3quarksdaily

Obama's Brilliant First Year

Jacob Weisberg in Slate:

About one thing, left and right seem to agree these days: Obama hasn't done anything yet. Maureen Dowd and Dick Cheney have found common ground in scoffing at the president's "dithering." Newsweek recently ran a sympathetic cover story titled, "Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet)." The sarcasm brigade thinks it's finally found an Achilles' heel in his lack of accomplishments. "When you look at my record, it's very clear what I've done so far and that is nothing. Nada. Almost one year and nothing to show for it," Obama stand-in Fred Armisen recently riffed on Saturday Night Live. "It's chow time," Jon Stewart asserts, for a president who hasn't followed through on his promises.

This conventional wisdom about Obama's first year isn't just premature—it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20. If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn't an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record—how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office.

More here.

Bauhaus - Ziggy Stardust (for shuffy)

Morgan Meis

the mouse is under the table

Morgan Meis

The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock

Morgan Meis

Cyrus Hall on the Swiss Islamic Minaret Ban

An email to me from 3QD friend, Cyrus Hall (published with his permission):

Ciao Abbas-

My temporary home of the last five years, Switzerland, has just voted for one of the most bigoted and undemocratic constitutional reforms in recent memory: the banning of Islamic minarets on Mosques. The vote appears to be quite stunning, with 58% of voters backing the ban. This was after the most recent polls showed the measure being rejected by 53%, a story in itself.

This represents the most direct attack on the European Muslim minority yet. The French "headscarf ban" was at least religion neutral -- something I would still argue against (as an Atheist), but I appreciate the attempt at even-handedness. On the other hand, this constitutional amendment targets a small, largely immigrant population (many of whom have no vote), single-handedly banning them from behavior that would be perfectly acceptable were they of any other faith. Outrageous.

This is an issue for 3QD like no other. To me, it represents the continued erosion of Western values, in the U.S. and Europe, and their replacement with vapid platitudes and fear, and deserves all the attention in the world.

It's early still, but some basic news links on the issue include this and this.

I am going to be sick with disgust and revulsion as Hannity, Rush, and other media personalities in the U.S. pick this up as a great example of the way forward, for both Europe and the U.S.

Cheers,
Cyrus

Couldn't agree more, Cyrus. Thanks.

The world's most prosperous (and happiest) countries are also its least religious

David Villano at Miller-McCune:

In a paper posted recently on the online journal Evolutionary Psychology, independent researcher Gregory S. Paul reports a strong correlation within First World democracies between socioeconomic well-being and secularity. In short, prosperity is highest in societies where religion is practiced least.

Using existing data, Paul combined 25 indicators of societal and economic stability — things like crime, suicide, drug use, incarceration, unemployment, income, abortion and public corruption — to score each country using what he calls the "successful societies scale." He also scored countries on their degree of religiosity, as determined by such measures as church attendance, belief in a creator deity and acceptance of Bible literalism.

Comparing the two scores, he found, with little exception, that the least religious countries enjoyed the most prosperity. Of particular note, the U.S. holds the distinction of most religious and least prosperous among the 17 countries included in the study, ranking last in 14 of the 25 socioeconomic measures.

More here.

Sunday Poem

You and I are Disappearing –Bjorn Hakansson

The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak

she burns like a piece of paper.

She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.

We stand with our hands

hanging at our sides,
while she burns

like a sack of dry ice.

She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker's cigar,

silent as quicksilver.

A tiger under a rainbow
at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.

by Yusef Komunyakaa

from Dien Cai Dau; Wesleyan University Press, 1988

Bjorn Hakansson

Karen Armstrong profile: Writing on His behalf

From National Post:

So what is Armstrong saying about God and religion? She argues for an approach that has more to do with the heart and spirit, approaching religious texts as allegories rather than literal truth. She argues for a religion not burdened by systems of belief that she views as man-made constructs that squeeze the joy out of faith. Religion, she believes, should be more about ritual than ideas. The height of religious experience, she insists, is to be left in a state of awe and the realization that God cannot be known.

Most important, religion is about developing a high level of compassion for our fellow beings.

We became distanced from that purer form of faith, as science and religion found themselves in conflict. People, she says, forgot that reason and myth, logos and mythos, were “essential, and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary.” But during the Enlightenment, religion began to take on more of the characteristics of science, with the Church adding layers of doctrine to prove scientifically that its belief could withstand scrutiny. She points to Newton — who “hated mystery, which he equated with sheer irrationality” — as being key in the melding of science and religion, to the detriment of both. “Newton confessed from the outset he hoped to provide a scientific proof for God’s existence,” Armstrong writes. “At a stroke, Newton overturned centuries of Christian tradition. Hitherto, leading theologians had argued that the creation could tell us nothing about God; indeed, it proved to us that God was unknowable.”

More here.

Multicultural Masochism

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Very well, then; the case for Maj. Hasan the overburdened caseworker seems to have evaporated. Robert Wright, among others, is big enough to admit as much. Wright, now emerging as the leading liberal apologist for the faith-based (see his intriguing new book The Evolution of God), now proposes an alternative theory of Maj. Hasan's eagerness to commit mass murder. "The Fort Hood shooting," says Wright, "is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism—or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan." I know that contributors to the New York Times op-ed page are not necessarily responsible for the headlines that appear over their work, but the title of this one—"Who Created Major Hasan?"—really does demand an answer, and the only one to be located anywhere in the ensuing text is "We did."

Everything in me revolts at this conclusion, which is echoed and underlined in another paragraph of the article. Why, six months ago, did "a 24-year-old-American named Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad—Carlos Bledsoe before his teenage conversion to Islam—fatally shoot a soldier outside a recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark.? ABC News reported, "It was not known what path Muhammad … had followed to radicalization." Well, here's a clue: After being arrested he started babbling to the police about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan." Wright describes this clue-based deduction of his as an illustration of the way that "an isolated incident can put you on a slippery slope." Though I can't find much beauty in his prose there, I want to agree with him.

More here.

