From City Journal:

For as long as big business has been around, management has operated under a simple principle: if you want people to do more of something, pay them more. Hence, bankers earn bonuses for posting big gains. Managers earn bonuses for meeting quarterly earnings targets (and get fired when they don’t). It’s worked reasonably well as the economy has trudged along over the past few decades.

But lately, people have begun questioning the efficacy of this approach. “In the first ten years of this century—a period of truly staggering underachievement in business, technology, and social progress—we’ve discovered that this sturdy, old operating system doesn’t work nearly as well” as it could, Daniel Pink writes in his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Why? The carrot-and-stick approach was created for an economy of assembly lines and mindless number-crunching. But these days, “for growing numbers of people, work is often creative, interesting, and self-directed rather than unrelentingly routine, boring, and other-directed,” says Pink, a former speechwriter for Al Gore whose previous book, A Whole New Mind, so captivated Oprah Winfrey that she gave copies to the entire 2008 graduating class at Stanford, where she delivered the commencement address.

An accumulating pile of academic research shows that rewards tend to focus the brain more narrowly on the specific task that earns the rewards—thus making it harder to encourage employees to develop creative, innovative solutions.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Francis Collins was appointed director of the National Institutes of Health (equivalent of the Medical Research Council) by President Obama in August 2009. He is the Pete Seeger of molecular biology. When he has made a great discovery he writes a song about it. And the connection is not just a matter of uplifting songs: Collins is a geneticist, but his spiritual, emotional and political inheritance comes from Roosevelt's New Deal (his parents worked with Eleanor Roosevelt), folk music and God, just as much as from Darwin, Mendel and Crick.

The cover of The Language of Life carries Obama's endorsement: “His groundbreaking work has changed the very ways we consider our health and examine disease.” His is a brilliant appointment, albeit controversial among some scientists: Collins is the highest-profile scientist and public administrator who is also a proselytising Christian. His previous book, The Language of God, contains both the most concise exposition I have read on why evolution is demonstrable fact and a moving account of his religious conversion from early atheism to strong belief. This stance has brought him into conflict both with Richard Dawkins and with Christian groups in the US. But, as right-wing attacks on evolution and global warming science broaden into a generalised anti-science movement, Collins is an important figure – someone who can wrong-foot people who have polarised attitudes.

In his new book, he is here to tell us that the era of personalised genetic testing is nigh.

More here.

Fodor makes his strongest case here, I think:

D.D. Guttenplan and Maria Margaronis in The Nation:

Its leaders may not wear white hats–or wings–but most people would put Amnesty International on the side of the angels. Decades of denunciations by dictators across the political spectrum have only increased the organization's prestige. Yet in recent weeks a new wave of criticism has portrayed Amnesty as “a threat to human rights,” whose “leadership is suffering from a kind of moral bankruptcy.” And this time the attack, which may affect not only Amnesty's reputation but also its funding, originates inside Amnesty itself.

Gita Sahgal is the head of Amnesty's gender unit and has a long and distinguished track record as a fighter for women's rights here in Britain and in South Asia. In February she gave an interview to the Sunday Times objecting to Amnesty's collaboration with Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo prisoner who has been touring Europe on behalf of Amnesty's campaign to persuade other countries to admit inmates from the detention center in Cuba. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain's most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment,” Sahgal said. Claiming she had gone public only after her bosses brushed aside repeated attempts to raise the issue internally, Sahgal, who was immediately suspended by Amnesty, soon became an international cause célèbre. Salman Rushdie issued a statement in her support; so did feminist groups and bloggers in Algeria, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and the United States. Christopher Hitchens wrote a column (a reprise, with variations, of a 2005 piece branding Amnesty's advocacy for Guantánamo detainees a “disgraceful performance”) urging Amnesty supporters to “withdraw funding until Begg is cut loose.”

