Daniel C. Dennett in the Washington Post:

Here are some questions that have haunted me for years. How many preachers actually believe what they say from the pulpit? We know that every year some clergy abandon their calling, no longer able to execute their duties with conviction. This can never be a decision taken lightly, and many of them labored on for years before taking the leap. Are they the tip of an iceberg? Is there a problem of deep hypocrisy separating many pastors from their flocks? What is it like to be a non-believing preacher? How do they reconcile their private skepticism with the obligations of their position? And how did they get into their predicament?

Several years ago I set out to get some answers, in collaboration with Linda LaScola, a clinical social worker with years of experience as a qualitative researcher. I had told her of my interviews with deeply religious people while writing my book, “Breaking the Spell” (2006), and of my surprise at how many of them were eager to tell me, in confidence, that they didn't believe a word of the doctrines of the faith to which they were devoting their lives. Was this also true of ordained clergy? With some help from me and a network of advisers, LaScola identified some brave informants, all currently Protestant pastors with congregations, and interviewed them at length and in depth–and of course in deep confidence.

More here. Also read “Preachers who are not Believers,” a study by Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

From Science:

Like many parents, my mother and father tried as hard as they could to make me feel special. They instilled in me the belief that my future success in life was assured, and I left home believing that I could accomplish just about anything. My parents didn't know that they were doing me a great disservice. Of course you are special. Everyone is special. But in the job market, you have to compete with all those other special people. You will face disappointment. You will fail sometimes. In my view, believing otherwise — believing that the constraints and realities that apply to other people don't apply to you — is a poor philosophy upon which to build a life and career.

There's an oft-cited stereotype about the generation now entering the workforce — Generation Y, or the “Millennials”: They have a sense of entitlement. That may or may not be true; I'm not here to reinforce the stereotype. But I will say that, no matter which generation you're from, a sense of entitlement is not an advantage in looking for a job or moving into a new one. Instead, you need to be practical, realistic, and clear-headed about your abilities — and your competition — not just now but at every career stage. In this month's Tooling Up column, I'm going to describe some of the lessons and pitfalls I've learned about being “special.” I'll also make a few suggestions that you can take away to help you manage the transition from this innate sense of specialness to a more durable life philosophy for success.

More here.

Ron Cowen in Science News:

The Grinch detested the noise created by the tiny residents of Whoville. Cosmologist Craig Hogan, in contrast, has become enamored of a noise he claims is generated by something even tinier — a minuscule graininess in the otherwise smooth structure of spacetime.

Call it Hogan’s noise. Many physicists are skeptical, but if his hunch about the existence of this subatomic clatter proves correct, it could have a mind-boggling implication: that the entire universe is nothing more than a giant hologram.

What’s more, it would mean that the structure of spacetime on subatomic scales might soon be revealed. “What’s new is that we can make a prediction and design an experiment to measure something on the tiniest of scales in the universe, and that’s what hasn’t been done before,” says Hogan, director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Ill., and a researcher at the University of Chicago.

In fact, it’s just possible that a detector in Hannover, Germany, built for an entirely different study, may have already recorded the noise generated by the smallest units of spacetime in the universe.

More here.

In the New Statesman:

There's a good deal of nostalgia in your new book, The Task of the Critic, for the “socialist culture” of the Seventies.

What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. One of Walter Benjamin's extraordinary achievements, for example, was to make a kind of revolutionary virtue out of a certain concept of looking back, or nostalgia. As a tutor at Oxford during that period, I could see all kinds of energies that simply had no outlet – all kinds of radical impulses that were rather inchoate, but certainly present. So I think nostalgia is justified to some extent.

There was at least one outlet for those energies, though: the Marxism seminar you ran at Wadham College, which you describe as a “hostel for battered leftists”. The left took even more of a battering in the intervening 30-odd years, didn't it?

I think the Gramsci formula about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will gets at something. But I was struck, when I spoke recently at King's College London, by the extraordinarily diverse number of militant projects and campaigns that were being either conducted or planned. It was like being back in the Seventies, or the late Sixties.