Let A Hundred Theories Bloom

George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz in Project Syndicate:

The economic and financial crisis has been a telling moment for the economics profession, for it has put many long-standing ideas to the test. If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern.
But there is, in fact, a much greater diversity of ideas within the economics profession than is often realized. This year’s Nobel laureates in economics are two scholars whose life work explored alternative approaches. Economics has generated a wealth of ideas, many of which argue that markets are not necessarily either efficient or stable, or that the economy, and our society, is not well described by the standard models of competitive equilibrium used by a majority of economists.
Behavioral economics, for example, emphasizes that market participants often act in ways that cannot easily be reconciled with rationality. Similarly, modern information economics shows that even if markets are competitive, they are almost never efficient when information is imperfect or asymmetric (some people know something that others do not, as in the recent financial debacle) – that is, always .
A long line of research has shown that even using the models of the so-called “rational expectations” school of economics, markets might not behave stably, and that there can be price bubbles. The crisis has, indeed, provided ample evidence that investors are far from rational; but the flaws in the rational expectations line of reasoning—hidden assumptions such as that all investors have the same information—had been exposed well before the crisis.
Just as the crisis has reinvigorated thinking about the need for regulation, so it has given new impetus to the exploration of alternative strands of thought that would provide better insights into how our complex economic system functions – and perhaps also to the search for policies that might avert a recurrence of the recent calamity.

Mumbai Revisited

One year ago, Mumbai was the target of a horrendous terrorist attack. Over at the Immanent Frame, several scholars--Veena Das, Sumit Ganguly, William R. Pinch, Vijay Prashad, Arvind Rajagopal, Anupama Rao, Tariq Thachil, and Arafaat A. Valiani--reflect on "what might constitute an appropriate response on the part of the Indian government, reflected on the terrorists’ use of spectacle (and the media’s response to it), considered India’s ongoing struggle to maintain its self-professed secular identity, and discussed the troubling socio-economic status of Muslims in India, the history and current state of Muslim-Hindu relations, and recent challenges to Mumbai’s historically cosmopolitan make-up." Vijay Prashad:

When mass movements wither, bitterness remains with the movements’ fugitives, many of whom plot amongst each other to contrive their return. These fugitives fire bullets at each other, accusing one another of treachery, holding themselves above the reasons for the failure of their movements. Equally, they seek refuge somewhere to gather up strength so as to return again with force.
In the 1990s, Afghanistan was that refuge for fugitives from Mindanao Island to Ingushetia, from the Arabian Peninsula to the Indonesian archipelago. Those who went to Afghanistan arrived with grievances of their own, some of the body, some of the soul. The exhaustion of national liberation into the authoritarian states of the 1980s, combined with the export of Saudi Islam to undermine any hope for the resurrection of radical nationalism and gave succor to this Jihad International. Funded by Washington and Riyadh, this International grew to have a greater sense of its own destiny, believing that what it accomplished was by its own means and not by the deft maneuver of its puppeteers. Not Hekmatyar, nor Shah Massoud, nor Bin Laden, could have set the trap for the Russian Bear, and none alone would have been able to thwart the Soviet Afghantsi, the frontline troops. It took this rag-tag brigade, despite Pakistani and US support, four years to dislodge the weak government of Mohammed Najibullah after the withdrawal of the Soviet armies. But the take-over of Afghanistan in 1992 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 produced the excessive fantasy that the Jihad International was responsible. It was a fantasy that continues to have catastrophic effects.

jedi romance

In fact, it was a 15-year-old who turned me on to the game in the first place—one of my SAT students. He was funny, smart, and sensitive and lived with his family in a wealthy community on Long Island where I’d recently started to work as a tutor to keep my writing habit afloat. I taught my student how to look for patterns on the SAT test, and how to spot the usual errors people made when answering questions. He liked learning how to outsmart others. But he was a teenage boy, and didn’t always want to concentrate. He wanted to talk about his Xbox, which my live-in boyfriend had coincidentally just given me for Christmas. My student wanted to know if I had played the video game Knights of the Old Republic. It was set in a mythical version of the Star Wars universe, and would train me in the ways of the Jedi: a private universe where I could build my own light saber, even have my own Wookie sidekick, and become that enviable thing—a cross between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker—all while still remaining a girl. Or a boy. I could mold my features to look like anyone I wanted. There were instructions I could follow in case I wanted my character to look like Halle Berry. It was January and I was bored. The low sky and constant snow made the cramped city borough where I lived even more claustrophobic. But out here in the neighborhood I visited twice a week, wide windows looked out over an icy lawn and Manhasset Bay. It was doubtful that any residence I ever owned was going to have the luxury of a vast, scenic view outside the dining room window. But now there was at least the allure of becoming a Jedi to pass the winter months. My boyfriend thought we ought to give the game a try.

more from Marie Mutsuki Mockett at The Morning News here.

Madame Chiang: far more complex, awful and brilliant than we had imagined

There is a bull market these days in Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) and his wife, Soong Mei-ling (1897-2003), usually called Madame Chiang Kai-shek. When I was studying in Taiwan in the late 1950s, then-President Chiang was regarded by most of the Western students on the island — and many of the Chinese as well — as the remote, cruel man who lost China; his wife was the austere, once-glamorous Dragon Lady who had helped him lose it. Although Chiang alone, or both Chiangs, had appeared numerous times on the cover of Time magazine, those illustrious days seemed over. But now that Jay Taylor has written his comprehensive book “The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China,” we are able to see Chiang as a man of considerable cunning, brutality and patience who skillfully played a weak hand against the Japanese and Mao’s forces while extracting huge sums from the Americans. Similarly, in her latest biography, “The Last Empress,” Hannah Pakula presents Madame Chiang as far more complex, awful and brilliant than we had imagined.

more from Jonathan Mirsky at the NY Times here.

Dubai: A morally bankrupt dictatorship built by slave labour

Johann Hari in The Independent:

The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying.

In their home country – Bangladesh or the Philippines or India – these workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them, and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were promised.

They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police.

I met so many men in this position I stopped counting, just as the embassies were told to stop counting how many workers die in these conditions every year after they figured it topped more than 1,000 among the Indians alone.

Human Rights Watch calls this system "slavery." Yet the Westerners who have flocked to Dubai brag that they "love" the city, because they don't have to pay any taxes, and they have domestic slaves to do all the hard work. They train themselves not to see the pain.

More here. [Thanks to Nikolai Nikola.]

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

From The Guardian:

When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the box, the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. "Darn it," he thought. "I have arrived 10 seconds unfashionably early. All New York knows you are not supposed to make your entrance until Marguerite is two bars into her aria." Newland's annoyance dissipated when he realised that no one who was anyone in New York society had witnessed his horrendous faux pas. During the interval he turned his gaze towards his beloved, the divine May Welland, seated in the Mingott box opposite, and frowned when he saw that her cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, was in her party. How very awkward! What would New York think of the reintroduction of the scarlet woman into society? Yet how typical of the Mingotts to be so brazenly protective of their own! No matter! He would rise above New York's pettiness and his reputation would be unstained!

