3quarksdaily

Martin Amis: over-60 and under-appreciated

From The Telegraph:

In the days when he was the hip young gunslinger of British fiction, the Martin Amis interview tended to follow a certain form. This would involve tyro journalists – Amis wannabes for the most part – joining their subject at the snooker table or on the tennis court, where the author would go through his famously competitive paces, presenting the journalist with the tricky dilemma of whether to throw the game and curry his favour, or beat him and risk his resentment. But at 62, time and Amis’s recent relocation to New York have put something of a damper on his sporting enthusiasms. The pub and snooker evenings were long ago sacrificed to family life. And he no longer plays tennis. 'It just got so tragic,’ he says with a sigh. 'I hated it so much – because I wasn’t winning. Isabel says, “Play 80-year-olds, you’ll win against them.” But that’s no good. I can still run – not as fast. My game was built on mobility; didn’t have any big shots or anything. A defensive lob was my big shot. But it’s more to do with reflexes. You shape to do it and you’re not there – you’re crowding it, and the ball’s out of reach, and it fills you with a weird sort of self-disgust. Solemn exasperation and self-disgust.’ Nowadays, he can’t even watch the Premier League because he is unable to operate the television. 'Pathetic!’ He gives a rueful shrug. 'The technology has moved so far beyond my competence.’

Amis relocated to New York some 18 months ago, and now lives in the Cobble Hill district of Brooklyn, in a handsome four-storey brownstone, with his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two teenage daughters, Fernanda and Clio. It is tempting to read something into the move. One of the recurring themes of Amis’s pronouncements over the past few years has been a palpable disenchantment with England and English life: the 'skanky town’ malice of London’s literary world; his bald declaration to a French newspaper that he would 'prefer not to be English’; the sense that his homeland is a busted flush; the fact that his new book, Lionel Asbo, is a satire on the shallowness and vulgarity of celebrity-obsessed Britain. All of this may or may not be true, but it is not the reason he has decamped to America. Isabel, he says, is a New Yorker, and wanted to be closer to her mother and stepfather as they grew older.

More here.

A Moveable Feast rises above the struggle of Hemingway's later years

From The Guardian:

In looking at In Our Time and A Moveable Feast, we've mainly focused on Hemingway as a young man: fit, young and heading for the stratosphere. But as Mogger64 noted in his original nomination, it's significant that A Moveable Feast was "written at the end of his life". It isn't quite the work of an old man. Hemingway never made it that far. But it's pretty much the last word from someone on the way out. It speaks as loudly of Hemingway at the end of his career as it does of the beginning. And that career was remarkable. He had done it all by 1956, when he was spurred into reminiscence following the rediscovery of some old Paris notebooks which had lain for many years in a trunk in the basement of the Ritz hotel. He'd won the Nobel prize. He'd won the Pulitzer prize. He'd sold hundreds of thousands of books. He'd inspired dozens of imitators. He'd become an adjective and a legend. His life outside writing was just as celebrated: the bull fight aficionado, the boxer, the big game hunter, the fisherman, the friend of Spanish Republicans, the man who liberated Paris. Papa: the tall, handsome, heavyweight alpha male.

But by 1956 all that was heading into memory, if it had ever really existed.

More here.

Guy Plays A Cat Organ

For James McVinnie:

Mohammed Hanif On Secrets And Lies In Pakistan

At NPR:

The Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif is living proof that you can sometimes tell the truth more easily with fiction than facts. Hanif is a journalist in one of the world's more dangerous places to be a journalist: Pakistan. He's also become one of the country's most prominent and provocative novelists. His book A Case of Exploding Mangoes told the tale of real-life Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq, who died in a plane crash in 1988. Few believed it was an accident, and Hanif's novel delved into the conspiracies (and conspiracy theories).

Hanif joins NPR's Steve Inskeep to discuss the reception of A Case of Exploding Mangoes and his new novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, the story of a poor hospital nurse in the city of Karachi.

On choosing to fictionalize Zia-ul-Haq's death

"Like all young reporters, I was like, this is going to be my big story, and I started working on it. After a few months, I realized that there was no way I was going to get to the bottom of it. There were layers and layers and layers of deception and cover-ups to cover the other cover-ups. Then it occurred to me that I would just make up my own facts. If no one was willing to tell me who did it, then as a fictional character, I'll raise my hand and say, 'Well, I did it,' and I'll write a book about it. And so, basically, it was a failed journalist's revenge."

On people accepting his version of events

"The funny thing is, after the book came out, a lot of people — and some of them were heads of intelligence agencies — I've run into them at a party or at a social gathering, and they take me into a corner and say, 'Son, you've written a brilliant novel. Now tell me, who's your source?' I used to find it a bit scary at the beginning that, my God, these people are running my country and they actually believe all the lies that I've written."

More here.

wonder, melancholy

We don’t have a good name for it – “nature writing” is about the best one can come up with. But that label has an obvious flaw. Anyone who was around 50 years ago will recall that the terms of reference changed radically, almost overnight, in the 1960s. The word “nature” gave way in popular discourse to “environment” and “nature writing” mutated into varieties of “eco-criticism”. The difference was conceptual. “Nature”, drawing on primeval myth and Romantic literature, had traditionally been conceived of as something superhuman and invincible. As Wordsworth grandly described it: A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Humans were part of that everything. Our species was no more capable of “destroying” nature than jellyfish can reverse the course of the Gulf Stream.

more from John Sutherland at the FT here.

a writer of place

It's tempting to call Richard Ford a writer of place. Beginning with his first novel, 1976's "A Piece of My Heart," the 68-year-old author has tended toward the border among landscape, language and character, using setting to help drive his narratives. Think of Frank Bascombe, who in "The Sportswriter," "Independence Day" and "The Lay of the Land" drifts across the bland surfaces of New Jersey, seeking not stimulation but a stasis similar to that of the suburbs where he resides. Or the people of Ford's Montana books, "Rock Springs" and "Wildlife": etched by the stark environment in which they find themselves, staring down the elements of their lives. It's as if, Ford wants us to imagine, we live at the mercy of larger forces, forces outside ourselves, forces that determine who we are. And yet, he insists by phone from his home in East Boothbay, Maine, that's not the case — or not exactly, anyway. "Growing up in Mississippi," he recalls, "and being told that this defined me, set me on a path away from place as generative. When I started writing, I took the Toulouse-Lautrec attitude that place is background scenery. I didn't want the place I came from to be responsible for me."

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

land of promise

Whatever their political party, American leaders have generally subscribed to one of two competing economic philosophies. One is a small-government Jeffersonian perspective that abhors bigness and holds that prosperity flows from competition among independent businessmen, farmers and other producers. The other is a Hamiltonian agenda that believes a large, powerful country needs large, powerful organizations. The most important of those organizations is the federal government, which serves as a crucial partner to private enterprise, building roads and schools, guaranteeing loans and financing scientific research in ways that individual businesses would not. Today, of course, Republicans are the Jeffersonians and Democrats are the Hamiltonians. But it hasn’t always been so. The Jeffersonian line includes Andrew Jackson, the leaders of the Confederacy, William Jennings Bryan, Louis Brandeis, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The Hamiltonian line includes George Washington, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, both Roosevelts and Dwight Eisenhower. Michael Lind’s “Land of Promise” uses this divide to offer an ambitious economic history of the United States.

more from David Leonhardt at the NY Times here.

Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life

Jeffrey K. McDonough reviews Justin Smith's Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life:

It is widely recognized that Leibniz's philosophical thought is deeply influenced by the mathematics, physics and philosophical theology of his era. Justin E. H. Smith's Divine Machines argues that many of Leibniz's most central philosophical doctrines are similarly bound up with the life sciences of his time, where the "life sciences" are understood very broadly to include fields as diverse as alchemy, medicine, taxonomy, and paleontology. Smith's groundbreaking exploration represents an important contribution to our understanding of both Leibniz's philosophy and the study of life in the early modern era. It is to be recommended to historians, philosophers, and historians of philosophy alike. Below I highlight four central topics in Smith's book, raising some reservations along the way.

1. First Things

The first part of Divine Machines is divided into two chapters, the first of which explores Leibniz's views on medicine. As Smith shows in detail, Leibniz, like many of his early modern contemporaries, was deeply interested in the study of medicine and its ancillary fields. Thus in a letter of 1697, Leibniz declares medicine to be "the most necessary of the natural sciences" and maintains that it is "the principal fruit of our knowledge of bodies," since the promotion of health may allow us to "work for the glory of God" (26). This lofty aim no doubt bolstered Leibniz's interest in (what we would call) chemistry and anatomy (28-33, 48-58). In connection with the former, Smith provides a rather detailed account of Leibniz's treatise on the "purgative power" of the ipecacuanha root, a treatise that Smith calls, with (I assume) unintentionally faint praise, "the most comprehensive and influential of Leibniz's contributions to the history of medicine and pharmacy" (40). In connection with anatomy, Smith chronicles what he sees as a shift in Leibniz's enthusiasms away from vivisection towards microscopy.

Ideology Never Ends: An Interview with Daniel Chirot

Almantas Samalavicius in Eurozine:

AS: Recently there has been a revival of leftist ideologies and discourses all over eastern Europe. Younger intellectuals have set out to reanimate the "Left" with a set of western discursive practices (multicultural, feminist, queer critique and the like). Do you think such "revivalism" has any potential?

DC: The "end of ideology" proposed by Daniel Bell a half century ago was exaggerated even then. In fact, not long after that book, which was based heavily on the death of the old Left as a dynamic ideology, a new kind of Left surged, and by 1968, it was very clear that ideology was far from ended. I once asked Bell if he had abandoned the idea of the end of ideology. His answer, which was no answer at all, was that this was like asking him when he had stopped beating his wife. In other words, whether or not he did (and there is no evidence he did!), once the question was posed that way, he could not answer without seeming foolish. Later, with the fall of European communism, Fukuyama and others made the same claim. But ideology never ends. Yes, of course, there will be a resurgent Left, though it is more likely to take the form of protest against the unfairness of the existing economic order. We see this slowly forming in the United States. A large part of the population wants a fairer taxation system, greater toleration of gays and racial minorities, and greater investments in education. But there is also a very active Right that does not want these things. What are called the "culture wars" in the United States is actually another form of a quite traditional left-right struggle. In Europe, both the Right (think Viktor Orban or the anti-immigrant parties in places like the Netherlands or Denmark) and the Left, particularly in southern Europe, are going to get much stronger. Economic crises have a way of doing that, and the one we have now is not going to go away so quickly.

Should Hate Speech Be Outlawed?

Former Justice John Paul Stevens reviews Jeremy Waldron's The Harm in Hate Speech in the NYRB:

...Waldron reviews his debate with Anthony Lewis about freedom for the thought that we hate. Lewis argues that we should learn to tolerate hate speech because codes regulating it would create a danger of overenforcement that could seriously threaten the expression of unpopular ideas. Waldron believes Lewis undervalues two points: first, that what is regulated by hate speech laws is not hateful thought but hateful expression (a point that seems unimportant to me, since thought and expression are closely intertwined in this context); and second, as Waldron often repeats, that toleration of ugly speech is easier for liberal bystanders than for the target of the speech.

Waldron and Lewis agree, however, that “Americans are freer to think what we will and say what we think than any other people.” They also agree, up to a point, about the history that led to that freedom. In 1798, when Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Act, the United States was a young country and federal authority was precarious:

George Washington was denounced as a thief and a traitor; John Jay was burned in effigy; Alexander Hamilton was stoned in the streets of New York…. Republican militias armed and drilled openly, ready to stand against Federalist armies. Over everything, like a specter, hung news of the Jacobin terror in France. It was by no means obvious in those years—though it seems obvious to us now—that the authorities could afford to ignore venomous attacks on the structures and officers of government, or leave the publication of such attacks uncontested in the hope that they would be adequately answered in due course in the free marketplace of ideas.

It was over a century later—in the aftermath of World War I—that federal judges began to see the power of the state as much more of a threat to the individual than vice versa.

The interesting and informative discussion of history in this chapter omits any comment on the importance of a unique aspect of American history: the fact that during the period under discussion the dynamic growth of America was fueled by immigration of several different ethnic groups, each attracted by the freedom of opportunity here but also each engaged in economic and political competition with other groups of immigrants. What might now be classified as “hate speech” included not merely comments by members of the majority but exchanges between rival ethnic groups.

The University Poem

By Vladimir Nabokov, in the LRB:

1.

‘So then you’re Russian? It’s the first time
I have met a Russian …’
And the lively, delicately bulging
eyes examine me. ‘You take your tea
with lemon, I already know.
I also know that you have icons
where you live, and samovars.’
A pretty girl. A British glow
spreads across her tender skin.
She laughs, she speaks at a quick clip:
‘Frankly, our town is dullish,
though the river’s charming!
Do you row?’ Big girl,
with sloping shoulders, hands that are large,
bereft of rings.

2

Thus, at the vicar’s, over tea,
brand-new acquaintances, we chat,
and I endeavour to be droll.
In troubling, dulcet worry lost
at the legs that she has crossed
and at her vivid lips I peer,
then, once again, I quickly shift
my cheeky gaze. She, as expected,
has come with aunt, although the latter
is busy with her left-wing patter – ,
and, contradicting her, the vicar,
a timid man (large Adam’s apple),
with a brown-eyed, canine squint,
chokes upon a nervous cough.

The Precarious State of the Literary Interview

From The Atlantic:

The 2010s may rightly be called the age of the interview. Interviews appear regularly in magazines and newspapers, on blogs, websites, videocasts, television, and podcasts. On iTunes this week, eight of the top-ten podcast revolve around or include conversations or interviews. The popularity of interviews indicates that although we may be isolated in our technology-clad bubbles, we still like to listen to people talk and engage, reflect and share, even if we've stopped doing it ourselves. According to some, literary interviews—which were oncethe apotheosis of the form—have become platitudinal and monotonous. In 2006, Pico Iyer attributed the decline of the literary interview to an overreliance on sound bites about authors plucked from search engines like Google and recommended that interviewers actually read an author's work. "[I]nterviews," he wrote, "have become a circular form in which almost every interviewer asks the same questions as every previous interviewer." Although some writers and readers have given up on literary interviews, now is not the time to abandon the form; some of the best examples of literary interviews are available on the Internet.

