Witchiness

Marina Warner in the London Review of Books:

250px-DubravkaUgresic Dubravka Ugrešić’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is the latest, most inventive and most substantial volume in Canongate’s series of revisioned myths. The first was Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, a harsh retelling in Penelope’s voice of the concluding scenes of the Odyssey. With her own special bite, Atwood singles out for dramatic treatment the girls who worked in the palace and fraternised with Penelope’s suitors; she reminds us how pitilessly Odysseus orders them to be hanged, every one. The resonances with contemporary matters, which this series of books aims to stir, are powerful in this new handmaid’s tale. Karen Armstrong opened the series with an introduction that stressed myth’s archaic origins and links to religion and ritual, to national or tribal identity. This is the ontological version of myth, which assumes that the stories connect to a metaphysical belief system that maps onto a culture’s history and ethics.

But, to borrow Christopher Warnes’s contrast between ontology and irreverence in his Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel,[*] the approach of contemporary retellers of myths, including Ugrešić, makes clear that the readers they have in mind aren’t concerned with sacred matters and are impatient with spiritual meaning. These writers have adopted a looser, secular conception of myth, which flattens hierarchies between faith and superstition, and doesn’t discriminate, as a Victorian anthropologist would have done, between high and low culture, between stories about gods, which are rooted in belief and enacted through ritual, and tales of goblins and fairies and witches, told to raise shivers of pleasurable fear on a dark winter night. By uncoupling itself from belief, the vision of myth/fairy tale can be angled more sharply towards other tasks.

More here.

Hormones, not sexism, explain why fewer women than men work in banks

From The Economist:

ScreenHunter_02 Aug. 28 00.12 That the risk-taking end of the financial industry is dominated by men is unarguable. But does it discriminate against women merely because they are women? Well, it might. But a piece of research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University, near Chicago, suggests an alternative—that it is not a person’s sex, per se, that is the basis for discrimination, but the level of his or her testosterone. Besides being a sex hormone, testosterone also governs appetite for risk. Control for an individual’s testosterone levels and, at least in America, the perceived sexism vanishes.

More here.

What Should Colleges Teach?

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

ScreenHunter_01 Aug. 27 23.14 A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.

As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research.

More here.

Jean-Louis Kerouac

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On a cold spring evening, a cluster of hipsters, aging hippies, writers, and professors convenes at 680 Park Avenue, scaling the spiral staircase that Michelle Pfeiffer rather more elegantly ascended in the movie version of The Age of Innocence. The century-old mansion once housed the Soviet Mission to the United Nations; today it is the headquarters of the Americas Society, a non-profit body created with Rockefeller money, and dedicated to fostering cultural and political ties between the US and its neighbours in the western hemisphere. Perched on chairs below the ballroom’s glittering chandeliers, the audience listens as Daniel Shapiro, a New York poet and translator who serves as the society’s director of literature, introduces a blue-chip panel speaking on the topic of Jack Kerouac: An Unlikely Franco-American Writer. Franco-American? Bien sûr. Kerouac’s given name wasn’t Jack; it was Jean-Louis. His mother tongue wasn’t English; it was French. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of immigrants from Quebec; on his mother’s side, he was related to René Lévesque. Indeed, tonight’s event is co-sponsored by the Association internationale des études québécoises and the Quebec government’s office in New York.

more from Mark Abley at The Walrus here.

Japan and Turkey form an alliance to attack the US

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In 1492, Columbus sailed west. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. These two events bracketed the European age. Once, Mayans lived unaware that there were Mongols, who were unaware there were Zulus. From the 15th century onwards, European powers collectively overwhelmed the world, creating the first truly global geopolitical system in human history, to the point where the fate of Australian Aborigines was determined by British policy in Ireland and the price of bread in France turned on the weather in Minnesota. Europe simultaneously waged a 500-year-long civil war of increasing savagery, until the continent tore itself apart in the 20th century and lost its hold on the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer a single European nation that could be considered a global power of the first rank. Another unprecedented event took place a decade or so earlier. For 500 years, whoever controlled the North Atlantic controlled Europe’s access to the world and, with it, global trade. By 1980, the geography of trade had shifted, so that the Atlantic and Pacific were equally important, and any power that had direct access to both oceans had profound advantages. North America became the pivot of the global system, and whatever power dominated North America became its centre of gravity. That power is, of course, the United States.

more from George Friedman at The New Statesman here.

