My long-term platonic love affair with Austria, Vienna in particular, began when I was still a boy. Every Friday many families in Bratislava would buy the Austrian daily Volkstimme. On this day the Austrian Communist Party’s official mouthpiece included the weekly programme of Austrian TV which was unavailable elsewhere in Czechoslovakia. The Voice of the People, hardly read in its country of origin, enjoyed a cult status sixty kilometres to the northeast. I am quite sure that the weekend edition had more, and certainly more loyal, readers in Slovakia than in its homeland. The hard-to find copies would immediately disappear from newstands and were often sold under the counter. In blocks of flats each copy would travel from door to door and was cherished by German-speaking families like some sort of holy relic. Who knows if the staff at Volkstimme’s modest little editorial office had any idea of this devoted following – if they had, they would surely have been spurred to work with greater enthusiasm and may even have extended the TV programmes. Neither myself nor my parents had ever been to Vienna and we did not expect we would ever get there. For me Austrian television and radio epitomized the whole of Western civilization.

more from Michal Hvorecký at Salon) here.

Evolution is weird – far weirder than Darwin ever imagined. But does that mean that Darwinism itself should go the way of the dinosaur and the dodo? That’s the question that Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini pose in What Darwin Got Wrong. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection rests on three elements: the existence of variation in a trait; the differential effects of such variation upon reproductive success; and a mechanism by which the trait is inherited. Little was known in Darwin’s time of the principles underlying heredity and variation. It was the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel who started unravelling the story of genetic inheritance. His ideas were eventually fused with those of Darwin to create the ‘Modern Synthesis’, the foundation stone of contemporary evolutionary theory. Only over the last twenty years, however, have we begun to understand in greater detail what genes are, how they express themselves and how variation in the genotype relates to variation in the phenotype (observable characteristic). Most biologists working within the Modern Synthesis had assumed that an organism was a straightforward reflection of its component genes. Specific genetic mutations, they believed, gave rise to specific changes in bodily structure or behaviour. Recent research has revealed a far more complex story of how genes make organisms.

more from Kenan Malik at Literary Review here.

A Coat

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
in walking naked.

by W.B. Yeats

Daniel Passent interviews Kapucinski-biographer Artur Domoslawski in Sign and Sight:

Daniel Passent: How did you come up with the title “Kapuscinski non-fiction?”

Artur Domoslawksi: During his lifetime, Kapuscinski created two oeuvres. One was his life's work as reporter, which went on to become great literature about the mechanisms of power, revolutions and marginalised peoples. The second was his story about himself, which he put together from facts and legends. He understood that there is no such thing as a literary world without legends about its writers and so, like many before him, he helped create his own. The life of a reporter, whose remit was revolution, war, and military coups in the Third World, provided brilliant material for this. The book's title signalises my decision to leave aside black-and-white portraiture because the world of non-fiction is never black-and-white. It contains many truths, in this case many truths about my protagonist. Secondly, it signalises my intention to separate fact and fiction. Reporters around the world regarded Kapusckinski as a master, and yet they had their suspicions about the traces of – let's call it – poetic licence, in his stories.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Today’s superhero undergraduates do “3,000 things at 150 percent.”

You wake up each morning

with a fever; you feel like a shadow of yourself. But no time for sickness today—the Adams House intramural crew has one of its thrice-weekly practices at 6 A.M., and you…will…row. Some mornings, you watch the sunrise from Lamont Library after hitting your study groove there around 11 the night before and bushwhacking through assignments during the quiet time between 3 A.M. and 5. The rower and late-night scholar is Becky Cooper ’10. “Lamont is beautiful at 5 A.M.—my favorite time,” she says. “Sunlight streams in.” There’s plenty to do—Cooper is taking five courses, concentrating in literature but still pre-med: “I can’t close doors.”

