Wicked Woman
If you come to my city
you are bound to find
my name in the roster
of wicked women
I have all that it takes
to be as wicked
as they come
I have a goblet
brimming over
in my hand
My laughter is known
for its abandon
Flames find a home
in my mouth
My heart beats and
every nerve does
a little dance
The road is at my feet
And just the sky above
I have the courage to bear
and express myself without fear
by Nirupama Dutt
Translation by author
From The National Geographic:
The ancient Egyptians thought so little of brain matter they made a practice of scooping it out through the nose of a dead leader before packing the skull with cloth before burial. They believed consciousness resided in the heart, a view shared by Aristotle and a legacy of medieval thinkers. Even when consensus for the locus of thought moved northward into the head, it was not the brain that was believed to be the sine qua non, but the empty spaces within it, called ventricles, where ephemeral spirits swirled about. As late as 1662, philosopher Henry More scoffed that the brain showed “no more capacity for thought than a cake of suet, or a bowl of curds.” Around the same time, French philosopher René Descartes codified the separation of conscious thought from the physical flesh of the brain. Cartesian “dualism” exerted a powerful influence over Western science for centuries, and while dismissed by most neuroscientists today, still feeds the popular belief in mind as a magical, transcendent quality.
A contemporary of Descartes named Thomas Willis—often referred to as the father of neurology—was the first to suggest that not only was the brain itself the locus of the mind, but that different parts of the brain give rise to specific cognitive functions. Early 19th-century phrenologists pushed this notion in a quaint direction, proposing that personality proclivities could be deduced by feeling the bumps on a person's skull, which were caused by the brain “pushing out” in places where it was particularly well developed. Plaster casts of the heads of executed criminals were examined and compared to a reference head to determine whether any particular protuberances could be reliably associated with criminal behavior.
More here.
From Scientific American:
Women are much choosier than men when it comes to romance. This is well known, but the reason for this gender difference is unclear. Evolutionary psychologists think it is because back in prehistoric times “dating” was much riskier for women. Men who made an ill-advised choice in the ancient version of a singles bar simply had one lousy night. Women who chose unwisely could end up facing years of motherhood without the critical help that a stable partner would have provided.
That is less true today, yet women remain much more selective. Is this difference a vestige of our early ancestry? Or might it be totally unrelated to reproductive risk, the result of something more modern and mundane? A couple of Northwestern University psychologists, Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick, decided to explore this question in an unusual laboratory: a real-life speed-dating event.
More here.
Max Fisher in The Atlantic:
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari signed a sweeping Consitutional amendment into law yesterday, transferring much of his own power to the nation's traditionally weak Parliament. The amendment, by decentralizing the government and strengthening the Parliament as well provincial governments, stands to bring much-needed stability and openness to a state long plagued by autocracy and by the military's heavy influence. Pakistan's secretive and self-interested military — long permiated by Islamist ideology and (until recently) driven by an agenda of dominating neighboring Afghanistan and Kashmir via insurgent proxies — has, as a rule either coerced the president or replaced him outright, as in the military coup that established the presidency of General Pervez Musharraf. As Pakistan's president and military have wrestled for power, they have dragged the state through periods of instability and corruption that has exaccerbated poverty and, at times, provoked domestic terror. Pakistan's volatility and political infighting also make it far more difficult for foreign diplomats to influence the state. As a lead player in the Afghanistan and Kashmir conflicts, Pakistan's international cooperation is essential. Today's amendment could bring new stability to the country, improving Pakistan's internal governance and ultimately aiding U.S. interests.
More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]
Lee Billings in Seed:
Seed: Why did you write this book?
Dirk Schulze-Makuch: The evidence for life on Mars has recently been portrayed over-skeptically and negatively. As a scientist you have to be skeptical, but here we have many strong lines of evidence for microbial life, and if you put them all together you really have a very consistent picture. So my coauthor, David Darling, and I both feel very strongly that we really have to get the public very enthusiastic about this, in order for space agencies to move forward.
Seed: But scientists also make names for themselves by overturning flawed conclusions. If the evidence is so good, why aren’t more researchers lining up to say there’s life on Mars?
DS: Well, it depends on what kind of group you’re looking at. If you ask the public, they seem to think there’s life on Mars—at least microbial life. I don’t want to speak for all scientists, of course, but I think among those who are knowledgeable there’s also a tendency toward thinking life is there as well. This is especially true for those researchers who study extremophiles, Earthly microorganisms that flourish in extreme environments. Some planetary scientists are still quite skeptical.
Seed: Your argument seems to hinge, in large part, on the results from the Viking landers. Could you summarize why these results point to life?
