This is an essay on drawing; but first of all I have a brief word to say in connection with literature. Ideas about the novel were, for a very long time, misdirected by the concept of “likeness to life,” indeed to some degree the notion has still not quite gone away. It implies (what is in fact absurd) that a bound collection of printed pages, or a string of sentences, or a narrative could actually be “like” life, in the weak sense in which a replica or recording is like its original. It is important that criticism of the novel should have learnt to get on without this false notion, and with it the concepts of “mimesis” and “realism.” That a novel can, in some way, “mirror” or be a copy of the human matters that it deals with is not, after all, something that would ever be posited of a poem or a work of history. A history of the American Civil War will not be expected to be like a civil war. The relationship between a work of fiction and human life is of the greatest significance, but it is not a relationship of likeness, or indeed of unlikeness. Shall we say much the same when it comes to paintings and drawings, I mean about the relationship between them and the scenes or objects they refer to? Certainly not so obviously; all the same, the more one considers the matter, the more one feels driven to do so. Here is what Ernst Gombrich says in his Art and Illusion about a painting by Constable of the country house Wivenhoe Park. “Constable’s painting is surely much more like a photograph than the works of either a Cubist or a medieval artist. But what do we mean when we say that a photograph, in its turn, is like the landscape it represents?” His answer to his own question is not very satisfactory.

more from P. N. Furbank at Threepenny Review here.

Jürgen Habermas ranks today as the single most important public intellectual in all of Continental Europe. But he is also a formidable philosopher whose major contributions to social and political theory, constitutional law, historical sociology, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of language (to name only the fields he revisits with greatest frequency) are pitched at such air-gasping heights of difficulty and place such merciless demands upon the reader as to turn away all but the most fearless. This twofold persona—technical philosopher and public controversialist—does not strike most Europeans as unfamiliar. Sartre was such a creature, too. But in the Anglophone world it is a species that remains exotic. John Rawls, to whom Habermas is often compared, is justly remembered as the major Anglophone political philosopher of the twentieth century, but beyond the university walls his public presence was minimal. You have to go back to the early twentieth century—maybe to Bertrand Russell—to find a philosopher who achieved a similar prestige for both his technical philosophical achievements and his interventions on the public stage.

more from Peter Gordon at TNR here.

Husna Haq in The Christian Science Monitor:

Loughner’s YouTube profile page includes a long list of his favorite books. On the list are “Animal Farm,” “Brave New World,” “The Wizard Of Oz,” “Aesop Fables,” “The Odyssey,” “Alice Adventures Into Wonderland,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Peter Pan,” “To Kill A Mockingbird,” “We The Living,” “Phantom Toll Booth,” “One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,” “Pulp,” “Through The Looking Glass,” “The Communist Manifesto,” “Siddhartha,” “The Old Man And The Sea,” “Gulliver's Travels,” “Mein Kampf,” “The Republic,” and “Meno.” Since its discovery, observers have scrutinized the list, straining to find clues about the mysterious 22-year-old suspect. They have attempted to draw correlations between his bookshelf and the impetus that drove him to release an explosion of bullets into Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others, ultimately leaving six people dead and 13 wounded or in critical condition, including Rep. Giffords. What insight does Loughner’s reading list offer?

Anti-government propaganda, for starters. “In examining Loughner’s list of favorite books, which includes Orwell and 'Mein Kampf,' the Southern Poverty Law Center’s [Mark] Potok notes that an anti-government thread runs through all those works,” reports Newsweek. In the current climate of political vitriol and venom, particularly regarding health care and immigration, the impassioned political rhetoric may have inspired violence in the mentally-troubled 22-year-old Loughner.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A new online game allows non-scientists to design molecules of RNA and then see how well the best of their virtual creations perform in a real-life lab. The game, called EteRNA, breaks down a barrier that has long kept the virtual reality of video games separate from the real world and in the process may help scientists build ever more sophisticated RNA machines, according to the game's creators. RNAs, or ribonucleic acids, have long been recognized as messengers for genetic information, but “we are just beginning to understand how powerful they are,” Adrien Treuille, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, told me today. For one, scientists think RNA regulates cells, acting much like the operating system of a computer. Until recently, though, this role was overshadowed by DNA, which encodes genes and proteins and do the work of the cells.

EteRNA will help scientists understand how RNA folds, knowledge that can then be applied to how it works in viruses and cells. Eventually, RNA could even be used to build little machines and sensors. “It is an amazing substrate for nanoengineering,” Treuille, who lead the design for EteRNA, said. “It is very simple to synthesize, unlike proteins, and it folds up into these really interesting, beautiful shapes which have all sorts of nanoengineering applications.”