hiding in plain sight

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What is never in doubt is Dylan’s enduring ability to connect with a new audience who are discovering his older classics for the first time. Still alive, still active, still Number One, he is taking us into uncharted territory in what was once considered a young man’s game. Together Through Life, indeed. The new record is lazy and charming, full of riffs borrowed and blue, befitting a songwriter with nothing left to prove. For someone who never looked back, and advised against it, most of the “late style” lyrics are nostalgic, as are the accompanying interviews: radio isn’t as good as it was when he was young, people aren’t in love like they used to be. In fact, quite how much of the album Dylan wrote is obscure. Those lines not purloined from old blues songs may well have been written by The Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter, whom Dylan “hired” as a collaborator. So now is the perfect time to take stock of the catalogue. Clinton Heylin has been an indefatigable chronicler of Dylan since the 80s when he co-founded Wanted Man, The Bob Dylan Information Office, with its fanzine/journal the Telegraph, under the editorship of John Bauldie. In the world of Wanted Man, Heylin was an extremely affable and opinionated conversationalist, always the man most likely to turn his passion into a career. He has written the best Dylan biography (Behind The Shades, 2001, since revised as Behind The Shades Revisited, 2003) and a day-to-day guide (Stolen Moments, 1988). His Bob Dylan: The recording sessions, 1997, followed soon after Marc Lewisohn’s classic The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, and the new book capitalizes on Ian MacDonald’s song-by-song Beatles book Revolution In The Head (to the title of which Heylin’s obviously alludes).

more from Wesley Stace at the TLS here.

The Unlikely Writer: Atul Gawande

From Harvard Magazine:

Atul If Gawande is an unlikely surgeon, envisioning a career in medicine, more generally, was easy. He grew up in Athens, Ohio, the son of a urologist father and a pediatrician mother, and he has often said that following them into the field seemed so inevitable that he tried every way he could think of to avoid it. Careers he considered along the way included philosophy and politics; they did not include writing. His first published writing for a popular audience, in 1996, came at the invitation of Jacob Weisberg, a friend from Gawande’s time at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Despite Gawande’s lack of writing experience, Weisberg, who helped found the online magazine Slate and later edited it, had a hunch that his friend would be good at explaining medicine to a lay audience. Besides, he was encouraged by what he knew of Gawande’s personal qualities: “Atul goes at everything in an incredibly focused, driven way. The odds of him not making something work are a lot lower than they would be with anybody else.”

More here.

Are the Brains of Reckless Teens More Mature Than Those of Their Prudent Peers?

From Scientific American:

Are-teens-who-behave-reck_1 Thrill seeking and poor judgment go hand in hand when it comes to teenagers—an inevitable part of human development determined by properties of a growing but immature brain. Right? Not so fast. A study being published tomorrow turns that thinking upside down: The brains of teens who behave dangerously are more like adult brains than are those of their more cautious peers. Psychologists have long believed that the brain's judgment-control systems develop more slowly than emotion-governing systems, not maturing until people are in their mid-20s. Hence, teens end up taking far more risks than adults do. Evidence supporting this idea comes from studies looking at functional and structural properties of gray matter, the important part of the brain that contains the neurons that relay brain signals.

At least two observations undermine this theory, however. First, American-style teen turmoil is absent in more than 100 cultures around the world, suggesting that such mayhem is not biologically inevitable. Second, the brain itself changes in response to experiences, raising the question of whether adolescent brain characteristics are the cause of teen tumult or rather the result of lifestyle and experiences. Because brain research is virtually always correlational in design, determining whether brain properties are causes or effects is impossible.

More here.

Remembering Ted Kennedy

1251296493-largeRobert Scheer in The Nation:

Unable to move with his brothers' intellectual alacrity, sometimes plodding in impromptu expression but smooth and skillful while reading from a script, the youngest Kennedy made up for his shortcomings early in his Senate career by resolutely working the substance of issues. His principled determination, plus his capacity to truly care about the real-world outcomes of legislation for ordinary people rather than its impact on his or anyone else's election, became his signature qualities as a lawmaker. But for those same reasons, he also wanted legislation passed, and his ability to work with the opposition, as he did three years ago with John McCain on immigration reform, now grants him a legacy as one of the nation's great senators.

Oddly enough, for one born into such immense familial expectations, he was a surprisingly accessible and down-to-earth politician in the eyes of most journalists who covered him. I think of him as always authentic and never oily. As opposed to most politicians, the offstage Ted Kennedy was the more appealing one.

