Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

In 1980 I attended a bicycle industry trade convention whose keynote speaker was Mark Victor Hansen, now well known as the coauthor of the wildly popular Chicken Soup for the Soul book series that includes the Teenage Soul, Prisoner’s Soul and Christian Soul (but no Skeptic’s Soul). I was surprised that Hansen didn’t require a speaker’s fee, until I saw what happened after his talk: people were lined up out the door to purchase his motivational tapes. I was one of them. I listened to those tapes over and over during training rides in preparation for bicycle races.

The “over and over” part is the key to understanding the “why” of what investigative journalist Steve Salerno calls the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (SHAM). In his recent book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown Publishing Group, 2005), he explains how the talks and tapes offer a momentary boost of inspiration that fades after a few weeks, turning buyers into repeat customers. While Salerno was a self-help book editor for Rodale Press (whose motto at the time was “to show people how they can use the power of their bodies and minds to make their lives better”), extensive market surveys revealed that “the most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months.” The irony of “the eighteen-month rule” for this genre, Salerno says, is this: “If what we sold worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us–at least not in that same problem area, and certainly not time and time again.”

More here.

Lee Siegel in The New Republic:

Now celebrating her twentieth year as the host of the world’s most influential talk show, Oprah Winfrey is to television what Bach is to music, Giotto to painting, Joyce to literature. Time magazine hit the nail on the head when it recently voted her one of the world’s handful of “leaders and revolutionaries.” (Condoleezza Rice wrote Oprah’s citation: “She has struggled with many of the challenges that we all face, and she has transformed her life. Her message is empowering: I did it, and so can you.”) Like all seminal creative figures, her essential gift lies in her synthesizing power. She has taken the most consequential strands in modern life and woven them together into an hourlong show that is a work of art. 

The boilerplate criticisms of Oprah–she exploits a culture of victimization that she did so much to create; she glamorizes misery; she amplifies already widespread narcissism and solipsism; she fills people’s heads with hackneyed nostrums about life–are correct, up to a point. But that’s not the whole story. Oprah’s critics write as if her goal of extending to her audience empathy, consolation, and hope were intrinsically cheap and cynical. On the contrary: The question is whether that is really what she is offering.

More here.  And see the essay “As I Lay Reading” on Oprah by 3QD’s own J.M. Tyree here, in The Nation.

John Felstiner in The New Republic:

Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe.” Why “must”? Writing from Paris in August 1948 to relatives in the new state of Israel, Paul Celan, having survived the “Final Solution,” explains that a poet cannot stop writing, “even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.” This fateful pledge, from a brutally orphaned son whose stunning poem of 1945, “Deathfugue,” intones, “Death is a master from Deutschland” and threads an ashen-haired Shulamith into the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Songs, throws a raking light over a recently discovered exchange of letters between Celan and the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.   

Born to German-speaking parents in Czernowitz, Bukovina, an eastern outpost of the Austrian Empire, Celan survived nineteen months of forced labor, eventually taking exile in Paris. There by hard degrees he became Europe’s most challenging postwar poet.

More here.  [Celan shown in photo.]

“Lurid new covers for The Iliad, Little Women, and other classics…”

From Slate (click the link at left for slide-show):

Pulp fiction is perhaps the only genre as beloved for its cover art as for its prose. And rightly so: Classic pulp covers are glorious and garish, rich with saturated color and sexual innuendo. Rare is the cover girl who hasn’t undone at least a few of her buttons. And so the images have endured, both in the popular imagination and in the countless online galleries that collect some of the greats. (There’s even a site dedicated to the covers of “poulpe pulps,” which feature women and octopuses in compromising positions.)

In the 1950s, some publishing houses opted to release literary fiction with pulp covers. A striking edition of The Sheltering Sky, for example, promised “a strange tale in the exotic desert”—a tagline that is, when you think about it, both pulpy and apt. Taking such efforts as our inspiration, we asked a handful of designers to create lurid new book jackets for classics from The Iliad to Animal Farm. Click here to see the results.

