From KurzweilAI:

Activated through permanent stress, immune cells in the brain can cause changes to the brain, resulting in mental disorders, a research team headed by professor Georg Juckel, Medical Director of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) LWL university clinic, has found. The research was based on psychoneuroimmunology, the study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems of the human body. The team focused mainly on microglia, a type of glial cell that acts as the main immune defense in the central nervous system and comprise 10–15% of all cells found within the brain. Under normal circumstances, microglia repair synapses between nerves cells in the brain and stimulate their growth. Repeatedly activated, however, microglia may damage nerve cells and trigger inflammation processes — a risk factor for mental diseases such as schizophrenia, the researchers found.

Interactions between the brain and immune system

“Originally, the brain and the immune system were considered two separate systems,” explains Juckel in RUB’s RUBIN publication. “It was assumed that the brain operates independently from the immune system and has hardly anything to do with it. This, however, is not true. “Direct neural connections from the brain to organs of the immune system, such as the spleen, do exist. And vice versa, immune cells migrate to the brain, and local immune cells carry out various tasks there, including disposing of damaged synapses. Notably, treatment with an immune system mediator such as Interferon alpha, used in hepatitis C treatment, for example, leads to depressions in 20 to 30 per cent of the patients.

Picture: Microglia cells from rat cortex before (left) and after (right) traumatic brain injury

More here.

Among Other Things
.

The rest
have driven to the mall.
Any second now
will be too dark.

This close to the edge,
among other things,
I read.

Leaves rattle overhead.
Little pockets
of canned applause
sift through
the screened porch
in next door’s yard.
.

by Conor O'Callaghan
from The Sun King
Gallery Press, Oldcastle, 2013

Nick Mamatas in the LA Review of Books:

I MAY AS WELL state my claim in as straightforward a way as possible: H. P. Lovecraft, he of the squamous and eldritch, is wrongly derided as a bad writer. Lovecraft is actually a difficult writer. The previous decade saw a slow-motion dust-up over the notion of difficult writers thanks to Jonathan Franzen’s 2002New Yorker essay “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books” and the 2005 rejoinder by Ben Marcus in Harper’s: “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It.” Franzen suggested an age-old conflict between Contract writers who wanted to offer a “good read” to their audiences, and Status writers who pursued an artistic vision to the very limits of the novel-form. Marcus, in his response, pled a case for high modernism, for writers who “interrogate the assumptions of realism and bend the habitual gestures around new shapes.”

Both essays are harmed by the simple fact that Franzen and Marcus are self-interested: Franzen considers himself “a Contract kind of person” and was put out when he received a letter from a reader who complained that his novel The Corrections contained the word “diurnality.” Marcus was put out by Franzen’s essay, labeling his own piece “a response to an attack” from the real status players of literature: the inappropriately named realists who hold experimental fiction of the sort Marcus prefers to write in disdain.

As it has been nine years, surely it is time to plant another flag: Lovecraftian fiction as experimental fiction — that is, the sort of fiction I’ve been known to write. I’ve done a bit of actual experiments: what if we triggered nucleic exchange between Lovecraft and the Beats, or Raymond Carver, or David Foster Wallace, or New Narrative, or or or…? (See my The Nickronomicon.) If there’s a difference between the self-interest in this essay and those of Franzen and Marcus, it’s a simple one: you’ve never heard of me. There’s no reason why you should, as I am a Status writer with no status, a Contract writer who has reneged.

More here.

Luke Savage in Jacobin:

The politics of the leading New Atheist thinkers are not uniform. Dawkins opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while Harris and Hitchens were some of its leading apologists. Harris defends torture as an ethical necessity in the “war on terror” while Hitchens, who was voluntarily subjected to waterboarding, did not. Both Hitchens and Harris have been prone to bellicose outbursts of violent, almost bloodthirsty rhetoric, which cannot be said of Dawkins.

Nevertheless, all are united by several common intellectual threads. Each espouses a binary worldview that pits a civilized, cosmopolitan, and progressive West against a barbaric, monistic, and reactionary East. Though varied in their political positions, Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins have all had very public dalliances with the Right, expressing either overt sympathy for, or enthusiastic endorsement of, some of its most vile and disreputable elements.

Each is outwardly a cultural liberal who primarily addresses liberal audiences — “respectable” to blue-state metropolitans and their equivalents elsewhere in ways Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh never could be — while embracing positions and causes that are manifestlyilliberal in the commonly understood sense of the term.

Beneath its many layers of intellectual adornment — the typical New Atheist text is laden with maudlin references to Darwin, Newton, and Galileo — we find a worldview intimately familiar to anyone who has studied the language of empires past: culturally supremacist, essentializing and othering towards the foreign, equal parts patronizing and paternalistic, and legitimating of the violence committed for its own ends.

In The End of Faith Harris suggests that nuclear-first strikes may be necessary if the ostensible conflict between “Islam” and “civilization” escalates: “What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?…The only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.”

