David Spencer at berfrois:

The idea that society might work less in order to enjoy life more goes against standard thinking that celebrates the virtue and discipline of hard work. Dedication to work, so the argument goes, is the best route to prosperity. There is also the idea that work offers the opportunity for self-realisation, adding to the material benefits from work. ‘Do what you love’ in work, we are told, and success will follow.

But ideologies such as the above are based on a myth that work can always set us free and provide us with the basis for a good life. As I have written elsewhere, this mythologizing about work fails to confront – indeed it actively conceals – the acute hardships of much work performed in modern society. For many, work is about doing ‘what you hate’.

Here I want to address another issue that is overlooked in conventional policy debates. This is the need to diminish work. Working less presents several advantages. One is the opportunity to overcome the anomaly of overwork for some and unemployment for others. Sharing out work more evenly across the available population by reducing average working time would enable those who work too much to work less and those do not work at all to partake in some work.

more here.

John Burnside at The New Statesman:

Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a hawk in flight will know that this is one of the natural world’s most elegant phenomena. In many traditions, hawks are sacred: Apollo’s messengers for the Greeks, sun symbols for the ancient Egyptians and, in the case of the Lakota Sioux, embodiments of clear vision, speed and single-minded dedication.

Yet, for all their grandeur, airborne hawks are difficult to describe. It takes the finest of naturalists to capture a sense of their wonder – those such as Edwin Way Teale, who, in one of the most affecting pieces of nature writing I have ever read, describes a field trip to eastern Pennsylvania’s “hawkways” to see how raptors from all over New England seek out the powerful updraughts that run along the Kittatinny Ridge and sail “almost without an effort – just as, for ages, their ancestors had done – mile after mile on their long journey to a winter home”.

This passage, from Teale’s all but forgotten classic The Lost Woods (1945), celebrates not just the birds’ grace and power but also their attunement to the land, in words at once elegant and unsentimental.

more here.

Ed Smith in More Intelligent Life:

Thirty-five years ago, a hundred tennis-playing children were tested for general athleticism. One girl (pictured) was rated by the psychologist leading the analysis as “the perfect tennis talent”. She outperformed her contemporaries at every tennis drill, as well as general motor skills. Her lung capacity suggested that she could have become a European champion at 1,500 metres. The girl’s name? Steffi Graf, who went on to win 22 grand slams. I was reminded of Graf’s innate sporting talent during a recent conversation with the geneticist and former Economist journalist Matt Ridley. We were discussing the common argument that greatness, even genius, is the result of 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. This has been the sales pitch of several widely read books, the subtitles of which include “The genius in all of us” and “Greatness isn’t born, it’s grown”. If nurture is so dominant and nature such an irrelevance, then an unavoidable question follows: how many people, of all those born in 1756, had the potential, if they were given the right opportunities, to be as good as Mozart? Or in this case, how many women, of all those born in 1969, had the potential to become as good at tennis as Graf? According to the logic that a genius lurks in all of us, the answer must lie somewhere between “most” and “many”.

Ridley’s answers were a bit different: four Mozarts and about 30 Grafs. There was mischief, of course, in attaching numbers to such hypothetical questions. But his answer rang true.

More here.

Ewan Callaway in Nature:

It took geneticist Craig Venter 15 years and US$40 million to synthesize the genome of a bacterial parasite. Today, an academic team made up mostly of undergraduate students reports the next leap in synthetic life: the redesign and production of a fully functional chromosome from the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

As a eukaryote, a category that includes humans and other animals, S. cerevisiae has a more complex genome than Venter's parasite. The synthetic yeast chromosome — which has been stripped of some DNA sequences and other elements — is 272,871 base pairs long, representing about 2.5% of the 12-million-base-pair S. cerevisiae genome.The researchers, who report their accomplishment in Science¹, have formed an international consortium to create a synthetic version of the full S. cerevisiae genome within 5 years. “This is a pretty impressive demonstration of not just DNA synthesis, but redesign of an entire eukaryotic chromosome,” says Farren Isaacs, a bioengineer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in the work. “You can see that they are systematically paving the way for a new era of biology based on the redesign of genomes.” The project began a few years ago, when Jef Boeke, a yeast geneticist at New York University, set out to synthesize the baker’s yeast genome with much more drastic alterations than those demonstrated by Venter and his team in 2010.

