Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Can it be ethical to give girl fetuses a drug to prevent ambiguous genitalia when the drug may also influence their sexual preferences in later life? The US researchers involved reject the idea of using the drug to “treat” homosexuality.

New Scientist explores what's behind the story.

What is the treatment, and what is it used for at present?

The treatment is for a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which affects about 1 in 15,000 babies. Fetuses affected by CAH have gene defects which mean that they either can't make or don't make enough of a key adrenal hormone called 21-hydroxylase.

That means that their adrenal glands carry on producing male hormones long after they should have stopped. Boys' sexual organs are not affected by this, but about one in eight fetuses that are at risk of CAH will be female and develop genitalia with masculine characteristics, such as a large clitoris. Girls may also have their urethra positioned inside the vagina, for example.

At birth doctors and parents may have difficulty deciding the gender of girls affected this way, and many go on to have surgery to correct the physical abnormalities. But a group of researchers led by Maria New of the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York have been testing a treatment that prevents the anatomical abnormalities in the womb. It means giving a pregnant woman at risk of having a child with CAH a drug called dexamethasone (dex) starting as early as five weeks after conception. The drug keeps male hormones at a normal level, reducing the possibility of the anatomical defects, though it has no effect on their CAH – people with the disorder will continue to take medication throughout their life.

How might such a treatment stop girls being gay?

The majority of girls with CAH are heterosexual. One of the hallmarks of girls who have CAH is that they are more likely to be tomboyish, to avoid having children in adulthood, and are slightly more likely than the average girl to be gay or bisexual.

The IMF's Olivier Blanchard and Carlo Cottarelli, in Vox EU:

Advanced economies are facing the difficult challenge of implementing fiscal adjustment strategies without undermining a still-fragile economic recovery. Fiscal adjustment is key to high private investment and long-term growth. It may also be key, at least in some countries, to avoiding disorderly financial market conditions, which would have a more immediate impact on growth through effects on confidence and lending. But too much adjustment could also hamper growth, and this is not a trivial risk. How should fiscal strategies be designed to make them consistent with both short-term and long-term growth requirements?

We offer ten commandments to make this possible. Put simply, what advanced countries need is clarity of intent, an appropriate calibration of fiscal targets, and adequate structural reforms – with a little help from monetary policy and their (emerging market) friends.

Commandment I: You shall have a credible medium-term fiscal plan with a visible anchor (in terms of either an average pace of adjustment, or of a fiscal target to be achieved within 4–5 years).

There is no simple one-size-fits-all rule. Our current macroeconomic projections imply that an average improvement in the cyclically-adjusted primary balance of some 1 percentage point per year during the next four to five years would be consistent with gradually closing the output gap, given current expectations on private sector demand, and would stabilise the average debt ratio by the middle of this decade. Countries with higher deficits/debt should do more; others should do less. Such a pace of adjustment must be backed up by fairly specific spending and revenue projections and supported by structural reforms (see below).

Raghuram Rajan in Project Syndicate:

Before the recent financial crisis, politicians on both sides of the aisle in the United States egged on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-backed mortgage agencies, to support low-income lending in their constituencies. There was a deeper concern behind this newly discovered passion for housing for the poor: growing income inequality.

Since the 1970’s, wages for workers at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution in the US –such as office managers – have grown much faster than wages for the median worker (at the 50th percentile), such as factory workers and office assistants. A number of factors are responsible for the growth in the 90/50 differential.

Perhaps the most important is that technological progress in the US requires the labor force to have ever greater skills. A high school diploma was sufficient for office workers 40 years ago, whereas an undergraduate degree is barely sufficient today. But the education system has been unable to provide enough of the labor force with the necessary education. The reasons range from indifferent nutrition, socialization, and early-childhood learning to dysfunctional primary and secondary schools that leave too many Americans unprepared for college.

The everyday consequence for the middle class is a stagnant paycheck and growing job insecurity. Politicians feel their constituents’ pain, but it is hard to improve the quality of education, for improvement requires real and effective policy change in an area where too many vested interests favor the status quo.

