In parliaments and in the public square, European democracy appears to be on its last legs. The European Union, garlanded last month with an incomprehensible Nobel Peace Prize, has become ever more feckless. National governments pushing senseless austerity budgets are losing public favor by the day. But on TV, democracy is thriving, and nowhere more than in the Danish political drama Borgen. From Greece to Ireland, where political leaders have been reduced to glorified accountants, audiences have made a series about a peripheral EU administration the most surprising television hit in years. Borgen (“The Castle,” a nickname for Christiansborg, the Copenhagen parliament building) depicts the trials of a new prime minister, her squabbling coalition government, and an aggressive, scandal-hungry news media. A quarter of the nation watches the program each week, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the country’s actual prime minster, is said to be an obsessive fan. Borgen is more than a sensation; it is a kind of parallel government.

more from Jason Farago at n+1 here.

Anonymous in The Caravan:

On the afternoon of 19 May 2009, at around 1:20 pm, a ration shop accountant named Sivarajan ran to the front of the winding lunch queue in the Anandakumaraswami Zone 3 refugee camp to serve rice and sodhi, a watery concoction of chillies and coconut milk. Swarna, a former militant, sat in her tent nearby, yelling at her mother for having told an army man from the morning shift that their family belonged to Mullaitivu, on the northeastern coast, where the war between the Sri Lankan Army and the separatists—“Tigers,” she called them—was still raging.

At that moment, they got a text message on their mobile phones from the government’s information department. Addressed to all Sri Lankans, it proclaimed, in Sinhala—a language neither Sivarajan nor Swarna could read—that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the man who led a 26-year-long separatist battle for a Tamil Eelam (state), had been killed by the army in a lagoon just a two hours drive north of where they were. So when the news was announced in Tamil over a loudspeaker that evening, they did not believe it. When it finally sank in, they realised—neither with remorse nor relief, but mere wonder at its very possibility—that in an instant the war they had been born into had left their lives.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

More here.

Daniel Levitin in The Atlantic:

Tom was one of those people we all have in our lives — someone to go out to lunch with in a large group, but not someone I ever spent time with one-on-one. We had some classes together in college and even worked in the same cognitive psychology lab for a while. But I didn't really know him. Even so, when I heard that he had brain cancer that would kill him in four months, it stopped me cold.

I was 19 when I first saw him — in a class taught by a famous neuropsychologist, Karl Pribram. I'd see Tom at the coffee house, the library, and around campus. He seemed perennially enthusiastic, and had an exaggerated way of moving that made him seem unusually focused. I found it uncomfortable to make eye contact with him, not because he seemed threatening, but because his gaze was so intense.

Once Tom and I were sitting next to each other when Pribram told the class about a colleague of his who had just died a few days earlier. Pribram paused to look out over the classroom and told us that his colleague had been one of the greatest neuropsychologists of all time. Pribram then lowered his head and stared at the floor for such a long time I thought he might have discovered something there. Without lifting his head, he told us that his colleague had been a close friend, and had telephoned a month earlier to say he had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor growing in his temporal lobe. The doctors said that he would gradually lose his memory — not his ability to form new memories, but his ability to retrieve old ones … in short, to understand who he was.

More here.

Pam Belluck in the New York Times:

The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.

But don’t scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers.

Experts not involved in the research said it suggested that overweight people need not panic unless they have other indicators of poor health and that depending on where fat is in the body, it might be protective or even nutritional for older or sicker people. But over all, piling on pounds and becoming more than slightly obese remains dangerous.

More here.

My Father's Hats ….

