Tom Bissell in The New Republic:

The historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo asks us to accept a somewhat unlikely premise, which is this: A titty magazine that has been culturally irrelevant since the late 1970s was at the forefront of many of this nation’s most important social upheavals and reconfigurations. It is to her book’s credit—and, it must be said, to Playboy’s—that one closes her book largely convinced that she is right.

The collapse of the U.S. Postal System’s de facto censorship apparatus? Playboy had a hand in that. Changing attitudes about sex outside of marriage? Playboy was part of this, too. The specious notion that a high-earning, free-spending bachelor is some kind of epicurean rebel? Playboy yet again. The feminist movement? Playboy “was partly responsible” for it, as Gloria Steinem once admitted. The now common glossy-magazine practice of advertising luxuries that readers cannot possibly afford? Thank you, Playboy. The idea that a man could have fine clothes, a sweet smell, an uncorked Bordeaux, and remain masculine? Yes, believe it or not, Playboy paved the way for metrosexuality, too.

More here.

Jay Dixit in Psychology Today:

Beginning in our late teenage years and early 20s, we develop and internalize a broad, autobiographical narrative about our lives, spelling out who we were, are, and might be in the future, says Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern and author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By. The story is peppered with key scenes—high points, low points, and turning points—and a first experience can be any of these. “These experiences give us natural ways to divide up the stories of our lives—episodic markers that help us make sense of how our life has developed over time,” McAdams explains.

Part of why firsts affect us so powerfully is that they're seared into our psyches with a vividness and clarity that doesn't fade as other memories do. You may not remember the 4th real kiss you ever had, or the 20th—but you almost certainly remember your first. This is known as the primacy effect.

When people are asked to recall memories from college, 25 percent of what they come up with draws from the first two or three months of their freshman year, says David Pillemer, a psychologist at the University of New Hampshire. What people remember most vividly are events like saying goodbye to their parents, meeting their roommates for the first time, and their first college class. In fact, when psychologists ask older people to recall the events of their lives, the ones they most often name are those that occurred in their late teens and early 20s.

More here.

Our own Asad Raza spent the last year producing this exhibition of an artwork by Tino Sehgal. Arthur Lubow writes about it in the New York Times Magazine:

Although Sehgal was very busy, thriving in the incubation culture of art fairs and international exhibitions, he did not surface in New York until his inaugural show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in November 2007. This time when I walked into the exhibition space, I had more of an idea of what to expect, but once again I was knocked off-balance. “Welcome to this situation,” a group of six people said in unison to greet me, ending with the auditory flourish of a sharp intake of breath; then they slowly backed off, all the while facing me, and froze into unnatural positions. At which point one of the group recited a quotation: “In 1958, somebody said, ‘The income that men derive producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence.’ ” Jumping off from that statement, the conversationalists — Sehgal refers to them as “interpreters” — began a lively back and forth. Occasionally one of the six might turn to a gallery visitor and utter a compliment or say, “Or what do you think?” and then incorporate that person’s comment into the exchange of words. Mostly they seemed content to natter at high velocity among themselves. It all continued until the moment when a new visitor arrived, an event that acted as a sort of rewind button. “Welcome to this situation,” they chanted again, breathing in and backing off as they had done before and then assuming another stylized stance. A new quotation was dropped and another discussion commenced. Just as in Berlin, I felt a battleground developing in my mind, between a fascinated desire to stay and a disquieted urge to flee.

If you are not a devotee of the cult of contemporary art, especially its Conceptualist cadre, you may feel a whirring sensation beneath your eyelids starting up right about now. Your skepticism isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a matter of “Is this art?” Almost a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp aced that one by attaching titles to everyday objects (a urinal, a bicycle wheel) and demonstrating that anything can be art if the artist says it is. Nevertheless, the ineffaceable critical question remains: “Is it good art?” Later this month, when Sehgal’s one-man show takes over the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda for a six-week run, thousands of noninitiates, many no doubt having come to see the Frank Lloyd Wright building without any advance notification of what art exhibitions are on, will be able to decide for themselves.

