Fred Dretske in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Prior to Gettier it was more or less assumed (without explicit defence) that knowledge, knowing that some proposition P was true (when it was in fact true), was to be distinguished from mere belief (opinion) that it was true, by one’s justification, evidence, or reasons for believing it true. I could believe – truly believe – that my horse would win the third race without knowing it would win. To know it would win I need more – some reason, evidence or justification (the race is fixed?) that would promote my true belief to the status of knowledge. Gettier produced examples to show that this simple equation of knowledge (K) with justified true belief (JTB) was too simplistic. His examples triggered a widespread search for a more satisfactory account of knowledge.

Gettier’s counterexamples are constructed on the basis of two assumptions about justification, both of which were (at the time he made them) entirely uncontentious. The first of these was that:

1: The justification one needs to know that P is true is a justification one can have for a false proposition.

Almost all philosophers who aren’t sceptics accept 1 without hesitation. After all, if one can, as we all believe we can – sometimes at least – come to know (just by looking) that there are bananas in the fruit bowl and (by glancing at the fuel gauge) fuel in the automobile tank, then given the existence of wax bananas and defective gauges, the justification, the kind of evidence, needed to know is clearly less than conclusive. It is something one can have for a false proposition.

Nonetheless, despite the overwhelming appeal of 1, accepting it lands one in the epistemological soup. Well, almost in the soup. The added push is supplied by Gettier’s second assumption:

2: If you are justified in believing P, and you know that P entails Q and accept Q as a result, you are justified in believing Q.

The idea behind 2, of course, is that one does not lose justification by performing deductive inferences one knows to be valid. If you have reasons to believe P is true, and you know P can’t be true unless Q is true, then you have equally good reasons to believe Q is true. It is difficult to see how 2 could be false if logic is to be regarded as a useful tool for expanding one’s corpus of rationally held beliefs.

But, alas, accepting both 1 and 2 lands you in deep trouble. Gettier explains why.

Our own Morgan Meis in French Culture:

I first opened Swann’s Way on a train. This is more than twenty years ago, Amtrak heading from New York City up the Hudson and finally to Montreal. It was a nine-hour train ride, the way I remember it. I remember stepping off the train in Montreal and wondering where the hours had gone.

Of course, I’d been in Combray for those nine hours, strolling through the sun-soaked gardens and the rich object-laden rooms of Proust’s childhood. Proust’s great aunts are teasing his grandmother again, poking at her with their relentless barbs. Then the book wavers and twitches in my hand. My head lolls back into that specific nook between the train-seat headrest and the window. The giant trees of the Hudson River are flickering past. The morning sun slides across the water, sparkling as tiny waves lick at the light. A morning yellow that isn’t even quite yellow yet. The presaging of yellow. The train car is quiet with morning readers, morning nappers.

Proust is trying to get to sleep again. Only, the wandering of his thoughts and memories will not let sleep come. Or is it the other way around? Maybe he’s been pulling the dream world so completely into his waking life that he doesn’t know how to be fully awake anymore. The train has reached full speed and rocks like a metronome slowly side to side even as it plunges ahead, north, north, away from the city and into the forests and rivers of another world, the world of Frederic Church and Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of painters who tried, again and again, to capture the roundy, orange-tinged leafy luminescence of the landscape along the river.

More here.

Over at More Intelligent Life:

BEFORE THE DISASTER, there was always something reassuring about life by the sea in Ukedo, on the Fukushima coastline. Farther up Japan’s north-eastern shores, the rias, or inlets, would often become deathtraps when tsunamis barrelled up the narrow coves, crashing over isolated villages before the residents had time to flee. But in Ukedo, which lies on a smooth grey beach, ruffled in the early morning only by gulls’ feet and crabs’ claws, the Pacific Ocean was typically gentler. In summer, surfers would lie idly for hours out at sea waiting for a wave big enough to ride. If ever the waves did rise, giant concrete sea walls stood between them and the village like grim-faced centurions.