Sahgal's case was also taken up with relish by Britain's self-styled “decent left” of journalists and commentators, whose superior moral compasses led them to support the invasion of Iraq–unlike Sahgal, who opposed it. The controversy offered a convenient distraction from February's headlines revealing that officials of MI5, the British security service, were complicit in the CIA's torture of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident detained in Guantánamo from 2004 to 2009. On March 8 the British government went to court to argue that a civil suit by Begg, Mohamed and other former Guantánamo detainees seeking damages for their mistreatment should be heard entirely behind closed doors. For Moazzam Begg, Sahgal's accusations add insult to injury, branding as dangerous a man who was never charged with any crime, and undermining his efforts on behalf of his fellow prisoners.

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's exchange with Read Ned Block and Philip Kitcher,in the wake of Block and Kitcher's review of What Darwin Got Wrong, in the Boston Review:

When we were writing our book, it occurred to us that there was a kind of misinterpretation of which a very incautious reader might be guilty, and which we ought to do our very best to block. We did do our very best; but to no avail. Ned Block and Philip Kitcher make precisely the mistake that we’d dreaded. Worse, they then proceed to commit several other misreadings, the possibility of which, we admit, had not occurred to us. We’ll now do our very best to correct their mistakes, but time and space are pressing, and the opportunities for misinterpretation are, it appears, boundless.

First misreading: Block and Kitcher think we argue, erroneously, that “with respect to correlated traits in organisms—traits that come packaged together—there is no fact of the matter about which of the correlated traits causes increased reproductive success.” They then speculate that we are making “the very ambitious claim that whenever there are correlated traits there is no fact of the matter about which of the traits causes any effect.”

But, of course, we don’t believe, still less endorse, either of these theses. In fact, we think both are preposterous. We therefore spent our whole seventh chapter discussing a number of ways in which the causal roles of confounded variables can be, and routinely are, successfully distinguished. There are many such, the most obvious of which is perhaps John Stuart Mill’s “method of differences.” In effect, you run an experiment in which one but not the other of the correlated variables is suppressed. If you still get the effect, then it must be the variable you didn’t suppress that’s doing the causing. (If you think it’s maybe the ice rather than the alcohol that makes you tipsy, try taking one or other out, drink what’s left, and see what happens). People, scientists very definitely included, do this sort of experiment all the time. And often it works fine; we report lots of cases in our book. All this is familiar from Philosophy 101; do Block and Kitcher really believe that, old and case-hardened as we are, we could have failed to notice this?

A new biography of the Polish war correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski alleges that he frequently forged details, invented images and claimed to have witnessed events that he didn’t, in fact, witness. Gerald Posner resigned from the Daily Beast after admitting that he had lifted sentences from a Miami Herald editorial, a Miami Herald blog, Texas Lawyer magazine and a health journalism blog; Posner blamed the “warp speed of the net” and his “master electronic files system.” The publisher of Charles Pellegrino’s new book, “The Last Train to Hiroshima,” withdrew it from publication following allegations that Pellegrino had created characters and extensively used a source whose status as witness to the bombing of Hiroshima was fabricated. A review of John D’Agata’s “About a Mountain” criticized him for compressing the timeline of some of the events in the book — which he acknowledges doing in the afterword.

more from David Shields at the LAT here.

Shenk’s “ambitious goal,” he tells us, is to take this widely dispersed research and “distill it all into a new lingua franca, adopting helpful new phrases and metaphors” to replace old and misleading ones. Forget about genes as unchanging “blueprints” and talent as a “gift,” all tied up in a bow. “We cannot allow ourselves to think that way anymore,” he declares with some fervor. Instead, Shenk proposes, imagine the genome as a giant control board, with thousands of switches and knobs that turn genes off and on or tune them up and down. And think of talent not as a thing, but as a process; not as something we have, but as something we do. It’s ambitious indeed to try to overthrow in one go the conventional ideas and images that have accumulated since 1874, when Francis Galton first set the words “nature” and “nurture” against each other. Yet Shenk convinces the reader that such a coup is necessary, and he gets it well under way. He tells engaging stories, lucidly explains complex research and offers fresh insights into the nature of exceptional performance: noting, for example, that profound achievements are often driven by petty jealousies and resentments, or pointing out the surprising fact that great talent seems to cluster geographically and temporally, undermining the assumption that it’s all due to individual genetic endowments.

more from Annie Murphy Paul at the NYT here.