More here.

Alice Munro’s Object Lessons

From The New York Times:

The Germans must have a term for it. Doppelgedanken, perhaps: the sensation, when reading, that your own mind is giving birth to the words as they appear on the page. Such is the ego that in these rare instances you wonder, “How could the author have known what I was thinking?” Of course, what has happened isn’t this at all, though it’s no less astonishing. Rather, you’ve been drawn so deftly into another world that you’re breathing with someone else’s rhythms, seeing someone else’s visions as your own. One of the pleasures of reading Alice Munro derives from her ability to impart this sensation. It’s the sort of gift that requires enormous modesty on the part of the writer, who must shun pyrotechnics for something less flashy: an empathy so pitch-perfect as to be nearly undetectable. But it’s most arresting in the hands of a writer who isn’t too modest — one possessed of a fearless, at times, fearsome, ambition.

From the beginning, Munro has staked her claim on rocky, rough terrain. Her first dozen books are rooted mostly in southwestern Ontario, mostly in the lives of women. Although the stories are, on the surface, bastions of domesticity — they’re full of mothers and daughters and aunts and cousins, darning and gardening, aprons and cakes — Munro flays this material with the unflinching efficiency of a hunter skinning a rabbit. More recently, in “The View From Castle Rock,” she broadened her narrative territory by venturing both into 17th-century Scotland and beyond the boundaries of conventional fiction, mining her family history to produce an unabashed amalgam of invention and fact. Her new book, “Too Much Happiness,” represents at once a return to her habitual form and a furthering of her exploratory sensibilities. The collection’s 10 stories take on some sensational subjects. In fact, a quick tally yields all the elements of pulp fiction: violence, adultery, extreme cruelty, duplicity, theft, suicide, murder. But while in pulp fiction the emotional climax coincides with the height of external drama, a Munro story works according to a different scheme. Here the nominally momentous event is little more than an anteroom to an echo chamber filled with subtle and far-reaching thematic reverberations.

More here.

Man Ray's Signature Work

Artist Man Ray mischievously scribbled his name in a famous photograph, but it took decades for the gesture to be discovered.

Abby Callard in Smithsonian Magazine:

In 1935, the avant-garde photographer Man Ray opened his shutter, sat down in front of his camera and used a penlight to create a series of swirls and loops. Because of his movements with the penlight, his face was blurred in the resulting photograph. As a self-portrait—titled Space Writings—it seemed fairly abstract.

But now Ellen Carey, a photographer whose working method is similar to Man Ray’s, has discovered something that has been hidden in plain sight in Space Writings for the past 74 years: the artist’s signature, signed with the penlight amid the swirls and loops.

“I knew instantly when I saw it—it’s a very famous self-portrait—that his signature was in it,” says Carey, a photography professor at the University of Hartford. “I just got this flash of intuition.” Her intuition was to look at the penlight writing from Man Ray’s point of view—which is to say, the reverse of how it appears to anyone looking at the photograph. “I knew that if I held it up to a mirror, it would be there,” Carey says. She did, and it was.

“This makes perfect sense if you understand that throughout his career, Man Ray did many artworks based off his signature,” says Merry Foresta, who curated a 1988 exhibition of his work at the National Museum of American Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) and decorates her Washington, D.C. office with a poster of his iconic Tears image.

Man Ray’s mischievous gesture is typical of his work. He was born Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia in 1890, but he spent most of his youth in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. In 1915, he met Marcel Duchamp, who introduced him to the modern art scene; the pair were involved with the Dadaists, who rejected traditional aesthetics (Duchamp, for example, displayed a urinal titled Fountain as part of his readymades series), and, later, the Surrealists.

More here.

Sex Pranks of the Orchid World

Carl Zimmer's new book excerpted in Discover:

Anne Gaskett, a Cornell University biologist, spends her days crouching quietly next to orchids in Australia. It may seem like an uneventful way to pass the time, but she is actually observing a marvelous act of sexual deception. The flowers are fooling wasps into making love to them.

Male wasps normally seek out females by sniffing for their pheromones, signaling chemicals that they produce. Each species makes a unique pheromone, which means that male wasps rarely end up with the wrong females. But the flowers that Gaskett studies, called tongue orchids, can produce a molecule that precisely mimics the pheromone made by the females of the species Lissopimpla excelsa, commonly known as dupe wasps. Male L. excelsa wasps pick up the scent of the orchids and race to the flowers, expecting to find a mate.

The deception only deepens when the wasp approaches the flower. The pheromone-like compounds are released from a part of the flower that has the coloring of a female dupe wasp. When a male wasp lands on the tongue orchid to investigate, he finds that his body fits snugly against it, just as it would against a female wasp. The dupe wasp is so profoundly fooled that he even extends sexual pincers, called genital claspers, into the flower.

More here.

Amazon Eve, Tall Model

Abbas Raza

Pakistan and India: Common Threat Needs Common Defence

This article by Pervez Hoodbhoy was published simultaneously today in Pakistan (Dawn) and India (The Hindu):

So, how can India protect itself from invaders across its western border and grave injury? Just as importantly, how can we in Pakistan assure that the fight against fanatics is not lost?

Let me make an apparently outrageous proposition: in the coming years, India’s best protection is likely to come from its traditional enemy, the Pakistan Army. Therefore, India ought to now help, not fight, against it.

This may sound preposterous. After all, the two countries have fought three and a half wars over six decades. During periods of excessive tension, they have growled at each other while meaningfully pointing towards their respective nuclear arsenals. And yet, the imperative of mutual survival makes a common defence inevitable. Given the rapidly rising threat within Pakistan, the day for joint actions may not be very far away.

Today Pakistan is bearing the brunt. Its people, government and armed forces are under unrelenting attack. South Waziristan, a war of necessity rather than of choice, will certainly not be the last one. A victory here will not end terrorism, although a stalemate will embolden jihadists in south Punjab, including Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammad. The cancer of religious militancy has spread across Pakistan, and it will take decades to defeat.

More here.

