Michael Sperber in Harvard Magazine:

For escape, Olmsted frequented the woods.

My mother died while I was so young that I have but a tradition of memory rather than the faintest recollection of her. While I was a small school boy, if I was asked if I remembered her, I could say ‘Yes; I remember playing in the grass and looking up at her while she sat sewing under a tree….’ [I]t has always been a delight to me to see a woman sitting under a tree, sewing and minding a child.

It is not far-fetched to suppose that Olmsted came into his calling because he sought with every fiber of his being to realize that vision. By introducing nature to the urban scene, he offered respite from the pathogenic influences of city life, “the symptoms of which,” he wrote, “are nervous tension, over-anxiety, hasteful disposition, impatience, [and] irritability.” Such symptoms could be reversed through exposure to pleasing rural scenery: “It is thus, in medical phrase, a prophylactic and therapeutic agent of value….”

In a tragic irony, Olmsted had to be hospitalized, at McLean, for the last five years of his life. His medical record is sealed, but whatever the problem, it undoubtedly exacerbated the earlier posttraumatic stress disorder. He was alert enough, nevertheless, to note that certain of his concepts had been disregarded in the hospital-grounds construction: he complained to a family member, “They didn’t follow my plan, confound them!

More here.

Photo of Back Bay Fens, Boston. More on Boston’s Emeral Necklace, designed by Olmstead, here.

Robert Irwin at TLS:

Countrymen passed bristling over with arms, each with a huge bellyful of pistols and daggers in his girdle; fierce, but not the least dangerous. Wild swarthy Arabs, who had come in with the caravans, walked solemnly about, very different in demeanour from the sleek inhabitants of the town. Greeks and Jews squatted and smoked, their shops tended by sallow faced boys, with large eyes, who smiled and welcomed you in; negroes bustled about in gaudy colours; and women with black nosebags and shuffling yellow slippers, chattered and bargained at the doors of the little shops.

So Thackeray described the bazaar in Smyrna in Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo. This evocation of crowds, costumes and racial types was a cliché in Orientalist travel writing; for example, Mark Twain, in Innocents Abroad, wrote of the thronging inhabitants of Istanbul as follows: “No two men were dressed alike. It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes – every struggling throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts”. And there is much more in the same vein.

More here.

Here’s a piece in the Forward from about a month ago on Steven Weinberg’s decision to cancel a speech at Imperial College London on the 50th anniversary of Abdus Salam’s arrival at Imperial College. The reason for the cancelation was the growing movement to boycott Israeli academia among English academics. The thrust of the article is more about the friendship between Salam and Weinberg.

Weinberg, whose father was a court stenographer, had graduated from Bronx High School of Science and studied Salam’s work in renormalization when he was a graduate student. That shared interest set the pair apart — “It was a bit out of fashion,” said physicist Tom Kibble, a contemporary of theirs at Imperial — and led to their first meeting, in 1960, at the University of California, Berkeley. Weinberg had recently become an assistant professor there; Salam, only 34, was already a member of Britain’s Royal Society.

“He had wonderful moustaches, and an Anglo-Indian accent,” said Weinberg of his elder colleague. “To me, he looked like a character in a movie about the Raj.”

The pair hit it off, and Weinberg was glad to join Salam at Imperial in 1961 as a visiting professor. As a collaborator, Weinberg’s calculated style was complementary to Salam’s flamboyance. “He was always bursting into our office to expound some new proposition,” wrote an Imperial colleague of the energetic Pakistani. Salam “loved to give names to expressions or equations — some of them risqué— and then tried to get them past the [journal] editor.”

“A little more effervescent than I was,” is how Weinberg described his friend to the Forward. “One day, he told me there was one thing he held against the Jews. I was worried what he’d say. He said, ‘The prohibition against eating pork, which you passed down to the Muslims. But every Jew I know eats the stuff.’… That kind of humor lubricated our friendship.”

This graphic has been making its rounds all over the left side of the blogosphere. It is from the WSJ, which seems to have reached a new low in right-wing mendaciousness and hackery in the cause of supply-side tax cut arguments.

Now the most obvious response is that Norway is an outlier, i.e., an observation whose value is abnormally different from other observations. Mark Thoma over at Economist’s View offered this chart instead. The chart shows no Laffer curve relationship, but instead a positive relationship between tax rates and tax revenues. If Norway’s excluded the relationship would be stronger, in the sense that the error would be smaller.

In the midst of this collective blogosphere howl at the WSJ, Kieran Healy takes the oppotunity to discuss how we should think about observations like Norway over at Crooked Timber.

