontroversial either, having had to vacate his position at the Hancock Museum, in Newcastle. It appears that in addition to his curatorial duties, he was also a bustling private dealer in geological and biological specimens. The governing committee of the Hancock felt that this was inconsistent with his duties as a curator, and King resigned. As a 19th Century naturalist and geologist, who took a keen interest in matters beyond the confines of his own discipline, and had written on the geomorphology of the famed karsts-formation of the Burren, Co Clare, it would not have been surprising had he penned a note on the origins of a variety of topographic features, especially those whose origins were not clearly understood. Alas he is not our King for this William King (1809–1886) came two centuries too late to be a pioneer in the matter of bog speculation. 

No, the William King that we are most concerned with was Church of Ireland Archbishop from 1703 till 1729. King was born 1650 in Antrim in Northern Ireland and studied at Trinity College Dublin getting his BA in 1671 and MA in 1673. At TCD he converted to Anglicanism and was ordained as a deacon in 1673 and priest in 1674. In 1679 he was appointed chancellor (and later Dean) of St Patrick's cathedral, Dublin, and rector of St Werburgh's Church, both iconic Dublin institutions. Like our previously discussed King, this King was also querulous, though on a grander political scale. During the Jacobite period from 1688 to 1691, King, then the senior Church of Ireland cleric in Ireland, declared his support for William of Orange. On suspicion of collusion he was jailed in Dublin Castle in July 1689 and incarcerated once again in 1690 as William’s forces marched towards Dublin. He was released shortly after the battle of the Boyne. The next year he was appointed Bishop of Derry. In 1703 he became Archbishop of Dublin.

Continue reading "The Epistemology of Hatred: A Case Study of Irish Bogs"

Breath of Death: A Pakistani Thriller

Fatema Imani in Dawn:

The main story line of the novel [by Saad Shafqat--shown in photo on the right] is based in Pakistan’s hub Karachi, but a generous portion is also set in America. An anonymous and unknown medical illness claims several lives in Karachi. The ill-fated victims more or less find themselves in a fictional ‘Avicenna University Hospital’, where Asad Mirza, a neurosurgeon freshly returned from medical residency in America, and his protégée Nadia Khan are trying to figure out the complex disease.

Alongside the duo’s quest to crack the riddle runs a sub-plot hatched by a terrorist network, aimed at the United States of America. How do these two plots come together? You certainly don’t want me to tell you, so read the novel to find out...

[Fatema Imani]: How did you get started with writing Breath of Death?

[Saad Shafqat]: The idea of penning down a novel came to me because I have always liked writing. I have been doing cricket writing for a while and have also written social pieces for some publications. I enjoy telling stories to friends and family members and seeing their interest gave birth to the idea of writing a book.

I started looking for a genre and it seemed befitting to write a medical novel, considering I am a physician seeing patients all the time in a hospital and clinic where there is a great deal of human drama. Illnesses and deaths are rampant, which is very tragic, but there is happiness too and a lot of intensity in taking care of sick patients. I conjoined these elements with social pressure, terrorism and extremist thinking and out came the novel.

More here.

Inflation Is Still the Lesser Evil

Kenneth Rogoff in Project Syndicate:

The world’s major central banks continue to express concern about inflationary spillover from their recession-fighting efforts. That is a mistake. Weighed against the political, social, and economic risks of continued slow growth after a once-in-a-century financial crisis, a sustained burst of moderate inflation is not something to worry about. On the contrary, in most regions, it should be embraced.

Perhaps the case for moderate inflation (say, 4-6% annually) is not so compelling as it was at the outset of the crisis, when I first raised the issue. Back then, against a backdrop of government reluctance to force debt write-downs, along with massively over-valued real housing prices and excessive real wages in some sectors, moderate inflation would have been extremely helpful.