Interdisciplinary Hype

Jerry A. Jacobs in The Chronicle of Higher Ed:

The present arrangement of discipline-based departments, combined with interdisciplinary research centers, provides an inelegant but practical way to nurture disciplinary skills while allowing the flexibility for scholars to come together around new and topical areas. Occasionally the results are so compelling that a new discipline is formed. Successful interdisciplinary endeavors are thus transitional. Once they settle into maturity, they increasingly resemble the disciplines they sought to overthrow, at least in their organizational form. Promising new areas of inquiry should be nurtured whether or not they happen to cut across disciplinary lines. They should be encouraged because of their intellectual and practical promise—not because they are interdisciplinary.
Exciting interdisciplinary opportunities undoubtedly exist in some fields, and individual scholars will continue to borrow insights, concepts, and techniques from a diverse portfolio of sources. There is no reason to prohibit creative interdisciplinary projects. Wise deans, provosts, and presidents may be able to attract distinguished scholars precisely because those individuals work on specialties that span adjacent fields or even colleges. The intellectual boundaries of today's research may not map neatly onto disciplinary frameworks developed long ago.
Yet interdisciplinarity is not a panacea. Some interdisciplinary experiments will be stillborn; some interdisciplinary units will prove unwieldy and fracture of their own accord. Remember a cautionary tale from the past: Harvard's department of social relations proved unable to unify anthropology, psychology, and sociology and finally agreed to a divorce in 1972 after more than 20 years of marriage.

Claude Lévi-Strauss: The View from Afar

The UNESCO Courier has an collection of pieces that Lévi-Strauss wrote for UNESCO (via Savage Minds). From the editorial:

“The efforts of science should not only enable mankind to surpass itself; they must also help those who lag behind to catch up”,” Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in his first UNESCO Courier article published in 1951. He contributed to the magazine regularly during the 1950s suggesting ideas he later developed in the works which made him world-famous.
Recommending the unification of methodological thinking between the exact sciences and the human sciences, he underlined in another article that “the speculations of the earliest geometers and arithmeticians were concerned with man far more than with the physical world”. Pythagoras, for one, was “deeply interested in the anthropological significance of numbers and figures”, as were the sages of China, India, pre-Colonial Africa and pre-Colombian America, “preoccupied” with the meaning and specific attributes of numbers.
His idea grew into a thesis on the “mathematics of man – to be discovered along lines that neither mathematicians nor sociologists have as yet been able to determine exactly,” and destined to be “very different from the mathematics which the social sciences once sought to use in order to express their observations in precise terms,” as the father of structural anthropology explained in a 1954 article published in the Social Science Bulletin, another source for this issue.
“Our sciences first became isolated in order to become deeper, but at a certain depth, they succeed in joining each other. Thus, little by little, in an objective area, the old philosophical hypothesis…of the universal existence of a human nature is borne out”, he said in a 1956 document preserved in the UNESCO archives, which opened their doors wide so that this special issue could be, if not definitive, as varied as possible.

Voting With Your Mouth

Robin Varghese

3 Quarks Daily Prize in Politics

November 27, 2009, NOTE: The deadline for nominations has been extended to December 2, 2009.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

In May of this year we announced that we would start awarding four prizes every year for the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature. We awarded the science prizes, judged by Steven Pinker, on June 21st, and then announced the winners of the philosophy prizes, judged by Daniel C. Dennett, on September 22. We have decided to do the prize in politics next, and here's how it will work: we are now accepting nominations for the best blog post in politics. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily 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 choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by renowned political author and intellectual Tariq Ali, who, we are very pleased, has agreed to be the final judge. He will also write a short comment on each of the winning entries.

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.

* * *

The winners of the polictics prize will be announced on December 21, 2009. Here's the schedule:

Today:

The nominating process is hereby declared open. Please nominate your favorite blog entry in the field of politics 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.
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 from today. In other words, it must have been written after November 23, 2008.
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 100 entries.
You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!

December 2, 2009

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

December 9, 2009

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

December 21, 2009

The winners are announced.

And another Mini-Contest!

For each of our contests, I have asked designer friends of mine to produce "trophy" logos that the winners of that prize can display on their own blogs. You can see three from the science prize here, and three more from the philosophy prize here. I am now running out of designer friends, so here is an offer: send me your design for a logo for the winners of the politics prize (it must contain the same info as in the examples I have linked to, and the size is 160 X 350 pixels), and if I use it, I'll send you $50. Try. It'll be fun. Deadline: December 10, 2009.

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, 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

The letters of Vincent van Gogh

When I did my last post, I hadn't realized that Morgan Meis had already written about Van Gogh's letters at The Smart Set:

A letter makes the world small again, shows a person enmeshed in the day-to-day affairs that everyone understands. Thus, by way of their potentially shocking intimacy or through their potentially overwhelming banality, letters tend to lack the specific elements that are to be found in the actual work of a great artist. Letters, inevitably, are the flotsam and jetsam through which the scholars pick. They contain little meat for you and me.

But this is not always the case. Thanks to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the letters of Van Gogh can now be perused in total. There is an exhibit running through January 2010 but, more important for those not able to make the trip, a complete online edition of the letters available at vangoghletters.org. The website is simply amazing. The letters themselves are interesting enough on the personal level. Vincent's last letter to his brother Theo contains the poignant thought, "I’d perhaps like to write to you about many things, but first the desire has passed to such a degree, then I sense the pointlessness of it." All of the letters to Theo, actually, reveal a thoughtful, sensitive, and loving brother.

In this, Vincent van Gogh is one of us. We see him as a human being negotiating his way through a complicated world. But there is something more, some portion of his greatness contained in these letters. This makes them unusual.

More here.

Black Friday Bonus: Here are two pictures of Morgan and me just before our visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Letters

Andrew Motion in The Guardian:

Michelangelo wrote some wonderful sonnets; Constable's correspondence has a fascinating tough-tenderness; most visualisers have, with varying degrees of success, tried to match words to their images. But Van Gogh's letters are the best written by any artist. Engrossing, moving, energetic and compelling, they dramatise individual genius while illuminating the creative process in general. No wonder readers have long since taken them to heart. No wonder, either, that singers have used them in their songs ("Starry Night"), and film-makers as the basis of their movies (Lust for Life). Their mixture of humble detail and heroic aspiration is quite simply life-affirming.

Received wisdom has it that the letters show Van Gogh as a tortured genius. Yet anyone who has actually read them (rather than watched the movie) will feel uncomfortable about this. There are, of course, harrowing stretches in which he frets about insanity, about poverty and about how others perceive him. But the great majority of them are impressive – even lovable – because, no matter how distressing their surrounding circumstances, they show an extraordinarily calm-sounding good sense and a beautiful directness in their account of complicated emotional states. This sense of balance, which frankly amounts to nobility, has been evident in all editions of his letters, ever since the first was published by his sister-in-law, Jo Bonger, in 1914. In this new edition it is even more vividly manifest.