KCRW's weekly half-hour broadcast and podcast "Bookworm" with host Michael Silverblatt reminds us that the literary interview can function as art. Silverblatt prepares for each interview by reading almost everything a guest has ever written. He is a sensitive and careful reader who shapes his questions based on a guest's responses rather than a set of rote queries. Silverblatt's questions spark analysis, discussion, and storytelling. As a result, his guests break subjects apart and examine them more closely, entertain multiple points of view, and create narratives rather than blab anecdotes. Silverblatt takes the role of "host" literally. He is cordial and considerate without being sycophantic. (Silverblatt's Lannan Podcasts are also available via podcast.)

More here.

Designs for a New India

From Harvard Magazine:

There are two Hyderabads. One, a historic city in the heart of India, established with a hilltop fort built by Hindu rulers in the fourteenth century, is rich with ancient palaces, tombs, and mosques built by the Muslim rulers who came later. The other is HITEC City, the northwestern suburb booming with industry linked to that acronym: Hyderabad Information Technology Engineering Consultancy. The two worlds rarely mix. Workers from HITEC City’s towering office buildings—emblazoned with their logos: Motorola, Novartis, Deloitte, Tata Consultancy—tend to live in equally monolithic apartment towers near their offices. They rarely come in contact with old Hyderabad, a densely populated district of winding medieval streets, inhabited mostly by poor Muslims. Rahul Mehrotra, M.Arch. ’87, has seen both Hyderabads. His Mumbai-based architecture firm designed a corporate campus in HITEC City and restored a palace in the historic center. In his work, Mehrotra—now professor of urban design and planning at the Graduate School of Design—endeavors to engage disparate worlds with each other, reminding the inhabitants of each to consider the existence of the other. “Softening thresholds” between different sectors of society is one of his guiding principles.

More here.

Friday Poem

Genetics

My father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure –
I know my parents made me by my hands.

They may have been repelled to separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.

With nothing left of their togetherness but friends
who quarry for their image by a river,
at least I know their marriage by my hands.

I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.
And when I turn it over,
my father’s by my fingers, my mother’s by my palms

demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.

So take me with you, take up the skin’s demands
for mirroring in bodies of the future.
I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.
We know our parents make us by our hands.
.

by Sinead Morrissey
from The State of the Prisons
publisher: Carcanet, Manchester, 2005

the backpack

There is an unavoidable truth about traveling: To travel is to make oneself a figure of potential ridicule. Travel makes us vulnerable. Most experienced travelers know their basic needs can be met wherever they may be. You just have to ask for what you want and accept what you get. This is not as easy as it might sound. It takes confidence. It takes faith. It is usually easier to bring your own stuff. This is not the backpack’s fault. Anyone who has experienced being dropped in the middle of a Warsaw winter with nothing but a giant suitcase on wheels that must be dragged over bumpy old cobblestones as it careens and falls over and over again into the snow knows the so-called comfort of this kind of luggage to be a farce. Wheeled-luggage travelers are like an army of Queequegs who strap their sea chests to their wheelbarrows only to carry the whole bundle up the wharf. The very act of packing is a confrontation with who we are at home and who we can be when we are away. It’s never easy to leave home and harder still to make oneself temporarily homeless. This is true if you are traveling with a carpetbag or a steamer trunk. But no luggage more bluntly — or more honestly — expresses the fears about packing than the contemporary backpack.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

a notebook

—“Your life is a number,” says time, being a Pythagorean. —“My life frees itself from you at every moment.” —“It realizes me, proves, fulfills, affirms.” —“I am that which lies beyond time. Like a melody, which sounds completely only after the last note is played.” —“Time and music. I’m both at once. I don’t know myself how it happens. Music is written into time, but gives it a value beyond numbers.” • Little Jakub, a technological child, sees the world as a great machine, a computer on which he presses buttons. He asks: “Who turned off the storm?” • “Night of the Senses”: St. John of the Cross. No poetry, since poetry needs things, the ladder of things along which the angels of poems ascend and descend. • Freud thought that each person possessed a fixed stock of affection. So if you love someone else, you love yourself less. Freud’s wrong. Love doesn’t run out. It’s the miracle of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. The more we love another person, the more we love ourselves, and everything else, and the world.

more from Anna Kamienska at Poetry here.

darwin's footstools

Given the apparent serenity of the photographic portraits for which he sat, it is difficult to imagine Charles Darwin fretful. But only a month after the publication of his Origin of Species in 1859, he became very anxious – not, as one might expect, about reviews of his book, but about a letter chastising him for failing to acknowledge his predecessors, the men who had published evolutionary ideas before him. Haunted by the ghostly presence of those who had struck out before him but who had since disappeared into oblivion, Darwin decided to write a proper acknowledgment, in the form of a list of his scientific forebears. He already knew the names of some of them: the Comte de Buffon, who flirted with evolutionary speculation in the 18th century; Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the professor of invertebrates at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris who first made his evolutionary claims publicly in 1800; his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who had slipped evolutionary ideas between the lines of his poetry and his medical treatises at about the same time; and then there was the anonymous author of a bestselling book of 1844 entitled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Here his list began to break down. There were “some Germans”, he wrote, and “an American (name this minute forgotten)”.

more from Rebecca Stott at The New Statesman here.

Mechanical Matchmaking: The Science of Love in the 1920s

From Smithsonian:

The April 1924 issue of Science and Invention magazine ran an article by Hugo Gernsback, the magazine’s publisher, which examined the different “scientific” ways to determine if a marriage will succeed or fail.

How much would the average man or woman give to know beforehand if his or her prospective married life is to be success or failure? At present, marriage is a lottery. It seems impossible to predict beforehand how your prospective mate will turn out in the future. Through certain fundamentals, which can easily be ascertained, one can be reasonably certain as to one’s choice. We take extreme care in breeding horses, dogs and cats, but when we come to ourselves we are extremely careless and do not use our heads nor the means that science puts in our hands for scientific breeding. There are certain basic tests which can be made today and which will give one a reasonable assurance of married happiness.

In the article Gernsback explains four different tests that can be administered to a couple in order to determine scientifically whether a marriage will work.

More here.

Off the Clock: Disrupted Daily Rhythms Hinder Fertility in Mice

From Scientific American:

“My biological clock is ticking.” The phrase typically pops up in movies about middle-aged women who want to start a family before menopause makes it impossible. But a new study published May 23 in PLoS ONE indicates that another clock may also be important for females trying to conceive: the one that regulates our waking and sleeping cycles.

A strong body of evidence links daily wake-sleep cycles to feminine reproductive cycles. When scientists remove a female mouse’s suprachiasmatic nucleus—the pacemaker in her brain that regulates daily circadian rhythms—her estrous cycle ceases, and she becomes infertile. In human females, working night shifts and frequently traveling across time zones has been associated with menstrual irregularities, reduced fertility and a greater number of negative pregnancy outcomes such as low birth weight, preterm birth and miscarriage. But “one of the issues with these epidemiological studies,” says Keith Summa, a medical and doctoral student at Northwestern University, “is that there are other factors associated with shift work that may also be playing a role.” For example, women who work night shifts also tend to sleep less. “Our study provides stronger evidence that reproductive problems are due to circadian disruption itself,” Summa says.

