From The Telegraph:

‘There’s a certain slant of light, / On winter afternoons” wrote Emily Dickinson, “That oppresses, like the Heft / Of cathedral tunes.” And although humans have developed nature-defying central heating and electric light bulbs since the American poet wrote those lines, many members of our species are still prone to the winter blues, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). As the weather gets colder and daylight hours dwindle, SAD sufferers feel their energy levels slumping. They can become depressed, lethargic and crave sweet or starchy foods. For despite our cocooning technology we are still, like all life on earth, subjects of the seasons.

In Rhythms of Life (2004), their first book on the fascinating chronobiology that ticks away inside every living cell, Russell Foster (professor of circadian neuroscience at Oxford) and Leon Kreitzman (broadcaster and author of The 24 Hour Society) explained the circadian rhythms generated by the Earth’s 24-hour revolution on its axis. They took us through the science behind flowers opening their petals in the day and folding them up at night, just as we wake and sleep. They advised that the best time of day for giving an impressively firm handshake is around 6pm and the best time for giving birth is between 4am and 6am. Now they’re taking in the bigger picture, pointing out that just as all creatures have an internal, 24-hour clock, so we also have an internal calendar governed by Earth’s 365-day rotation around the sun.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Are geeks guilty of groupthink? A network expert argues that less social networking would produce more radical innovation on the Internet. “An overabundance of connections over which information can travel too cheaply can reduce diversity, foster groupthink, and keep radical ideas from taking hold,” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, director of the Information + Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, writes in this week's issue of the journal Science. That may be one of the reasons why much of the open-source software currently being produced is rarely altered in anything more than an incremental manner, Mayer-Schönberger says. “The basic point that I'm trying to make is … how do we get to the next stage of the Internet, the new-generation Internet, the radical innovation, rather than another dot release on the Firefox browser?” he told me today.

More here.

From the Columbia University Press website:

Question: Your last book, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat, centered on the German philosopher in order to dismiss the division of philosophy into the analytic and continental schools, while in this new book you seem to engage in a strictly ontological issue: “What remains of Being after the deconstruction of metaphysics?” What is the difference between both books? What is the goal now?

Santiago Zabala: I don’t think there is a big difference since they both engage in what has become the most important problem for philosophy since Heidegger: how can metaphysics be overcome? While in the first book I gave an answer through the postmetaphysical thought of Tugendhat, in this new book I confront the problem at its root, that is, through the concept of Being. Although in this new book I include a whole section on Tugendhat (as well as sections on Jacques Derrida, Reiner Schürmann, Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gianni Vattimo), its purpose to expose the remnants of Being in Tugendhat’s philosophy, which shows the continuity between both investigations. In sum, the goal of this book is to expose the remains of Being after Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy. The greatest achievements of this destruction are, first, the revelation that Being has always been described as a present object in its presentness and, second, the realization that it is not possible to definitively overcome this objective interpretation without falling back into another descriptive interpretation. In this condition, where metaphysics cannot be “überwinden,” (overcome, meaning a complete abandonment of the problem) but can only be “verwinden” (surpassed, alluding to the way one surpasses a major disappointment not by forgetting it but by coming to terms with it) it is necessary to start interpreting Being through its remains, which is a concept that maintains metaphysics in such a way to also overcome it.

More here.

Why are we so fascinated by Danton? Perhaps because we know so little about him. We know he was a powerful orator, and popular on the streets of revolutionary Paris. We know that, with the enemy at the gates, he made stirring speeches urging the French to save their revolution by being tirelessly bold. We know, above all, that in the spring of 1794 he questioned whether a policy of Terror was doing more harm than good, and paid the price by being guillotined himself. He thus died a martyr to humanity, struck down by his polar opposite, the frigid and inflexible Robespierre. These are the elements of a legend that began in the 1830s with Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death, and was taken up by historians, particularly those writing in English, from Thomas Carlyle onwards. If only he had prevailed, the bloody climax of the Terror might have been avoided! Lesser and meaner men brought him down. In France, too, Danton had his fervent liberal advocates, but in the twentieth century the admirers of Robespierre gained the upper hand in the historical profession. They largely accepted the accusations great and small thrown at Danton at his show trial: he was venal, greedy, immoral, a political trimmer, a closet royalist and even perhaps a traitor. Much of the historical evidence comes down sooner or later to what historians think of these accusations, themselves scraped hastily together by Robespierre once he decided that Danton had to go. Corroborative evidence is remarkably scanty and almost always ambiguous. Danton seldom wrote anything down, least of all his famous speeches, and at crucial moments he had a habit of disappearing. Most of the secondary information comes from an increasingly intimidated revolutionary press, or later recollections by third parties with their own records to protect.

more from William Doyle at Literary Review here.

