Possibly as an act of vengeance, a history professor–compiling, verbatim, several decades' worth of freshman papers–offers some of his students’ more striking insights into European history from the Middle Ages to the present.

Anders Hendriksson in the Wilson Quarterly:

History, as we know, is always bias, because human beings have to be studied by other human beings, not by independent observers of another species.

During the Middle Ages, everybody was middle aged. Church and state were co-operatic. Middle Evil society was made up of monks, lords, and surfs. It is unfortunate that we do not have a medivel European laid out on a table before us, ready for dissection. After a revival of infantile commerce slowly creeped into Europe, merchants appeared. Some were sitters and some were drifters. They roamed from town to town exposing themselves and organized big fairies in the countryside. Mideval people were violent. Murder during this period was nothing. Everybody killed someone. England fought numerously for land in France and ended up wining and losing. The Crusades were a series of military expaditions made by Christians seeking to free the holy land (the “Home Town” of Christ) from the Islams.

In the 1400 hundreds most Englishmen were perpendicular. A class of yeowls arose. Finally, Europe caught the Black Death. The bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras. It was spread from port to port by inflected rats. Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. The plague also helped the emergance of the English language as the national language of England, France and Italy.

More here.

The Goths

I love them. They bring a little antilife and uncolour
to the Corn Exchange on city centre shopping days,
as if they had all just crawled out of that Ringu well,
so many Sadakos in monochrome horror, dripping
silver jewellery down flea-market undead fashions.
They are the black that is always the new black;
their perfume lingers, freshly-turned-grave sweet.
Black sheep, they pilgrimage twice a year to Whitby
through our landscape of dissolved monastery and pit,
which they will toast in cider’n’blackcurrant, vegan blood.
They danse macabre at gigs like the Dracula Spectacula.
Next day, lovebitten and wincing in the light, they take
photographs of each other, hoping they won't develop.

by Ian Duhig

from: Jericho Shanty
Publisher: Picador, London, 2009

From The Guardian:

In 1969, Philip Roth's most famous character, the sex-obsessed Alexander Portnoy confessed to his analyst: “What I'm saying, Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds – as though through fucking I will discover America.” That was 40 years ago, but the reverberations are still being felt. Portnoy's Complaint, which the New Yorker greeted as “one of the dirtiest books ever published”, helped Roth shake off any lingering respectability he had earned from his early novels. “Enough being a nice Jewish boy, publicly pleasing my parents while privately pulling my putz!” cried Portnoy from his analyst's couch. As he did so, Roth was denounced by leading Jewish figures, while critics went wild and the novel became an instant bestseller. The respectable boy from Newark, New Jersey had embarked on his lifelong work refining what has been called his art of immaturity.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Throughout his life, Charles Darwin surrounded himself with flowers. When he was 10, he wrote down each time a peony bloomed in his father’s garden. When he bought a house to raise his own family, he turned the grounds into a botanical field station where he experimented on flowers until his death. But despite his intimate familiarity with flowers, Darwin once wrote that their evolution was “an abominable mystery.”

Darwin could see for himself how successful flowering plants had become. They make up the majority of living plant species, and they dominate many of the world’s ecosystems, from rain forests to grasslands. They also dominate our farms. Out of flowers come most of the calories humans consume, in the form of foods like corn, rice and wheat. Flowers are also impressive in their sheer diversity of forms and colors, from lush, full-bodied roses to spiderlike orchids to calla lilies shaped like urns.

More here.

Our own Kris Kotarski in the Calgary Herald:

It is increasingly apparent that modern copyright law is utterly and completely incompatible with the right to privacy. This is at the core of the Pirate movement in Europe which broke through to elect its first members of the European Parliament this summer, and the Pirate Party of Canada, which is collecting signatures on its website to register as an official political party as we speak.

While the name may sound a little humorous, the cause is very serious indeed. Whether you spend a lot of time online or not, the Pirate movement aims to keep the bounds of your and your children's relationship with their government in a reasonable place, and to make certain that the balance between citizen rights and the bottom line does not tilt in the wrong direction.

What has changed? Before home computers, compact discs and Internet file sharing, it was conceivable for copyright laws to be enforced in a manner that did not bring the state to any-one's doorstep. If there was an illegal copy of a book in a bookshop, one could report it to the authorities. If someone brought a video camera into a theatre or a concert, they could be readily seen.

Given today's technological realities, this is no longer the case.

More here.

Ahmad Saidullah in The Quarterly Conversation:

If the old-fashioned Anglo-American gumshoe mystery typifies the supremacy of reason and detection with an entrenched belief in the rationality of society, its laws, justice, and morals, the Italian noir novel is without any such optimism. It thwarts the deductions and logical propulsions that lead to neat endings. Italian noir exemplifies the Foucauldian instrumentality of reason in the “mansion of power,” to use Pier Paolo Pasolini’s phrase, with conspiracies, compromises, cover-ups, and unsolved crimes resulting.