Economic and Political Weekly (India) debates what is perhaps the most crucial step in unfettering the power of capital, capital account convertibility.  Most of the pieces oppose convertability or at least counsel delaying the move towards it; some are pro. L. Randall Wray offers the argument that capital controls are necessary for sovereignty, with reference to Argentina’s disasterous experience with its currency board.

A nation like the US (as well as countries like Japan and Turkey, and Argentina after it abandoned the currency board) creates a currency for domestic use (and ensures its use primarily by demanding payment of taxes in that currency, although some go further by adopting legal tender laws). The government, itself (including the treasury and the central bank – the Fed in the case of the US), issues and spends high powered money (HPM – cash and reserves at the central bank) as its liability. The US government does not promise to convert its HPM to any other currency, nor to gold or any other commodity, at any fixed exchange rate.The flexible exchange rate is key to maintaining fiscal and currency independence – what I call sovereignty, although governmental sovereignty certainly has other dimensions as well. But there is more to it than a flexible exchange rate. The sovereign government spends (buys goods, services, or assets, or makes transfer payments) by issuing a treasury cheque, or, increasingly, by simply crediting a private bank deposit. In either case, however, credit balances (HPM) are created when the central bank credits the reserve account of the receiving bank. Analogously, when the government receives tax payments, it reduces the reserve balance of a bank. Simultaneously, the taxpayer’s bank deposit is debited. While we commonly think of a government needing to first receive tax revenue, and then spending that revenue, this sequence is not necessary for any sovereign government. If a government spends by crediting a bank account (issuing its own IOU – HPM) and taxes by debiting a bank account (and eliminating its IOU – HPM), then it is not as a matter of logic, “spending” tax revenue. In other words, with a floating exchange rate and a domestic currency, the sovereign government’s ability to make payments is neither revenue-constrained nor reserveconstrained… This fundamentally simple point is difficult for some to grasp because we are used to thinking about government as if it were not sovereign.

In The Nation, a review of Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme.

[The] philosophical cult of experience arises from a sense that full engagement with existence has somehow been rendered problematic, whether by social, spiritual or economic arrangements or by the sheer perversity of the individual psyche. Authentic experience, from this view, seems always maddeningly just out of reach.

How could this assumption acquire such enduring force? How is it that “experience”–like its kin “reality” and “life”–could be split off from the self, rather than remaining the ground of being in which the self is embedded? How did something universal and inescapable become external to consciousness–an object of feverish speculation and hot pursuit among men and (far less often) women of ideas? Part of the answer must lie in the historical experience of the thinkers themselves–their awareness of the world outside their study windows. Martin Jay rarely glances at that world, though he can deftly dissect the shifting emphases in Kantian aesthetics or Deweyan ethics.

What we have in Jay’s Songs of Experience is a shining example of the history of ideas, an underrated genre of the historian’s art. An exceptionally learned, humane and prolific practitioner of his craft, Jay is among our most reliable guides through the key sites of twentieth-century social thought, from the labyrinths of Western Marxism to the thickets of French post-structuralism. Songs of Experience is a worthy addition to this oeuvre, though its history-of-ideas form sometimes seems ironically at odds with its content.

Here, at 3QD, we’re divided over what to make of and where we stand on the Euston Manifesto (not that personal opinions in and of themselves matter, unlike sound reasons).  But many of us are interested in the manifesto, at least in so much as it fights over what the “Left” is about.  Hence our mild fixation on it.  Here is one anti-manifesto view, expectedly, in Counterpunch, in what can be called, er, the Counterpunch tone.

Conclusion, quoted in its entirety: “It is vitally important for the future of progressive politics that people of liberal, egalitarian and internationalist outlook should now speak clearly. We must define ourselves against those for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic ‘anti-imperialism’ and/or hostility to the current US administration. The values and goals which properly make up that agenda–the values of democracy, human rights, the continuing battle against unjustified privilege and power, solidarity with peoples fighting against tyranny and oppression–are what most enduringly define the shape of any Left worth belonging to.”

They have not noticed that some of their principles are contradicted by their political positions.