In 1815, Cardinal Angelo Mai made an extraordinary discovery in the Ambrosian Library in Milan. He spotted that a book containing the records of the First Church Council of Chalcedon in ad 451 had been made out of reused parchment. The earlier writing on each sheet had been erased (washing with milk and oat-bran was the common method), and the minutes of the Church Council copied on top. As often in reused documents of this kind, the original text had begun to show through the later writing, and was in part legible. It turned out that the recycled sheets had come from a very mixed bag of books. There was a single page of Juvenal’s Satires, part of Pliny’s speech in praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and some commentary on the Gospel of St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of the book, were faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of the leading scholars and orators of the second century ad, and tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, who reigned from 161 to 180. The majority of the letters in the palimpsest were between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius himself, both before and after he had ascended to the throne. Unlike the passages from Juvenal and Pliny, these were entirely new discoveries.

more from Mary Beard at the LRB here.

One hundred years ago this month, Marion Wallace-Dunlop (1864–1942) became the first modern hunger striker. She came to her prison cell as a militant suffragette, but also as a talented artist intent on challenging contemporary images of women. After she had fasted for ninety-one hours in London’s Holloway Prison, the Home Office ordered her unconditional release on July 8, 1909, as her health, already weak, began to fail. Her strike influenced those of Mohandas Gandhi, James Connolly and others who followed her example. Thousands of other strikes have moved the practice in new directions, but we should acknowledge its originator. Students and scholars of the women’s suffrage movement know Wallace-Dunlop’s name, some of her protests, and the main events of her life, but her art and writings are almost entirely unknown. Recently discovered works of hers reveal a mind that knew how images are read, how stories are made and publicity generated. Along with the materials released in 2005 through the British Freedom of Information Act (2000), Wallace-Dunlop’s art and writings, along with her prints, sketches, letters and photos, provide a more complete genealogy of the hunger strike, and show a woman challenging the aesthetic and gender boundaries of her day. Her oil portrait of her sister Constance (“Miss C. W. D.”, 1892) portrays a woman with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, who sits erect, alarmed, with a tinge of fear, and stares disturbingly out at the viewer.

more from Joseph Lennon at the TLS here.

A. E. Hotchner in the New York Times:

Bookstores are getting shipments of a significantly changed edition of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, “A Moveable Feast,” first published posthumously by Scribner in 1964. This new edition, also published by Scribner, has been extensively reworked by a grandson who doesn’t like what the original said about his grandmother, Hemingway’s second wife.

The grandson has removed several sections of the book’s final chapter and replaced them with other writing of Hemingway’s that the grandson feels paints his grandma in a more sympathetic light. Ten other chapters that roused the grandson’s displeasure have been relegated to an appendix, thereby, according to the grandson, creating “a truer representation of the book my grandfather intended to publish.”

It is his claim that Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s fourth wife, cobbled the manuscript together from shards of an unfinished work and that she created the final chapter, “There Is Never Any End to Paris.”

Scribner’s involvement with this bowdlerized version should be examined as it relates to the book’s actual genesis, and to the ethics of publishing.

More here.

David Billet in The New Republic:

Albert Einstein was not only a scientist and universal eminence, but also a proud Jew who had a longtime association with the Zionist movement. In the 1920s, he toured America with Chaim Weizmann to gather support for the creation of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. When Weizmann died in office in 1952 as Israel's first president, Einstein was proposed as his successor by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

Because of such incidents, observes Fred Jerome–the author of three books about Einstein's political/philosophical thought, including a new one, Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East–Zionist fgures and institutions have claimed Einstein as a “champion” of the state of Israel. The mainstream media in the U.S. has told and retold this “widely accepted story.” But the story, says Jerome, is a myth. In the present volume, he collects and comments upon various letters, speeches, and public statements of Einstein in order to demonstrate that the latter was never comfortable with the idea or reality of a Jewish state.

