The Second Fortune
Between what is and what is not
we walked, the Huntress loosed a shot.
Before and after, we were there –
the arrow pierced but singing air.
That, my love, was quite an art,
to be together and apart
yet we, transparent, without fear –
what were we but singing air?
by Theo Dorgan
from: What This Earth Cost Us; Dedalus Books,
Dublin, 2008
From Salon:
I confess the idea of babies carrying on philosophical investigations never crossed my mind until I met Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Gopnik, a cognitive scientist with cross-training in philosophy and common sense, has spent her career carefully and cleverly teasing out the previously unsuspected complexity of a baby's thoughts. In her new book, “The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life,”
Gopnik incisively and compassionately highlights the extraordinary range of mental capabilities of even the youngest child.
What makes Gopnik's book stand out from the myriad recent books on consciousness is her overarching insight into the sophisticated ways that even infants think and scheme. Citing her work and that of colleagues, Gopnik makes a convincing case that, from a very early age, even before the acquisition of language, we are actively engaged in assessing everything from statistics (probabilities) to right vs. wrong in a moral sphere. Recently I sat down with Gopnick for a conversation about how each of us began our thinking, and how kids might presently be looking at the world.
More here.
From Orion Magazine:
WHEN I WAS FIVE and my sister was two, my father started to lose his balance. He stumbled down the sidewalk, tripped up the stairs. Clumsiness became extreme. Newspapers were reporting that children who had radiation to reduce their tonsils were developing thyroid cancer as adults. He went in for a thyroid examination, only to have the doctor note his swaying and order a CT scan of his head instead. It showed a tumor on his brain stem. Surgery removed the growth but left him deaf in one ear, a better outcome than expected. Then my mother reminded him to go back for the thyroid test, and he ended up having an operation for thyroid cancer. By the time he healed from that, I was seven.
During his recovery, he read me The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White—the story of Louis, a trumpeter swan born mute, unable to make the honking cry that marks his species. As a fluffy gray cygnet in Canada, Louis doesn’t mind, but when he migrates to the Red Rock Lakes in Montana, he finds he is unable to woo a mate. In a dramatic scene of broken glass and a fainting salesgirl, his father steals a trumpet from a music store in Billings to give his son a voice. Anxious to pay off the debt, Louis gets a series of gigs playing trumpet at a camp in Ontario, leading the Swan Boat in the Boston Public Garden, and performing jazz in a Philadelphia night club.
More here.
Experiments show that a sagebrush plant can recognise a genetically identical cutting growing nearby.
What’s more, the two clones communicate and cooperate with one another, to avoid being eaten by herbivores.
The findings, published in Ecology Letters, raise the tantalising possibility that plants, just like animals, often prefer to help their relatives over unrelated individuals. The ability to distinguish self from non-self is a vital one in nature.
It allows many animals to act preferentially towards others that are genetically related to themselves; for example, a female lion raising her young, or protecting other more distantly related cubs in her pride.
But the evidence that plants can do the same is limited and controversial.
Some experiments have shown that if a plant’s roots grow near to those of another unrelated plant, the two will try to compete for nutrients and water. But if a root grows close to another from the same parent plant, the two do not try to compete with one another.
However, in these experiments, when two cuttings of the same plant are then grown alongside each other, their roots still compete for resources. That implies that two separate plants cannot recognise that they are genetic kin.
[H/t: Dan Nexon]
Much of the existing Sri Lankan media has also been incensed by the international criticism over the government’s handling of the military offensive, with editorials accusing the West of kowtowing to LTTE supporters. The United States has especially been singled out for its perceived double standard for carrying out its war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but chastising the Sri Lankan government as it teeters on the brink of eradicating its own terrorist menace, the LTTE—a group labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and Canada.
But the dearth of dissenting views in the Sri Lankan media is more due to fear of reprisal from the state than a sense of patriotic zeal. The government does not tolerate dissent from journalists and media outlets that criticize its operation against the LTTE—and those who do are ruthlessly suppressed.
My uncle, a doctor, lamented to me of a lost friendship with a well-known Sunday Times defense columnist. He had received a phone call from the columnist’s wife, saying that he could no longer maintain contact with him because he was being followed and feared that further contact would endanger my uncle. According to a January 2009 Amnesty International report, at least fourteen media workers have been unlawfully killed since the beginning of 2006 and more than 20 journalists have fled the country because of threats. One of the most widely reported incidents was the murder of Lasantha Wikrematunga, editor of the English-language Sunday Leader, who was shot by unknown gunmen in Colombo. In an editorial written by Wikrematunga and published posthumously, he accused the government for his death.*
The Sri Lankan government, meanwhile, has framed the military offensive as a massive humanitarian mission, dubbing it the “the world’s largest hostage rescue operation.”
