Pushpesh Pant in Open The Magazine:

Father loved his paan so much that at times Mother teased him that he loved the leaf more than he loved her. He would just smile and wink at us children and put another gilori (triangle of prepared paan) of his beloved magahi, plucked out of a silver pandibiya (paan box) in his mouth. He would never let any other variety ruin his delicate palate. Mother was not the only one who thought he carried this fuss too far. Didn’t other paan leaves have seductions of their own—the meetha patta, saunfia, kalkatia, kapoori, saanchi, jagannathi and mahoba?

Nothing could persuade Father to change his ways. He made do with magahi (a betel leaf from Magadh, Bihar) that he received via VPP in that pre-courier era from his trusted supplier, Chaurasiaji in Banaras. The kattha (brown paste applied to the leaf) he used was just the cream at the top, and he slaked chuna not in water, but in milk. The supari (betel nut) had to be dakhani—cooked in kattha and bone-hard. Not addicted to tobacco, he relished a few grains of muski daana produced by M/S Ittada Khan, Muttada Khan—perfumers from Kannoj. These were seeds of green cardamom dipped in tobacco water, then draped in chandi ka varq (silver foil) and then aromatised with a few strands of saffron. The name suggests the presence of a trace of aphrodisiac musk as well. The miniature bottles the stuff came in even looked like ittar (perfume) containers.

All this knowledge came much later. What mattered in the years before one’s loss of innocence was to ensure that one was rewarded with a grain of the forbidden delight after a long spell of tedious good conduct. Mother, of course, didn’t approve.

This was the beginning of my unending affair with this leaf of myriad delights; little did one know that paan is not native to this land and was imported from south-east Asia and called naag vallari, literally the ‘snake vine’. The name is an apt one, as the creeper does resemble the hood of a cobra.

William Grimes in The New York Times:

Lucian Freud, whose stark and revealing paintings of friends and intimates, splayed nude in his studio, recast the art of portraiture and offered a new approach to figurative art, died on Wednesday night at his home in London. He was 88.

He died following a brief illness, said William Acquavella of Acquavella Galleries, Mr. Freud’s dealer.

Mr. Freud, a grandson of Sigmund Freud and a brother of the British television personality Clement Freud, was already an important figure in the small London art world when, in the immediate postwar years, he embarked on a series of portraits that established him as a potent new voice in figurative art.

In paintings like “Girl With Roses” (1947-48) and “Girl With a White Dog” (1951-52), he put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter’s social facade. Ordinary people — many of them his friends and intimates — stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist’s ruthless inspection.

From the late 1950s, when he began using a stiffer brush and moving paint in great swaths around the canvas, Mr. Freud’s nudes took on a new fleshiness and mass. His subjects, pushed to the limit in exhausting extended sessions, day after day, dropped their defenses and opened up. The faces showed fatigue, distress, torpor.

Jacob Silverman in Tablet:

Pity the comic-book fan who, with plucky optimism, skips to the movie theater to see one of this summer’s superhero flicks, only to leave two-and-a-half hours later with a CGI-induced hangover. Green Lantern was a travesty—you could feel the producers looming just off-camera, pleading with whatever fallen deities they pray to that this overdone stew of a movie would earn enough money to enable a franchise. Thor had moments of levity, and its star, Chris Hemsworth, appears to know his way around a Shake Weight, but the title character and his brother Loki seemed more like cosseted brats than Norse immortals locked in fratricidal conflict. Captain America, which will be released this Friday, is directed by Joe Johnston, a man who would probably rather forget the aughts (when he brought us Jurassic Park III, Hidalgo, and The Wolfman), and stars an actor, Chris Evans, whose best performance—by far—was a 10-minute cameo as an imbecilic action star in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Need we even bother?

There are plenty of other examples of terrible recent superhero films. There are some exceptions, of course, but most of the last decade—an era when Hollywood has supposedly rededicated itself to producing quality superhero movies featuring iconic characters—has been a wash.

What happened? Popular entertainment, after all, need not shy away from complexity or genuine moral conflict; the recent revival of Batman as the Dark Knight proved that well. Rather, the problem is one common to most superhero movies: Too often, filmmakers treat comic books as a brand rather than as source material, emptying them of all the intricacies and ironic reversals that made the beloved characters beloved in the first place. Put simply, contemporary superhero movies suck because they’ve forgotten their Jewish roots.

