The freak East Coast snowstorm answered one challenge question a few weeks early: What will happen to the encampments when the weather turns cold? Apparently they will stay. More ominously, protesters in many cities now face the prospect of sustained police crackdowns, from the hassles of permitting and noise ordinances to the violence that erupted last week in Oakland. There, police used tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets to attack protesters near city hall. One of those bullets fractured the skull of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, leaving him hospitalized in critical condition. Since then, Olsen has become the chief symbol of Occupy’s new reality: Going up against Wall Street, it turns out, is serious business. And the more serious the Occupy movement gets, the more official and near-lethal hostility it’s likely to encounter. Advertisement As they sort out what to do next, the Occupiers might take a page from the history of American labor, the only social movement that has ever made a real dent in the nation’s extremes of wealth and poverty. For more than half a century, between the 1870s and the 1930s, labor organizers and strikers regularly faced levels of violence all but unimaginable to modern-day activists.

more from Beverly Gage at Slate here.

Lawrence Osborne in Newsweek:

To call Manny Pacquiao a “boxer” is one of those descriptions that don’t quite fly, like calling Mahatma Gandhi a “Hindu lawyer.” The pound-for-pound greatest fighter on earth has begun to move beyond his bloody sport in increasingly unpredictable ways. In the Philippines, where he was born into abject poverty, the WBO welterweight champion is an almost religious figure, whose following is ecstatically cult-like. In America, he is “Pacman”—the idol of Las Vegas mega-fights, the Bruce Lee of Marquess of Queensberry boxing: tiny, furious, and lethal. “Manny Pacquiao,” Mike Tyson has said, “is a phenomenon.” No argument there: ESPN ranked him tied for first among the world’s highest-salaried athletes this year.

Pacquiao’s fights are not ordinary fights. His battles with Miguel Cotto, Oscar De La Hoya, and Shane Mosley, his seesaws with Erik Morales and Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez—against whom he will fight, for the third time, on Nov. 12 in (where else) Vegas—showcased a mortal intensity without equal. Against De La Hoya, few expected an easy fight for the Filipino. Pacquiao, however, dominated the larger man with his precision and speed.

It was ironic, in a way: Pacquiao had burst onto the American scene in 2001 on a De La Hoya undercard. Then unknown, he was brought in as a late substitute for Enrique Sanchez in an IBF super-bantamweight title fight at 122 pounds against South African champion Lehlohonolo Ledwaba. Pacquiao was 32–2, but no one really knew who he was. (George Foreman, commentating, repeatedly mispronounced his name.) After a rampant Pacquiao overwhelmed Ledwaba, however, Larry Merchant stated that “Ledwaba came in here with a chance to be a star but it looks like Pacquiao may go out being the real star.” But it was not until November 2003 that Pacquiao became a true American superstar, with an 11th-round stoppage of the menacing Mexican Marco Antonio Barrera for the featherweight title.

More here.

The Way We Were Made

Brian Palmer in Slate:

Joel Whitney in Guernica:

Since its publication in 1980, Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States has sold more copies every year and has had a tremendous effect on our understanding of who gets left out of traditional histories. Zinn grew up in the slums of New York, and worked as a young man in the New York shipyards. At seventeen, he attended his first public rallies to petition for better working conditions. He volunteered as an Air Force bombardier in World War II and, after the war had effectively ended, was ordered to drop napalm on French villagers and German soldiers who'd already surrendered.

After a doctorate from Columbia University, Zinn took a job at Spelman College, an all-black women’s college in Atlanta, where he worked with students as an early civil rights advocate. In 1968, during the United States war in Vietnam, he worked on the North Vietnamese prisoner exchange and at home as an anti-war activist. He ended up at Boston University and published A People’s History and many other books. A documentary released this summer, Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train traces his career and his influence on progressives, historians, and the anti-war movement.

Guernica: I just saw the documentary on your life and career, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Could you explain the title of the film.

Howard Zinn: It comes from something I used to say in teaching when I was starting a new class. I would tell my students, “This is not going to be a neutral class.” I don’t believe in neutrality because the world is already moving in certain directions and wars are going on and children are going hungry. Terrible things are happening. And so to be neutral in a situation like this when things are already moving is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I don’t want to collaborate with the world as it is. I want to intrude myself. I want to participate in changing the direction of things. So that’s the origin of the title, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

More here.