She writes out her daily schedule to the minute: “Shower, 7:15-7:20.” Lunch might be at the Signet Society, the private, arts-oriented, undergraduate club where she is vice-president. She also belongs to the Isis, a female social club, and has held the post of Dionysus at the Harvard Advocate, planning social events like the literary quarterly’s spring dinner (which she revived) for 70 attendees. Cooper has an omnivorous appetite for learning and experience: new fascinations constantly beckon, and she dives in wholeheartedly. Yet the ceaseless activity leaves little space or time for reflection on who she is or what she wants. “I’m more terrified of being bored than busy,” she explains. “Though I’m scared I’ll work myself into a pile of dust if I don’t learn when to stop.”

More here.

From MSNBC:

Whether it's a grieving dog, a depressed horse or even a whale mysteriously beaching itself, there is a long history of animals behaving suicidally, behavior that can help explain human suicide, says newly published research. The idea that animals could actually be very good models for human suicide started to take root in the 20th century, said Edmund Ramsden, one of the study's authors. If animals can be deliberately self-destructive, they could also then help us to better understand the same behaviors in humans, argue the study's authors, Ramsden, of the University of Exeter in the U.K. and Duncan Wilson of the University of Manchester.

“You begin to challenge the definition of suicide. The body and mind are so damaged by stress and so it leads to self destruction. It's not necessarily even a choice,” he said. There are many stories of animal suicide dating back centuries. In 1845, for example, the Illustrated London News reported a “Singular Case of Suicide” involving a “fine, handsome and valuable black dog, of the Newfoundland species.” The dog had for days been acting less lively than usual, but then was seen “to throw himself in the water and endeavor to sink by preserving perfect stillness of the legs and feet.”

More here.

Our own Morgan J. Meis in The Smart Set:

Surrealism isn't surreal anymore. It doesn't shock or jolt. It isn't confusing or upsetting. If anything, the works of Surrealism have taken on a quaint charm. This would surely have annoyed its practitioners. The great theorist of Surrealism, André Breton, thought of himself as a revolutionary. He once wrote, “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.” Like most big talkers, he was wrong. Surrealism didn't ruin anything or solve anything either.

Surrealism did its best, though, to shake things up. Looking out at the madness of modern life in the early 20th century, Surrealism said, “Bring it on.” The show currently on display at the International Center of Photography, “Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris,” makes that patently clear. Paris inspired the Surrealists. There was so much going on. The chaos of traffic and lights and humanity was constantly producing jarring images. Reality seemed to blur into a dream state and then back again. Shit had gotten crazy for everyone.

Man Ray's “Barbette Applying Makeup” from 1926 makes the point as well as any photograph in the show. As Barbette applies her makeup, she is, literally, putting on a mask. Is Barbette even a “she”? It is unclear. Anyway, we see her in two different mirrors as she works. But the images in the two mirrors are amazingly different. The angles change everything. The top mirror gives a clear and straightforward image — Barbette looks hard and clean. The bottom image is blurry and falling apart — she is a leering coquette. Same person, same instant in time, wildly different identities. Here is the shock of juxtaposition, the contradictions that nag at our experience of the world. This is the side of Surrealism with which we've long been acquainted.

More here.

Watch in full screen mode for full effect:

Maciej Ceglowski in Idle Words:

Scurvy had been the leading killer of sailors on long ocean voyages; some ships experienced losses as high as 90% of their men. With the introduction of lemon juice, the British suddenly held a massive strategic advantage over their rivals, one they put to good use in the Napoleonic wars. British ships could now stay out on blockade duty for two years at a time, strangling French ports even as the merchantmen who ferried citrus to the blockading ships continued to die of scurvy, prohibited from touching the curative themselves.

The success of lemon juice was so total that much of Sicily was soon transformed into a lemon orchard for the British fleet. Scurvy continued to be a vexing problem in other navies, who were slow to adopt citrus as a cure, as well as in the Merchant Marine, but for the Royal Navy it had become a disease of the past.

By the middle of the 19th century, however, advances in technology were reducing the need for any kind of scurvy preventative. Steam power had shortened travel times considerably from the age of sail, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food. Citrus juice was a legal requirement on all British vessels by 1867, but in practical terms it was becoming superfluous.

