Gary J. Bass in the New York Times Magazine:

…Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.

In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what they call “the miracle of aggregation.” It might seem obvious that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal health care. (I certainly don’t.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters’ ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.

The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random.

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth and Ben Rosamond.]

Margaret Busby in The Guardian:

According to Yoruba wisdom, as one approaches elder status, one ceases to indulge in battles. “Some hope!” comments Wole Soyinka, early in his new memoir: “When that piece of wisdom was first voiced, a certain entity called Nigeria had not yet been thought of.” Now past his biblical three-score-and-ten and with a distinctive mass of white hair making him the most recognisable of African writer-elders, Soyinka shows no sign of laying down the cudgels or his pen just yet. Last month’s flawed Nigerian elections to deliver a successor to President Obasanjo had Soyinka calling for a new poll, declaring that: “It is not right to accept the unacceptable.” His love-hate relationship with his homeland testifies to his refusal to back down in the face of injustice and tyranny, possessing as he does “an over-acute, remedial sense of right and wrong, of what is just and unjust”.

You Must Set Forth at Dawn is an extraordinary chronicle (the title derives from a Soyinka poem that goes on to promise the traveller “marvels of the holy hour”), as much an insider’s political biography of Nigeria as an updating of the author’s own restless story since the publication over a quarter of a century ago of his first autobiographical work. Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood was a modern classic and fortunately, he was persuaded to abandon his vow not to “pursue the task of recollection and reflection beyond the age of innocence, calculated at roughly eleven and a bit”.

More here.

Sarah Crown in The Guardian:

Hay snorkles for top words:

Snorkle, freedom, midwifery and interglobular are just some of the suggestions authors and visitors to the Hay festival have come up with at the launch of a nationwide search for our favourite word.

Education Action, one of the festival’s official charities, is using the ‘Words for the World’ campaign to draw attention to their support for education for children in conflict zones. Festival visitors are being asked to donate £1 to add their favourite word to a pinboard outside the charities’ tent, and Education Action is calling on everyone from authors and journalists to politicians and members of the public to visit the website and add their own favourite words.

The charity chose the festival to launch their campaign, says Education Action’s communications manager Pippa Ranger, because “Hay plays host to some of the most literate people in the world, and we’re working with some of the least literate. Those who value and have benefited from education can show their support for the millions of children around the world who need it.”

More here.

About the Hay festival  here.

In her latest volume, Native Guard, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Natasha Trethewey finds a wormhole to the past through the Negro spiritual. Its sounds can be heard in nearly every poem in this taut, mournful book, elevating grief into song, turning the blues into something as sacred and fleshly as mud:

It rained the whole time we were laying her down;

Rained from church to grave when we put her down.

The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.

The woman being buried is, one presumes, the poet’s mother, but Native Guard doesn’t have the whiff of the personal the way so much contemporary poetry does. Indeed, it hardly grieves in the conventional sense. Instead, it feels more like the ephemera that crowded the fiction of the late German novelist W.G. Sebald.

more from The Philadelphia Inquirer here.

Levi is justly revered for his masterly memoirs, beginning with “Survival in Auschwitz” and continuing through “The Reawakening,” “The Periodic Table” and finally, and most darkly, “The Drowned and the Saved.” “Survival in Auschwitz” was written in a white heat soon after Levi’s liberation and published in 1947, though translation and recognition came much more slowly. It has often been noted, but is worth noting again, that the American title represents an unfortunate decision by the publisher to replace the haunting Italian title, “Se Questo È un Uomo” — “If This Is a Man” — with a more utilitarian one. The decision signals a confusion that exists in Levi’s reputation and that perhaps existed even inside of him: the urge to poeticize and philosophize competing with the need to bear witness, to record in as literal and straightforward a manner as possible the Nazi war against Western civilization in general and Jews in particular. But in all his writing, Levi, who worked as an industrial chemist much of his life, combined scientific detachment with deep, sympathetic imagination, a combination that allowed him to parse with excruciating clarity all the degradations — large and small, physical, psychic and spiritual — of the Nazi genocide.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From BBC News:

Scientists from the University of Bristol observed that, when ants were foraging on rough terrain, some of them used their own bodies to plug potholes. They even chose which of them was the best fit to lie across each hole. The flatter surface provided the rest of the group, which can number 200,000, a faster route between prey and nest. The research, published in the journal of Animal Behaviour, said that the team first noticed the army ants’ (Eciton burchellii) unusual behaviour in the insects’ native rainforest home in Panama.