Reading Moby Dick –at 30,0000 Feet
At this height, Kansas
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn
……………..
no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor's travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey
……………..
I would estimate the distance
between myself and my own feelings
is roughly the same as the mileage
……………..
from Seattle to New York,
so I can lean back into the upholstered interval
between Muzak and lunch,
……………..
a little bored, a little old and strange.
I remember, as a dreamy
backyard kind of kid,
……………..
tilting up my head to watch
those planes engrave the sky
in lines so steady and so straight
……………..
they implied the enormous concentration
of good men,
but now my eyes flicker
……………..
from the in-flight movie
to the stewardess's pantyline,
then back into my book,
……………..
where men throw harpoons at something
much bigger and probably
better than themselves,
……………..
wanting to kill it,
wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt
to prove that they exist.
……………..
Imagine being born and growing up,
rushing through the world for sixty years
at unimaginable speeds.
……………..
Imagine a century like a room so large,
a corridor so long
you could travel for a lifetime
and never find the door,
……………..
until you had forgotten
that such a thing as doors exist.
Better to be on board the Pequod,
……………..
with a mad one-legged captain
living for revenge.
Better to feel the salt wind
……………..
spitting in your face,
to hold your sharpened weapon high,
to see the glisten
……………..
of the beast beneath the waves.
What a relief it would be
to hear someone in the crew
……………..
cry out like a gull,
Oh Captain, Captain!
Where are we going now?
by Tony Hoagland
From The Telegraph:
Neville Cardus was one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the 20th century. Born in Manchester in 1888 and raised in genteel poverty by his mother and aunt, who belonged to the oldest profession, he had achieved an international reputation as a writer on music and cricket by the time he died, a knight of the realm, in February 1975.
His autobiography, published in 1947, is one of the outstanding memoirs of English letters, and should perhaps be included on school reading lists, to remind the modern generation of how much we have lost. For this “uneducated boy in an illiterate home”, as Cardus called himself, enjoyed a life so rich that it seems sinful not to pass on its fruits. Christopher Brookes wrote a fine biography, His Own Man, in 1986. Now comes this book by Robin Daniels, which is ostensibly a memoir, but which really attempts to place Cardus in a critical context. It is all here: the familiar tale of the self-taught adolescent, who immersed himself in books and music, absorbed Walter Pater and Bernard Shaw, and did all sorts of jobs before he found a university at the old Manchester Guardian, whose high-minded editor, C P Scott, said of the paper’s readers: “Let them educate themselves up to us.”
More here.
From Scientific American:
In 1998 Judith Rich Harris, an independent researcher and textbook author, published The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. The book provocatively argued that parents matter much less—at least when it comes to determining the behavior of their children—than is typically assumed. Instead Harris argued that a child’s peer group is far more critical. The Nurture Assumption has recently been reissued in an expanded and revised form (Free Press, 2009). Scientific American Mind contributing editor Jonah Lehrer chatted with Harris about her critics, the evolution of her ideas and why teachers can be more important than parents.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND: Freud famously blamed the problems of the child on the parents. (He was especially hard on mothers.) In The Nurture Assumption, an influential work that was published 10 years ago, you argued that parents are mostly innocent and that peers play a much more influential role. What led you to write the book?
JUDITH RICH HARRIS: It wasn’t just Freud! Psychologists of all persuasions, even behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner, thought the parents were responsible, one way or the other, for whatever went wrong with a child. One of my purposes in writing the book was to reassure parents. I wanted them to know that parenting didn’t have to be such a difficult, anxiety-producing job, that there are many different ways to rear a child, and that no convincing evidence existed that one way produces better results than another.
But my primary motive was scientific. During the years I spent writing child development textbooks for college students, I never questioned the belief that parents have a good deal of power to shape the personalities of their children. (This is the belief I now call the “nurture assumption.”) When I finally began to have doubts and looked more closely at the evidence, I was appalled. Most of the research is so deeply flawed that it is meaningless. And studies using more rigorous methods produce results that do not support the assumption.
More here.
Each American presidential election eventually turns into a story. In 1960 Nixon stumbled in the debates and lost to a more vigorous Kennedy; in 1988 Dukakis was self-defeatingly passive in response to an aggressive Republican campaign; in 1992 Bush lost core supporters when reneging on his “read my lips” pledge came back to haunt him. These stories about the meaning of the election begin to coalesce during the campaign. Once the votes are counted, the stories solidify into conventional wisdom and supply convenient ways to judge what the election was about, why it came out the way it did, and what the result suggests about the future. Because these stories become part of the public understanding, they have real political importance. And because they are so important, there is strong pressure to provide explanations as soon as the election is over; people debate the future by arguing about what just happened.