More here.

Kari Lydersen in Discover:

The Ebola virus has consistently stayed several steps ahead of doctors, public officials and others trying to fight the epidemic. Throughout the first half of 2014, it spread quickly as international and even local leaders failed to recognize the severity of the situation. In recent weeks, with international response in high gear, the virus has thrown more curve balls.

The spread has significantly slowed in Liberia and beds for Ebola patients are empty even as the U.S. is building multiple treatment centers there. Meanwhile the epidemic has escalated greatly in Sierra Leone, which has aserious dearth of treatment centers. And in Mali, where an incursion was successfully contained in October, a rash of new cases has spread from an infected imam.

Predicting the trajectory of Ebola rather than playing catching-up could do much to help prevent and contain the disease. Some experts have called for prioritizing mobile treatment units that can be quickly relocated to the spots most needed. Figuring out where Ebola is likely to strike next or finding emerging hot spots early on would be key to the placement of these treatment centers.

But such modeling requires data, and lots of it. And for stressed healthcare workers on the ground and government and non-profit agencies scrambling to combat a raging epidemic, collecting and disseminating data is often not a high priority.

Air traffic connections from West African countries to the rest of the world. Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are not well connected outside the region; Nigeria, in contrast, is.

More here.

John Edward Terrell in the NYT's The Stone (photo Brian Snyder/Reuters):

At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.

Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.

This conclusion is unlikely to startle anyone who is at all religious or spiritual. When I was a boy I was taught that the Old Testament is about our relationship with God and the New Testament is about our responsibilities to one another. I now know this division of biblical wisdom is too simple. I have also learned that in the eyes of many conservative Americans today, religion and evolution do not mix. You either accept what the Bible tells us or what Charles Darwin wrote, but not both. The irony here is that when it comes to our responsibilities to one another as human beings, religion and evolution nowadays are not necessarily on opposite sides of the fence.

More here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

As late as the 1970s, it was hard to find Philip Larkin’s poetry in American bookstores. I remember searching all over Washington for his first collection, “The North Ship” (1945), before locating a paperback in the now long-gone Daedalus Bookshop next to the Uptown Theater. I already owned shabby copies of “The Less Deceived” (1955), “The Whitsun Weddings” (1964) and “High Windows” (1974), but I can no longer remember how I first discovered Larkin’s work. It was certainly prior to Noel Perrin’s moving essay on the long poem “Church Going,” part of the wonderful series of “Rediscoveries” he wrote for Book World in the 1980s and later collected in “A Reader’s Delight.”

Today, of course, Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is as famous a poet as any in the second half of the 20th century. In England he holds a roughly comparable position to Robert Frost in the United States — a beloved, curmudgeonly figure, with dark corners in his private life, who produced clear, accessible poetry that, once read, could never be forgotten. “Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me). . . . What will survive of us is love. . . . Age, and then the only end of age. . . . Never such innocence again.”

more here.

Anthony Domestico at berfrois:

The 1932 Obelisk Press edition of Pomes Penyeach came at a crucial juncture in James Joyce’s writing career and in the life and mental health of his daughter, Lucia. At the time, Joyce was internationally renowned for Ulysses and laboring over his Work in Progress; meanwhile, Lucia was descending into the nightmare of schizophrenia, becoming increasingly delusional and erratic in behavior. Joyce had already published Pomes Penyeach, a series of 13 poems written between 1904 and 1924, with Shakespeare and Co. in 1927. In 1931, a publisher named Caresse Crosby, having seen and admired Lucia Joyce’s designs for a musical setting of Joyce’s poems, suggested that Joyce put out a limited edition volume of Pomes Penyeach containing illuminations of the initial letters for each poem. Joyce, eager to believe that some productive work would soothe Lucia’s inner demons and lead her back onto the road to normalcy, jumped at the chance.

Joyce approached Jack Kahane, a founder of Obelisk Press who had previously produced a limited edition of Joyce’s Haveth Childers Everywhere, and the two agreed to terms. With Desmond Harmsworth, Obelisk Press agreed to print a version of Pomes Penyeach that would use Lucia’s drawings and stress the handcrafted, artisanal nature of the book.

more here.

Darrell Hartman at Guernica:

Dry Wood, Les Blank’s 1973 documentary about Creole life and music, throws the viewer headfirst into unfamiliar, almost bizarre, scenes of backwoods theater. It opens with a troupe of revelers costumed in cone hats, clown masks, and frilled jumpsuits, chasing a rooster around a yard. The camera follows their pickup trucks down a country road and into a gas station’s dirt parking lot, where they tip back handles of liquor and dance around while a fiddler plays. Someone throws a handful of pocket change up into the air; they go chasing after that, too.