If the overall response to “This Situation” at the Marian Goodman Gallery is any guide, even some who expect to hate Sehgal’s work will leave enthralled. “I often see shows I don’t like, but this was the only show I’ve ever seen that didn’t like me,” wrote New York magazine’s art critic, Jerry Saltz, judging “This Situation” to be the best exhibition he encountered in 2008.

Much more here.

Most readers interested in Jewish history know something about the conversos, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced to convert to Christianity in the 14th and 15th centuries. In recent decades, historians have come to see their story not just as a tragic or heroic one—an affair of Jews forced to give up their faith, or contriving to remain faithful in secret—but as an important episode in the evolution of the modern world. Yirmiyahu Yovel argued last year in The Other Within: The Marranos that these “New Christians” were the first large group in European history to be effectively post-religious—free to define the world and its meaning for themselves, instead of accepting the definitions of rabbinic Judaism or medieval Catholicism. That Spinoza and Montaigne, those skeptical modern minds, were both descendants of conversos, and that New Christians played a major role in the economy of the New World, is seen as evidence that these Jewish converts helped to invent the secular world we live in. Much less is known, however, about a later, smaller, but perhaps even more intriguing group of Jewish converts, who emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century.

more from Adam Kirsch at Tablet here.

Amanda Taub over at Wrong on Rights:

[I]f you can’t give as much as you would like, or find yourself wanting to do more, then I have one further suggestion: contact the White House and tell them that you support granting Haitians Temporary Protected Status (TPS) immediately.

TPS is a form of temporary humanitarian immigration relief given to nationals of countries that have suffered severe disasters, natural or man-made. (For example, El Salvador got TPS was after the country was hit by a terrible earthquake in 2001, Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1999, and Burundi, Liberia, Sudan, and Somalia were designated because of ongoing armed conflicts.)

Once a country has been given TPS, its nationals who are in the United States can apply for work authorization (a very useful thing to have if, say, one needs to send money home to family members in need of medical care or a house that has not been reduced to rubble), can’t be deported or put into immigration detention (also quite handy if you’re trying to work and send money home), and can apply for travel authorization, which allows them to visit their home country and return to the US, even if they wouldn’t otherwise have a visa that would allow them back into the country (incredibly important if you have loved ones who have been badly hurt and need to visit them, or if you need to go home to attend funerals).

Designating Haiti for TPS status would provide an immediate, tremendously valuable benefit to Haitian immigrants in the United States. But, more importantly it would benefit their loved ones who remain in Haiti and are in desperate need of their assistance. TPS would increase and stabilize remittances at a time when they are absolutely vital.

[H/t: Jenny Davidson]

Diaries brings together the eleven individual journals that George Orwell compiled between 1931 and 1949. The final entry, written in September 1949, describes the daily routines of University College Hospital, where he was to die of advanced tuberculosis early in 1950. All were published in the monumental twenty-volume Complete Works (1998), but now appear consecutively for the first time. There is certainly a twelfth diary, and possibly even a thirteenth, among the items taken from a Barcelona hotel room in June 1937 by Soviet agents and now gathering dust somewhere in the NKVD archive in Moscow. In his introduction, Peter Davison reveals that he once met a man – Miklos Kun, grandson of the Hungarian Communist leader Béla Kun – who had tracked down Orwell’s NKVD file, but was unable to fillet it before the archive shut its doors to the public. Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell’s own pencil sketches and footnoted with Davison’s customary élan, this latest wave in the repackager’s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries? And what do they tell us about him?

more from DJ Taylor at The Times here.

Peter Lopatin in Commentary:

Arguments on the subject of religious faith come variously and abundantly these days, from theist and atheist alike. From the former, they range from the oracular hectoring of slick televangelists concerning the rewards that await the believer—both in this life and the next—to the carefully wrought arguments of the more intellectually rigorous Christian and Jewish clergy as they confidently and earnestly assert the rationality of faith, its cognitive inevitability, and its ethical necessity.