More here.

Tante Tina Puts the 1991 Gulf War Into Perspective

…………… (for my mother, 1911-2001, whose story this is)

I have a right to be cranky, ja.
I am an old lady.
You come sitz mal here.
Na, a little closer.
I already have to talk so loud
my hearing goes.
But I think still, ja?

One time when I was little still in Russia
in the war, before the unsettling to Canada,
ja, I was maybe five maybe six years old, you listen mal
you're not so busy,
a man to the door was pummeling
at night, his hand bleeding in a torn shirt.
He was dirty, I could smell even,
not like the barn smelling, not like pigs
in spring, like old meat more, wurst gone bad.
His eyes were deep like the broken well with no water.
Mutti took him in, and has him soup gemade –
kertofel and water, it was all.
I was by the stove scared while he is slurping.
And then Mutti him to the bed showed
where Uncle Peter slept before they took him
and Papa. I was so tight holding
to Mutti's rough wool my fingers were aching.

We were just to bed going then,
the candle auss-poosting, and more men came,
krass, loud, shouting even more than you
and Papa sometimes. They grabbed the man from the bed
his feet banging on the floor,
and outside by the barn there was a crash.

The men left and we sat on the bed,
still, Mutti my hand squeezing again.
Finally with one hand she takes me
and a pail with water in the other
like she knows what she must do.

Come, Tina, she says, and we walk through the dark
where the cows were – we have them all
eaten, and Fritz the dog also – and there outside
by the door is the man, like a sack.
He is again with dirt and blood besmeared
so Mutti takes the water and I too
and we wash him. This could be Papa, she says.
This could somewhere be your Papa.
Always she looks over her shoulder.
I am thinking maybe the men will come back
but I am not afraid. Mutti and I are washing
a man who could be like Papa who was taken away.

Read more »

Yesterday was Richard Dawkins's birthday and I wrote to him to wish him a good one. To amuse him, I also sent along a letter I had written some time ago to a correspondent from Karachi. Richard wrote back saying, “Dear Abbas, thank you for this. It is excellent. Is there some way we can post this on RichardDawkins.net?” Who am I to say no to Richard? So here it is at his site:

Quite recently I received a letter from a very religious and clearly very intelligent and well-educated young person from Pakistan asking about my personal religious views. This was my reply:

Dear X,

I am not going to speak here about my own religious views but about yours. It seems from what you have written that you are somewhat troubled that I might not share your own beliefs. What I want to do is recommend to you a reasonable, scientific, logical, and quite surefire method by which you may strengthen your own faith.

It doesn't really matter which sect of which religion you belong to, this is what you need to do: pick two or three well-known religions with large numbers of adherents which are as different as possible from your own. From your perspective, the people who believe in these religions are quite wrong about a great number of things, even though you may agree with them about some aspects of their faith. Forget about the things you agree on. Focus instead on their wrong beliefs. The more ridiculous they seem to you, the better. And now ask yourself why such a large number of people find these beliefs to be not only reasonable but often quite self-evident. You must make finding the answer to this question your project for some time. You will essentially be compiling a list of bad reasons for holding a religious belief.

If you think about it (and look into the matter) you will find that there is generally no great difference in the average intelligence of those people who believe in religions very different from yours and the people of your own religion. After all, one can find accomplished and very smart artists, scientists, musicians, mathematicians, writers, philosophers, and so on, from all major religions. (One can, of course, also find imbeciles in every religion, but that is neither here nor there.) Similarly, one can find morally decent people as well as cheats and liars and evil psychopaths from all sorts of religious backgrounds.

More here. My interview with Richard is here.

Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times:

Architecture generally involves creating monuments to permanence from substantial materials like steel and concrete. Yet this year, the discipline’s top award is going to a man who is best known for making temporary housing out of transient materials like paper tubes and plastic beer crates.

On Monday, the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban was named the winner of this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, largely because of his work designing shelters after natural disasters in places like Rwanda, Turkey, India, China, Haiti and Japan.

“His buildings provide shelter, community centers and spiritual places for those who have suffered tremendous loss and destruction,” the jury said in its citation. “When tragedy strikes, he is often there from the beginning.”

In a telephone interview from Paris, Mr. Ban, 56, said he was honored to have won, not because the Pritzker would raise his profile but because it affirms the humanitarian emphasis of his work. “I’m trying to understand the meaning of this encouragement,” he said of the prize. “It’s not the award for achievement. I have not made a great achievement.”