………………Sunday mornings I would reach
high into his dark closet while standing
on a chair and tiptoeing reach
higher, touching, sometimes fumbling
the soft crowns and imagine
I was in a forest, wind hymning
…………….. through pines, where the musky scent
of rain clinging to damp earth was
his scent I loved, lingering on
bands, leather, and on the inner silk
crowns where I would smell his
hair and almost think I was being
held, or climbing a tree, touching
the yellow fruit, leaves whose scent
was that of clove in the godsome
air, as now, thinking of his fabulous
sleep, I stand on this canyon floor
and watch light slowly close
on water I can't be sure is there.

by Mark Irwin
from New Letters, Volume 66, Number 3, 2000

From The Spiked Review of Books:

Ignore the hyperbolic title. Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men and the Rise of Women is filled with worthwhile insights and raises serious questions about the meaning and implications of shifting gender roles. Rosin, an editor at the Atlantic and founder of Slate’s ‘DoubleX’, has emerged as one of only a handful of American writers who has understood the centrality of so-called ‘women’s issues’ to American culture.

Her thesis goes something like this: our society is in the midst of a whole host of social and economic changes that women are benefiting from more than men, and perhaps at the expense of men. It’s a compelling idea, not least because it seems to confirm what many people have observed in the course of their own experiences. It is not simply that men have lost their jobs, or even that those jobs are gone for good, or that it is mainly women doing the jobs that are now being created. It is more a sense of creeping demoralisation and ambivalence about the future that is as much in evidence in Charles Murray’s discussion of the decline of marriage, in his book Coming Apart, as it is in ‘The Myth of Work/Life Balance’ debate that appeared in the Atlantic last summer. Rosin intuitively understands that discussions like these are related to, and have been shaped by, changes in women’s status over the past 30 years. What isn’t so clear is whether the current situation is the inevitable consequence of a shifting balance between men and women or a symptom of something else.

More here.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Here are six of today's potentially transformative trends.

DNA Sequencing for Routine Checkups

At a genetics conference in November, Oxford Nanopore Technologies unveiled the first of a generation of tiny DNA sequencing devices that many predict will eventually be as ubiquitous as cellphones—it's already the size of one. Since the first sequencing of the human genome was completed in 2003 at a price tag of over $2 billion, the speed, price and accuracy of the technology have all improved. Illumina Inc. has dropped its price for individual readouts to $5,000; earlier this year, Life Technologies introduced a sequencer it says can map the human genome for $1,000. The smallest machine is now desktop-size. But nanopore sequencing devices, which are designed to be even smaller and more affordable, could speed efforts to make gene sequencing a routine part of a visit to the doctor's office. DNA molecules are exceedingly long and complicated; that makes them hard to read. Nanopore technology measures changes in the molecules' electrical current as the DNA is threaded in a single strand through tiny holes called “nanopores” created in a membrane.

Letting Your Body Fight Cancer

Few advances in cancer care are generating more enthusiasm than harnessing the power of the immune system to fight the disease. Tom Stutz is one reason why. Last April, the 72-year-old retired lawyer was confined to a wheelchair, struggling for every breath, and required help with simple tasks such as eating, all because of a previously diagnosed skin cancer that had spread to his lungs and liver. “I was ready to check out, to be honest,” he says. That month, he began taking an experimental drug known as MK3475. Six weeks later, he started feeling better. Today, Mr. Stutz has jettisoned the wheelchair and regularly walks a 3.5-mile loop near his home in Los Angeles. “I feel terrific,” says Mr. Stutz, who learned after a checkup in the fall that his tumors had shrunk by about 65% so far. For decades, cancer researchers have wondered why the immune system typically doesn't treat tumor cells as invaders and target them. Part of the mystery was recently solved: Tumors protect themselves by hijacking the body's natural brake for the immune system. MK3475, being developed by Merck & Co., is among a new category of drugs that release the brake, unleashing an army of immune cells to hunt down the cancer. A recent report from a trial in which Mr. Stutz participated said that of 85 patients who took the drug, 51% saw their tumors significantly shrink; in eight cases, the tumors couldn't be detected on imaging tests.

More here.