From The New York Times:

SOON after the announcement was made last December that Joan Didion would be writing a one-woman play based on her autobiographical book, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Ms. Didion had a meeting with Scott Rudin, the Broadway producer who first proposed the idea, and David Hare, the British playwright who will be directing the production. One of the topics was casting. It was not a long conversation.

Vanessa Redgrave, said Mr. Rudin, “was the only person we ever talked about. There was no one else ever discussed.” And so after a phone call to Ms. Redgrave, the two women, among the greatest practitioners of their crafts, started the process of becoming, in a sense, one. “I said, ‘My God,’ and I couldn’t speak for a long time,” Ms. Redgrave, 69, recalled in an interview Wednesday afternoon in Ms. Didion’s sunlight-filled apartment. “I’d read the book and given it to all my family.”

“The Year of Magical Thinking” will be the first play for Ms. Didion, 71. It will not be a strict adaptation of the book, she said, because it will cover events that happened after it was published. The book, an account of the fear, despair and exasperation of bereavement, begins on Dec. 30, 2003, with the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, after a heart attack at the dinner table.

More here.

Towards the end of the last century major cultural institutions established themselves as generators of urban activity rather than just repositories for artefacts and information. Architecture is central to this role. As the new century progresses, the architecture of high culture is evolving still further, and a new museum now carries with it the weight of cultural expectation, anticipated by both critics and town planners as a potent symbol of place, be it a district, city or even a whole country.

Iconic monumentalism was a reaction against the anodyne Modernism that had become the de facto house style of museology. Sober, self-effacing, functional museum architecture stems from the Bauhaus-era fascination with purity and simplicity. The gradual reduction of the decorated façade into a muted, abstract composition took place in parallel with the most significant American art movement of the postwar era, Abstract Expressionism, an integration epitomized by Philip Johnson’s Rothko Chapel in Houston (1971), a self-consciously pared-down structure built to house a Mark Rothko triptych. Art overflowed the constraints of the canvas; architecture followed meekly.

more from Frieze here.

In 1943, a young sailor named Milton on furlough from his duties in the psych ward at Camp Pendleton wandered into the Huntington Library in San Marino and stood stock-still, transfixed by the aesthetic epiphany of seeing Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy and Lawrence’s Pinkie in the flesh. He remembered having seen them reproduced on packs of playing cards back home in Port Arthur, Texas. “It sounds corny,” Milton later recalled, “but my moment of realization that there was such a thing as being an artist happened right there.”

Ten years later, Milton Rauschenberg had changed his name to Bob and the seed planted by that unholy marriage of male and female über-kitsch archetypes, having passed through an art history wormhole called Erased de Kooning, spawned an outpouring of virtuosic and revolutionary visual artifacts unsurpassed in the history of 20th-century visual culture.

more from the LA Weekly here.

SOON AFTER leaving Romania in the late 1940s, Paul Celan wrote to a friend of the “too short season which was ours…” It is a good epitaph for the all too brief explosion of artistic and literary talent in Romania in the first half of the 20th century, set against a darkening background of rising anti-Semitism, invasion and dictatorship.

There were two generations. The first were born in the years before the First World War and included Tristan Tzara (né Sami Rosenstein), the father of Dadaism, the Yiddish poet, Itzik Manger, the screenwriter, Emeric Pressburger (born in Hungary but briefly a Romanian citizen in the 1920s), Mircea Eliade, Ionesco, E.M. Cioran and Saul Steinberg. None of them remained in Romania by the end of the Second World War.

The second generation were born between the wars and included Celan, Elie Wiesel, Aharon Appelfeld and Norman Manea. They were formed by three experiences: the rise of Romanian anti-Semitism in the 1930s, the Holocaust and exile.

more from a review of Norman Manea’s memoirs in Salmagundi here.

Tariq Ali in the New Left Review:

Looking down on the world from the imperial grandeur of the Oval Office in the fall of 2001, the Cheney–Bush team was confident of its ability to utilize the September events to remodel the world. The Pentagon’s Vice Admiral Cebrowski summed up the linkage of capitalism to war: ‘the dangers against which us forces must be arrayed derive precisely from countries and regions that are “disconnected” from the prevailing trends of globalization’. Five years later, what is the balance sheet?

