Hilary Spurling in The Telegraph:

When the young John Maynard Keynes bought a tiny painting of apples by Paul Cézanne at the Degas collection sale in Paris 1918, his friend the art critic Roger Fry was outraged. “He was like a bee on a sunflower,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Keynes had bought for himself what the National Gallery’s director refused to spend a penny of public funds on. That tiny painting became the first Cézanne in any British private collection. Fry was not amused. “Roger nearly lost his senses,” wrote Woolf.

Outrage was for years the default reaction to Cézanne’s clashing colours, coarse brush strokes, and a construction so ugly that “he could paint bad breath”, according to a critic in 1907. Rilke said you had to go on looking: “For a long time nothing, and suddenly one has the right eyes.” It was the evenness of Cézanne’s vision as much as its intentness – his rejection of conventional hierarchies of subject and style – that shook both factions, for and against. Rilke saw in Cézanne’s self-portraits “the unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog”. Or, as Heidegger put it: “If only one could think as directly as Cézanne painted.”

It would be virtually impossible for anyone now to get back behind the wrong eyes, and the great strength of Alex Danchev’s book is that it doesn’t try. This is a biography for an age that takes Cézanne’s supreme clarity, balance and pictorial logic for granted.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

This year we give thanks for an idea that is central to our modern understanding of the forces of nature: gauge symmetry. (We’ve previously given thanks for the Standard Model Lagrangian, Hubble’s Law, the Spin-Statistics Theorem, conservation of momentum, effective field theory, andthe error bar.)

When you write a popular book, some of the biggest decisions you are faced with involve choosing which interesting but difficult concepts to tackle, and which to simply put aside. In The Particle at the End of the Universe, I faced this question when it came to the concept of gauge symmetries, and in particular their relationship to the forces of nature. It’s a simple relationship to summarize: the standard four “forces of nature” all arise directly from gauge symmetries. And the Higgs field is interesting because it serves to hide some of those symmetries from us. So in the end, recognizing that it’s a subtle topic and the discussion might prove unsatisfying, I bit the bullet and tried my best to explain why this kind of symmetry leads directly to what we think of as a force. Part of that involved explaining what a “connection” is in this context, which I’m not sure anyone has ever tried before in a popular book. And likely nobody ever will try again! (Corrections welcome in comments.)

Physicists and mathematicians define a “symmetry” as “a transformation we can do to a system that leaves its essential features unchanged.” A circle has a lot of symmetry, as we can rotate it around the middle by any angle, and after the rotation it remains the same circle. We can also reflect it around an axis down the middle. A square, by contrast, has some symmetry, but less — we can reflect it around the middle, or rotate by some number of 90-degree angles, but if we rotated it by an angle that wasn’t a multiple of 90 degrees we wouldn’t get the same square back. A random scribble doesn’t have any symmetry at all; anything we do to it will change its appearance.

More here.

David Runciman reviews Nassim Nicholas Talib's new book in The Guardian:

The core idea behind this book is simple and quite enticing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb divides the world and all that's in it (people, things, institutions, ways of life) into three categories: the fragile, the robust and the antifragile. You are fragile if you avoid disorder and disruption for fear of the mess they might make of your life: you think you are keeping safe, but really you are making yourself vulnerable to the shock that will tear everything apart. You are robust if you can stand up to shocks without flinching and without changing who you are. But you are antifragile if shocks and disruptions make you stronger and more creative, better able to adapt to each new challenge you face. Taleb thinks we should all try to be antifragile.

If the idea is nice and neat, however, the book that houses it is just the opposite. It is a big, baggy, sprawling mess. Taleb seems to have decided not just to explain his idea but also to try to exemplify it. One of his bugbears is the fragility of most of what passes for “knowledge” – especially the kind produced by academics – which he thinks is so hung up on order and completeness that it falls apart at the first breath of disruption. So he has gone for deliberate disorder: Antifragile jumps around from aphorism to anecdote to technical analysis, interspersed with a certain amount of hectoring encouragement to the reader to keep up. The aim, apparently, is to show how much more interesting an argument can be if it resists being pinned down.

There are two problems with this.

More here.

Colin Dayan in the Boston Review:

Talking about Gaza is like talking about God. We face the ineffable. We cannot talk about what we see. Or if we do, we are accused of lacking common sense, failing to take a realistic approach to an unmanageable problem.