More here.

Nathan Schneider in The Immanent Frame:

Patrick Lee Miller is an assistant professor of philosophy at Duquesne University and the author of Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy (Continuum). His work focuses primarily on ancient Greek philosophy, albeit in constant conversation with modern thinkers. Becoming God examines the early conflict between Heraclitean philosophy and the Parmenidean metaphysics that was to become the cornerstone of Plato’s thought, and hence of the tradition of Western philosophy that followed in his wake.

NS: What is at stake in the questions of time and consistency that you’re probing through your inquiries into ancient philosophy?

PLM: If you’ve ever lost someone you loved, or ever deeply regretted something you’ve done, then time is a problem for you. We’ve all longed for the past, whether to be with someone or to be without some deed. Nietzsche expressed this very clearly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where his hero says that our impotence before “greedy time” makes us resentful of it. To cope with this resentment, we dream of hinterworlds outside of time, eternities that promise to redeem us from its greed. There, everything will be made whole, every beloved will live again. So goes the dream. The sort of rationality pioneered by Parmenides—consistency—makes time impossible, and so when Plato combined it with the philosophical religion of Pythagoreanism, the result was a moralized rejection of time. We can cope with greedy time, for Plato, by seeing it as not only unreal, but evil. Our real life is not here, but there, among the Forms in eternity. If that’s so, however, why not commit suicide and get there immediately? This is a serious problem for Platonism. To avoid its nihilism and affirm our life in this world, we need a way to understand time as fully real. I argue in the book that Heraclitus offers this way.

More here.

From The Browser:

These books you’ve picked – have you chosen them to get people interested in statistics? Or are they more for people who are already interested in statistics as a way to think about statistics?

Statistics is what people think math is. Statistics is about patterns and that’s what people think math is about. The difference is that in math, you have to get very complicated before you get to interesting patterns. The math that we can all easily do – things like circles and triangles and squares – doesn’t really describe reality that much. Mandelbrot, when he wrote about fractals and talked about the general idea of self-similar processes, made it clear that if you want to describe nature, or social reality, you need very complicated mathematical constructions. The math that we can all understand from high school is just not going to be enough to capture the interesting features of real world patterns. Statistics, however, can capture a lot more patterns at a less technical level, because statistics, unlike mathematics, is all about uncertainty and variation. So all the books that I thought of, they’re all non-technical, but they’re all about variation and comparison and patterns. I put them in order from most statistical to least statistical. Most people would probably only consider the first of them as really about statistics, but they’re all about statistical thinking, as I view it.

Your first one, then, is The Bill James Baseball Abstracts, from 1982 to 1986. I have to confess I know nothing about either statistics or baseball…

Baseball and statistics traditionally go together. One of my inspirations to become a statistician was reading The Bill James Baseball Abstracts. I can’t remember what Bill James did before, but he had an unusual career: I believe he was a night watchman. He was not employed by any baseball team or academic organisation. He just, on his own, decided he wanted to study baseball statistics. He wrote a series of books called The Baseball Abstracts that became widely published, starting in 1982, and became cult classics. In these books he mixes in stories about baseball and goofy statistics – which in the pre-ESPN era weren’t widely available – with in-depth analysis of questions such as, which is more important: speed or power? At what age are baseball players most productive?

More here.

Alex Shephard in Full Stop:

Immigrants today, Shteyngart tells me, “move back and forth all the time and live in a kind of limbo.” In Super Sad True Love Story, his latest novel, all of the characters — not just immigrants — live in this limbo. Permanently wedded to äppäräts – a somewhat more sinister descendant of the iPhone – the characters struggle to relate to one another and, living in a world in which their personality and “fuckability” are constantly and publicly being rated by others. In this sense, Shteyngart perhaps more than any other contemporary writer understands the appeal of social networking: it promises the connection that we crave, but never quite delivers.

I spoke with Gary about the role technology plays in Super Sad True Love Story, and our lives, the state of the novel, and the Real Estate section of The New York Times during a recent stop on his book tour in Philadelphia.

You’ve said that you think of yourself as being an entertainer as much as an intellectual. Can you talk about that distinction? And how did that idea of yourself develop?

It used to be that novelists wanted to entertain. Huckleberry Finn: helluva read. Portnoy’s Complaint, a big monologue aimed at an unsuspecting audience: hilarious. If it wasn’t funny, who gave a shit? Some dude has problems with his mom? Whatever. So that’s always at the basis of what I’m trying to do. I don’t want literature – literary fiction – to be ghettoized, to be this tiny little thing that’s only read by the people who write it. That’s the worst thing – poetry is basically already in that condition. But I don’t know – I don’t see too many great things on the horizon. More and more people work in academia like I do and it’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

More here.