The consensus at the time, of course, was that a robust “V-shaped” recovery was around the corner, and it was foolish to embrace inflation heterodoxy. I thought otherwise, based on research underlying my 2009 book with Carmen M. Reinhart, This Time is Different. Examining previous deep financial crises, there was every reason to be concerned that the employment decline would be catastrophically deep and the recovery extraordinarily slow. A proper assessment of the medium-term risks would have helped to justify my conclusion in December 2008 that “It will take every tool in the box to fix today’s once-in-a-century financial crisis.”

Five years on, public, private, and external debt are at record levels in many countries. There is still a need for huge relative wage adjustments between Europe’s periphery and its core. But the world’s major central banks seem not to have noticed.

Soviet Philosophy and Then Some

Richard Marshall interviews David Bakhurst in 3:AM Magazine:

RM: What led you to develop a specific interest in Russian philosophy?

DB: Well, I was drawn to the philosophical intensity of Russian culture, which comes through so strikingly in its literature, poetry, and art, and in the impassioned writings of Russian political thinkers. Moreover, the Soviet Union was, in a sense, the living embodiment of a philosophical idea. At the same time, it was obvious that the Russian philosophical tradition was very unlike anything I was studying in philosophy at Keele. So I tried to find out more on the philosophical culture of the USSR, about which relatively little was known in the West. I was encouraged in this by the Professor of Russian at Keele, Eugene Lampert, who was a fascinating figure. He was an intellectual historian, who’d written a couple of marvelous books on 19th century Russian political thinkers, and he was highly literate in philosophy. He’d translated Berdyaev, for example.

Anyway, I soon found that the Western literature on Soviet Philosophy was for the most part dismal. The Russian literature, so far as I could understand it, was obviously subject to censorship, so it was difficult to know how to approach it from an outsider’s perspective. I concluded, therefore, that I should go to Russia and talk to philosophers. Keele gave me a small bursary to travel to Moscow in the summer of 1980. I signed up for a language course with the intention of using my spare time to investigate Russian philosophy. My efforts to meet philosophers through official channels proved unrewarding—unsurprisingly in those Cold War days. But just before I was due to leave Russia I had an amazing stroke of good fortune.

In the Progress Publishers bookstore I came across a copy of Felix Mikhailov’s The Riddle of the Self, newly translated into English. I was really impressed. It was quite unlike the doctrinaire tomes of dialectical and historical materialism I’d be trying to plough through. It was an intelligent, witty, and engagingly-written introduction to a range philosophical questions that were familiar to me—questions about the justification of knowledge, concept formation, self-consciousness, other minds, and so on. 

Rachel Kushner’s Ambitious New Novel Scares Male Critics

Laura Miller in Salon:

Often the debate about bias against women writers — now regularly revived by the annual VIDA survey and its dismaying figures on the gender breakdown of book reviewers and authors reviewed in prominent literary publications — focuses on genre. Why are some themes (courtship, family life) or forms (the short story) typically regarded as less significant than others (war, adventure, the epic novel)? How is it that purportedly lightweight themes suddenly become momentous in critics’ eyes when the novelist who takes them up is a man (Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides)?

These are legitimate and essential challenges to the values embedded in Mailer’s concept of the Room. It’s also true that chipping away at the fantasy of a rigidly hierarchical aesthetic pecking order — a typological crutch for structure junkies — will open up the literary landscape to more writers and readers. It’s important to challenge both the Room and the supremacy of the kind of novel the Room tends to prize: long, wide-ranging, idea-driven, full of social commentary and concerned with the American dream of self-invention — “ambitious,” as critics often call it.

Given how fiercely American male writers have fought for the Great American Novel laurels, many women authors apparently decided it simply wasn’t worth wading into the fray. Furthermore, there’s a grandiose self-presentation, a swagger, that goes along with advancing your book as a Great American Novel that many women find impossible or silly. Besides, critics longing for a silverback alpha male to declare the leader of the pack are never going to glance at the distaff side. Who wants to play a game whose rules are so obviously rigged against you?

