From Harvard Magazine:

When Majid Ezzati thinks about declining life expectancy, he says, “I think of an epidemic like HIV, or I think of the collapse of a social system, like in the former Soviet Union.” But such a decline is happening right now in some parts of the United States. Between 1983 and 1999, men’s life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counties, according to a recent study by Ezzati, associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and colleagues. For women, the news was even worse: life expectancy decreased in more than 900 counties—more than a quarter of the total. This means 4 percent of American men and 19 percent of American women can expect their lives to be shorter than or, at best, the same length as those of people in their home counties two decades ago.

Disparities in health tend to fall along income lines everywhere: the poor generally get sicker and die sooner than the rich. But in the United States, the gap between the rich and the poor is far wider than in most other developed democracies, and it is getting wider. That is true both before and after taxes: the United States also does less than most other rich democracies to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. Americans, on average, have a higher tolerance for income inequality than their European counterparts. American attitudes focus on equality of opportunity, while Europeans tend to see fairness in equal outcomes. Among Americans, differences of opinion about inequality can easily degenerate into partisan disputes over whether poor people deserve help and sympathy or should instead pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The study of inequality attempts to test inequality’s effects on society, and it is delivering findings that command both sides’ attention.

More here. (Note: This article is for my brother Tasnim and also a must read for the conscientious and concerned)

From Scientific American:

The Phoenix Lander may have dominated Mars news in recent weeks, but a new study performed here on Earth has turned up a whopper of a finding: The Red Planet seems to have been the victim of a massive hit and run more than four billion years ago. That is the conclusion of researchers who have finally mapped the edges of something known as the Martian hemispheric dichotomy. That feature—in which the crust thickness drops from 30 to about 10 miles (50 to 20 kilometers) over a large area that is the most visible feature on Mars—has been known to astronomers for more than 30 years and was long suspected to be due to an asteroid impact that flung most of the crust out the area.

Scientists could not say for sure, however, because the dichotomy’s exact shape was unclear: As much as a third of its edge was obscured beneath a 20-mile- (30-kilometer-) high pile of volcanic rock (the second largest feature on Mars) known as the Tharsis Rise. To uncover the dichotomy’s true edge, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used geologic data to probe the structure of the crust underneath Tharsis. They combined data on the surface height, or topography, with variations in mass revealed by disparities in the surface’s gravitational force, looking for telltale changes in mass under Tharsis. The analysis revealed an elongated round shape measuring about 6,600 by 5,300 miles (10,600 by 8,500 kilometers) and covering 42 percent of the planet. The team calls it the Borealis basin.

More here.

[Update: My educated guess is that Gell-Mann is talking about nostratic languages, or maybe a larger “macrofamily”.  Here’s a post from Paleogot on long-range theories of language (for Aditya, especially):

I’m sure I must have hinted before that I hate when some treat long-range theories (like Nostratic, North Caucasian, Dene-Caucasian, or whatever far-away proto-language) as if they’re written in stone. A person with a level head recognizes these ideas for what they are, idle conjectures requiring many ammendments before something more substantial can be made of them. However, I’m not against conjecture as long as it’s fully differentiated from facts or well-substantiated theories. I also think there is an important difference between sharing conjectures for discussion on a blog or in a forum versus wasting trees to write a manifesto of your pseudolinguistic doctrine for you to enforce on disbelievers.

As much as I sound like a conservative fart for downplaying long-range comparison, I’m actually quite interested in it. It’s just that I haven’t read anything serious enough for me to go “wow!” yet and as I learn more, the errors in books start to become more apparent. Overall, I’m the most impressed (in a very moderate sense) by the Nostratic hypothesis as presented by Allan Bomhard who proposes that Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic, Eskimo-Aleut, Elamite, Dravidian, Sumerian, Kartvelian and Afro-Asiatic language families come from a parent language dated to about 15 000 BCE in a period following the last ice age. He wasn’t the first to come up with this century-old theory but he had a few different takes on it. For now, Nostratic is not an established theory because it doesn’t present enough evidence to prove its claims, but it doesn’t hurt to suggest further improvements that may help to inspire discussion and, just maybe, progress.

When looking through Allan Bomhard’s Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis (1996) or The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship (1994) co-authored by Allan Bomhard and John Kerns, one thing that I noticed was how many pronouns are being reconstructed without a clear structure. This is but one of a number of serious gaps in this theory just waiting to be resolved.

A similar post from Language Log.  But I also invite readers to link to arguments in favor of the hypotheses as well.]