A conversation between David Rotheberg and Laurie Anderson, in n+1:

David Rothenberg: That is a humpback whale singing there, recorded in Hawaii. They do it during mating season. They swim from Alaska all the way down to Hawaii, and they don’t eat—they just sing and mate and give birth. Only the males are singing, scientists have figured out, and they assume it is to attract the attention of female whales, but in the thirty years people have been studying this, they never have seen a female whale show any interest in this song.

Laurie Anderson: Maybe they are interested but just don’t express it.

DR: Exactly—they are not going to show this to us humans.

LA: Isn’t there sort of a cyclical way those work, sort of like pop songs?

DR: That is the amazing thing; humpback whales change their song as a group from year to year, from month to month. From week to week you can hear a difference. And why do they want to change it if they all want to sound the same? No other animal does anything quite like that. People are thinking, “Well, it is like pop music?”

LA: When you are playing with whales, can you just describe how that works?

DR: Yes. I play clarinet, but I don’t jump in the water with the clarinet because it would get all wet and be kind of hard to play. So I’m on a boat, playing into a microphone; the sound goes into an underwater speaker and is broadcast into the world of these whales. I am wearing headphones listening to an underwater microphone, so I am playing along with this other environment. A lot of times I try this and nothing happens, the whales don’t seem to care. But in the best moments they do seem to interact. Sometimes they really do seem to respond to what I’m doing, which isn’t surprising when you have an animal that wants to change its song and maybe is interested in new sounds.

Paul Collins in Slate:

It was 1 a.m. on a hot July night when detectives marched into the offices of the New York World. “Where's the head?” they demanded.

In the summer of 1897, that question meant just one thing in Manhattan newsrooms, and it wasn't a request to meet the managing editor. The head everyone sought was of William Guldensuppe, a masseur who had disappeared in late June from his Hell's Kitchen apartment. He'd reappeared scattered in pieces along the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. What was still missing, though, was his head—which, rumor had it, a jealous lover had hidden inside a block of plaster.

To William Randolph Hearst, the crime was perfect opportunity to trumpet his newly launched New York Evening Journal. Hearst offered a whopping $1,000 reward to solve the crime, and even formed a “Murder Squad” of reporters who were ready to resort to flashing badges and pistols to make citizen's arrests. Yet his stunts were merely improvements on the carnivalesque populism of rival publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Featuring celebrity news and scandal, Pulitzer's New York World had also created the world's first color comic section, and the popularity of strips like “The Yellow Kid” inspired competitors to scoff that the World and Journal were selling comic-strip journalism—”Yellow Journalism,” they called it.

Not to be upstaged by Hearst's Journal, the World stole evidence from the Guldensuppe murder scene by shaving off a piece of a floorboard, testing it, and proclaiming BLOOD IN THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY. They also hired divers to search the East River for Guldensuppe's head. But after a World diving crew was spotted surreptitiously drawing a slimy white mass out of the river, the delicate matter of legality arose. The New York Herald believed the World had the scoop of the day—literally scooping William Guldensuppe's head off the bottom of the East River—and that Pulitzer's henchmen were now concealing the ghastly thing in their editorial offices. In a burst of righteous indignation, the Herald called in the police.

More here.

Anjum Altaf in The South Asian Idea:

In a discussion of the arts, it was mentioned that middle-class families in India encouraged children to learn classical music because it was a mark of high culture; it made one special in one’s esteem and in that of others. It was then asked why classical music was not healthy in Pakistan given that much the same considerations should be applicable across the border. It is my sense that the question was less an expression of belief and more an opening for a discussion and I am going to exploit that to speculate on some topics of interest.

The one-word, and not altogether flippant, answer to the question is God. Hindu deities (Krishna and Saraswati, to mention just two) not only approve of but delight in music. Whether Allah approves or disapproves is still in doubt with no resolution in sight while the camp of disapprovers continues to add adherents.

That would be sufficient; but simple answers rarely do justice to the fascinating complexities of reality. Many conjectures beg to be addressed and many tales clamor to be told.

