John Tierney in The New York Times:

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page. The results are surprising — well, to me, anyway. I would have hypothesized that there are two basic strategies for making the most-e-mailed list. One, which I’ve happily employed, is to write anything about sex. The other, which I’m still working on, is to write an article headlined: “How Your Pet’s Diet Threatens Your Marriage, and Why It’s Bush’s Fault.”

But it turns out that readers have more exalted tastes, according to the Penn researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman. People preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics. Perhaps most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list. In general, they found, 20 percent of articles that appeared on the Times home page made the list, but the rate rose to 30 percent for science articles, including ones with headlines like “The Promise and Power of RNA.” (I swear, the science staff did nothing to instigate this study, but we definitely don’t mind publicizing the results.)

More here.

Charles Simic reviews Mark Danner's Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, in the New York Review of Books:

Now that independent war correspondents are nearly an extinct species and we fight wars with fewer and fewer images of destruction and carnage shown on television or in newspapers, it's worth recalling that there was a time when this wasn't so. Before the Pentagon established the policy of embedding reporters with our armed forces—thus restricting their movement and making it harder for images and reports that do not fit the official narrative to appear—war correspondents were more or less on their own in war-torn countries, reporting what they saw and drawing their own conclusions. It was an extremely dangerous line of work. Between 1991 and 2001, forty-three journalists died in the Balkans, which is fewer than in Iraq, where between 2003 and 2009, 145 were killed in crossfire, suicide bombings, and premeditated murders by various participants in the conflict who didn't want reporters poking their noses where they shouldn't.

Beginning with the 1987 election that was supposed to bring democracy to Haiti after the bloody reign of the Duvaliers, and which resulted in another bloodbath, Mark Danner chronicles the even more violent conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia in the early 1990s, the post-invasion violence in Iraq, the torture in our secret prisons around the world, and the various policy decisions in Washington that had either a dire or beneficial impact on the people of those countries. These lengthy, well-researched, and well-written pieces, many of which appeared in these pages, combine political analysis, historical background, and Danner's eyewitness reporting to convey the vast human suffering behind events that can often seem remote.

More here. [Photo shows Charles Simic.]

Amitava Kumar in Open:

What do you do if a young man who was a student in your class is thrown in prison on a terrorism charge?

Jeanne Theoharis teaches Political Science at Brooklyn College. In June 2006, when British authorities detained 29-year-old Syed Fahad Hashmi at Heathrow Airport, she remembered the youth from her class several years ago. Back in 2002, in the days following the 11 September attacks, Hashmi had been a student in Professor Theoharis’s class on race. He was articulate and very critical of the ways in which the civil rights of US citizens, especially Muslims, had been curtailed by the Bush Administration.

When Theoharis heard that Hashmi had been arrested by the British police because there was a warrant out for him in the US, she was struck by the irony of it all. A part of her former student’s thesis had been about the government’s surveillance and harassment of four or five Muslim groups in the US. Now, he was himself behind bars on suspicion of having aided and abetted terrorism. Less than a year later, when Hashmi was extradited to the US, the FBI revealed that the detainee had supplied ‘military gear’ to people who had delivered these materials to Al-Qaida members in Pakistan. Then, Hashmi’s lawyer found out that the items being labelled as ‘military gear’ were socks and rainproof ponchos. The rest of the details of the indictment remain shrouded in mystery. The FBI has revealed nothing more.

I met Theoharis recently for lunch in a restaurant in New York’s West Village.

More here.

Daniel R. Hawes in Psychology Today:

…one possibility for analyzing the origin of sex differences in math performance exists in looking at changes in the data over time, and in correlating math achievements with indicators of gender equality in order to see if changes in women's role in society have been followed by improved achievements in mathematics.

Last year ago, a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science takes just this approach and in doing so focuses on the following four questions:

• Do gender differences in mathematics performance exist in the general population?
• Do gender differences exist among the highly mathematically talented?
• Do females exist who possess profound mathematical talent?
• How do sociocultural factors correlate with gender differences observed in measured mathematical performance?

Drawing on meatanalysis of the literature and new data gathered as a result of “No Child Left Behind” the researchers find that

“gender differences in performance were close to zero in all grades, including high school. […] Thus, girls have now reached parity with boys in mathematics performance in the U.S., even in high school where a gap existed in earlier decades.”

A question, that is not addressed by the study, but which I am curious about is how much of the narrowing of the gender gap is girls catching up vs how much is boys falling behind; especially as numeracy is one of my pet peeves.