For generations, villagers came together twice a year to celebrate the bounty of the ocean. At New Year, dozens of fishing boats, festooned with flags, would join a parade out to sea, their horns blaring. In the lead was the vessel that had caught the most fish the year before. Two months later, when the sea was cold and rough and the fishermen needed an excuse to stay on shore drinking, the main matsuri, or Shinto festival, was held. It honoured the sea and the paddy fields of Ukedo, which together provided the two staple ingredients of every Japanese table: fish and rice. Children would dress up in gaudy costumes, with red and yellow flowers on their hats, speckled robes and red clogs, dancing to songs that celebrated life by the sea. Young fishermen would strip down to a pair of tight white shorts, and, fired up with slugs of the village’s sake, they would hurl themselves into the icy water, carrying heavy wooden shrines that sloshed about on the waves. The name of the festival spoke to the success of their entreaties to the Shinto spirits of the sea. It was called the Amba Matsuri, or Festival of the Safe Wave.

Richard Marshall interviews Tim Maudlin in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re working in the area of philosophy of physics and science. This hasn’t been an altogether happy relationship and recent spats have broken out that suggest that physicists don’t think they need to heed philosophy and philosophers think physicists are inept at interpreting their own theories. You tend to be in this latter camp don’t you, and have been pretty vociferous in arguing that there is a role for philosophy in understanding physics. How do you diagnose the problem – and how come it is philosophy that tends to be sober in their interpretations and the scientists who seem more content with paradoxes and contradictions and expensive ontologies like multiverses?

TM: I don’t think that the spats between physicists and philosophers are more heated, or of a different kind, then the spats that break out among philosophers or among physicists; they just get more public attention. Disputes in foundations of physics typically cannot be settled by observation or experiment, so argumentation has to come to the fore. And the analysis and evaluation of arguments requires a certain fastidiousness about terms and concepts that can be fostered by a background in philosophy.

That said, though, I do not see any deep fissure that runs between the two fields. In my view, the greatest philosopher of physics in the first half of the 20th century was Einstein and in the second half was John Stewart Bell. So physicists who say that professional philosophers have not made the greatest contributions to foundations of physics are correct. But both Einstein and Bell had philosophical temperaments, and Einstein explicitly complained about physicists who had no grounding in philosophy. The community of people who work in foundations of physics is about evenly divided between members of philosophy departments, members of physics departments and members of math departments. Many of us on all sides are trying to open and broaden channels of communication across disciplinary boundaries. And I don’t see that there is much correlation between disciplinary affiliation and sobriety: no one is more sober than Bell and Einstein were, or more cavalier (at times) than Bohr or John Wheeler. A more salient division in contemporary foundations is between those, like myself, who judge that Bell was basically correct in almost everything he wrote and those who think that his theorem does not show much of interest and his complaints about the unprofessional vagueness that infects quantum theory are misplaced.

To understand why Dreamliners catch fire, we must look all the way back to the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, when major defense contractors were facing the prospect of declining defense budgets and consequent diminishing profits. In response, William Perry, newly installed as Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, presided over a series of mergers between the big firms, which produced an industry dominated by five giant “primes.” Perry offered handsome subsidies to the firms as encouragement to merge, promoting the initiative as beneficial to the taxpayer because it would cut down on wasteful overhead. Needless to say there were no such savings for taxpayers, and the resultant corporate oligopoly inevitably led to increased weapons costs. One of the mergers united Boeing, the world’s pre-eminent commercial-airliner manufacturer, with McDonnell Douglas, a pure defense company. Boeing was of course also a defense contractor, but top management had traditionally kept the civil and defense divisions separate for fear that the defense team might infect the civilians with their culture of cost overruns, schedule slippage, and risky or unfeasible technical initiatives. These habits were all very well when the taxpayer was footing the bill for cost-plus contracts that might or might not result in a useful product, but they could obviously have proved disastrous when it came to competing with the company’s own money in a free-enterprise market.

more from Andrew Cockburn at Harper’s here.

Over at Open Culture (I guess it's on):

Well with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my first point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate, not just some crazy Lacanian speculations and so on… well I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever! Let’s look… I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.” And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that “No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know.” But I totally reject this line of reasoning.

For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about their prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have a regime which in the first two years (’75 to ’77) behaved towards itself, treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called “Angka,” an organization — not communist party of Cambodia — an organization. Leaders were nameless. If you ask “Who is my leader?” your head was chopped off immediately and so on.