More here.

Thursday Poem

CLOUD

A blue stain
creeps across
the deep pile
of the evergreens.
From inside the
forest it seems
like an interior
matter, something
wholly to do
with trees, a color
passed from one
to another, a
requirement
to which they
submit unflinchingly
like soldiers or
brave people
getting older.
Then the sun
comes back and
it’s totally over.

by Kay Ryan
from Poetry, Vol. 195, No. 5, February
publisher: Poetry, Chicago, 2010

pounded

By my count, though I may have missed a few, this is the 25th volume of Ezra Pound’s highly distinctive correspondence to see the light of day. The first selection of his letters, edited by D.D. Paige and culled from the years 1907-41, was published in 1950, when Pound was four years into what would be a 12-year sojourn in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, to which he’d been confined indefinitely after pleading insanity at his trial for treason in 1946. Paige’s selection introduced to the world madcap Ez the compulsive letter-writer, all hectoring capitals and italics and doolally spelling, here berating recalcitrant magazine editors, there puffing his chosen (in the main, pretty well chosen) band of modernistas; here, somewhat less happily, solving the world’s political and economic woes by promoting Social Credit, there championing the achievements of his great hero, Benito Mussolini. Coming the year after the scandal caused by the decision to award the Bollingen Prize to The Pisan Cantos, the book’s publication caused something of a furore – as indeed did all things Poundian in the immediate postwar era.

The Yankee Comandante

For a moment, he was obscured by the Havana night. It was as if he were invisible, as he had been before coming to Cuba, in the midst of revolution. Then a burst of floodlights illuminated him: William Alexander Morgan, the great Yankee comandante. He was standing, with his back against a bullet-pocked wall, in an empty moat surrounding La Cabaña—an eighteenth-century stone fortress, on a cliff overlooking Havana Harbor, that had been converted into a prison. Flecks of blood were drying on the patch of ground where Morgan’s friend had been shot, moments earlier. Morgan, who was thirty-two, blinked into the lights. He faced a firing squad. The gunmen gazed at the man they had been ordered to kill. Morgan was nearly six feet tall, and had the powerful arms and legs of someone who had survived in the wild. With a stark jaw, a pugnacious nose, and scruffy blond hair, he had the gallant look of an adventurer in a movie serial, of a throwback to an earlier age, and photographs of him had appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. The most alluring images—taken when he was fighting in the mountains, with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara—showed Morgan, with an untamed beard, holding a Thompson submachine gun. Though he was now shaved and wearing prison garb, the executioners recognized him as the mysterious Americano who once had been hailed as a hero of the revolution.

more from David Grann at the New Yorker here.

poppy-heads

“May I call you my morphine?” Robert Browning asked Elizabeth Barrett the month before they married in 1846. Barrett, who had been taking opiates every day since she was fourteen, replied “Can you leave me off without risking your life?”. Jean Cocteau later reversed the trope, describing not the woman as an addiction but the addiction as a woman – “Opium is the woman of destiny, pagodas, lanterns” – while for Baudelaire the solipsism of the opium addict resulted in “an appalling marriage of man to himself”. You can always rely on an opium-eater for a fancy prose style. Opium also brings out the stylist in doctors: “What”, asked Dr John Jones in The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d (1700), “can cure pain and all its effects better than pleasure?”, and he compared the effect of the drug to “the sight of a dearly-loved Person etc thought to have been lost at Sea”. The Victorian physician Sir William Osler described morphine as “God’s own medicine”, but the sap of the Papaver somniferum was enjoyed long before the worship of Osler’s own God. Fossilized poppy seeds found at the remains of a lakeside village in Zurich suggest that opium was first consumed in the late Stone Age; Egyptian scrolls reveal that Ra recommended opium for headaches; Homer relates how Helen, pitying the dejection of Telemachus at the absence of his father Odysseus, pours an ointment into his wine called “no sorrow” (nepenthe); Sibyl sedates Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog at the gates of Hades, with a soporific, and Galen prescribed opium as an antidote for “confusion” in the elderly.

more from Frances Wilson at the TLS here.

Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life

Michael Scammell in The New Republic:

Joseph Brodsky caught the attention of the outside world for the first time in 1964, when he was tried in Leningrad for the crime of writing poetry. That is not how the indictment read, of course: his “crime” was that he did not have a regular job, and was therefore a “parasite.” But a scurrilous article attacking Brodsky in theEvening Leningrad newspaper not long before his trial gave the game away. He was charged with being a “literary drone,” a writer of pointless doggerel, and therefore useless to society unless he was made to do “real” work. The newspaper attack and the subsequent trial were badges of honor for someone as young as Brodsky. He was only twenty-four and virtually unknown outside the narrow circle of his admirers, and campaigns of this sort were ordinarily reserved for famous older figures, such as Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova.

Brodsky was in fact the victim of political events far beyond his control.

More here.

Tracking The Junk Food The World Eats After Dark

Ted Burnham at NPR:

People around the world show remarkable similarity in their daily eating habits: meals start off healthy in the morning, but get progressively worse throughout the day – until by nightfall we're deep into junk food territory. Just take a look at these images from mobile startup Massive Health. Focus on the dots over North America in the upper left, which indicate the healthiness (green) or unhealthiness (red) of people's meals at different times of day.

At 10 a.m. Eastern, North America is covered in green as people dig into healthy breakfasts. But by 10 p.m., red and orange splotches dominate most of the continent. And at 1 a.m., there's hardly any green to be seen. Similar trends appear according to local time in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. View an interactive version showing the whole day here.

The data was culled from Massive Health's iPhone app, Eatery. Users record, rate, and track the healthiness of their meals over time. The images reflect ratings on about 500,000 meals from users in 50 countries, collected over 5 months.

The data doesn't explain why we eat worse the later it gets – it just tells us that we do. But there's something profound about such a consistent, worldwide pattern.

More here.

Genomics, Is the Target in Sight for Myelodysplastic Syndromes?

Our own Azra Raza at The Science Network:

Bolaño’s Last, Great Secret

R.B. Moreno in The Millions:

Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolaño, the prolific genre-bender whose narratives and exile from Chile began seriously enchanting the literary world in 2005, the year The New Yorker began publishing his short stories. Altogether, nine stories have appeared in the magazine, including January’s “Labyrinth,” which accompanied a curious photograph. But I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a bit about Bolaño’s following, which may be credited in part to his early exit from said world at the age of 50, by way of liver failure. For the uninitiated, “Gomez Palacio,” his posthumous New Yorker debut about a tormented writer interviewing for a teaching post in a remote Mexican town, tends to work a kind of magic. A ragged copy of the issue in which “Gomez Palacio” appeared caught critic Francine Prose in a waiting room: “I was glad the doctor was running late,” she wrote later in reviewing Last Evenings on Earth, “so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.”