Moreover, any change will require years to take effect, and therefore will not address the electorate’s current anxiety. Thus, politicians have looked for other, quicker ways to mollify their constituents. We have long understood that it is not income that matters, but consumption. A smart or cynical politician would see that if somehow middle-class households’ consumption kept up, if they could afford a new car every few years and the occasional exotic holiday, perhaps they would pay less attention to their stagnant paychecks.

Therefore, the political response to rising inequality – whether carefully planned or the path of least resistance – was to expand lending to households, especially low-income households.

Jordan Ellenberg on the Poincaré conjecture, in Slate:

Poincaré conjectured that three-dimensional shapes that share certain easy-to-check properties with spheres actually are spheres. What are these properties? My fellow geometer Christina Sormani describes the setup as follows:

The Poincaré Conjecture says, Hey, you've got this alien blob that can ooze its way out of the hold of any lasso you tie around it? Then that blob is just an out-of-shape ball. [Grigory] Perelman and [Columbia University's Richard] Hamilton proved this fact by heating the blob up, making it sing, stretching it like hot mozzarella, and chopping it into a million pieces. In short, the alien ain't no bagel you can swing around with a string through his hole.

That's zingier than anything the Times will run, but may still leave you without a clear picture of Perelman's theorem. Indeed, it's pretty hard to give an elementary account of the statement that Poincaré conjectured and that Perelman seems to have confirmed. (If that's what you're after, Sormani's home page links to a variety of expositions, including one in the form of a short story.) Instead, I'll try to explain why Perelman's theorem matters without explaining what it is.

Susan Stewart reviews The Sonnets and Poems of the Night, both by Jorge Luis Borges, in The Nation:

In the introduction to his Obra Poética 1923–1985, brought out by Emecé Editores in Buenos Aires in 1989, Borges recalls a passage from a letter of his beloved literary ancestor Robert Louis Stevenson: “I do not set up to be a poet. Only an all-round literary man: a man who talks, not one who sings…. Excuse this apology; but I don't like to come before people who have a note of song, and let it be supposed I do not know the difference.” This borrowed strategy of first apologizing, then dazzling, was an intrinsic aspect of Borges's public persona; we find it, too, in the doubled being of his well-known little essay “Borges and I.” There he writes: “news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor…. I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification.”

Obscure provincial of the New World, destined to live out his life as a near invalid in a tiny apartment with his mother once he loses his “reading and writing” sight in his mid-50s; prim celibate; lover, Platonic or otherwise, of dozens of women and husband of two in his late age; firebrand of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, who brought the news of Geneva, Madrid, Seville and Majorca to Buenos Aires; publisher, in the 1920s, of the “Ultraist” Symbolist journal Prisma and of Proa, the journal of democratic reform and liberal, syncretic, poetics; high school dropout; devotee of Federico García Lorca, denigrator of García Lorca; the most learned reader of the twentieth century; in a bizarre historical irony, the third person to hold the position of director of the National Library of Argentina “whom God granted both books and blindness”; professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and scholar of Anglo-Saxon; recipient of honorary degrees from Oxford, Columbia, Cambridge and elsewhere, of the Jerusalem Prize, the Alfonso Reyes Prize and the Cervantes Prize; longstanding supporter of the Radical Party; fearless opponent of the dictatorship of Juan Domingo Perón; willfully naïve apologist for the brutal late-1970s military regimes of Argentina and Chile. There is no end to the string of paradoxes that arise from the biographies of Borges and “Borges.”

Such contradictions were indeed part of Borges's legacy—from his family, his nation, his literary tradition.

From Wired:

Several evenings a week, after a day’s work at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, Sergey Brin drives up the road to a local pool. There, he changes into swim trunks, steps out on a 3-meter springboard, looks at the water below, and dives. Brin is competent at all four types of springboard diving—forward, back, reverse, and inward. Recently, he’s been working on his twists, which have been something of a struggle. But overall, he’s not bad; in 2006 he competed in the master’s division world championships. (He’s quick to point out he placed sixth out of six in his event.) The diving is the sort of challenge that Brin, who has also dabbled in yoga, gymnastics, and acrobatics, is drawn to: equal parts physical and mental exertion. “The dive itself is brief but intense,” he says. “You push off really hard and then have to twist right away. It does get your heart rate going.”

