China’s leaders will not be able to continue indefinitely to meet the nation’s deeply rooted desire for datong with empty rhetoric. Yet the persistence of Grand Harmony as an ideal also suggests that China’s evolution in the direction of Western-style liberal democratic capitalism is not very likely. “Despite all the references to ziyou (freedom) in the many constitutions of the successive regimes of 20th-century China,” notes historian Philip Huang, “ziyou has never quite been able to shake its associated negative connotations of selfishness, with obvious consequences for Chinese conceptions of ‘democracy.’”

For a glimpse of how China may evolve, many scholars look to Asia’s other Confucian societies, such as Taiwan and South Korea. The continuing strength of the datong mentality in those countries can be seen in the relatively narrow gap between rich and poor—narrower than in many Western countries—that is maintained as a matter of government policy. Yet this emphasis on the collective good often goes hand in hand with some variety of authoritarian rule. While Taiwan and South Korea took several decades before they embarked on the path to democratization, China may take longer, given its official communist ideology and the size and diversity of the country. For better or worse, the datong tradition will remain a powerful influence for a long time to come as China struggles toward modernity.

more from the Wilson Quarterly here.

Apart from his collection of long stories, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), which was banned for obscenity in the State of New York, Edmund Wilson’s books were never widely read. But for upwards of half a century they had an incalculable impact on readers. Several generations of American intellectuals not only cared what he thought about literature and politics but used his career as a model. They admired his restless curiosity, omnivorous reading, sharp literary judgement, and grasp of culture as a living entity. They envied the unforced clarity of his style. Wilson was hardly more than a decade older than the writers who founded Partisan Review in the mid-1930s, and his deep-dyed American background was different from their immigrant roots, yet, as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin testified, they looked to him as their difficult-to-please mentor. Other sources of inspiration for the Partisan Review circle were distant figures, but Wilson actually married into the family when he took Mary McCarthy, their scarlet princess, as his third wife.

more from the TLS here.

Punk rock was great and it made for a great story. The Ramones and other upstart bands came out of nowhere, playing songs that were loud, fast and obnoxious. With more passion than skill, they made the established rock stars look like pompous windbags. The movement came to a fitting end with the self-destruction of the Sex Pistols in 1978. Johnny Rotten turned back into John Lydon, Sid Vicious overdosed and everybody else pulled their safety pins out of their cheeks. Since then, scores of writers and filmmakers have been attracted to punk’s outrageous characters and shapely plot.

The story of punk’s aftermath is more fragmented, with no clear beginning, a mixed-up middle and a whimper of an ending. Pop-culture historians have found it easy to avoid. With “Rip It Up and Start Again,” the brainy music critic Simon Reynolds steps forward to accept the challenge. He is a brave man.

more from the Ny Times Book Review here.

From Science:

Researchers visited 186 streams and 5000 wells across the country. Every stream had at least one pesticide at some time, and 10% had levels that exceeded the benchmark at which human health effects are possible. The prevalence of pesticides was much lower in ground water; only 1.2% of wells exceeded the benchmark. There is more concern for aquatic organisms and the wildlife that feed upon them. Of the 178 streams near farms or cities, 56% had one or more pesticides exceeding benchmarks. “Aquatic life in urban streams is particularly threatened,” said report author Robert Gilliom, who leads the USGS’s Pesticide National Synthesis Project Study Team.

More here.

From Nature:

While Hollywood celebrates the best in movie making from 2005, [email protected] has decided to delve into the world of science and cinema.

Proof

Plot summary: A devoted daughter mourns the death of her father, a brilliant but mentally ill mathematician. Also a mathematician herself, she claims to have written a groundbreaking proof during the five years that she was caring for him.

Science review: This film reinforces the popular stereotype of the brilliant mathematician recluse, who outshines everyone in his youth before slowly losing his marbles. But it also asks a deeper question: how do we know anything with certainty? Proof plausibly shows that a mathematician’s work is never done. But less plausibly, it shows young Hal (Jake Gyllenhaal) checking the claimed proof of Catherine (Gwyneth Paltrow) in just one week.