From The Paris Review;

Arundhati Roy’s 1997 Booker Prize–winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, helped transform her into an overnight literary celebrity and something of a poster author for the boom in Indian writing. (Billboards across the country trumpeted her Booker victory.) She followed up the novel, however, with a stinging essay condemning India and Pakistan’s nuclear showdown, entitled “The End of Imagination,” and set off, as she’s said, “on a political journey which I never expected to embark on.” She was soon taking up the pen on a range of issues—big dam projects that were displacing communities, India’s occupation of Kashmir, political corruption, and Hindu extremism. Suddenly, she was seen in a very different light at home: a voice of conscience, perhaps, but also a shrill and uncomfortable reminder of what lurked behind India’s democracy. But perhaps nothing quite prepared her for the virulent response to her March 2010 cover story for the Indian newsweekly Outlook, an inside report from the jungle camps where Maoist insurgents (and tribal villagers) were locked in a deadly and drawn-out battle with government forces over mineral-rich land. “Here in the forests of Dantewada [in central India],” she writes, “a battle rages for the soul of India.” That article forms the centerpiece of her new collection, Walking with the Comrades, from Penguin Books; while Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, out now from Verso, also includes pieces by Roy as well as Tariq Ali, Pankaj Mishra, and others. She’ll be making two rare appearances in New York next month, at the CUNY Graduate Center on November 9 and the Asia Society on November 11. I recently spoke with her by phone in Delhi.

Tell me about the reaction in India to your article “Walking with the Comrades.” I know it caused quite a stir and, as you say, landed in the flight path of a whole slew of debates, on both the left and the right.

Whenever my essays are collected into a book what is missing is the atmosphere in the country at the time when the original pieces were published. These essays came at a time when the government had announced Operation Green Hunt, calling on paramilitary forces to go into the jungle and very openly branding all resistance—not just the guerrillas, but really all across the board—as Maoist. They were picking up people by using laws such as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and Special Securities Act, in which thinking an antigovernment thought is a almost a criminal offense. So when I went into the forest, my idea was that nobody really knew what was going on in there. These places were choked off; there was a siege on reporting. But what was real and what was not? I wanted to go in and deepen the story, to make it more human.

More here.

From Nature:

In the opening scene of The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg portrays a cold Mark Zuckerberg getting dumped by his girlfriend, who is exasperated by the future Facebook founder's socially oblivious and obsessive personality. Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is the stereotypical Silicon Valley geek — brilliant with technology, pathologically bereft of social graces. Or, in the parlance of the Valley: 'on the spectrum'. Few scientists think that the leaders of the tech world actually have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which can range from the profound social, language and behavioural problems that are characteristic of autistic disorder, to the milder Asperger's syndrome. But according to an idea that is creeping into the popular psyche, they and many others in professions such as science and engineering may display some of the characteristics of autism, and have an increased risk of having children with the full-blown disorder.

The roots of this idea can largely be traced to psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge, UK. According to a theory he has been building over the past 15 years, the parents of autistic children, and the children themselves, have an aptitude for understanding and analysing predictable, rule-based systems — think machines, mathematics or computer programs. And the genes that endow parents with minds suited to technical tasks, he hypothesizes, could lead to autism when passed on to their children, especially when combined with a dose of similar genes from a like-minded mate¹.

More here.

Morgan and I debate the merits of Steven Pinker's new book in The Boston Review:

Dear Abbas,

Steven Pinker has written a book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, about violence and progress. It is, moreover, an extended defense of modernity. At the very beginning he asks, “How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?” Pinker responds that modernity has produced a less violent world. It’s a great answer. Who in their right mind could object to less killing in the world, less cruelty? And if you accept that modernity has created a less violent world, then aren’t you obliged to look favorably upon it? Aren’t you obliged to see history as a work of progress?

