Sughra Raza. Inner Pain-ting. 2000.

Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″.

“How economists and climatologists deal with uncertainty…and each other.”

Dave Munger in Seed Magazine:

People across the nation are socking it to state gas tax revenues by buying energy-efficient cars, making it more difficult for states to pay for road maintenance. Legislators from Oregon estimate that as a result of all those hybrids, by 2014 the state’s gas tax revenues will begin to decline; as a result they may replace the current gas tax with a mileage tax.

Most climatologists agree that curbing greenhouse gas emissions and fighting global warming will require that we build more energy efficient cars and homes. Yet some of these choices are still not cost effective. Even as gas prices climb past $3 per gallon, filling the tank on a standard-engine economy car is still cheaper than plunking down the extra money for a $22,000 Toyota Prius. (Over the long term, however, a Prius requires only a $2.28 gas price to recoup its cost premium over an $18,000 Camry).

Economists have called for incentives to force conservation, such as increasing gas taxes to promote moves to more efficient cars or providing subsidies for installing solar water heaters. But when these incentives actually work, they can deplete tax revenue steams, creating a disincentive for the state to continue the incentive. And increased taxes can be unpopular, which is why Oregon is now considering alternatives to a gas tax.

More here.

“Seamus Heaney published his first collection when he was 27, he won the Nobel Prize when he was 56 and his 12th book of poetry came out this spring. He talks to James Campbell about growing up on a farm in County Derry, politics and his current project, inspired by a 15th-century Scots poet.”

From The Guardian:

In 1977, Seamus Heaney visited Hugh MacDiarmid at his home in the Scottish borders, when the great poet and controversialist was in the final phase of life. MacDiarmid had been overlooked by the curators of English literature: compiling the Oxford Book of English Verse, Philip Larkin asked a friend if there was “any bit of MacD that’s noticeably less morally repugnant and aesthetically null than the rest?” Heaney, who has always felt at home with Scots vernacular takes a different line. “I always said that when I met MacDiarmid, I had met a great poet who said ‘Och’. I felt confirmed. You can draw a line from maybe Dundalk across England, north of which you say ‘Och’, south of which you say ‘Well, dearie me’. In that monosyllable, there’s a world view, nearly.”

In a literary career that spans 40 years, Heaney’s appointed subject matter has been largely extra-curricular: Irish nationalism, “Orange Drums”, the sod and silage of his father’s 45-acre farm at Mossbawm, County Derry. In 1999, he took the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf and hammered it into a weathered English, which sold in astounding quantities and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. However, it is “the twang of the Scottish tongue”, audible throughout his Derry childhood, particularly “over the Bann in Country Antrim”, that has given him his current project, a modern English account of the work of the 15th- century Scottish makar Robert Henryson.

More here.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker:

Rita Katz is tiny and dark, with volatile brown eyes, and when she is nervous or excited she can’t sit still. She speaks in torrents, ten minutes at a stretch. Everybody who works in intelligence calls her Rita, even people who don’t know her well. She sometimes telephones people she hasn’t met—important people in the government—to tell them things that she thinks they ought to know. She keeps copies of letters from officials whose investigations into terrorism she has assisted. “You and your staff . . . were invaluable additions to the investigative team,” the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Salt Lake City Division wrote; the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boise said, “You are a rare and extraordinary gem that has appeared too infrequently throughout the course of history.” The letters come in handy, she told me, when she meets with skepticism or lack of interest; they are her establishment bona fides.

Katz, who was born in Iraq and speaks fluent Arabic, spends hours each day monitoring the password-protected online chat rooms in which Islamic terrorists discuss politics and trade tips: how to disperse botulinum toxin or transfer funds, which suicide vests work best.

More here.

From CNN:

It’s a question that has baffled scientists, academics and pub bores through the ages: What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg.

Put simply, the reason is down to the fact that genetic material does not change during an animal’s life.

Therefore the first bird that evolved into what we would call a chicken, probably in prehistoric times, must have first existed as an embryo inside an egg.

Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear.

More here.

Cynthia Haven in Stanford Magazine:

Biographers argue that Lolita’s infamous narrator, the self-deluding Humbert, was inspired in part by the man who started Stanford’s Slavic department, Professor Henry Lanz. While the portrait is hardly flattering, it should be remembered that Lolita is a work of fiction that reflects many influences (see sidebar).

Whatever inspiration Nabokov drew from the cosmopolitan man who became his chess companion that summer, he owed Lanz an enormous debt: the professor paid for Nabokov’s appointment out of his own pocket, forfeiting his summer salary to back the Russian novelist, a complete unknown in America. Nabokov told his biographer Andrew Field that he considered this job his “first success.”

Nabokov needed the break desperately. Russia had banned his writings as “anti-Soviet.” Living in Berlin with his Jewish wife, Véra, from 1922 to 1937, he wrote in Russian under the name Vladimir Sirin. (The Hoover Institution archives preserve a sampling of Sirin’s numerous rejection slips for English editions of his books.) After Berlin, they lived in poverty if not near-starvation in Paris, the more conventional haunt of Russian émigrés. They left for New York a few weeks before the Nazi tanks rolled in and moved into a seedy little flat with their 6-year-old son, Dmitri.

So the Stanford appointment was manna and the westward journey a portal into another world.

More here.  [Photo shows house Nabokov lived in while in Palo Alto.]

Also in Against the Current, Purnima Bose on the fight over representations of Hinduism in California textbooks.

Two organizations with ties to militant Hindu nationalist groups in India, the Hindu Educational Foundation (HEF) and the Vedic Foundation (VF), complained vociferously that the textbooks’ representations of Hinduism and ancient Indian history were demeaning and stereotypical…

Were the parent organizations of the HEF and VF not downright scary, their understanding of history and Hinduism might be comical.  The first entry under “resources” on the HEF’s website, for instance, leads to a page called, “A Tribute to Hinduism.”  Quoting everyone from Carl Sagan to Frijtof Capra and Robert Oppenheimer, the site asserts that ancient India had everything from supersonic airplanes to electric trains to nuclear weapons.

This site also boasts that while the Aryans made it to the moon, ancient India could claim the distinction of being the only destination in the world for UFOs.  Scientific-minded readers can be assured that “Vedic technology does not resemble our world of nuts and bolts, or even microchips.  Mystic power, especially manifest as sonic vibration plays a major role.  The right sound—vibrated as a mantra, can launch terrible weapons, directly kill, summon beings from other realms, or even create exotic aircraft.”

Equally wacky is the VF’s chronology of Indian history and Hinduism.  According to this group, the “Hindu religion was first revealed 111.52 trillion years ago” (before the Big Bang, apparently).  Hinduism appears prior to Indian history which is dated as “1972 million years ago” (roughly 1.7 billion years before the dinosaurs).

The sentiment “If I go there will be trouble/Si me voy – va a ver peligro/And if I stay it will be double/Si me quedo es doble,” in the words of the Clash, haunts debates about Iraq, with disagreements about how “go”, “trouble”, “stay”, and “double” pair up.  In Against the Current, three views on the merits and dangers of a US withdrawl from Iraq.  One pro withdrawl view:

[Susan Weissman]: There’s this sense that if the United States were to leave—now that the Ba’athists and Shi’ite militants are more organized than they were before, and that there’s even splits within them with more radical elements within each sector, including the jihadists—that if there were even just redeployment or planned withdrawal, it would encourage them and all hell would break loose.  And there’s even the notion that maybe Turkey would invade, maybe Kuwait would try to reclaim…can you give us a kind of scenario of what you think could happen?

[Gilbert Achcar]: One could imagine and draw all kinds of apocalyptic scenarios, but there is apocalypse now, we are in the midst of it. And of course, it could get worse…but it is getting worse.  It is getting worse day after day. And it has been proved very very obviously, very factually, that the longer the U.S. troops stay in that country the worse it is getting.