One of the leftist Oxford students from the earlier period whom you mention by name in the book is Christopher Hitchens. What do you make of his political trajectory?

I just turned down the offer of a public debate with him in the States. I've said what I want to say, and we wouldn't have got anywhere – it would only have been a sort of bloodsport.

Even then, Christopher was mesmerised by the idea of America. He always wanted a bigger scene.

What was definitive for him, politically, was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. I think that was the turning point. The deep Islamophobic impulse he has stems from that. But he's still an idiosyncratic mixture of various political attitudes that don't always go together.

And I wouldn't for a moment underestimate his formidable eloquence and intellectual resources. I think he is a superb writer. But I think that the radical was always at war with the public school boy who wanted to succeed.

Tony Judt and Kristina Božić in the LRB:

Europeans fell in love with Obama even before he became president. At the same time we are hardly aware of who our new president is, the president of the EU. The feelings aren’t reciprocal, are they?

Enthusiasm for Barack Obama in the US was initially huge, but it had a very domestic dynamic, it was a story about how America could elect a black person only 150 years after slavery, 40 after segregation ended. It meant – though this was a little too optimistic – that we were finally ready to put an end to the race question. That he would change policies, present a new face of America, bring an end to the Bush era and begin a new relationship between America and the world: these considerations mattered only to a small number of people. Here is the asymmetry between American and European expectations: Europeans believed there would be a radical improvement, a moral regeneration of US foreign policy; they are disappointed, or will be, because this isn’t going to happen. Americans’ expectations were partly fulfilled by Obama’s election itself. It was bound to be disappointing from there on: the first black man to be elected president of the United States was never going to be an out and out radical, a wild, courageous, path-breaking liberal or social democrat.

Obama is none of these things. He is a compromiser, constantly trying to build a bipartisan relationship between the Republicans and the Democrats. Furthermore, it might have been more obvious in the US than in Europe that Obama was very distinctly part of the American tradition of rhetoric. He is a great speaker, a great mover of crowds and, in a way, a great manipulator of morality and ethical ideals. This tradition goes from Adlai Stevenson all the way back to Abraham Lincoln and on. What Obama is missing is the ability to channel his rhetoric into political strengths. The danger we Americans see is that he will be weakened by the gap between his rhetoric and his actions. This is true for his policies in the Middle East, and to an extent also for his response to the economic crisis. Europeans don’t see this yet.

ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 1, 1934, a Belgian information scientist named Paul Otlet sat in silent, peaceful protest outside the locked doors of a government building in Brussels from which he had just been evicted. Inside was his life’s work: a vast archive of more than twelve million bibliographic three-by-five-inch index cards, which attempted to catalog and cross-reference the relationships among all the world’s published information. For Otlet, the archive was at the center of a plan to universalize human knowledge. He called it the Mundaneum, and he believed it would usher in a new era of peace and progress. The Belgian government, however, had come to view Otlet and his fine mess of papers, dusty boxes, and customized filing cabinets as a financial and political nuisance. Thirteen years earlier, Otlet’s Mundaneum—then called the Palais Mondial—had occupied 150 gleaming rooms in the Palais du Cinquatenaire in Brussels. Thousands of visitors a day filed through, marveling at the seven-foot-high card-catalog cabinets lining the walls of an eighty-foot-long room. Otlet and other scholars delivered lectures on topics such as “The Problems of Language” and “The Necessity for Dental Hygiene” in a thousand-seat auditorium. Scores of workers operated the Mundaneum’s search service, which employed the card catalog to answer questions from the public.

more from Molly Springfield at Triple Canopy here.