More here.

From The Physics arXiv:

Last week, the world of science was ablaze with the news that astrophysicists had found the first evidence of ripples in spacetime from the instants after the Big Bang. The discovery of these gravitational waves would be big news by itself but there was another aspect to this work that was even more significant.

The work also found crucial evidence for a process known as inflation: that in the instants after the Big Bang the universe expanded explosively—by some 20 orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second—making it the size we see today.

But even before the sound of champagne corks popping has died down, theorists are beginning to question the new result. Everyone agrees that the data shows important evidence of gravitational waves. The question is whether these waves could have been created after inflation, rather than before it. If so, then they do not provide any evidence that the early universe expanded so quickly and the celebrations have been premature.

More here.

William Kremer in BBC World News:

Around the year 1500, an assistant to the Venetian ambassador to England was struck by the strange attitude to parenting that he had encountered on his travels. He wrote to his masters in Venice that the English kept their children at home “till the age of seven or nine at the utmost” but then “put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years”. The unfortunate children were sent away regardless of their class, “for everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own”. It was for the children's own good, he was told – but he suspected the English preferred having other people's children in the household because they could feed them less and work them harder.

…So why did this seemingly cruel system evolve? For the poor, there was an obvious financial incentive to rid the household of a mouth to feed. But parents did believe they were helping their children by sending them away, and the better off would save up to buy an apprenticeship. These typically lasted seven years, but they could go on for a decade. The longer the term, the cheaper it was – a sign that the Venetian visitor was correct to conclude that adolescents were a useful source of cheap labour for their masters. In 1350, the Black Death had reduced Europe's population by roughly half, so hired labour was expensive. The drop in the population, on the other hand, meant that food was cheap – so live-in labour made sense. “There was a sense that your parents can teach you certain things, but you can learn other things and different things and more things if you get experience of being trained by someone else,” says Jeremy Goldberg from the University of York.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

MIT engineers have coaxed bacterial cells to produce biofilms that can incorporate nonliving materials, such as gold nanoparticles and quantum dots. These “living materials” combine the advantages of live cells — which respond to their environment, produce complex biological molecules, and span multiple length scales — with the benefits of nonliving materials, which add functions such as conducting electricity or emitting light.

This approach could one day be used to design more complex devices such as solar cells, self-healing materials, or diagnostic sensors, says Timothy Lu, an MIT assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering. Lu is the senior author of a paper describing this innovation in the March 23 issue of Nature Materials. The researchers also demonstrated that the cells can even coordinate with each other to control the composition of the biofilm. These hybrid materials could be worth exploring for use in energy applications such as batteries and solar cells, Lu says. The researchers are also interested in coating the biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose, which could be useful for converting agricultural waste to biofuels. Other potential applications include diagnostic devices and scaffolds for tissue engineering.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

On Monday my essay ‘In Defence of Diversity’ – which exposes the hollowness of contemporary anti-immigration rhetoric, and places it in historical context – won the 3 Quarks Daily 2014 essay prize. And on Monday, the Times’ new columnist Melanie Phillips – my old colleague from the days when I was a panelist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze – published a polemic trying to claim the progressive groundfor critics of mass immigration. Her arguments are familiar – they are the very arguments I unpicked in my essay. So here are Phillips’ main points – and my response. If only she had read my essay first (not that I think it would have made much difference…)

‘Even now, it is still the issue that dare not speak its name… Mass immigration is still something on which only one view is considered socially acceptable: that there is nothing wrong with it.’

This, of course, has become the standard meme among anti-immigration campaigners, endlessly pushed by authors such as David Goodhart and Paul Collier. I find it extraordinary that anyone still has the gall to make such a claim. To suggest that there is no debate about immigration, or that the only position that one can hold is in defence of mass immigration, is about as credible as suggesting that Nigel Farage is a shy, retiring type who hates stirring up controversy.

Far from immigration being a taboo subject, there are few issues about which politicians and journalists are more obsessed, and few ideas that have more acquired the status of uncontestable wisdom than the need to impose tighter immigration controls.

More here.