In letters translated from the German by Michael Schiffmann, we read that Einstein was deeply affected by the ugly treatment of Jews in Germany after World War I–including the dismissal by nationalist scientists of his theory of relativity as a “Jewish” perversion. He believed that it was inexcusable to flee one's Judaic heritage, as many assimilated German Jews of the middle class did, and he believed that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would lift the standing and confidence of Jews worldwide.

Still, Einstein was as wary of crude Jewish nationalism as of the German kind.

More here.

Grammar

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat

and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

by Tony Hoagland

From The New York Times:

With “Fordlandia,” Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, tells a haunting story that falls squarely into this tradition: Henry Ford’s failed endeavor to export Main Street America to the jungles of Brazil. Fordlandia was a commercial enterprise, intended to extract raw material for the production of motor cars, but it was framed as a civilizing mission, an attempt to build the ideal American society within the Amazon. As described in this fascinating account, it was also the reflection of one man’s personality — arrogant, brilliant and very odd.

In 1927, Ford, the richest man in the world, needed rubber to make tires, hoses and other parts for his cars. Rubber does not grow in Michigan, and European producers enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the rubber trade because of their Asian colonies. So, typically, the car magnate decided to grow his own. The site chosen for Ford’s new rubber plantation was an area of some 2.5 million acres on the banks of the Tapajós River, a tributary of the Amazon about 600 miles from the Atlantic. It took Ford’s agents approximately 18 hours to reach the place by riverboat from the nearest town. Ford’s vision was a replica Midwestern town, with modern plumbing, hospitals, schools, sidewalks, tennis courts and even a golf course. There would be no drink or other forms of immorality, but gardening for all and chaste dances every week.

More here. (Note: Congratulations to Greg, a dear friend.)

From Science:

Classical philosophers called humans “the rational animal.” Clearly, they never looked closely at ants. A new study suggests that ant colonies avoid irrational decisions that people and other animals often make.

Consider the following scenario: You want to buy a house with a big kitchen and a big yard, but there are only two homes on the market–one with a big kitchen and a small yard and the other with a small kitchen and a big yard. Studies show you'd be about 50% likely to choose either house–and either one would be a rational choice. But now, a new home comes on the market, this one with a large kitchen and no yard. This time, studies show, you'll make an irrational decision: Even though nothing has changed with the first two houses, you'll now favor the house with the big kitchen and small yard over the one with the small kitchen and big yard. Overall, scientists have found, people and other animals will often change their original preferences when presented with a third choice.

Not so with ants. These insects also shop for homes but not quite in the way that humans do. Solitary worker ants spread out, looking for two main features: a small entrance and a dark cavity. If an ant finds an outstanding hole–such as the inside of an acorn or a rock crevice–it recruits another scout to check it out. As more scouts like the site, the number of workers in the new hole grows. Once the crowd reaches a critical mass, the ants race back to the old nest and start carrying the queen and larvae to move the entire colony.

More here.

Hosted by Cosma Shalizi:

Scott Page is a professor of political science and economics at the University of Michigan, where he’s also the associate director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. (Disclosure: I worked for Scott when I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center, and I’m also external faculty at SFI, so take my enthusiasm with salt to taste.) Scott’s written lots of academic papers, and co-written a textbook, but The Difference is, well, different. It’s a serious, but also playful, look at the power and virtues of diversity when it comes to solving difficult problems. It draws together many insights from many different academic disciplines, without requiring any special knowledge of its readers, just willingness to stretch their minds a little.

All very well, you say, but it’s a lot more abstract than most books which show up here: why should you spend your time reading about heuristics and preference aggregation and so forth? For two reasons: to help us persuade others, and to acquire tools for us to use ourselves.

Most progressives have embraced diversity as a value, but there seem to be competing considerations. A common objection — my guess is it’s even often sincere — is that we shouldn’t care how diverse the people who do X are, but just how good they are at X. If those who have discovered and developed their abilities to do X happen to be mostly privileged, that’s just part of what “privilege” means, and the thing to worry about is unfair privilege, not lack of diversity. This is a general objection, and it calls for an equally general, that means abstract, rebuttal.

