From Salon:

Do not take the misanthropic title of “Scroogenomics” at face value. Consider that the subtitle, “Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays,” doesn't apply to the beloveds on your “nice” list. And for God's sake, pay no attention to the child sobbing atop a red-wrapped package on the book's cover. Author Joel Waldfogel doesn't want to harsh on your holidays. In fact, he wants to make them better. In his sane, reasonable and conveniently stocking stuffer-size new book, the Wharton School economist elaborates on what those of us on a first-name basis with the folks at the return desk already know — that the glut of holiday overspending is a drain on both the wallet and the ho ho ho spirit. But the book is no polemic; it's a study in retail trends, spending and debt habits, and a simple call for a better use of our money than Itty Bitty Book Lights for people we barely know.

More here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

What is the essence of human nature? Flawed, say many theologians. Vicious and addicted to warfare, wrote Hobbes. Selfish and in need of considerable improvement, think many parents. But biologists are beginning to form a generally sunnier view of humankind. Their conclusions are derived in part from testing very young children, and partly from comparing human children with those of chimpanzees, hoping that the differences will point to what is distinctively human. The somewhat surprising answer at which some biologists have arrived is that babies are innately sociable and helpful to others. Of course every animal must to some extent be selfish to survive. But the biologists also see in humans a natural willingness to help.

When infants 18 months old see an unrelated adult whose hands are full and who needs assistance opening a door or picking up a dropped clothespin, they will immediately help, Michael Tomasello writes in “Why We Cooperate,” a book published in October. Dr. Tomasello, a developmental psychologist, is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The helping behavior seems to be innate because it appears so early and before many parents start teaching children the rules of polite behavior.

More here.

Anis Shivani picks “The 10 Best Books of 2009” in The Huffington Post:

3. H. M. Naqvi, Home Boy (Crown). Three carefree, young Pakistani men–Chuck (Shehzad), Jimbo (Jamshed Khan), and AC (Ali Chaudhry)–think New York is theirs in the days just before 9/11. Of course their lives fall apart, and of course things can never be put together again. Home Boy is a superior contribution to the genre, its compassionate humor saving it from easy judgment. Naqvi's prose is evocative of Nabokov, in its immense energy; the vitality of the language reflects the immigrant's resourcefulness in standing up to the nightmares of bureaucratic rectitude. The prose creates a new life, an expressiveness not always available to the native-born lazily deploying the proprietary language. It is interesting that both Torsten Krol and H. M. Naqvi have hit on parallel formulas to take down the insanity of America in the present decade, and have left such a treasure trove of illuminating language.

More here.

Evan R. Goldstein in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

On a Wednesday afternoon in late October, David Gelernter is seated at the head of a green Formica table in a small classroom in Arthur K. Watson Hall on the campus of Yale University, where he is a professor of computer science. “Can you know something you don't know you know?” he asks the small group of students enrolled in a course called “Computer Science and the Modern Intellectual Agenda,” which, according to the syllabus, explores how cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind can distinguish “seeming from being” and locate “a man's (or your own) identity.”

An hour before class, Gelernter—technological guru, conservative polemicist, Unabomber target—had tried to locate his own identity. “I'm a misfit,” he said. “Most people fit in a groove and focus on one thing, but I cut across the grain of different areas.” In conversation, the eclecticism of Gelernter's mind is immediately apparent. An opinionated raconteur, he seamlessly transitions from literary criticism (“Deconstructionists destroy texts”), to trends in the art world (“Modern museums are devoted to diversity as opposed to greatness”), gender roles (“Women mainly work because of male greed”), contemporary politics (“Anti-Semitism in Europe is so intense that, I think, Hitler would have an easier time today then he did in 1933”), and earthier topics (“I am obsessed with sex and sexuality as much as anyone I have ever met”).

More here.

Jim Fusilli in the Wall Street Journal:

Forró is a folk dance that originated in northeastern Brazil, and the percussion heavy folk music that accompanies it has co-opted the name. It’s said the word is derived from a Brazilian word meaning a party. And that was the atmosphere at the Highline Ballroom, as Forro in the Dark fans danced joyously during its set.

“You can’t help but move your hips,” Refosco said. “It’s the kind of music anyone can dance to. A good samba dancer is almost intimidating, or with salsa or rumba you just want to watch. But with forró, anyone can do it.”

The band comprises Refosco on the zabumba drum, which looks a bit like a tom-tom worn around the neck and played on both sides, resulting in two different tones; Davi Viera on percussion and vocals; Guilherme Monteiro on guitar; Jorge Continentino on vocals, tenor saxophone and the pifano flute, a wooden instrument; and Alberto Continentino on bass. All are natives of Brazil, Refosco from Santa Catarina, Viera from Bahia, and Monteiro and the Continentinos from Rio de Janeiro.