So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice.

More here. [Thanks to Cyrus Hall.]

Jonathan Swift arrives on our bookshelves in disguise, and for most readers he stays that way. Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is a book for children, a tale of wonder and adventure, with shipwrecks and talking animals, worthy to stand with Robinson Crusoe and Moby-Dick, which are also children’s books. Generations of teachers and librarians have given Lemuel Gulliver their imprimatur of wholesomeness. Let’s remind them of the scene in Lilliput when the emperor commands Gulliver to stand in a field with his legs wide apart while the emperor’s army rides through the giant’s arch:

His Majesty gave Orders, upon pain of Death, that every Soldier in his March should observe the strictest Decency with regard to my Person; which, however, could not prevent some of the younger Officers from turning up their Eyes as they passed under me. And, to confess the Truth, my Breeches were at that time in so ill a Condition, that they afforded some Opportunities for Laughter and Admiration.

That may stand as my favorite phrase in Swift, the arch-coiner of memorable phrases: “Laughter and Admiration”—rooted, of course, in exhibitionism, voyeurism, and a joyous sense of smutty-mindedness. Because of such bawdy, Gulliver’s Travels is surely among the most frequently bowdlerized of classics, and most readers probably have never read Gulliver’s description of a Brobdinagian woman’s breast as she nurses:

It stood prominent six Foot, and could not be less than sixteen in Circumference. The Nipple was about half the Bigness of my Head, and the Hue both of that and the Dug so varified with Spots, Pimples, and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous.

more from Patrick Kurp at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Karen Armstrong in Big Think:

Ralph Dumain in Logos:

Secular government in the U.S. resulted from an alliance between politically disadvantaged churches and the supporters of the Enlightenment they otherwise disdained. American Protestantism was split. Those with a modernist bent gravitated toward more liberal, deistic, rationalist and scientific thinking. This tendency had political impact; however, it tended to be limited to highbrow, well-educated, and well-off congregations. Today, the fundamentalist Right leads a backlash against them.

Indian secularism was born of the need to keep the peace among rival religious groups, neutralize the caste system, and reform barbaric social practices associated with a variety of religious practices. The state took on the role of religious reform. The downside is that state interference in religion has made religion a battleground for political manipulation and power plays.

Hindu revivalism outmaneuvered the secular forces within the Indian independence movement. Hindu ideologues sanitized the past, proffering a ‘purified’ Hinduism as consistent with modern needs. This is reactionary modernism: the incorporation of modernizing impulses into an atavistic anti-modernist ideology. Secularization amounted to an endorsement of Hinduism, compounded by the hypocritical claim of essential Hindu ‘tolerance’. As in the United States, a rupture with the past was passed off as continuity with the past. India’s trajectory was far worse. The secularist, deistical, naturalistic and scientific tendencies of the American Enlightenment at least had some institutional impact, but there was no counterpart in India. No ‘disenchantment of nature’ took root among a decisive contingent of Indian intellectuals; instead, modern science was incorporated into Vedic superstition.

Nanda argues that the pragmatic maneuvers establishing secular states prior to the formation of secular cultures created the conditions for the right-wing religious populism that menaces both countries today. Secular states cannot ultimately survive without the secularization of their inhabitants.

Eric Maskin and Joseph Stiglitz respond, at the Heyman Center for the Humanities:

Read more »

Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker:

The Taliban have embarked on a sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned ones, to soften their image. . . . The dictates include bans on suicide bombings against civilians, burning down schools, or cutting off ears, lips and tongues. —The Times.

Isn’t it time you took another look at . . . the Taliban™?

Not your father’s Taliban™. The New Taliban™. TalibanLite™.

We know what you’re thinking: “The Taliban™? Aren’t they the dudes who blow up shit and cut off body parts?”

LOL! You’re thinking of the Old Taliban™.

How do we know what you’re thinking?

Focus groups.

You’re, like, “Focus groups? Since when do the Taliban™ do focus groups?”