What possessed a generation of young European artists, and a few Americans, to suddenly suppress recognizable imagery in pictures and sculptures? Unthinkable at one moment, the strategy became practically compulsory in the next. Many of the artists had answers—or, at least, they cooked them up. The trailblazing Wassily Kandinsky and the bulletproof masters of abstraction, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, doubled, tortuously, as theorists. They initiated what would become a common feature of determinedly innovative art culture to this day: the simpler the art, the more elaborate the rationale. That’s easily understood. We need stories. When they are banished within art, they re-form around and about it. But most interesting to me are the early abstract artists’ personal motives. The Swiss Taeuber-Arp and her husband, Hans Arp, from Alsace, were Dadaists in Zurich during the First World War. They seem to have been excited by the prospect of a passably pure, toughly modest aestheticism that jettisoned the traditions of a Europe gone mad with slaughter. Arp was making sprightly geometric and free-form collages and reliefs, often composed by games of chance—for example, shapes in colored paper dropped onto sheets of white paper and glued down more or less where they fell.

more from Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker here.

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, a real if not full step towards freedom and justice in the United States. Over at The Root:

January 1, 2013, marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and in light of the historical milestone, two educators — Deborah Willis, New York University photographic historian, and Barbara Krauthamer, historian of slavery at University of Massachusetts-Amherst — created Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, a book of photographs that shows what freedom looked like for blacks around the time of emancipation and reveals the role African Americans played in gaining their own freedom. The two scholars spoke to The Root about the history behind the photos and how there's more to these stills than meets the eye.

George Dvorsky in io9:

1. A Cyborg Competes Against Able-Bodied Athletes at the Olympics

For the first time ever in Olympic history, a double-amputee raced alongside able-bodied athletes. Nicknamed “Blade Runner,” South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius’s remarkable achievement raised as much enthusiasm as it did concern — some observers felt that his advanced prosthetic “Cheetahs” gave him an unfair advantage over the other athletes. But while Pistorius failed to medal, his remarkable achievement signified the dawn of the cyborg age.

2. NASA Starts to Work on a Faster-Than-Light Warp Drive

Speaking at the 100 Year Starship 2012 Public Symposiumearlier this year, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein’s law of relativity. Though still in the proof-of-concept phase, White and his colleagues are trying to turn theory into practice — and potentially change the nature of space travel as we know it.

3. Scientists Enhance the Intelligence of Primates with a Chip

Back in September, scientists demonstrated that a brain implant could improve thinking ability in primates — and by a factor of 10 percent. By implanting an electrode array into the cerebral cortex of monkeys, researchers were able to restore — and even improve — their decision-making abilities. The implications for possible therapies are far-reaching, including potential treatments for cognitive disorders and brain injuries. And it also means the era of animal uplifting has begun.

Noam Chomsky and Michael Kasenbacher in Reader Supported News:

The question I would like to ask is what is really wanted work? Maybe we could start with your personal life and your double career in linguistics and political activism? Do you like that kind of work?

If I had the time I would spend far more time doing work on language, philosophy, cognitive science, topics that are intellectually very interesting. But a large part of my life is given to one or another form of political activity: reading, writing, organising, activism and so on. Which is worth doing, it's necessary but it's not really intellectually challenging. Regarding human affairs we either understand nothing, or it's pretty superficial. It's hard work to get the data and put it all together but it's not terribly challenging intellectually. But I do it because it's necessary. The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren't being paid for it. It's work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.

The philosopher Frithjof Bergmann says that most people don't know what kind of activities they really want to do. He calls that 'the poverty of desire.' I find this to be true when I talk to a lot of my friends. Did you always know what you wanted to do?

That's a problem I never had – for me there was always too much that I wanted to do. I'm not sure how widespread this is – take, say, a craftsman, I happen to be no good with tools, but take someone who can build things, fix things, they really want to do it. They love doing it: 'if there's a problem I can solve it'. Or just plain physical labour – that's also gratifying. If you work on command then of course it's just drudgery but if you do the very same thing out of your own will or interest it's exciting and interesting and appealing. I mean that's why people look for work – gardening for example. So you've had a hard week, you have the weekend off, the kids are running around, you could just lie down to sleep but it's much more fun to be gardening or building something or doing something else.