So we don’t have many novels of this type written by American women, even if the women who might have written them (Jennifer Egan, say, or Joyce Carol Oates, to name just two) have done equally impressive work in other rooms, such as composing prismatic explorations of style or exploding seemingly hidebound genres like the gothic. Still, it’s possible to point out that a novel needn’t be “ambitious” to be worthy of the highest acclaim and yet stop short of dismissing the “ambitious” genre entirely. 

ways of seeing 2

rauschenberg

if

Lives that seem perfect but aren’t

From New Statesman:

I first came to read James Salter 20 years ago, when I was in the US on a book tour. I was promoting a novel I’d written about a family who, from the outside, seem to have everything – beauty, leisure, endless summers and a house by a lake – but whose lives are freighted by a sadness that eventually pulls them down. After one of my readings, in Stanford, a young man came up to me and told me that I must read Light Years by Salter. “He’s interested in those things you’re interested in,” he said. “Lives that seem perfect but aren’t. He sees the cracks and broken pieces that were there all along.”

...All That Is, Salter’s latest novel, may be his last (he is 87), though he’s not saying that. “You have the brains,” he once remarked, “but it’s energy and desire that make you write a novel.” Still, there is about All That Is the sense that the author is telling us once and for all what he is about. Philip Bowman, his hero, is more clearly drawn – as the selfmade man who has fashioned himself from the lessons life has taught him and the instruction of others who have lived on the scale to which he aspires – than any of Salter’s other protagonists. There’s also the sound here of elegy, a grand farewell:

He had been weeding in the garden that afternoon and looked down to see, beneath his tennis shorts, a pair of legs that seemed to belong to an older man. He mustn’t . . . be going around the house in shorts like this . . . He had to be careful about such things.

More here.

Top 10 Matt cartoons for Father's Day

From The Telegraph:

 

From lying to your doctor about alcohol consumption, to going to parenting classes to avoid your children, Matt skewers the habits of our nation's fathers in Matt For Dads. A brilliant pocket-sized book from the Telegraph's award-winning cartoonist, it's the perfect present for Father's Day this Sunday.

 

More here.

Sunday Poem

Hunger

This is hunger. An animal
all fangs and eyes.
It cannot be distracted or deceived.
It is not satisfied with one meal.
It is not content
with a lunch or dinner.
Always threatens blood.
Roars like a lion, squeezes like a boa,
thinks like a person.

The specimen before you
was captured in India (outskirts of Bombay)
but it exists in a more or less savage state
in many other places.

Please stand back. 

by Nicolas Guillén

messages sent from the dawn of history

On March 30, 1900, during the excavation of the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, site of the legendary labyrinth from which Daedalus and Icarus took flight, workmen unearthed a clay tablet inscribed with an unknown script. Some of the characters of the script looked like the letters of an alien alphabet, others like alien hieroglyphics. In the following weeks and months workmen unearthed more tablets, several hundred of which had fallen from a floor above into a terra cotta bathtub. The tablets contained messages sent from the dawn of history, from before the time of Homer, but they were messages that could not be received. No one knew what language people spoke 30 centuries ago on Crete, and there was no Rosetta stone among the discoveries at Knossos. (There were, however, other enchanting wonders — elaborate lavatories, murals of griffins and dolphins.) For 50 years, the inscriptions seemed impossible to crack. The code’s ultimate decipherment would turn out to be one of the great scientific detective stories of the 20th century — The Mysterious Case of Linear B.

more from Donovan Hohn at the NY Times here.

The Real War on Reality

Peter Ludlow in The NYT's The Stone:

To get some perspective on the manipulative role that private intelligence agencies play in our society, it is worth examining information that has been revealed by some significant hacks in the past few years of previously secret data.

Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group best known as LulzSec  (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal.  That hack yielded 75,000 e-mails.  It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it.  The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis.

Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program),  because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case.

Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”

criminals and the brain

Raine's key notion that, good or bad, we are the playthings of our brains – "free will is sadly an illusion" (the return of the lumbering robots) – raises the question of why we should stop at the brain in our search for causes. Given that it is a material object wired into the material world, "my brain made me do it" (kill my spouse, write a book on neurocriminology) should translate into "the Big Bang" (ultimately) made me do it. In fact, the brain is but one player in the complex game of life, not the beginning and end of our destiny. And Raine seems gradually to accept this. For all his headline-grabbing talk of "murderous minds", "broken brains" and "natural born killers" he ends with "the biosocial jigsaw puzzle", where "the social environment beats up the brain and reshapes gene expression". There is the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back. He rows back from his initial "biology + genes + brain" thesis towards the kind of "environment (including junk food, toxic metals, maternal rejection, poverty, childhood abuse) + heredity + personal factors" truisms that the rest of us accept. Even so, he is determined to hold on to his brain-centred criminology: "Deprivation makes a big dent on the brain."

more from Raymond Tallis at The Guardian here.

the italian paradox

Italy is now seriously threatened by its own ungovernability. The collapse of the so-called “Second Republic” dominated by Silvio Berlusconi and the end of Mario Monti’s 18 months in power have left a cobbled-together, right-left-centrist government under Enrico Letta with grim valleys of austerity to traverse and steep mountains of reform to climb. All the while, as rightwing and leftwing populisms grow, the European Union is being transformed, in many Italian minds, from a benign and generous zio (uncle) into a malignant matrigna (stepmother) wearing an Angela Merkel mask. Yet whatever its failings, Italy is a nation that arguably projects more soft power than any other in the world – think of its food, its fashion, its music, its cultural history, its natural beauty. Resolving contradictions, as three new books amply demonstrate, will always be part of the task of writing about this country.

more from John Lloyd at the FT here.

What is ‘smart’ and how does it fit our consciousness?

Sandipan Deb in Outlook:

Which, of course, brings us to that common capitalist question: “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” There is something abhorrent about this query. Of course, Mukesh Ambani is super-smart, but so was Jagadish Chandra Bose, who invented wireless communication at least a couple of years before Guglielmo Marconi, who received the Nobel prize for the breakthrough (It is now established that Marconi met Bose in London when the Indian scientist was demonstrating his wireless devices there, and changed his research methods after that meeting). Bose also invented microwave transmission and the whole field of solid state physics, which forms the basis of micro-electronics. Bose’s contributions are all around us today, from almost every electronic device we have at home to the most powerful radio telescopes in the world. But he steadfastly refused to patent any of his inventions, or to license them to any specific company. Some 70 years after Bose’s death, the global apex body, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, officially acknowledged Bose to be the father of wireless communication.

In fact, that smug question about smart and rich is actually a stupid one. There is no natural correlation at all between smartness and wealth, or even career success. I doubt whether any great poet ever made much money. Van Gogh sold only one painting in his entire lifetime. How many great Indian authors are rolling—or ever rolled—in the dough? Instead, all of us can possibly name at least one truly talented writer/creator in our mother tongue who died in penury or committed lengthy frustrated alcoholic suicides. Ritwik Gha­tak instantly comes to mind. Smartness and academic success? Of course, we have the Ama­rtya Sens and the V.S. Ram­a­chandrans, but one can draw no definite conclusions. Not by a long shot. Tagore couldn’t stand school and had less than a year of formal education.

Siddhartha Mukherjee.

More here.

‘What Do Women Want?’

