Born a Half-Century Ago, Helvetica’s Made a Lasting Impression.

Frank Jordans in the Washington Post:

Open a newspaper, look at a street sign, type an e-mail and chances are a Swiss design icon is staring you in the face, though you’d be hard-pressed to identify it.

But peer closely at the shape of the letters: If they’re easy to read and without unnecessary flourishes, then you might well be looking at an example of the Helvetica typeface, which turns 50 this year.

Helvetica lettering adorns images most people can conjure instantly, from New York subway signs to the logos of Harley-Davidson, American Airlines and BMW. But much of the time it remains invisible in a sea of print, unobtrusively conveying the message the designer intended it to.

Unusually for the little-celebrated craft of typography — the design and arrangement of typed letters — the anniversary is being marked in grand fashion, with an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the release of a film by Gary Hustwit paying homage to what the cult documentary maker calls “one of the most popular ways for us to communicate our words.”

“Helvetica is one of those typefaces that everybody knows, everybody sees, but they don’t really see it at the same time because it’s so good at its job…”

More here.

Anthropologists are looking at how prehistoric tasks were divided, perhaps indicating the moment when we became truly human.

Faye Flam in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Could it be that Neanderthal females achieved an equality that is rare even by today’s standards?

Some anthropologists make a case that our extinct female cousins hunted alongside the males during an epoch when our own ancestral women were gathering plants and doing other (essential) work. They argue that the appearance of gender roles was critical to humans’ eventual domination of the globe – and that the importance of the women of the Pleistocene period has been vastly understated.

These assertions, controversial to be sure, play into growing scientific interest in prehistoric sex roles: How did our male and female ancestors divvy up the tasks of getting food, clothing and shelter, and how did those roles shape the evolving species? Did primitive peoples form relationships, the males playing father to sons and daughters, or did we act more like our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins – promiscuous, violent, with males fighting over the females?

More here.

From The Washington Post:

BURIED IN THE BITTER WATERS: The hidden history of racial cleansing in America by Elliot Jaspin.

People knew about the terror, of course. The stories came to them in whispers, passed on in warning or in shame or perhaps in pride. There was a day 80 or 90 years ago, they were told, when the rumor of a crime — a rape, most likely — had so enraged the whites in town that they lynched the black man they thought responsible. Then something else had happened, something every bit as sinister. In the fever of the moment, the whites had turned on their black neighbors, ordering entire communities of African Americans to gather what they could carry and get out of town, appropriating the property the victims were forced to abandon, destroying the homes they left behind. Years later, people still knew. But these weren’t the sort of stories that you told in public.

In the last decade or so, the silence has started to lift. Oklahoma established a public commission to investigate the destruction of Tulsa’s African American neighborhood in a horrific 1921 pogrom.

More here.

From Science:

The U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today in Brussels has a familiar ring. As the climate disasters headlined recently–intense hurricanes, drought in the American West, Arctic thawing–become commonplace in a greenhouse world, plants, animals, and people will suffer. That has been the presumption, but the latest report from the IPCC projecting greenhouse impacts calculates mounting costs that will fall the heaviest on the world’s poor.

February’s IPCC report on the physical science of climate firmly links most of the recent warming of the world to human activity. Scientists authoring the second report had a tougher challenge: figuring out the likely consequences. To do that, they considered 29,000 datasets from 75 studies. Of those data series, 89% showed changes–receding glaciers or earlier blooming, for example–consistent with a response to warming. Because those responses usually occurred where the warming has been greatest, the scientists concluded that it’s “very unlikely” the changes were due to natural variability of climate or of the system involved. “For the first time, we concluded anthropogenic warming has had an influence on many physical and biological systems,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a coordinating lead author on the report.

More here.

Ignacio Ramonet in Le Monde Diplomatique:

The Poles call it the law of lustration, a term meaning ritual purification; the word has strong connotations of repentance and penitence in Poland, where history and Catholicism are so closely intertwined.

Under the law, which was passed last October and entered into force on 15 March this year, 700,000 Poles are required to confess any collaboration with the communists between 1945 and 1989. All senior civil servants, university professors, lawyers, headmasters and journalists born before 1972 must now confess their past sins by 15 May.