Francisco Goldman, who likened “The Great Bolaño” to Borges in a profile for The New York Review of Books, dates the ex-Chilean’s rise to 1999, the year The Savage Detectives won a coveted Venezuelan prize for the best Spanish-language novel. “The inseparable dangers of life and literature, and the relationship of life to literature, were the constant themes of Bolaño’s writings,” reads Goldman’s summary of his subject’s legacy, which at the time spanned ten novels and three story collections. (Bolaño’s drive to finish his 900-page masterwork, 2666, a far-flung novel involving the murders of women in the Sonora desert, is thought to have exacerbated his liver condition.) “It’s as if Bolaño is satirizing the routine self-pity of exile,” adds Goldman, in turning to one of his short fictions (“Mauricio ‘The Eye’ Silva”). “Yet the story’s mood of nearly inexpressible and lonely grief leaves you an intuitive sense of its truthfulness, which seems something other than a literal truthfulness.”

Cognitive Democracy

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi in Crooked Timber:

Over the last couple of years, Cosma Shalizi and I have been working together on various things, including, inter alia, the relationship between complex systems, democracy and the Internet. These are big unwieldy topics, and trying to think about them systematically is hard. Even so, we’ve gotten to the point where we at least feel ready to start throwing stuff at a wider audience, to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a paper we’re working on, which argues that we should (for some purposes at least), think of markets, hierarchy and democracy in terms of their capacity to solve complex collective problems, makes the case that democracy will on average do the job a lot better than the other two ways, and then looks at different forms of collective information processing on the Internet as experiments that democracies can learn from. A html version is under the fold; the PDF version is here. Your feedback would very much be appreciated – we would like to build other structures on top of this foundation, and hence, really, really want criticisms and argument from diverse points of view (especially because such argument is exactly what we see as the strength of democratic arrangements).

Cognitive Democracy

Henry Farrell (George Washington University) and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi (Carnegie-Mellon/The Santa Fe Institute)

In this essay, we outline a cognitive approach to democracy. Specifically, we argue that democracy has unique benefits as a form of collective problem solving in that it potentially allows people with highly diverse perspectives to come together in order collectively to solve problems. Democracy can do this better than either markets and hierarchies, because it brings these diverse perceptions into direct contact with each other, allowing forms of learning that are unlikely either through the price mechanism of markets or the hierarchical arrangements of bureaucracy. Furthermore, democracy can, by experimenting, take advantage of novel forms of collective cognition that are facilitated by new media.

The Crisis of European Democracy

Amartya Sen in the NYT:

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Europe’s current malaise is the replacement of democratic commitments by financial dictates — from leaders of the European Union and the European Central Bank, and indirectly from credit-rating agencies, whose judgments have been notoriously unsound. Participatory public discussion — the “government by discussion” expounded by democratic theorists like John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot — could have identified appropriate reforms over a reasonable span of time, without threatening the foundations of Europe’s system of social justice. In contrast, drastic cuts in public services with very little general discussion of their necessity, efficacy or balance have been revolting to a large section of the European population and have played into the hands of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.

Europe cannot revive itself without addressing two areas of political legitimacy. First, Europe cannot hand itself over to the unilateral views — or good intentions — of experts without public reasoning and informed consent of its citizens. Given the transparent disdain for the public, it is no surprise that in election after election the public has shown its dissatisfaction by voting out incumbents.

Great Gatsby: a story for the modern age

From The Telegraph:

A Gatsby moment is upon us. The Great Gatsby is by far the most popular novel of F Scott Fitzgerald; it embodies the 1920s, and has attained an iconic status, both for American novelists and for many readers. Still, the flood of adaptations about to pour over us is unprecedented. Is there something in the air? Is there something that makes this most glamorous of novels speak to us with especial resonance? Later this summer, a new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby will be released, starring Leonardo DiCaprio (you can watch the trailer here) and the ubiquitous Carey Mulligan, as Daisy Buchanan. There are, too, a number of stage adaptations, some rather unusual. A musical version is being launched at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington in the summer, with music and lyrics by Joe Evans. An “immersive” version was staged in Wilton’s Music Hall in April, with dancing and cocktails throughout – the audience advised to dress in their 1920s best. Most curious is a New York version, retitled GATZ, coming to London as part of the London International Festival of Theatre in June and July. The New York theatre group Elevator Repair Service has set the book in a drab office, where a worker finds a copy of the book and starts to read it out; his colleagues take on the roles and the action plays itself out. Remarkably, every single word is performed; it is not a long novel, but even short novels are longer than the longest plays, and this evening will last for eight hours.

The Great Gatsby has always encouraged this sort of reverence. It is true that the earliest surviving film version, a 1949 adaptation with Alan Ladd and a memorable Shelley Winters as Myrtle, takes some bold liberties, beginning with Gatsby’s crooked empire and purchase of the mansion, rather than letting him intrude gradually on the action. Modern viewers, however, will be astonished at the dutiful reverence of the 1974 version with Robert Redford as Gatsby and scripted by Francis Ford Coppola, which preserves many of Nick Carraway’s comments in voiceover and an amazing amount of the casual dialogue.

More here.

When Women Were Birds

From The Daily Beast:

Mountain time: Terry Tempest Williams is at home in Utah, and I’m in Los Angeles, flabbergasted by her warmth, even over the phone, by her graciousness, intuition, and intimacy. She is comfortable with distance and interruption; with poor phone connections and tesserated thoughts. Everything Williams has ever written, from her first book, The Secret Language of Snows, written for children in 1984, to her latest, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice, finds its roots in the precariousness and uncertainty of life and grows from there, skyward. It has taken her 35 years to begin to understand and write about what this meant to her. “Honestly, I buried this story,” she says, the wind whistling through the phone; helicopters overhead in L.A. “I did not save or cherish those journals. I wrote in them unceremoniously. It wasn’t until I turned 54, the age she was when she died, that I realized how terrified I had been of my own blank mind.”

Williams has loyal readers. Her lectures and readings—held in far corners and small towns as well as distinguished, big-city venues—are always packed. Why? Because she’s the kind of writer who makes a reader feel that his voice might also, one day, be heard. Why? Because she cancels out isolation: connections are woven as you sit in your chair reading—between you and the place you live, between you and other readers, you and the writer. Without knowing how it happened, your sense of home is deepened reading her work, dug out, the soil pressed down around you as if you were a plant the author promised to water. It’s the strangest thing. Williams was born into a large Mormon clan in northern Utah. Mormon women are expected, she explains, to keep journals and bear children. The author is fond of saying that the only things she has done religiously in her life are keep a journal and use birth control. When Williams’s mother died at 54, she left Terry, then 22, shelves and shelves of brightly bound journals.