What is that problem? Palestinians are the problem. Like so many others in our world today, Palestinians are labeled as “terrorists” by the powerful, so that lethal force is the rule and extreme violence—or exemplary disregard—may be directed indiscriminately against civilians and non-civilians alike. The problem is not a simple one. If we pretend it is, then we risk validating those who hold Israel to an unfair standard, or worse, who question its right to exist. And in protesting Israeli government policy, expressing horror at its brutal excesses, we risk being condemned as “anti-Semitic” or worse, as “self-hating Jews.”

The tired debates about the history of Zionism and the threat of the Palestinian national movement—or, put more bluntly, about the end of Israel and what Jonathan S. Tobin calls “a war with Palestinian Islamists that has no end in sight”—ignore what is specific about more than four decades of Israeli domination in the Occupied Territories. Especially masked in these debates are the unique and various forms of violence used to control the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the eruption of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000. In the name of “security,” Israel has implemented something like a permanent state of emergency. Brute force coexists with, to a sometimes-calamitous degree, a systematic practice of discrimination, surveillance, and disappearance. Behind the barriers—and they are everywhere—live the confined, sealed off from the zone of inclusion, the Israeli state.

More here.

Bawdy, exorbitant, unethical. In the most mythic banquets, everything is permitted, nothing impossible. Mile-high desserts carved to resemble palaces, grapes served upon platters of young boys, vomit buckets. But aside from the slaves, drunkenness, and orgies, it is perhaps the dining upon outrageously prepared animals — much like the stuffed camel Bohumil Hrabel describes in I Served the King of England — that is most…indelible. Heliogabalus enjoyed ostrich brains and eels fattened with Christians. The Emperor Vitellius once served a dish including flamingo tongues and lamprey milt in the name of Minerva. Hampton Court under Henry VIII was often the stage for feasts of whale, peacock beaks, and the ever-popular flaming boar’s head. No organ was left unturned. The home version of this is the Turducken, the infamous carnival of carnage that involves three unfortunate birds (chicken, duck, turkey) stuffed into each other.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at Table Matters here.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding over recent scientific portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes. When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the “first Thanksgiving,” in which supposedly friendly Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a fall feast of turkey, venison, squash and corn. This episode seemed to support the view—often (apparently erroneously) attributed to the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau—of Native Americans and other pre-state people as peaceful “noble savages.”

Many prominent scientists now deride depictions of pre-state people as peaceful. In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature (which I reviewed last fall), Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker mocked the idea that “war is a recent invention, and that fighting among native peoples was ritualistic and harmless until they encountered European colonialists.” According to Pinker, pre-state societies were on average far more violent than even the most brutal modern states. Native Americans definitely waged war long before Europeans showed up. The evidence is especially strong in the American Southwest, where archaeologists have found numerous skeletons with projectile points embedded in them and other marks of violence; war seems to have surged during periods of drought. But scientists such as Pinker, Keeley and LeBlanc have replaced the myth of the noble savage with the myth of the savage savage.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

Christopher Kimball, the bow-tied host of America’s Test Kitchen and founder of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, knows the difference between good cooks and great cooks. Great cooks—and he has built his empire on this premise—understand the scientific principles involved in their techniques. They are fluent in the different modes of heat transfer: radiant heat, convection and conduction. They can explain how diffusion and osmosis maintain equilibrium in their recipes. And, perhaps most impressively, they harness this scientific knowledge to defy gravity—when making soufflés and other baked goods rise.

In a recent presentation at the National Museum of American History, Kimball flashed a photograph of Albert Einstein. “Einstein was so smart not to get involved,” he said. “The science of cooking is actually much more complicated than particle physics.” Luckily, Kimball and his crew of editors, test cooks and food scientists at the actual test kitchen, a 2,500-square-foot culinary laboratory just outside of Boston, unpack the science and serve it to us in bites we can chew on. I’ve found that the team’s latest book, The Science of Good Cooking, offers helpful tips in explaining the science behind some Thanksgiving favorites.

More here.

The Heart and the Mind

I love him with all my heart
But that is where the whole problem lies,
My mind warns me.
that the man I love
Is a man with four young children.
My heart says I will love him
As well as his four or one hundred children!
But my mind sighs and says:
What will happen if his children do not accept you?