DS: In some ways the timing was bad for Viking. A lot of progress was made after its life-detection experiments were already on or on their way to Mars: The discovery of all the ecosystems at undersea hydrothermal vents, and the extremophile research of the early 1980s really changed how we think about life and its limitations. The Viking researchers thought life on Mars would be heterotrophic, feeding off abundant organic compounds distributed everywhere all over the Martian surface. That picture was wrong, and studies of extremophiles on Earth have made us think differently about Mars.
More here.
A fun TED talk:
Joel Whitney in Guernica:
For the Scholls, the three Protestant siblings behind Germany’s short-lived White Rose movement, the choice to spam their fellow Germans was an easy one. Here’s what they told readers in the Fourth Leaflet:
And do not forget the petty scoundrels in this regime; note their names, so that none will go free! They should not find it possible, having had their part in these abominable crimes, at the last minute to rally another flag and then act as if nothing had happened!
To set you at rest, we add that the addresses of the readers of the White Rose are not recorded in writing. They were picked at random from directories.
We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!They repeatedly warned Germans of the consequences of war crimes for years to come, and declared the war unwinnable. Here’s another chunklet from the First Leaflet (there were six in all, and a seventh was under way when the movement ended in arrest):
Isn’t it true that every honest German is ashamed of his government these days? Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?
Hans and Sophie Scholl were caught distributing the leaflets, and were executed (beheaded); it fell on Inge to tell her siblings’ story.
More here. [Photo shows Sophie Scholl.]
Wainwright, his friends often say, can only be understood in the context of his family. “They just strike me as an aristocracy, a royal family,” says the musician Thomas Bartlett (who performs under the name Doveman), a collaborator who played at the Christmas show and recently recorded an album of Edith Piaf covers with Martha. “They’re usually the most compelling people in the room, and they know it.” His mother, Kate, came from the singing McGarrigles from Montreal, while his father, Loudon Wainwright III, was the Westchester-raised son of a longtime Life magazine editor. Loudon was once compared to Bob Dylan for his blunt, acerbic folk songs, but while he never became nearly that big, he’s still the only family member to have a single on the American pop charts: “Dead Skunk,” back in 1972. The couple divorced in the mid seventies, and McGarrigle raised Rufus and Martha. “We’d go out to a bar,” says artist Walt Cassidy, formerly the club kid Walt Paper, an early friend of Wainwright’s, “and Rufus’s mom and sister would be there, and if there happened to be a stage or a musical instrument, forget it—they’d kick the other band off the stage and take over the equipment and do a show.”
more from Tim Murphy at New York Magazine here.
A distinctive characteristic of modernity is its belief in its special progressive trajectory. It was during the period of Enlightenment that this belief gained its most confident and theoretical articulations. The idea of progress was certainly no ancillary dimension of the Enlightenment. As, for example, Kant’s essays on the philosophy of history make clear, the essence of the self-understanding of the Enlightenment was progress, a distinctive historical period consciously reaching beyond what had gone before. What today might be considered the lasting legacies of the Enlightenment, such as the critique of superstition, the improvement of scientific method, or the rejection of irrational authority, were contributions to rather than the core of this process. The efforts of Condorcet – who was not alone in this – to develop a science of progress tell us how real the phenomenon of progress appeared to the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. In his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind he proposed that if “there is to be a science for predicting the progress of the human race, for directing and hastening it, the history of the progress already achieved must be its foundation.” This indeed was a quite unique form of science in that the science of progress might stimulate further progress, its apparently non-paradoxical aim being to promote the very thing it set out to verify. And with regard to historical advancement, Condorcet noted, the “present state of enlightenment assures us that this revolution will have a favourable result,” delivering eventually “the abolition of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within each nation, and the true perfection of mankind.”
more from Brian O’Connor at TPM here.
The last decade has seen an explosion of copying in its various forms. Technology has made it easier to do everything from rip off a song to replicate the design of an engine, and rising powers like China and India are home to burgeoning industries dedicated to creating low-cost alternatives to cutting-edge, brand-name products, whether they’re cars, computers, or drugs. At the same time, researchers in the fields of biology, business, and economics are looking in detail at how and why and when copying works. What some are finding is that it is a strategy that works much better than we think — whether for businesses, people, or animals competing in the wild. At its best, copying spreads knowledge and speeds the process by which insights and inventions are honed, eliminating dead-end approaches and saving time, effort, and money. “We hear so much about innovation, I don’t know how many hundreds if not thousands of books, articles, and so forth,” says Oded Shenkar, a professor at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business and author of the forthcoming book “Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge,” “but imitation is at least as important as innovation if you really want to grow efficiently and make a profit.”
more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.