In Defence of Adultery

We don't fall in love: it rises through us
the way that certain music does –
whether a symphony or ballad –
and it is sepia-colored,
like split tea that inches up
the tiny tube-like gaps inside
a cube of sugar lying in a cup.
Yes, love's like that: just when we least
needed or expected it
a part of us dips into it
by chance or mishap and it seeps
through our capillaries, it clings
inside the chambers of the heart.
We're victims, we say: mere vessels,
drinking the vanilla scent
of this one's skin, the lustre
of another's eyes so skilfully
darkened with bistre. And whatever
damage might result we're not
to blame for it: love is an autocrat
and won't be disobeyed.
Sometime we manage
to convince ourselves of that.

by Julia Corpus

from In Defence of Adultery
publisher: Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 2003

Timothy Noah in Slate:

A friend of mine wrote the original script for a Hollywood movie I prefer not to name. The script was full of wonderful stuff, but the director gave it to another writer who crapped it up. So far, a familiar story. What happened next, though, was a little unusual. The director recognized the error of his ways—not completely enough to return to the original version, but enough to get my friend to put some of his wonderful stuff back in. The movie, although no masterpiece, ended up being a huge hit.

This is more or less the pattern health care reform has followed. The House passed a bill full of wonderful stuff, the Senate crapped it up (mainly by tossing out the public option), and now the House, with a strong assist from the Obama White House, has restored some of the House's wonderful stuff (though not, alas, the public option, whose inclusion in this round would doom the bill—not necessarily in the Senate, ironically enough, but in the House, where the Democratic leadership is still short a half-dozen or so votes). What we're left with falls short of what health care reform could have been—it's no masterpiece—but it's better than it almost was, and it lays a workable and long-overdue foundation for health policy in the United States that, I predict, will eventually win support even from the Republican Party. In spite of the dark threats we've been hearing. (Fred Barnes: “The Health Care Wars Are Only Beginning.” Booga-booga!) Assuming the damn thing passes.

More here. If you support passage of health care reform (as you should!), now is the time to write or call your representative in congress.

Curtis Silver in Wired:

Every day we follow a routine filled generally filled with the same day to day activities. Some of our routines vary from week to week and every once in a while we mix in other similarly mundane but less frequent activities. We have a passive acceptance of the behavior and mental state associated with these tasks, taking for granted the psychological possibilities that exist within each routine activity. From waking up, driving to work to going to lunch, on vacation or having sexual relations there are deeper meanings for our particular function in each of these seemingly mundane routine behaviors. It’s these deeper meanings that Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day seeks to explore and explain.

Author and former Oxford Philosophy Fellow Robert Rowland Smith takes the reader into a worm hole of psychology, sociology and theology when explaining these aforementioned every day activities. With help from some artists, philosophers, poets and some of the other great minds throughout history, Smith sets out to show us the hidden meanings in our daily lives.

For example, in reading Breakfast one of the most stunning revelations was how deeply rooted in psychology a simple act of taking your parents out to lunch actually is.

More here.

David Byrne on the song “Please Don't” from his album (with Fatboy Slim) Here Lies Love, at his own website:

Here’s the video for the Santigold track “Please Don’t.” We did a photo session for a magazine the other day, and I told the interviewer that on this song, by the time you get to the chorus, she owns it — she’s turned it into a Santigold song. Perfect.

There are six of these videos that have been completed for this project. Most, like this one, use news and archival footage to, well, show that every word of the song is true! Most of the lyrics on this one are lifted gently from interviews and quotations — the “please don’t” chorus especially. At some point as first lady, Imelda began to feel that she could help Philippine interests by charming world leaders into seeing things her way. “Handbag diplomacy” she called it — as she liked to imply that to solve a problem, she could bypass President Marcos and just grab a handbag and hop on a plane with some of her assistants. It sometimes worked! There was, for example, an Islamic-backed insurgency rising in the south of the Philippine archipelago, and she thought that a leader in that part of the world, Qaddafi in this case, might help pull the plug on that support if he saw things her way. Apparently he did — the funding stopped and the insurrection lost momentum, and she later described him as a pushover, a mama’s boy.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty at National Public Radio:

When Osama bin Laden declared war on the West in 1996, he cited the Quran's command to “strike off” the heads of unbelievers. More recently, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan lectured his colleagues about jihad, or “holy war,” and the Quran's exhortation to fight unbelievers and bring them low. Hasan is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last year.