Focusing on the mathematically talented, i.e. the professors and award winning mathematicians, the researchers also find the gap to be closing. This is interesting, since one popular hypothesis regarding sex differences in mathematical (and other cognitive) abilities used to state that possibly men's and women's ability was spread around the same mean, but that men displayed greater variance. This would explain why men dominate the lowest and the highest percentiles for many cognitive ability scores.

However, the researchers not only find the score to be narrowing, but also cite data that shows no difference in variance for math performance in a number of countries. Given that most people will not be willing to extend an hypothesis in which sex differences are the reason for differential math performance in some countries but not in others (which does seem quite absurd), this also seems to indicate that the “greater variance hypothesis”, as I shall term it loosely, needs to be discarded.

More here. And the second part of this article is here.

Sughra Raza. Brown Girl. Jumeirah beach, Dubai.

Painting: acrylics on canvas ca 2001; digital photograph on Jumeirah beach, January 2010.

by Colin Marshall

Errol Morris is not a humanist. Or at least he's repeatedly claimed not to be one. In fact, he's gone so far as to label himself a misanthrope, a pessimist, a perpetual bemoaner of the human condition and the hopeless, delusional humans eternally walled in by it. But his filmography would seem to give the lie to his assertions. In all of Morris' movies, but especially in this, his first, his attentiveness to and curiosity about humanity, confused or trapped though it may be, is made obvious by every conversation, every shot, every observational choice.

Known as an examiner of the fanciful personal worlds — intellectual cocoons, really — that people build around themselves, he doesn't exempt himself from the diagnosis. Perhaps, then, he's as unable to achieve full self-awareness as his subjects are. Maybe that's why he can insist his own distaste for the human race when the truth is more complex. Gates of Heaven is not the work of a man with an abjectly dim view of humanity; it feels like nothing so much as the product of a questioning mind, a probing demeanor and a highly unorthodox kind of love.

Not every viewer will agree with this. There's a good chance that no other viewer will agree with this, as everyone seems to come away from the film with entirely different ideas about what it thinks, what it argues, what it explains, what it's “about.” By design or by chance, Morris has crafted an artwork that brightly reflects back whatever themes an audience happens to bring into it. The result is a film you can watch over and over again, undergoing a different set of revelations in each screening. Roger Ebert, one of the picture's earliest champions, may have been the first to realize this. “I have seen this film perhaps 30 times, and am still not anywhere near the bottom of it,” he wrote in 1997. “All I know is, it's about a lot more than pet cemeteries.”

But on a concrete level, it's about pet cemeteries. You can frame it as a tale of two of them, one good-intentioned but failed; another successful but, in some ineffable way, bothersome. Through a series of narration-free interviews, Morris spends the film's first half telling the story of Floyd McClure, would-be Los Altos pet cemetery entrepreneur and living definition of the term simpleton. He'd hoped to build a veritable “garden of Eden” to honor the departed domestic critters who have so loved and been loved, but the sales projections didn't pan out. He and his weary investors relate the tale of their clients' dispossessed pet caskets, which had to be exhumed and relocated to the slicker, more solvent Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park.

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To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Samuel Beckett

He was the Roman god of beginnings, the guardian of gates and doors who presided over the first hour of each day, and the first day of each month and, as his name, suggests, January. Depicted on Roman coins with a double faced head, one side bearded, the other clean shaven, Janus represented both sun and moon. A sort of Roman ying and yang he symbolised the light and the dark within human experience. Facing both East and West, the doors of his temple at the Forum marked the beginning and end of each day, whilst many Romans began their morning with prayers to him. Worshipped during the time of planting, he was also evoked during rites of passage such as birth and marriage. Throughout Rome a number of freestanding structures – ceremonial gateways known as jani – were used as thresholds to make symbolically auspicious entrances or exits. Emblematic not only of new beginnings, Janus represented the transition between primitive life and civilisation, between the rural and the urban, youth and old age, whilst having the ability to look back at the past and simultaneously into the future. So what relevance does this obscure Roman god have for a contemporary British painter?
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Over at The Immanent Frame (excerpt can be found here):

EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral, and cognitive. In your Yale lectures from the fall of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the need to rethink the link between social theory and secularization theory. In those lectures, you suggest that we need to uncouple modernization theory from secularization theory. Does this mean that you are taking distance from the dominant trends in social theory in the West, which began with Pareto, continued through Durkheim, and reached their apogee in Weber, and thus also from its explicit and avowed Eurocentrism?