More here. [A couple of weeks ago Morgan Meis and I saw some of the letters in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and some of the drawings in them are truly stunning. We agreed they were the best thing in the museum.]

Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Hope and Risk

From The New York Times:

One was a middle-aged man who refused to get into the shower. The other was a teenager who was afraid to get out. The man, Leonard, a writer living outside Chicago, found himself completely unable to wash himself or brush his teeth. The teenager, Ross, growing up in a suburb of New York, had become so terrified of germs that he would regularly shower for seven hours. Each received a diagnosis of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, or O.C.D., and for years neither felt comfortable enough to leave the house. But leave they eventually did, traveling in desperation to a hospital in Rhode Island for an experimental brain operation in which four raisin-sized holes were burned deep in their brains. Today, two years after surgery, Ross is 21 and in college. “It saved my life,” he said. “I really believe that.” The same cannot be said for Leonard, 67, who had surgery in 1995. “There was no change at all,” he said. “I still don’t leave the house.” Both men asked that their last names not be used to protect their privacy.

More here.

Americans' Eating Habits More Wasteful Than Ever

From Science:

After their biggest meal of the year, Americans might reflect on the fate of those moldering Thanksgiving leftovers. Nearly 40% of the food supply in the United States goes to waste, according to a new study, and the problem has been getting worse. "The numbers are pretty shocking," says Kevin Hall, a quantitative physiologist at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) in Bethesda, Maryland. Food waste is usually estimated through consumer interviews or garbage inspections. The former method is inaccurate, and the latter isn't geographically comprehensive. Hall and his colleagues tried another approach: modeling human metabolism. They analyzed average body weight in the United States from 1974 to 2003 and figured out how much food people were eating during this period. Hall and Chow assumed that levels of physical activity haven't changed; some researchers think that activity has decreased, but Hall and Chow say their assumption is conservative. Then they compared that amount with estimates of the food available for U.S. consumers, as reported by the U.S. government to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The difference between calories available and calories consumed, they say, is food wasted. "We called it the missing mass of American food," says co-author Carson Chow, a mathematician at NIDDK. In 2003, some 3750 calories were available daily per capita; 2300 were consumed, so 1450 were wasted, comprising 39% of the available food supply, the team reports in the November issue of PLoS ONE. This figure exceeds the 27% estimated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from interviews with consumers and producers.

More here.

Israel & Palestine: Can They Start Over?

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in the New York Review of Books:

What is the matter with the two-state solution? To this day, it remains the only outcome that appears attuned to reality; the only one that enjoys broad support. Its rough outlines no longer constitute much of a mystery. Yet all this does not so much answer the question as it reframes it: What basic ingredients have been missing from the conventional two-state concept? Why, so widely embraced in the abstract, has it been so stubbornly rejected in practice?

The problem with the two-state idea as it has been construed is that it does not truly address what it purports to resolve. It promises to close a conflict that began in 1948, perhaps earlier, yet virtually everything it worries about sprang from the 1967 war. Ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories is essential and the conflict will persist until this is addressed. But its roots are far deeper: for Israelis, Palestinian denial of the Jewish state's legitimacy; for Palestinians, Israel's responsibility for their large-scale dispossession and dispersal that came with the state's birth.

If the objective is to end the conflict and settle all claims, these matters will need to be dealt with. They reach back to the two peoples' most visceral and deep-seated emotions, their longings and anger. For years, the focus has been on fine-tuning percentages of territorial withdrawals, ratios of territorial swaps, and definitions of Jerusalem's borders. The devil, it turns out, is not in the details. It is in the broader picture.

More here.

Friday Poem

Seeing the Light

After she draws the pension on Friday
I drive my mother to the graveyard,
She walks among the dead and prays
While I read the newspaper in the car.
I envy how near she is to them, how
Soon she will join the dear departed.
I was in love like that once, consumed
By the idea of ‘love’ until I realised that
It’s not all that people make it out to be.
I envy your faith Mama, your prayer book
Bulging with photographs of the missing,
Your trust in that ghostly other-world
More real to you than the one
You see every day with your eyes.

by Eugene O'Connell

from Diviner; Three Spires Press, Cork, 2009

Daniel Dennett: The Evolution of Confusion

Abbas Raza

Syncretistic and tolerant Hindu-Muslim culture

Pankaj Mishra in The National:

India is one of the world’s oldest civilisations; but as a nation-state it is relatively very new, and its nationalism can still appear weak and unresolved, as became freshly clear in August, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party expelled its veteran leader Jaswant Singh. Singh had dared to praise, in a new book about the partition of India, the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Indian nationalists, of both the hardline Hindu and soft-secular kind, see Jinnah as the Muslim fanatic primarily responsible for the vivisection of their “Mother India” in 1947. But Singh chose to blame the partition on allegedly power-hungry Hindu freedom fighters, rather than Jinnah, who he claimed had stood for a united India.

Explaining his motivations, Singh referred back to his origins in Sindh (the province famous for its syncretistic and tolerant Hindu-Muslim culture) and suggested that he could only mourn the subsequent division of pluralist communities on the basis of abstract and singular religious identities. “In Jaisalmer,” he said, “Muslims don’t eat beef, Rajputs don’t eat pork.” Singh went on to speak wistfully of a famous shrine in Indian Sindh that is revered by both Muslims and Hindus.

Singh is not being a romantic. Hindus and Muslims commonly worship at each other’s sites across the subcontinent. One of my most intense childhood memories is of being immersed, by my Hindu Brahmin parents, into the great crowd at the dargah (shrine) of the Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer. I felt a similar sense of wonder earlier this year at another dargah in Pakistan, standing amid ecstatic dancers at a spring festival in Lahore that celebrates the friendship, apparently homoerotic, of a Muslim and a Brahmin boy in the 16th century.

More here.

