From The New York Times:

“Earth (The Book)” is a mock textbook by writers for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — or “the authors of the popular television program ‘The John Daly Show’ ,” as they put it in a fake Wikipedia blurb on the book’s back cover. It is conceived as a handy guide for extraterrestrials who arrive on this planet after humanity has become extinct, in case those extraterrestrials want to know what they’re missing. It explains everyday details about how we live(d), from our use of the fork (“a way to hurt food one last time before eating it”) to our wearing of pants. “We put these on one leg at a time,” it says. “You may require a different approach.”

“Earth” adopts a faux-scientific tone to explain the planet, its life forms and their quantifiable characteristics. Like the “Daily Show” this parody delivers wittily framed absurdities in a sweetly deadpan way. So there are statistics. (“Length of day (in days) …… 1.”) There are charts. (Time We Were Willing to Wait for a Baked Potato: from 8 hours in 1900 to 1 second in 2010. Lifetime Food Consumption of First Slices of Wedding Cake: 2.1.)

More here.

From npr:

Ever since drugmakers first started selling prescription medicines, they've been currying favor with doctors who write the orders. So why do so many physicians, who, even now, earn more money and maintain more public trust than most of us so readily accept the drug industry's blandishments? Well, a clever study that surveyed hundreds of young pediatricians and family practice doctors found, basically, the doctors think they're worth it. The likelihood that doctors will look kindly on gifts rises as they're reminded of their long hours and educational debts. Then offer doctors this rationalization:

Some physicians believe that the stagnant salaries and rising debt levels prevalent in the medical profession justifies accepting gifts and other forms of compensation and incentives from the pharmaceutical industry. To what extent do you agree or disagree that this is a good justification?

Even if they say they disagree with the proposition, just showing it to them increases the odds they'll say gifts are OK. Overall, the researchers from Carnegie Mellon found that reminding doctors of the sacrifices they've made improves their view of gifts.

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend C.M.Naim)

Nick Cave is an Australian by blood, an honorary American by dint of his devotion to pulp, and, at fifty-two, the standard-bearer for a global assembly of bookish, noisy, morbid year-round Halloweeners. His most recent band, Grinderman, which shares members with his longest-running group, the Bad Seeds, has just released a second record strong enough to make “side project” seem like an inaccurate description. In the eighties, it looked as though Cave might become a darker, underground version of Elvis, but that time has passed, partly because his interests have changed. Now his profile is pleasantly complicated; in the past thirty years he has channelled a dozen different versions of the male psyche. To the rock audience, he is a highbrow front man who also writes novels and soundtracks, and pals about with artistes who wouldn’t be caught dead at a rock show where the audience is forced to stand. In Australia, he is mainstream enough to have won a recent MySpace poll that asked which musician Australians would like to see installed as Prime Minister. (Three hundred thousand votes were cast.) In the U.S., Cave has a smaller but intense following. With his tailored suits, gold rings, and bad-hombre mustache, he has become our most dapper weirdo, a Don Draper for people who don’t get up before sunset.

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

The world of letters: does such a thing still exist? Even within the seemingly homogeneous sphere of the university English department, a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in their points of reference (Samuel Richardson v. Jhumpa Lahiri), the graduate degrees they award (Doctor of Philosophy v. Master of Fine Arts) and their perceived objects of study (‘literature’ v. ‘fiction’). Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, a study of Planet MFA conducted from Planet PhD, might not strike the casual reader as an interdisciplinary bombshell, but the fact is that literary historians don’t write about creative writing, and creative writers don’t write literary histories, so any secondary discourse about creative writing has been confined, as McGurl observes, to ‘the domain of literary journalism’ and ‘the question of whether the rise of the writing programme has been good or bad for American writers’: that is, to the domain of a third and completely different group of professionals, with its own set of interests, largely in whether things are good or bad. McGurl’s proposal to take the rise of the programme ‘not as an occasion for praise or lamentation but as an established fact in need of historical interpretation’ is thus both welcome and overdue.

more from Elif Batuman at the LRB here.