Given this violent legacy, religion historian Philip Jenkins decided to compare the brutality quotient of the Quran and the Bible.

“Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible,” Jenkins says.

Jenkins is a professor at Penn State University and author of two books dealing with the issue: the recently published Jesus Wars, and Dark Passages , which has not been published but is already drawing controversy.

Violence in the Quran, he and others say, is largely a defense against attack.

“By the standards of the time, which is the 7th century A.D., the laws of war that are laid down by the Quran are actually reasonably humane,” he says. “Then we turn to the Bible, and we actually find something that is for many people a real surprise. There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide.”

More here.

From The Telegraph:

There is no doubt that Robert Winston is on the side of the angels: he is professor of science and society and emeritus professor of fertility studies at Imperial College, fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and, well, the list goes on. More than that, though, he has always been keen to popularise science, even going so far as to appear as a fertility consultant on The Archers.

His new book, then, a history of the potential hazards the human race has created each time we’ve come up with something new, ought to be a bracing combination of the stringent and the accessible. Winston argues that scientists should engage more closely with the rest of us. This way, we can ensure scientific discoveries are not abused – to create the flame-thrower, say – or used in such a way that any advances are not accompanied by lethal by-products, such as the H1N1 virus that comes from the intensive rearing of pigs.

More here.

From Nature:

When the sperm of different male insects meet inside a female, they use everything from wrestling to chemical warfare to try and fertilize as large a share of her eggs as possible, according to two studies published this week. The studies also show that females don't just let the battle take its course, but manipulate it to their own ends. A US team has genetically engineered fruitflies to produce sperm that fluoresce in different colours. The researchers use the technique to watch the sperm of different males as they jostled for position inside a female, giving a first look at sperm competition in action.

And researchers in Denmark and Australia have shown that the seminal fluid of some ants and bees aids a male's own sperm and attacks his rivals. But queen ants, which need huge sperm reserves for the long years of egg-laying ahead, suppress this competition. Both studies are published in Science. For the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster the most recent male to mate with a female fertilizes most of her eggs — 80% — and his predecessors lose out. But the mechanism by which the last male got this advantage wasn't known. “The female reproductive tract has been a black box,” says Scott Pitnick of Syracuse University in New York.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Gary Greenberg is a psychotherapist who joined a clinical trial for an antidepressant at a time when he was mildly depressed. He was diagnosed as severely depressed, got better, and found that his pill was a placebo. His book contains a major attack on antidepressants, and he blames the drug companies for the false advertising of their positive effects. He is also very critical of the concept of depression itself.

He is right that quite a lot of random clinical trials have failed to demonstrate the effectiveness of antidepressants – as opposed to placebos – in curing depression. However, he ignores the evidence that, for severe depression, they really can help. He accuses the drug industry of downplaying the numerous side-effects, such as the 774 papers showing their effect on sexual performance. In addition, he argues that the industry has successfully campaigned to persuade doctors and the public that they suffer in enormous numbers from a disease called depression when in fact they might not. Only someone who has not been seriously depressed could accept that. He suggests that those who benefit from antidepressants that raise serotonin levels might instead be thought of as suffering from Prozac-deficit disorder.

His main thesis seems to be that depression is not a disease or an illness.

More here.

James Traub in Foreign Policy:

Of the many levers Obama administration officials have installed on the mighty console that is AfPak strategy, the one to which the least attention has been paid is almost certainly the civilian assistance program in Pakistan. If journalists are embedding with USAID operatives in the vast, Taliban-plagued province of Baluchistan, not many of us have heard about it. And yet senior U.S. officials, most prominently Vice President Joe Biden, regularly note that Pakistan, with its 180 million people and nuclear stockpile, matters to the United States far more than Afghanistan. Thanks in no small part to Biden, who pushed legislation to massively increase civilian aid, Congress last fall passed the so-called Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill authorizing the expenditure of $7.5 billion in Pakistan over the next five years. Nowhere else does so much hang on the success or failure of development assistance.