In discussion threads about this kind of thing, you’ll find people saying stuff like, “I want to see a line showing x z or z”, or “I want to know what happens when you …”, and very often they’ll add “excluding outliers like Norway from the analysis.” Now, it’s true that in this plot Norway is very unlike the other countries. It’s also true that if you run regressions with data like this and don’t look at any plots while you do it then you will probably be misled by your coefficients, because some observations (like Norway) may have too much leverage or influence in the calculations. In this sense it’s important to take “outliers” into consideration.

But when your data set consists of just 18 or 25 advanced industrial democracies and your goal is to assess the empirical support for some alleged economic law, then you should be careful about tossing around the concept of “outlier.” In an important sense, Norway isn’t an outlier at all. It’s a real country, with a government and an economy and everything. Clearly they are doing something up there in the fjords to push the observed value up to the top of the graph. Maybe you don’t know what that is, but you shouldn’t just label it an outlying case and throw it away, at least not without re-specifying the scope of your question.

Fron Oneworld:

Swordfish is a quintessential Mediterranean dish and one that thousands of Britons will tuck into as they holiday in the region over the coming weeks, but as the new report, “Illegal Driftnetting in the Mediterranean” reveals illegal driftnets, which have a devastating on the Mediterranean’s marine wildlife, are being used to catch swordfish.

Up to one-quarter of Mediterranean swordfish are caught using illegal driftnets, which were banned from global use in the early 1990s. Known as ‘walls of death’ because of their devastating impact on non-target marine species such as whales, dolphins, turtles, sharks and seabirds, these nets can be tens of miles long and continue to be used by an estimated 600 vessels from Italy, France, Morocco and Turkey.

“Swordfish is clearly not a sustainable choice for the responsible consumer,” continues Trent. “The EU and national governments have failed in their duty to manage swordfish stocks responsibly, but holiday makers can simply choose not to eat swordfish when they dine out this summer”.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In July 1957, an ocean liner set sail from France to New York and on board was the 32-year-old, James Baldwin. Nine years earlier, he had made the reverse journey and left his native New York City for Paris with $40 in his pocket and no knowledge of either France or the French language. He had chosen Paris because his mentor, Richard Wright, was living there, having sought refuge from the demeaning racial politics of his homeland. The young James Baldwin felt that if he was ever going to discover himself as a man and a writer, then he would also have to flee the United States. His exile in France had often been difficult, and was marked by poverty, a period in jail, and at least one suicide attempt, but in the end this opening act of Baldwin’s literary life proved to be triumphantly productive. His first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) established his name, and his collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955), and his controversial second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), secured his reputation as an important, and fast-rising literary figure.

More here. (When he was alive, I was a Baldwin groupie, and attended many of his readings. He was a mountain.)

From The New York Times:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

More here.

How some extremely smart hackers pulled off the most audacious cell-network break-in ever.

Vassilis Prevelakis and Diomidis Spinellis in the IEEE Spectrum:

On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months.

The next day, the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of the mayor of Athens and at least 100 other high-ranking dignitaries, including an employee of the U.S. embassy.

The victims were customers of Athens-based Vodafone-Panafon, generally known as Vodafone Greece, the country’s largest cellular service provider; Tsalikidis was in charge of network planning at the company. A connection seemed obvious. Given the list of people and their positions at the time of the tapping, we can only imagine the sensitive political and diplomatic discussions, high-stakes business deals, or even marital indiscretions that may have been routinely overheard and, quite possibly, recorded.

More here.

From the Bill Moyers Journal at PBS:

“Every kid has a bug period…I never grew out of mine.”

Edward Osborne Wilson grew up off the gulf coast of Alabama and Florida, becoming fascinated at a very early age by the diversity of the natural world surrounding him. After blinding himself in one eye while fishing at the age of 7, Wilson explains that he no longer was very good at bird-watching, so decided to “turn towards the little things in life,” namely ants.

At 13, he discovered the first U.S. colony of fire ants near the docks of Mobile, Alabama, well on his way to becoming one of the country’s foremost myrmecologists (ant biologists), discovering the ways intricate chemical signals affect colony behavior. While a professor at Harvard, Wilson used his insect expertise as the basis for larger study into animal and human behavior, releasing in 1975, SOCIOBIOLOGY: THE NEW SYNTHESIS, advancing Darwin’s study of evolution into the realm of behavior:

“In a Darwinian sense, the organism does not live for itself. Its primary function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and it serves as their temporary carrier.”

Though highly praised and extremely popular, SOCIOBIOLOGY proved equally controversial, primarily due to its last chapter, which extended analysis of the animal kingdom to human behavior and culture.