On Saturday June 8, 1940, West Ham beat Blackburn Rovers in the FA Cup Final. Ten days later, Winston Churchill warned the British people that a somewhat more serious contest was in the offing: “The Battle of France is over”, he told the House of Commons. “I expect the battle of Britain is about to begin.” Soon the skies were criss-crossed with vapour trails as the airmen of Fighter Command fought it out with the Luftwaffe over the waters of the Channel and the fields and towns of southern England. Almost before it was over, the duel had won them legendary status. National mythology set the defeat of the Luftwaffe during that long hot summer alongside the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 as one of the defining moments of English history – and of the English character. Myth wrapped itself around the facts, as myth will at such moments. Britain “stood alone”, a David facing Goliath as “the Few” fought for the skies and kept an all-conquering German juggernaut at bay. United as one, and stiffened by the “Dunkirk spirit”, the country stood behind its Prime Minister, ready to fight to the last. Its saviour, during that hot anxious summer, was the thin blue line of the Royal Air Force, embodied in the lethal beauty of the Supermarine Spitfire – a plane every schoolboy could recognize instantly years after the battle was over.

more from John Gooch at the TLS here.

Marco Evers interviews A. C. Grayling in Der Spiegel:

Militant atheists want to arrest Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to Britain over his alleged complicity in covering up abuse by priests. In a SPIEGEL interview, the British philosopher Anthony Grayling explained why he believes the pope is the head of a conspiracy and argues that the Vatican should not be a state.

SPIEGEL: Professor Grayling, will you really try to arrest the pope when he comes to Britain this week?

Anthony Grayling: If I got anywhere near him — yes, I would like to try it. English law provides for the possibility of a citizen's arrest.

SPIEGEL: But only if there is no doubt about the person's guilt, there is an imminent danger and there are no police around …

Grayling: … and that probably won't happen. There's also only a very slight hope that we will succeed through legal proceedings. All in all I'd say: The chances of getting the Pope arrested this week are quite slim, unfortunately.

SPIEGEL: Wasn't that idea a little over the top anyway?

Grayling: Let me explain this in the most neutral terms. For decades, priests have sexually abused thousands of children, in this country and in many others. These are serious crimes. The hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has been systematically instrumental in covering up these crimes, hiding people who committed them from public prosecution and in numerous cases allowing the abuse of children to go on. The conspiracy has gone all the way to the top. We know there are questions on Pope Benedict himself. When he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he knew about some of these cases and participated in the cover-ups himself. That is a conspiracy — there is no other word for it. It is organized crime.

More here. [Thanks to Tauriq Moosa.]

Phineas Baxandall in The Huffington Post:

This week's news made the path for great idea a lot clearer. The international agreement in Basel this weekend introducing mild controls on financial firms is proof that a bolder proposal to reduce instability by taxing speculation is an idea whose time has come. Further urgency came this week with yesterday's AP-CNBC poll showing that “Wild gyrations on Wall Street have made U.S investors leery of buying individual stocks and skeptical that the market is a fair place to park their money.”

For decades various economists have proposed a simple way to make the American financial system more stable. As the 2008 Wall Street meltdown reminds us, financial markets become more volatile when huge volumes of money slosh across financial markets seeking tiny margins on high-volume trades. Nobel Laureate economist and presidential adviser James Tobin proposed in 1972 the first version of this simple solution currently before Congress. By placing an infinitesimal fee on short-term financial trades, real productive investments won't be discouraged; but purely speculative trades seeking tiny gains will disappear because they'll no longer be profitable.

The simple elegance of a speculation fee has captured the imagination of a broad swath (PDF) of world leaders and economists (PDF) because it would dry up the financial waves that disrupt markets and can devastate communities (link). Government budget writers have also been drawn to the promise of raising billions in tax revenue while improving capital markets. A tax of a measly quarter ($0.25) per $100 would not discourage investors, but would raise an estimated $150 billion annually that could be dedicated to funds against future financial meltdowns, paying down debt, or other needs. Dozens of far-sighted members of Congress have even lined up behind Rep. DeFazio to introduce legislation to create a “Financial Transaction Tax” that would exempt smaller middle-class investors and pension funds.