Not to be outdone, however, come the New Atheists, fierce conscientious objectors to what they regard as the hollow temptations of religion. These acolytes of pure reason assert, as against their religious counterparts (and with no less self-assurance), the manifest irrationality of religious faith, its logical incoherence, and its ethical superfluousness.

This is all a terribly disheartening spectacle for the beleaguered agnostic, moved as he is by the felt need for the transcendent yet unable to yield fully to the allure of faith or to any of the particular creeds of the conventionally religious, aware as he is of the power of science to explain the hitherto mysterious, and struck as he is by the discordant irony in the fact that the atheists share with their theist adversaries what is, to the agnostic, a strangely apodictic certainty concerning that matter about which certainty is surely not possible.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein enters this fray armed with a sophisticated grasp of philosophy (Ph.D., Princeton, 1977) and religion (raised in an Orthodox family, she is the author of a short biography of Spinoza). In previous works of fiction, (The Mind-Body Problem, Mazel, Properties of Light, among others) she has examined the rich territory that lies at the intersection of fact and intimation, thought and passion. In her latest, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, she explores the conflict between faith and reason, and the result of that engagement is a captivating, original, and at times riotously funny novel.

More here.

Abbas Milani in The New Republic:

The Green Movement is a revolt against theocracy. Most of its adherents are young Iranians with little or no religious motivation. Yet, an iconic figure of the revolt was the nation’s highest-ranking cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri; and, last month, Ashura, a holy day celebrating martyrdom, occasioned some of the movement’s most massive protests.

Perhaps the fact that the movement has acquired a Shia veneer shouldn’t be terribly surprising. During the past century, no social movement in Iran has succeeded without draping itself in religion or without a strong Shia contingent in its leadership.

But to limit the discussion of the Green Movement’s religiosity to rhetoric and political maneuverings is to diminish the significance of the happening. The Green Movement (and the Ayatollah Khamenei’s clumsy response to it) has exacerbated a split with Shiism. It has accelerated the development of profound and potentially far-reaching doctrinal innovations. The course of the coming months will determine the extent to which these innovations will transform Shiism and Iran.

More here.

Paul Sutherland in Scientific American:

David McKay, chief of astrobiology at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Houston, says powerful new microscopes and other instruments will establish whether features in martian meteorites are alien fossils.

He says evidence for life in the space rocks could have been claimed by the UK if British scientists had used readily-available electron microscopes. Instead, images of colonies of martian bacteria were collected by American scientists.

The NASA team is already convinced that colonies of micro-organisms are visible inside three martian rocks that landed on Earth. If so, this would have profound implications for our understanding of life in the universe.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The human race can breathe a tiny bit easier (but not too much) now that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hand of its Doomsday Clock one minute farther away from midnight, the time which symbolizes catastrophic destruction and the apocalyptic end of civilization. The clock now reads six minutes from that end-of-days witching hour after it was changed during a press conference Thursday in New York City, citing an increased awareness and interest in stopping key threats to humanity (in particular nuclear conflict and global warming) since U.S. President Barack Obama took office about a year ago.

But the Bulletin, a group established shortly after World War II by the likes of Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, tempered its actions with the major caveat that humankind could slip closer to oblivion again if the world's governments do not follow through on promises made to curb the creation of more nuclear weapons and greenhouse gases. Although the Bulletin was originally formed out of concern for global nuclear annihilation, the group has since broadened its purview to include the world's vulnerability to climate change. The Bulletin's members at Thursday's press conference noted that leaders of nations equipped with nuclear weapons have expressed the desire to cooperate in reducing their arsenals and securing nuclear bomb-making material. This includes a shared sentiment between Obama and Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev that nuclear arms negotiations that could bring down deployed strategic warheads from more than 2,000 to about 1,500 each.

More here.