Ustad Jhandey Khan was the guru of Begum Akhtar and the mentor of Naushad. His story, found in a fading magazine from the 1960s, was the centerpiece of a lament about the conflicted state of music in Pakistan. Ustad Jhandey Khan loved his music and would weep all night after practicing certain ragas. Then something would happen; he would unstring his instruments and pronounce that henceforth there would be no more profanity in his house. Life would lose all meaning; after a while he would quietly go back to the music. The point of the article was that music would never flourish in Pakistan till this conflict between the yearning of the soul and the voices in the head was resolved.

More here.

J. Anderson Thomson and Claire Aukofer in the Los Angeles Times:

In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion's “DNA.” They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including “imaging” studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to “no heaven … no hell … and no religion too.”

Like our physiological DNA, the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural selection. They helped our ancestors work effectively in small groups and survive and reproduce, traits developed long before recorded history, from foundations deep in our mammalian, primate and African hunter-gatherer past.

For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Individual survival was enhanced by protectors, beginning with our mothers. Attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it. We easily expand that inborn need for protectors to authority figures of any sort, including religious leaders and, more saliently, gods. God becomes a super parent, able to protect us and care for us even when our more corporeal support systems disappear, through death or distance.

Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved “adaptations” as the building blocks of religion.

More here.

From Salon:

Nicholas Meyer's bestselling 1974 novel, “The Seven Percent Solution,” isn't mentioned once in “An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug Cocaine” by Howard Markel, but any of Markel's readers who have also read Meyer's highly entertaining Sherlock Holmes pastiche will think of it often all the same. The novel “reveals” that Holmes' “Great Hiatus” (the three years between his false death at Reichenbach Falls and his reappearance in “The Adventure of the Empty House”) was actually a period of recovery from cocaine addiction after his treatment by the great Viennese therapist Sigmund Freud. The founder of psychoanalysis brought exceptional insight to bear in providing this cure; he once abused cocaine himself.

Markel's provocative book is a dual addiction biography of Freud and his contemporary, William Halsted, arguably the greatest surgeon of his time, a founding professor at Johns Hopkins Hospital and deviser of at least a half-dozen revolutionary surgical techniques and procedures still employed today, such as the use of rubber gloves. Both were unquestionably great men, but they also wrestled with dangerous drug habits that imperiled their work. Both sought to conceal or downplay their drug use and, as a result, information on that use and how, if at all, they managed to stop it is pretty sparse on the ground. If Meyer's novel is the story of a doctor investigating the psyche of a great detective, then “An Anatomy of Addiction” is the work of a doctor — Markel is an M.D. and director for the Center of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan — who plays detective to understand the secret lives of two medical giants.

More here.

From Columbia.edu:

The rise of Internet search engines like Google has changed the way our brain remembers information, according to research by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published July 14 in Science. “Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,” said Sparrow. “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”

Sparrow’s research reveals that we forget things we are confident we can find on the Internet. We are more likely to remember things we think are not available online. And we are better able to remember where to find something on the Internet than we are at remembering the information itself. This is believed to be the first research of its kind into the impact of search engines on human memory organization. Sparrow’s paper in Science is titled, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” With colleagues Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard University, Sparrow explains that the Internet has become a primary form of what psychologists call transactive memory—recollections that are external to us but that we know when and how to access.

More here.

Michael Moats in The Awl:

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye. This excerpt is from a longer essay, “The Real Holden Caulfield,” available at the Fiction Advocate.