They must all fill in a form and answer the question: “Did you secretly and knowingly collaborate with the former communist security services?” The forms must be handed to their immediate superiors, who will forward them to the Institute of National Memory in Warsaw, which will check its records and issue a certificate of political purity. Journalists employed in any public service will be dismissed automatically if they collaborated. Anyone who refuses to answer the question or who is proved to have lied may be banned from their profession for 10 years.

This mad law, which is causing uproar in the European Union, makes the McCarthyites of the United States in the 1950s look like amateurs at the practise of anti-communism.

Gary Gerstle reviews Aristide R. Zolberg’s A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America in Dissent.

Aristide R. Zolberg’s A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America is an extraordinary achievement. In its sweep, erudition, conceptual precision, and analytic acuity, it may be the most important book on the history of immigration policy published in twenty-five years. It reaches back into the eighteenth-century origins of the American nation and forward to the post–September 11, 2001, country we now inhabit. In between, Zolberg analyzes virtually every critical moment and development in American immigration policy: the first naturalization law in 1790; the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798; the Passenger Acts of the antebellum period (through which states tried to regulate immigration by stipulating passenger/tonnage ratios); the anti-immigrant policy proposals that emerged from the Know-Nothing movement in the 1850s; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Literacy Act of 1917; the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924; debates during the 1930s about whether to open America’s gates to Nazism’s victims; and the major immigration reform packages of 1952, 1965, 1986, and 1996. Full consideration of these many legislative debates, laws, and policy consequences requires extensive narration and analysis. Indeed, with its more than six hundred pages of text and notes, this book is not for the faint of heart. But Zolberg’s writing is always crisp. And he inserts into his analysis revelations about policy both large and small, along with meditations of the most profound sort about what kind of nation we have been in regard to immigration—and what kind of nation we ought to be.

In The New York Times, William Logan reviews the Selected Poems of Derek Walcott, as Morgan posts below. Walcott’s is my favorite reading voice in the English language, one that you can hear at the Lannan Foundation’s audio archives, including a reading of “The Schooner Flight”.

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!

From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road

to when I was a dog on these streets;

if loving these islands must be my load,

out of corruption my soul takes wings,

But they had started to poison my soul

with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,

coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,

so I leave it for them and their carnival —

I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road.

I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,

a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes

that they nickname Shabine, the patois for

any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw

when these slums of empire was paradise.

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,

and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.

Many mirrors hang in Andre Glucksmann’s living room in Paris. Even the salon table is mirrored and on it lies yet another gold-framed mirror. Asked why, he says, “It’s not as if I’m constantly looking at myself. But the mirrors expand the space.”

Glucksmann is a philosopher, he’s made a career out of reflection. But he hasn’t lost himself in post-modern reflection, which renders everything a representation or simulation, nor in philosophical terminological hair-splitting.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Here’s how I read Mallarmé’s prose, in Barbara Johnson’s lustrous new English translation: painfully, dutifully, passionately, a sentence at a time, while holding the French original in my other hand, so I can compare her sentence with his sentence, and so I can measure as accurately as possible each crevice where an adjective meets a noun, a comma meets a dependent clause.

Mallarmé published Divagations (a collection of essays and other highly compact prose implosions) in 1897 and died the following year. English-speaking aficio­nados of Symbolist rarities have relied on Mary Ann Caws’s exquisite anthology Mallarmé in Prose (2001), which contains some of the pieces in Divagations. Now we have in English the whole of Divagations, a volume whose contents are at once “scattered” (like Osiris’s limbs) and scrupu­lously arranged (like a rigged séance).

more from Bookforum here.

Poets behave like conquistadors wherever they roam, picking up a new verse form, a lover, some inventive cursing, a disease. Would Byron have been Byron without Italy and Greece? What would Eliot and Pound have become without the hostility of London? Can we imagine Hart Crane without the Caribbean or Elizabeth Bishop without Rio? Derek Walcott has crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much-thumbed Baedeker. To a boy born on St. Lucia, the rhythms and intonations of English verse were a passport to the elsewhere; but they came with a burden — the language of the colonial masters was not the one caught in his ear at home. “How choose,” he wrote, “Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give back what they give?”

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Autopsy With Sliced Human Brain, 2004.

