David Meskhi. “23” from the series “When the Earth Seems to be Light”, 2008.

More on this young Georgian photographer here, here and here.

Scott McLemee over at Inside Higher Ed:

How Playboy brought carnal and acquisitive desires into alignment is the central concern of [Carrie] Pitzulo’s study. She focuses on the magazine’s first two decades, from its debut in 1953 through a mutually polemical encounter with radical feminism in the early 1970s. In the uncorrected page proofs sent out to reviewers, she refers to the book a couple of times by the title For the Articles — a nod to the old joke explaining why one read Playboy. Presumably this was the title it bore when the project started out as a dissertation. (Pitzulo is now assistant professor of history at the University of West Georgia.) This has been corrected in the final version — and in any case, Bachelors and Bunnies is both a better title and more fitting, since its argument is that Playboy's agenda was, at heart, emancipatory for men and women alike.

As the magazine came on the scene in the 1950s, pundits were in the midst of brow-furrowing over a “crisis in masculinity.” Expansion of the professional-managerial class meant that there were more guys working at desks than ever. Women had increasing power in the marketplace, and lots of them were having careers. Some of the rough-hewn male virtues of yesteryear, such as indifference to fashion and a distaste for luxury, were becoming inappropriate in an affluent society. However suitable in the day of the covered wagon, they now slowed the wheels of commerce. “This translated into a cultural angst over the ability of middle-class men to maintain their traditional authority in the home, workplace, and world,” Pitzulo writes.

A new, alternative code of masculinity could be found in the pages of Playboy. It was completely urban and tended towards a sophistication verging on dandyism. While displaying an aversion toward being domesticated by women, it was unambiguously (even strenuously) heterosexual. A man had to know how to consume, and women were there for the consuming. You used the best available hi-fi to play the coolest possible jazz album for that secretary you met in the elevator; soon she would be wearing only a smile, just like this month’s centerfold.

Mark O'Connell over at the Millions:

[T]hree or four years ago, something changed. For some reason I can’t recall (probably a longish lapse in productivity on my thesis) I set myself the task of reading a Great Big Important Novel. For another reason I can’t recall (probably the fact that it had been sitting on a shelf for years, its pages turning the sullen yellow of neglected great books), I settled on Gravity’s Rainbow. I can’t say that I enjoyed every minute of it, or even that I enjoyed all that much of it at all, but I can say that by the time I got to the end of it I was glad to have read it. Not just glad that I had finally finished it, but that I had started it and seen it through. I felt as though I had been through something major, as though I had not merely experienced something but done something, and that the doing and the experiencing were inseparable in the way that is peculiar to the act of reading. And I’ve had that same feeling, I realize, with almost every very long novel I’ve read before or since.

You finish the last page of a book like Gravity’s Rainbow and—even if you’ve spent much of it in a state of bewilderment or frustration or irritation—you think to yourself, “that was monumental.” But it strikes me that this sense of monumentality, this gratified speechlessness that we tend to feel at such moments of closure and valediction, has at least as much to do with our own sense of achievement in having read the thing as it does with a sense of the author’s achievement in having written it. When you read the kind of novel that promises to increase the strength of your upper-body as much as the height of your brow—a Ulysses or a Brothers Karamazov or a Gravity’s Rainbow—there’s an awe about the scale of the work which, rightly, informs your response to it but which, more problematically, is often difficult to separate from an awe at the fact of your own surmounting of it.

The upshot of this, I think, is that the greatness of a novel in the mind of its readers is often alloyed with those readers’ sense of their own greatness (as readers) for having conquered it. I don’t think William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, for instance, is nearly as fantastic a novel as people often claim it is. But it is one of the most memorable and monumental experiences of my reading life. And these are the reasons why: because the thing was just so long; because I had such a hard time with it; and because I eventually finished it.

A video over at Reset DOC.

An interview with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran over at Neurophilosophy:

I visited Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's lab at the University of California, San Diego recently, and interviewed him and several members of his lab about their work. Rama and I talked, among other things, about the controversial broken mirror hypothesis, which he and others independently proposed in the early 1990s as an explanation for autism. I've written a short article about it for the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), and the transcript of that part of the interview is below. I also wrote an article summarizing the latest findings about the molecular genetics of autism, which were presented in a symposium held at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting last November.

MC: Autism is an umbrella term referring to numerous conditions. Can the broken mirror hypothesis account for all of them?

Ramachandran: Autism is characterized by a specific subset of symptoms. There may be three or four that are lumped together, but by and large it is one syndrome, as good a syndrome as any in neurology. It's not like dyslexia, where there are half a dozen or a dozen types. With autism, people are debating whether high functioning and low functioning autistics should be lumped together or not. There's a tendency to group them together rather than saying they're distinct.

We have suggested that the mirror neuron system is deficient in autism, and there's mixed evidence of that, but most groups support our view. [Marco] Iaconobi's group at UCLA did a brain imaging study showing that the mirror neuron system is deficient, but others claim that it's normal. That may partly be based on the heterogeneity of autism. The mirror neuron system itself could be normal but its projections, or the regions it's projecting to, could be abnormal. It's still up in the air.

A Soul, Geologically

The longer we stay here the harder
it is for me to see you.