To investigate this further, the researchers inserted wooden planks, drilled with a variety of different sized holes, into the army ants’ trails. They found that the ants did indeed plug the holes, but the team also discovered that individuals would size-match themselves to a hole for the best fit.

More here.

Reviewed by Frank Rich in The New York Times:

FALLING MAN

By Don DeLillo.

No matter where you stood in the city, the air was thick after the towers fell: literally thick with the soot and stench of incinerated flesh that turned terror into a condition as inescapable as the weather. All bets were off. New Yorkers who always know where they’re going didn’t know where to go. Cab drivers named Muhammad were now feared as the enemy within; strangers on the street were improbably embraced like family under a canopy of fliers for the missing. Such, for a while anyway, was the “new normal,” though the old normal began to reassert itself almost as soon as that facile catchphrase was coined. Today 9/11 carries so many burdens — of interpretation, of sentimentality, of politics, of war — that sometimes it’s hard to find the rubble of the actual event beneath the layers of edifice we’ve built on top of it. (Or built on top of all of it except ground zero.)

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth and Matthias Matthijs.]

Nicolai Ouroussoff in the NYT:

The headquarters of the federal environment agency in Dessau, Germany, occupies a low-slung building on the edge of an abandoned gasworks. Dessau, a center for munitions production during the war, was virtually obliterated by Allied bombs. Over the next 50 years, East German factories saturated the soil with chemical and industrial waste. Yet both the agency building and its location might be said to embody a new, ecologically sensitive Europe.

Designed by a young Berlin-based firm, Sauerbruch Hutton, the building is touted as one of the most efficient in the world, but it doesn’t wear its sustainability on its sleeve. Four stories high, it wraps around a vast interior courtyard that is cooled and heated by a system of underground pipes. Vents in the glass roof allow hot air to escape, and an occasional breeze passes through the courtyard’s gardens. The sinuous wood structure is clad in horizontal bands of candy-colored, enameled glass panels, in shades of green, red and blue. The pattern, it turns out, is carefully tuned to the surrounding environment: the green reflects a nearby park; the red, the brick facades of an industrial shed; and the blue, the sky.

More here.

Hopper has long been associated with compelling images of urban buildings and the dwellings within them.  The artist lived in Washington Square, in New York’s Greenwich Village, for more than fifty years, and New York City was his favorite backdrop.  Rather than focusing on the skyscrapers that symbolized the ambition of the Jazz Age, Hopper lovingly depicted the city’s crumbling brownstones, dusty storefronts, and undistinguished bridges.  Paintings like Drug Store (1927, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), From Williamsburg Bridge (1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and Early Sunday Morning are Hopper’s tribute to quieter, less dramatic, but nonetheless eloquent parts of the city.  Other New York scenes provide fascinating glimpses—often through windows and from passing trains—into the lives of strangers.  Such well-known paintings as Chop Suey (1929, Barney A. Ebsworth Collection), Room in New York (1932, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Office at Night (1940, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) intrigue because they suggest stories but leave unresolved the motivations of the figures within them.  A section of the exhibition will be dedicated to Hopper’s paintings of women in interiors.  These pictures—from Eleven A.M. (1926, Hirshborn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.) to New York Movie (1939, Museum of Modern Art, New York)—are tender evocations of the poignancy of solitude in the midst of the city’s noise and energy.

More here, and here.

Robert Wilonsky in The Village Voice:

Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie—a narrative strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen (or arrogance) of most cinematic musicals. By day, a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion, is swiped by old friends in far more desperate straits than he. At night, the singer switches to his own compositions, most written for the girlfriend who abandoned the guy (who has no name in the film or credits other than The Guy). A Czech girl (Markéta Irglová, billed only as The Girl) approaches The Guy and asks him about his songs. He brushes her off; she’s pretty but too young (Irglová was 17 when the movie was shot two years ago). She’s also persistent.