From The New York Times:
LAHORE, Pakistan — The professor was working in his office here on the campus of Pakistan’s largest university this month when members of an Islamic student group battered open the door, beat him with metal rods and bashed him over the head with a giant flower pot. Iftikhar Baloch, an environmental science professor, had expelled members of the group for violent behavior. The retribution left him bloodied and nearly unconscious, and it united his fellow professors, who protested with a nearly three-week strike that ended Monday. The attack and the anger it provoked have drawn attention to the student group, Islami Jamiat Talaba, whose morals police have for years terrorized this graceful, century-old institution by brandishing a chauvinistic form of Islam, teachers here say.
But the group has help from a surprising source — national political leaders who have given it free rein, because they sometimes make political alliances with its parent organization, Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s oldest and most powerful religious party, they say. The university’s plight encapsulates Pakistan’s predicament: an intolerant, aggressive minority terrorizes a more open-minded, peaceful majority, while an opportunistic political class dithers, benefiting from alliances with the aggressors. The dynamic helps explain how the Taliban and other militant groups here, though small and often unpopular minorities, retain their hold over large portions of Pakistani society.
More here.
Satyabhama
Satyabhama
Chuckled on the window seat
of the bus, and then
Hid her face
In her hands
Was she shy?
Satyabhama
Faint, dark, like a slate,
Forgotten.
How could she
Have been otherwise?
It's two decades since
She was in class five
And I in two
In our village school.
On her cheek
The flush of self-confidence
To have learnt by rote
The alphabet.
Married to a dhoti-clad gentleman,
She is now in search
Of a suitable girl
For her son;
Persuaded by the villagers
She is now a candidate
In the local body election;
She said all this
Pressing her face
To the window-sill.
Satyabhama
Gives the feeling
Of someone intimate
Like the torn pages
of an old book
From childhood
When eating porridge together
She taught me the art
of sewing sal-leaf bowls.
There was nothing more
To share with Satyabhama.
By the time I was in class five
And she in class two
The bus had left.
I do not know
If I will meet her again.
If only I had had
A fleeting glimpse
Of her face.
by Basudev Sunani
from Karadi Haata;
publisher: Eeshan-Ankit Prakashani, Naupada, 2005
From Science:
y a computer game, boost your IQ—that's the claim made by some software companies peddling so-called brain-training programs. It's probably an empty promise, according to the largest study to date of brain-training software, which finds no evidence of general cognitive benefits. Yet the study's limitations give brain-training advocates plenty to gripe about. The idea for the study originated with a BBC science television show, Bang Goes the Theory. Producers contacted Adrian Owen at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, U.K., to help design an experiment to test the efficacy of computer brain training. Many of these programs are set up like a game, and playing along supposedly boosts memory, attention, and other cognitive functions. But few rigorous studies have been conducted on them, and many researchers question whether even the best programs do anything more than make people better at the game itself. For example, there's little solid research to suggest that using these programs has a beneficial effect on overall cognition that carries over into daily life.
In the new study, Owen and colleagues developed two online training programs and tested them in 11,430 healthy adults who registered on a Web site set up by the BBC. One group trained on a program that emphasized reasoning and problem-solving skills, and another group trained on a program that emphasized different skills, including short-term memory and attention. A third, control group, essentially did busywork, hunting for answers to general knowledge questions on the Internet. All participants were asked to “train” for at least 10 minutes, three times a week for 6 weeks, and all received a battery of cognitive tests before and after this 6-week period.
Not surprisingly, people in both training groups got better at the tasks they actually practiced. But that's as far as it went. “None of the brain-training tasks transferred to other mental or cognitive abilities beyond what had been specifically practiced,” Owen's co-author and MRC colleague Jessica Grahn said at a press conference this morning announcing the results, which are published online today in Nature.
More here.
Our own Kris Kotarski in the Calgary Herald:
In 2006, psychiatry professor Anne Speckhard from Georgetown University and psychology professor Khapta Akhmedova from Chechen State University profiled the Chechen black widows like Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, 17, and Markha Ustarkhanova, 20, who attacked the Moscow metro. Looking in depth at a sample of 26 female bombers, they concluded that the death of a brother, a father or the rape of a female relative at the hands of Russian soldiers had traumatized every woman in their sample, and formed the motivation for their behaviour.
“They do not appear coerced, drugged or otherwise enticed into these acts.
