Would you like people with that city?

by Misha Lepetic

The world has not been at any time different than it is now.

– ślokavārtika

Lewis Mumford, perhaps the 20th century’s most broad-ranging and eclectic thinker and critic concerned with the American urban experience, is remembered mostly as a messenger of modernism. Certainly, his open contempt of architectural ornament and of the City Beautiful movement in general was, like many of his counterparts, influenced by the dark and overwrought Victorian era that preceded it. However, modernism in general was enamored of the opportunities extended by new building materials and techniques – materials such as steel, glass and concrete that would be combined to create entirely new structures such as skyscrapers – which empowered it to leave behind the context of place. In contrast, Mumford’s concern was primarily humanistic, that is, one where an act of planning or design was primarily about the way in which the social life of a town, city or neighborhood could be understood, and only then improved.

Geddes Mumford was greatly influenced by Patrick Geddes, a peripatetic Scot whose diverse explorations lead him to apply Spencer’s idea of biological evolution to the investigation of society – that “society itself was an organism and that social progress was analogous to biological change” (Wojtowicz, p11). Mumford’s idea of the regional survey as the principal tool by which society, economy and nature could be holistically apprehended was derived directly from Geddes’s idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary style of thinking.

Along with Geddes, Mumford was also deeply influenced by Ebenezer Howard, who authored the Garden Cities movement, which was designed to combat inner city squalor by redesigning the urban concept into large towns of about 30,000 inhabitants, surrounded by an agricultural belt meant to make the city nearly self-sufficient (Howard was perhaps the last urban planner to take into account that people needed to eat as well as work, shop and sleep). These cities were meant to foster a deep and proximate connection to nature, and were intended to remain insular, their centers connected by light rail.

In all, not many of these designs were executed, and New Yorkers wondering how far away one ought to build a Garden City are encouraged to visit Forest Hills Gardens, which is now a part of Queens. Rather, the modernist enterprise took off with full force, and the holistic approach that Geddes and Mumford sought was buried in the succeeding tidal waves of boom, bust, war and post-war prosperity.

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A Lament For Souza (In The Week Of Lucian Freud’s Death)

by Vivek Menezes

Not a single decade has passed, yet the circumstances of Francis Newton Souza’s last years already seem inconceivable. Souza Gallery One_jpeg

I’ve been stewing about this since coverage of the death of “Nudist painter Lucian Freud” inexplicably spread across the Indian press right into my morning papers here, a media backwater that is by far the smallest state in the country. But it was the same across the subcontinent – even the most obscure regional publications marshalled a deeply respectful send-off for the British painter.

Yet when Freud’s one time rival for the 1950’s London spotlight, the monumentally brilliant Indian painter Francis Newton Souza, died on 28 March, 2002 during a trip to Bombay, the news barely caused a ripple anywhere in the world.

He founded the Bombay Progressives in 1947 – unquestionably the single most important 20th century development for Indian art – but when he died in the same city more than 50 years later, Souza's body was consigned to shabby Sewri Cemetery, where only the unattached are sent to be buried. The old man had been near-indigent, selling his best work from the 1950's and 60's for two and three thousand dollars. Most of the stragglers graveside were art dealers, already jostling to feed from the artist’s corpus. It took no time at all for them to push his work to knock down million-dollar records at auction, but the shameful truth is that Souza burned livid right to the end of his life, shot through with pain about being abandoned, and totally ignored by the same trampling hordes of instant cognoscenti that now like to pretend they knew and acknowledged his worth all along. That's just a blatant, barefaced lie.

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The Dignity of Skepticism

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Empiricus

Being a responsible believer requires one to have reasons for one’s beliefs. In fact, it seems that having reasons for one’s beliefs is a requirement for seeing them as beliefs at all. Consider the conflict in thought that arises with assertions like the following:

I believe I live in Nebraska, but I have no idea why I believe that.

I hold firmly that there are jellybeans in that dish, but I have no reason for doing so.