“Each one of us has his own story about how we came to New York,” said Refosco, who earned his Master’s degree at the Manhattan School of Music. “In January 1994, the week I graduated, I got a phone call from David Byrne and I joined his band.”

More here.

Sophie Jodoin. The Ward. War series, 2008-09.

Conte on mylar.

More here, here and here.

Postcard from Vancouver
By Stacie Cassarino

In this fog, it’s true, we are made-up of less than bone. When I reach for you, there is radiance in the dark. I promise you kindness. This blue city misses your New York. What can I say about so many windows? On the Greyhound, a woman is reading The Case for Christ. I remember Grandma blessed me before leaving as if something might make me suffer in the future. How dumb belief is, silly boat with its red flag. She was right. The sea surrounds. A cable pulls my body to the top of a mountain and the view is broken: I see you everywhere. I wonder how love ever goes away. We should insist on willing things: archipelagos, the secret your lip feels, the harbor. I ache for you. We should insist that letting go is one form of hope. Here, defiance in a stand of evergreens. I sip red wine with a Brazilian queer. Remember Rio de Janeiro, the size of God’s hand, sardines fleshed-open at the market, the way I entered and moved inside? Looking down, is this the kind of density you can live with? What is the slightness of our bodies to stay, to be good at loving a second time? My mouth pretends it is an oar when it lives inside your mouth, but you are far away. The last time, above a playground on 6th Avenue, I tasted your fear. We heard basketball, pigeon, boy after school. There were names called out, even mine was not among them. We didn’t know what to hold onto. Red light, green. A delivery truck kept turning the same corner. I kept paddling nowhere fast, but you couldn’t see me. You said you needed time. The playground emptied. I flew West into summer. From a payphone, I describe the light in Canada. I tell you it is something I believe in, though there is no voice on the other end.

*

Stacie Cassarino is a recipient of the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize. She is currently a candidate for the Ph.D. at UCLA. “Postcard from Vancouver” is from her first book, Zero at the Bone, published by New Issues Press at Western Michigan University, available here.

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Mark Feeney in the Boston Chronicle:

Robert Frank’s “The Americans’’ certainly is a book, one that consists of 83 photographs taken during 1955 and 1956. But to say it’s “just’’ a book is like saying the same thing about “Moby-Dick.’’ Both works are central, defining documents of American culture. What the white whale was for Ahab, a red, white, and blue nation was for Frank. Ahab employed a harpoon. Frank used a camera. Unlike Ahab, he not only managed to capture his prey, he survived. Frank turned 85 on Nov. 9.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the US publication of “The Americans.’’ (The French edition came out a year earlier.) To observe the occasion, the National Gallery of Art has organized a superbly comprehensive exhibition, “Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans.’ ’’ After stops earlier this year at the National Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it’s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Jan. 3.

“Looking In’’ is just right as a title. Seeing, an act that’s optical in nature, is as much passive as active. Looking, an act that’s not just optical but directive, is inherently active. It’s no accident that the first photograph in “The Americans’’ shows both an American flag and people watching.

Looking at America, Frank took in things others had seen but failed to note. Some were banal: jukeboxes, the ubiquity of flags, the many manifestations of automotive culture. Other elements – vaguer, abstract, even sinister – were anything but banal: a sense of isolation, the place of African-Americans in US society, a tension between openness and confinement. The latter is evident in everything from the sweep of a Southwestern landscape to the flickering image on a TV screen. Precisely because Frank’s exteriors look so large, even boundless, his interiors (bars, elevators, the inside of an automobile) feel so constricting.

Michael Doliner in Swans Commentary (via bookforum):

It seems to have become fashionable to quote Marx's famous line from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Grazing on the Web I came upon others using these bons mots to refer to a political battle in Hungary over the legacy of 1956. Then there's one comparing Obama's Nobel to Carter's. Lot's of people like to crack wise about “the third time” with a frisson of clever self-congratulation. Some guy on the Democraticunderground.com, a blog, conjectures that what Marx meant by this is that things keep changing all the time.

Although many use this expression, no one seems to have bothered actually to have read The Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx was not merely coining bons mots, he actually meant something when he wrote this. The two events Marx was talking about were first, the French Revolution, which he took to extend from 1789 to 1814, and second, the French Revolution of 1848-1852, of which The Eighteenth Brumaire is a history.