Sabahat Zakariya in The Friday Times:

As the conversation turns to ‘Two Lives’, his book about his Indian uncle and German aunt that is a particular favourite of mine, I ask him which prose genre is his favourite: “I like narrative non-fiction as a reader, though I do like a lot of fiction too. People tend to think that narrative non-fiction is simpler. You start at one point and you end at another but for something like ‘Two Lives’, for instance, there is a lot of complexity. It is actually two and a half lives since I am also a character in the book. A great deal of thought went behind deciding its structure, how to fit all the lives, where to place the letters and the pictures and so on.”

“I love the way it begins, with you standing outside that house in London”, I gush. He smiles graciously, “Chekov had this wonderful saying: Start in medias res. So just that, ‘When I was sixteen I was sent to…’ Just that.”

“No Thomas Hardying around?” I add helpfully.

“Haha. Yes. No Thomas Hardying around. Bus seedhi baat.”

More here.

Three Trees

…………—for J, J & I

Over at Brain Pickings:

2. Now and in the time to be, try to be kind to your parents. If this sounds too close to “Honor thy mother and father” for your comfort, so be it. All I am trying to say is try not to rebel against them, for, in all likelihood, they will die before you do, so you can spare yourselves at least this source of guilt if not of grief. If you must rebel, rebel against those who are not so easily hurt. Parents are too close a target (so, by the way, are sisters, brothers, wives or husbands); the range is such that you can’t miss. Rebellion against one’s parents, for all its I-won’t-take-a-single-penny-from-you, is essentially an extremely bourgeois sort of thing, because it provides the rebel with the ultimate in comfort, in this case, mental comfort: the comfort of one’s convictions. The later you hit this pattern, the later you become a mental bourgeois, i.e., the longer you stay skeptical, doubtful, intellectually uncomfortable, the better it is for you.

On the other hand, of course, this not-a-single-penny business makes practical sense, because your parents, in all likelihood, will bequeath all they’ve got to you, and the successful rebel will end up with the entire fortune intact — in other words, rebellion is a very efficient form of savings. The interest, though, is crippling; I’d say, bankrupting.

3. Try not to set too much store by politicians — not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that political party, doctrine, system or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, at best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantial an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, because there will always be those — say, just one person — who won’t profit from this improvement. The world is not perfect; the Golden Age never was or will be. The only thing that’s going to happen to the world is that it will get bigger, i.e., more populated while not growing in size. No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that, or, rather, in dark of that — you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves — at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius. Yet in doing this, you must also prepare yourselves for the heart-rending realization that even that pie of yours won’t suffice; you must prepare yourselves that you’re likely to dine as much in disappointment as in gratitude. The most difficult lesson to learn here is to be steady in the kitchen, since by serving this pie just once you create quite a lot of expectations. Ask yourself whether you can afford a steady supply of those pies, or would you rather bargain on a politician?

More here.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis in the NYT Magazine:

Spend any time hanging around bisexual activists, and you’ll hear a great deal about biphobia. You’ll also hear about bi erasure, the idea that bisexuality is systematically minimized and dismissed. This is especially vexing to bisexual activists, who point to a 2011 report by the Williams Institute — a policy center specializing in L.G.B.T. demographics — that reviewed 11 surveys and found that “among adults who identify as L.G.B., bisexuals comprise a slight majority.” In one of the larger surveys reviewed by the institute (a 2009 study published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine), 3.1 percent of American adults identified as bisexual, while 2.5 percent identified as gay or lesbian. (In most surveys, the institute found that women were “substantially more likely than men to identify as bisexual.”)

Then there’s the tricky matter of identity versus behavior. Joe Kort, a Michigan-based sex therapist whose next book is about straight-identified men who are married but who also have sex with men, says that “many never tell anyone about their bisexual experiences, for fear of losing relationships or having their reputation hurt. Consequently, they’re an invisible group of men. We know very little about them.”

Bisexuals are so unlikely to be out about their orientation — in a 2013 Pew Research Survey, only 28 percent of people who identified as bisexual said they were open about it — that the San Francisco Human Rights Commission recently called them “an invisible majority” in need of resources and support.

But in the eyes of many Americans, bisexuality — despite occasional and exaggerated media reports of its chicness — remains a bewildering and potentially invented orientation favored by men in denial about their homosexuality and by women who will inevitably settle down with men.

More here.