Clay Shirky in Foreign Affairs:

On January 17, 2001, during the impeachment trial of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted to set aside key evidence against him. Less than two hours after the decision was announced, thousands of Filipinos, angry that their corrupt president might be let off the hook, converged on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major crossroads in Manila. The protest was arranged, in part, by forwarded text messages reading, “Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk.” The crowd quickly swelled, and in the next few days, over a million people arrived, choking traffic in downtown Manila.

The public's ability to coordinate such a massive and rapid response — close to seven million text messages were sent that week — so alarmed the country's legislators that they reversed course and allowed the evidence to be presented. Estrada's fate was sealed; by January 20, he was gone. The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a national leader. Estrada himself blamed “the text-messaging generation” for his downfall.

Since the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, the world's networked population has grown from the low millions to the low billions. Over the same period, social media have become a fact of life for civil society worldwide, involving many actors — regular citizens, activists, nongovernmental organizations, telecommunications firms, software providers, governments. This raises an obvious question for the U.S. government: How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it?

More here. [Free registration required.]

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

The best political speech I ever heard was delivered by the late Paul Foot, scion of one of England's great radical and socialist families, at the Oxford Union in the late 1960s. The motion before the house was in favor of the African National Congress and its decision to renew “armed struggle” against the white supremacist regime in South Africa. By then, I knew enough about apartheid to be convinced that such a policy was justified almost by definition, but Paul wasn't content with that. Using extraordinary skill and patience, he reviewed the efforts of the trade unions, the legal parliamentary opposition, the churches, the censored but still active press, and all the other constituents of “civil society” to resist or even to ameliorate the conditions imposed on the majority by a pitiless oligarchy and its iron-bound cult of racist and fundamentalist theology. He detailed the efforts of the ANC to make its case at the United Nations and other international forums and chronicled the heroism of its lawyers in defending both individual and communal rights before the rigged South African courts. To every attempt of this sort, as he demonstrated, the response had been increased repression and the confiscation of even more land, more rights, and more liberties. Having at one point laid down the gun, the ANC now had every right to take it up again.

What impressed me about this masterly speech was not so much the case itself, with which I already agreed, but the “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” that it exemplified. A decision to resort to violence was not something to be undertaken without great care—and stated in terms that were addressed to reasonable people.

More here.

By some accounts, the first draft of Moby-Dick was a conventional sea story. Hawthorne encouraged him to develop such transcendent themes as obsession, anger, revenge, and lust. “Ah, God!” Melville writes in Moby-Dick, “What trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.” Presumably such passages were missing from the first draft, which was heavy with chapters that read like a textbook on cetology or a history of the whaling industry. The critic Leon Howard has written that the “excitement and enthusiasm aroused in him by Hawthorne belonged entirely to the period in which he was reworking Moby-Dick.” Hawthorne’s influence, late in the book, may also explain why the novel has the feel of two books in one: the conventional passages about the whaling industry, and the psychological drama of Ahab’s self-destruction. Ahab’s obsessions must have been conjured in Melville’s Arrowhead writing room. That legacy led me to the most perplexing aspect of the house tour: how Melville, so far from the sea, was able to imagine and write Moby-Dick in a room that looks out on Mount Greylock, the tallest peak in the Berkshires. It would be as if his contemporary, Honoré de Balzac, had written about Paris from a South Sea island. One explanation can be found in one of Melville’s letters to an editor friend, Evert Duyckinck: “I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all covered with snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole in a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the winds shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”

more from Matthew Stevenson at The Critical Flame here.

And marriage, as I have argued, has not been one unchanging institution over time. Features of marriage that once seemed essential and indispensable proved otherwise. The ending of coverture, the elimination of racial barriers to choice of partner, the expansion of grounds for divorce—though fiercely resisted by many when first introduced—have strengthened marriage rather than undermining it. The adaptability of marriage has preserved it. Marriage persists as simultaneously a public institution closely tied to the public good and a private relationship that serves and protects the two people who enter into it. That it remains a vital and relevant institution testifies to the law’s ability to recognize the need for change, rather than adhere rigidly to values or practices of earlier times. Enabling couples of the same sex to gain equal marriage rights would be consistent with the historical trend toward broadening access. It would make clearer that the right to marry represents a profound exercise of the individual liberty central to the American polity.

more from Nancy F. Cott at Boston Review here.