Among the most celebrated artists of his generation, Damien Hirst has evolved a fresh and challenging attitude and approach to the production and exhibition of contemporary art. A media icon and household name because of his infamous shark in a tank of formaldehyde sculpture, Hirst is widely seen as the legitimate heir to Marcel Duchamp. Recipient of the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize in 1995, Hirst’s work tackles the big subjects of art—love, desire, life, and death—with irony, wit, and complex references to science and culture.

The exhibition presents four works that represent major forms within Hirst’s practice: minimalist abstraction, hyperrealism, commercial product, and natural science specimen, suggesting a continuing involvement with post-modern tropes of representation and how he questions art’s role in contemporary culture and our relationship to the forces of change.

More here.

Richard Schickel in LA Times:

Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry
By Holly George-Warren.
  Autry deserves to be regarded as an important American figure — certainly a significant one in the history of Los Angeles — though no one but the rubes paid him more than the slightest heed. The writers and thinkers who set our cultural agenda never wrote even a discouraging word about him.

This is perhaps understandable. Born to a shiftless father and a sickly mother near Tioga, Texas, Autry received a primitive education and became a telegrapher for the St. Louis-San Francisco railroad. It was a job he clung to even as he began warbling and wandering as the “Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy.” Entirely self-taught as a singer and guitar picker, Autry had a pleasant, unpretentious voice and manner, and his records and radio work brought him to the modest hinterlands of fame. The movie business called in 1934, when he made the first of his 92 B-movie westerns. Soon thereafter, he had a network radio show and a relentless schedule of public appearances, mostly with rodeos that he owned.

Here, a certain mystery — which is not entirely solved by Holly George-Warren in her devoted but not very venturesome biography, “Public Cowboy No. 1” — enters our story. Put simply, it is: How in the world did Gene Autry become the richest cowboy in human history?

More here.

Carl Swanson in New York:

The initial public offering of Dana Vachon’s first novel, the Wall Street satire Mergers & Acquisitions, was still a few weeks off when we met for lunch at Le Colonial, a sort of Indochina theme restaurant on East 57th Street where the ceiling fans turn slowly and even the wait staff seem stunned by the nonexistent tropical humidity. Vachon is 28 and dressed for a Saturday of shopping in downtown Greenwich, in a blazer and open-necked Ralph Lauren shirt and loafers. He’d suggested this place because it was where the send-off party was held for Roger Thorne—the name of a character in his book—when he “left to be a war profiteer.” Except that never happened in the book. Oh, he meant the real-life Thorne, the one he met at JPMorgan, where he started interning in his sophomore year in college in 2000 and went to work in 2002.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson: David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University, takes a different and decidedly refreshing approach. Rather than catalog its successes, denounce its detractors or in any way present evolutionary theory as the province of expert tacticians like himself, Wilson invites readers inside and shows them how Darwinism is done, and at lesson’s end urges us to go ahead, feel free to try it at home. The result is a sprightly, absorbing and charmingly earnest book that manages a minor miracle, the near-complete emulsifying of science and the “real world,” ingredients too often kept stubbornly, senselessly apart.

In Wilson’s view, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has the beauty of being both simple and profound. Unlike quantum mechanics or the general theory of relativity, the basic concepts behind evolutionary theory are easy to grasp; and once grasped, he argues, they can be broadly applied to better understand ourselves and the world — the world both as it is and as it might be, with the right bit of well-informed coaxing. Wilson has long been interested in the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behavior, and much of the book is devoted to the premise that “goodness can evolve, at least when the appropriate conditions are met.” As he sees it, all of life is characterized by a “cosmic” struggle between good and evil, the high-strung terms we apply to behaviors that are either cooperative or selfish, civic or anomic.

More here.

From MSNBC News:

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study. The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to  implausible reincarnation claims in the first place. Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

More here.

Matthew Polly in Slate:

The only thing more varied than the expressions of male vice is the ways in which men justify them.

It was 1 a.m., and, after searching for an hour, the fisherman and I had failed to find the Marine, who had rushed out of the pingpong show earlier in the evening and could now be just about anywhere in Pat Pong. Instead, we had bumped into the young woman from Cambridge and her Scottish boyfriend at one of the lean-to bars. I decided to join them because the night had the feeling of one that I would never forget but hopefully never repeat, and I didn’t want it to end. The fisherman decided to join the table, because he wanted to rationalize all the sins he had committed when he had disappeared into the pingpong show’s backroom brothel.