I’m confident that it will not rain on the picnic, but I have no evidence for that.

I support a flat-tax system, but all of my information concerning economic matters is highly unreliable.

Statements like these are conflicted because in each the but-clause seems to retract the grounds for asserting what came before. To affirm, for example, that one lives in Nebraska is often to affirm also that that one has reasons that are sufficient to support that claim. Statements of the kind above, then, don’t look like they could be beliefs at all; they rather something else – perhaps a cognitive symptom, an obsession, a queer dogmatism.

We may say that beliefs are supposed to be not only reason-responsive, but reason-reflective. Our beliefs should be based on our evidence and proportioned to the force of our evidence. And so, when we hold beliefs, we take ourselves to be entitled to reason to and from them. So beliefs must be backed by reasons.

Reason-backing has a curious pattern, however. Each belief must be backed by reasons. But those backing reasons must themselves be backed by still further reasons. And so on. It seems, then, that every belief must be supported by a long chain of supporting reasons.

This is a point familiar to anyone who has spent time with children. Why? is a question that can be (and often is) asked indefinitely. The child’s game of incessantly asking why? may not be particularly serious, but it calls attention to the fact that, for every belief you hold, you ought to be able to say why you hold it.

These rough observations give rise to a deep problem, one that has been at the core of the philosophical sub-discipline of epistemology since its inception.

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Mindfulness meditation: A primer and some thoughts

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Laos-vipassana Among the meditative practices I’ve explored, Vipassana seems the one that is most easily seen as a principled way of exploring the structure of one’s experience and the one most easily separated from a religious or soteriological context. This is true even amongst the Buddhist meditations. For example, Zazen is fascinating but its goals seem different. It pays great attention to exactly how you should position your body but tells you little about what you should do with your mind. The idea seems to be that, since you are already enlightened, active exploration or instruction in mental technique is a hindrance, and you just need to recognize your inherent enlightenment. On the other end of the spectrum, the practices derived from the esoteric Buddhisms (like Shingon and the Tibetan schools) rely heavily on symbols and their unpacking. This is a simplistic classification and mindfulness meditation appears in the other Buddhist traditions (even if not as prominently), but it’s one that I think is roughly true.

The general principle in Vipassana is to train one’s attention through focus on a particular object and, once this is well-trained, to use it to observe the unfolding of experience. It’s effectively a systematic way of noticing experience. The breath is typically the chosen focus. As far as I can tell, this choice is semi-arbitrary but has a number of advantages. Apart from the comforting stamp of tradition, the breath is both ever-present but also changes with emotional and mental state, giving a good starting ground both for training concentration and for training mindfulness of the multiple aspects of one’s state.

So here’s a sketch of how you might start off:

Sit down (on a chair, on the floor, cross-legged or not, it doesn’t matter) and bring your attention to the edge of your nostrils, where your breath enters and leaves. Again, all you want is an anchor point that you can use to train your concentration and to return to when your mind starts to get swamped by thoughts. Other foci would work.

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The Shape of Things To Come: Saatchi Gallery, London

by Sue Hubbard

Saatchi Gallery, London. Until 16 October, 2011

ScreenHunter_13 Jul. 25 10.37 What, I wonder, would a visitor from the future make of the sculpture show The Shape of Things to Come at the Saatchi Gallery if they were to visit it, say, in a couple of hundred years time? What would it tell them of the state of the society that had made this artwork? Seen from such a distance those coming back from the future might be forgiven for thinking that this was an era of extreme distress, one that lacked confidence, dreams, vision and hope. Smashed cars wrapped around pillars, sexual orgies of faceless participants, horses in a state of destitution and collapse, and fragments everywhere speak of a community that has lost faith in itself and the future. Compared to the thrusting optimism of Modernism with its utopian faith in the benefits of technology and scientific progress, the world presented here is one of post-technological ruin, distortion and despair.