It's an old insight, not mine. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who did some of the most interesting work on this, once pointed out that if an artisan produces a beautiful object on command we may admire what he did but we despise what he is – he's a tool in the hands of others. If on the other hand he creates that same beautiful object out of his own will we admire it and him and he's fulfilling himself.

Katie Engelhart interviews Zizek in Salon:

You have said before: “I am a philosopher, not a prophet.” And yet, your followers are remarkably pious; many worship you as a prophet. Why?

Well, I’m ambiguous on this. On the one hand, I return to a more classical Marxism. Like: ‘It cannot last! This is all crazy! The hour of reckoning will come, blah blah blah.’

Also, I really hate all of this politically correct, cultural studies bullshit. If you mention the phrase “postcolonialism,” I say, “Fuck it!” Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

So you offer respite to the 20-something who wants to escape the fruits of postmodernism: political correctness, gender studies, etc.?

Yes, yes! That’s good!

But here I also have a bit of megalomania. I almost conceive of myself as a Christ figure.OK! Kill me! I’m ready to sacrifice myself. But the cause will remain! And so on…

But, paradoxically, I despise public appearances. This is why I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you … Office hours!

Berndnaut Smilde. Nimbus II. Hotel MariaKapel, Hoorn. 2012.

Lambda print.

More here and here.

Rashid Latif Ansari:

The very next day that 2013 is ushered in, I would step in to the 83^rd year of my life, leaving me little time to do much. However, I resolve to devote my remaining time and energy to strive for the reversal of the centuries old myth of male superiority, which was only due to a single male attribute, the greater muscular power. With the advancements in science and technology, the muscular power has, and will have, to give in to the brain power, in which females are exhibiting greater prowess. Since 80’s women in the Western colleges are out numbering and outperforming men. Women bring and nurture new life, build homes and societies and rarely take part in criminal activities that take away life and destroy properties. They live longer and lead much healthier life than men. Leaving aside muscular power, what else men can boast about for their superiority? Allow me to take couple of minutes of your time to quote the findings of Greg Hampikian, a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University, USA:

· Much against the myth of male lineage, ‘an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection defines our species.’

· ‘Women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither. From the production of the first cell (egg) to the development of the fetus and the birth and breast-feeding of the child, fathers can be absent. They can be at work, at home, in prison or at war, living or dead.’

· ‘Your life as an egg actually starts in your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother.’

· ‘After the two of you left Grandma’s womb, you enjoyed the protection of your mother’s prepubescent ovary. Then, sometime between 12 and 50 years after the two of you left your grandmother, you burst forth and were sucked by her fimbriae into the fallopian tube. You glided along the oviduct, surviving happily on the stored nutrients and genetic messages that Mom packed for you.’

· ‘Then, at some point, your father spent a few minutes close by, but then left. A little while later, you encountered some very odd tiny cells that he had shed. They did not merge with you, or give you any cell membranes or nutrients — just an infinitesimally small packet of DNA, less than one-millionth of your mass.’

· ‘Over the next nine months, you stole minerals from your mother’s bones and oxygen from her blood, and you received all your nutrition, energy and immune protection from her. By the time you were born your mother had contributed six to eight pounds of your weight. Then as a parting gift, she swathed you in billions of bacteria from her birth canal and groin that continue to protect your skin, digestive system and general health. In contrast, your father’s 3.3 picograms of DNA comes out to less than one pound of male contribution since the beginning of Homo sapiens 107 billion babies ago.’

· ‘If a woman wants to have a baby without a man, she just needs to secure sperm (fresh or frozen) from a donor (living or dead). The only technology the self-impregnating woman needs is a straw.’

· ‘Recently, the geneticist J. Craig Venter showed that the entire genetic material of an organism can be synthesized by a machine and then put into what he called an “artificial cell.” Mr. Venter started with a fully functional cell, then swapped out its DNA. In doing so, he unwittingly demonstrated that the female component of sexual reproduction, the egg cell, cannot be manufactured, but the male can.’