Not surprisingly, noir’s popularity soared during the polarizing and corrupt rule of the Christian Democrats, led by Giulio Andreotti, when the mafia and over two hundred urban terrorist outfits confronted the violence of the state. Under Berlusconi, new themes have emerged. Open xenophobia, cultural racism, machismo, the derogation of labor and human rights, and the usurpation of press freedoms have divided Italy. This has given rise to intellectual and creative ferment, evident from the new wave of noir stories.

This engagement of writing with social realities is what separates Italian noir from, say, the mystery pieces that have emerged from peaceful, happy, uncorrupt, and relatively homicide-free Scandinavia.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our philosophy prize (details here) is over. A total of 565 votes were cast for the 64 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller, a South Tyrolean graphic artist, has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own blogs. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Der Wille Zur Macht und Sprachspiele: Nietzsche's Causal Essentialism
2. The Space of Reasons: A Counterexample to Setiya
3. Perverse Egalitarianism: Early Heidegger: Fundamental Ontology
4. Edge of the American West: All noble things are as difficult as they are rare
5. Larval Subjects: Object-Oriented Ontology and Scientific Naturalism
6. Specter of Reason: Wise on Intelligent Design in the Classroom
7. Another Heidegger Blog: Interview with Jeffery Malpas
8. The Immanent Frame: Immanent Spirituality
9. Blog & ~Blog: Graham Priest's Theory of Change
10. 3 Quarks Daily: The Temporal Prospects of Humanity
11. Larval Subjects: Speculative Realism and the Unheimlich
12. Cognition & Culture: Descarte's Skull
13. 3 Quarks Daily: Penne For Your Thought
14. Underverse: Refuting “It,” Thus
15. The Garden of Forking Paths: Defining Determinism and Such
16. Tomkow: Blackburn, Truth and other Hot Topics
17. Brain Hammer: Bandwidth and Storage in the Human Biocomputer
18. PEA Soup: Scanlon on Moral Responsibility and Blame
19. Philosophy, et cetera: Reflecting on Relativism
20. Strange Doctrines: Third-World Zombies and (Ana) Qualiac Reference

The daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Professor Dan Dennett on September 11. We will also post the list of finalists here on that date.

Good luck!

Abbas

Hello,

The period for nominating entrees for the 3QD Philosophy prize is over.

To see a full list of the nominees, go here.

To vote, go here.

To see details of the prize, go here.

Good luck to all! The voting round closes today at 11:59 pm EDT.

Tauba Auerbach. Static V. 2008.

More here and here.

Sean Carroll on Paul Krugman's NYT Magazine piece:

One of the reasons it’s a great essay is that it’s a wonderful example of popularizing science. You can debate all you like about whether economics counts as a science, but there’s little doubt that Krugman does an amazing job at explaining esoteric ideas in non-technical language, and is so smooth about it that you hardly realize difficult ideas are even being discussed. I wish I could write like that.

One part of the essay worth commenting on, or at least musing about, is the punchline. Krugman thinks that a major factor leading to the failures of economics to understand the mess we’re currently in was the temptation to think that beautiful models must be right…

Without knowing much of anything about the relevant issues, I nevertheless suspect that this moral might be a bit too pat. Sure, people can fall in love with beautiful theories, to the extent that they overestimate their relationship to reality. But it seems likely to me that the correct way of understanding all this, once it’s properly understood, will look pretty beautiful as well. General relativity is widely held up as an example of a beautiful theory — and it is, when understood in its own language. But if you put the prediction of GR in the Solar System into the language of pre-existing Newtonian physics (which you could certainly do), it would look ugly and ad hoc. Likewise, Newton’s theory itself is quite elegant, when phrased in the language of potentials on a fixed spacetime background; but if you express the theory in terms of differential geometry (which you could certainly do), it looks like a mess. Sometimes the beauty/ugly distinction between theoretical conceptions is more a matter of how well we understand them, and less about their intrinsic qualities.

Paul Krugman on Sean's point:

[O]n an interesting point raised by Discover (via Mark Thoma): won’t we eventually have a true theory that’s as beautiful as the full neoclassical version? Well, one thing’s for sure: we don’t have that beautiful final theory now, so the current choice is between ideas that are beautiful but wrong and a much messier hodgepodge. But my guess is that even in the long run it won’t be all that neat. Discover suggests general relativityversus Newtonian physics; but a better model may be meteorology, which as I understand it starts from some simple basic principles but is fiendishly complex in practice.

Actually, let me put it this way: the economy is a complex system of interacting individuals — and these individuals themselves are complex systems. Neoclassical economics radically oversimplifies both the individuals and the system — and gets a lot of mileage by doing that; I, for one, am not going to banish maximization-and-equilibrium from my toolbox. But the temptation is always to keep on applying these extreme simplifications, even where the evidence clearly shows that they’re wrong. What economists have to do is learn to resist that temptation. But doing so will, inevitably, lead to a much messier, less pretty view.

Michael Slezak in the Guardian:

Imagine if a cold cup of coffee spontaneously heated up as you watched. Or a cracked pane of glass suddenly un-broke. According to physicist Lorenzo Maccone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you see things like this all the time – you just don’t remember.