Wall Street doesn't like this idea.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Kenan Malik debate the issue in New Humanist. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown:

Burqa bans are coming in a number of EU countries. A Pew Global Attitudes survey found that 62 per cent of Britons want the same ban imposed here. An unlikely alliance of resistors has assembled to prevent any such move – Muslim Wahabis, right-wing libertarians, left-wing anti-racists. And, of course, fervent torch bearers of the Enlightenment, whose central argument is freedom – the core value of liberalism. That one principle overrides other serious considerations and reveals the inadequacies of textbook British liberalism – idle, unaware of plates shifting enigmatically in the 21st century. Avowed liberals are only able to see conflicts in binary terms – left/right, faith/atheism, freedom of expression/censorship, west/rest, Islam/enlightenment and so on. They are as committed to literalism as are literalist religious believers – in all situations they revert to the rule book, quote Voltaire, Mill and Locke, their prophets. Real liberalism means accepting illiberal choices they say, somewhat self-righteously. The burqa does not affect their own lives or test their powers of endurance. I tried to wear the full veil for a day, but threw it off in a couple of hours. I felt wiped out, lifeless and voiceless.

Kenan Malik:

The burqa should have no place in a 21st-century society, either as a piece of clothing or as a symbol of the status of women. But is the medievalism of the burqa best confronted through the illiberalism of a state ban? I think not.

There are three main kinds of arguments in favour of a ban: practical, political and existential. Practical concerns centre around worries that the burqa might make it easier for terrorists to evade security checks, and harder for people to perform certain jobs, especially those requiring face-to-face contact with the public. Politically, the burqa does little for gender equality or social integration. And for some, it poses a mortal challenge to Western values.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Some philosophers believe in doing experiments in philosophy. Joshua Knobe is one of these. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast David Edmonds interviews him about this new movement.

Listen to Joshua Knobe on Experimental Philosophy

Via Crooked Timber, in Theory Talks:

What is, according to you, the biggest current challenge or principal debate in politically oriented social sciences? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?

This is not a question I pose to myself often. About the only time I did was, however, some years ago. I don’t know if you know about the Perestroika Movement in Political Science? Some time ago, an anonymous manifesto signed by Mr. Perestroika appeared. It started out with the observation that Benedict Anderson and I had never read the American Political Science Review, and it proceeded to ask why—arguing that perhaps this journal and the hegemonic organization that backed it were irrelevant and indeed inhibitive of progress. Now the Perestroika Movement connected with the European Post-Autistic Economics Movement, which propagates heterodox economics as a challenge to all-consuming mainstream neoclassical economics. I was on the Executive Council of the Political Science Association because they invited me as a result of the Perestroika insurgency, and that was the only time I got actively involved in trying to think about what political science ought to do. By and large, I do what I do and let the chips fall where they may; I prefer not to spend my time in the methodological trenches of the fights are swirling around me.

As you can see, I haven’t thought deeply about how political science ought to be reformed; but I do believe that in political science, the people who do have pretentions to ‘scientificity’ are actually very busy learning more and more about less and less. There is an experimental turn in political science, consisting of people conducting what they call ‘natural experiments’ and that are carefully organized the way a psychology experiment would be organized, with control groups and so on. But the questions they ask are so extraordinarily narrow! They imagine that you answer as many of these questions as possible and you are slowly constructing a kind of indestructible edifice of social science, while I think all you have then is a pile of bricks that doesn’t add up to anything.

Her Copy of the Epic

That afternoon I held the frayed edges
of my mother’s college Odyssey.
I touched her graphite in the margins, and
I felt the cheap acid paper of Fitzgerald’s
1962 translation. All edges become curves.

I read what Homer said of young Telemakhos,
“The son is rare who measures with his father,”
and the comment she left in a hand that has not changed,
or not much, “descent from a super-race?”
likewise men lag behind their works, their inventions.

Above the suture, the needle’s widening eye –
I had spent my Saturday wandering
through the bookstores in the Square,
reading dust jackets, trying to think
a thought so big you could fit your life through it.

My eyes on the nymph at the violin,
case open for homage. We’re more than a stone’s throw from rocky
soiled Ithaka. All hands on the bowstring
my hands can’t pull. She bows into her applause, the clink
of nickels, above which I can’t raise my voice.