Implicitly, the objection assumes that there’s a best way to do X, that there’s One Right Answer, and that the best results, the closest approach to the optimum, will always come from the person who’s best at the job. Some advocates of diversity deny the first premise, the One Right Answer bit. This leads to tedious arguments about relativism and other reminders of the unfun parts of the 1990s. Page doesn’t go there; instead he shows that the other premise is wrong, because it ignores complexity.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

In April, Germany’s parliament placed limits on the use of genetic diagnosis. Is the new German law a model for other countries to follow as we grapple with the ethical issues posed by our growing knowledge of human genetics?

Some provisions of the German law draw on the widely shared ethical principles of respect for individual autonomy and privacy. No one can be tested without his or her consent. Neither employers, nor insurance companies, may require genetic testing. Individuals are granted both the right to know – to be informed of the results of any genetic test about themselves – and the right to choose to live in ignorance of what a genetic test may predict about their future. To discriminate against or stigmatize anyone on account of their genetic characteristics is prohibited.

Desirable as these provisions seem, they could impose a heavy cost on German companies. If insurance companies outside Germany are permitted to require genetic tests while German companies are prohibited from doing so, then people who know they have life-shortening genetic diagnoses will get their life insurance from German insurance companies. These companies will then find themselves making more payments for premature deaths relative to their competitors. To cover the increased costs, they will have to raise premiums, making themselves uncompetitive.

In an attempt to mitigate this problem, the law specifies that anyone taking out an insurance policy valued at more than €300,000 may be required to disclose the results of prior genetic tests. But if people lie about whether they have previously been tested, that provision will be moot.

As genetic testing becomes increasingly able to predict not only health, but also some cognitive and personality traits, the prohibition on employer testing may also put German employers at a disadvantage in the international marketplace. They will invest resources in training employees whom their competitors will exclude from the initial pool of recruits.

This may be a humane thing to do, for it gives every individual a chance, irrespective of the genetic odds against their paying their way for the company. But, in the long term, if we are serious about prohibiting such tests, we need an international agreement – on both insurance and employment – to ensure a level playing field for all countries.

Jessica Pfeifer reviews Elliott Sober’s Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Elliott Sober’s excellent book, Evidence and Evolution, builds on views about evidence that Sober has been developing over the years and shows how these views bear on issues relevant to evolutionary biology. The book is divided into four main chapters, with a fifth chapter as a conclusion. The first chapter develops Sober’s views about evidence, while Chapters 2-4 apply this discussion to three issues of importance to evolutionary biology: the argument for intelligent design (Chapter 2), the evidence for natural selection (Chapter 3), and the evidence for common ancestry (Chapter 4). One advantage of this organization is that it is possible, without too much loss, to read Chapter 1 and then skip to whichever later chapters are of interest. While there are points made in the intervening chapters that might be relevant for later conclusions, Sober very helpfully makes note of where these topics have previously been discussed.

In Chapter 1, Sober not only forcefully defends his particular views about evidence, but in the process also provides an excellent introduction to many of the issues at stake between Bayesian, likelihood, and frequentist accounts. Sober argues that versions of each approach have their place. However, his view is not pluralistic. Which view one ought to adopt depends on the goals one has, the information at hand, and the hypotheses of interest. Bayesian methods can tell us what our degree of belief in a hypothesis ought to be, likelihoodism has the more modest aim of telling us whether and to what degree the evidence favors one hypothesis over another, and the version of frequentism Sober endorses (model-selection theory, and in particular the Akaike Information Criterion) estimates how accurate a model will be at predicting new data when fitted to old data.

Michael Bond in New Scientist:

The “unruly mob” concept is usually taken as read and used as the basis for crowd control measures and evacuation procedures across the world. Yet it is almost entirely a myth. Research into how people behave at demonstrations, sports events, music festivals and other mass gatherings shows not only that crowds nearly always act in a highly rational way, but also that when facing an emergency, people in a crowd are more likely to cooperate than panic. Paradoxically, it is often actions such as kettling that lead to violence breaking out. Often, the best thing authorities can do is leave a crowd to its own devices.