· ‘If all the men on earth died tonight, the species could continue on frozen sperm. If the women disappear, it’s extinction.’

Keeping Greg’s beautiful expose’ in mind and recollecting the shameful attacks of terrorists on unarmed civilians, recently targeting even a school going girl, Malala (Pakistan), the wanton killing of school children in Newton USA and the latest barbaric act of gang rape (Delhi, India) culminating in an un imaginable torturous death of an innocent victim, a young woman, I feel that it is high time that the women take the driving seat and transform this world from the mayhem created by men to a peaceful, considerate and compassionate planet.

In 2013, I will contribute my humble bit towards this cause. Will you too???

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Javed Jabbar)

Gary Marcus in The New Yorker:

For me, much of the past year revolved around discussions prompted by a book of mine that was published in January, called “Guitar Zero,” about the science of learning and my own adventures in learning guitar at the age of forty. The basic premise was that the scientific evidence for a widespread view called the “critical-period effect” was far weaker than widely supposed. The critical-period effect is the idea that you can’t do certain things—like learn a language, or learn an instrument—unless you start early in life. It’s a discouraging thought for anyone past adolescence. But, recently, the evidence for this idea had started to unwind.

…Learning a new skill can also have unexpected benefits. Recently, the neuroscientist Nina Kraus published a pile of new studies that show that learning about music can facilitate getting better at other things, like language skills and hearing in noisy places—and can do so in ways that last for decades. (Her first studies were with children; other studies are now in progress to see if the same holds true for lessons taken by adults). Music training can help the brain better decompose the elements of sound—in ways that Kraus was able to directly measure in the lab—and seems to improve working memory, too. And, in another recent study, a team of Canadian researchers found evidence that a mere twenty days of music lessons can lead to better scores on a test of verbal intelligence. Moreover, whether or not picking up a new skill makes you smarter, it can certainly make you happier. We can’t all be rock stars. But, as the cliché goes, the journey can be every bit as rewarding as the destination. A New Year’s resolution shouldn’t just be about becoming great at something. It should be about becoming a better or happier or more fulfilled person. Whether your dream is to play piano, cook steak sous-vide, or finally learn to speak French, the lesson from all this new research is clear: there is no better time than now to take on something new. Happy New Year!

More here.

Emma Pearson in The New York Times:

I jogged into the Stanford Cancer Clinic with my boyfriend, the youngest people there by two decades. We stood there sweating and holding hands, a jarring sight in the sickly light. “You are 18, right?” the receptionist asked. Behind me, a woman so gaunt that her cheekbones protruded rolled by in a wheelchair. The oncologist called me alone to the exam room, and I told her the story I had revealed to more doctors than friends: I carry the BRCA1 mutation, which gives you a 98 percent chance of developing cancer. When my family found out that I might have inherited the mutation from my mother, we took it as a given that I would get tested. Scientists, atheists and lawyers, we are compulsively rational. Yet when I learned I carried the mutation, I felt the cruel weight of a paradox: you can never know whether you want to know until you already do.

At Stanford, I study artificial intelligence, in which math is used to resolve these sorts of dilemmas. My teachers claim that gaining information never hurts. It can be proved mathematically that a robot with more information never makes worse decisions But we are not robots. Our eyes don’t filigree the world with coordinates and probabilities, and they can be blinded by tears. Still, we, too, display a preference for information. We dislike uncertainty so strongly that we sometimes even prefer bad news. One study of people at risk for a terminal disease found that those who learned they were going to die from it were happier a year later than those who remained uncertain about their fates. Most people have a deep intuition that a life lived cleareyed has inherent value, independent of whether the truth makes you happy. But surely this has limits. I know there are some things I do not want to know: which other girls my boyfriend finds attractive or the day and manner of my death. The truth can hurt in two ways. It can worsen your options: you can’t live as happily with a significant other after learning of his infidelity. Or it can make you irrational: hearing about terrorists targeting airplanes may lead you to drive instead of fly, though planes remain much safer than cars.

So was I wrong to unwind my double helix?

More here.