We’re, like, “Since Domino’s Pizza started doing them.”

You told Domino’s their crust tasted like cardboard and their sauce tasted like ketchup. Harsh, right? But your criticism only made their pizza much tastier. At the New Taliban™, we want to be the Domino’s of extremists.

So we held focus groups in caves across Afghanistan, only instead of talking about crust and sauce you talked about the things you didn’t like about us, like the way we explode things without warning and cut off ears, lips, and tongues. And you know what? It hurt to hear you say that stuff. But we’re big boys. We can take it. We sent your opinions down the hall to the guys in marketing, and this is what they came back with:

TalibanLite™: We’re Cutting Out the Cutting™.

Ears? History. Lips. Done-zo. Tongues? So 2001. If there’s a part of your body we don’t like, we’ll just defriend it. O.K., maybe we’ll cut off a little toe. Not the big one, mind you, but maybe the itty-bitty one. Come on, you weren’t using that one anyway.

Psych! Ha-ha, just messing with you.

More here. [Thanks to Ejaz Haider.]

Clear Night

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says, “What?” to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say, “What?” to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.

by Charles Wright

From Salon:

David Shenk's new book, “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong,” is 300 pages long, and more than half of those pages are endnotes. You need to offer up a lot of evidence when your goal is to overturn a concept as commonplace as the idea that genes are the “blueprints” for both our physical bodies and our personalities. Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that “the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark — tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors.” Instead of acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we're either born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate ability.

Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it coming from geneticists and other biological researchers who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted in the media. “Today's popular understanding of genes, heredity and evolution is not just crude, it's profoundly misleading,” Shenk writes. While most scientists long ago rejected the idea that nature and nurture are two separate factors competing in a zero-sum game to dominate human behavior, laypeople still cling to the idea that whatever aspect of ourselves isn't caused by our environment must be caused by our genes, and vice versa. In recent decades, heredity has gotten most of the credit; the host of the brainiest NPR talk show in my area inevitably prompts every expert to confirm that whatever they're discussing — mathematical ability, wanderlust, ambition, mental illness — is genetically determined.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Soon after the exciting discovery of a method to turn human adult cells into stem cells in 2007 came the frustration of actually trying to make that transformation efficient. In creating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, scientists typically only get 0.01 percent of a sample of human fibroblast (skin) cells to change. A group led by Duanqing Pei of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health in China has found that a simple chemical can boost the efficiency by 100-fold—namely, vitamin C.

The researchers can trigger the conversion to iPS cells by introducing genes or proteins to adult cells, typically with a virus. Once the cells become pluripotent, they have the ability to become any cell in the body, thereby offering the promise of repairing damaged organs and treating disease. But scientists have yet to come up with the ideal recipe. “It’s a worldwide effort to boost efficiency and make this more practical for much wider participation from the scientific community,” Pei says.

More here.

Once in a while we think about removing “Gossip” from the list of subjects we cover here at 3QD from our banner. But then we just post something like this and move on.

Geofferey Levy in The Daily Mail:

Alpha minds in and around Westminster that normally grapple with issues such as the forthcoming election, the sinking pound and the war in Afghanistan, were turned this week towards a ticklish and wholly unexpected political mystery.

Which two ministers of Margaret Thatcher's government had gay relations with the writer Christopher Hitchens while at Oxford?

Since Hitchens's extraordinary claim emerged this week, the louche figure, now 60, who has been married twice, has fended off all requests for further information.

After all – even for a clever polemicist who takes his work very seriously – such a tantalising, if frivolous kiss-and-tell is bound to sell extra copies of his memoir Hitch-22 when it is published in the summer.

But those who knew 'Hitch' in his Balliol College years, between 1967 and 1970, when he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics while simultaneously running amok as a rabid Trotskyist (he got a third-class degree, incidentally), have little doubt his claims are true.

For although he has always enjoyed a reputation as a womaniser, at Oxford Hitchens was known to be bisexual.

More here.