Previous shows put on by Saatchi have been packed full of irony, a cheeky in-your- face insouciance that when it first arrived in the brazen 80s and 90s was iconoclastic, witty and fun. But over the passing decades it has all too often become the default position of many young artists eager to make their mark. Form has dominated over content, while meaning and metaphor have often been subsumed to novelty for its own sake.

In contrast this show, rather ominously, opens with a gallery full of megalithic boulders. Kris Martin’s found stone slabs look like pre-historic monoliths from some lost pagan religion. Each is topped with a fragile, almost invisible paper cross. In its monumentality the piece is reminiscent of Joseph Beuys’s The End of the Twentieth Century. Its meaning is fluid. Man’s success in conquering the limits of awesome nature, the ruins of war and the collapse of civilisations are all implied. The tiny crosses equally suggest the shrinkage of faith in a late capitalist age or, depending on your point of view, act as tiny beacons of hope. “Dreams are what keep people going.” Martin says.

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How to Write about Congo

Book Review: Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. The Collapse of Congo and the Great War of Africa, Jason K. Stearns (Public Affairs: 380pp, 2011)

byDancing-in-the-Glory-of-Monsters-Stearns-Jason-9781586489298-1 Edward B. Rackley

How best to make sense of Congo’s enduring crisis, a tale of daunting political complexity and extraordinary cruelty? Many writers have tried, for no other African country captivates the western literary imagination as much as Congo. This fascination long precedes Joseph Conrad, who indelibly described King Leopold’s Congo Free State over a century ago. But faithful subjects do not good art make, and most western writing on Congo is unreadable or, at best, unbearable.

The sheer complexity of Congo’s dramatic history is one contributing factor behind all the dreadful writing. Many an author sacrifices compelling narrative for rigorous scholarship, resulting in a turgid swamp of acronyms for all the armed groups, the Security Council Resolutions and the doomed peace deals. Epic chronicles like Africa’s World War (Gérard Prunier) may be valuable to scholars but are so microscopically detailed as to be opaque to non-specialists.

Adventure writing, the other main genre of Congo literature, is equally abundant and can carry a plot, but the stories glorify the exploits of the author and ignore the Congolese. “Watch me as I commune with gentle pygmies, wrestle crocodiles on the great Congo River, escape beheading by a throng of stoned child soldiers”— setting the bar for unbearable reading. Common to both schools is the absence of Congolese voice; for both, Congo is a neutral, muted stage for the author’s performance (scholarship, “survival”). Faced with such output, one thinks, the trampling of Congo just goes on and on.

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Breivik was my friend on Facebook. I’ve seen what fed his hatred

Camilla Ragfors in The Guardian:

Anders-breivik-007 I understand how a man like Anders Behring Breivik fed the flames of his hatred, even if that was not the only reason for his terrible act of terrorism, because I was, for a while, his friend on Facebook.

I joined the Sweden Democrats many years ago. It wasn't because I was a nationalist, or terrified of Muslims. There were two reasons: one was pure and simple curiosity; the other was that I was interested to see how democracy works. I had soon had enough, not because the rest of the world hated me for being a member, but because of all the hate which came my way from people who saw the SD as God's solution to all the world's problems. I had never before come across such hatred.

One day I had a friend request on Facebook from Anders Breivik. There wasn't anything odd about that: when I was a member of SD I was magnetically attractive to everyone who called himself a nationalist: both those for whom it was a game, and the real extremists. Those were, in fact, the people who drove me away from the party. A machine of hate propaganda pumped through my feed on Facebook. There were YouTube clips of massacre victims, demands that all the “fucking niggers” should get out of the country, and far more horrible things.

I reacted by backing away. But for many other people who are weak, or feel bad for some reason, this stream was something to drink from.

More here.