And in few other places has the United States spent so much money so thoughtlessly in the past. In The Idea of Pakistan, historian Stephen P. Cohen concludes that decades of U.S. aid strengthened the hand of Pakistan's Army without making it pro-American and had economic consequences no less ambiguous, bolstering elites and self-appointed middlemen.

More here.

Mark David Chapman, the young assassin, was carrying two things with him when he shot and killed John Lennon on the steps of the Dakota apartments in Manhattan: a pistol and a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye. The function of the pistol was obvious. Less obvious was the function of J. D. Salin­ger’s novel. Yet the book, it seems fair to say, must have had some special significance to Mark Chapman. Any attempt to uncover its significance is, in the nature of the case, highly speculative. Yet some aspects of The Catcher in the Rye, set beside Mark Chap­man’s murder of John Lennon, seems so sug­gestive that not to speculate upon the connec­tions between the two seems a temptation impossible to forgo. J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951. Like the Beatles, whose rise to fame came about roughly thirteen years later, the novel’s adolescent hero, Holden Caulfield, became a spokesman for a genera­tion of rebellious, supposedly much-misun­derstood youth. An oversimplified yet func­tional reading of the Salinger novel might conclude that all that the book advocates would fall under the heading of “innocence” and all that it condemns falls under that of “phoniness.” Holden Caulfield, during his somewhat aimless ramble through New York, feels overwhelmed by the phoniness he finds all around him. He struggles to preserve his own tenuous hold on youthful innocence–or, as he sometimes puts it, “niceness”–and de­spairs when he finds that innocence lost or threatened in the young people around him.

more from Daniel Stashower at The American Scholar here.

Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years.” But this is nonsense. For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline. Globally, women today have half as many babies as their mothers did, mostly out of choice. They are doing it for their own good, the good of their families, and, if it helps the planet too, then so much the better. Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. As I show in my new book, Peoplequake, half the world already has a fertility rate below the long-term replacement level. That includes all of Europe, much of the Caribbean and the far east from Japan to Vietnam and Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Tunisia.

more from Fred Pearce at Prospect Magazine here.

Photography is dead. That news may come as a surprise, since obituaries about art tend to be written about painting. Invented in the 1830s, photo-graphy is still in its infancy as an art form compared to the centuries-old medium of painting. Despite inventions like portable paint tubes and fast-drying acrylic, painting has not undergone the transformations that digitalization is bringing to the medium of photography. Of course, I’m speaking about the death of film photography. Happy to save on the cost of film and the time taken to develop it, consumers embraced digitalization with such gusto that a whole industry is dying. In 2005, the film photography giant AgfaPhoto filed for bankruptcy. In 2009, Polaroid ceased the production of instant Polaroid film, and Kodak discontinued Kodachrome film. Digital photographs are not only cheaper and faster to produce; they can be stored endlessly and shared instantly with countless friends. Polaroids, though ‘instant’, could not be emailed and tweeted. For artists, such mass-market developments are turning film photography into a specialist field, like lithography.

more from Jennifer Allen at Frieze here.

Clary

Her cart like a dug-out canoe.
Had been an oak trunk.
Cut young. Fire-scoured.
What was bark what was heartwood: P u r e C h a r – H o l e
Adze-hacked and gouged.
Ever after (never not) wheeling hollow there behind her.
Up the hill toward Bennett Yard; down through Eight-Mile,
..the Narrows.
C o m e s C l a r y b y h e r e n o w
Body bent past bent. ……Intent upon horizon and carry.
Her null eye long since gone isingglassy, opal.
—The potent (brimming, fluent) one looks brown.
C o u r s e s C l a r y s u r e a s b a y o u t h r o u g h h e r e n o w
Bearing (and borne ahead by) hull and hold behind her.
Plies the dark.
Whole nights most nights along the overpass over Accabee.
C r o s s e s C l a r y b l e s s h e r b a r r o w u p t h e r e n o w
Pausing and voweling there— the place where the girl fell.
( …………. )
Afterwhile passing.
Comes her cart like a whole-note held.

by Atsuro Riley

from Poetry, Vol. 192, No.5, September
publisher: Poetry, Chicago, 2008