There’s another benefit as well: With every dive, Brin gains a little bit of leverage—leverage against a risk, looming somewhere out there, that someday he may develop the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson’s disease. Buried deep within each cell in Brin’s body—in a gene called LRRK2, which sits on the 12th chromosome—is a genetic mutation that has been associated with higher rates of Parkinson’s. Not everyone with Parkinson’s has an LRRK2 mutation; nor will everyone with the mutation get the disease. But it does increase the chance that Parkinson’s will emerge sometime in the carrier’s life to between 30 and 75 percent. (By comparison, the risk for an average American is about 1 percent.) Brin himself splits the difference and figures his DNA gives him about 50-50 odds.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Since 1998, the New York Public Library has housed a manuscript so blistering that researchers are probably required to don oven mitts before handling it. Consisting of a long-overlooked autobiographical fragment by Claire Clairmont, who was Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Lord Byron’s lover and the inspiration for Henry James’s “Aspern Papers,” it has the declared intention of showing what “evil passion” sprang from the pursuit of free love by Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. “Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love,” Clairmont states, “I saw the two first poets of England . . . become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery — under the influence of free love Lord B became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women.” Her indictment, which Daisy Hay says is now being published for the first time, comes only at the end of “Young Romantics” yet sends a blast of scorching fury back across the entire book. For Clairmont’s charges, however hyperbolic, have about them a degree of truth. Not just for her but for Mary Shelley and other women, participating in the communal, proto-1960s life of “English poetry’s greatest generation,” as Hay’s subtitle puts it, was ultimately less thrilling than damaging. This, at least, is the dominant impression I took away from “Young Romantics,” even if it isn’t Hay’s thesis or even drift.

More here.

Captain Haddock vs. the PTA
……………………..
Bewildered Saint of the curse, bulbous
& profane, I invoke you against this Nest
Of Lice & Vipers: O volcanic Captain, I implore you, pour
Your scorn upon these Borgias; before these Braggarts
Unfurl your thick invective, show your bullet head
Whiskey-pickled, weathered & pupilless, sweating
In a bantam rage, your sad-fish face a fist;
Ostrogothic versus the matrons
Voluble against the Vampire’s slander
Because I would never say Vivisectionist to her face
While you old Captain Fatstock, Hopscotch, Havoc
Denouncer of Bullies, Knitters & Bandits
Live to make the air around you frantic
To spill your black lake of Cannibal ink.
……………………..
by Amy Beeder
from Poetry, Vol. 194, No. 4,
July/August, 2009

It feels as if I wrote American Psycho 100 years ago. I think I began it in December 1986 and finished it in December 1989; it was published in 1991. I was 22 when I started writing and 26 – the same age as Bateman – when it was ready for publication. I was young, but I felt old. I wanted to write a novel about the people on Wall Street making vast sums of money. I wanted to write about someone who was very emblematic of the period. But I was also writing about myself. On a certain level it was an autobiographical novel. In many ways Patrick Bateman was me: his rage, his disgust and to a degree his passivity stem from what I was feeling at the time. And boredom. The novel is really about my loneliness, my alienation. I wasn’t part of the yuppie culture of the America of the 80s. I identify a lot with Bateman’s criticism of the society and the culture he is in. I found myself in a similar position where I was both upset at what it meant to become an adult and also found myself attracted to certain aspects of whatever that lifestyle meant at that time. The term “yuppie” was coined in something like 1984. In retrospect, Wall Street is just wallpaper in the novel. I don’t think it would be as widely read if the point or the message of the book was specifically an attack on yuppie culture. I think there’s a larger feeling that people respond to in the book. I don’t know what that is, but it is obviously something.

more from Bret Easton Ellis at The Guardian here.

The Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam are more than just icons of American engineering. They are Depression-era monuments that transformed not only California’s physical landscape, but its social one as well. The bridge linked San Francisco to rural Marin County, hastening the consolidation of the Bay Area into a huge metropolis. The dam brought reliable irrigation to Imperial Valley farms, as well as drinking water and hydroelectric power to Los Angeles and other Southwestern cities, fostering their explosive growth. Both structures smashed precedents: Rising 726 feet above the Colorado River bed, Hoover was more than twice as high as the tallest previous dam on its opening day in 1935; the Golden Gate, with its 4,200-foot-long main span, was the longest suspension bridge in the world when the first pedestrian crossed its span on May 27, 1937. With their soaring ambitions clad in sleek Art Deco designs, bridge and dam seem the epitome of New Deal optimism. Yet neither was a New Deal project.

more from Wendy Smith at the LAT here.

Belief in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth and belief in the virtue of his teachings are not at all the same thing. Writing to John Adams in 1813, having taken his razor blade to the books of the New Testament and removed all “the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests,” Thomas Jefferson said the 46-page residue contained “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Ernest Renan, in his pathbreaking “Life of Jesus” in 1863, also repudiated the idea that Jesus was the son of God while affirming the beauty of his teachings. In rather striking contrast, C. S. Lewis maintained in his classic statement “Mere Christianity”: “That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.” As an admirer of Jefferson and Renan and a strong nonadmirer of Lewis, I am bound to say that Lewis is more honest here. Absent a direct line to the Almighty and a conviction that the last days are upon us, how is it “moral” to teach people to abandon their families, give up on thrift and husbandry and take to the stony roads? How is it moral to claim a monopoly on access to heaven, or to threaten waverers with everlasting fire, let alone to condemn fig trees and persuade devils to infest the bodies of pigs? Such a person if not divine would be a sorcerer and a ­fanatic.

more from Christopher Hitchens at the NYT here.

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Some birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic field and orientate themselves with the ease of a compass needle. This ability is a massive boon for migrating birds, keeping frequent flyers on the straight and narrow. But this incredible sense is closely tied to a more mundane one – vision. Thanks to special molecules in their retinas, birds like the European robins can literally see magnetic fields. The fields appear as patterns of light and shade, or even colour, superimposed onto what they normally see.

Katrin Stapput from Goethe University has shown that this ‘magnetoreception’ ability depends on a clear image from the right eye. If the eye is covered by a translucent frosted goggle, the birds become disorientated; if the left eye is covered, they can navigate just fine. So the robin’s vision acts as a gate for its magnetic sense. Darkness (or even murkiness) keeps the gate shut, but light opens it, allowing the internal compass to work.

The magnetic sense of birds was first discovered in robins in 1968, and its details have been teased out ever since. Years of careful research have told us that the ability depends on light and particularly on the right eye and the left half of the brain. The details still aren’t quite clear but, for now, the most likely explanation involves a molecule called cryptochrome. Cryptochrome is found in the light-sensitive cells of a bird’s retina and scientists think that it affects just how sensitive those cells are.

When cryptochrome is struck by blue light, it shifts into an active state where it has an unpaired electron – these particles normally waltz in pairs but here, they dance solo. The same thing happens in a companion molecule called FAD. Together, cryptochrome and FAD, both with unpaired electrons, are known as a “radical pair”. Magnetic fields act upon the unpaired electrons and govern how long it takes for the radical pair to revert back to their normal, inactive state. And because cryptochrome affects the sensitivity of a bird’s retina, so do magnetic fields.

Havi Carel and Greg Tuck in The Philosophers Magazine:

Film studies scholars have always drawn on philosophical ideas. Philosophers, and in particular those working on aesthetics and philosophy of art, have been interested in cinema for as long as it has existed. However, film as philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline is relatively new, emerging in the 80s and coming into its own over the past five years. The 00s have seen the emergence of extraordinary interest and a large number of publications focusing on the conjunction of film and philosophy. This is not to say that it is a well-defined field of enquiry or one that has broad agreement amongst its practitioners on what exactly it is and what it should be doing. This lack of agreement is what, in part, contributes to the richness of this sub-discipline.