“The first girl was from the north—”

“The first?” I interrupted. “Dude, how many were there?”

More (including slide show) here.

Neuroplasticity can allow for treatment of senility, post-traumatic stress, ­obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression—and Buddhists have been capitalizing on it for millenia.

Matthew Blakeslee in Discover Magazine:

If old dogs haven’t been able to learn new tricks, maybe that’s because no one has known how to teach them properly. Until quite recently orthodox neuroscience held that only the brains of young children are resilient, malleable, and morphable—in a word, plastic. This neuroplasticity, as it is called, seems to fade steadily as the brain congeals into its fixed adult configuration. Infants can sustain massive brain damage, up to the loss of an entire cerebral hemisphere, and still develop into nearly normal adults; any adult who loses half the brain, by contrast, is a goner. Adults can’t learn to speak new languages without an accent, can’t take up piano in their fifties then go on to play Carnegie Hall, and often suffer strokes that lead to permanent paralysis or cognitive deficiencies. The mature brain, scientists concluded, can only decline.

It turns out this theory is not just wrong, it is spectacularly wrong. Two new books, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Ballantine Books, $24.95) by science journalist Sharon Begley and The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psychiatrist Norman Doidge, offer masterfully guided tours through the burgeoning field of neuroplasticity research. Each has its own style and emphasis; both are excellent.

More here.

Joan Acocella in The New Yorker:

Many of the early inventors of the typewriter thought that what they were inventing was a prosthetic device for the blind. Why would ordinary writers need a writing machine? They had pens. Eventually, it became clear that such a mechanism could benefit the seeing, too, but, as we find out in “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting” (Cornell; $29.95), by Darren Wershler-Henry, a professor of communication studies in Ontario, almost two centuries, roughly the eighteenth and the nineteenth, passed before that hope was realized. There was no single moment of discovery, no lone inventor crying “Eureka!” in a darkened laboratory. On the contrary, historians estimate that the typewriter was invented at least fifty-two times, as one tinkerer after another groped toward a usable design. One early writing mechanism looks like a birthday cake, another like a pinball machine. One was almost eight feet tall; another, a Tyrolean entry, was whittled largely from wood. Until about the eighteen-thirties, all typewriters lacked a keyboard, and when they got one it was usually modelled on that of the piano. Nor did they have a ribbon. That didn’t make its appearance until 1841; in most earlier machines the keys were inked by rollers or carbon paper.

More here.

A Chinese initiative sets out to train 1.3 billion scientists–one farmer at a time.

Mara Hvistendahl in Seed Magazine:

During the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 70s, China persecuted scientists and sent the Red Guard to the farthest reaches of the country to promote anti-intellectualism. This year, China is again sending delegates to the countryside, but this time they are spreading a very different sort of message: the virtues of scientific progress.

As part of its 15-year plan to develop nationwide science and technology literacy, particularly among farmers and migrant workers, Beijing has rolled out an 860 million renminbi ($111 million) initiative to introduce China’s vast, rural adult population to science. Formally established last year, the program uses unusual means such as “science trains” and “science circuses” to deliver its message. Academics and educators now tour the country, traversing even remote areas of Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces, where they greet locals, hand out materials and books translated into the nation’s minority languages, and unfurl red banners that read “Spread the Scientific Spirit.”

More here.

Charles Taylor reviews Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear, in the New York Review of Books:

Radical Hope is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies. This has been the fate of many aboriginal peoples in the last couple of centuries. Jonathan Lear takes as the main subject of his study the Crow tribe of the western US, who were more or less pressured to give up their hunting way of life and enter a reservation near the end of the nineteenth century.

The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe’s great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

Lear concentrates on those last four words. What can they mean? Of course, they could be an expression of dejection, of depression. But he sets that aside for good reasons. He argues that if we interpret the statement psychologically, we are being “guided by our own sense of what is true” and ignoring the question of “Plenty Coups’s humanity” and the particular cultural circumstances in which he found himself. We have to take this expression more literally.

More here.