Award: Best song on a mathematical topic (three minutes of silence for the imaginary number ‘i‘)

More here:

Journalism, wrote HL Mencken towards the end of his career, ‘is a fleeting thing, and the man who devotes his life to it writes his history in water’. When he died, almost exactly 50 years ago, he left instructions to colleagues on the Baltimore Sun: no biographical sketches, no pictures, no editorial hymning of achievements, please – just a terse death announcement. The most resonant name in American newspapers wished (metaphorically) to put on his coat one final time, close the office door and steal away, collar turned high against excessive eulogy.

They didn’t obey him, of course. Mencken was given an obituary and feted in excelsis, as he still is. And now a walloping, meticulously scholarly biography adds perhaps the last few hundred thousand words to a reputation he would surely have shrugged away. For, at heart, this gruff, iconoclastic guy was right about himself and his trade. There’s a hole in your bucket, dear Henry, and the water of history pours through it.

more from The Observer here.

(Phone rings.)

CTHULHU: Hello?

SOLICITOR: Hello, Mr. Cthulhu?

CTHULHU: Yes?

SOLICITOR: Do you have good car insurance?

CTHULHU: I am an Elder God of the Damned. I don’t need that simplistic mode of transportation.

SOLICITOR: Well, I understand that you, as an elderly person, must pay a high premium.

CTHULHU: Cthulhu does not pay for anything.

SOLICITOR: I am sure that living on a fixed income can make affording good car insurance a difficulty. What if I told you that I could save you a minimum of 25 percent on your yearly premium?

CTHULHU: I hate human scum like you. You know, I could transport myself through this phone line and reveal myself in all of my horrible grandeur—causing you to live in a world of constant nightmares. You would pray for a swift death at my hands.

SOLICITOR: OK, OK. What about life insurance?

more from McSweeney’s here.

Fritz Lanham in the Houston Chronicle:

While Diamond’s warnings about deforestation, soil erosion and unfettered energy consumption resonate with environmentalists, he’s taken some heat for not roundly bashing corporations — oil companies in particular. For example, he has nice words for the environmentally sensitive way Chevron has managed its Papau New Guinea oil fields.

He favors ”a mixed relationship” with energy companies and the like, he said, ”rewarding those do good things. And for those who are doing bad things, a mixture of punishing them and encouraging them to do good things.” In New Guinea, Chevron apparently recognized that mucking up the place would rile the locals, making it harder to do business.

Asked if he considers himself a man with a mission, Diamond first dismisses the idea, then reconsiders…

More here.

Anthony Hernandez is known for his lush images of urban landscapes such as the L.A. River. He began photographing in black-and-white in the early ’70s, mostly people downtown, and when he experimented with color in Beverly Hills in the ’80s, things did not go so well at first. “Finally, at the beginning of ’84,” he says, “I made my first picture that worked. I’d go to Rodeo Drive at least four or five days a week in the middle of the day and spend a few hours. I was working in a very particular way, photographing as I passed people on the street — very quickly, very intuitively making a picture just at that moment. I used what is called zone focus. Basically, you don’t have time to focus your camera so you pre-set focus to 6 or 8 feet, framing people the way you want to frame them, and quickly bringing the camera to your eye. Not until you get your film back do you know if the subjects were in the zone of focus. It’s like a dance, in the sense of passing through this very animated landscape of people and cars and buildings. Everything is very fluid, the way I’m moving and making the picture.

more from the LA Weekly here.

Ian Sansom in the London Review of Books:

In his thorough and entertaining authorised biography of Cash, Steve Turner establishes a suitably saintly tone on the first page. ‘It was doubtful,’ he writes of his subject, ‘whether he had a bodily organ that hadn’t been operated on, an area of skin that hadn’t been gashed, or a significant bone that hadn’t been cracked.’ This sounds like an entry from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and Turner – the author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied contrast with the Paschal lamb of Exodus 12.46 and the fulfilment of the Scripture in the Gospel of John, chapter 19 (‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs . . . For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken’). As with the saints of old, Cash’s afflictions and repulses – his brokenness of body and of spirit – are seen as spiritual tests and trials, and he is venerated for his sufferings. ‘As Cash’s eyes and legs grew weaker, his faith appeared to grow stronger,’ Turner writes of Cash’s last illness. ‘In his final years, as Cash was gradually stripped of everything – his sight, his mobility, his strength, his looks and, at the end, his wife – he became more confident than ever in the object of his faith.’ Tried and tested, Cash comes forth as gold.