I have arrived – finally – in Gago Coutinho, after an apocalyptic journey, the kind of journey I never imagined I would make in my entire life: we set off in buses at three o’clock in the morning on the 22nd, to travel from Luanda to Nova Lisboa, through the most marvellous scenery, which by eleven o’clock at night I began to find somewhat wearisome. We reached Nova Lisboa at dawn, where we slept in our seats, and at three o’clock in the afternoon of the 29th (or was it the 23rd?), after 600 km on the bus, they put us on a train to Luso: two days of travelling in fourth-class carriages – that celebrated English invention for the inhabitants of the third world, and which the Benguela railway company has, very Englishly, adopted – in which we formed great mounds of arms and legs, weapons and heads. These carriages are fitted with only three long benches: two running on either side beneath the windows and a double one in the middle, like a line drawn down the centre. Since there were not enough carriages, the scene was indescribable: from every side there emerged limbs that appeared to belong to no particular body. I ended up scratching my head with someone else’s hand. I slept, or pretended to sleep, and ate some canned food – the floor was awash with cans and spilled sauces – that played havoc with my insides. Jews being deported to some Nazi concentration camp.

more from António Lobo Antunes at Granta here.

The charm of Vermeer is at once obvious and elusive. Everyone feels the pull of these paintings. No one can quite say how they exercise their magnetism, their unique beauty, their compelling mood. When people attempt to define the paintings, they often speak of Vermeer’s “poetry”. If you are a poet, you wonder what they mean by this. After all, there are many kinds of poetry, as Auden noted in “Letter to Lord Byron”: “By all means let us touch our humble caps to/La poésie pure, the epic narrative;/But comedy shall get its round of claps, too.” On 20 June, in his Guardian blog, Jonathan Jones talked about “the camera-crisp art of Vermeer”. Which is exactly wrong. Crisp. The paintings are clear, yes, but with a faint, phantom nimbus, much subtler than Man Ray’s photographic solarisations, where the image is surrounded by an edge of fierce light like an eclipse of the sun. Vermeer’s images are as if magnified. They have that shimmering granular quality you experience looking through binoculars. There is an indefinite surrounding glow, an almost infinitesimal tremor of light, common to the face of his ermine-clad female guitar player, the city of Delft and a milkmaid pouring from a jug, wearing coarse workaday cloth next to her white skin and the dark russet-pink of her hands.

more from Craig Raine at The New Statesman here.

Ahmir Questlove Thompson in New York Magazine:

I'm trying not to internalize these feelings about the Trayvon Martin case and make it about me — but hey, it is what it is, and maybe I'm melodramatic. All I'm consumed with is my positioning in life.

I often tell cute, self-deprecating celebrity run-in stories that end with my own “pie in the face” moment. But rarely do I share stories of a more serious nature, another genre of “pie in the face” moments, mostly because in the age of social media, most people are quick to dismiss my tales as #FirstWorldProblems. But I can't tell you how many times a year I'm in a serious situation, only to hear the magic words “Oh, wait … Questlove?” Hey guys, it's Questlove. “We're so sorry, you can go!” Like, five to seven times a year, a night ending in the words “Thank God for that Afro or we'd never have recognized you” happens to me.

I'm in scenarios all the time in which primitive, exotic-looking me — six-foot-two, 300 pounds, uncivilized Afro, for starters — finds himself in places where people who look like me aren't normally found. I mean, what can I do? I have to be somewhere on Earth, correct? In the beginning — let's say 2002, when the gates of “Hey, Ahmir, would you like to come to [swanky elitist place]?” opened — I'd say “no,” mostly because it's been hammered in my DNA to not “rock the boat,” which means not making “certain people” feel uncomfortable.

I mean, that is a crazy way to live. Seriously, imagine a life in which you think of other people's safety and comfort first, before your own. You're programmed and taught that from the gate. It's like the opposite of entitlement.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

What the Old Woman Said

I will tell you this. There was a garden by the pump. Fallow land given me.
My father built flowerbeds. Offshoots of paths. Geometric patterns.
Cuttings. Bulbs from my mother. The texture of earth.
Stone. The smell of water. I could grow anything.