Williams opened them. They were blank.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

A Knocker

There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white cities

it's easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down their foreheads

my imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stick

I strike the board
it answer me
yes--yes
no--no

for others the green bell of a tree
the blue bell of water
I have a knocker
from unprotected gardens

I thump on the board
and it prompts me
with the moralists dry poem
yes--yes
no--no

by Zbigniew Herbert
translation: Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

Syria Diary

Layla Al-Zubaidi in the LRB:

In a hit YouTube show called Top Goon, wooden puppets act out the parts of Bashar and his father. The director relocated his operation to Lebanon after a march last July led to the detention of many of his friends. In August, the political cartoonist Ali Farzat was kidnapped and dumped by a roadside, his hand broken, after he published a cartoon depicting Bashar hitching a ride out of town. Dissent is met with brute force, no matter what form it takes, and masks and puppets are a reasonable precaution. In the final episode of Top Goon the puppeteers show (part of) their faces. His eyes just visible behind a Syrian flag, one of them pops up from behind the stage to tell the Bashar puppet his time is up. Bashar won’t go down easily: ‘I’m president of this republic! I’ll annihilate you! Infiltrator! Scum! Al-Qaida!’ The puppeteer isn’t bothered. ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘I can make you do whatever I want. I can make you dance.’ He makes the president do a few pirouettes. Then he unscrews his head.

In downtown Damascus I passed the usual bustling alleys filled with shops and cafés, busy as ever. The window of a loyalist restaurant displayed a cartoon. A big devil, carrying a hat emblazoned with the UN flag, was blowing a horn labelled SECTARIAN SCHISM. Little devils sliced chunks out of a map of Syria, their knives marked with the corporate logos of al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and the BBC.

I got into a cab. When the driver asked why I’d come to Syria I said I was writing about Syrian culture – I was careful not to say ‘revolutionary’ culture. He gave me a look in the mirror that seemed to say he thought I’d come from outer space. I asked him to drop me off by the central bank, where a huge portrait of Bashar, eyes tinted ice-blue, covered the monumental façade.

‘You want culture?’ the driver asked and pointed at a stage being set up in the square in front of the bank, in preparation for a visit by Kofi Annan’s international observers. Giggling teenagers in scout uniform were taking up position. Kiosks were draped with Syrian flags and posters of the ruling family surrounded the stage. ‘That’s our culture. Setting up a theatre to show the world that millions support our president.’

The Lonely Ones

Emily Cooke in The New Inquiry:

By all accounts, Susan Sontag found being alone intolerable. In Sigrid Nunez’s 2011 memoir, Sempre Susan, Sontag didn’t even want to drink her morning coffee or read the newspaper without someone else around. When she was alone and unoccupied by books, she tells Nunez, her “mind went blank” like “static on the screen when a channel stops broadcasting.” Without others to respond to her ideas, or a book to provoke them, the ideas vanished. Sontag herself substantiates Nunez’s impression in the second volume of her journals, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh. The tension visible here between the demands (and solace) of relationships and the appeal (and terror) of solitude may be a basic human circumstance. But women, in modern history, feel the tension with special acuteness, we who are assumed to be talented at interaction and rudderless when alone. It is striking that even Sontag, the most authoritative and singular of public figures — the most masculine of women intellectuals — also found the conflict vexing. The first volume of the journals charted her heady, headlong ascent into sexual and intellectual self-knowledge. This second volume, even as it spans the period of her most important work, shows her running up against her own limits. For Sontag, one of the most troubling of these was her difficulty being alone.

Solitude is a problem for writers generally, who spend so much time alone rehearsing a form of ideal communication. And men —as a practical matter — are often worse at being alone than women. But for male writers, however often an appearance of self-sufficiency can be stripped away to reveal a hidden structure of support, there is a writerly tradition of solitude that has existed at least since Romanticism: Rousseau’s “my habits are those of solitude and not of men,” or Shelley’s “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude.” A man who chooses to be alone assumes the glamour of his forebears. A woman’s aloneness makes us suspicious: Even today it carries connotations of reluctance and abandonment, on the one hand, and selfishness and disobedience, on the other. Kate Bolick, writer of a much-discussed piece in The Atlantic about the “rise of single women,” became something of a spectacle for suggesting that she was happy, at 39, being unmarried and on her own. Albeit strangely titillated, many readers rallied to believe her. The rest called her deluded.

Why China Won’t Rule

Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate:

Is China poised to become the world’s next superpower? This question is increasingly asked as China’s economic growth surges ahead at more than 8% a year, while the developed world remains mired in recession or near-recession. China is already the world’s second largest economy, and will be the largest in 2017. And its military spending is racing ahead of its GDP growth.

The question is reasonable enough if we don’t give it an American twist. To the American mind, there can be only one superpower, so China’s rise will automatically be at the expense of the United States. Indeed, for many in the US, China represents an existential challenge.

CommentsThis is way over the top. In fact, the existence of a single superpower is highly abnormal, and was brought about only by the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The normal situation is one of coexistence, sometimes peaceful sometimes warlike, between several great powers.

CommentsFor example, Great Britain, whose place the US is often said to have taken, was never a “superpower” in the American sense. Despite its far-flung empire and naval supremacy, nineteenth-century Britain could never have won a war against France, Germany, or Russia without allies. Britain was, rather, a world power – one of many historical empires distinguished from lesser powers by the geographic scope of their influence and interests.

CommentsThe sensible question, then, is not whether China will replace the US, but whether it will start to acquire some of the attributes of a world power, particularly a sense of responsibility for global order.

Trouble at the Heart of Psychiatry’s Revised Rule Book

Edward Shorter in Scientific American:

Major depression was created in 1980 by DSM-III editor Robert Spitzer as an effort to bridge disagreements between psychoanalysts, when they ruled the roost in the American Psychiatric Association, and the rest of the profession, which was becoming increasingly oriented towards biology. As a political construct, major depression included the two forms of depressive illness that previously had been considered as different from each other as measles and tuberculosis: melancholic illness and nonmelancholia. Melancholia, a grave form of depression involving slowed thought and movement, a complete joylessness in life and lack of hope for the future, had always been considered a separate illness. By 1980 the term melancholia had gone out of style and had been replaced by endogenous depression.

The other form of depressive illness that psychiatry had always recognized as separate was an ill-defined aggregation of symptoms of mood, anxiety, fatigue, somatic complaints – and a tendency to obsess about it all – that had been called on occasion neurasthenia, neurotic depression, reactive depression and other terms indicating real illness but not melancholic disease.

So the first artifact the DSM series created was lumping these two forms of depressive illness together. In fact, they are so disparate that the depression term itself should be abandoned.

More here. [Thanks to Louise Gordon.]

Fifth Element Diva Song

Abbas Raza

From Terror Suspect to College Graduate

Amitava Kumar in The Daily Beast:

He will be graduating this Sunday from Trinity College in Connecticut. He is not a very good student. His GPA is only 2.7. Once he was even threatened with expulsion because he had been quarrelling with his wife and had missed classes. He surprised me a few days ago by saying that he wanted to give a speech at his graduation ceremony. Would I read the draft he had written?

There was a further surprise. In what he had sent me, there was mention of his incarceration, in a federal prison in upstate New York, a few months after the events of 9/11. He was suspected of being a terrorist. I had known of this, but I had also found him taciturn and secretive; I was surprised that he was prepared to stand in his blue and gold robes at graduation and read aloud about having been put behind bars.