From Science:

Many years ago, my family discovered a small journal that my grandfather had written in 1915, 2 years before he left for World War I. It contained a short essay titled simply, “My Guide.” Here's a paragraph from it: To respect those I love, my country, and above all myself. To be as honest and as fair with my fellow man as I know how, and to expect them to be honest and fair with me in return. To keep my future clear of debt by saving as well as by earning, and to guard my health of body and peace of mind as my most precious stock in trade. To use my strengths and skills to the best of my abilities, and to share the rewards of my success with my community. I was impressed that my grandfather, who would go on to become a successful businessman and patriarch of a large family, had thought about his life's philosophy at age 22. But I didn't think much more about my grandfather's words until years later when I met another person who would prove to be very influential in my life.

Jim Rohn was a public speaker and author of self-help books, known throughout the world as a “business philosopher.” I had the pleasure of attending a number of his talks and workshops and listened to his audio books until the tapes fell apart. His words have influenced many of my decisions (the best ones) over the past 20 years. I count him as one of my mentors. Sadly, he died at the end of 2009. Rohn taught that most of personal success boils down to a handful of basics. The cornerstone of Rohn's message was that you must put time and effort into thinking about your goals, priorities, and personal philosophy, because these things set your compass for later career and job satisfaction. One of his oft-cited pieces of advice is, “Your personal philosophy is the greatest determining factor in how your life works out.”

More here.

Cliché

We were talking about cliché

the perfesser with the beard and glasses,

tweed jacket with the leather

patches,

and twelve men in blue and orange

jump suits, most with shaved heads,

wearing knit caps,

and tattoos on their arms and necks,

when there was a commotion

at the back, and we all got up

to look out the window

beyond the cinder block,

chain link and razor wire:

deer at the dark edge of the woods.

by Eric Gadzinski

from The Bijou Poetry Review;
January, 2009

The trailer (in Russian) to the film a Room and a Half, which is based on the life of Joseph Brodsky, shows some of the film's amazing animation.

The life journey of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky inspired this drama written and directed by Andrey Khrzhanovsky. Brodsky, a Nobel laureate who was born in 1940, fled the Soviet Union in 1972, and died in 1996, once told a reporter that if he were to return to the land of his birth, he’d do so without identifying himself, and in Poltory komnaty ili sentimentalnoe puteshestvie na rodinu (aka A Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland), Khrzhanovsky imagines what the voyage would be like, and what he thinks the poet’s reaction would be. Touring his old neighborhood, the older Brodsky (Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy) recalls his youth, when he (Artem Smola) lived with his loving father (Sergei Yursky) and mother (Alisa Freindlich) in a small but comfortable apartment in Leningrad following the end of World War II, and the idyll of life with his family colors his view of the world around him. As Brodsky becomes a young man and goes off to college, he learns about art and language, and a new world is opened to him; however, he also becomes aware of the oppressive nature of the Soviet regime, and he begins speaking out in favor of greater freedoms, marking the first steps on his road to exile.

Over at the Journal of Evolution and Technology, a series of articles on transhumanism and Nietzche by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Max More, Michael Hauskeller and Russell Blackford. Blackford:

In issue 20(1) of The Journal of Evolution and Technology, we published “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (March 2009). In this intriguing article, Sorgner argues that there are significant similarities between the concept of the posthuman (as typically deployed in transhumanist thought) and Nietzsche’s celebrated notion of the overhuman (often referred to, perhaps misleadingly, as “the Superman”). Sorgner does not claim that late twentieth-century and contemporary transhumanist thinkers were knowingly influenced by Nietzsche: this is a question that he explicitly leaves open. Nor does he depict transhumanism as monolithic, or the concept of the posthuman as unambiguous. For all that, he suggests that the similarity between the two concepts – overhuman and posthuman – is not merely superficial: it lies at a fundamental level.

Sorgner compares the posthuman and overhuman concepts in a way that is calculated to bring out a deep similarity. He discusses, for example, how the relevant systems of thought are alike in viewing humanity as merely a work in progress, with only limited potential in the absence of a radical transformation. Humanity is, in other words, not an evolutionary culmination but something that cries out for improvement. Sorgner adds, however, that the idea of the overhuman provides Nietzsche with a grounding for values that appears to be missing in transhumanist thought.