I will tell you this. There was a pond. Wrinkles of mud. Pups that were drowned there.
Dragged to the bank. Sacksful slit open. Way beyond saving.
Names that I gave them. Returned to the water. Each small splash.
Spirals expanding. My own face rippling.

I will tell you this. There was a heron. Constant. Returning.
Stilt-leg. Growing above water. Curtain of willows.
Everything still. A crowning of feathers.
Inflections of music. Nothing was moving.

I will tell you this. There were meadows. Light. Nectar from clover.
More flowers than I could name. Armfuls I carried.
Stems that I split. Smelling of summer.
Chains on my neck. Ankles. The bones of my wrists. Knowing nothing.

I will tell you this. There was a boy. Eyes like the sky.
Eyes like my father's. Children imagined. Rooms that were borrowed.
Rooms that were painted. Stories invented.
Histories. Futures. We knew everything.

I will tell you this. There was a man. Veins under skin.
Bones. Barely there. His stuttered breathing.
Green light on a screen. Intermittent beeping.
False light. False music. Someone was dying.

I will tell you this. I had seen his face on the shroud.
Running and bleeding. Wounds on his hands.
Pictures on glass. Coloured and leaded.
Faces on statues. A cross through his heart. Light always fading.

I will tell you this. There was a room. White. A white plate on the table.
A man at the table. Notes in his voice. A tune that I knew.
Beauty in the movements of his face. His arms. Frisson of wings.
Touch. Touch me. But he already had. I had forgotten everything.

I will tell you this. Some days are unbearable. Horizontal planes.
Moment to moment. Each long tick. I have been lonely.
Last night. A dream of a heron. The span of his wings.
Sounding through air. Listen. Listen. I am disappearing.

From Nature:

The organism was initially called NLF, for “new life form”. Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, evolutionary biologists at Aix-Marseille University in France, found it in a water sample collected off the coast of Chile, where it seemed to be infecting and killing amoebae. Under a microscope, it appeared as a large, dark spot, about the size of a small bacterial cell. Later, after the researchers discovered a similar organism in a pond in Australia, they realized that both are viruses — the largest yet found. Each is around 1 micrometre long and 0.5 micrometres across, and their respective genomes top out at 1.9 million and 2.5 million bases — making the viruses larger than many bacteria and even some eukaryotic cells. But these viruses, described today in Science¹, are more than mere record-breakers — they also hint at unknown parts of the tree of life. Just 7% of their genes match those in existing databases.

“What the hell is going on with the other genes?” asks Claverie. “This opens a Pandora’s box. What kinds of discoveries are going to come from studying the contents?” The researchers call these giants Pandoraviruses. “This is a major discovery that substantially expands the complexity of the giant viruses and confirms that viral diversity is still largely underexplored,” says Christelle Desnues, a virologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Marseilles, who was not involved in the study.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian:

Dear Adnan Rasheed,

I am writing to you in my personal capacity. This may not be the opinion of the people of Pakistan or the policy of the government, but I write to thank you in response to the generous letter you have written to Malala Yousafzai. Thanks for owning up that your comrades tried to kill her by shooting her in the head. Many of your well-wishers in Pakistan had been claiming the Taliban wouldn't attack a minor girl. They were of the opinion that Malala had shot herself in order to become a celebrity and get a UK visa. Women, as we know, will go to any lengths to get what they want. So thanks for saying that a 14-year-old girl was the Taliban's foe. And if she rolls out the old cliche that the pen is mightier than sword, she must face the sword and find it for herself.

Like you, there are others who are still not sure whether it was “Islamically correct or wrong”, or whether she deserved to be “killed or not”, but then you go on to suggest that we leave it to Allah.

There are a lot of people in Pakistan, some of them not even Muslims, who, when faced with difficult choices or everyday hardships, say let's leave it to Allah. Sometimes it's the only solace for the helpless. But most people don't say leave it to Allah after shooting a kid in the face. The whole point of leaving it to Allah is that He is a better judge than any human being, and there are matters that are beyond our comprehension – maybe even beyond your favourite writer Bertrand Russell's comprehension.

More here.