More, including video, here.

Forget science fiction. If you want to hear some really crazy ideas about the universe, just listen to our leading theoretical physicists. Wish you could travel back in time? You can, according to some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Could there be an infinite number of parallel worlds? Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg considers this a real possibility. Even the big bang, which for decades has been the standard explanation for how the universe started, is getting a second look. Now, many cosmologists speculate that we live in a “multiverse,” with big bangs exploding all over the cosmos, each creating its own bubble universe with its own laws of physics. And lucky for us, our bubble turned out to be life-friendly.

But if you really want to start an argument, ask a room full of physicists this question: Are the laws of physics fine-tuned to support life?

more from Salon here.

AI WEIWEI’S CONTRIBUTION to Documenta 12 is titled Fairytale, but in China, where Ai is as famous as a movie star, people have acerbically taken to calling it “Yellow Peril.” The original concept for the artwork was simple: Round up 1,001 Chinese people from the artist’s sprawling, blog-mediated social network, give them matching clothes and luggage, fly them en bloc to Kassel, billet them on bamboo bunks in Ai-designed temporary quarters inside an old textile factory, and set them to wandering the city for the three-month duration of the show, which opens June 16. A spokesperson at Ai’s studio says, “To design also means to set up a condition, which makes individuals change. The project is about a new way to communicate, to participate, a new spiritual condition.” The primary design object here, in other words, is not clothing or suitcases but the participants’ experiences, even their spirits. In its emphasis on changing individuals by changing their material circumstances, Fairytale resonates with both midcentury Western architectural idealism and current Chinese political ideology.

more from artforum here.

INTERVIEWER

Might it be said, in any event, that writing is a sort of self-annihilation?

MAILER

It uses you profoundly. There’s simply less of you after you finish a book, which is why writers can be so absolutely enraged at cruel criticisms that they feel are unfair. We feel we have killed ourselves once writing the book, and now they are seeking to kill us again for too little. Gary Gilmore once remarked, “Padre, there’s nothing fair.” And I’ve used that over and over again. Yet if you’re writing a good novel then you’re being an explorer—you’re getting into something where you don’t know the end, where the end is not given. There’s a mixture of dread and excitement that keeps you going. To my mind, it’s not worth writing a novel unless you’re tackling something where your chances of success are open. You can fail. You’re gambling with your psychic reserves. It’s as if you were the general of an army of one, and this general can really drive that army into a cul-de-sac.

more from Paris Review here.

From Grist.org:

What’s the most worrisome aspect of the current U.S. food system?

That’s a tough one. But the thing that really struck me is just how much energy goes into the process. The most recent study I’ve seen, from the University of Michigan, says that 20 percent of our fossil-fuel consumption is going to feeding ourselves. This happens at three different stages. One is on the farm, because we use synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which is made from natural gas and a great deal of electricity. Then we take commodity crops, such as corn and soybeans and wheat, and we process them intensively, adding another seven calories of fossil-fuel energy for every one calorie of food. It’s a very intensive process to take the corn and turn it into the high-fructose corn syrup, or take the corn and turn it into the chicken, and the chicken into the Chicken McNugget. As we move further away from eating food to eating highly processed, complicated food products — as we move from yogurt to Go-GURT — it takes more energy, and more energy in the packaging. We’re putting a lot of time into redesigning our whole food supply so we can eat in the car. Nineteen percent of meals [and snacks in the U.S.] are eaten in the car right now. And then we drive [the food] around the country, if not fly it around the world. You can get your organic asparagus from Argentina, you can get your grass-fed beef from New Zealand.

So given that our most serious environmental problem is global warming, I’d have to say the most serious problem with the food system is its contribution to global warming.

From Nature:

People can will themselves to forget traumatic or emotional scenes, researchers have found. When the brain conducts such deletions, brain regions that process vision and emotion go quiet.
Knowing that memories can be consciously suppressed, and the brain areas involved, could point to therapies for people who struggle to forget traumatic experiences, such as those with post-traumatic stress disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Neuroscientist Brendan Depue, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, wanted to find out what goes wrong in the brains of sufferers of such conditions.

Previous studies have shown that people can suppress memories of words. But to make the test relevant to traumatic memories, Depue’s team included an emotional component. They showed volunteers pairs of pictures: one of a face, and one to evoke an emotional response — a car crash, or a wounded person. Once the subjects had learned to associate the image pairs, they were shown the faces alone, and either told to think of the associated picture or to try not to think about it. The subjects’ brains were less active when they deliberately tried not to think of the associated picture, the team found.

More here.