On the credit side, Russia, China and India remain subdued, along with Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Here, despite the attempts of Western political science departments to cover the instrumentalist twists of us policy with fig-leaf conceptualizations—‘limited democracies’, ‘tutelary democracies’, ‘illiberal democracies’, ‘inclusionary autocracies’, ‘illiberal autocracies’—the reality is that acceptance of Washington Consensus norms is the principal criterion for gaining imperial approval. In Western Europe, after a few flutters on Iraq, the eu is firmly back on side. Chirac now sounds more belligerent than Bush on the Middle East, and the German elite is desperate to appease Washington. On the debit side, the Caracas effect is spreading. Cuba’s long isolation has been broken, the Bolivian oligarchy defeated in La Paz and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has assumed a central role in mobilizing popular anti-neoliberal movements in virtually every Latin American country. [1]

More alarmingly for Washington, American control of the Middle East is slipping.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Researchers say they are rapidly closing in on new types of materials that can throw a cloak of invisibility around objects, fulfilling a fantasy that is as old as ancient myths and as young as “Star Trek” and the Harry Potter novels. Unlike those tales of fictional invisibility, the real-life technologies usually have a catch. Nevertheless, limited forms of invisibility might be available to the military sooner than you think.

“We’re very confident that at radar frequencies, these materials can be implemented on a time scale of 18 months or so,” John Pendry of Imperial College London told MSNBC.com. The most exotic technologies involve “metamaterials,” blends of polymers and tiny coils or wires that twist the paths of electromagnetic radiation.

“There are recipes for controlling metamaterials,” explained

More here.

Robert S. Feranec in American Scientist:

Between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, during the final millennia of the Pleistocene Epoch, roughly 100 genera of megafauna (animals weighing more than 100 pounds) became extinct worldwide. Among them are such well-known creatures as mammoths and saber-toothed tigers and the more obscure, though no less significant, Diprotodon (an Australian marsupial the size of a hippopotamus) and Coelodonta (a woolly rhinoceros found in Europe). Whether their disappearance was caused by changes in climate or by “overkill” (being hunted to extinction by humans) has been hotly debated for the past 40 years. In Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America, Paul S. Martin reviews the end-Pleistocene extinction, arguing that overkill is the more likely explanation.

More here.

From Science:

A desert beetle that wrings water from fog has inspired scientists to create a nanomaterial that literally plucks moisture from the air. The invention could boost water supplies in the driest regions, say experts, and a similar setup could be used to precisely control the flow of tiny amounts of fluids for sensitive diagnostic tests.

Stenocara beetles live in the Namib Desert, one of the driest places on Earth. Located on the southwest coast of Africa, the region has scarce, unpredictable rainfall and no streams. On mornings when thick fog drifts in from the Atlantic Ocean, the insect climbs to the top of a dune and does a headstand, tilting its back into the breeze. Water droplets collect on the tops of smooth bumps until they spill into waxy, water-repellent grooves studded with smaller bumps that shunt the water down the insect’s shell into its mouth.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his brilliant blog, The Loom:

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a book on Escherichia coli (more on that later). To get a feel for how scientists work with the bug, I’ve been spending some time at the lab of Paul Turner at Yale. He sets up experiments to observe microbes evolve. His lab is full of freezers and incubators and flasks full of suspicious goo. One of his students gave me my first Petri dish of E. coli, which I brought home and put by my desk, where I could observe the colonies spread and then fade.

In addition to his work on Escherichia coli, Turner also studies viruses called phi-six that infect another species of bacteria. He experiments with them to watch how viruses shift hosts, cheat on one another, and go through other fascinating evolutionary changes. I’ve written an article on Turner’s work with viruses–and what it means for everything from flu pandemics to the tragedy of the commons– in the new issue of Yale’s alumni magazine.

More here.