James K. Galbraith reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century in Dissent:

Early in the last century, neoclassical economics dumped this social and political analysis for a mechanical one. Capital was reframed as a physical item, which paired with labor to produce output. This notion of capital permitted mathematical expression of the “production function,” so that wages and profits could be linked to the respective “marginal products” of each factor. The new vision thus raised the uses of machinery over the social role of its owners and legitimated profit as the just return to an indispensable contribution.

Symbolic mathematics begets quantification. For instance, if one is going to claim that one economy uses more capital (in relation to labor) than another, there must be some common unit for each factor. For labor it could be an hour of work time. But for capital? Once one leaves behind the “corn model” in which capital (seed) and output (flour) are the same thing, one must somehow make commensurate all the diverse bits of equipment and inventory that make up the actual “capital stock.” But how?

Although Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, has written a massive book entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he explicitly (and rather caustically) rejects the Marxist view. He is in some respects a skeptic of modern mainstream economics, but he sees capital (in principle) as an agglomeration of physical objects, in line with the neoclassical theory. And so he must face the question of how to count up capital-as-a-quantity.

His approach is in two parts. First, he conflates physical capital equipment with all forms of money-valued wealth, including land and housing, whether that wealth is in productive use or not. He excludes only what neoclassical economists call “human capital,” presumably because it can’t be bought and sold. Then he estimates the market value of that wealth. His measure of capital is not physical but financial.

This, I fear, is a source of terrible confusion.

More here.

T.J. Clark at The London Review of Books:

Over the past half-century or so, when writers have turned their attention to the four canvases by Veronese in the National Gallery called The Allegories of Love, they have spent their time trying to unpack the pictures’ iconography and said almost nothing about their visual character. This seems nearly as odd to me as it would have done to Ruskin, since the four pictures’ iconography is banal and their visual character unique and demanding. Iconographically speaking, the paintings tell a familiar late Petrarchan story of the pains and ecstasies of desire. Matrimony is eventually called on, in the stateliest of the four, to quieten things down, but most of the pictorial action in the three leading up to it has to do with Love’s double-dealing. The mysterious letter that goes from hand to hand in the painting called Infidelity is usually taken to be written by the woman in the middle to the man towards the left – the ‘soft musing poet’, as Edgar Wind imagined him, sweating in a pink silk number, ‘with some of the obesity of a coloratura tenor’. The little winged Eros stands at the clavichord nearby, ready to play continuo to his young master’s next outpourings. The poet looks to the sky for inspiration.

more here.

Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker:

Not long after the Waco siege began, James Tabor, the Biblical scholar, heard David Koresh on CNN talking about the Seven Seals. Tabor is an expert on Biblical apocalypticism and recognized the Branch Davidians for what they were—a community immersed in the world of the Old Testament prophets. He contacted a fellow religious scholar, Phillip Arnold, and together they went to the F.B.I. “It became clear to me that neither the officials in charge nor the media who were sensationally reporting the sexual escapades of David Koresh had a clue about the biblical world which this group inhabited,” Tabor writes, in an essay about his role in the Mount Carmel conflict. “I realized that in order to deal with David Koresh, and to have any chance for a peaceful resolution of the Waco situation, one would have to understand and make use of these biblical texts.”

Arnold and Tabor began long discussions with Livingstone Fagan, a Branch Davidian who had been sent out of Mount Carmel early in the siege to act as a spokesman. Fagan was a Jamaican-born Brit, and one of the community’s scholars—a man known for greeting others with the very English “Hello, Livingstone Fagan here. Shall we study?”

more here.

Ellen Douglas from a 1975 peice for The New Republic:

Flannery O'Connor, a Southerner and a Catholic, removed herself from the secular, convictionless global village and built her life in a specific place and on a specific faith. She wrote: “As a novelist, the major part of my task is to make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible. The novelist begins his work where human knowledge begins—with the senses; he works through the limita- tions of matter and unless he is writing fantasy, he has to stay within the concrete possibilities of his culture. He is bound by his particular past and by those institutions and traditions that this past has left to his society. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has formed us in the West; we are bound to it by ties which may often be invisible, but which are there, nevertheless. It has formed the shape of our secularism; it has formed even the shape of modern atheism. . . .

“The writer learns, perhaps more quickly than the reader, to be humble in the face of what-is. What-is is all he has to do with; the concrete is his medium and he will realize eventually that fiction can transcend its limitations only by staying within them.”

more here.