Pinker’s first task is to convince us, through exhaustive historical data, that there is less violence in the world today than there was in the past. He knows people don’t want to believe this. He knows that everyone thinks about the world wars of the twentieth century, the genocides in Armenia and Rwanda, the Holocaust. So he sets out to convince. As could be expected from Dr. Pinker, the facts are numerous, well organized, and well argued. I cannot find any holes in the basic argument. The data look sound. We are forced to accept the basic fact that the world is less violent than ever. There are fewer wars, wars kill fewer people, and everyday violence (murder, assault, rape, etc.) is down as well.

More here.

Captain Nawa Salah Ahmed was not thinking of Hollywood when he signed up for the bomb-disposal unit in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk. It was 2004, and the young policeman was burnt out. He had enlisted in the force when the American military invaded his homeland, taking a job in the local criminal-investigations unit. And as a lawless chaos had come crashing down upon the country, business, so to speak, was booming. Cases flooded in—Ahmed dealt daily with thefts, murders, and worse. But the pressure, he says, was unrelenting. So a year into his police career, he applied for and secured a transfer—one that gave him personal ease, but thrust his family in a roiling dread. He joined the Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit, universally referred to by its English acronym, E.O.D.—and known to Americans as “the Hurt Locker guys.” As his family protested his transfer, he reassured them by saying his new job was actually safer than his old one, in which he was harangued by criminals and terrorists, made a target for revenge. “Bombs,” he would say, “don’t have tongues.”

more from Neil Arun at Vanity Fair here.

The city of toronto is stumbling toward the end of 2011 mired in a deep civic funk. Mayor Rob Ford, a renegade small-c conservative from the suburban ward of Etobicoke North, bulldozed his way to victory a year ago on a simplistic pledge to slash municipal waste. His mantra: “Stop the gravy train.” While he has yet to identify instances of reckless spending, he has ordered city officials to extract almost $800 million from Toronto’s $9-billion operating budget, the sixth-largest public purse in Canada. This punishing and potentially ruinous process may entail shuttering libraries, firing police officers, and scaling back everything from snow removal to grass cutting to transit. Municipal services — such as public housing, environmental advocacy, and even zoos — that don’t conform to the mayor’s narrow vision of local government may be eliminated, privatized, or significantly reduced. Toronto’s woes, however, go well beyond the mayor’s fiscal populism. The Greater Toronto Area — a 7,100-square-kilometre expanse of 5.5 million residents who live in a band of municipalities extending from Burlington to Oshawa to Newmarket — finds itself increasingly crippled by some of North America’s nastiest gridlock, congestion so bad it costs the region at least $6 billion a year in lost productivity. Sprawl, gridlock’s malign twin, continues virtually unchecked, consuming farmland, stressing commuters, and ratcheting up the cost of municipal services. Without reliable funding, transit agencies can barely afford to modernize, much less expand, straining the GTA’s roads and highways to the bursting point.

more from John Lorinc at The Walrus here.

Nevertheless, I am a Jew and as such I am made to understand by Jewish history that I cannot absolutely count on enlightened laws and institutions to protect me and my descendants. I observe the Jewish present closely and actively remember the Jewish past—not only its often heroic suffering but also the high significance of the meaning of Jewish history. I think about it. I read. I try to understand what it may signify to be a Jew who cannot live by the rules of conduct set down over centuries and millennia. I am not, as the phrase goes, an observant Jew, and I doubt that Scholem was wholly orthodox. He was, however, immersed in Jewish mysticism of the sixteenth century, and studied Kabbalism closely, so it is unlikely that he should have been devoid of religious feeling. I, by contrast, am an American Jew whose interests are largely, although not exclusively, secular. There is no way in which my American and modern experience of life could be reconciled with Jewish orthodoxy. So that my ancestors, if they were able to see and judge for themselves, would find me a very strange creature indeed, no less strange than my Catholic, Protestant, or atheistic countrymen. Yet their scandalously weird descendant insists that he is a Jew. And of course he is one. He can’t be held responsible for the linked historical transformations of which he became the odd heir.

more from Saul Bellow at the NYRB here.

Sam McNerney in Why We Reason:

It is often argued that religion makes individuals and the world more just and moral, that it builds character and provides a foundation from which we understand right from wrong, good from evil; if it wasn’t for religion, apologists say, then the world would fall into a Hobbesian state of nature where violence prevails and moral codes fail. To reinforce this contention, they point out that Stalin, Hitler and Mao were atheists to force an illogical causal connection between what they did and what they believed.