Google and the New Digital Future

Robert Darnton in the NYRB:

November 9 is one of those strange dates haunted by history. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Nazis organized Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, beginning their all-out campaign against Jews. On November 9, 1923, Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch was crushed in Munich, and on November 9, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and Germany was declared a republic. The date especially hovers over the history of Germany, but it marks great events in other countries as well: the Meiji Restoration in Japan, November 9, 1867; Bonaparte's coup effectively ending the French Revolution, November 9, 1799; and the first sighting of land by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, November 9, 1620.
On November 9, 2009, in the district court for the Southern District of New York, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers were scheduled to file a settlement to resolve their suit against Google for alleged breach of copyright in its program to digitize millions of books from research libraries and to make them available, for a fee, online. Not comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall, you might say. True, but for several months, all eyes in the world of books—authors, publishers, librarians, and a great many readers—were trained on the court and its judge, Denny Chin, because this seemingly small-scale squabble over copyright looked likely to determine the digital future for all of us.
Google has by now digitized some ten million books. On what terms will it make those texts available to readers? That is the question before Judge Chin. If he construes the case narrowly, according to precedents in class-action suits, he could conclude that none of the parties had been slighted. That decision would remove all obstacles to Google's attempt to transform its digitizing of texts into the largest library and book-selling business the world has ever known. If Judge Chin were to take a broad view of the case, the settlement could be modified in ways that would protect the public against potential abuses of Google's monopolistic power.

Centrifugal Force

Via Paul Krugman, at xkcd:

Romantic agony

To celebrate Francis Bacon's centenary in 2009, Tate Britain mounted a retrospective exhibition that was subsequently shown at the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Bacon's theater of cruelty was an enormous popular success at all of its venues, but especially in New York, where he was hailed by fans as the greatest painter of the twentieth century. However, such clouds of hyperbole were already a touch toxic following the sale in 2008 of a flashy triptych for $86 million, and serious reviews of the Met show were anything but favorable. Also, those of us who care about the integrity of an artist's work were worried by the appearance on the market of paintings that, if indeed they are entirely by him, Bacon would never have allowed out of the studio. As a longtime fan of Bacon, I have strong feelings about these matters. My admiration dates back to World War II, when, like many another art student, I was captivated by an illustration of a 1933 painting entitled Crucifixion in a popular book called Art Now, by Britain's token modernist, Herbert Read (first published in 1933, and frequently reprinted). Read's text was dim and theoretical, but his ragbag of black-and-white illustrations—by the giants of modernism, as well as the chauvinistic author's pets—was the only corpus of plates then available. This Crucifixion—a cruciform gush of sperm against a night sky, prescient of searchlights in the blitz—was irresistibly eye-catching. But who Bacon was, nobody seemed to know.

more from John Richardson at the NYRB here.

literary 09

JULIAN BARNES The main literary event of 2009 was the death of John Updike. Generous to the last, he left us two posthumous books: in prose, My Father’s Tears, and in verse, Endpoint (both Hamish Hamilton), an account of his last years – and days – of grateful, tender looking around. He was still writing in his final weeks (“Days later, the results came casually through: / the gland, biopsied, showed metastasis”) and correcting proofs on his deathbed. Over here, death afforded him no courtesy, and the stories received several reviews of impudent stupidity; the longer view will see them as a fit end to the staggeringly rich arc of story collections which began fifty years ago with “The Same Door” (1959). In part-homage, Everyman usefully reprinted the full version of “The Maples Stories”, one of his keenest anatomies of the marriage problem. Everyman also publish Updike’s final reworking of the Rabbit quartet, retitled by him as Rabbit Angstrom. Rereading confirms it as the greatest American novel of the second half of the twentieth century. An Angstrom is a hundred-millionth of a centimetre: a fitting name, since Updike, apart from his many other virtues, simply saw in finer detail than most of his contemporaries.

more from various literary bigwigs at the TLS here.

Thursday Poem

September Song

Autumn has come stripping the trees
to make them look like an army in defeat.
Soon everything will appear bereft,
even the girls on the street in décolletage
and canal swans nesting by the side of the bridge:
A pair of them in a swan-marriage,
schooled to be faithful companions.

Roads are brimming with slow-motion traffic
going out of the city, home to the foothills,
to time in the garden pulling weeds,
the Hollywood epic on late-night TV:
the one with the long list of etceteras
scrolled in haste before we turn over
in the double bed of brass reflections.

by Gerard Smyth

from The Mirror Tent
publisher: Dedalus, Dublin, 2007

Monogamy isn't easy, naturally

From LA Times:

Right-wing pro-marriage advocates are correct: Monogamy is definitely under siege. But not from uncloseted polyamorists, adolescent "hook-up" advocates, radical feminists, Godless communists or some vast homosexual conspiracy. The culprit is our own biology. Researchers in animal behavior have long known that monogamy is uncommon in the natural world, but only with the advent of DNA "fingerprinting" have we come to appreciate how truly rare it is. Genetic testing has recently shown that even among many bird species -- long touted as the epitome of monogamous fidelity -- it is not uncommon for 6% to 60% of the young to be fathered by someone other than the mother's social partner. As a result, we now know scientifically what most people have long known privately: that social monogamy does not necessarily imply sexual monogamy.

In the movie "Heartburn," the lead character complains about her husband's philandering and gets this response: "You want monogamy? Marry a swan!" But now, scientists have found that even swans aren't monogamous.

More here.

Dangerous Liaisons: How to Deal with a Drama Queen

From Scientific American:

Sam paged me at 9 p.m., crying. It had started with his hair, which he was convinced was falling out. And although his work as a teacher’s aide had “filled him with love and joy,” he was sure his boss had given him a nasty look at the lunch break, and he felt utterly sick inside. Later Sam had phoned his partner, who had seemed distant. Afraid he was about to be dumped, Sam locked himself in the staff bathroom and cried for almost an hour, failing to finish his work and preventing others from using the facilities. Sam is a drama queen—a person who reacts to everyday events with excessive emoton and behaves in theatrical, attention-grabbing ways. This type is the friend who derails a casual lunch to tell you a two-hour story about the devastating fight she had with her partner or the co-worker who constantly obsesses about how he is about to lose his job and needs your support to make it through the day. The drama queen worships you one minute and despises you the next, based on overreactions to minor events.

More here.

Muslims Should Raise the Other Finger

Ali Eteraz in True/Slant:

During the salat, or prayer, Muslims raise their index finger to bear witness to the oneness of God. In America today, with all the calls for Muslims to condemn every little act of violence committed in the name of their religion, Muslims should start raising up the other finger. The middle one.

There is no need for one Muslim to condemn the crimes of another. Collective responsibility cannot, and should not, be accepted. Where one accepts collective responsibility one opens the door to collective punishment. Are Muslims individuals? Or are they one singular marionette that pirouettes each time its string is pulled?