JH: We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The debate over the sociological thesis of secularization has led to a revision above all in respect to prognostic statements. On the one hand, the system of religion has become more differentiated and has limited itself to pastoral care, that is, it has largely lost other functions. On the other hand, there is no global connection between societal modernization and religion’s increasing loss of significance, a connection that would be so close that we could count on the disappearance of religion. In the still undecided dispute as to whether the religious USA or the largely secularized Western Europe is the exception to a general developmental trend, José Casanova for example has developed interesting new hypotheses. In any case, globally we have to count on the continuing vitality of world religions.

In view of the consequences of which you speak, I consider the program of the group around Shmuel Eisenstadt and its comparative research on civilizations promising and informative. In the emerging world society, and concerning the social infrastructure, there are, as it were, by now only modern societies, but these appear in the form of multiple modernities because the great world religions have had a great culture-forming power over the centuries, and they have not yet entirely lost this power. As in the West, these “strong” traditions paved the way in East Asia, in the Middle East, and even in Africa for the development of cultural structures that confront each other today—for example, in the dispute over the right interpretation of human rights. Our Western self-understanding of modernity emerged from the confrontation with our own traditions. The same dialectic between tradition and modernity repeats itself today in other parts of the world.

Jason Zasky in Failure magazine:

In “Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America” (Oxford University Press), Elizabeth Fraterrigo—assistant professor of history at Loyola University in Chicago—examines the magazine’s place in postwar America, a time in which sexual mores, gender roles, marriage and family life were evolving, at least in small part due to Playboy’s urging. Though the Playboy brand may be in the midst of a long, slow decline, Fraterrigo’s measured academic analysis (there are 47 pages of footnotes), reminds the reader how Playboy both molded and mirrored American culture in the mid to late twentieth century.

Failure interviewed Fraterrigo by phone to discuss: what readers can expect to learn from her book, what made Playboy so successful, and a handful of Hefner’s pre-Playboy business failures, which in hindsight seem to have been quite fortuitous…

What was Playboy’s agenda in the postwar period?

The kernel of that agenda was there from the very beginning but it really came to fruition by the late 1950s and early ’60s. From the get-go, Hefner was trying to create a magazine that he felt didn’t really exist in American culture. He felt that most of what you saw—whether it be in popular magazines or literature or television—was geared toward families. There wasn’t anything that spoke to the kinds of things in which men were interested. Hefner wanted to create a magazine for adult men but he also wanted to create a vision of a lifestyle that showcased the pleasures one could enjoy in a blooming, blossoming postwar consumer society. So that it wasn’t just about showing up for your job every day and bringing home a paycheck to support a wife and kids. He wanted to have this alternative world where one could indulge in pleasure and materialism.

Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed:

Howard Zinn — whose A People’s History of the United States, first published by Harper & Row in 1980, has sold some two million copies — died last week at the age of 87. His passing has inspired numerous tributes to his role in bringing a radical, pacifist perspective on American history to a wide audience.

It has also provoked denunciations of Zinn as “un-American,” which seems both predictable and entirely to his credit. One of Zinn’s lessons was that protest is a deeply American inclination. The thought is unbearable in some quarters.

One of the most affectionate tributes came from the sports writer Dave Zirin. As with many other readers, he found that reading Zinn changed his whole sense of why you would even want to study the past. “When I was 17 and picked up a dog-eared copy of Zinn’s book,” he writes, “I thought history was about learning that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. I couldn’t tell you what the Magna Carta was, but I knew it was signed in 1215. Howard took this history of great men in powdered wigs and turned it on its pompous head.” Zirin went on to write A People’s History of Sports (New Press, 2008), which is Zinnian down to its cells.

Another noteworthy commentary comes from Christopher Phelps, an intellectual historian now in the American and Canadian studies program at the University of Nottingham. He assesses Zinn as a kind of existentialist whose perspective was shaped by the experience of the civil rights struggle. (He had joined the movement in the 1950s as a young professor at Spelman College, a historically black institution in Atlanta.)

An existentialist sensibility — the tendency to think in terms of radical commitment, of decision making as a matter of courage in the face the Absurd — was common to activists of his generation. That Phelps can hear the lingering accent in Zinn’s later work is evidence of a good ear.

Zinn “challenged national pieties and encouraged critical reflection on received wisdom,” writes Phelps. “He understood that America’s various radicalisms, far from being ‘un-American,’ have propelled the nation toward more humane and democratic arrangements…. He urged others to seek in the past the inspiration to dispel resignation, demoralization, and deference, the foundations of inertia. The past meant nothing, he argued, if severed from present and future.”