On the contrary, they are self-recruited on the basis of seeking a means of enacting social justice, revenge and warfare against what they perceive as their nation's enemy. All the women in our sample had been deeply personally traumatized and bereaved by violent deaths in their near families or all about them, and we believe this formed the basis for their self-recruitment into terrorist organizations.”
Another raid, this time in Paktia Province in Afghanistan, illustrates this dynamic as well. Here, NATO admitted earlier this month that its forces were responsible for a house raid that killed five civilians, a government official, his brother, and three female relatives, including two pregnant women and a teenager.
More here.
Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic:
1. Universal access to quality pre-and-post-natal care for mothers in chronically stressed, underserved communities. The correlations between a mother's nutrition consumption and how a child is nourished for the first year of life and obesity are quite strong. Pregnant women, particularly younger pregnant women, don't experience their pregnancy with any significant degree of social or community support; they don't nurse their child with access to health care, or to a support system or feedback system that guides them.
2. Congress should ask the Federal Trade Commission to begin a rule-making process to ban food companies from advertising unhealthy food to kids under 10 or 12. The industry will probably respond by establishing (another set of) voluntary guidelines, which will progressively tighten as the rule-making progresses. Make the implementation of the rule contingent of the industry coming up and complying with its own set of rules, and perhaps monitored by an independent panel appointed by the Institute of Medicine. If the industry resists, ban all food advertising aimed at kids, and aggressively enforce the ban. Drawing lines with be difficult, because one person's advertising “aimed” at kids could easily be claimed to be “aimed” at teenagers or adults. Come down on the side of the kids. Prevent ads from airing during “family” hours. Be creative. Let's have this debate again. Marketing practices need to be revised.
3. The government already highly regulates foodstuffs and the content of school lunches. The political will exists to streamline and clarify these regs, and to prevent food companies from finding loopholes. No new regulations are needed; regulations that comport with the 21st century reality of education are required. We can regulate less, if we want to, but regulate better, if we want to.
More here.
Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:
An absolutely fascinating documentary from Dawn TV on the Karachi music scene from the 1960s into the 1970s. About a Karachi that is no more. A Karachi where Duke Ellington and Quincy Jones fly in to play.
Parts 2, 3, and 4 here. [Thanks to Sadi Raza.]
Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:
If blogs could have mascots, the Loom’s would be the Emerald Cockroach Wasp (Ampulex compressa). Back in 2006, I first wrote about the grisly sophistication of this insect, which turns cockroaches into zombie hosts to be devoured by their offspring. Since then I’ve blogged from time to time about new research on this parasite’s parasite. Last year I sang the praises of the Emerald Cockroach Wasp on the NPR show Radiolab, and, to my surprise, brought some peace of mind to a very scared kid.
Scientists still don’t understand the wasp very well, though, and so I decided last night to see if anyone had discovered something new about it recently. It turns out Ram Gal and Frederic Libersat, two scientists at Ben Gurion University in Israel, just published a paper in which they reveal one of the secrets to zombification. In effect, they identified the seat of the cockroach soul.
Before I describe the new results, let me just refresh your memory about what the Emerald Cockroach Wasp actually does.
Like many parasites, the Emerald Cockroach Wasp manipulates its host’s behavior for its own benefit. As I explain in Parasite Rex, parasites make their hosts do lots of different things (get them into the body of their next host, act as a bodyguard, or build them a shelter to name a few examples). The Emerald Cockroach Wasp needs a live, tame cockroach to feed its babies.
When the female wasp is ready to lay her eggs, she seeks out a cockroach. Landing on the prospective host, she delivers two precise stings.
More here.
Ezra Pound never made it easy. He was a poet who cared little about public success and not at all about money: he dedicated his life to art with the rapturous abandon of a bacchant. Pound saw himself as forging ahead on the path poets had pursued since the preclassical bards, toward deeper wisdom and a more perfect expression, in pursuit of the beautiful. In the years since his death, this perennial vision of an enlightened Republic of Letters, one of humankind’s greatest intellectual accomplishments, has quietly gone the way of falconry and intaglio carving. So impenetrable and taxing do Pound’s poems appear to most modern readers that the soaring ambition of his work has been eclipsed by the neatly plotted narrative of his life.
Everybody knows the story. Pound launched the Imagist movement, epitomized by that hardy perennial of poetry anthologies, “In a Station of the Metro” (in full: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet, black bough”), and then played a decisive role in shaping T. S. Eliot’s epochal masterpiece The Waste Land. He devoted the rest of his life to composing The Cantos, a vast, unreadable epic left unfinished at his death in 1972. The story ends badly: he went off the rails during the war years, embracing fascism and anti-Semitism in broadcasts for Mussolini that got him arrested for treason, and was eventually committed to a mental hospital.