The Second World War was two separate wars for the Soviet Union, one to be entirely forgotten and one to be selectively remembered. Between 1939 and 1941, the Soviet Union fought as a German ally, invading or occupying Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania. During this period, the Soviets committed mass murder among populations that had not been Soviet citizens before the war, such as the Poles at Katyń, in 1940. Between 1941 and 1945, after Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Germany committed mass murders on a still greater scale, such as those of Belarusians at Khatyn in 1943. Between 1945 and 1991, from the end of the war to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Soviet propaganda sought to displace the first war with the second, such that the Soviet Union and its citizens appeared unambiguously as victims and victors. German atrocities were supposed to annul Soviet atrocities. Khatyn was to supplant Katyń. In 1969, the opening of the memorial to the murdered Belarusians of Khatyn transformed the unfathomable suffering of Soviet citizens in Belarus into geopolitical propaganda. The chilling cynicism was required by the system: if all that mattered was the future of the socialist state, then the only past worth recalling was the one that served the present. The effect was to confuse minds about both the Soviet murder of Poles at Katyń and the German murder of Belarusians at Khatyn. As Soviet propagandists understood, few people can remember both.

more from Timothy Snyder at the TLS here.

The dominant Western narrative of the events so far is serious, if formulaic, and well suited to a liberal appetite. The battle is against Erdoğan, a religious conservative, and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Part of the antipathy towards Erdoğan is due to his assault on the urban middle-class lifestyle. Istanbul, for a Westerner, is quite a cheap city: not much more than a dollar for a kebab, half that to ferry across the Bosphorus, and under five dollars for an excellent, multi-course meal at a neighborhood restaurant. Alcohol is a different matter; because of taxes levied by the akp it costs roughly the same to have a drink in either Istanbul or Chicago. Under a new law, alcohol can’t be sold after 10 p.m. I can’t recall a time, though, when I made it to Taksim Square much before midnight. Crowds buy beer from small convenience shops and drink outside before going to bars. On warm nights students often stay outside, sitting underneath Galata Tower. Many of those small shops, I have to imagine, won’t survive under the new laws. People are afraid the new alcohol legislation is symptomatic of a wider push to impose a regime of conservative social values in a country regionally renowned for its secularism. This is the partial story the Western media has done an admirable job covering: the occupation as a reaction to an assault on liberal rights. And so the Western media has in a certain sense maintained a legitimacy in Turkey not afforded to the Turkish press: in a much-discussed incident on June 2nd, while cnn covered the brutal police reaction to the occupation, the satellite network cnn Türk broadcast a documentary on penguins. (Protestors have since taken to the street in penguin masks.)

more from William Harris at The Point here.

A new “world’s tallest” building seems to crop up every year, with a frequency that calls to mind the home-run champs of the nineties, each attaining new, unthinkable heights with less and less meaning. Since 1998 alone, Petronas Towers 1 and 2, the Shanghai World Financial Center, and the Taipei 101 have all briefly claimed the title. But even among this craze of ascendance, the opening of Dubai’s reigning world’s-tallest, the Burj Khalifa in January 2010, did, in fact, seem meaningful. For one, the Burj is dramatically taller than the nearest world’s-tallest contender (if you stacked the Chrysler Building on top of the Empire State Building, the resulting behemoth would still not equal the Burj’s height). It is also beautiful. Many skyscrapers, while yearning quite obviously for style points, serve a clear utilitarian mission: to maximize office space in a crammed chunk of commercial real estate. This is true of the Empire State Building, the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower, and Shanghai’s World Financial Center. This is deeply untrue of the Burj, which houses even less commercial space than the much shorter World Financial Center and must fend for room not in the heart of midtown Manhattan or downtown Shanghai, but in the middle of a vast desert.

more from Jacob Rubin at n+1 here.

Justin Smith over at his website:

There is a deeply ingrained idea coming from what passes for the Left, and distracting the younger and more naive members of the Left, to their own detriment, according to which we can each only speak for our own group, and in relation to other groups the most we can hope to be is 'allies'.

A good example of this was in the reaction to the phrase that sprang up spontaneously as a call to rally against the verdict: I am Trayvon Martin. This was of course not new, but a recycling of a common reaction to galvanizing events, e.g., the banners around Paris that declared Nous sommes tous américains on September 12, 2001. (I say, with Whitman: I am everyone, I am each of you, at every moment.) By the next morning some bold white internauts had posted video clips of themselves declaring emphatically that they are not Trayvon Martin, that they could not possibly be Trayvon Martin, in view of the many privileges they have that keep them safe from Martin's fate. By nightfall of the same day white people were abuzz in social media about how other white people needed to stop trying to get attention by announcing how not-Trayvon Martin they were, that this was not about what they either were or were not.