The dusty-pink flowers of the hellebore droop like the snowdrops, but its modesty is false. Unlike the pert green shoots of the bulbs, its leaves are tousled, as if it has woken from its winter’s sleep with bad hair. Hellebores come in a spectrum of colors. One winter-blooming pale-pink-and-white variety is called Christmas rose: a shepherd girl, weeping because she had nothing to offer the newborn Christ, attracted the attention of a sympathetic angel, who revealed the flower where her tears had fallen. But this particular specimen is no blushing virgin. Its petals (sepals, technically) are veined, green-tinged, leathery. They make me think of dragon wings, arresting and faintly menacing. Hellebore, from the Greek for “injure” and “food,” is poisonous and feared in folklore along with hemlock, nightshade, and aconite. In the 6th century B.C., the League of Delphi attacked the fortified city of Kirrha, poisoning the city’s water supply with crushed hellebore leaves, whereupon diarrhea besieged the defenders from within—an early act of chemical warfare. The mythological seer Melampus was summoned by the king of Argos when his three royal daughters suddenly shed their clothes and ran naked through the streets, mooing like cows, bewitched by Dionysus. Melampus brewed a potion of hellebore and restored the princesses to sanity, thereby winning one of them to wed. Perhaps the plant’s purgative properties expelled the lingering influence of the god of wine.

more from Janice P. Nimura at The Morning News here.

Is my wife having a baby? Am I going to see a death? Will I become a councillor? Am I going to be sold? Am I about to be caught as an adulterer? These are just a few of the ninety-two questions listed in one of the most intriguing works of Classical literature to have survived: the Oracles of Astrampsychus, a book which offers cleverly randomized answers to many of ancient life’s most troubling problems and uncertainties. The method is relatively straightforward, but with just enough obfuscation to make for convincing fortune-telling (“easy to use but difficult to fathom” as one modern commentator nicely put it). Each question is numbered. When you have found the one that most closely matches your own dilemma, you think of a number between one and ten and add it to the number of your question. You then go to a “table of correspondences” which converts that total into yet another number, which directs you in turn to one of a series of 103 lists of possible answers, arranged in groups of ten, or “decades” (to make things more confusing there are actually more lists of answers than the system, with its ninety-two questions, requires or could ever use). Finally, go back to the number between one and ten that you first thought of, and that indicates which answer in the decade applies to you.

more from Mary Beard at the TLS here.

From Nature:

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical 'ground state' — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as well as as atomic-scale particles. The work is simultaneously being published online today in Nature and presented today at the American Physical Society's meeting in Portland, Oregon.

According to quantum theory, particles act as waves rather than point masses on very small scales. This has dozens of bizarre consequences: it is impossible to know a particle's exact position and velocity through space, yet it is possible for the same particle to be doing two contradictory things simultaneously. Through a phenomenon known as 'superposition' a particle can be moving and stationary at the same time — at least until an outside force acts on it. Then it instantly chooses one of the two contradictory positions.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The quantum world may seem so small and weird that there's no connection with everyday reality, but that impression couldn't be further from the truth. Newly published studies – and a newly released documentary – explore the big frontiers of the quantum information revolution. Actually, quantum physics is as connected to everyday reality as the device that's displaying these words of mine. If it weren't for the quantum nature of light, inventions such as computers, TVs and DVD players would be impossible.

Some aspects of quantum mechanics are easier to understand than others, however. It's one thing to wrap your mind around the idea that light comes in individual packets called photons, and quite another to suggest that a single photon can travel along two paths at once. Or to suggest that two photons can be linked so strongly that doing something to one of them affects the other. Even Albert Einstein said that was “spooky.” It may be that our brains just aren't programmed to pick up on the weirder implications of quantum physics, such as superposition, information teleportation and particle entanglement. But Anton Zeilinger, a University of Vienna physicist who pioneered the technology behind teleportation, says that doesn't always have to be the case.

More here.

Rochelle Gurstein in Guernica:

It is an historical irony that in last two years’ public discussions about bailing out Detroit, what was once perceived as the death of dignified labor was portrayed by Republican lawmakers and reactionary journalists as a kind of overpaid, over-compensated worker’s paradise. This characterization of the reasonable wages, paid vacations and sick days, health insurance, and retirement packages that labor unions gained in exchange for workers relinquishing the skills required to build cars reveals a distressing loss of historical memory. What is more, this talk of pampered workers is an outrageous libel on the uneasy bargain to which middle-class workers—both blue and white-collar alike—eventually submitted, trading meaningful work for the promise of better working conditions, a higher standard of living, and increased leisure time.