As conventional wisdom goes, the standard skinny on Pound is no worse than most. True to the genre it lacks nuance, emphasizing controversy over substance, but it isn’t actually wrong about anything—except the work. Pound’s Imagist poetry was revolutionary but by no means the best even of his early compositions, and The Cantos are called unreadable by the same people who call Tristram Shandy and Ulysses unreadable, those who haven’t read them. Many of the cantos are as deeply felt and exquisitely rendered as any verse in English. No poet has ever been so influential, so controversial, and so little read.
Walter Benjamin, or rather, the now-beloved figura of Benjamin—shuffling, myopic, mustachioed, fat, unhealthy, small round glasses glinting like flashlights—was largely unattractive in his own lifetime. Introducing Benjamin, a precis of his life and work in comic-book form, spends an inordinate amount of time demonstrating that Benjamin had no positive libido—and that, in fact, women just could not under any circumstances find him attractive. How strange is it now, then, to read in the Guardian that “as a teenager,” the novelist Nicole Krauss “had a crush on the German philosopher.” How odd to reflect upon the growth and consolidation of a veritable Benjamin industry in the sixty-five years since his death, an industry that extends well beyond the academy, to art-pop songs like Laurie Anderson's “The Dream Before (For Walter Benjamin),” and Jay Parini's embarrassingly unreadable “novel of ideas” Benjamin's Crossing. A movie must surely be on the way: can I start by suggesting Tim Robbins as Benjamin?
Such widespread reverence has been essential to the growth of Benjamin studies; but it has also served as a barrier to actual understanding and use of his thought. Franco Moretti, for one, leveled a bitter disparagement at academics for treating Benjamin as “the sancta sanctorum” of literary criticism, a pure soul from whose gloomy pen issued the true plash of ideas, protected from the reproof and constant reconsideration one expects from critics. Susan Sontag's “Under the Sign of Saturn,” (originally published in the New York Review of Books, with Sontag's characteristic vatic humorlessness, as “The Last Intellectual”) is symptomatic of this unreserved Benjamin adoration. She begins by lovingly—too lovingly, perhaps—describing photographic portraits of the man, how “the downward look through his glasses—the soft, day-dreamer's gaze of the myopic—seems to float off to the lower left of the photograph.” She goes on to discuss Benjamin's melancholia and saturnine disposition, glancingly using Benjamin's own highly interesting work on melancholy and German Baroque allegory to produce wan axioms and declarations: “precisely because the melancholy character is haunted by death, it is melancholics who best know how to read the world”; “only because the past is dead is one able to read it.” The presentation of Benjamin's ideas on allegory, collecting, and city life point continuously back to Benjamin the pudgy myopic. Using what is clearly an “erotics” of reading and not a hermeneutics, Sontag winds up arguing, however inadvertently, on behalf of the photographs, the image, the figure of Benjamin—as if to say: only because he is dead is one able to make love to him.
I never knew Toni Avegael. She was born in Antwerp in February 1926 and lived there most of her life. We were related: she was my father’s first cousin. I well remember her older sister Lily: a tall, sad lady whom my parents and I used to visit in a little house somewhere in northwest London. We have long since lost touch, which is a pity.
I am reminded of the Avegael sisters (there was a middle girl, Bella) whenever I ask myself—or am asked—what it means to be Jewish. There is no general-purpose answer to this question: it is always a matter of what it means to be Jewish for me—something quite distinct from what it means for my fellow Jews. To outsiders, such concerns are mysterious. A Protestant who does not believe in the Scriptures, a Catholic who abjures the authority of the Pope in Rome, or a Muslim for whom Muhammad is not the Prophet: these are incoherent categories. But a Jew who rejects the authority of the rabbis is still Jewish (even if only by the rabbis’ own matrilineal definition): who is to tell him otherwise?
I reject the authority of the rabbis—all of them (and for this I have rabbinical authority on my side). I participate in no Jewish community life, nor do I practice Jewish rituals. I don’t make a point of socializing with Jews in particular—and for the most part I haven’t married them. I am not a “lapsed” Jew, having never conformed to requirements in the first place. I don’t “love Israel” (either in the modern sense or in the original generic meaning of loving the Jewish people), and I don’t care if the sentiment is reciprocated. But whenever anyone asks me whether or not I am Jewish, I unhesitatingly respond in the affirmative and would be ashamed to do otherwise.
The ostensible paradox of this condition is clearer to me since coming to New York: the curiosities of Jewish identity are more salient here.