No one can dispute that since day one of the invasion up until now the situation has steadily worsened—look at all the figures, it’s absolutely terrible.  The idea that the United States should stay there even longer to prevent it from deteriorating is completely absurd.  It’s clear, it has been tried and tried and over-tried, and the conclusion is clear, the U.S. troops should get out of that country if that country is ever to recover.

Now, I’m not saying that it’ll be paradise as soon as U.S. troops get out, that’s not the point.  We, the antiwar movement, were the people who were saying that if the invasion took place, it would lead to chaos.  We were saying that during all the long period before the invasion.  The invasion took place, and exactly what we predicted happened.  It led to a chaotic situation, a very dangerous situation.

From The Washington Post:

REVOLUTIONARY CHARACTERS What Made the Founders Different By Gordon S. Wood:

Benjamin Franklin — the subject of one of the essays in this stimulating new collection — once said that “Historians relate, not so much what is done, as what they would have believed.” Most historians would agree with that gently cynical proposition, though they would wish to add a proviso that interpretations of the past should always rest on evidence — on what was “done,” as Franklin said. Among historians in universities these days, essays often tilt toward sheer interpretation, leaving the substance of the past scanted. Gordon S. Wood’s book bucks that trend, offering a good deal of empirical evidence — what was “done” — in these absorbing essays from one of our leading scholars of the American Revolution.

Eight of the 10 chapters of Revolutionary Characters are biographical, featuring Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, John Adams, Thomas Paine and Aaron Burr. The founders are often considered as a group, as indeed they are here, and widely admired as being “different” (the key word in Wood’s subtitle) from our current leaders in their commitment to enlightened principles. Looking at the founders together, it is hard not to conclude that though they deserve our admiration, they may not have constituted the group we have imagined. Certainly, they acted at times as if they had nothing in common.

More here.

From Nature:

Scientists have identified a key microbe in our guts that helps us glean more calories from food. The discovery backs the idea that the type of microbes in our gut help to determine how much weight we gain, and that seeding the intestine with particular bugs could help fight obesity.

Samuel Buck of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues focused on one microbe called Methanobrevibacter smithii, which is effectively a waste-removal bug. It eats up the hydrogen and waste products released by other microbes, and converts them into the methane that escapes from our rear ends everyday. “It’s a minor component of the gut flora with a major impact,” Buck says tactfully.

M. smithii may have a dirty job, but Buck and his colleagues have now shown that it is a vital one. The researchers found that mice with a hefty dose of M. smithii in their guts are fatter than those that don’t have the bacteria.

The discovery suggests that calorie counts on food labels could be misleading, because different people may glean a different number of calories from an identical banana or cheeseburger, based on the individual mix of microbes in their gut.

More here.

Bruce Handy in the New York Times:

It’s often easy to forget, when absorbing some great work of art, the extent to which the creative process is kept afloat not just by genius but also by dumb luck, desperation and sweat. This is true of great food as well. Sitting down to an expensive dinner at Per Se or Babbo, we might like to imagine that our entree was pulled fully formed from Thomas Keller’s or Mario Batali’s toque as if by magic — immaculate confection. But the reality of restaurant cooking is much uglier, at least if Anthony Bourdain is to be believed. He is the executive chef at Les Halles, the French steakhouse on Park Avenue South, and also the author of seven previous books, including the best-selling memoir “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.” Published in 2000, this was a “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again” for the restaurant trade, famous for the chapter “From Our Kitchen to Your Table,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker. It explained why you should never order fish on Monday (your snapper special has most likely been sitting around since Thursday, owing to the quirks of fishmongers’ schedules) and why your basket of bread has probably been recycled from another table (an easy shortcut for overworked busboys). More alarming still is the reason Bourdain gave for why the pros never order swordfish: “those three-foot-long parasitic worms that riddle the fish’s flesh.” In other words, you’ll never eat lunch in any town again.