For decades now, manufacturers have demonstrated their contempt for this trade-off. Claiming competitive threats from “the global market,” more and more manufacturers and associated industries have moved their factories outside the United States to take advantage of poor people who have no choice but to accept meager wages. As for the few remaining manufacturers that have kept their factories in the U.S., most notably, the automobile industry, last spring we heard their obscenely rich executives explain to Congress that the main reason their companies were failing was the extreme financial burden of their workers’ benefits.

As we know, President Obama has been intent on saving Detroit. Last year, in his address to Congress on February 24, he announced, “We are committed to the goal of a re-tooled, re-imagined auto industry that can compete and win. Millions of jobs depend on it; scores of communities depend on it, and I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”

More here.

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:

Once the unpleasantness at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had a little time to recede, America discovered that “the atom” wasn’t all bad. The bomb, yes—it was terrifying, as terrifying as a hundred 9/11s. American children got the wits scared out of them at school by being made to prepare for Armageddon by ducking, covering, and shutting their eyes tight lest the fireball melt them. Grownups were nervous, too, especially after 1949, when Stalin got his bomb. But in December of 1953 President Eisenhower went before the United Nations General Assembly to tell all mankind that the mushroom cloud had a silver lining. His plan, dubbed Atoms for Peace, promised “abundant electrical energy” for everyone.

Who could doubt that shining vision? Certainly not Lewis Strauss, Ike’s chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who predicted that nuclear technology would guarantee that “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.” Not Walt Disney, whose “Our Friend the Atom,” featuring a cartoon genie, entertained millions of schoolchildren fresh from ducking and covering. More surprising, in light of subsequent developments, Students for a Democratic Society, the paradigmatic organization of the new student left, had no doubts, either. S.D.S.’s founding document, the Port Huron Statement, issued in 1962, fretted at length about the Bomb. But among its Rousseauian “blueprints of civic paradise” was this:/p>

Our monster cities, based historically on the need for mass labor, might now be humanized, broken into smaller communities, powered by nuclear energy, arranged according to community decision.

The happy consensus did not last long. It was already breaking down by the nineteen-seventies, and by the late eighties it was gone, obliterated by the accidents at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979 (where no one was killed), and at Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986 (which caused thousands of deaths).

More here.

Rex Brynen in Foreign Policy:

Last week Palestinians marked the 1,000th day of the “siege” of the Gaza Strip. The continuing economic embargo, with its attendant social and economic effects on the more than 1.5 million Gazans, makes for a depressing story. Equally depressing is the extent to which this situation has somehow become accepted as normal and acceptable by much of the international community.

The “1000th day” is in some ways misleading, for Gaza has long endured economic restrictions. The Israeli military occupation after 1967 (or, for that matter, Egyptian administration before it) was never especially development-friendly. With the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 there was hope for future economic growth. Instead, however, some incidents of terrorism led to a sharp reduction in the number of Gazans permitted to work in Israel-from tens of thousands in the early 1990s, to essentially zero today. Increasing limits on Gaza's imports and exports followed, and intensified with the eruption of the second intifada in late 2000. With Hamas' victory in the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, as well as the seizure of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in June of that year, the restrictions tightened still further in an attempt to unseat the Islamist movement. When Hamas seized direct control of Gaza in June 2007, the Israeli government officially designated the territory as an “enemy entity.”

Today, what is or is not allowed into Gaza is never entirely clear and can change from month to month. Broomsticks and chamomile have recently been permitted; toys, music, books, and shampoo with conditioner have been prohibited; and the importation of pasta required the direct intervention of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

More here.

Marina Warner in The Liberal:

WRITERS don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew. If some individuals present weren’t acquainted with Odysseus’s wanderings or the Trojan War, and were listening in for the first time (as I was when a child, enthralled by the gods and goddesses in H.A. Guerber’s classic retelling), they were still aware that this was a common inheritance that belonged to everyone. Its single author – if Homer was one at all – acted as a conduit of collective knowledge, picking up the thread and telling it anew.