Barbara Herrnstein Smith follows up her review of Boyer’s Religion Explained with a review of Walter Burkert’s Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions, over at the Immanent Frame:

The intellectual interest of the general program [of“cognitive” and/or “evolutionary” explanations of religion] and the promise of its cognitive-evolutionary approaches for affording better understandings of important features of human behavior and culture should, I think, be recognized. But I also think that critical attention should be given to the intellectual confinements represented by some of the program’s characteristic theoretical assumptions and methodological commitments, especially when viewed in relation to existing methods in the naturalistic study of religion and alternative theories of human behavior, culture, and cognition. Indeed, in spite of the disdain New Naturalists commonly exhibit for prior achievements and alternative methods (as illustrated by Boyer’s wholesale brush-offs), their characteristic cognitive-evolutionary accounts of religion are likely to become more substantial, persuasive, and illuminating when joined to studies by researchers and scholars working with other naturalistic approaches to religion, both social-scientific and humanistic.

A good example of such cross-disciplinary achievement is the study, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions, by the distinguished German classicist Walter Burkert. Burkert’s account of the origins of archaic beliefs and practices, though thoroughly naturalistic, is not an example of the New Naturalism. Rather, in offering a series of perspectives on religion without pretensions to natural-scientific status itself, it underscores the promise of a biologically and otherwise scientifically informed approach to religion that is also instructed by and connectable to broader understandings of human behavior, culture, and history.  A few passages from the book must suffice to illustrate these points here, but I hope they are suggestive enough.

Sam Anderson reviews Robert Olen Butler’s Intercourse, in NY Magazine:

Robert Olen Butler’s new story collection, Intercourse, is, as its title suggests, totally about doing it. It imagines the thoughts of 50 iconic couples as they knock the proverbial boots, beginning with Adam and Eve copulating on “a patch of earth cleared of thorns and thistles, a little east of Eden,” and ending with Santa Claus blowing off postholiday steam in January 2008 by doing the nasty with an 826-year-old elf in the back room of his workshop. But, as the clinical tone of Butler’s title also suggests, Intercourse is very much not a work of erotica. It tends to ignore messy fluids and crotch-logistics in favor of wordplay and psychological nuance. The book proceeds through twinned vignettes—complementary stream-of-consciousness prose-poems paired across facing pages, with the primal physical act implied in the margins between. (When you close the book, each of the couples gets pressed together.) The entire thing contains, by my count, only one legitimate orgasm—and that probably shouldn’t even qualify, since it involves Richard Nixon masturbating while thinking about his mother.

The keynote of Intercourse is not connection but distraction. Very few of Butler’s characters are what you would call “in the moment.” Many scheme for political gain: Cleopatra, for instance, services “stone-fingered” Marcus Antonius while remembering hot nights with Caesar and plotting the consolidation of her power—“the first thing I will ask of him is that he kill my sister.” Others see sex as redemptive, a chance to heal past abuses. A Mississippi slave sleeps with a fellow slave in order to cancel out her rape at the hands of the Master; the sixteenth-century Italian aristocrat Lucrezia Borgia sees the consummation of her marriage as a way to negate being raped by her father, the pope. Butler’s best vignettes create, in just a handful of lines, surprisingly rich dramatic texture. Mary Magdalene has sex with a Roman centurion under a fig tree on the day she first sees Jesus; she thinks of the mysterious holy stranger as the centurion ponders his first murder, which he committed earlier that day. Leda is insulted that Zeus, as a swan, stopped to eat barley on his way to meet her. Louis XVI hates sleeping with Marie Antoinette, who thinks of Mozart. “I would much prefer,” the king thinks, “to put my member in the forge until it is yellow-hot from the flame and then pound it on an anvil with a hammer.”

[H/t: Ruchira Paul]

Via bookforum, Anna Reed and Lily Penza on their year of hooking up through Craigslist, in East Bay Express:

It takes a woman about a thousand words and a condom to get laid on Craigslist. But for a woman to be laid properly — by a passionate lover who knows what he’s doing — well, that’s a whole different ball game.

We are both middle-aged women who have spent the past eleven months sleeping around Craigslist. At an age when most women were sending their firstborns off to college, we found ourselves — through chance and circumstance — single, tumescent, and ripe for adventures. Those adventures have spanned ten counties and four states, and involved roughly 45,000 e-mailed words, 27 phone calls, 36 face-to-face initial dates, 13 actual lovers, and re-aggravated our carpal tunnel syndrome from all the typing.

Years before embarking on Craigslist, both of us had experienced sexual abandonment. We were both hungry for intimacy and physical touch after years of wandering in the desert. Our lives were on similar trajectories.