As Sorgner develops his thesis, Nietzsche rejects any concept of transcendent meaning, but finds value in the interest of “higher humans” in permanently and continually “overcoming” themselves. On this approach, the ultimate “overcoming” consists in surpassing the human species itself. The prospect of success in creation of the overhuman is thus supposed to give meaning to human beings who are immersed in the efforts of self-overcoming. For individuals with a scientific materialist view of the world, or a scientific “spirit,” and who have rejected the epistemic and moral authority claimed by Christianity, this is supposed provide an alternative source of meaning. Sorgner’s thesis, then, is that Nietzsche’s thought contains an important value dimension. Further, he suggests, this is missing from the transhumanist movement, which would do well to incorporate it. As Sorgner puts the matter:

Transhumanists, at least in the articles which I have consulted, have not explained why they hold the values they have, and why they want to bring about posthumans. Nietzsche, on the other hand, explains the relevance of the overhuman for his philosophy. The overhuman may even be the ultimate foundation for his worldview.

Is this correct?

Deirdre McCloskey's eureka moment, on realizing the explanatory power of rhetoric, in Times Higher Education:

I realised with a jolt that economists are fibbing when they say that they follow a positivist, hypothetico-deductive method-of-science-I-learnt-in- secondary-school. The new awareness came partly from noting that when I put forward any proposition in Chicago School economic-historical science (wholly correct, I assure you), I got from other economic scientists not counter-evidence but anti-Chicago School ideology. I had already perceived that my Keynesian teachers at Harvard in earlier years had exhibited in their ways of arguing such a disgraceful lack of devotion to the plain truth. Shame on them. But around 1977, hiding in Hyde Park, I realised that the Chicago School folk had it, too – in spades, redoubled and vulnerable.

A professor of English at Chicago, Wayne Booth, asked me – on the strength, I think, of a reputation I had for being marginally more open than other economists – to give a lecture to some undergraduates on the “rhetoric of economics”. Sure, I said. But what's that? Wayne suggested that I read books such as The Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin and The New Rhetoric by Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, and I suddenly got it. Oh, my God! Even a science such as economics has a rhetoric – that is, a means of unforced persuasion! And the claimed “scientific method” ain't it!

This blindingly obvious point led me to start doubting that economics was the queen of the social sciences, or at any rate that the queen had any clothes on. First I realised (I recall the day, by then based at the University of Iowa, talking to my colleague Richard Zecher) that a crucially important technique used by economists, “statistical significance”, was rhetorical rubbish. Close fit is not the same thing as scientific or political importance. It just isn't.

[H/t: Mark Blyth]

Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:

A friend recently sent me a two year old obituary of Jennifer Musa (today is her second death anniversary). I must confess, I had never heard of her. But the tag line of the article from London’s Daily Telegraph was enough to send me on a search for more information on her. The line read:

Irish nurse who became head of a tribe in Baluchistan and dedicated her life to its interests

As if that was not enough, the second paragraph of the same article had me running to find out more. It read:

“Mummy Jennifer”, as she was known, married the scion of a noble Pathan family that played a key role in bringing the oil-rich province of Baluchistan into Pakistan after its creation in 1947. She founded an ice factory, became the first woman member of the national assembly from her province, and later acted as an intermediary for rebels who staged an armed uprising against the federal government.

What I found was a remarkable story that deserves to be shared with others.

More here.

Paul Waldman in The American Prospect:

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama warmed the hearts of progressives when he promised to change “the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.” And when he got into office, he took a number of steps that demonstrated his sincerity.

He abolished George W. Bush's restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research and announced that he was “directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making.” His Department of Energy — run by Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu — is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on exploring innovative new energy sources under its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), modeled on the Defense Department's DARPA. Obama also increased spending for the National Science Foundation. And he just announced a $250 million public-private partnership to improve math and science teaching.

All good stuff. But could eight years of an Obama administration undo the damage wrought by eight years of what American Prospect alum Chris Mooney termed “The Republican war on science” that characterized the Bush era?

More here.