Elaine Blair in The New York Times:

Bergner’s previous book, “The Other Side of Desire,” is a thoughtful study of unusual sexual inclinations — fetishism, sadism, attraction to children or amputees. In his new book, “What Do Women Want?,” which appears to have grown out of his earlier research, Bergner turns to what you might say is the largest group of sexual deviants: women, whose strange sexual parts and desires never seem quite as mainstream as men’s. Squeezed into these 200 pages are interviews with psychologists, psychiatrists and primatologists who have been “puzzling out the ways of eros in women”; a capsule history of ideas about female sexuality from biblical times to the present; the story of the so-far elusive hunt for a Viagra-type aphrodisiac for women; a discussion of the different types of female orgasm; and the personal accounts of a dozen or so ordinary women who talk about their sex lives and fantasies. The experiments and data Bergner writes about vary widely and don’t all point in the same direction, but he sets this tour of contemporary sex research against one particular shibboleth: the notion that women are naturally less libidinous than men, “hard-wired” to want babies and emotional connection but not necessarily sex itself. Bergner, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, blames evolutionary psychologists for spreading a contemporary version of this old idea. He assembles a group of scientists from different fields who talk about how earlier sexist bias has obscured the existence, strength and significance of female sex drive in animal reproduction.

More here.

Saturday Poem

.
God, who like nature abhors a vacuum,
one day slid Her hands under Her footstool,
scooped the dust bunnies of the earth into His mitts
and formed a likeness of Their self
 
S/He breathed life into it
It became full of vim and vigor
and was cool but self-destructive

R.Bob
May 2011

An Outbreak of Reasonableness in Tehran: Top Ten Conclusions from Iran’s Early Election Returns

Juan Cole in Informed Comment:

Early election returns in Iran suggest that former National Security adviser and nuclear negotiator Hassan Rouhani may have won over 50% of the vote, in which case he will have won without needing to go to a second round. Too early to tell if that is so. While it is true that the president in Iran is more like the typical US vice president and is relatively powerless, he can nevertheless set a tone and initiate policies slightly different from those of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran is not yet a totalitarian dictatorship, and Khamenei himself has sometimes been forced to tack with the wind. Any change will be slow and at the margins, but it could nevertheless be significant in a very polarized world.

1. People are still willing to come out and vote for president in impressive numbers, despite the widespread feeling that the 2009 polls were tinkered with by the regime in favor of populist hard liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Even if the 75% turnout claimed by the Iranian press is exaggerated, turnout was impressive.

2. The poor showing of nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili is a slap in the face both of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and of outgoing president Ahmadinejad. The most hard line of the candidates got only 13% of the vote in early returns.

3. Those who believed that Khamenei would try to fix this election for Jalili as he is accused by the Green movement of doing four years ago were mistaken. Either the Leader feels that he has sufficient control of the country to risk a mildly reformist candidate like Hasan Rouhani winning, or the turmoil the country faced in 2009 chastened him and he decided to let the public blow off steam by giving him a president he isn’t entirely happy with.

More here.

The 30 Dimensions Of Lady N

Azra Raza in The MDS Beacon:

It was Marcel Proust who said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

I experience a slightly different version of this dictum practically on a daily basis.

As a physician-scientist whose last three decades have been spent seeking novel treatment options for myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) patients, I develop new (in)sights through my patients’ eyes, and none could claim a vision more penetrating and acute than Lady N. I assign her this moniker because of her larger-than-life personality.

She had an uncanny habit of connecting seemingly unrelated things by combining common sense, extreme intelligence, and an inimitable sense of humor with pure and simple intuition.

Five years ago, she swept into my clinic at St. Vincent’s Comprehensive Cancer Center for her first visit with the announcement: “FYI, I have been extremely anemic for at least 25 to 30 years, if not longer.  I also believe strongly that there is a genetic component to my MDS. As you know, my father’s sister’s first child was born with no marrow in his bones.”

Although she was anemic for a long time, her actual MDS was not diagnosed until relatively recently.

The first few years after her diagnosis were not too hard, as she had a del(5q) chromosomal abnormality and responded well first to Procrit (epoetin alfa) and then to Revlimid (lenalidomide). The anemia improved beyond expectation, and she had an excellent quality of life, caring for her many cats, taking long drives visiting her numerous best friends, shopping and dining with her 99-year-old mother, and generally enjoying life to the fullest.

More here.