One of the most egregious acts of kowtowing to the “massa” occurred recently in the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings. At Huffington Post, Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Salam al-Maryati wrote an article directed to Muslim-Americans, extolling them to “amplify our Muslim American identity.” No thanks. The only thing I’ll amplify is the length of my middle finger. A law-abiding American-Muslim has no need to do anything, one way or the other, when someone with a Muslim sounding name goes off the rail.

More here.

Pakistan conspiracy theories stifle debate

Ahmed Rashid at the BBC:

Pakistan is going through a multi-dimensional series of crises and a collapse of public confidence in the state.

Suicide bombers strike almost daily and the economic meltdown just seems to get worse.

But this is rarely apparent in the media, bar a handful of liberal commentators who try and give a more balanced and intellectual understanding by pulling all the problems together.

The explosion in TV channels in Urdu, English and regional languages has brought to the fore large numbers of largely untrained, semi-educated and unworldly TV talk show hosts and journalists who deem it necessary to win viewership at a time of an acute advertising crunch, by being more outrageous and sensational than the next channel.

On any given issue the public barely learns anything new nor is it presented with all sides of the argument.

Every talk show host seems to have his own agenda and his guests reflect that agenda rather than offer alternative policies.

Recently, one senior retired army officer claimed that Hakimullah Mehsud - the leader of the Pakistani Taliban which is fighting the army in South Waziristan and has killed hundreds in daily suicide bombings in the past five weeks - had been whisked to safety in a US helicopter to the American-run Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.

In other words the Pakistani Taliban are American stooges, even as the same pundits admit that US-fired drone missiles are targeting the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan.

These are just the kind of blatantly contradictory and nut-case conspiracy theories that get enormous traction on TV channels and in the media - especially when voiced by such senior former officials.

More here.

I happened to mention this phenomenon to Robin Varghese, and he immediately brought to my attention the following paper published in 1996 by Jack Snyder and close 3QD friend Karen Ballentine:

From "Nationalism and the Marketplace of Ideas," International Security, Vol. 21, no. 2 Fall 1996:

We agree that media manipulation often plays a central role in promoting nationalist and ethnic conflict, but we argue that promoting unconditional freedom of public debate in newly democratizing societies is, in many circumstances, likely to make the problem worse. Historically and today, from the French Revolution to Rwanda, sudden liberalizations of press freedom have been associated with bloody outbursts of popular nationalism. The most dangerous situation is precisely when the government's press monopoly begins to break down.(4) During incipient democratization, when civil society is burgeoning but democratic institutions are not fully entrenched, the state and other elites are forced to engage in public debate in order to compete for mass allies in the struggle for power.(5) Under those circumstances, governments and their opponents often have the motive and the opportunity to play the nationalist card.

When this occurs, unconditional freedom of speech is a dubious remedy. Just as economic competition produces socially beneficial results only in a well-institutionalized marketplace, where monopolies and false advertising are counteracted, so too increased debate in the political marketplace leads to better outcomes only when there are mechanisms to correct market imperfections.(6) Many newly democratizing states lack institutions to break up governmental and non-governmental information monopolies, to professionalize journalism, and to create common public forums where diverse ideas engage each other under conditions in which erroneous arguments will be challenged. In the absence of these institutions, an increase in the freedom of speech can create an opening for nationalist mythmakers to hijack public discourse.

More here.

Estimated Nuclear Weapons Locations 2009

Hans M. Kristensen in Federation of American Scientists Strategic Security Blog:

The world’s approximately 23,300 nuclear weapons are stored at an estimated 111 locations in 14 countries, according to an overview produced by FAS and NRDC.

Nearly half of the weapons are operationally deployed with delivery systems capable of launching on short notice.

The overview is published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and includes the July 2009 START memorandum of understanding data. A previous version was included in the annual report from the International Panel of Fissile Materials published last month...

Israel probably has about four nuclear sites, whereas the nuclear storage facilities in India and Pakistan are – despite many rumors – largely undetermined. All three countries are thought to store warheads separate from delivery vehicles.

Despite two nuclear tests and many rumors, we are unaware of publicly available evidence that North Korea has operationalized its nuclear weapons capability.

Warhead concentrations vary greatly from country to country. With 13,000 warheads at 48 sites, Russian stores an average of 270 warheads at each location. The U.S. concentration is much higher with an average of 450 warheads at each location. These are averages, however, and in reality the distribution is thought to be much more uneven with some sites only storing tens of warheads.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Richard Dawkins' singing debut

Abbas Raza

Are you there Allah? It's me Ali

Steven Martinovich in Enter Stage Right:

One can't help but be sympathetic to American Muslims in the post-9/11 era. Their patriotism has been questioned and they are simultaneously pulled in opposite directions by the fundamentalists and reformers in Islam. Though secure in their faith, many are beginning to question some of the assumptions that their communities have accepted and promoted, triggering what may be the beginning of an Islamic reformation. It is not surprising, therefore, that many Muslims in the United States are confused about their place in the world.

Ali Eteraz, noted blogger and lawyer, was certainly one of those Muslims. As he relates in Children of Dust: A memoir of Pakistan, he was born in Pakistan but was raised for much of his life in the United States. Told from an early age that he would play a prominent role in the Islamic world, his given name of Abir ul Islam translates into "Perfume of Islam", Eteraz has suffered through a crisis of faith, fundamentalism and finally becoming a proponent for reform. Coming from a traditional culture like Pakistan has meant that he has also had to fight outsized battles against temptation, and not always successfully.

More here.

The Austere Optimist

Julian Baggini presses Peter Singer on his call for much more charitable giving, in The Philosopher's Magazine:

I want to make it clear that I did not pay for this hotel.” Peter Singer is understandably keen to distance himself from the incongruous opulence of our surroundings. There is a rich irony in discussing his latest book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, in the lobby of a five-star central London hotel, to a soundtrack of the obligatory easy-listening pianist./p>
Hearing the message of Singer’s book is anything but easy listening. In it, he reiterates for a popular audience the argument he first put forward in his famous paper “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, published in the first issue of the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1971. It starts by arguing that we should accept the deceptively uncontroversial-sounding principle that “if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.” From this, however, Singer concludes that “I and everyone else in similar circumstances ought to give as much as possible, that is, at least up to the point at which by giving more one would begin to cause serious suffering for oneself and one’s dependents – perhaps even beyond this point to the point of marginal utility, at which by giving more one would cause oneself and one’s dependents as much suffering as one would prevent in Bengal.”/p>
In The Life You Can Save, Singer reiterates the same argument, but deals head-on with the problem that, obviously, hardly anyone is going to meet the stringent demands it makes of us. So what he proposes is a much less exacting sliding scale, where the rich are obliged to give quite a lot, and the less well-off hardly anything, or nothing at all. Is it then true to say that the populism of the book is a double-dilution of “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”: a less-rigorous argument for a less-rigorous principle?