Political scientists often complain about these quick and simple accounts. While piles of data are available—tracking polls, exit polls, election results themselves—commentators often fixate on a single piece of data and exaggerate its significance in order to produce a crisp and usable story. In 2004 a poorly worded exit-poll question (mixed with some editorial-page hyperventilation) made “values voters” the key to Bush’s reelection. Subsequent research failed to confirm this (see Stephen Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart III, “Truth in Numbers,” Boston Review, February/March 2005). Similarly, commentators often seize upon a “key moment” or a turning point in a campaign: Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad is frequently cited in accounts of the 1964 election, even though Johnson’s lead over Goldwater did not change at all after the advertisement aired.
The 2008 campaign was, in this regard, little different from its predecessors. Like them, it produced a variety of narratives, some of which rapidly morphed into the stories that now circulate about the outcome. But a broad survey of available evidence tells a different tale, one that is also more equivocal than popular discourse currently allows.
After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.
David Goldhill in The Atlantic:
Almost two years ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.
More here.
Ben Fritz in the Los Angeles Times:
The adult entertainment business, centered in the San Fernando Valley, has weathered several recessions since it took off with the advent of home video in the 1980s. But this time the industry is not dealing with just a weakened economy. A growing abundance of free content on the Internet is undercutting consumers' willingness to pay for porn, and with it the ability of many workers to earn a living in the business.
For Stern, 23, the rapid decline of job opportunities in the porn business over the last year has been dramatic. She has gone from working four or five days a week to one and now has employers pressuring her to do male-female sex scenes for $700, a 30% discount from the $1,000 fee that used to be the industry standard.
Less than two years ago, Stern earned close to $150,000 annually, sometimes turned down work and drove a Mercedes-Benz CLK 350. Now she's aggressively reaching out for jobs and making closer to $50,000 a year.
As for that Mercedes? She's replacing it with a used Chevy Trailblazer — from her parents.
Richard Conniff in the New York Times:
Not long ago, I got stung by a yellow jacket, and after the usual ow-plus-obscenities moment, I found myself thinking about pain, happiness, and Justin O. Schmidt. He’s an Arizona entomologist and co-author of the standard text in the insect sting field, “Insect Defenses: Adaptive Mechanisms and Strategies of Prey and Predators.” But he’s more widely celebrated as the creator of the “Justin O. Schmidt Sting Pain Index,” a connoisseur’s guide to just how bad the ouch is, on a scale of one (“a tiny spark”) to four (“absolutely debilitating”).
Among connoisseurs of insect stings, it’s the equivalent of Robert Parker’s wine ratings. Schmidt has been stung by about 150 different species on six continents and seems to have opinions about all of them. In faux-Parker mode, he once described a bald-faced hornet sting as “Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.” Other researchers tend to regard his work with fascination. But hardly anyone tries to replicate his results.
More here.
“The human brain has been terra incognita for as long as we’ve known it,” says Olaf Sporns, a professor of neuroscience at Indiana University. In 2005, Sporns co-authored a paper attributing the large-scale shortcomings of comprehensive neuroscience research to a lack of a foundational, anatomical description of the brain: In order to properly navigate this “unknown land,” he said, we must first draw a map. Sporns proposed calling this map the “connectome.” As a thorough atlas of the connections in the brain, the name deliberately conjures associations with the enormously successful human genome map that had been sequenced two years prior. Now, four years after Sporns’ initial paper, the National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research is launching the $30 million Human Connectome Project (HCP) in hopes of creating a comprehensive map of a healthy adult brain by 2015.
more from Azeen Ghorayshi at Seed here.
Why turn to the Enlightenment? There is no better option. Rejections of the Enlightenment result in premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion; where Enlightenment is at issue, modernity is at stake. A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you are committed to understanding the world in order to improve it. Twenty-first century Enlightenment must extend the work of the 18th by pointing out new dangers to freedom of thought within our own culture as well as without it, and extend social justice by expanding older attacks on injustice. These are crucial commitments, but they are also formal ones, like the tolerance and scepticism often cited as crucial to the Enlightenment core. Scepticism and tolerance will not take us very far; while it’s possible they may prevent harm, it’s unlikely that they can inspire anyone to do good. Reclaiming the Enlightenment must entail reexamining other values that derive from it, and these must include at least four. One of them is the idea that human beings have equal rights to happiness on earth. Earlier ages viewed disease as a sign of divine disfavour, or poverty a condition to be remedied in heaven; only Enlightenment thinking allowed us to view them as things human beings might overcome. A second Enlightenment value is the commitment to reason – not as opposed to passion, which was as riotous during the 18th century as at any other period, but as opposed to blind authority and superstition.
more from Susan Neiman at the New Humanist here.