Anti-Star Trek: A Theory of Posterity

StarTrek_Logo_2007 Peter Frase over at his blog (image from wikipedia):

One of the intriguing things about the world of Star Trek, as Gene Roddenberry presented it in The Next Generation and subsequent series, is that it appears to be, in essence, a communist society. There is no money, everyone has access to whatever resources they need, and no-one is required to work. Liberated from the need to engage in wage labor for survival, people are free to get in spaceships and go flying around the galaxy for edification and adventure. Aliens who still believe in hoarding money and material acquisitions, like the Ferengi, are viewed as barbaric anachronisms.

The technical condition of possibility for this society is comprised of of two basic components. The first is the replicator, a technology that can make instant copies of any object with no input of human labor. The second is an apparently unlimited supply of free energy, due to anti-matter reactions or dilithium crystals or whatever. It is, in sum, a society that has overcome scarcity.

Anti-Star Trek takes these same technological premises: replicators, free energy, and a post-scarcity economy. But it casts them in a different set of social relations. Anti-Star Trek is an attempt to answer the following question:

* Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power?

Economists like to say that capitalist market economies work optimally when they are used to allocate scarce goods. So how to maintain capitalism in a world where scarcity can be largely overcome? What follows is some steps toward an answer to this question.

Like industrial capitalism, the economy of anti-Star Trek rests on a specific state-enforced regime of property relations. However, the kind of property that is central to anti-Star Trek is not physical but intellectual property, as codified legally in the patent and copyright system.

Asymmetric Quarks Defy Standard Model of Physics

News436-i0.1 Ron Cowen in Nature News:

Newly released observations of the top quark — the heaviest of all known fundamental particles — could topple the standard model of particle physics. Data from collisions at the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, hint that some of the top quark's interactions are governed by an as-yet unknown force, communicated by a hypothetical particle called the top gluon. The standard model does not allow for such a force or particle.

The results, presented1 today at the Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics in Grenoble, France, could help researchers to understand the origins of mass. According to one theoretical interpretation, a top quark bound by to its anti-matter partner, the antitop, would act as a version of the elusive Higgs boson, conferring mass on other particles.

Regina Demina, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York, and her colleagues sifted through eight years' worth of particle-collision data recorded by one of the Tevatron's two detectors, known as DZero. Top quarks produced during collisions can fly off in the direction of the accelerator's proton beam or its antiproton beam; Demina and her team discovered that more travel towards the proton beam than is predicted in the standard model of physics. A different model would seem to be needed to explain the discrepancy.

In the Details

Burt_36.4_book Stephen Burt reviews Allan Peterson's As Much As, in the Boston Review:

What if all that mattered in a life, all that stuck in the mind or pulled at the heart, were the well-defined events and decisions: where to live, what to do for a living, when to get married, whether to go to war? What would we miss? Almost everything that makes a life worth living. We want not just actions and consequences, victories and defeats, but dragonflies and paperclips, daydreams and counterfactual syllogisms. And perhaps poetry—that verbal art form without obvious consequence, whose shapes are not the shapes of events and plots—best suits those apparently negligible phenomena: if it cannot preserve them, it can at least show how we care.

That is not the only goal for poets, nor is poetry the only art that adopts it (Virginia Woolf to the white courtesy telephone, please). But it is a goal that many poets take on, by precept or example, and there may be no better example right now than Allan Peterson. No other poet—to judge by this third book, As Much As—focuses so fully on the inward effects of apparently inconsequential observations; no other poet makes them speak so well. Though he entitles one poem “Pure Description,” Peterson almost never describes scenes literally and at length; poets who do so can lose a lopsided contest against the resources of visual art, as Peterson must know (until 2005 he taught painting and ran the art department at Pensacola State College in Florida).