“In many ways, crowds are the solution,” says psychologist Stephen Reicher, who studies group behaviour at the University of St Andrews, UK. Rather than being prone to irrational behaviour and violence, members of a crowd undergo a kind of identity shift that drives them to act in the best interests of themselves and everyone around them. This identity shift is often strongest in times of danger or threat. “The ‘mad mob’ is not an explanation, but a fantasy,” says Reicher.

All this has profound implications for policing and the management of public events. “The classic view of crowd psychology, which is still widespread, talks about the loss of selfhood, leaving people at best out of control and at worst generically violent,” says Reicher. “That is not only wrong, it’s also counterproductive. If you believe all crowds are irrational, and that even rational people are liable to be dangerous in them, then you’ll treat them accordingly, often harshly, and stop people doing things they have a right to do. And that can lead to violence.”

[H/t: Pablo Policzer]

IMAGINE SLASHER FILMS WITHOUT BLOOD; porn without nudity; the Sistine Chapel without God; the New York Stock Exchange without capital. Pretend that Hieronymus Bosch’s intermeshed figures could text. Ryan Trecartin’s videos depict a vertiginous world I’m barely stable enough to describe. Watching them, I face the identity-flux of Internet existence: surfing-as-dwelling. Images evaporate, bleed, spill, metamorphose, and explode. Through frenetic pacing, rapid cuts, and destabilizing overlaps between representational planes (3-D turns into 2-D and then into 5-D), Trecartin violently repositions our chakras. Digitally virtuoso, his work excites me but also causes stomach cramps. I’m somatizing. But I’m also trying to concentrate. Trecartin, born in Texas (a trace of drawl is a vocal leitmotif of his videos), broke into the art world with A Family Finds Entertainment in 2004, the year he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. (The art world: Does Trecartin need it?) Then, in 2006, came the seven-minute-long video (Tommy Chat Just E-mailed Me.) and the feature-length I-Be Area, both available on YouTube and UbuWeb. In the “Younger than Jesus” exhibition, at New York’s New Museum until July 5, Trecartin unveiled installments of his latest epic, composed of three interconnected, modular psychodramas: Sibling Topics (Section A), K-Corea INC. K (Section A), and Re’Search Wait’S (Edit 1: Missing Re’Search Corruption Budget), all 2009. (The videos are also on display this summer, with a larger installation, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.)

more from Wayne Koestenbaum at artforum here.

Jack Vance, described by his peers as “a major genius” and “the greatest living writer of science fiction and fantasy,” has been hidden in plain sight for as long as he has been publishing — six decades and counting. Yes, he has won Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy awards and has been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and he received an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but such honors only help to camouflage him as just another accomplished genre writer. So do the covers of his books, which feature the usual spacecraft, monsters and euphonious place names: Lyonesse, Alastor, Durdane. If you had never read Vance and were browsing a bookstore’s shelf, you might have no particular reason to choose one of his books instead of one next to it by A. E. van Vogt, say, or John Varley. And if you chose one of these alternatives, you would go on your way to the usual thrills with no idea that you had just missed out on encountering one of American literature’s most distinctive and undervalued voices.

more from Carlo Rotella at the NY Times Magazine here.

If you watch a video of the Jackson 5 performing “I Want You Back,” on the Ed Sullivan show, in 1969, you will see that the group’s lead vocalist—Michael, the youngest of the five brothers—was already an A-list dancer at the age of eleven. Here is this fat-cheeked boy, in a pink Super Fly hat that he is obviously proud of, doing tilts and dips and fanny rocks and finger snaps, and tucking in little extras—half steps, quarter steps—between them. Most amazing is his musicality, his ability to respond to the score faithfully and yet creatively, playing with the music, moving in before and after the beat. Musicality always comes off as spontaneity, and he was loved, early on, for that quality. Now turn to “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” (1979). Ten years have passed. He has started recording his own songs. He does fancier steps. But at twenty-one, as at eleven, he is galvanizing above all because of his naturalness. He hops with joy; he wags his head; his shirt comes untucked.

more from Joan Acocella at The New Yorker here.

Museum Piece

The good grey guards of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.

Here dozes one against the wall,
Disposed upon a funeral chair.
A Degas dancer pirouettes
Upon the parting of his hair.

See how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.

Edgar Degas purchased once
A fine El Greco, which he kept
Against the wall beside his bed
To hang his pants on while he slept.

by Richard Wilbur

from Contemporary American Poetry;
Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1962