Dani Rodrik in Project Syndicate:

Two and a half years ago, senior staff members of the World Bank approached the Nobel laureate Michael Spence to ask him to lead a high-powered commission on economic growth. The question at hand could not have been more important. The “Washington consensus” – the infamous list of do’s and don’ts for policymakers in developing countries – had largely dissipated. But what would replace it?   

Spence was not sure he was the man for the job. After all, his research had focused on theoretical issues in advanced economies; he had been dean of a business school; and he did not have much experience in economic development. But he was intrigued by the task. And he was encouraged by the enthusiastic and positive response he received from the commission’s prospective members. Thus was born the Spence Commission on Growth and Development, a star-studded group of policymakers – including another Nobelist – whose final report was issued at the end of May.   

The Spence report represents a watershed for development policy – as much for what it says as for what it leaves out. Gone are confident assertions about the virtues of liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and free markets. Also gone are the cookie cutter policy recommendations unaffected by contextual differences. Instead, the Spence report adopts an approach that recognizes the limits of what we know, emphasizes pragmatism and gradualism, and encourages governments to be experimental.

Robert Goodin in Philosophy and Public Affairs:

Democracy might be characterized, semicircularly, as a matter of “groups of people making collective decisions in a democratic way.” I employ that circularity deliberately to bracket off the part of the formula that I do not want to focus upon for present purposes.

Of course, what it is to “make collective decisions in a democratic way” is precisely the part of the formula that traditionally preoccupies democratic theorists. Is that a matter of expressing opinions or of aggregating votes or of deliberating together? (And if “all three,” then combined how and in what proportions?) Insofar as it is a matter of aggregating votes, according to what rules? (Simple majority rule or something else?) Insofar as it is a matter of elections, what makes them free and fair? (How are campaigns to be conducted, electors apportioned to districts, and so on?) Are there any substantive constraints on what democracies may or must do? (Respect human rights, for example.) Such questions constitute the warp and the woof of democratic theory.

All that leaves to one side, however, the prior question of who exactly it is that is to be making those decisions in that democratic way. How do we specify the group making those decisions? That is what I shall call the problem of “constituting the demos.”¹

Writing in 1970, the preeminent democratic theorist of the previous generation complained, “Strange as it may seem . . . , how to decide who legitimately make up ‘the people’ and hence are entitled to govern themselves . . . is a problem almost totally neglected by all the great political philosophers who write about democracy.”

David Albert and Sean Carroll’s fascinating discussion of the issue:

//
Design
Billy Collins

I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is the cycle of life
I say to no one.
This is the wheel of fortune,
the arctic circle.
This is the ring of Kerry
and the white rose of Tralee
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window.
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life
I say
touching my finger to my tongue.

//

From Prospect Magazine:

Is it possible to be a true religious believer and at the same time enjoy good relations with people of other faiths or none? Moreover, can you remain open to new ideas and new ways of thinking?

Fethullah Gülen, a 67-year-old Turkish Sufi cleric, author and theoretician, has dedicated much of his life to resolving these questions. From his sick bed in exile just outside Philadelphia, he leads a global movement inspired by Sufi ideas. He promotes an open brand of Islamic thought and, like the Iran-born Islamic philosophers Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Abdolkarim Soroush, he is preoccupied with modern science (he publishes an English-language science magazine called the Fountain). But Gülen, unlike these western-trained Iranians, has spent most of his life within the religious and political institutions of Turkey, a Muslim country, albeit a secular one since the foundation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s republic after the first world war.

Unusually for a pious intellectual, he and his movement are at home with technology, markets and multinational business, and especially with modern communications and public relations—which, like a modern televangelist, he uses to attract converts. Like a western celebrity, he carefully manages his public exposure—mostly by restricting interviews to those he can trust.

More here.

Brian Greene in Edge:

And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there’s simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future.

These are the standard — and enormously important — reasons many would give in explaining why science matters.

But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

As a practicing scientist, I know this from my own work and study. But I also know that you don’t have to be a scientist for science to be transformative. I’ve seen children’s eyes light up as I’ve told them about black holes and the Big Bang. I’ve spoken with high school dropouts who’ve stumbled on popular science books about the human genome project, and then returned to school with newfound purpose. 

More here. (First published as an OpEd piece by The New York Times, June 1, 2008)

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge seems to be grabbing a lot of attention, including Barack Obama’s and David Cameron’s. Richard Woods in The Times:

“There can be a rather pious approach to it all, which I find off-putting,” she said. “What I like about the Wattson is that it just tells you what you are using. It’s not trying to make you feel guilt. I’m a great one for carrots, not sticks.”