It was either dumb luck or artistic excess that led Salinger to give his most sentimental and developmentally arrested character the name “Holden.” Salinger jammed his foot into the trap set by that name, and only managed to walk away because, as with everything about Holden, there is an authenticity that insulates him and his author from the annual term paper analyses that he is “holdin’ on to his innocence” or “holdin’ back his emotions.” According to one story, Salinger was walking through Manhattan some unassuming day in 1947 when he came across the marquee for the movie Dear Ruth, starring William Holden and Joan Caulfield. Side-by-side in marquee letters (in lights, as it were) were the words ‘Holden’ and ‘Caulfield.’ Another story carries over the Joan Caulfield connection, but instead claims that ‘Holden’ came from one of Salinger’s shipmates during his time as part of the entertainment crew on a cruise ship. The plot thickened in 2001 when Denver’s Rocky Mountain News printed the obituary of a man named Holden Bowler, an Idaho-born singer, ad man, 1932 U.S. Olympic athlete, and, in 1941, shipmate to J.D. Salinger on the cruise liner SS Kungsholm. According to Bowler’s widow, “Jerry told him, ‘What you like about Holden is taken from you, and what you don’t like about him, I made up.'” Salinger took no action to confirm or deny the story, nor did he ever comment on speculation that ‘Caulfield’ was pulled from Joan Caulfield.¹ Salinger’s daughter Margaret wrote that her father often complained about “giving his beloved characters ‘terrible’…names, such as Seymour, but that’s just what Seymour’s parents would have done, he said, so he had to do it even though it ‘nearly killed him.’”² So it simply may be that Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield are responsible. It may also be worth noting that the hero of David Copperfield, referred to by Holden in the opening sentences of The Catcher in the Rye, divulges in his own opening chapter that he was born with a caul. So perhaps there is some David Copperfield kind of crap in Holden’s story after all.

More here.

Eric Michael Johnson in Scientific American:

According to statistics compiled by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission there were 12,772 workplace sexual harassment cases in 2010 (including all forms of sexual coercion in the work place, and representing a fraction of the number that actually occurred) and 84% of these cases were brought by women. Employers have gotten increasingly serious about cracking down on such abuses but during the last decade they were still held liable to the tune of $540 million. What is going on here? Could this kind of gender inequality be an intrinsic feature of human nature that we’re stuck with or is it simply a failure to create an environment that prevents such behaviors from reoccurring?

Primatologists and evolutionary biologists have taken this question seriously and have developed some surprising conclusions that could inform our approach to this issue. Unlike Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s book A Natural History of Rape, a thesis that was criticized by scholars both in biology and gender studies, other evolutionary researchers have developed a much more balanced analysis. One example is from the recent edited volume Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans by Martin Muller and Richard Wrangham.

More here.

Graeme Blair, C. Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra, and Jacob N. Shapiro in Foreign Affairs:

To test the assumption that poor people are more likely to become radicalized, we fielded a 6,000-person, nationally representative survey of Pakistanis in the four provinces of Punjab, Balochistan, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly North-West Frontier Province) in the spring of 2009.

The survey measured attitudes toward four important militant groups: al Qaeda; the Afghan Taliban; the so-called Kashmiri groups, which include Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, among others; and sectarian groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba. The survey was much larger than any previous effort and, for the first time, included rural Pakistan. Previous studies had been undermined by low response rates, perhaps because they asked Pakistanis directly about their support for militant groups. Instead, we measured attitudes toward the groups using an indirect questioning technique called an “endorsement” experiment. We presented respondents with a set of four policy issues, including World Health Organization’s administration of polio vaccinations and the redefinition of the Durand Line separating Pakistan from Afghanistan, and asked how much they supported each. Some respondents were told that one of the four militant groups supported the policy. Comparing the support for each policy of those who were told a militant group supported the policy with those who were not gives the measure of support for the group.

The data revealed four findings that undermine common wisdom about support for militancy in Pakistan. First, survey participants were generally negatively inclined toward all four militant organizations. Contrary to some popular accounts, Pakistanis do not have a taste for militants.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

'The Sense of an Ending’, the disturbing new novel from Julian Barnes, is narrated by a man looking back on a lifetime of hope and remorse. In this exclusive extract, he grapples with his memories of a former friend – a charismatic figure who enters his life as a prodigious schoolboy and departs it with an act of chilling calculation. There were three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn’t expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life. His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself.