One way to answer the question of if religion makes people and the world more moral and better off is to look at the history books. For that, I draw upon Steven Pinker’s latest, The Better Angels of Our Nature, an 800 page giant that examines the decline of violence from prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies to the present. Pinker opens his book with the following: “Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.” Whether you’re familiar with Better Angels or not, it’s worth reviewing its arguments to show why violence declined. Let’s run through three sections of Pinker’s book – The Pacification Process, The Civilizing Process, and The Humanitarian Revolution – to see how violence declined. Doing so will allow us to judge if history has anything to say about religion being a credible source of moral good at the individual and global level.

More here.

Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

Dr. Gazzaniga, 71, now a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is best known for a dazzling series of studies that revealed the brain’s split personality, the division of labor between its left and right hemispheres. But he is perhaps next best known for telling stories, many of them about blown experiments, dumb questions and other blunders during his nearly half-century career at the top of his field.

Now, in lectures and a new book, he is spelling out another kind of cautionary tale — a serious one, about the uses of neuroscience in society, particularly in the courtroom.

Brain science “will eventually begin to influence how the public views justice and responsibility,” Dr. Gazzaniga said at a recent conference here sponsored by the Edge Foundation.

And there is no guarantee, he added, that its influence will be a good one.

For one thing, brain-scanning technology is not ready for prime time in the legal system; it provides less information than people presume.

For another, new knowledge about neural processes is raising important questions about human responsibility.

More here.

The story of Tom Petters—a Minnesota scam artist who orchestrated a convoluted and gargantuan Ponzi scheme that grew to over $36 billion…

Mariah Blake in The New Republic:

Just after dawn on a cool morning in September 2008, two FBI agents and a police officer walked into the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas and took the security elevator up to the twenty-third floor, where they knocked on the door of a high-roller haven known as the Grand Lakeview Suite. A Minnesota businessman named Tom Petters answered wrapped in a bathrobe. After a moment’s hesitation, he invited them in. The officer searched the bedrooms and closets to make sure no one was listening, and the FBI agents began peppering Petters with questions.

Then, suddenly, Petters’s Blackberry started ringing. At that moment, 1,700 miles away in the leafy suburb of Minnetonka, Minnesota, more than 50 government agents were swarming into the parking lot of Petters Company Incorporated (PCI). The agents entered the building, ordered everyone out, and began opening safes and rummaging through file drawers. Another team of agents descended on Petters’s mansion overlooking Lake Minnetonka, where they moved from room to room snapping photos and stuffing Petters’s belongings into cardboard boxes.

More here.

Voltaire at Ferney

Perfectly happy now, he looked at his estate.
An exile making watches glanced up as he passed
And went on working; where a hospital was rising fast,
A joiner touched his cap; an agent came to tell
Some of the trees he'd planted were progressing well.
The white alps glittered. It was summer. He was very great.

Far off in Paris where his enemies
Whsipered that he was wicked, in an upright chair
A blind old woman longed for death and letters. He would write,
“Nothing is better than life.” But was it? Yes, the fight
Against the false and the unfair
Was always worth it. So was gardening. Civilize.

Cajoling, scolding, screaming, cleverest of them all,
He'd had the other children in a holy war
Against the infamous grown-ups; and, like a child, been sly
And humble, when there was occassion for
The two-faced answer or the plain protective lie,
But, patient like a peasant, waited for their fall.

And never doubted, like D'Alembert, he would win:
Only Pascal was a great enemy, the rest
Were rats already poisoned; there was much, though, to be done,
And only himself to count upon.
Dear Diderot was dull but did his best;
Rousseau, he'd always known, would blubber and give in.

Night fell and made him think of women: Lust
Was one of the great teachers; Pascal was a fool.
How Emilie had loved astronomy and bed;
Pimpette had loved him too, like scandal; he was glad.
He'd done his share of weeping for Jerusalem: As a rule,
It was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.

Yet, like a sentinel, he could not sleep. The night was full of wrong,
Earthquakes and executions: soon he would be dead,
And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses
Itching to boil their children. Only his verses
Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working: Overhead,
The uncomplaining stars composed their lucid song.