Benedict J. Fernandez on the photographs of Jeff Brouws, in Almanac Magazine:

“Meant to be seen as one.” These were the words expressed to Almanac Magazine by photographer Jeff Brouws. Freshly Painted Houses, part of Brouws’ American Typologies, is a series of images which, although taken separately, have been joined together in a grid as one singular piece. Raised in Daily City, California, Brouws returned to his home town later in life to find that the Henry Doelger post World War II stock houses had been boldly painted over by the recent Asian immigrants in an effort to express a newfound individuality.

More here.

A poem by Billy Collins:

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles

It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.
Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

“Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune
on a Cloudy Afternoon” is one of Sun Tung Po’s.
“Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea”
is another one, or just
“On a Boat, Awake at Night.”

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with
“In a Boat on a Summer Evening
I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.
It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying
My Woman Is Cruel–Moved, I Wrote This Poem.”

There is no iron turnstile to push against here
as with headings like “Vortex on a String,”
“The Horn of Neurosis,” or whatever.
No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, “I Walk Out on a Summer Morning
to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall”
is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

…continue reading here.  [Thanks to Jim Culleny.]

Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber picks up on Cosma Shalizi’s recent post on privatized military, security and intelligence services and raises some issues worth considering, quoting Cosma:

If the last sixty years of the military-industrial complex is anything to go by, the rapidly-growing espionage-industrial complex of spooks and contractors will be very hard indeed to uproot. Wasting money on jets and battle-ships for never-going-to-happen wars is one thing, and might even be excused as Keynesianism-that-dare-not-speak-its-name, but making money out of classifying peaceful political opponents of the current administration as enemies of the state seems, not put too fine a point on it, like a danger to the republic.

Henry continues:

Getting the government to contract out chunks of its security apparatus to private actors may sound fine and dandy in principle, but it may not be a good idea for civil liberties or for restraining the state from getting involved in unpopular wars. It can make the state more powerful in democratic countries, not less. Lines of responsibility get blurry, allowing the state (bluntly put) to get away with a lot of shit that it couldn’t get away with if it had to do so directly.

In al-Ahram, Joseph Massad on Palestinian democracy:

Let us start with some historical precedents to the situation of today. The first time a legitimate Palestinian government was established in Gaza and prevented from extending its authority over other parts of Palestine was in September 1948. It was King Abdullah I of Jordan who at the time opposed the All-Palestine Government (APG) ( Hukumat ‘Umum Filastin ), which interfered with his plan to annex Central Palestine to his kingdom. Indeed, the APG was recognised by the Arab League (who was less shamelessly subservient to imperial agendas at the time than it is today) as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the legitimate heir to the Arab Higher Committee. Repressive measures were undertaken by Jordan’s king to purge the West Bank of all supporters of the APG and many inducements were offered to those willing to support his bid for annexation, dubbed “unification”. Once Abdullah annexed the territory “legally and administratively”, the “international community”, i.e. the United Kingdom and Israel, recognised his expanded kingdom (minus East Jerusalem) while the Arab League continued to oppose it, at the prodding of the APG. The APG would soon disappear from legal and popular memory, with Gaza subjected to complete and total Egyptian administration. Central Palestine was renamed the West Bank and declared as part of Jordan as a step on the way to Arab unity and in support of the Palestinians. Opposition to the annexation was portrayed by the king as opposition to Arab unity and Palestinian liberation. This is precisely what the Fatah putschists and their president are hoping to achieve in the West Bank today, except that the unity they are seeking is an ideological one between the Fatah putschists and their American and Israeli and Arab sponsors.

In openDemocracy, Robert Wade on the World Bank’s long-term problems:

The new president, Robert Zoellick, is a good choice – if the choice had to be restricted to someone in the Bush circle.

Apart from the day-to-day challenges, the biggest challenge for the new team is to find a way out of the bank’s crisis of relevance. Its market has changed fundamentally in the past decade, but the bank continues to operate in much the same way and with much the same products as a decade ago and more. The challenge to reposition itself is almost as big as that faced by the March of Dimes when a cure for polio was found.

The change in the bank’s market was dramatically symbolised in May 2007 when the African Development Bank held its annual meeting not in Africa but in Shanghai – an event which will be looked back on as a milestone in the history of the early decades of the 21st century.

In its traditional products – aid projects and economic policy advice to governments of developing countries – the bank faces an array of new competitors. These include China and Korea, which have become big sources of financial assistance to poorer countries; private consulting firms; private investment banks; and private foundations, like the Bill & Melissa Gates Foundation. But the bank retains a sizeable competitive advantage over these other entities based on three elements: its governmental guarantees, its own revenue base, and its global reach.