In time, it turns out this Girl selling flowers to strangers for loose coins is also a musician—a pianist and singer, every bit The Guy’s equal. And so theirs becomes a friendship and partnership—though not quite a relationship, because of The Guy’s ex and The Girl’s estranged husband. He teaches her his songs: He gives them heart, but she gives them soul.

More here.

Dear 3QD Reader,

An NPR program that I admire very much is Christopher Lydon’s Open Source. Their content dovetails nicely with many of our own fascinations and obsessions at 3QD, and they are a key player in the dissemination of interesting and important ideas. I have met Chris Lydon, and found him a remarkably intelligent and decent person. I urge you to try and help him out as best you can. See this email from him:

Nobody but you can get Open Source out of a jam.

We’re launching a week-long appeal for support, passing the hat to sustain “the blog with a radio show.”

For Open Source these last two years, it’s taken a global community to build a conversation.

And now we need you as never before: every listener, every guest, everyone who’s ever downloaded a podcast or flavored the site with a comment.

With your encouragement and robust participation, Radio Open Source has become one of the most talked-about experiments in public media — a civil union of online and on-air communities that trust each other to talk about pretty much anything.

So we’re in this together. And now we’re in a bit of an emergency together.

As you may know, we lost a major funder without warning late last year. The University of Massachusetts, Lowell ended a five-year sponsorship agreement in a political shuffle of chancellors.

We’re an independent, non-profit production company, and it has been no small challenge to try to replace half a million dollars a year in six months. We’ve made some progress — a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, not least — and negotiations are underway with several interesting partners.

So the rescue ships are approaching the harbor, and still the wolf is at the door.

We need your help to keep broadcasting through the summer while we try to ink a deal.

If every listener sent one dollar, we’d have more than enough. If just the registered users on our site sent $100 on average, we’d be way over the top. And if you forward this appeal to your ten best friends, we’ll have a vastly bigger base to draw on.

We hope you’ll consider a tax-deductible contribution.

Click here to donate.

Morris Dickstein at TLS:

T. S. Eliot once wrote that there were two ways good writers could court recognition – either by publishing so much they turned up everywhere or by publishing so little that each work, perfectly crafted, would become a literary event. Eliot himself took both courses, writing reams of critical prose (but republishing it selectively), and bringing out poems only at widely spaced intervals, each a landmark in a carefully plotted career. Curiously, Eliot did not mention another approach which he would also try: polishing your mystique by not publishing at all. Turning to the stage, he wrote almost no new poetry in the decades after Four Quartets.
An even more ingenious way of not publishing is to create a buzz around work in progress. By offering tantalizing glimpses of ambitious projects, writers arouse expectations that the books themselves, if they do appear, can almost never satisfy. I recall the long wait for Joseph Heller’s second novel, the gossip that attended Truman Capote’s unwritten magnum opus, the anticipation Norman Mailer stoked around unfinished works, including his novel about ancient Egypt. Harold Brodkey’s reputation never quite recovered from the publication of his long-awaited novel, The Runaway Soul. Henry Roth, legendary for his writer’s block, surprised the world with an autobiographical novel some sixty years after Call It Sleep. But there was nothing quite like the awe surrounding Ralph Ellison’s heroic labours over a successor to Invisible Man – protracted for four decades, right up to his death in 1994 at the age of eighty-one.

The picture is of the Ralph Ellison memorial.

More here.

While Americans have focused on President Bush’s “war on terror,” Iraq, and the Middle East, democracy has been under siege in another part of the world. India — the most populous of all democracies, and a country whose Constitution protects human rights even more comprehensively than our own — has been in crisis. Until the spring of 2004, its parliamentary government was increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condoned and in some cases actively supported violence against minority groups, especially Muslims.

What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and issues of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive the assault of religious extremism.

In May 2004, the voters of India went to the polls in large numbers. Contrary to all predictions, they gave the Hindu right a resounding defeat. Many right-wing political groups and the social organizations allied with them remain extremely powerful, however. The rule of law and democracy has shown impressive strength and resilience, but the future is unclear.

more from The Chronicle Review here.