I love him with all my heart,
And I will love him to the end of the world.
He has more wealth than we both need.
Again my mind interferes with my love:
Wealth is morning dew,
Let the sun reach the noon of its life,
The dew – the wealth of the morning
Will be nowhere to be seen.
Do I need to embarrass you with the question?

But I cannot help falling in love with such a handsome man.
So young, he will stride into the future with me.
And my mind looks desperate:
Why are you so fascinated with perishables?
Do you know of any one with perpetual youth?
Ever heard of someone who died of good health?
All men grow old and weak with time.
No one has ever leaped into the future.
Is it going to start with your handsome man?

“After a certain age, every man has the face he deserves,” claims Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the self-proclaimed ‘judge-penitent’ in Albert Camus’ final novel, The Fall. A century earlier, Abraham Lincoln had decided that the all-important age was forty years, reportedly refusing to appoint someone to a post in his government because he didn’t like his appearance. Aged forty-six and on his deathbed, George Orwell more prudently proclaimed that it was at fifty that “every man has the face he deserves.” None of them seemed to have a view about women. Nor did any of them consider the altogether more plausible suggestion that it is our parents, partners, employers and government who have the most to answer for when it comes to our faces, and that, by the same token, we might ourselves be held a little accountable for the faces of those we share our lives with.

more from Constantine Sandis at Philosophy Now here.

I look forward to blessing my children on Sabbath eve as a highlight of each week. But this week, as missles and rockets flew back and forth between Gaza and southern Israel, the yearning for peace and well-being for children felt particularly acute, for mine and ours and theirs, all caught in the middle of a cascading political failure, a persistent vacuum of vision and leadership. I put on my jacket and stepped out of our garden gate to head to a local synagogue to hear how a Rabbi with whom I have been studying on Sun. evenings for the past few weeks would respond. A deeply kind and compassionate man, he is composing his doctoral dissertation in Philosophy on the metaphysical and theological underpinnings of John Rawls’ concept of distributive justice. As such, his commitment to traditional Judaism is deeply intertwined with a rigorous and deeply felt humanism, a combination all too rare these days. Three steps out of the gate, as I turned up the lovely, quiet street we live on, a different kind of siren sounded.

more from a 3QD friend, Strummerson, at The Motley Moose here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Is it a painting or a photograph? It is a harbor. Ships sit on the beach at low tide. The clouds are puffy and white in the sky. A city can be seen in the background. Lovely cliffs rise up behind. Édouard Baldus, a Frenchman, created the image in 1855. It is a photograph, but the clouds have [been] painted on to the print. The image comes to us from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the way of an exhibit titled “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,” on view through January 27th, 2013. The exhibit contains photographs that have been doctored and manipulated from the 1840s all the way up through the 1990s. The inspiration for the show is explained to us thusly:

Over the past two decades, digital technology has made us all more keenly aware of the malleability of the photographic image, and many lament a loss of faith in the testimony of the camera. What we have gained, however, is a fresh perspective on the history of the medium and its complex relationship to visual truth. Through today's eyes, we can see that the old adage “the camera never lies” has always been photography's supreme fiction.

People like to believe this about photography. They like to believe that photographs are a direct testimonial of visual truth, that the camera never lies. When it can be shown, however, that photographs are always lying, that they are always a manipulation of visual truth, it is supposed to be a great revelation. The revelation of fakery in photography thus gives us a “fresh perspective” and reveals to us that there is no reason to “lament a loss of faith in the testimony of the camera” since there was no reason to have any faith in the testimony of the camera in the first place.

In fact, this reasoning is cockamamie all over the place. That's because photography did not begin as a way to visually record the truth. Photography began as a new way to make paintings.

More here.

Adam Kirsch in Poetry:

The only copy of Catullus’s poems to survive from antiquity was discovered in the Middle Ages, plugging a hole in a wine barrel. One of two morals can be drawn from this fact. Either pure chance determines what survives, from which it follows that eventually every work will lose its gamble and be forgotten; or else every worthy work is registered in the eye of God, the way books are registered for copyright, so that its material fate is irrelevant. The first conclusion, which is rationally inevitable, would in time lead anyone to stop writing; anyone who continues to write somehow believes a version of the second. But surely a God who was able to preserve all human works could also preserve all human intentions—indeed, He could deduce the work from its intention far more perfectly than the writer can produce it. Thus a writer with perfect trust would not have to do any work, but simply confide his intentions and aspirations to God. His effort, the pains he takes, are the precise measure of his lack of trust.