Your outline, skin
that marks you off
melts in this light

and from behind your face
the unknown areas appear:

hills yellow-pelted, dried earth
bubbles, or thrust up
steeply as knees

the sky a flat blue desert,

these spaces you fill
with their own emptiness.

Your shape wavers, glares
like heath above the toad,

then you merge and extend:
you have gone,
in front of me there is a stone ridge.

Which of these forms
have you taken:

hill, tree clawed
to the rock, fallen rocks worn
and rounded by the wind

You are the wind,
you contain me

I walk in the white silences
of your mind, remembering

the way it is millions of years before
on the wide floor of the sea

while my eyes lift like continents
to the sun and erode slowly

by Margaret Atwood
from Margaret Atwood Selected Poems
Simon and Shuster, 1976

From Guernica:

Zero Bridge, the first narrative film to emerge from the devastated state of Kashmir in forty years, had its theatrical release earlier this year at the Film Forum in New York City. It is the first feature film from Tariq Tapa, who made it more or less on his own: he wrote it, shot it, cast it, even gaff-taped the microphones for it, with only the equipment he could fit into a backpack and for less than what some filmmakers pay for a single camera. The New York Times called the film “a moving slice of life from a corner of the world usually seen only in news reports or as a mountainous backdrop for Bollywood musicals.”

The movie subverts expectations a viewer is likely to have for a story set in Kashmir. The region has long been a place of violence and has been a primary cause of conflict between India and Pakistan since the 1947 partition. An indigenous movement for independence exploded there in 1989, leading to India’s military occupation and a period of vicious guerrilla combat. Violent uprisings against the Indian army have occurred regularly since the end of the 1990s, and thousands—some say tens or hundreds of thousands—of Kashmiris have been killed or disappeared since the start of the insurgency. Fighting, poor infrastructure, poverty, and unregulated pollution have eroded the region’s stunning natural beauty.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

“Human beings are more or less like a computer,” Jian-Jun Shu tells PhysOrg.com. “We do computing work, and our DNA can be used in computing operations.” Shu is a professor at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Nanyang Technical University in Singapore. “For some problems, DNA-based computing could replace silicon-based computing, offering many advantages.” “Silicon-based computing relies on a binary system,” Shu explains. “With DNA-based computing, you can do more than have ones and zeroes. DNA is made up of A, G, C, T, which gives it more range. DNA-based computing has the potential to deal with fuzzy data, going beyond digital data.”

Shu and his students manipulated strands of DNA at the strand level and at the test tube level. They found that they could fuse strands together, as well as cut them, and perform other operations that would affect the ability of the DNA to compute. In this model, DNA molecules are used to store information that can be used for computational purposes. “We can join strands together, creating an addition operation, or we can divide by making the DNA smaller by denaturization,” Shu says. “We expect that more complex operations can be done as well.”

More here.

Marx and Lenin both liked a joke. So they would have appreciated the irony that, since the ongoing financial crisis began, their analyses of unstable, destructive capitalism has been spectacularly confirmed at the same time that the movement they ostensibly inspired (and for a time, involuntarily gave their names to) lies powerless and moribund. All of capitalism’s house journals have run some obligatory article since 2008 asking: “Was Marx right?” but the proletarian revolution has singularly failed to rise in response. There have been very exciting, even epochal outbreaks of revolt, but whether democratic pan-Arabism or internet-assisted student autonomism, they don’t threaten capitalism itself. These two short books don’t explore this irony, but, in the absence of the movement, they offer challenges to our received ideas about communism. Of the two, Why Marx Was Right, by prolific academic populariser and scourge of English letters Terry Eagleton, is the less controversial. As he acknowledges, our age of no-strings-attached state handouts to banks and punitive cuts to social services has embraced a form of capitalism so grotesque that it resembles the caricatures of the most leaden Soviet satirists. Eagleton presents his book as the fruit of “a single, striking thought: what if all the objections to Marx’s thought are mistaken?” In order to demonstrate this, each of the chapters of this erudite yet breezy (occasionally too breezy) tract begins with a series of assertions about Marx and Marxism, which Eagleton then proceeds to debunk, one by one.

more from Owen Hatherley at The Guardian here.

“There’s so many sides to Bob Dylan, he’s round,” recalls one of the singer-songwriter’s old Woodstock buddies, quoted in just about every book ever written on Dylan. Like a planet, then, with its own rarefied atmosphere and a gravitational pull that has brought more than one hopeful author crashing to the ground. How to write about Dylan? To engage with him as a fan is to risk high-temperature sycophancy and subsequent ridicule; but to approach him as a scholar is fraught with even greater dangers. Since his earliest days, Dylan has indulged in the art of playful deceit. He made up stories, lied to his loved ones and treated his casual interlocutors with even more contempt than his colleague-in-mischief, John Lennon. Here is a typical exchange, from Robert Shelton’s early account of a 1965 press conference, freshly re-edited in time for Dylan’s 70th birthday on Tuesday: “Q: Who are your favourite performers, I don’t mean folk, I mean general?” “A: Rasputin. Charles de Gaulle. The Staple Singers.” It is a reply that owes more to Dadaist disdain than the tinny tropes of showbusiness.

more from Peter Aspden at the FT here.