From Scientific American:

We smile because we are happy, and we frown because we are sad. But does the causal arrow point in the other direction, too? A spate of recent studies of botox recipients and others suggests that our emotions are reinforced—perhaps even driven—by their corresponding facial expressions. Charles Darwin first posed the idea that emotional responses influence our feelings in 1872. “The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensi­fies it,” he wrote. The esteemed 19th-cen­tury psychologist William James went so far as to assert that if a person does not express an emotion, he has not felt it at all. Although few scientists would agree with such a statement today, there is evidence that emotions in­volve more than just the brain. The face, in particular, appears to play a big role.

This February psychologists at the University of Cardiff in Wales found that people whose ability to frown is comp­romised by cosmetic botox inject­ions are happier, on average, than people who can frown.

More here.

Lorrie Moore in the New York Review of Books:

Before beginning this review, I took a quick unscientific survey: Who had read the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector? When I consulted with Latin American scholars (well, only four of them) they grew breathless in their praise. She was a goddess; she was Brazilian literature's greatest writer. Further inquiry revealed some misunderstandings about her life, a life that clearly had reached mythic proportions, with a myth's errors and idiosyncratic details. Still, Lispector was held in reverent esteem by all four, though one believed she had died tragically in a fire (not so, although in her forties Lispector was burned on one side of her body, including her right hand, by a fire she accidentally started by smoking a cigarette in bed). Others were under the impression that she was a lifelong lesbian (also not so).

On the other hand, when I asked American and British writers (nine) whether they had read Lispector's work, I could find very few who had even heard of her. Some had heard of her—they thought—but knew nothing about her and had not read her. Some had read her novels and recalled them as “intense.” Others had read a short story or two in some anthology or other. (I myself have spent most of my life in this last, somewhat dishonorable category.) I then went to Amazon .com—is there a more coarsely ironic place to assess the public reception of a Brazilian woman writer?—where the customer reviews from Brasília and São Paulo were glowing. But the American responses were often tepid, including one that suggested giving Lispector's novel The Hour of the Star as an April Fool's gift to a person you don't like very much, telling that person it's the best book you've ever read.

More here.

Douglas Rushkoff at Edge:

We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Charles Darwin was interested not just in how new things evolve, but also in how old things disappear. Often, they don’t disappear completely without a trace. We don’t have a visible tail like our primate ancestors did, but we still have a series of little bones tucked away at the bottom of the spine. While it may not function like a full-blown tail, it still anchors muscles around the pelvis. Blind cavefish may not have eyes of the sort found on their cousins in the outside world, but they still start to develop eyes as larva, before the cells start to die away.

Sometimes, though, the only place to look for vestiges of a lost trait is in a genome.

In the journal PLOS Genetics, Mark Springer of the University of California and his colleagues have published an intriguing study of how teeth–and the genes for teeth–have faded away over the past 50 million years.

More here.

The journal Nature has just published a paper entitled “Pakistan's reform experiment” by Athar Osama, Adil Najam, Shamsh Kassim-Lakha, Syed Zulfiqar Gilani & Christopher King. Unfortunately, the paper is only available to subscribers to the journal. The editors of Nature have, however, also published an editorial in the same issue about Pakistan's education reforms:

Eight years ago, a task force advising Pakistan's former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, laid out a bold plan to revitalize the country's moribund research system: initiate a fivefold increase in public funding for universities, with a special emphasis on science, technology and engineering. The proposal was a radical departure from conventional wisdom on the economics of developing nations, which favours incremental investments. Sudden surges of cash are held to be dangerous in poorer countries, which often lack the institutions or the calibre of people required to make the most of such a windfall, and the money can easily be wasted or fall prey to corruption.

Nonetheless, Musharraf agreed to the proposal. The reforms began in 2003. And the results, which have now earned a qualified thumbs-up from a group of experts in science and education policy (see page 38), offer some valuable lessons for other developing nations.

More here. Pervez Hoodbhoy, one of Pakistan's most respected scientists, and a well-known social and political analyst and activist, has been very critical of Pakistan's Higher Education Commision in the past, and he sent me a copy of a letter that he has written to Nature about the above-mentioned paper and their editorial. I am (with Pervez's permission) publishing it below. I shall also ask Adil Najam (one of the co-authors of the paper, and a 3QD friend) to respond to Pervez's letter, and if he does so, I will publish his response as well. This is Pervez's letter:

“Pakistan's Reform Experiment” (Nature, V461, page 38, 3 September 2009)
gives the impression of providing a factual balance sheet of Pakistan's
higher education under General Pervez Musharraf's former government.
Unfortunately, several critical omissions indicate a partisan bias.