Writers are necessarily ambivalent about any kind of recognition—honors, prizes, simple praise—because they are ambivalent about their relationship to the present. The first audience that a writer wants to please is the past—the dead writers who led him to want to write in the first place. Forced to admit that this is impossible, he displaces his hope onto the future, the posterity whose judgment he will never know. That leaves the present as the only audible judge of his work; but the present is made up of precisely the people whom the writer cannot live among, which is why he subtracts himself from the actual world in order to deposit a version of himself in his writing. The approbation of the living is thus meaningful to a writer only insofar as he can convince himself that it is a proxy for the approbation of the past or the future—insofar as it becomes metaphorical.

More here.

i like my body when it is with your body

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

by e.e. cummings

Arif Hasan in HimalSouthAsian:

In recent years, you will have heard of a lot of honour killings in Pakistan, and they have been blamed on the Taliban. I would like to present my case through another anecdote. In 1983, I worked in a taluka in rural Sindh, a province that had suffered under the Pakistan Army because of the movement for democracy. I had not returned to the district since, but read in a newspaper report in 2006 that honour killings were taking place there with regularity. So I went over to study the phenomenon.

I asked an elder from the taluka whom I had met in 1983, now much older, “Sahib, did you have honour killings before?”

He said, “Yes, we used to have one in perhaps ten years. It was a rare occurrence, and we would discuss one for ten years until another happened.”

“Then why it is happening now with such regularity?”

He said, “Now, everyone has become shameless, without honour, so honour killings are taking place.”

I asked, “Why is there no honour today?”

He responded, “The young people, they’ve gone to the city, and they’ve done all the wrong things. The girls have learned how to read and write, they’ve gone to school, some of them have gone to university as well. They have no morals left, so this is bound to happen.”

“You mean this is going to continue like this forever?”

“No, no, it will stop!”

“How and when will it stop?”

His reply was educative: “The honour killings will stop when everyone becomes shameless, then it will end.” Then he added, “But I hope that I die before that day.”

He was a man of the old, feudal rural culture, with its own pattern of behaviour and way of thinking. He was part of it, and it was dying, so he wished to die with it.

In 1992, the applications for court marriages in Karachi amounted to about 10 or 15, mainly applications from couples who were seeking the protection of the court for wedlock without familial consent. By 2006, we were seeing more than 250 applications for court marriages per day in Karachi. Significantly, more than half of the couples seeking court recognition of their betrothal came from rural areas of Sindh. This is yet another indication of how the entire feudal system and its values are in rapid collapse.

This collapse is also heralded by the advances in women’s education. According to 2006 figures, fully 72 percent of the University of Karachi student body is today female. Among medical students, 87 percent are women, and the figure for architecture and planning is as high as 92 percent. In fact, our vice chancellor was so concerned that he suggested a quota for men. I used to teach a class with one boy and 15 girls. That has changed a little now as we have tried to even it out. But the reason is simply that women do better on the entrance tests. There’s no other reason for it. In 1971, I started working in low-income settlements in Karachi, and a decade later I joined the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP). The settlements that we worked in at that time were primarily working-class, and when we went over we were met by older men who were mostly illiterate. They spoke to us in very formal, feudal language – janaab, huzoor, sahib, miyan, “We are all your children and need your protection,” and all that. At that time, in the 1980s, the women hardly worked. Things are entirely different when you go to the OPP today; it’s not what you would call a shanty settlement. It’s mostly the younger generation who will meet you, and they will address you as ‘uncle’ rather than ‘sahib’. The people you meet are bank managers, school teachers, professionals working in the service sector of Karachi. The additional phenomenon of the past decade has been the growing anarchy linked to the Afghan war, and the further demise of feudal institutions. Spending a week in northern Sindh earlier this year, I was struck by three elements. Firstly, I noticed the immense physical mobility women have gained from the end of feudalism. Nothing can control them or contain them anymore. Secondly, there are protests against the excesses both of the landlords and of the establishment. If the landlord has been harsh, or if the state has not delivered on some demand, the men come out and block the highway. Often it is women who carry out the blockade because the police action against them is not so harsh. Thirdly, the nature of landlord-ship has changed. The landlord is now married to a modern, urban woman, and that heralds significant shifts. When I asked villagers about the difference between the old landlords and the new, the reply was, “The young landlord has married into the city and stays in Karachi. His children never come here either, so we are alright.” The result is that sharecropping has given way to contracting, and this has transformed the society of rural Sindh.