Instead, Peterson uses what he sees as a starting point for effects of inwardness, of ratiocination, above all of analogy. His title means that anything can matter as much as anything else, approached rightly, but it also means that he will use as much of “as”—as many similes—as he can. Unmoored from action, without preset pattern— no rhyme schemes, no New Sentences, no Oulipian bravado—his relatively short poems add to the world they explore by webs of simile, by like and as and so. “Docks along the coast looked like a thumb piano. / I listened.” “One harebell starts the yard in its frenzy / of reexplaining. / What takes its place appears lovingly / like caressing a pet.” Bird song consists of “short notes like dog names, / one or two syllables, something unmistakable.” Wrong numbers on a telephone exist “within hearing but unheard / even when you hold them to your ear / the way people will touch a photo / in a private ritual.”

Ratings Agencies and Public Sector Predictions

Mike Konczal over at Rortybomb:

There’s a few ways to think about how the ratings agencies could add value to the financial marketplace. Information tends to be a public good, so there’s a free rider problem towards any individual investor paying to rate a bond. This is one reason why issuers tend to pay for the rating. There are also instruments so complex, or with so little historical and comparative information, or so illiquid, that the ratings agencies can bring their so-called expertise to give information.

But the United States bond market is one of the largest, most-liquid, most-studied, most transparent markets in the world. There’s nothing the ratings agencies have that any else doesn’t have.

And what’s more important, the ratings agencies own internal analysis shows that they are terrible at rating government debt. Their ratings are all off, as government, especially those with a printing press for their own currency, simply don’t behave like the corporate world they were designed to analyze. And rather than just being wrong, they are wrong in that they are always overestimating the liklihood that governments will default.

A life in writing: Slavoj Žižek

Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

ScreenHunter_12 Jul. 24 17.32 “There is an anarchist leftist group here in London who hate me,” says Slavoj Žižek with a giggle as we settle into a dilapidated leather sofa in the bar of his Bloomsbury hotel. He is wearing freebie airline socks, an Italian T-shirt someone gave him and jeans that could easily have been made decades earlier in an unsuccessful Soviet tractor factory. “But fuck it, let's speak frankly, no bullshit, most of the left hates me even though I am supposed to be one of the world's leading communist intellectuals.”

Žižek summons the waiter and orders hot chocolate, Diet Coke and lots of sugar (“I am diabetic”). He is disappointed, he tells me parenthetically, that we didn't do the interview in the hotel's adjacent Virginia Woolf burger bar. “What would the Virginia Woolf burger be like?” he asks. “Dried out, topped with parsley, totally overrated. I always preferred Daphne du Maurier.” He then launches into a denunciation of the pretensions of James Joyce, arguing that his literary career went downhill after Dubliners, and then into a eulogy to the radical minimalism of Beckett's Not I. Within minutes we're on to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's views on the Malaysian economic miracle, the prospects for Žižek's film theory course in Ramallah and Katarina Wagner's production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, in which Hans Sachs is depicted as a Heil Hitler-ing Nazi. One's task as a reader or interviewer of Žižek is rapidly to build a network of mental pontoon bridges to unite his seemingly autonomous intellectual territories.

More here.

NETWORKS, CROWDS, AND MARKETS: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World

Cosma Shalizi reviews the new book at American Scientist:

ScreenHunter_11 Jul. 24 17.21 David Easley and Jon Kleinberg’s Networks, Crowds, and Markets is one of the first textbooks on what could reasonably be called network science—the study of networks of semiautonomous but interdependent units and of the way those networks shape both the behavior of individuals and the large-scale patterns that emerge from small-scale interactions. This is, of course, a very broad description, and it’s not at all obvious that a single book should try to explain, within a common framework, information search on the Web, the spread of epidemic diseases, patterns of scientific collaboration, and much else besides. That these topics are grouped together not by rambling paranoiacs (who find connections everywhere), but by sober, mathematically minded scientists, employing a common and coherent set of concepts, testifies to a remarkable change in perception over the past few decades among scientists and the general educated public: We now see networks everywhere.