Mention of the billions wasted on mindless prestige mega-projects is
noticeably absent. Example: nine new universities were hastily conceived
and partially constructed, but abandoned and finally scrapped after it
became obvious that it was impossible to provide them with the most
crucial ingredient – trained faculty. Similarly, fantastically expensive
scientific equipment, imported with funds from the Higher Education
Commission, remain hopelessly under-utilized many years later. They litter
the country's length and breadth. For instance, my university has been
forced to house a “souped-up” Van de Graaf accelerator facility, purchased
in 2005 with HEC funds. A research purpose is still being sought in 2009.

The authors conveniently choose not to mention that the 400% claimed
increase in the number of publications was largely a consequence of giving
huge payments to professors for publishing in international journals,
irrespective of actual substance and quality. Not surprisingly these
cash-per-paper injections had the effect of producing a plagiarism
pandemic, one that is still out of control. In a country where academic
ethics are poor and about a third of all students cheat in examinations,
penalties for plagiarism by teachers and researchers are virtually
non-existent.

Citing Thomson Scientific, the authors claim a large rise in the “relative
impact” in some disciplines, based upon citation levels of papers
published between 2003 and 2007. But did the authors try to eliminate
self-citations (a deliberate ploy) from this count? If they had – as I did
using an available option in the Thomson Scientific package – they might
actually have found the opposite result.

Read more »

The City Planners

Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the house in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary streets, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

Read more »

From The Guardian:

As someone who teaches and writes about Dickens, the question of why we still read him is something that's often on my mind. But that question was never more troubling than one day, nearly 10 years ago, when I was standing as a guest speaker in front of a class of about 30 high school students. I had been speaking for about 20 minutes with an 1850 copy of David Copperfield in my hand, telling the students that for Victorian readers, Dickens's writing was very much a “tune-in-next-week” type of thing that generated trends and crazes, much as their own TV shows did for them today. Then a hand shot up in the middle of the room.

“But why should we still read this stuff?”

I was speechless because in that moment I realised that, though I had begun a PhD dissertation on Dickens, I had never pondered the question myself. The answer I gave was acceptable: “Because he teaches you how to think,” I said. But lots of writers can teach you how to think, and I knew that wasn't really the reason. The question nagged me for years, and for years I told myself answers, but never with complete satisfaction. We read Dickens not just because he was a man of his own times, but because he was a man for our times as well. We read Dickens because his perception and investigation of the human psyche is deep, precise, and illuminating, and because he tells us things about ourselves by portraying personality traits and habits that might seem all too familiar. His messages about poverty and charity have travelled through decades, and we can learn from the experiences of his characters almost as easily as we can learn from our own experiences. These are all wonderful reasons to read Dickens. But these are not exactly the reasons why I read Dickens. My search for an answer continued but never with success, until one year the little flicker came – not surprisingly – from another high school student, whose essay I was reviewing for a writing contest.

“We need to read Dickens's novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are.”

More here.

From Science:

When we eat may be just as important as what we eat. A new study shows that mice that eat when they should be sleeping gain more weight than mice that eat at normal hours. Another study sheds light on why we pack on the pounds in the first place. Whether these studies translate into therapies that help humans beat obesity remains to be seen, but they give scientists clues about the myriad factors that they must take into account. Observations of overnight workers have shown that eating at night disrupts metabolism and the hormones that signal we're sated. But no one had done controlled studies on this connection until now. Biologist Fred Turek of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and graduate student Deanna Arble examined the link between a high-fat diet and what time of day mice eat. A control group of six nocturnal mice ate their pellets (60% fat by calories, mostly lard) during the night. Another group of six ate the same meal during the day, Turek says, which disrupts their circadian rhythm–the body's normal 24-hour cycle.

After 6 weeks, the off-schedule mice weighed almost 20% more than the controls, Turek and Arble report today in Obesity, supporting the idea that consuming calories when you should be sleeping is harmful.

More here.