W.H.Auden

From Harvard Magazine:

Google and other search engines have changed the way we use the Internet, putting vast sources of information just a few clicks away. But Lindsley professor of psychology Daniel Wegner’s recent research proves that websites—and the Internet—are changing much more than technology itself. They are changing the way our memories function. Wegner’s latest study, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” shows that when people have access to search engines, they remember fewer facts and less information because they know they can rely on “search” as a readily available shortcut.

Wegner, the senior author of the study, believes the new findings show that the Internet has become part of a transactive memory source, a method by which our brains compartmentalize information. First hypothesized by Wegner in 1985, transactive memory exists in many forms, as when a husband relies on his wife to remember a relative’s birthday. “[It is] this whole network of memory where you don’t have to remember everything in the world yourself,” he says. “You just have to remember who knows it.” Now computers and technology as well are becoming virtual extensions of our memory. The idea validates habits already forming in our daily lives. Cell phones have become the primary location for phone numbers. GPS devices in cars remove the need to memorize directions. Wegner points out that we never have to stretch our memories too far to remember the name of an obscure movie actor or the capital of Kyrgyzstan—we just type our questions into Google. “We become part of the Internet in a way,” he says. “We become part of the system and we end up trusting it.”

More here.

From MSNBC:

Theoretical physicist Brian Greene admits that the world he describes in his new public-TV documentary series, “The Fabric of the Cosmos,” is nothing like everyday experience. He's not even sure some of the things he describes are for real. For example, how can we possibly know other universes exist? Believe it or not, there are ways to find out. The four-part “Nova” series makes its debut on PBS stations on Wednesday night with an episode that delves into the mysteriously substantial properties of empty space. “As it turns out, empty space is not nothing,” the Columbia University professor says at the start of the show. “It's something. … So real, that empty space itself helps shape everything in the world around us, and forms the very fabric of the cosmos.” That episode is already available for watching over iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices, as well as through Amazon Prime instant video. And if you miss seeing it on TV on Wednesday, you'll be able to catch up with it later online. Over succeeding weeks, Greene addresses not only space, but also the nature of time, the weird world of quantum mechanics and the possibility that our universe is just one bubble in the cosmic ocean (or raisin-bread loaf, or cheese wedge) of the multiverse. Most of the substance in “The Fabric of the Cosmos” comes from Greene's book of the same name — but the part about the multiverse is more speculative, and is derived from Greene's follow-up book titled “The Hidden Reality.” So of course that's where I had to start when I had a chat with Greene this week. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

You must get this question all the time: What sort of proof do you have that any of this stuff is true?

Brian Greene: Well, the first three episodes — focusing on space, time and quantum mechanics — are much more closely tied to observations and experiments that have already been done. Much of what we describe in those programs is firmly rooted in science that is now largely accepted, even though it's weird. The fourth program is different in that regard, because as the last program in the series, it is looking beyond what we currently know, and surveying the landscape of possibilities that may in the future become accepted science. But not yet.

More here.

They’re flying kites on Galle Face Green. The air is alive, twisting and fluttering against the blue in swatches of yellow and red and blue and flags. All along the mile of Green, children grasp their kite strings like umbilical cords to the sky, only just barely keeping hold of the ground beneath them. Families and lovers walk patiently through the tangle. A boy who has only been alive for a few years has gotten his kite into the clouds. The women are wearing gold-and-peach saris and t-shirts and white headscarves and sundresses and sandals and sneakers. The men wear pants with jerseys and sarongs with business shirts, heads covered and not. There are clusters of women in long black abayas and niqabs, which also flutter in the breeze, and clusters of bright balloons with feet underneath, that walk through the crowd, peddling themselves to passersby. Every outfit worn by the children is the perfect outfit for a game of cricket. Girls hold their fathers’ hands and boys roll around in patches of dirt where the grass has worn bald with play. The Galle Face Green is reported to be the most expansive place in the city, and though the Green itself is as bustling as the street, you can catch your breath there. It is, as was once written, Colombo City’s lung.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Owls here. (PS we have 401 contributors to our little fundraiser. We have many many thousands of daily readers. Please, two minutes of your time and few bucks means we can keep doing what we do. Thanks.)