I will call him Khalid Farooq. He is 34 years old, and grew up in Abbotabad in Pakistan. He arrived in the U.S. on Sept. 5, 2001. Over the year that I have now known him, Khalid had mentioned his arrests—the first only a few days after the September attacks—but the details I was now reading were new to me.

More here.

The Most Comma Mistakes

Ben Yagoda in the New York Times:

If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like:

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

Comma after “movie,” comma after “friend” and, sometimes, comma after “Paris” as well. None is correct — unless “Midnight in Paris” is the only movie in the world and Jessie is the writer’s only friend. Otherwise, the punctuation should be:

I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend Jessie.

If that seems wrong or weird or anything short of clearly right, bear with me a minute and take a look at another correct sentence:

I went to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my oldest friend, Jessie.

You need a comma after “movie” because this and only this is Mr. Allen’s newest movie in theaters, and after “Jessie” because she and only she is the writer’s oldest friend.

The syntactical situation I’m talking about is identifier-name. The basic idea is that if the name (in the above example, “Jessie”) is the only thing in the world described by the identifier (“my oldest friend”), use a comma before the name (and after it as well, unless you’ve come to the end of the sentence). If not, don’t use any commas.

More here.

Anne Boleyn: witch, bitch, temptress, feminist

Hilary Mantel in The Guardian:

As a small child I remember being told by a solemn nun that Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand. In the nun's eyes, it was the kind of deformity that Protestants were prone to; it was for Anne's sake, as everyone knew, that Henry VIII had broken away from Rome and plunged his entire nation into the darkness of apostasy. If it weren't for this depraved woman, England would be as holy as Ireland, and we'd all eat fish on Friday and come from families of 12.

Anne Boleyn wasn't exactly a Protestant, but she was a reformer, an evangelical; and the sixth finger, which no one saw in her lifetime, was a fragment of black propaganda directed at her daughter, Elizabeth I. In Elizabeth's reign it was the duty of beleaguered papists to demonstrate that the queen's mother had been physically and spiritually deformed. Hence, not just the extra finger but the "wen" on her throat, which supposedly she hid with jewellery: hence the deformed foetus to which she was said to have given birth. There is no evidence that this monster baby ever existed, yet some modern historians and novelists insist on prolonging its poor life, attracted to the most lurid version of events they can devise.

Anne Boleyn is one of the most controversial women in English history; we argue over her, we pity and admire and revile her, we reinvent her in every generation. She takes on the colour of our fantasies and is shaped by our preoccupations: witch, bitch, feminist, sexual temptress, cold opportunist.

More here.

Hidden Epidemic:  Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms. Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.

Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.

A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in people’s intestines and their ribbon-shaped bodies can grow as long as 21 feet. But that’s just one stage in the animal’s life cycle. Before they become adults, tapeworms spend time as larvae in large cysts. And those cysts can end up in people’s brains, causing a disease known as neurocysticercosis.

More here.

Meet India’s sperm donors

Lhendup G. Bhutia in Open:

In the film Vicky Donor, Annu Kapoor plays Dr Baldev Chaddha, a fertility specialist whose sperm bank in New Delhi is close to shutting down because the quality of his donors’ samples is just too poor to impregnate patients. That’s when Vicky Arora, played by Ayushmann Khurrana, comes in. A good-for-nothing lad who lives off his mother’s beauty parlour, his sperm samples rejuvenate Dr Chaddha’s flagging business. Vicky discovers that the quick buck assured by his virility beats the tedium of managing his uncle’s garment store: every single shot of semen fetches him a wad of Rs 500 notes. And this is how Vicky Arora becomes Vicky Donor and starts wanking for a living.

For all the earnest talk of the film’s intention to cast light on an industry cloaked in secrecy and ridden with stigma, its portrayal of the sperm donation business is but a caricature. The industry does exist, but there are no wads of cash being dispensed, donors don’t hang out at Costa Coffee outlets, and they certainly don’t earn enough to buy cars. Indian donors are mostly outstation students living in cramped hostel rooms, sweating to pay their bills and embarrassed by their need to encash what everyone else flushes down the drain. For some donors, it may be pocket money, but for most it’s the room rent or phone bill. And turning donor entails putting their pride at risk. Every commercial ejaculator must pass a strict selection test. Only the best are signed on. The rejects return home unpaid and dejected.

More here.

Rory Sutherland: Perspective is everything

Abbas Raza

fresno

Fresno sits about two thirds of the way down California’s huge Central Valley, which runs almost the entire length of the state, bounded to the west by the coastal ranges and to the east by the Sierra Nevada mountains. This is the most fertile farmland in the United States. The central and nothern parts get plenty of rain, but the southern part, called the San Joaquin Valley, is dry and subject to droughts, though with a few nice months of green in fall and spring. It could not have looked very promising when Fresno first appeared as a small outpost along the San Joaquin River; the expansion of the California Pacific Railroad to Fresno in the 1870s helped, however. And soon enough it became clear that despite the difficulty of the land, the connection to the farming infrastructure being set up to the north, including the railroad, made settling there worthwhile. Dutch and German farmers built irrigation ditches to make the land farmable. They were soon followed by immigrants from Mexico, Armenia, China, and Japan.

Four Ways Happiness Can Hurt You

June Gruber in Greater Good:

Clearly, happiness is popular. But is happiness always good? Can feeling too good ever be bad? Researchers are just starting to seriously explore these questions, with good reason: By recognizing the potential pitfalls of happiness, we enable ourselves to understand it more deeply and we learn to better promote healthier and more balanced lives. Along with my colleagues Iris Mauss and Maya Tamir, I have reviewed the emerging scientific research on the dark side of happiness, and we have conducted our own research on the topic. These studies have revealed four ways that happiness might be bad for us.

1. Too much happiness can make you less creative—and less safe.

Happiness, it turns out, has a cost when experienced too intensely. For instance, we often are told that happiness can open up our minds to foster more creative thinking and help us tackle problems or puzzles. This is the case when we experience moderate levels of happiness. But according to Mark Alan Davis’s 2008 meta-analysis of the relationship between mood and creativity, when people experience intense and perhaps overwhelming amounts of happiness, they no longer experience the same creativity boost. And in extreme cases like mania, people lose the ability to tap into and channel their inner creative resources. What’s more, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found that too much positive emotion—and too little negative emotion—makes people inflexible in the face of new challenges.