Does anyone call him or herself an Expressionist these days? The bloviated gigantism of the “Neo” 80’s finished off, deliberately no doubt, what the cool reactions of the 60’s and 70’s had started, and the word “Expressionist”––also its variants: ism, istic, big E, small e––can hardly be handled thereafter without the smirking forceps of quotation marks. But these terms were once indispensable, and maybe enough time has passed for the restoration of their nuance. The best painters of the day, after all, have generally been expressionists, at least for a time. (An all-star roster would start with Titian––older and in a hurry––run through late Goya and early Cezanne, and end with de Kooning and Guston. This skeleton line-up can be filled out according to taste and emphasis.) Expressionism has always entailed an alchemical negation of technique, per se, but what was forgotten in the extremity of rhetoric that blossomed like catbriers around the New York School (and has been with us ever since) was how mucking around with paint could also be a way to get at visual reality––a more convincing way, potentially, than even the most transcendent design or optics. Vermeer’s rooms are unsurpassably alive but his people, even those half dozen that seem charged with thought, have several fewer dimensions than a Rembrandt self-portrait with its skin that is paint that is skin. Rembrandt’s lopsided 350 year-old eyes, helter-skelter paint ridges and all, look right into yours.

more from Artcritical here.

Salvador Dalí was the last of the great cultural outlaws, and probably the last genius to visit our cheap and gaudy planet. Look around you with an unbiased eye and, alas, you will see no painter of genius, and no novelist, poet, philosopher or composer who takes his or her place in that top tier without asking our permission. I think Dalí was the greatest painter of the 20th century – far more important than Picasso, who was a 19th-century painter most at home in his studio, with the familiar props of guitars, jugs of wine and stoical girlfriends who must have wondered what was going on in his self-enclosed mind. Picasso was driven around Cannes in his American car, but he seems to have seen nothing of the world on the far side of the windscreen.

With Dalí, we have the immediate sense that he not only saw the increasingly sinister world of the 1930s in all its lurid truth, but fully grasped the deranged unconscious forces that propelled Hitler and Stalin into the daylight. His paintings are like stills from an elegant newsreel filmed inside our heads, and we could reconstitute the whole of the last century from them, all its voyeurism, barbarism, scientific genius and self-disgust.

more from The Guardian here.

From Scientific American:

Turns out that sheer intelligence is not enough to become a young math whiz. It also takes a good attention span and training your mind to “self regulate” or focus on the task at hand. The measure for academic success for decades has been a person’s intelligence quotient, or IQ. But new research published in the journal Child Development says that a thought process called “executive functioning,” which governs the ability to reason and mentally focus, also plays a critical role in learning, especially when it comes to math skills.

In this study 141 healthy children between the ages of three and five years took a battery of psychological tests that measured their IQs and executive functioning. Researchers found that a child whose IQ and executive functioning were both above average was three times more likely to succeed in math than a kid who simply had a high IQ.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Science has the power to harness energy, allow human flight, help cure the sick, and explain much about the world. But as amazing and beneficial as science is, it cannot explain everything. Scientists may never know exactly how the universe began, or help to settle matters of faith. The same is true for the paranormal world. Though science can explain many strange phenomena, some mysteries remain to be solved — often because there is simply not enough information to reach a definitive conclusion. Some of these phenomena may one day be fully understood, as many things that were once mysterious or unexplained (such as the causes of disease) are now common knowledge.

Medical science is only beginning to understand the ways in which the mind influences the body. The placebo effect, for example, demonstrates that people can at times cause a relief in medical symptoms or suffering by believing the cures to be effective — whether they actually are or not. Using processes only poorly understood, the body’s ability to heal itself is far more amazing than anything modern medicine could create.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan, more on nature vs. culture in perceptions of attractiveness, in ScienceDaily:

Score one for body language: It seems that body shape and the way people walk hold major cues to their attractiveness to others, according to collaborative research findings published by Texas A&M University professor Louis G. Tassinary and co-author Kerri Johnson of New York University.

“People have always tried to identify the magical formula for beauty, and we knew body shape was important, but we found movement was also key,” Johnson says.

“When encountering another human, the first judgment an individual makes concerns the other individual’s gender,” Johnson explains. “The body’s shape, specifically the waist-to-hip ratio, has been related to gender identification and to perceived attractiveness, but part of the way we make such judgments is by determining whether the observed individual is behaving in ways consistent with our culture’s definitions of beauty and of masculinity/femininity. And part of those cultural definitions involves movement.”