More here.

“The Internet is allowing unsigned authors to publish books affordably, while keeping old titles alive, writes Victor Keegan.“

From The Guardian:

Everyone thought Amazon would kill off the second hand book trade. As it happens, bookshops around the world have found a new lease of life through the admirable abebooks.com, which links them together enabling readers to find a forgotten book gathering dust in a shop half way round the earth.

Now the internet is in the throes of giving another huge boost to books through a combination of self-publishing web sites, which are sprouting up all over the place, and the explosive potential of print-on-demand (POD).

Self-publishing enables anyone to upload a book in digital form to a website, which then formats it complete with a cover. It costs anything from £4.50 (single proof of one book) to more than £500 for full personalised involvement of the publishing house at all stages, from starting up to getting a link to Amazon.

More here.

In Deutsche Welle, another attempt at reforming German orthography:

The original spelling reform of 1996, which was meant to harmonize the spelling rules across the German-speaking countries, turned out to be a major embarrassment if not outright failure.

After six years of teaching the new spelling rules, two German states which make up over one-third of Germany’s population — Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia — decided to throw out both the baby and the bath water and not make the new spelling compulsory.

One of Germany’s major newspapers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and several other press groups turned their back on the 1996 rules, preferring the traditional spelling rules. German Nobel prize winner Günter Grass stood up against the reforms, and the country found a new national pastime: trashing the writing reform. Organizations such as the German Language Research Group or the Teachers Against the Spelling Reform launched their impassioned campaigns with the result that in 2004, 77 percent of Germans still considered the spelling reform not sensible.

It is truly mind-boggling to an outsider that in a country with an unemployment rate of over five million, spelling rules should stir up so much passion. It is even more mind-boggling that spelling seems like a more controversial topic than equal access to education, integration policies and German education underachievement in the EU context. Yet it is beyond any doubt that failed reforms, partial reforms and reforms of the reforms can only undermine public trust in their cultural and political institutions.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val and Ibn Warraq give us a manifesto against Islamism, in Jyllands-Posten. (Via Amitava Kumar.)

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject « cultural relativism », which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

Yesterday, I posted on a working paper by James Galbraith and Travis Hale on income inequality and voting patterns. Andrew Gelman suggests that Galbraith and Hale have fallen prey to the ecological fallacy, in which one infers atributes about individuals from information about statistical aggregates about the group to which s/he belongs. (Thanks Abbas.)

But then they write:

We [Galbraith and Hale] can, however, infer that the Democratic Party has engaged in campaigns that have resonated with both the elite rich and the comparatively poor.

Well, no, you can’t infer that from aggregate results! To state it in two steps:

1. Just because state-level inequality is correlated with statewide vote for the Democrats, this does not imply that individual rich and poor voters are supporting the Democrats more than the Republicans. To make this claim is to make the ecological fallacy.

2. The Democrats do much better than the Republicans among poor voters, and much worse among the rich voters. (There’s lots of poll data on this; for example, see here.) So, not only are Galbraith and Hale making a logically false inference, they are also reaching a false conclusion.

Galbraith and Hale have revised their paper (see p. 12 and footnotes 19 and 20) in light of Gelman’s critique.

From MSNBC:

Scientists have long wondered why organisms bother with sexual reproduction. It makes a whole lot more sense to just have a bunch of females that can clone themselves, which is how asexual reproduction works. Turns out sex might have evolved as a way to concentrate lots of harmful mutations into individual organisms so they could be easily weeded out by natural selection, a new computer model suggests.

It provides a way for organisms to swap and shuffle genes and to create offspring with new gene combinations that might survive if the environment suddenly changes.

More here.