That is a theme whose time has come, according to David Cameron. While Gordon Brown bludgeons us with top-down targets, on-the-spot fines and endless regulation, the Conservative leader wants to adopt a subtle new approach: the power of “social norms”, a phenomenon making waves thanks to a book called Nudge, which is published in Britain this week.

At the heart of social norms, Cameron says, is the idea “that one of the most important influences on people’s behaviour is what other people do”. The majority, it seems, don’t want to be very different from those around them.

Instead they want to belong, and they want to be on the side of the good guys. Give them proper information about the acceptable norm, plus a gentle push in the right direction, and they will change behaviour of their own accord.

The ideas have been mooted before, but some behavioural economists believe the potency of this phenomenon has been underestimated. Now leading politicians, such as Barack Obama, the Democrat candidate for the US presidency, are taking an interest.

Cameron appears to have taken the ideas to heart. “We’ve got to stop thinking that if government tells people what to do, they’ll do it,” he said in a speech earlier this month. “Instead we’ve got to harness the power of social norms to bring about social change.”

Were secular citizens to encounter their fellow citizens with the reservation that the latter, because of their religious mindset, are not to be taken seriously as modern contemporaries, they would revert to the level of a mere modus vivendi – and would thus relinquish the very basis of mutual recognition which is constitutive for shared citizenship. Secular citizens are expected not to exclude a fortiori that they may discover, even in religious utterances, semantic contents and covert personal intuitions that can be translated and introduced into a secular discourse.

So, if all is to go well both sides, each from its own viewpoint, must accept an interpretation of the relation between faith and knowledge that enables them to live together in a self-reflective manner.

more from Sign and Sight here.

The 1950s were arguably the greatest years of the Western — the period in which clichés were sustained and destabilized through psychology, revisionism, high style, and the kind of grandeur that follows when the most durable clichés are reframed against classical paradigms. Consider “The Furies,” in which a baggy reworking of the Oresteia is played out in an agora that stretches to the horizon, encompassing endless cattle pastures, mountainous outposts, a city strip with a saloon and bank, and communities of squatters. Yet ponderousness has no place on this Ponderosa. Anthony Mann was a director who knew his Aeschylus well enough to keep the story front and center, goading it with efficiency and brio, confining the poetry to visual effects that make the story memorable and, in two instances of sudden violence, awful — but in a good, Greek way.

more from the NY Sun here.

GOOGLE MAY BE widely admired for its technical wizardry and its quick, accurate search engine, but one of the company’s most impressive accomplishments has been its ability to grow as powerful as it is while still remaining, in the minds of most Americans, fundamentally likable.

The company today is a behemoth, with more than 15,000 employees and a market value as big as Coca-Cola and Boeing combined. Its search engine is the tool of first resort for expert researchers and schoolkids alike; for suspicious employers, first-daters, long-lost friends, blackmailers, reporters, and police investigators – in short, for seekers of any and all sorts of information. In April, the most recent month for which it compiled statistics, Nielsen Online found that 62 percent of all US Internet searches were done using Google. Yahoo, the next largest player, had only 17.5 percent of the market.

Despite its size and dominance, Google has avoided the public suspicion and vilification that have plagued powerful companies from Standard Oil to Microsoft. Instead, protected by its reputation for innovation, its famed “Don’t Be Evil” mantra, and the ever-improving precision of its search engine, Google has remained for the most part a trusted, even a beloved, brand.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The Guardian:

When novelist Mohammed Hanif told friends he was returning to Pakistan after 12 years in Britain, they were aghast. Why would he and his young family swap London for a city with daily power cuts and rampant gun crime? The answer proved surprisingly simple …

Two months from now, we are planning to return to Karachi with a container full of furniture, more pots and pans than we left behind and a 10-year-old son. Friends and family in Pakistan are aghast. From London to Karachi? Why are you coming to Karachi? Do you know what happened to Sana’s friend the other day? Do you have any idea how you’ll live without electricity for 10 hours every day? And, by the way, have you discussed this with Channan? How does he feel about it?

I will return to Sana’s friend’s plight and my own plans for living without electricity later, but let’s deal with the Channan question first. It’s a heart-wrenching one. He was born in Chelsea and Westminster hospital. He goes to a Church of England school in south London where he is the self-styled star of the school cricket club. His school people are divine, and not because of the church connection. His trumpet teacher has finally managed to get him into a school concert. His closest friends live in the neighbourhood. Obviously, he doesn’t want any of that to change.

More here.