Fouad Sultani in The Electronic Intifada:

The persecution of Palestinian citizens inside Israel is not a new phenomenon. Yet, for me, this time it hit home. The Israeli intelligence agency Shabak, also known as the Shin Bet, accuses my son Rawi Sultani of “contact with a foreign agent” and “delivering information to the enemy.” Both are grave security offenses in Israeli law. These and similar offenses were used against many Palestinian leaders and activists such as Azmi Bishara of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA), Raed Salah of the Islamic Movement and Muhammad Kanaaneh of Sons of the Land. At times, even Jewish political activists sympathetic to Palestinians like Tali Fahima are similarly accused.

Rawi, a 23-year-old law student and a political activist of the NDA, is being charged in the district court of Petach Tikva with having contact with Hizballah members in order to deliver information on the whereabouts of the Israeli army's chief of staff.

More here.

Review of Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, from The Economist:

His title has a double-meaning: empathy is both very old and freshly topical. It is as ancient as the entire mammalian line, he argues, engaging areas of the brain that developed in our distant ancestors over 100m years ago. And we are also entering a new age of empathy, he thinks, brought on by the financial crisis (the product of a selfishly oriented system), and marked by America’s election of President Barack Obama, who has re-emphasised the importance of compassion and helping one’s neighbour.

The book is a polemic, and its main target is what Mr de Waal takes to be a distorted idea of human life as relentlessly selfish and ruthlessly competitive. As an antidote to this picture, he offers plenty of evidence of apparently selfless sacrifice, unforced sympathy, co-operation and even a keen sense of fairness in our closest animal relatives, who evolved to reap the benefits of mutual aid. In other words, his answer to Thomas Hobbes’s famously gloomy statement that man’s existence tends to be “nasty, brutish and short” is, in effect, that it is unfair to brutes. Beasts are not actually all that beastly, and so we need not be either. Nature does not force us to be selfish.

More here.

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times:

At the end of his deeply affecting memoir, the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy writes about his grandson “Little Teddy” — the son of his son “Medium Teddy” who delivered such a heartbreaking eulogy at the senator’s funeral on Saturday — and his difficulties mastering the family tradition of sailing. The senator told the 10-year-old “we might not be the best,” but “we can work harder than anyone,” and Little Teddy stayed with it, grew eager to learn and started winning races. That, the senator writes, “is the greatest lesson anyone can learn”: that if you “stick with it,” that if, as the title of his book suggests, you keep a “true compass” and do your best, you will eventually “get there.”

And that, in a sense, is the theme of this heartfelt autobiography: that persistence, perseverance and patience in pursuit of a cause or atonement for one’s failures can lead to achievement and the possibility of redemption. It’s the story of how this youngest and most underestimated of siblings slowly, painfully, incrementally found genuine purpose of his own in shouldering the weighty burden of familial expectations and the duty of carrying on his slain brothers’ work. He found a purpose, not as they did in the high-altitude pursuit of the presidency but in the dogged, daily grind of being a senator — of laboring over bills, of sitting through endless committee meetings, of wading through briefing books and making deals with members across the aisle. The resulting legislation — including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program of 1997 — would help the poor and the disenfranchised and those with disabilities, and win him recognition as one of the foremost legislators in American history.

More here.

I write from Caracas, the murder capital of the world, where I’ve been employed by the Leones to score runs and prevent balls from falling in the outfield. At the ankles of the Ávila Mountain amongst a patch of dusky high-rises, the downtown grounds of el Estadio Universitario packed beyond capacity are ripe for a full-bodied poem. A mere pitching change is an occasion “para rumbiar,” and the purse-lipped riot squad is always on the move with their spanking machetes swinging from their hips. The game isn’t paced necessarily by innings or score. It’s marked by the pulsating bass drums of the samba band that trail bright, scantily-clad, head-dressed goddesses strutting about the mezzanine. The young fireworks crew stand mere feet from flares that don’t always set out vertically, sometimes landing in the outfield still aflame. “The wave” includes heaving drinks into the sky.

more from Fernando Perez at Poetry Magazine here.