It started to rain very gently. The margins
Seemed inviting.

by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
from Sleep on It;
Hot Metal Bridge, Spring 2010

From Salon:

To discuss the book, Salon asked Curtis Sittenfeld, author of the acclaimed novels “American Wife” (a compassionate, fictionalized history of Laura Bush) and “Prep” (a keenly observed coming-of-age tale), to interview Traister over the phone. A transcript of their conversation follows.

For me, reading this book, there were so many revelations. I thought I had followed the election closely, but as I read I kept thinking, “Oh, I never saw that. I never realized that.” I think a lot of people who read the book will have a similar reaction to mine, but I also think that before cracking it open, before buying it, people might think: What is there that's left to say about the 2008 election? Do you feel like you're fighting an uphill battle in terms of that perception?

When Michiko Kakutani wrote her “Game Change” review in the New York Times, she started with some sentiment like, “Ugh, who needs another book about the election?” But my reaction to that — and every other book that is going to come out about the election, including mine — is that, oh my God, everything in America was busted open during that election. Between race and gender and Obama and Hillary and Palin, there was so much that had never happened before in American history. There will be scores more books about this election, and each of them will offer their own set of revelations about this election, which happens to be a completely gripping narrative, by the way. The greatest thing that happened to me writing this book was remembering how great the story of the election is, so even if you lived it, even though I'd written about it as it was taking place, when I went back to write about it in retrospect, I was like, “Did that really happen?”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

New research published today, Wednesday 15 September, in New Journal of Physics, uses a particle model to explain the collective decision making process of flocks of birds landing on foraging flights. Using a simple self-propelled particle (SPP) system, which sees the birds represented by particles with such parameters as position and velocity, the researchers from Budapest, Hungary, find that the collective switching from the flying to the landing state overrides the individual landing intentions of each bird.

In the absence of a decision making leader, the collective shift to land is heavily influenced by perturbations the individual birds are subject to, such as the birds' flying position within the flock. This can be compared to an avalanche of piled up sand, which would occur even for perfectly symmetric and cautiously placed grains, but in reality happens much sooner because of increasing, non-linear fluctuations.

More here.

Humans are carbon-bond consumers. Carbon bonds come into the front end of your feeding tubes in the form of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins; you then break those chemical bonds to extract energy, and excrete the residue as carbon dioxide, water vapor and various solid waste. Sometimes, however, some of these chemicals can make their way from your digestive system and into your brain; the consequences can be subtle or profound. The distinction between what is considered a food (something that your body wants or needs in order to function optimally) or a drug (something that your brain wants or needs in order to function optimally) is becoming increasingly difficult to define. Indeed, the routine use of some substances, such as stimulants and depressants, is so universal that most of us do not even consider them to be drugs, but, rather, actual food. Is coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, cocoa, or marijuana a nutrient or a drug? In truth, anything you take into your body should be considered a drug, whether it’s obviously nutritious or not.

more from Gary Wenk at Seed here.

Test your religious literacy: Which sacred text says that Jesus is the “word” of God? a) the Gospel of John; b) the Book of Isaiah; c) the Koran. The correct answer is the Koran. But if you guessed the Gospel of John you get partial credit because its opening passage — “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God” — is an implicit reference to Jesus. In fact, when Muhammad described Jesus as God’s word, he was no doubt aware that he was affirming Christian teaching. Extra-credit question: Which sacred text has this to say about the Hebrews: God, in his “prescience,” chose “the children of Israel … above all peoples”? I won’t bother to list the choices, since you’ve probably caught onto my game by now; that line, too, is in the Koran.

more from Robert Wright at The Opinionater here.

On 18 July 1573, the Venetian Inquisition summoned Paolo Veronese to answer questions about the Last Supper that he had painted for the Convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. In Veronese’s magnificent image, Palladian architecture frames the central scene, while Hogarthian servants and soldiers talk and scuffle in the foreground. The extras who give the painting its life and color provoked dry, precise queries: “What signifies the figure of him whose nose is bleeding?” “What signify those armed men dressed in the fashion of Germany, with halberds in their hands?” “And the one who is dressed as a jester with a parrot on his wrist, why did you put him into the picture?” Veronese did his best to satisfy the inquisitors. The figure with the bleeding nose, he explained, “is a servant who has a nose-bleed from some accident.” The jester with the parrot “is there as an ornament, as it is usual to insert such figures.” As to the halberdiers, he offered a more theoretical explanation: It is necessary here that I should say a score of words. … We painters use the same license as poets and madmen, and I represented those halberdiers, the one drinking, the other eating at the foot of the stairs, but both ready to do their duty, because it seemed to me suitable and possible that the master of the house, who as I have been told was rich and magnificent, would have such servants.

more from Anthony Grafton at Cabinet here.