Although he excelled as an orator, never more so than delivering the speech that Bob Shrum crafted for him at the 1980 Democratic Convention but which was informed by Kennedy's own deeply felt passion, it was in his less choreographed moments that he was at his best.

Are Heavily Computational Complex Systems Approaches Killing Science?

88-avatar-nieXV79Zus_-8TxW1C79_Michael White makes the case over at Adaptive Complexity (via Sci Tech Daily):

Many of these researchers don’t understand what it means to test a theory. They build these complex models, which involves making important assumptions that could easily be wrong, and then if their models fit existing data, they think the model is right.

Hence you get this McColloh guy claiming that his network analysis model was responsible for a big drop in sniper attacks, ignoring the much more obvious and plausible causes for the drop in violence: the addition of 30,000 troops and the US Military’s major new approach to counterinsurgency implemented by Petraeus. The network researchers can’t justify ruling out the more obvious explanation; their only retort is to say that their critics don’t understand their fancy methods. (Which is not true in many cases – there are plenty physicists, biologists, and economists who understand the mathematical/statistical/computational techniques, who are bothered by the scientific culture of complex systems research.)

This a dangerous mindset to have in science. What these researchers are doing is practicing a sham form of science called by Feynman Cargo Cult Science:

There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

And no, that does not mean simply training your model on half of your data set and showing that you can effectively explain the other half of your data.

space, again

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Four decades have passed since the first small step on the dusty surface of our nearest neighbor in the solar system in 1969. It has been almost that long since the last man to walk on the Moon did so in late 1972. The Apollo missions were a stunning technological achievement and a significant Cold War victory for the United States. However, despite the hope of observers at the time—and despite the nostalgia and mythology that now cloud our memory—Apollo was not the first step into a grand human future in space. From the perspective of forty years, Apollo, for all its glory, can now be seen as a detour away from a sustainable human presence in space. By and large, the NASA programs that succeeded Apollo have kept us heading down that wrong path: Toward more bureaucracy. Toward higher costs. And away from innovation, from risk-taking, and from any concept of space as a useful place. In a sense, Apollo occurred too soon. Had you asked the boldest science fiction writers in, say, 1954 whether men would walk on the Moon within a decade and a half, they would have scoffed—and justifiably so. Even though writers of fiction and nonfiction alike had theorized for decades about putting objects into orbit, and even though work was already underway in 1954 to put the first small unmanned satellites into orbit, the notion that we could develop so rapidly the capability to put men on the Moon on a politically feasible budget would have seemed ludicrous.

more from Rand Simberg at The New Atlantis here.

frankly

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With all due respect to the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, the Left Bank literati, and the Rent guy, the only version of bohemianism that has ever mattered to me came from Robert Frank. I discovered The Americans, his book of photographs, in 1986, after fleeing the suburbs for New York. I was wallowing in the music of the Replacements and the films of Jim Jarmusch, and Frank’s 1959 work captured my feelings of being part of the world yet estranged from it. The pictures of rural-Mississippi riversides and ravaged Montana mining towns beckoned toward a country I had yet to explore; his subjects—bummed-out lunch-counter patrons, business-suited fat cats, religious crazies—evoked the fantastic hodgepodge I saw on the Lower East Side. And Frank’s unapologetically critical view of cozy Eisenhower-era consumerism resonated with my own hysterical alienation from Reagan’s eighties. In The Americans, the rich are gargoyles; the poor, the outsiders—queers, blacks, Hispanics—radiate pride and authenticity. They are, to cop one of his friend Jack Kerouac’s favorite words, “holy.”

more from Karen Schoemer at New York Magazine here.

berlin 2009

Risen-Bohemian

Most Berliners I know—a generally liberal bunch and pretty typical for the city—tell me the police are playing up the leftists’ role, and they downplay conservative chatter about a coming wave of leftwing violence. But they don’t deny that the city is restless. Many Berliners in the central districts are unhappy over the city government’s support for commercial development, high-end condo construction, and everything else that falls under the rubric of gentrification. Berlin suffers from all the same problems faced by once-derelict, suddenly trendy cities worldwide: rising rents, capricious developers, rezoning. But unlike residents in, say, Portland, Ore., many Berliners place little faith in the legislative process. Direct action, at least for the young, is still a preferred form of social activism. Earlier this summer more than 1,000 protesters clashed with police outside the shuttered Tempelhof airfield; developers and allies in the government want to turn much of the 450 acres into mixed-use neighbourhoods, while local activists want it to be a new city park. And there are recurrent street fights over Mediaspree, a public-private effort to turn a stretch of riverbank southeast of the city center that is currently home to a bevy of artist collectives and dance clubs, into a home for IT, media, PR, and graphic design firms, with a heavy dollop of corporate entertainment on top—the newly opened hockey stadium, sponsored by the O2 cell phone company, was christened with a concert by Tina Turner.

more from Clay Risen The Morning News here.