Studies dealing with what we now recognize to be social networks go back to the years around 1900, when political economists, social reformers and muckraking journalists began looking at interlocking directorates of corporate boards and other institutions through which the ruling classes (as they were then called) coordinated their actions without actually having an executive committee. People spoke of “social circles.” By the 1950s, sociologists had a notion of social networks, a concept that had a small band of enthusiastic devotees but was an esoteric idea even within mathematical social science. Even 25 years ago, the idea of networks as a form of social organization was reasonably avant-garde. (One can trace some of this evolution in Linton C. Freeman’s 2004 book, The Development of Social Network Analysis, but a proper history of the “network” concept has not yet been written.)

Nowadays, companies whose sole and explicit purpose is the formalization of social networks have hundreds of millions of active customers. (Although they are not often seen this way, these firms are massive exercises in centrally planned social engineering, inspired by sociological theories.)

More here.

The New Generation Of Molecular Tools

William McEwan at Edge.org:

ScreenHunter_09 Jul. 24 17.07 This afternoon I received in the post a slim FedEx envelope containing four small vials of DNA. The DNA had been synthesized according to my instructions in under three weeks, at a cost of 39 U.S. cents per base pair (the rungs adenine-thymine or guanine-cytosine in the DNA ladder). The 10 micrograms I ordered are dried, flaky, and barely visible to the naked eye, yet once I have restored them in water and made an RNA copy of this template, they will encode a virus I have designed.

My virus will be self-replicating, but only in certain tissue-culture cells; it will cause any cell it infects to glow bright green and will serve as a research tool to help me answer questions concerning antiviral immunity. I have designed my virus out of parts—some standard and often used, some particular to this virus—using sequences that hail from bacteria, bacteriophages, jellyfish, and the common cold virus. By simply putting these parts together, I have infinitely increased their usefulness. What is extraordinary is that if I had done this experiment a mere eight years ago, it would have been a world first and unthinkable on a standard research grant. A combination of cheap DNA synthesis, freely accessible databases, and our ever expanding knowledge of protein science is conspiring to permit a revolution in creating powerful molecular tools.

More here.

America’s attempted Quartet sophistry

Daniel Levy in Foreign Policy:

97853197_0 As more information seeps out from the Quartet principals meeting held in Washington on July 11, it becomes harder not to reach the conclusion that American policy on Israel-Palestine is now being driven almost exclusively by a desire to prevent any possible U.N. vote on the matter in the Autumn. Reading the draft text proposed as a Quartet statement by the U.S. (the text is not yet public, but the authenticity of the draft described here has been reliably confirmed) and rejected by the EU, Russia, and the U.N. Secretary General entrenches that conclusion — and worse, that the U.S. was attempting to pull something of a diplomatic fast one on the senior Quartet officials assembled. But more on that later.

First, a veritable minefield of myths that have sprung up around a possible Palestine vote at the U.N. should be debunked.

No a U.N. vote will not in practical terms deliver a sovereign Palestinian state and Israeli withdrawal and de-occupation. Nor will Israelis instantly be hauled in front of various international legal bodies as a consequence of a U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) resolution. Several other steps would have to take place subsequent to a U.N. vote for either of those things to happen and those do not flow seamlessly, one from the other.

No the U.N. Security Council or General Assembly is not an inappropriate venue for discussing or passing resolutions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor does doing so contravene previous agreements signed between the parties. It is hard to imagine a more relevant or obvious matter for the U.N. to act on. One does not have to get very far in reading the charter of the U.N. to understand that U.N. member states who are signatories to that charter would be derelict in their duties if they refused to act on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

More here.

First Banana: Steve Carell and the meticulous art of spontaneity.

From The New Yorker:

Banana What’s the smartest way to play dumb? Steve Carell carries that question around like a portable chessboard. One evening in December, he sat at a huge dining table on Stage 18 of the Paramount Studios lot, ruminating. His challenge for the next scene, part of a chaotic banquet sequence that ends the comedy “Dinner for Schmucks,” was to give the director at least five different takes—each one spontaneous, funny, and original—without ever stepping out of character. Carell was playing Barry, a sweet, beamish misfit who builds dioramas using taxidermized mice. Barry’s new pal, Tim (Paul Rudd), a silver-tongued financial analyst, has invited Barry to his boss’s house for a company dinner where everyone brings a schmuck for the execs to mock. Among the other oddballs present are a ventriloquist with a promiscuous dummy and a vulture trainer with a baleful-looking bird. The schmucks all believe it’s a “dinner for winners.”