“The Nasty Bits,” mainly a catchall of Bourdain’s magazine and newspaper writing, offers more in this vein: “Fast well-done steak? I’ve watched French grads of three-star kitchens squeeze the blood out of filet mignons with their full body weight, turning a medium to well in seconds. I’ve watched in horror as chefs have hurled beautiful chateaubriands into the deep-fat fryer, microwaved veal chops, thinned sauce with the brackish greasy water in the steam table. And when it gets busy? Everything that falls on the floor, amazingly, falls ‘right on the napkin.’ Let me tell you — that’s one mighty big napkin.”

As they say, you don’t want to see how the sausage is made.

More here.

Is it a royal Egyptian tomb, a glorified supply room for ancient embalmers, or something in between? A year after the discovery of a chamber that had lain hidden in the Valley of the Kings for millennia, archaeologists are still asking themselves exactly what they’ve found. “Until we examine each coffin to some extent, we can’t draw a conclusion,” University of Memphis archaeologist Otto Schaden told MSNBC.com. “We can draw one, but it might be wrong.”

Schaden spoke via telephone from the Valley of the Kings, where he and his colleagues are continuing to remove artifacts from the chamber, including jars of mummification materials and the coffins labeled A through G. Experts wondered whether the chamber might have contained royal mummies that were brought in from less secure sites to protect them from ancient grave robbers.

More here.

“Understanding consciousness may be easier than we thought.”

Alex Byrne in the Boston Review:

Here is a remarkable fact. When atoms and molecules are organized in a suitably complicated way, the result is something that perceives, knows, believes, desires, fears, feels pain, and so on—in other words, an organism with a psychology. Besides ourselves, who else is in the club? Descartes notoriously claimed that other animals were merely unthinking bits of clockwork, but that is an extreme position. Probably cockroaches don’t have much of a mental life, if they have one at all, but few would harbor doubts about monkeys, apes, cats, and dogs. Indeed, there is a flourishing discipline at the intersection of biology and psychology—cognitive ethology—devoted to the study of the mental and social lives of nonhuman animals. Somehow, minds emerge from matter. And so, of course, does the weather, digestion, photosynthesis, and glaciation. But although some everyday nonmental phenomena remain poorly understood—apparently the jury is still out on the explanation of why ice is slippery—the connection between minds and matter is supposed to be especially mystifying. Why so?

In the famous 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel fingered consciousness as the culprit. “Without consciousness,” he wrote, “the mind–body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.” And consciousness has had philosophers hot and bothered ever since. Daniel Dennett published a book called, rather optimistically, Consciousness Explained in 1990, and his fellow philosophers could hardly get into print fast enough to proclaim that Dennett had not explained consciousness at all. But before we get to the conundrum of consciousness, let’s start with an apparently easier part of the mind–body problem.

More here.

“A 1994 rape conviction not only altered N.J. court rules on eyewitness testimony, it raised questions of identifying people of another race.”

Tom Avril in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The young woman was on edge for months, keeping a lookout for the stranger who had robbed her, raped her, and threatened to cut her throat.

She had gotten a good look at him before and after the attack in her basement apartment, not far from Rutgers University campus. At one point, their faces were just two feet apart. She’d never forget that face.

Then one April day on a New Brunswick street corner, more than seven months after the rape, she froze.

There he was. Strolling along with a boom box, walking with the same side-to-side swagger she remembered when the rapist left her apartment.

She ran to call the police. A few minutes later, they arrested the suspect, a black man named McKinley Cromedy.

The ensuing trial helped trigger an overhaul of the way New Jersey treats the oldest and most dramatic sort of courtroom evidence: an eyewitness pointing out the person who did it.

Cromedy’s defense attorney took an unusual tack. He questioned her ability to tell black men apart, noting that she was white, that she grew up in an overwhelmingly white northern New Jersey suburb, that there were no black students in her high school class.

The victim was undeterred.

“It’s just something you don’t forget after what happens and everything,” she told a jury of 11 whites and one black person. “It was him.”

More than 61/2 years later, science would prove her wrong.