This sequence of rag-tag Mardi Gras—like Rabelais with tractors and Budweiser—unfolds mostly on its own. No voiceover narrator or talking head chimes in to explain what we’re seeing—there are only the subjects themselves, accompanied by festive strains of zydeco music. Dry Wood becomes a brief immersion in that folk genre, a film that weaves the music into scenes of daily life—especially of celebration—for a dynamic, appreciative portrait of a longstanding American micro-culture.

In short, it’s vintage Blank.

more here.

Frank Rich interviews Chris Rock in Vulture:

What would you do in Ferguson that a standard reporter wouldn’t?

I’d do a special on race, but I’d have no black people.

Well, that would be much more revealing.

Yes, that would be an event. Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

Right. It’s ridiculous.

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

It’s about white people adjusting to a new reality?

Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for.

Read the full interview here.

Suzi Feay in The Telegraph:

The Marquis de Sade, who died 200 years ago today, lived a turbulent life. He was born into an aristocratic Provençal family, enjoying all the privileges of the ancien régime before it took against him; he kept his head through the French Revolution and died, aged 74, in a lunatic asylum. His libertarian writings alienated two kings, a revolutionary tribunal and an emperor. He spent most of his adult life under lock and key: if they couldn’t get him for being bad, being mad would do. In his final miserable years, Sade was an obese, despised and penniless social outcast. Yet soon after his death in 1814 his reputation began to climb. He was claimed as a hero by writers and artists; in 1839, he was hailed as “one of the glories of France, a martyr… the very high and powerful seigneur de Sade”. He is now a seminal (an unfortunate though apt adjective) cultural figure. In France this year, celebrations are being held in his honour: the Musée D’Orsay is currently hosting an exhibition tracing the influence of Sade on Goya, Géricault and Picasso. The manuscript of his most notorious work, The 120 Days of Sodom, has been bought for seven million euros; his Provençal châteaux is owned by Pierre Cardin and acolytes beat a path there every year.

Sade’s bizarre psychopathy and life story, as much as his gruelling writings, have inspired such disparate figures as Flaubert, Angela Carter, the Surrealists, Camille Paglia and Pier Paolo Pasolini. American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is a descendant of Sade’s murderous protagonists; Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose grows up in the shadow of Sade’s chateau, with a violent, abusive father who could have walked straight from the pages of Sade’s 1791 novel Justine. And let’s not forget Moors murderer Ian Brady, whose youthful reading of Sade apparently inspired his fantasies of domination and murder.

More here.

Helene Stapinski in The New York Times:

Behind a black curtain in a downstairs corner of the National Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan (known as MoMath), a small group of mathematicians, designers and engineers was hard at work — laughing, shouting, clapping and having a blast, while being chased by robots. They were doing final testing on an exhibit called Robot Swarm, opening Dec. 14 and featuring dozens of glowing, motorized, interactive robots that resemble horseshoe crabs. The museum says it is the nation’s most technologically ambitious robotics exhibit. But the assembled experts, standing in stocking feet, were as excited as a gaggle of 6-year-olds. Sealed under an 11-by-12-foot glass floor, the small, colored robots swarm, skitter and react to whoever is standing on top of the glass. It is a strangely exhilarating sensation to be shoeless and have creatures — albeit human-made, computer-controlled creatures — react to your every step. “It’s cool, right?” asked a creator of the exhibit, Glen Whitney, who is also a co-founder of the museum. “It’s a feeling of power.”

Four visitors at a time will don harnesses with a small “reflector pod” on the right shoulder. That sends a location signal to overhead cameras, which transmit the information to the robots — which, in turn, move in accord with a variety of programmed settings determined by visitors working a control panel. Set the robots to “Run Away” mode, for example, and you can’t help feeling like Godzilla, stomping around the glass floor and scattering the frightened robots to the far corners of the grid. “Pursue” mode can be downright creepy, with the robots — like giant glowing cockroaches or trilobites — following you everywhere, trying to get as close to you as possible, surrounding you and then refusing to go away — until the algorithm is changed. In the more amusing “Spin” mode, the robots play a game of Simon Says, turning in whatever direction you turn, spinning when you spin.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants. Details of the prize can be found here.

On the right is a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Huw Price, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Is applied ethics applicable enough? Acting and hedging under moral uncertainty
   
2. A Philosopher's Take: Moral Resposibility and Volunteer Soldiers
3. Absolute Irony: Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and Rorty’s Strange Looping Trick
4. Flickers of Freedom: The Case for Libertarian Compatibilism
5. New York Times, Opinionator: The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz
6. Philosopher's Beard: The Case for Ethical Warning Labels on Animal Products
7. Practical Ethics: Why I Am Not a Utilitarian
8. Psychiatric Ethics: Anosognosia and Epistemic Innocence
9. Vihvelin: How Not to Think About Free Will

We'll announce the three winners on December 22, 2014.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

Saud Baloch. Strained and Sustained. 2013.

Latex and fabric.

More here and here.