The mud in which we modern creatures—trying so hard, in all of our blindness, to find our modern lovers—are covered and buried must have been a theme that Hurston meditated on for years. Their Eyes Were Watching God was published a decade after “Monkey Junk,” but there’s already plenty of mud-slinging going on. At the end of “Monkey Junk,” the savvy city diva calls her ex a “hunk of mud” and tells him to go hang out with monkeys. She dismisses him coldly, in other words. She’s trying her best to dehumanize and demoralize him, to banish him from the place where the successful and the professional go to get out of the dirt. She’ll be earning a hundred “shekels” a month off the poor guy, so she can buy her silk drawers and hosiery in the “marketplace.” But Hurston seems to suggest that this diva has maligned her priorities, that her sense of value is skewed. She thinks, perhaps, the ease and comfort of the city has cleaned her of that mud and allowed her to gleam and shine, to become glossy and precious. But she still, apparently, has mud in her eyes, for she’s entirely missed the glimmer and glamour of her fellow. Perhaps all of her fellows. It’s a morality tale that seeks to expose the extent to which—in spite of the slick tricks of the city’s shop windows and lights—modern lovers are still (as they ever were) drowned in mud. They hunt and they hunt, but the mud keeps them from simply seeing each other’s glitter and flash, or hearing the weird little hum of that strange old love song as it plays on, and on.

more from Beatrice Marovich at Killing the Buddha here.

If

If you can disentangle
yourself from your selfish self
all heavenly spirits
will stand ready to serve you

if you can finally hunt down
your own beastly self
you have the right
to claim Solomon's kingdom

you are that blessed soul who
belongs to the garden of paradise
is it fair to let yourself
fall apart in a shattered house

you are the bird of happiness
in the magic of existence
what a pity when you let
yourself be chained and caged

but if you can break free
from this dark prison named body
soon you will see
you are the sage and the fountain of life

by Rumi
translation: Nader Khalili

Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When David Foster Wallace committed suicide, on September 12, 2008, at the age of 46, he put an abrupt and shocking end to what was already one of the most distinctive writing lives in contemporary America. Fans who knew his work tended to be passionate about it. If you weren't drawn to his epic, ironic, lonely-in-the-crowd, cri-de-coeur of a novel Infinite Jest, you might have known him from “Consider the Lobster,” or “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again,” or another of the wry, footnoted essays that turned up from time to time in magazines like Harper's.

Readers outside academe caught on to Wallace before scholars did. When he died, academic interest in him had only begun to show real signs of life, with scholars starting to look closely at the ways in which Wallace responded to and reshaped for a new generation the postmodernism practiced by writers like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Two years later, spurred in part by his death but even more by a rising generation of young scholars, the impending publication of a posthumous novel, and the opening of a major archive of the writer's papers, David Foster Wallace studies is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise.

More here.

Feisal H. Naqvi in Pakistan Today:

Many people who critique the blasphemy law do so on the basis that there is no punishment provided in the Quran for denigrating the Prophet (PBUH). So what? There is no punishment provided in the Quran for many crimes. Surely, nobody can deny that a society has a right to determine the acts it wishes to punish. And as Ms Menocal’s book shows, blasphemy is a crime to which Muslim societies have historically been – and self-evidently remain – uniquely sensitive.

The standard jurisprudential response to my assertion is that society indeed has a right to determine what actions are to be treated as criminal, but only within certain rights provided by the fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. I concede that point, so let us then look at the next issue: is punishing blasphemy violative of fundamental human rights?

My answer is no. As much as I disagree with the blasphemy law, I do not think that criminalising the act of blasphemy is violative of any fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. All of those rights are subject to reasonable limitations. And in Pakistan – repeat, in this country – I do not think it is unreasonable for the law to provide that blasphemy shall be a criminal offence. Even in England, the last blasphemy prosecution took place not centuries ago, but in 1977.

Does that mean the blasphemy law cannot, or should not, be challenged or changed? Absolutely not. The blasphemy law, as it stands today, invites abuse and serves as a terrible instrument of oppression. But what it does mean is that the change must be brought about through political means, not legal. And politics, as we too often forget, is the art of the possible, not the art of the desirable.

There are three basic ways to attack the blasphemy law. The first…

More here.

From The Telegraph:

From The New York Times:

They should have seen it coming. In recent weeks, editors at a respected psychology journal have been taking heat from fellow scientists for deciding to accept a research report that claims to show the existence of extrasensory perception. The report, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is not likely to change many minds. And the scientific critiques of the research methods and data analysis of its author, Daryl J. Bem (and the peer reviewers who urged that his paper be accepted), are not winning over many hearts.

Yet the episode has inflamed one of the longest-running debates in science. For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings — often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: “effective” therapies that are no better than a placebo; slight biases that do not affect behavior; brain-imaging correlations that are meaningless.

More here.