More here.

sci-fi philosophy

The fish pendant, on Dick’s account, began to emit a golden ray of light, and Dick suddenly experienced what he called, with a nod to Plato, anamnesis: the recollection or total recall of the entire sum of knowledge. Dick claimed to have access to what philosophers call the faculty of “intellectual intuition”: the direct perception by the mind of a metaphysical reality behind screens of appearance. Many philosophers since Kant have insisted that such intellectual intuition is available only to human beings in the guise of fraudulent obscurantism, usually as religious or mystical experience, like Emmanuel Swedenborg’s visions of the angelic multitude. This is what Kant called, in a lovely German word, “die Schwärmerei,” a kind of swarming enthusiasm, where the self is literally en-thused with the God, o theos. Brusquely sweeping aside the careful limitations and strictures that Kant placed on the different domains of pure and practical reason, the phenomenal and the noumenal, Dick claimed direct intuition of the ultimate nature of what he called “true reality.” Yet the golden fish episode was just the beginning.

more from Simon Critchley at the Opinionater here.

perl on sendak

The great popular artists have an instinctive relationship with the audience. That was true of Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday at the age of 83. He followed his gut. He kowtowed to no one. He knew that when pop culture really matters, it’s grounded in personal experience—in something the artist feels so strongly that other people cannot help but feel it too. Sendak had been involved with more than 50 children’s books by the time he became a national sensation in 1963 with Where the Wild Things Are. But even after Max in his white pajamas became part of modern mythology, right up there with the Beatle’s Nowhere Man, Sendak refused to take the audience for granted. He was resolutely independent to the end, and he expected the same of the public that had made him famous. There was something of the nineteenth-century reformer about Sendak—an old-fashioned optimism about the capacity of popular art to change public opinion and make the world a better place. He worked hard to provide public theater for children. He took on the subject of homelessness in 1993, with We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, his old familiar cast of adorable child-gremlins now living in hideaways jerrybuilt from cardboard boxes.

A Richer Life by Seeing the Glass Half Full

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” — is the antithesis of optimism. In a book called “Breaking Murphy’s Law,” Suzanne C. Segerstrom, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, explained that optimism is not about being positive so much as it is about being motivated and persistent. Dr. Segerstrom and other researchers have found that rather than giving up and walking away from difficult situations, optimists attack problems head-on. They plan a course of action, getting advice from others and staying focused on solutions. Whenever my husband, a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, said, “It can’t be done,” I would seek a different approach and try harder — although I occasionally had to admit he was right. Dr. Segerstrom wrote that when faced with uncontrollable stressors, optimists tend to react by building “existential resources” — for example, by looking for something good to come out of the situation or using the event to grow as a person in a positive way. I was 16 when my mother died of cancer. Rather than dwell on the terrible void her death left in my life, I managed to gain value from the experience. I learned to apply her lifelong frugality more constructively, living each day as if it could be my last, but with a focus on the future in case it wasn’t. Yes, I saved, but I also chose not to postpone for some nebulous future the things I wanted to do and could, if I tried hard, find a way to do now. And I adopted a very forthright approach to life, believing that if I wanted something badly enough, I could probably overcome the odds against me.

More here.

The two 3QD summer interns for 2012

Dear Readers and Applicants,

I must confess that I am extremely gratified by the number of amazingly talented and intelligent and fascinating young persons from four continents who applied for our internship. I feel sad that I can only take a maximum of two people but I would like to express my gratitude also to all the other remarkable individuals in the excellent pool of candidates: thank you so much for making the effort to apply. I am sorry that it didn't work out this time but I am glad that I got to know you a little bit, and I want to assure you that it was not necessarily a matter of any applicant being "better" than any other, it is just that I was looking for some specific skills and experience in certain areas. I wish you the best and hope that we have the opportunity to work together sometime in the future.

And now without further ado here are the two 3QD interns for summer 2012:

Henry Molofsky

Proudly hailing from Washington, DC, Henry now lives in Connecticut where he studies philosophy and music at Wesleyan University. He has previously worked at the nationally syndicated public radio program Afropop. He has also spent time studying and being a middle-school English teacher's assistant in Israel. He writes a lot of essays, which sometimes he'll admit he enjoys, but he also enjoys running in the woods, playing crazy parties with his top-40 cover band, and banging on West-African drums with nearly-correct technique. And he is a pianist.

Zujaja Tauqeer

Zujaja is a DPhil student researching military power and medical aid in Pakistan at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. A graduate of Brooklyn College, she will study medicine at Harvard Medical School after completing her DPhil. Born in Lahore, Zujaja left Pakistan with her family to escape persecution against Ahmadi Muslims, and someday, when she's finally out of the classroom, she hopes to return there and work to create an equitable and sustainable healthcare system.

Welcome Zujaja and Henry and get ready for June 18th! You are now Associate Editors of 3QD. And thanks once again to all the brilliant people who applied.

Yours,

Abbas

Public Access to Publicly Funded Research: it’s only fair

by Bill Hooker

Attention Conservation Notice: this post is here to ask you to sign a petition asking the White House to make all publicly funded research publicly available. Read on for background, or go straight to the petition.

You paid for it -- this is about research funded by tax dollars.

You don’t own it -- the majority of research is still published under the subscription model, with authors transferring copyright to the publisher.

You can’t even read it -- unless you have access through a subscribing institution, such as a university library, it will cost you around $30-$40 per paper to read the research you funded. The same goes for the researchers whose salaries you also pay: either their institution pays millions of dollars per year in subscriptions, or they pay the same $30-$40 per paper to access the work they need to build on. And no matter which institution they work at, they don’t have access to everything they need. Not even Harvard can afford full access.

That’s not right.

It’s not right, but some vested interests like it that way and are spending plenty of lobbying dollars trying to keep it that way. Recently, though, researchers and the public have been pushing back.

The Cost of Knowledge Boycott coincided with the withdrawal of the RWA, universities are canceling subscriptions, editors are resigning from the boards of toll-access journals, and there has been a good deal of mainstream media coverage.

It’s important that we push back. We, meaning everyone -- whether you’re a patient who wants to take control of their own healthcare, a backyard scientist who wants to know more about how the world works, or a taxpayer who wants their investment in research to yield the maximum return, it’s in your interests to stand up and tell the government that all research funded by all federal agencies should be publicly available. It is high time we took back the science we paid for.

The US government funds a lot of research. I mean, a lot. Counting just the research budgets over $100 million, we have the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health & Human Services, Homeland Security and Transportation; the Environmental Protection Agency; NASA; and the National Science Foundation. Of all those agencies, only the NIH (which is just one part of HHS) has a public-access policy.

All of that research is paid for by taxes. All of that research should be publicly available. That’s the premise and the promise of this petition to the White House:

We petition the obama administration to:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

If the petition reaches the signature threshold (25,000 in 30 days), the government will respond. This is a crucial time in the access debate, and a key point at which to let the Obama administration know, as they weigh priorities in the runup to the election, that this issue matters to everyone. The petition was prompted by meetings with the President's Science Advisor, in which the clear message was that the administration will be receptive to a strong display of broad public support.

So please sign the petition, and ask everyone you know to do the same.

Oh, and it’s important to point out: you don’t have to be a US citizen to sign. That’s appropriate, because science is an international enterprise.

If you would like more information:

some context, and a blog, from the petition organizers
the campaign has a Facebook page and a Twitter handle (@access2research)
Wikipedia is a pretty good place to start if you are unfamiliar with Open Access
Mike Taylor got mad, and he did something about it; it’s entertaining and informative to follow along as he blogs about the infuriating inefficiencies in research publishing. Much of this post is cribbed from Mike's blog.
I don’t know who is behind the satirical Twitter account @FakeElsevier, but they talk a lot of sense in amongst the one-liners
Michael Nielsen gave up tenure to write a book that covers all of this and more; it’s called Reinventing Discovery, and you can watch a TED talk or read an essay by way of introduction to its themes and content.

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