Swinging by the Pasadena Museum of California Art is often like grazing some kind of far-fetched fusion buffet — blithely mixing collectible vinyl action figures with early California Impressionist landscape painting, wrapped in a custom rainbow fumigation tent with a side order of spray-painted Kenny Scharf legume entities. The gestalt isn’t always successful, but the unexpected shifts can deliver the effect of cleansing the mental palate, piquing your appetite for the next new sensation. The current menu is particularly appetizing, sandwiching a combination of smooth midcentury modernist design and funky, quirky postmodernisms between two slices of contemporary landscape experiments. And, appropriately enough, the largest of these shows is devoted to dinnerware. Edith Heath (1911-2005) was a Danish farm girl from Iowa, who reinvented herself as one of the central figures of midcentury West Coast Modernist design, founding Heath Ceramics in 1947 with a mission to produce sturdy, functional and affordable ceramic products — primarily dishware and tiles — in a cool, Bauhaus-derived vocabulary of clear, simplified geometry and cool, subtle colors. The company still manufactures out of Sausalito and maintains a store on Beverly Boulevard.

more from Doug Harvey at The LA Weekly here.

As presented in the Bible, the characters in Genesis have no internal lives: We see them speak and act, with little sense of their motivations. When a primary character (God or one of the patriarchs) speaks at length, we can only guess at how the words were received. Crumb’s major interpretive act is to offer reaction shots to this biblical speech making. When God tells Noah that divine justice demands the destruction of almost all life on earth, the poor farmer is aghast. In chapter 35, Jacob calls on the members of his household to cleanse themselves and destroy their idols. The text is silent about their reactions, but Crumb shows the women of the family quietly crying as they hand over their beloved objects. Among its many riches, Genesis is a book about bodies, a book where men and women constantly grapple with one another, where a servant swears an oath by putting his hand under his master’s thigh, where even angels are threatened with sexual violation. Crumb has long been the preeminent cartoonist of the body. His women are notoriously full-figured, with ample butts and protruding nipples (a motif he uses in this book). But more significantly, the bodies he draws—whether they are quivering or standing still, dancing or drooping—have a visceral impact few artists can match. That’s why he was the perfect cartoonist to illustrate the Book of Genesis, a fitting capstone to a great career.

more from Jeet Heer at Bookforum here.

Where are the Waters of Childhood?

See where the windows are boarded up,
where the gray siding shines in the sun and salt air
and the asphalt shingles on the roof have peeled or fallen off,
where tiers of oxeye daisies float on a sea of grass?
That’s the place to begin.

Enter the kingdom of rot,
smell the damp plaster, step over the shattered glass,
the pockets of dust, the rags, the soiled remains of a mattress,
look at the rusted stove and sink, at the rectangular stain
on the wall where Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream hung.

Go to the room where your father and mother
would let themselves go in the drift and pitch of love,
and hear, if you can, the creak of their bed,
then go to the place where you hid.

Read more »

From The Washington Post:

In the summer of 2005, a villager walked into a district hospital in Rwanda complaining of abdominal pain. The cause was not difficult to diagnose: an acutely enlarged spleen resulting from untreated malaria. But the American doctors were unable to identify a series of angry rings, scored deep into the skin, that covered the patient's distended belly. A medical student from Burundi recognized them at once: They were burns. Someone, possibly even a parent, had heated a metal pipe over a fire and pressed its red-hot tip into the very part of the body that hurt the most. “Distracting pain with pain,” the young doctor called it — a common practice among the people of Rwanda and Burundi, who know a good deal about agony and affliction.

That young medical student is the subject of Tracy Kidder's extraordinarily stirring new book, “Strength in What Remains”; and the gruesome business of numbing pain with pain is nothing less than a metaphor for the genocide that swept through Burundi and Rwanda in 1994, killing or displacing millions who had already suffered all the miseries of the damned.

More here.

Country's internal turmoil is feeding underground music scene and popular guitar school.

Declan Walsh in the The Guardian:

Even in a summer of Taliban violence young Pakistanis are rocking on. An underground music scene is quietly thriving in the country's major cities, nourished by the internet and the passion of mostly amateur bands.

In Lahore a pair of unemployed rockers have tapped into that enthusiasm with a new school for rock'n'roll.

“We weren't getting a lot of gigs, and we needed to survive,” said co-founder Hamza Jafri. “So we thought we'd try this.”

The Guitar School, as it is known, has been surprisingly successful. Around 40 students have signed up, ranging from surly teenagers in drainpipe jeans to more practised musicians such as Ahsan looking to hone their skills. Classes take place in a small room lined with egg boxes; the school's teaching style is reflected in its motto: “Play it like you feel it.”

More here.