Cognitivist film theorists appeal to philosophy of mind and perception and even neuroscience to analyse the experience of film viewing. Wittgensteinians, such as Cavell, have linked film and representation to the general problem of scepticism. Other philosophers, such as Deleuze, Adorno and Baudrillard, have each inspired a different range of film-philosophical understandings. What this diverse work shares are the questions: what film can bring to philosophy, how it can broaden our understanding of philosophical activity as going beyond the written and spoken word, and whether this practice will transform our views of what philosophy is.

Much of the debate has focused on exactly what philosophers can do with film. On the simplest level, film can be used to illustrate existing philosophical ideas. The Matrix has often been used to demonstrate sceptical arguments about the nature of our perceptions and the reality of the external world. But increasingly, philosophers see film as not just illustrating but advancing philosophical views. Thus we can see Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanours as playing out the classical problem of inequity: how can an evil man flourish, while a righteous man suffers?

A stronger view still is advanced by Stephen Mulhall in his book On Film, in which he claims that films can actually do philosophy in a way that is as cogent and detailed as philosophical texts.

Over at The Immanent Frame:

NS [Nathan Schneider]: Natural Reflections has been the subject of a lively debate (here and here) on Stanley Fish’s blog at The New York Times. Have you found the exchange productive?

BHS: One-shot retorts, or seesaw exchanges on blogs, are rarely models of intellectually productive discussion, but Stanley Fish’s columns attract thoughtful readers, and I found the responses to his column on Natural Reflections instructive. Two related anxieties were repeatedly voiced on the basis of Fish’s description of my evenhanded—or, in fact, determinedly symmetrical—treatment of religious beliefs and what we take as scientific knowledge. One is that I am flattening out important differences between them. The other is that I’m refusing to take a stand on a major issue of our time, and thus—wittingly or unwittingly—giving aid and comfort to the wrong side.

The first of these worries is unwarranted. While I locate the differences between “science” and “religion” on multiple levels, I don’t diminish either the significance of such differences or the stakes that may be involved in identifying them accurately.

The second worry is, I think, misplaced in principle, and reflects increasingly oversimplified public views of science, religion, and the relations between them. Most of the commentators anxious about what side the book comes out on are concerned, I think, about such issues as the promotion of creationist ideas in science classes, or the clerical condemnation of contraceptive devices or homosexuality—that is, public issues in which noisy literalist convictions clash with established scientific accounts, or where informed secular attitudes are confronted by uncompromising ecclesiastic doctrine. Such concerns are understandable and I share them. But taking a clear stand on such issues does not require choosing sides between Science and Religion, conceived as monolithic adversaries in an epic battle.

Justin Smith over at his blog:

I still have fantasies about being an anthropologist, but I have to admit I would be terrible at it. I don't mind being an observer, but to be a participant-observer, that's a bit too much to ask of me. Forget about living for years among rainforest-dwelling, insectivorous hunter-gatherers: I have trouble passing a single week in a provincial Romanian town, surviving on nothing but traditional home cooking (even though it's cooked with love). I prefer my meals meatless, largely uncooked, heavily based on imported and exotic fruits, grains, and pulses. Now that I am back in Bucharest, whenever I see a restaurant that advertises food that is 'just like home', I think to myself: Well in that case nevermind.

But still, the questions that anthropologists ask, if not the field investigations they undertake, attract me more than ever. This much was driven home to me after a leisurely morning of reading recently, during which I alternated between the eminent moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum's recent work in defense of same-sex marriage, and the eminent anthropologist Jack Goody's The Theft of History, a learned tirade against the remnants of Eurocentrism in the writing of world history. The contrast was stark: in the latter case, there was a thinker at work, surveying the range of possible ways human beings do in fact organize societies and attempting to draw general conclusions from these data about the nature of human social existence as such. In the former case, there was a thinker at work, surveying the prevailing opinions of her small community (educated, liberal Westerners), and then attempting to come up with a priori arguments in defense of them.

“This is the first line. . .”