In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of The Arabian Nights’, Jorge Luis Borges praises the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become. Borges wasn’t a believer in anything – not even magic – but he couldn’t do without the fantastic and the mythological. He compiled a wonderfully quixotic and useful bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, to include the fauna of world literature: chimeras and dragons, mermaids and the head-lolling catoblepas whose misfortune is to scorch the earth on which he tries to graze with his pestilential breath. But Borges also included some of his own inventions – The Creatures who Live in Mirrors, for example, a marvelous twist on the idea of the ghostly double.

More here.

First you notice the dogs. In all other ways Freetown is a West African city like any other, of red dust and raised cries, forty-degree heat and a year neatly segmented into two – hot and dry, hot and wet. Today water tips from the sky. Beneath the canopy of a local store three street dogs and a man holding a briefcase stand and contemplate the rain. Another dog shelters beneath the umbrella of a cigarette seller. A fifth follows a woman across the street, literally dogging her footsteps, using her as a beacon to navigate the traffic and the floodwater. In the dry season the kings of the city are the dogs. They weave through the crowds, lie in the roadside shade watching through slitted eyes, they circle and squabble, unite in the occasional frenzied dash. For the most part the people and the dogs exist on separate planes. The dogs ignore the people, who likewise step around and over them. On the road the drivers steer around reclining animals. This city has more street dogs than any I have known.

more from Aminatta Forna at Granta here.

Anthill is E.O. Wilson’s first work of fiction. It contains what its title promises it will contain: an anthill, embedded at its core. Not a metaphorical anthill, a real anthill, filled to the brim with—well, ants. And thereby hangs its tale. People have long been fascinated by the similarities between ants and human societies. Though there are no ant symphony orchestras, secret police, or schools of philosophy, both ants and men conduct wars, divide into specialized castes of workers, build cities, maintain infant nurseries and cemeteries, take slaves, practice agriculture, and indulge in occasional cannibalism, though ant societies are more energetic, altruistic, and efficient than human ones. The mirroring makes us nervous: Are we not enough like ants or are we too much like them?

more from Margaret Atwood at the NYRB here.

A little while back, when I was working on one of my many doomed projects, I went into a cave. Not just a little cave, either, but an enormous emptiness in the ground, the trace of a watercourse that gnawed its way across half the state of Kentucky a few thousand years ago. We—this was my friend Wayne and I—went a long way in, then we sat down and turned off our lights. The darkness was like nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; after a while I could barely believe that my hand was there, in front of my face, 
waving. That darkness is what I think about when I think of black. I was going to write, the color black, but as every child knows black isn’t a color. Black is a lack, a void of light. When you think about it, it’s surprising that we can see black at all: our eyes are engineered to receive light; in its absence, you’d think we simply wouldn’t see, any more than we taste when our mouths are empty. Black velvet, charcoal black, Ad Reinhart’s black paintings, black-clad Goth kids with black fingernails: how do we see them?

more from Paul La Farge at Cabinet here.

Mark Vernon in The Guardian:

In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of Buddhism as the sleep of reason, and of Buddhists as discarding their minds as well as their sandals. His passionate diatribe appeared in 2007. So what's he doing now, just three years later, endorsing a book on Buddhism written by a Buddhist?

The new publication is Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Its author, Stephen Batchelor, is at the vanguard of attempts to forge an authentically western Buddhism. He is probably best known for Buddhism Without Beliefs, in which he describes himself as an agnostic. Now he has decided on atheism, the significance of which is not just that he doesn't believe in transcendent deities, but is also found in his stripping down of Buddhism to the basics.

Reincarnation and karma are rejected as Indian accretions: his study of the historical Siddhartha Gautama – one element in the new book – suggests the Buddha himself was probably indifferent to these doctrines. What Batchelor believes the Buddha did preach were four essentials. First, the conditioned nature of existence, which is to say everything continually comes and goes. Second, the practice of mindfulness, as the way to be awake to what is and what is not. Third, the tasks of knowing suffering, letting go of craving, experiencing cessation and the “noble path”. Fourth, the self-reliance of the individual, so that nothing is taken on authority, and everything is found through experience.

More here.