Clearly, the white kids just don't know what to do with themselves.

A white South African friend of mine in social-media land, a journalist I admire very much who is also a former ANC activist, wrote recently about a limousine ride he took in New York with an unnamed American hip-hop star. The driver was a Palestinian socialist. All three got to talking about the fall of Apartheid, and apparently the American simply could not get it through his head that there were white, Jewish ANC members fighting against Apartheid right alongside Mandela. The Jewish South African and the Palestinian driver in turn were alarmed at the American rapper's black-and-white thinking (as it were): the ANC wasn't made up of black people plus their white 'allies'; it was made up of South Africans who hated Apartheid. Listen to the way Mandela talks about Joe Slovo, for example. Is there any hint that Mandela thinks the Lithuanian Jewish immigrant doesn't get, can't get, what's at stake in bringing down a racist totalitarian system? Of course not. That's not the way racism is defeated. And the distraction of identity politics, perpetuated by well-intentioned young people who take themselves to be on the Left, is, I'm sorry to say, helping to abet and sustain the racist system in the United States.

So what is my deal? Why did I decide to write about race?

From The Independent:

In 2003, Spain was one of three EU nations (together with Portugal and Greece) with the lowest average number of regular readers: just 47 per cent (compared to 70 per cent in Scandinavia and the UK) said they read at least one book a year. Now, though, that figure has risen to nearly 60 per cent. However, while libraries are increasingly at peril from spending cuts, as part of the embattled country’s attempts to solve its financial crisis, the desire to use these institutions among recession-hit Spaniards is booming. In Andalusia, where Granada is situated, there has been a 50.6 per cent rise in library borrowers since Spain’s economic troubles began in 2008. In some extreme cases, such as in Seville’s libraries, it is up by 150 per cent. “Above all there are more men,” says Roberta Megias Alcalde, a librarian working in a village near Granada, La Zubia. “Whereas before you’d mainly have housewives coming in for novels, now there’s a lot more unemployment and everybody in the household is borrowing books.” She and other librarians also say the recession has seen a large increase in the presence of the homeless in libraries, “many to read, others to get a wash and brush up”.

Her library, though, has faced dramatic cutbacks, with its staff reduced to just herself from January. As for Las Palomas, it was shut down by Granada town hall with no advance warning in August 2011, using the argument that a brand new library had been built on the far side of the Zaidín district. “Since then,” says Ms Calvo, “they’ve blamed the closure on the cuts too.” Those supporting Las Palomas point out that according to regional Spanish laws, with its 44,000 inhabitants the Zaidín should have two libraries, not one. They also say the new library, well over a mile away, is too far from the district’s centre, too student-orientated for their elderly clients and does not respond to the needs of one of the poorest areas of Granada, where for decades families have lived jammed together in a labyrinth of cramped flats and houses and narrow streets. “This library is small and can’t cope with all the district, it’s vast,” says Las Palomas volunteer Encarnación Gonzalez Martin, “and we supported the opening of the other one – but on condition this library wasn’t closed.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

A book a day may keep dementia away. Even if you read it as a kid. Because a study finds that exercising the brain, at any age, may preserve memory. The work appears online in the journal Neurology. [Robert S. Wilson et al, Life-span cognitive activity, neuropathologic burden, and cognitive aging]

Previous studies have shown that engaging in brain-building activities is associated with a delay in late-life cognitive decline. But why? Does flexing the old gray matter somehow buffer against age-related intellectual impairment? Or is cognitive loss simply a consequence of the aging brain’s physical decline? To find out, researchers questioned nearly 300 elderly individuals about their lifelong participation in intellectual pursuits—like reading books, writing letters and looking things up in the library. Then, every year, for an average of six years until they died, the subjects took tests to measure their memory and thinking. What the researchers found is that folks who worked their mental muscles, both early and late in life, remained more intellectually limber than those who didn’t—even when a post-mortem look at their brains revealed the telltale signs of physical decline.

More here.