An Evolve-By Date

Olivia Judson in the NYT:

The basis of evolutionary potential is clear enough in principle. Whether a population can evolve to cope with new circumstances depends on how much underlying genetic variation there is: do any individuals in the population have the genes to cope, even barely, with the new environment, or not? If not, everybody dies, and it’s game over. If yes, evolution may come to the rescue, improving, as time goes by, the ability of individuals to cope in the new environment. What determines the extent of the underlying genetic variation? Factors such as how big the population is (bigger populations usually contain more genetic variation) and how often mutations occur.
Let me give an example of how this works. Imagine you have a population of algae that have been living for generations in a comfy freshwater pool. Now suppose there’s a ghastly accident and, all of a sudden, the pool becomes super-salty. Whether the algae will be able to survive depends on whether any individuals already have any capacity to survive and reproduce in salty water. If none of them do, they all die, and the population goes extinct. But if some do, then the survivors will reproduce, and over time, beneficial mutations will accumulate such that the algae get better and better at living in a high-salt environment.
This isn’t just hypothetical: many experiments have taken organisms, be they algae, fungi or bacteria, from an environment to which they are well-adapted to one where they are not, and watched what happens. The result is reliable: at first, they tend not to cope that well (measured, as usual in evolution, by their ability to survive and reproduce). However, as long as the environment doesn’t change again, their coping ability rapidly improves: within a few tens of generations, beneficial mutations appear and spread, and the organisms evolve to become much better at handling their new circumstances.
But here’s the thing. A big drawback of experiments of this type is that the initial change the organisms experience is not that severe — it is not, in fact, so severe that no one can cope, and the population goes extinct.

zadie essays

For Samuel Johnson in 1755 it is: "A loose sally of the mind; an irregular undigested piece; not a regularly and orderly composition." And if this looks to us like one of Johnson's lexical eccentricities, we're chastened to find Joseph Addison, of all people, in agreement ("The wildness of these compositions that go by the name of essays") and behind them both three centuries of vaguely negative connotation. Beginning in the 1500s an essay is: the action or process of trying or testing; a sample, an example; a rehearsal; an attempt or endeavour; a trying to do something; a rough copy; a first draft. Not until the mid 19th century does it take on its familiar, neutral ring: "a composition more or less elaborate in style, though limited in range." Which is it, though, that attracts novelists – the comforts of limit or the freedom of irregularity? A new book by the American novelist-essayist David Shields (to be published here by Hamish Hamilton early next year) makes the case for irregularity. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call "truthiness" – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an "unbearably artificial world". He recommends instead that artists break "ever larger chunks of 'reality' into their work", via quotation, appropriation, prose poems, the collage novel . . . in short, the revenge of the real, by any means necessary. And conventional structure be damned.

more from Zadie Smith at The Guardian here.

Not enough silence, alas

Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s “Confessions.” A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to within an inch of his life; Mary was set on fire, and survived just five days in the I.C.U. By day, Phaedo translated; at night, he worked on a novel about Charlie Dark, who was never convicted. Then Phaedo drank himself senseless with Scotch. He drank to drown his sorrows, to dull his senses, to forget himself. The phone rang, but he never answered it. Sometimes, Holly Steiner, an attractive woman across the hall, would silently enter his bedroom, and expertly rouse him from his stupor. At other times, he made use of the services of Aleesha, a local hooker. Aleesha’s eyes were too hard, too cynical, and they bore the look of someone who had already seen too much. Despite that, Aleesha had an uncanny resemblance to Holly, as if she were Holly’s double. And it was Aleesha who brought Roger Phaedo back from the darkness. One afternoon, wandering naked through Phaedo’s apartment, she came upon two enormous manuscripts, neatly stacked. One was the Rousseau translation, each page covered with almost identical words; the other, the novel about Charlie Dark. She started leafing through the novel. “Charlie Dark!” she exclaimed. “I knew Charlie Dark! He was one tough cookie. That bastard was in the Paul Auster gang. I’d love to read this book, baby, but I’m always too lazy to read long books. Why don’t you read it to me?” And that is how the ten-year silence was broken. Phaedo decided to please Aleesha. He sat down, and started reading the opening paragraph of his novel, the novel you have just read.

more from James Wood at The New Yorker here.

memories of the future

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is a writer even most Russians knew nothing about until his work was resurrected from Soviet archives and published--most of it for the first time--in the late 1980s. He was ethnically Polish and grew up near Kiev. He studied law without much enthusiasm, worked for an attorney in that city for a few years and spent as much time as he could writing and lecturing on literature, drama and music. In 1922, when he was in his mid-30s, he moved to Moscow hoping to make a living from his writing. His timing was not auspicious. Krzhizhanovsky became acquainted with other Moscow writers, gave private readings of his work and collaborated on scripts with experimental theater director Alexander Tairov. But publication eluded him. In the story "The Bookmark," he describes the situation of a writer who has arrived in Moscow just after the revolution with a collection of stories he's eager to publish. One editor after another rejects his manuscript: the style and subject do not fit with the new Soviet ways of thinking. "On one manuscript," the writer recalls, "I remember finding the penciled comment: Psychologizing."

more from Elaine Blair at The Nation here.

Creationism vs. atheism: It's on!

From Salon:

America's universities are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas, but last week they looked more like theaters of the absurd, as representatives of an evangelical group descended on an undetermined number of campuses to hand out free copies of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species." The catch: They used an edition of Darwin's seminal 1859 text that included an introduction by Ray Comfort, a minister who has made a specialty of arguing for creationism.

Was this stunt shrewd or moronic? From the first it's been hard to tell. The plan, innocuously named "Origin Into Schools," was announced this September in a video featuring Kirk Cameron, a former television child star who co-founded a ministry called Living Waters with Comfort. There's something almost pitiable about the way Cameron crows over the scheme; he truly seems to find it ingenious. He points out that the University of California at Berkeley cannot prevent the action because "their own Web site" dictates that "anyone is free to distribute noncommercial materials in any outdoor area of the campus." "Besides," he gleefully adds, "what are they really going to do? Ban 'The Origin of Species'? That would be big news! Especially when their own bookstore sells it for $29.99!"

More here.