This is the first line. This line is meaningless.
And this is the second line, in which you’re no longer yourself,
which means you aren’t the person from the first line,
and now you aren’t even who you were
in lines two and three, and four, and additionally

in five. This poem is life, I do everything
to be myself in every line, so that every line
by some miracle bends back to me, meanwhile you,
whether you want to or not, must live this life and in

the last line, as close to the end as possible,
make the grade, the subject of which will be
you. You’ll only survive if you admit

that the poem spoke of God. The last line will come
however faster
than

by Tadeusz Dabrowski
from Agni, 2009
translation from Polish: Jennifer Carter-Zielińska

From Scientific American:

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have identified long-sought and elusive broadly neutralizing antibodies to HIV in a pair of papers published in the July 9 issue of Science. These proteins produced by the innate immune system are crucial for creating a preventive vaccine, and could also have therapeutic uses developed in the coming years or decades. Variations in individuals' innate and adaptive immune systems can dramatically affect responses to infection—HIV is no exception. The result generally can be shown as a bell curve, with a group of people whose disease progresses rapidly, a broad middle segment who progress typically, and a small group of “elite controllers” whose immune systems are quite effective at containing HIV viral replication. The quest to figure out why has focused primarily on the adaptive immune system, because CD4+ and CD8+ T cells have a clearly demonstrated capacity to kill cells infected with HIV. But that response only arises some days, weeks and even months after a person has been exposed to HIV and the virus has integrated itself into cellular DNA, establishing lifelong infection. The adaptive immune response can only contain an established infection, it cannot prevent that infection from occurring at its onset.

The innate immune system is the first line of defense against infection. It attacks at the initial exposure to a pathogen, and can prevent the establishment of infection—and HIV is no exception. But there are a number of reasons why it has proved difficult to identify components of the innate immune response that can neutralize the deadly virus. HIV transmission is not very efficient. Exposed persons may avoid infection for a variety of mechanical (barrier) and biological reasons, such as the virus's failure to penetrate to the surface of mucosal tissue or dendritic cell difficulties in latching onto the virus to carry it to a lymph node. So it is challenging to conclusively identify the contribution of a specific innate immune response that can prevent an initial infection. Over the years, it has become clear that there are factors other than CD4+ and CD8+ T cells that help to control the virus in at least a portion of those infected with HIV.

Researchers have identified several antibodies that can neutralize the virus.

More here.

From Nature:

Stress has acquired a bad image as a contributor to disease, but a little stress may be no bad thing. Mice raised in a complex environment providing social interactions, opportunities to learn and increased physical activity are less likely to get cancer, and better at fighting it when they do, a new study suggests. A mild boost in stress hormones seems to be what keeps the cancer at bay by switching on a molecular pathway that restrains tumour growth.

Researchers from the United States and New Zealand injected mice with melanoma cells — the deadliest form of skin cancer. After six weeks, mice raised in an enriched environment — extra-large cages housing 20 individuals with running wheels and other toys — had tumours that were almost 80% smaller than those in mice raised in standard housing — five animals to a cage with no additional stimulation. Whereas all the normally housed mice developed tumours, 17% of the mice from the enriched environment developed no tumours at all. Tests in mice with colon cancer showed the same effect.

More here.

Like all soccer writers, I have a debilitating nostalgic streak, and like all soccer writers, I love Holland. The Dutch, who face Spain in Sunday’s World Cup final, are soccer’s most gorgeous losers, a team defined by a single generation of players who brilliantly failed to reach their potential. The Dutch teams of the 1970s—led by the mercurial Johan Cruyff, who’s widely considered the greatest European player of all time—launched a tactical revolution, played one of the most thrilling styles of their era, and lost two consecutive World Cup finals in memorable and devastating ways. In the process, they became the icons of soccer romantics who would rather see teams play beautifully and lose than win and be boring. That’s a harsh legacy for any team that just wants to take home trophies, and this year’s Dutch squad is trying hard to transcend it. The dreams of millions of fans are riding on their success. Personally, I hope they fail. The legend of Dutch soccer begins, and inevitably ends, with Totaalvoetbal: “total football.” The Dutch haven’t really played total football in years; their current World Cup team is constructed more in opposition to the system than in line with it. But embraced or resisted, it’s the idée fixe that looms over everything they do.

more from Brian Phillips at Slate here.