More here.

From Scientific American:

I’m teaching Darwin again this semester, in two separate courses, and I’m confronted with a familiar dilemma: How should I respond to students who reject evolutionary theory on religious grounds?

…I point out that some religion-bashing Darwinians exaggerate the power of evolutionary theory. For example, Richard Dawkins was wrong–egregiously wrong–when he claimed in his 1986 bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that life “is a mystery no longer because [Darwin] solved it.” Even when bolstered by modern genetics, evolutionary theory does not explain why life emerged on Earth more than 3 billion years ago, or whether life was highly probable, even inevitable, or a once in a universe fluke. The theory doesn’t explain why life, after remaining single-celled for more than 2 billion years, suddenly spawned multi-cellular organisms, including one exceedingly strange mammal capable of pondering its own origins. Some prominent thinkers—from philosopher Karl Popper to complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman–have critiqued Darwinism for purely scientific rather than religious reasons. Some of these critics have suggested that natural selection, as conventionally understood, must be supplemented by other processes, such as “self-organization” of simple chemical and biological systems. But so far none of these alternatives has gained much traction. As for proponents of intelligent design, some raise reasonable questions about the limits of biology, but their answers—which invoke some sort of divine intervention–are pathetically inadequate. The theory of evolution by natural selection is arguably the single most profound insight into reality that humanity has ever achieved, and it is supported by overwhelming evidence–mountains of evidence!–from the ever-expanding fossil record to DNA analyses of living species.

These are the sorts of things I tell my students. I feel a bit queasy, I admit, challenging their faith, from which some of them derive great comfort. Part of me agrees with one student who wrote: “Each individual is entitled to his or her own religious beliefs… Authority figures teaching America’s youth should not be permitted to say certain things such as any religion being simply ‘wrong’ due to a certain scientific explanation.” On the other hand, if I don’t prod these young people into questioning their most cherished beliefs, I’m not doing my job, am I?

More here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Looks like the good folks at the BaBar experiment at SLAC, feeling that my attention has been distracted by the Higgs boson, decided that they might be able to slip a pet peeve of mine past an unsuspecting public without drawing my ire. Not so fast, good folks at BaBar!

They are good folks, actually, and they’ve carried out an extremely impressive bit of experimental virtuosity: obtaining a direct measurement of the asymmetry between a particle-physics process and its time-reverse, thereby establishing very direct evidence that the time-reversal operation “T” is not a good symmetry of nature. Here’s thetechnical paper, the SLAC press release, and a semi-popular explanation by the APS. (I could link you to the Physical Review Letters journal server rather than the arxiv, but the former is behind a paywall while the latter is free, and they’re the same content, so why would I do that?)

The reason why it’s an impressive experiment is that it’s very difficult to directly compare the rate of one process to its precise time-reverse. You can measure the lifetime of a muon, for example, as it decays into an electron, a neutrino, and an anti-neutrino. But it’s very difficult (utterly impractical, actually) to shoot a neutrino and an anti-neutrino directly at an electron and measure the probability that it all turns into a muon. So what you want to look at are oscillations: one particle turning into another, which can also convert back.

More here.

Gilad Sharon in the Jerusalem Post:

Why do our citizens have to live with rocket fire from Gaza while we fight with our hands tied? Why are the citizens of Gaza immune? If the Syrians were to open fire on our towns, would we not attack Damascus? If the Cubans were to fire at Miami, wouldn’t Havana suffer the consequences? That’s what’s called “deterrence” – if you shoot at me, I’ll shoot at you. There is no justification for the State of Gaza being able to shoot at our towns with impunity. We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.

There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire.

Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and civilians spared.

If the government isn’t prepared to go all the way on this, it will mean reoccupying the entire Gaza Strip. Not a few neighborhoods in the suburbs, as with Cast Lead, but the entire Strip, like in Defensive Shield, so that rockets can no longer be fired.

More here.