From Scientific American:

In the wild, chimpanzees have been known to hunt together, particularly when conditions dictate that a solo hunter will not be successful. Yet this does not prove that our nearest living relatives understand cooperation the same way that we do: such group hunts may simply be the product of independent and simultaneous actions by many individuals with little comprehension of the need for coordinated action to ensure success. A new study, however, shows for the first time that chimpanzees understand when cooperation is needed and how to go about securing it effectively. And another study shows they might even be willing to cooperate without hope of reward.

More here.

Moisés Naím in Foreign Policy:

In 1849, the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle labeled economics the “dismal science.” Two centuries later, contemporary practitioners still study dismal choices: Higher prices or fewer jobs? Spend or save? They have also become a smug lot.

Economists take pride in the sophisticated statistical techniques on which they rely to analyze phenomena such as growth, inflation, unemployment, trade, and even the long-term effects of abortion on crime rates. Many are convinced that their methods are more rigorous than those of all other social sciences and dismiss research that does not rest on quantitative methods as little more than “storytelling” or, worse, “glorified journalism.” Anthropologists, some economists jest, believe that the plural of anecdote is “data.”

A survey published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that 77 percent of the doctoral candidates in the leading departments in the United States believe that “economics is the most scientific of the social sciences.” It turns out, however, that this certitude does not stem from how well they regard their own discipline but rather from their contempt for the other social sciences. Although they were nearly unanimous about the relative superiority of their profession, only 9 percent of the respondents were convinced that economists agree on fundamental issues.

More here.  [Thanks to Pablo Policzer.]

In Slate.com, Fred Kaplan on Bush’s nuclear deal with India.

It began last July, when Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh issued a joint statement pledging to “transform” their two countries’ relations—for many decades hostile, even now ambivalent—into a “global partnership.” This was a shrewd geopolitical maneuver. A grand alliance with India—the world’s largest democracy, one of the fastest-growing economies, a natural partner in the war on terrorism, a vast market already oriented toward American goods and services, a counterweight against the prospect of an emergent China—would serve U.S. interests in every way and help regain our standing on a continent where our influence has waned.

But there was a catch, or at least a knot that would have to be untangled. What India wanted out of this deal, above all else, was access to materials for nuclear energy. India faces staggering energy demands over the coming decade, yet it lacks the resources to meet them. The Nonproliferation Treaty obliges the existing nuclear-armed powers—including the United States—to supply such resources to the treaty’s signatories, under specific terms of inspection, as a reward for forgoing nuclear weaponry. However, India already has an arsenal of A-bombs, and it never signed the NPT.

Bush and Singh dealt with this dilemma last summer by simply ignoring it. India, their joint statement declared, would be treated “as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology” and should therefore be allowed to “acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states.”

I finally finished collecting all of 3QD’s Monday columns and they can be conveniently browsed now at our “Monday Columns” page (on the navigation bar above). I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have managed to publish more than 130 essays on a wide variety of topics in less than a year. Many thanks to all the contributors, and as always, to our readers.

Abbas and I often complain of the all too common problem of innumeracy in our society. Jennifer Ouellette over at Cocktail Party Physics reflects on innumeracy, the TV show Numb3rs and the pedagogy of math.

For a science writer who specializes in physics topics, I’m still surprisingly phobic about math. Chalk it up to my English major roots, but the sight of even a simple algebraic equation still elicits an involuntary shudder of trepidation. This isn’t necessarily due to a lack of aptitude. I might not be gifted in the subject, or have that mysteriously intuitive grasp of abstract numerical concepts that distinguish most talented mathematicians and physicists from the rest of the population, but I always did very well in my high school algebra classes. So why did I fear it so much?

Human beings tend to fear the unfamiliar and unknown. We might have been formally — nay, forcibly — introduced as part of the required US educational curriculum, but math and I, we were never close. Our relationship was doomed from the start. For one thing, we never learned how to communicate. Our conversations were strictly monologues, with no room for give and take. I might have gotten “As” in my algebra classes, but I was merely doing what I was told: memorizing the “rules”, plugging in the parameters, and dutifully crunching out answers by rote, with no real grasp of the significance of what I was doing, or its usefulness in solving real-world problems. The lack of a contextual framework meant that no genuine dialogue could take place, and without that dialogue, there could be no real understanding.