Wednesday Poem

When we Lean Against Each Other . . .

A man on the edge of the bath. A shoe, defenseless
on the floor. Her head wrapped in a towel.
Two arms with a dress in the air. Two dimples in a back.

A telephone with a flashing display: I can hear you . . .
please listen to me . . . I can feel your hands on our cheeks . . .
please feel my hand on your heart . . .

A man on the edge of the bed. A woman on her belly.
An arm, dangling over the edge. Mouth-to-mouth every millimetre
of her back in to life
– eyeball, spinning under the eyelid:

a man and a woman lean against each other. The woman tilts her head,
breathes in and closes her eyes, gently presses an auricle to his chest
as if she may listen to the coming of age
of the avalanche.

by Peter Verhelst

Translation: Astrid van Baalen, 2009

Getting at the Heart of Kindness

From The Washington Post:

Book “On Kindness” is just a little over 100 pages long, but those pages are tightly packed with insights into our riven human heart. More accurately, I should say “the human psyche,” because one of the authors, Adam Phillips, is a distinguished psychoanalyst who has written about his work in scores of elegant essays collected in a dozen slender volumes, among them “Side Effects,” “On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored” and “Going Sane.” The other author, Barbara Taylor, is an award-winning historian whose books include “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination” and “Eve and the New Jerusalem.” How the pair actually worked together isn't explained, but the resulting text — an essay in five chapters — is seamless and a pleasure to read, though it does demand close attention.

“Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers.” But Phillips and Taylor show that kindness — “the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself” — is essential to our humanity. “Indeed it would be realistic to say that what we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other.” What kindness does is “open us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread.” I'll come back to that “dread.”

More here.

Frog serenade foiled

From Nature:

Frog Frogs in the Australian metropolis of Melbourne are having trouble getting together to mate, and the culprit is traffic noise, according to Kirsten Parris, an ecologist at the University of Melbourne. One species of frog is even changing the pitch of its love song to be heard above the roar of the road, she reported on 20 August at the International Congress of Ecology in Brisbane, Australia.

Parris visited many urban ponds and pools inhabited by frogs, measuring traffic noise, which is, unfortunately, at the same low frequencies as many frog mating calls. For a frog such as the onomatopoeic 'pobblebonk' (Limnodynastes dumerilii), she found that a call that could originally be heard by a female 800 metres away may only carry 98 metres above 60 decibels of traffic noise, an average value for Melbourne. She has also discovered that the southern brown tree frog (Litoria ewingii) seems to be compensating for the traffic noise by increasing the pitch of its calls (listen to before and after calls).

More here.

Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice

SenjusticeIn the Economist, a review of Amartya Sen’s new book:

Two themes predominate [in The Idea of Justice]: economic rationality and social injustice. Mr Sen approaches them alike. He can, when he wants, theorise without oxygen at any height. But he believes that theory, to be of use, must keep its feet on the ground. Modern theorists in his view have drifted too far from the actual world.

Economists have tended to content themselves with a laughably simple picture of human motivation, rationality and well-being. People are not purely self-interested. They care for others and observe social norms. They do not always reason “instrumentally”, seeking least-cost means to given ends. They question the point of their aims and the worth of their wants. Well-being, finally, has no single measure and is not inscrutable to others. Its elements are many and do not boil down to “utility” or some cash-value equivalent.

Complexity, though, need not breed mystery. Well-being’s diverse elements (freedom from hunger, disease, indignity and discrimination, to name four) are generally observable and, he believes, measurable. They are, to put it crudely, matters of fact, not taste, even if his philosophical story—that what underpins the several elements of well-being is that they all extend people’s “capabilities”—is still argued over.

Rawls held that social justice depended on having just institutions, whereas Mr Sen thinks that good social outcomes are what matter. Strictly both could be right. The practical brunt of Mr Sen’s criticism, however, is that just institutions do not ensure social justice. You can, in addition, recognise social injustices without knowing how a perfectly fair society would arrange or justify itself. Rawlsianism, though laudable in spirit, is too theoretical, and has distracted political philosophers from corrigible ills in the actual world.