A growing body of experimental evidence suggests that, on the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. This lack of knowledge extends far beyond embarrassing game-show fodder – we’re often completely wrong about their likes and dislikes, their political beliefs, their tastes, their cherished values. We lowball the ethics of our co-workers; we overestimate how happy our husbands or wives are. “Our friends will surprise us much more than we would imagine,” says David Dunning, a psychology professor at Cornell University who has done influential research on how we perceive ourselves and others. Although such blind spots might at first seem like a comment on the atomization of modern life, the shallowness of human connection in the age of bowling alone, psychologists say that these gaps might simply be an unavoidable product of the way human beings forge personal bonds. Even in close relationships, there are holes in what we know about each other, and we fill them with our own assumptions.
more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.
Jacob Gershman in New York Magazine:
Back in April, when the debate over torture was roaring, Jon Stewart invited Cliff May, a national-security hawk and former spokesman for the Republican Party, to come on The Daily Show and defend waterboarding. May was hesitant. He thought Stewart would paint him as a crazy extremist. The audience would jeer. It would be a disaster. “I was apprehensive about going on, even though I've been on TV for a dozen years,” says May. “A lot of my friends told me: 'Don't do it. You're meat going into the sausage factory.'”
But May had a change of heart after soliciting advice from his friend Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. “Kristol told me: 'You'll be pleasantly surprised. He doesn't take cheap shots. Jon is smart. You'll do just fine.'” Kristol proved to be right. Stewart's interview of May — a crackling, lengthy debate about where to draw the line between freedom and security — produced one of the most clarifying discussions about torture on television. “Literally, this is the best conversation I've had on this subject anywhere,” May told Stewart.
“There is genuine intellectual curiosity,” May told New York. “He's a staunch liberal, but he's a thoughtful liberal, and I respect that.” May isn't the only conservative gushing about Stewart.
More here.
Raja Shehadeh in The Guardian:
For the last 12 years of his life, Mahmoud Darwish was my neighbour. He was a shy, private man who was rarely ever seen in public events unless he was reading his poetry. I served with him on the board of the literary magazine, Karmil, which he edited. Except for these work meetings, I rarely saw Darwish. Sometimes I would come across him taking a walk around the hills of Ramallah; sometimes at the house of mutual friends, but never in public places, restaurants or cafes. The opportunity to find out more about my neighbour came when we were both under curfew during the invasion of Ramallah by the Israeli army in 2002. It was then that I got a call from the aptly named Bomb magazine in the US to conduct an interview with Darwish. I readily accepted hoping that through an intimate one-to-one discussion I would get to know my famous neighbour better.
We just had a few hours in the morning when the Israeli army lifted the curfew to allow people to shop. I asked Mahmoud to come to my house for the interview and he agreed. As always, he was immaculately dressed but, like all of us, he looked tense and concerned that we finish on time so that he could make it back to his house. We ended up spending three hours together, where I was able to find out how he was managing to write under these conditions. He described to me his poem State of Siege, which he wrote in response to the Israeli invasion. It was “a poet's journal that deals with resisting the occupation through searching for beauty in poetics and beauty in nature. It was a way of resisting military violence through poetry. The victory of the permanent, the everlasting, the eternal, over the siege and the violence.” Hearing him speak, I realised how fortunate I was to have found a kindred soul who was struggling with the same difficult issues I was having in my attempts to write about the invasion.
He was adamant that Palestinians “cannot be defined by our relationship, positive or negative, to Israel. We have our own identity.” In his diaries, A River Dies of Thirst, just out from Saqi, under the entry entitled “If We Want” Darwish writes: “We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying, 'Our country is loftier and more beautiful.'”
More here.
From The New York Times:
One spring when I was a graduate student, I would go each Monday down into the bowels of the entomology building. There I would meet Prof. Jack Franclemont, an elderly gentleman always with little dog in tow, to be tutored in the ordering and naming of life — the science of taxonomy.
Professor Franclemont, a famed moth specialist, was perfectly old school, wearing coat and tie to give the day’s lecture even though I was the only member of the audience. Quaintly distracted, he never quite got my name right, sometimes calling me Miss Loon or Miss Voon. After the talk, I would identify moths using a guide written in 1923, in silence or listening to stories of his dog’s latest antics. I enjoyed the meditative pleasure of those hours, despite the fact that as the lone (and not terribly proficient) student of an aging teacher, I could not help feeling that taxonomy might be dying, which, in fact, it is.
Despite the field’s now blatant modernity, with practitioners using DNA sequences, sophisticated evolutionary theory and supercomputers to order and name all of life, jobs for taxonomists continue to be in steady decline. The natural history collections crucial to the work are closeted or tossed.
More here.