Robert C. Morgan in The Brooklyn Rail:

I find it encouraging to know that there are still exhibitions being mounted capable of altering one’s aesthetic or historical point of view. Such an experience happened this past summer at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice with Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus, a relatively modest exhibition tracing the concept of utopia in art from the late 1790s to the early avant-garde movements of the 20th century. The exhibition was not a typical chronology; there were surprises and curious leaps as one moved, for example, from the Arts and Crafts guilds in England to the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire or from the Neo-Impressionists in France to the De Stijl movement in Holland. This lack of predictability questioned what has been accepted as mainstream art for more than two centuries, and implied that the neat packages and categories of specialization of art survey courses may be too pristine. Often, not enough emphasis is given to the exceptions to the logic of historical progression, where major leaps occur as a result of works that appear out of sequence and are therefore not accurately understood, assimilated, evaluated, or even recognized.

In all fairness, what I garnered from this exhibition may not have been what the curator, Vivian Greene, intended. After two fully engaged and stimulating viewings of Utopia Matters, I was provoked once again to rethink the Greenbergian slant on Modernism and to conjure up that familiar, age-worn bifurcation between the avant-garde and kitsch. According to Greenberg’s essay, titled “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” originally published in 1939, and later shortened and revised in 1961, the avant-garde presumably evolved first, only to be followed by the phenomenon of kitsch whereby synthetic saplings—later appropriations from the originals—were produced to fill the mindless consumerist demand created by the Industrial Revolution. In fact, if I understood one aspect of this exhibition correctly, it is that the more familiar Modernist paradigm should be seen in reverse, namely, that the avant-garde emerged a century after kitsch had already found an alternative aesthetic to the mainstream that the Neo-Classical paintings of Jacques-Louis David helped supplant.

by Pete Simonelli

The foil on the pack catches my eye. An emptiness is captured there. The sky. The foil is reflecting the sky. Rhymes with it.

M. DeCapite

If he looks outside again,
perhaps the evening sky will blue a little more,
and the image half seen in the neighbor’s window
might bore into the lately-dulled warrens of his curiosity
and prowl among other burdensome urges not soon
(or already half-) written,
and find the same small, transcendent nudge
a sky and a pack of Camels once gave him.
He might see, as Morandi did,
that the trouble with getting any image right
is not a question of the wrong-aged soul
dithering between minutiae (such as light)
and intrigue (such as pussy)
but simply:
the little chasm of a late afternoon between the two boxes,
in the one and darkest shadow,
where who knows what truly sits on the table.
So he turns
(because you always must), and
before the image could disappear or, worse,

disappoint,

his eye led not just to a source—
………………..or some glimpsed body
of a source—
but the emulsion, too,
the fade,
just to see something take hold
then die.

[Originally published in the Breakwater Review.]

Ashley Mears in Jezebel:

Suckers are not born a minute, but dreamers are. We all dream — of fame, fortune, and glory — and for teenage girls, all three are rolled into one tenacious fantasy: the dream of being a fashion model.

Anatomy of a Scheme: Why Teenagers Dream of Becoming Models, and How Modeling Agents Could Care Less

Enter the Model Search, an event run by corporations like iPOP, IMTA, and ProScout, who promise a shot at making these dreams come true for fees ranging from a few hundred to several thousand dollars.

One such Model Search was underway last month at a hotel in midtown NYC, where, over a few days, thousands arrived to impress representatives from over 100 international modeling and talent agencies. In the modeling showcase alone, over 500 people ages 13-25 strutted down an elevated runway constructed in the hotel's ballroom, alongside which rows of agents sat and watched.

I followed a modeling agency's scout — let's call her Allie — as she attended the search for three days. As it turns out, Allie and the hundreds of agents here are not too interested in what's on the runway. They actually find it all rather boring and tasteless.