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

In 1980 I attended a bicycle industry trade convention whose keynote speaker was Mark Victor Hansen, now well known as the coauthor of the wildly popular Chicken Soup for the Soul book series that includes the Teenage Soul, Prisoner’s Soul and Christian Soul (but no Skeptic’s Soul). I was surprised that Hansen didn’t require a speaker’s fee, until I saw what happened after his talk: people were lined up out the door to purchase his motivational tapes. I was one of them. I listened to those tapes over and over during training rides in preparation for bicycle races.

The “over and over” part is the key to understanding the “why” of what investigative journalist Steve Salerno calls the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (SHAM). In his recent book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown Publishing Group, 2005), he explains how the talks and tapes offer a momentary boost of inspiration that fades after a few weeks, turning buyers into repeat customers. While Salerno was a self-help book editor for Rodale Press (whose motto at the time was “to show people how they can use the power of their bodies and minds to make their lives better”), extensive market surveys revealed that “the most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months.” The irony of “the eighteen-month rule” for this genre, Salerno says, is this: “If what we sold worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us–at least not in that same problem area, and certainly not time and time again.”

More here.

Lee Siegel in The New Republic:

Now celebrating her twentieth year as the host of the world’s most influential talk show, Oprah Winfrey is to television what Bach is to music, Giotto to painting, Joyce to literature. Time magazine hit the nail on the head when it recently voted her one of the world’s handful of “leaders and revolutionaries.” (Condoleezza Rice wrote Oprah’s citation: “She has struggled with many of the challenges that we all face, and she has transformed her life. Her message is empowering: I did it, and so can you.”) Like all seminal creative figures, her essential gift lies in her synthesizing power. She has taken the most consequential strands in modern life and woven them together into an hourlong show that is a work of art. 

The boilerplate criticisms of Oprah–she exploits a culture of victimization that she did so much to create; she glamorizes misery; she amplifies already widespread narcissism and solipsism; she fills people’s heads with hackneyed nostrums about life–are correct, up to a point. But that’s not the whole story. Oprah’s critics write as if her goal of extending to her audience empathy, consolation, and hope were intrinsically cheap and cynical. On the contrary: The question is whether that is really what she is offering.

More here.  And see the essay “As I Lay Reading” on Oprah by 3QD’s own J.M. Tyree here, in The Nation.

John Felstiner in The New Republic:

Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe.” Why “must”? Writing from Paris in August 1948 to relatives in the new state of Israel, Paul Celan, having survived the “Final Solution,” explains that a poet cannot stop writing, “even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.” This fateful pledge, from a brutally orphaned son whose stunning poem of 1945, “Deathfugue,” intones, “Death is a master from Deutschland” and threads an ashen-haired Shulamith into the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Songs, throws a raking light over a recently discovered exchange of letters between Celan and the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.   

Born to German-speaking parents in Czernowitz, Bukovina, an eastern outpost of the Austrian Empire, Celan survived nineteen months of forced labor, eventually taking exile in Paris. There by hard degrees he became Europe’s most challenging postwar poet.

More here.  [Celan shown in photo.]

“Lurid new covers for The Iliad, Little Women, and other classics…”

From Slate (click the link at left for slide-show):

Pulp fiction is perhaps the only genre as beloved for its cover art as for its prose. And rightly so: Classic pulp covers are glorious and garish, rich with saturated color and sexual innuendo. Rare is the cover girl who hasn’t undone at least a few of her buttons. And so the images have endured, both in the popular imagination and in the countless online galleries that collect some of the greats. (There’s even a site dedicated to the covers of “poulpe pulps,” which feature women and octopuses in compromising positions.)

In the 1950s, some publishing houses opted to release literary fiction with pulp covers. A striking edition of The Sheltering Sky, for example, promised “a strange tale in the exotic desert”—a tagline that is, when you think about it, both pulpy and apt. Taking such efforts as our inspiration, we asked a handful of designers to create lurid new book jackets for classics from The Iliad to Animal Farm. Click here to see the results.