Marx follows this famous line about tragedy and farce with one almost equally famous: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” This also used to be quoted often, but now isn't, I suspect because it makes some people uneasy to suggest that men make their own history. After all, if they get the idea that they can do something, they might decide to make something other than what the rulers have in mind. Marx is not treating history as a scientific phenomenon worthy of observation. Science is a discipline that postulates the impossibility of acting with a purpose. It expunges purposes from the pantheon of causes. Marx, a firm believer in human action, that is action with a purpose, is trying to explain its difficulties. People often take the farce line to mean that the first time, the tragic one, is serious, and the second, farcical one, is a kind of joke. But Marx is making the point that whenever people want to act they usually can only act in a pattern taken from the past. People act in a way that they know. Thus the first French Revolution took on the trappings of Rome to bring about the Bourgeois Revolution. Once the revolutionaries overthrew the ancien régime, the Roman garb came off and they settled down to moneymaking in a world free of the complicated obligations and ties of the ancien régime. The Revolution of 1848 imitated the Revolution of 1789 precisely because it was not a “real” revolution. For whereas the Revolution of 1789 threw off its Roman costume once it had accomplished itself in the abolition of the ancien régime, the Revolution of 1848 continued to imitate the earlier revolution because it had so little to accomplish: it was a farcical revolution. In the end it all vanished behind Louis Napoleon's conjurer's handkerchief.

Jacob Weisberg in Slate:

About one thing, left and right seem to agree these days: Obama hasn't done anything yet. Maureen Dowd and Dick Cheney have found common ground in scoffing at the president's “dithering.” Newsweek recently ran a sympathetic cover story titled, “Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet).” The sarcasm brigade thinks it's finally found an Achilles' heel in his lack of accomplishments. “When you look at my record, it's very clear what I've done so far and that is nothing. Nada. Almost one year and nothing to show for it,” Obama stand-in Fred Armisen recently riffed on Saturday Night Live. “It's chow time,” Jon Stewart asserts, for a president who hasn't followed through on his promises.

This conventional wisdom about Obama's first year isn't just premature—it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20. If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn't an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record—how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office.

More here.

An email to me from 3QD friend, Cyrus Hall (published with his permission):

Ciao Abbas-

My temporary home of the last five years, Switzerland, has just voted for one of the most bigoted and undemocratic constitutional reforms in recent memory: the banning of Islamic minarets on Mosques. The vote appears to be quite stunning, with 58% of voters backing the ban. This was after the most recent polls showed the measure being rejected by 53%, a story in itself.

This represents the most direct attack on the European Muslim minority yet. The French “headscarf ban” was at least religion neutral — something I would still argue against (as an Atheist), but I appreciate the attempt at even-handedness. On the other hand, this constitutional amendment targets a small, largely immigrant population (many of whom have no vote), single-handedly banning them from behavior that would be perfectly acceptable were they of any other faith. Outrageous.

This is an issue for 3QD like no other. To me, it represents the continued erosion of Western values, in the U.S. and Europe, and their replacement with vapid platitudes and fear, and deserves all the attention in the world.

It's early still, but some basic news links on the issue include this and this.

I am going to be sick with disgust and revulsion as Hannity, Rush, and other media personalities in the U.S. pick this up as a great example of the way forward, for both Europe and the U.S.

Cheers,
Cyrus

Couldn't agree more, Cyrus. Thanks.

David Villano at Miller-McCune:

In a paper posted recently on the online journal Evolutionary Psychology, independent researcher Gregory S. Paul reports a strong correlation within First World democracies between socioeconomic well-being and secularity. In short, prosperity is highest in societies where religion is practiced least.

Using existing data, Paul combined 25 indicators of societal and economic stability — things like crime, suicide, drug use, incarceration, unemployment, income, abortion and public corruption — to score each country using what he calls the “successful societies scale.” He also scored countries on their degree of religiosity, as determined by such measures as church attendance, belief in a creator deity and acceptance of Bible literalism.

Comparing the two scores, he found, with little exception, that the least religious countries enjoyed the most prosperity. Of particular note, the U.S. holds the distinction of most religious and least prosperous among the 17 countries included in the study, ranking last in 14 of the 25 socioeconomic measures.

More here.

You and I are Disappearing –Bjorn Hakansson

The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak

she burns like a piece of paper.

She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.

We stand with our hands

hanging at our sides,
while she burns

like a sack of dry ice.

She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker's cigar,

silent as quicksilver.

A tiger under a rainbow
at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.

by Yusef Komunyakaa

from Dien Cai Dau; Wesleyan University Press, 1988

Bjorn Hakansson