The scene had been written as a brief shrieking fit by a schmuck named Madam Nora, a pet psychic, who suddenly channels the death agonies of the boiled-lobster entrée. But the director, Jay Roach, in search of more material, had swung his cameras around to shoot the schmucks’ reactions to Madam Nora, as well as any bits they wanted to improvise.

More here. (Note: For Ga who just visited a diorama in Louisville, KY)

Open City

785f8da4-b3dd-11e0-8339-00144feabdc0 Pankaj Mishra reviews Teju Cole’s novel Open City, in The Financial Times:

Early in the history of the modern city, Baudelaire established, with his prose and poems about Paris, the figure of the flâneur: the peripatetic recorder of the bewildering metropolitan spectacle. Baudelaire also identified the flâneur’s natural recording instrument: “a poetic prose, musical, yet without rhythm and without rhyme, supple and jarring enough to be adapted to the soul’s lyrical movements, the undulations of reverie, to the sudden leaps of consciousness”.

Long after Baudelaire’s mid-19th-century vision, the flâneur tended to be an alienated bourgeois gentleman – such as the conservative Polish-Jewish protagonist of Saul Bellow’s novel Mr Sammler’s Planet, who walks around New York berating the city for being far too open to non-European influences. Mass global immigration has now produced another, more resourceful and cosmopolitan outsider: Julius, the flâneur-narrator of Teju Cole’s novel Open City, who is a half-Nigerian, half-German psychiatrist living in New York.

Julius’s narrative, which is held together by subtle perceptions rather than plot or strong characterisations, evokes his memories of Nigeria as well as describing his walks in New York (and Brussels, which he briefly visits). The flâneur’s prose, Baudelaire wrote, “is born, above all, from the experience of giant cities, from the intersecting of their myriad relations”. Cole fully exploits this potential for discursiveness in his narrator’s serendipitous encounters in New York.

Attitudes Towards Women, The Plough and the Hoe

20110723_fnd000 The Economist reports on research that makes the case that the choice of agricultural technology shaped, through the ages, attitudes towards women:

FERNAND BRAUDEL, a renowned French historian, once described a remarkable transformation in the society of ancient Mesopotamia. Sometime before the end of the fifth millennium BC, he wrote, the fertile region between the Tigris and the Euphrates went from being one that worshipped “all-powerful mother goddesses” to one where it was “the male gods and priests who were predominant in Sumer and Babylon.” The cause of this move from matriarchy, Mr Braudel argued, was neither a change in law nor a wholesale reorganisation of politics. Rather, it was a fundamental change in the technology the Mesopotamians used to produce food: the adoption of the plough.

The plough was heavier than the tools formerly used by farmers. By demanding significantly more upper-body strength than hoes did, it gave men an advantage over women. According to Mr Braudel, women in ancient Mesopotamia had previously been in charge of the fields and gardens where cereals were grown. With the advent of the plough, however, farming became the work of men. A new paper* by Alberto Alesina and Nathan Nunn of Harvard University and Paola Giuliano of the University of California, Los Angeles, finds striking evidence that ancient agricultural techniques have very long-lasting effects.

Long after most people have stopped tilling the land for a living, the economists find, their views about the economic role of women seem to line up with whether their ancestors ploughed or whether they hoed. Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than their counterparts in countries at similar levels of development who happen to be descended from hoe-users. The research reinforces the ideas of Ester Boserup, an economist who argued in the 1970s that cultural norms about the economic roles of the sexes can be traced back to traditional farming practices.