In a paper published last week in Physical Review Letters, he attempts to provide a solution to what has been called the mystery of “the arrow-of-time”.

Briefly, the problem is that while our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant” – they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards – most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not. They never seem to happen in reverse.

We have a statistical law that describes these everyday phenomena called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law tells us that the “entropy” or degree of disorder of a closed system never decreases. Roughly speaking, a process in which entropy increases is one where the system becomes increasingly disordered. Windows break, thereby increasing disorder, but they will not spontaneously unbreak. Gases will disperse but not spontaneously compress.

However, entropy describes what happens with large numbers of particles. We presume that it must arise from what happens with individual particles, but all the laws that govern the behaviour of individual particles are time-reversal invariant. This means that any process they allow in one direction of time, they also allow in the other.

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?

Maccone’s solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time – so there is no asymmetry and no associated mystery about the arrow of time.

He argues that quantum mechanics dictates that if anyone does observe an entropy-decreasing event, their memories of the event “will have been erased by necessity”.

A roundtable discussion with Miranda Alison, Debra Bergoffen, Pasquale Bos, Louise du Toit, Regina Mühlhäuser and Gaby Zipfel in Eurozine:

Louise du Toit: War is a boys’ game. War and the figure of the warrior are closely entwined with hegemonic and hetero-normative masculinities. In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry makes us intensely aware of the extent to which traditional and modern warfare take place on a symbolic plane – the extent to which they are imaginary constructs.[1] The identity of the warrior, soldier or freedom fighter is closely tied up with the image of the hero, who challenges and risks, but also wields death for some supposed greater good. The Italian feminist Adriana Cavarero sees the heroic risking of personal death as a cornerstone of idealized masculinity in the West.

In material terms, of course, armed conflicts are often about the expansion of male-owned power-bases, including access to land, minerals, and other resources such as oil. To my mind, therefore, the very notion of “war” needs to be interrogated before one looks at the set of questions at hand. For gangs of youngsters on the Cape Flats, or gangs of criminals in Johannesburg, one could say that, irrespective of the official status of the country as a whole, their lives are characterized by perpetual warfare, and indeed that is the language they themselves employ. The metaphor of war dominates their lives and so crowds out other possibilities for them. South Africa as a nation-state need not be at war with any other state for these young men to inhabit, on a permanent basis, a parallel universe that constitutes a war zone. Built into the rhetoric of war is the notion or value of survival, which legitimizes conduct that would not be permissible otherwise. In other words, war per definition entails an exceptional situation or period that calls for exceptional sacrifices and exceptional conduct.

Eric Hobsbawm reviews Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars in the LRB:

There is a major difference between the traditional scholar’s questions about the past – ‘What happened in history, when and why?’ – and the question that has, in the last 40 years or so, come to inspire a growing body of historical research: namely, ‘How do or did people feel about it?’ The first oral history societies were founded in the late 1960s. Since then the number of institutions and works devoted to ‘heritage’ and historical memory – notably about the great 20th-century wars – has grown explosively. Studies of historical memory are essentially not about the past, but about the retrospect to it of some subsequent present. Richard Overy’s The Morbid Age demonstrates another, and less indirect, approach to the emotional texture of the past: the difficult excavation of contemporary popular reactions to what was happening in and around people’s lives – one might call it the mood music of history.

Though this type of research is fascinating, especially when done with Overy’s inquisitiveness and surprised erudition, it presents the historian with considerable problems. What does it mean to describe an emotion as characteristic of a country or era; what is the significance of a socially widespread emotion, even one plainly related to dramatic historical events? How and how far do we measure its prevalence? Polling, the current mechanism for such measurement, was not available before c.1938. In any case, such emotions – the extremely widespread dislike of Jews in the West, for instance – were obviously not felt or acted on in the same way by, say, Adolf Hitler and Virginia Woolf. Emotions in history are neither chronologically stable nor socially homogeneous, even in the moments when they are universally felt, as in London under the German air-raids, and their intellectual representations even less so. How can they be compared or contrasted? In short, what are historians to make of the new field?

The specific mood Overy looks into is the sense of crisis and fear, ‘a presentiment of impending disaster’, the prospect of the end of civilisation, that, in his view, characterised Britain between the wars. There is nothing specifically British or 20th-century about such a mood.

Nicholas Shakespeare in The Telegraph:

In 1954, shortly after his 80th birthday, William Somerset Maugham was shown the in-house abattoir of a Swiss clinic in Vevey and then injected with the minced foetus of a freshly slaughtered sheep by means of a large horse-syringe into his buttocks. Other patients who had sought to recapture their youth in this manner were: Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, Thomas Mann and Pope Pius XII.

Later, apparently revitalised by his treatment, the most widely read English writer since Dickens was observed by an elderly lady on Vevey railway station trying to play hide-and-seek with Alan Searle, the last of his secretary-companions. “Yoo-hoo,” Maugham called from behind a pillar. When the red-faced Searle reprimanded him, the woman was quick to scold: “You should be gentle with that nice old man. He thinks he’s Somerset Maugham.”

More here.