David Roberts in Smithsonian Magazine:

The Grand Canyon occupies such an outsize place in the public imagination, we can be forgiven for thinking we “know” it. More than four million tourists visit the canyon each year, and the National Park Service funnels the vast majority of them through a tidy gantlet of attractions confined to a relatively short stretch of the South Rim. Even people who have never visited America’s greatest natural wonder have seen so many photographs of the panorama from Grandview Point or Mather Point that the place seems familiar to them.

But the canyon is a wild and unknowable place—both vast (the national park alone covers about 1,902 square miles, about the size of Delaware) and inaccessible (the vertical drops vary from 3,000 feet to more than 6,000). The chasm lays bare no fewer than 15 geological layers, ranging from the rim-top Kaibab Limestone (250 million years old) to the river-bottom Vishnu Schist (as old as two billion years). The most ecologically diverse national park in the United States, the Grand Canyon embraces so many microclimates that hikers can posthole through snowdrifts on the North Rim while river runners on the Colorado below are sunbathing in their shorts.

More here.

John D. Kasarda in The Next American City:

Across from Schiphol’s passenger terminal, one finds the World Trade Center, which contains conference facilities as well as the regional headquarters of such firms as Thomson-CFS and Unilever. Two five-star hotels adjoin this complex. Within a ten-minute walk is another complex of class-A office buildings that house financial and consulting firms which serve the aviation industry. Clustered along the A4 and A9 motorways linking the airport to downtown Amsterdam are large business parks for companies in industries that make intensive use of the airport, such as telecommunications, logistics, and distribution. With the airport and its immediate area serving as a multimodal transportation and commercial nexus, a new economic geography is taking shape: property near the airport commands premium office rental prices for the Amsterdam area, even above those in Amsterdam’s central business district.

Schiphol is but one example of how major airports are beginning to drive business siting and urban development in the 21st century, much as highways did in the 20th, railroads in the 19th, and seaports in the 18th. As aviation-oriented businesses cluster at and near major airports, a new urban entity is emerging: the Aerotropolis. Similar in shape to the traditional metropolis of a central city and its commuter-heavy suburbs, the Aerotropolis consists of an airport city core and an outlying area of businesses stretching fifteen miles along transportation corridors.

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1822, Thomas De Quincey published a short book, “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” The nature of addiction to opiates has been misunderstood ever since.

De Quincey took opiates in the form of laudanum, which was tincture of opium in alcohol. He claimed that special philosophical insights and emotional states were available to opium-eaters, as they were then called, that were not available to abstainers; but he also claimed that the effort to stop taking opium involved a titanic struggle of almost superhuman misery. Thus, those who wanted to know the heights had also to plumb the depths.

This romantic nonsense has been accepted wholesale by doctors and litterateurs for nearly two centuries. It has given rise to an orthodoxy about opiate addiction, including heroin addiction, that the general public likewise takes for granted: To wit, a person takes a little of a drug, and is hooked; the drug renders him incapable of work, but since withdrawal from the drug is such a terrible experience, and since the drug is expensive, the addict is virtually forced into criminal activity to fund his habit. He cannot abandon the habit except under medical supervision, often by means of a substitute drug.

In each and every particular, this picture is not only mistaken, but obviously mistaken. It actually takes some considerable effort to addict oneself to opiates: The average heroin addict has been taking it for a year before he develops an addiction. Like many people who are able to take opiates intermittently, De Quincey took opium every week for several years before becoming habituated to it. William Burroughs, who lied about many things, admitted truthfully that you may take heroin many times, and for quite a long period, before becoming addicted.

More here.

From the BBC:

The Simpsons is more than a funny cartoon – it reveals truths about human nature that rival the observations of great philosophers from Plato to Kant… while Homer sets his house on fire, says philosopher Julian Baggini.

With the likes of Douglas Coupland, George Walden and Stephen Hawking as fans, taking the Simpsons seriously is no longer outre but de rigeur.

It is, quite simply, one of the greatest cultural artefacts of our age. So great, in fact, that it not only reflects and plays with philosophical ideas, it actually does real philosophy, and does it well.

How can a comic cartoon do this? Precisely because it is a comic cartoon, the form best suited to illuminate our age.

More here.