I was looking for Syrian kind of trouble but couldn’t get into Syria. Due in Beirut for a work trip, I had arrived a few days early to head up to Wadi Khaled in Lebanon’s far north. A small lick of land up there juts into Syria just south of Krak des Chevaliers and thousands of people from towns on the Syrian side of the border had fetched up in the preceding weeks before, fleeing house to house searches and outright invasion by their own army. Just the intense awareness of being in the line of sight of an invisible sniper’s rifle, on open ground. I’d met refugee families camped on open farmland, others who still commuted to Lebanon freely from the city of Homs as business owners or day labourers, and the many extended families whose members straddled the border. I’d walked across a freshly cropped field of hay to the edge of the Kabir River and looked twenty yards across the knee-deep muddy water to Syria, its reed beds, market garden hothouses and dirty, small-town concrete buildings indistinguishable from the Lebanese side on which I stood. No barbed wire or walls, no flags even. Just the intense awareness of being in the line of sight of an invisible sniper’s rifle, on open ground. Evidence of the crisis was everywhere. I forgot the rules of journalism and found myself stuffing a paltry wad of Lebanese lira into the hand of a reluctant elder, only to curse myself and the young man who trailed me back to my car looking for his own handout. But the humanitarian crisis itself was generic, much as it must have been in Kosovo or Bosnia, Libya or Iraq. As mobile, affluent, privileged outsiders, our questions to these refugees who had so recently had to flee their homes were just points along the single vector of suffering – how much have you suffered, are you suffering, will you suffer, and in what ways? That accumulated suffering, weighed and conveyed, becomes a kind of combustible fuel that feeds the news cycle.

more from Johnny West at Granta here.

So far, I’m not quite old enough to entertain any worries about the youth of the nation or the deficiencies of their character. Plenty of today’s young adults actually strike me as irritatingly great: Growing up with the Internet means they knew by age 10 what I learned last week, and a lot of them seem awfully bold and brave about asserting themselves all over everyone. My opinion might be in the minority. Lately, the conventional wisdom is that young people think far too much of themselves—they’re coddled little zeppelins of ego in desperate need of shooting down. The cover of July’s Atlantic is emblazoned with the headline how THE CULT OF SELF-ESTEEM IS RUINING OUR KIDS; inside, quotes from psychologist Jean M. Twenge explain how we’re producing generations of feckless narcissists. Earlier this year, the online equivalent of applause greeted a study of pop lyrics from 1980 to 2007 in which a whole team of psychologists, Twenge included, claimed there’s been a rise in narcissism, self-regard, and antisocial hostility at the top of the Billboard charts: Songs have moved from we and us to me and I, and come over all ornery in the process. Surprised? New York Times columnist David Brooks, for one, already saw that as self-evident: “It’s nice,” he wrote, “to have somebody rigorously confirm an impression many of us have formed.” “Rigorously” is a stretch. The study consists of little more than running ten lyrics per year through a word-counting computer program, which I can’t imagine taking longer than an afternoon.

more from Nitsuh Abebe at New York Magazine here.

From Nature:

Brian Kobilka knew that his postdocs didn't like him peeking at their experiments until they were finished. But he couldn't resist a quick look — after all, he and his entire field had been waiting for this result for more than 20 years.

As Kobilka peered through the microscope, the dream finally came into focus. Nestled in a drop of viscous liquid were tiny crystals, each trapping millions of copies of a fragile protein complex. The structure of this complex could finally reveal how one of biology's most important signalling mechanisms, G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), do their job. This structure, published online in Nature¹ by a team led by Kobilka at Stanford University in California and Roger Sunahara at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, now reveals the complete three-dimensional atomic structure of an activated GPCR — the β₂ adrenergic receptor (β₂AR) — in a complex with its G protein. GPCRs sit in the membranes of cells throughout the body, where they detect signals from the outside world — such as light, odours and flavours — and signals from within the body, such as hormones and neurotransmitters. These signals are transmitted to the inside of the cell where they activate intracellular G proteins, which then trigger a variety of biochemical pathways.

More here.

Somewhere in the backslapping fest that was the final issue of the News of the World, there were the stirrings of something worth reading. Under the headline “Cream of Britain”, the article revealed what MPs had chosen as the greatest designs from their constituencies. These included the custard cream, the fish finger and McCain Smiley Potato Faces. Not to belittle the cultural impact of anthropomorphised potato powder, but MPs should probably head down to the Design Museum. In a retrospective entitled Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern, which opens tomorrow, they’ll encounter a more apt selection of the cream of Britain – and it’s the work of just one man. Kenneth Grange, who turned 82 over the weekend, has designed much of the domestic and public landscape that we’ve taken for granted over the last 50 years. Indoors we’ve used his Kenwood food mixers, Wilkinson Sword razors and Parker pens. Outdoors we ride his InterCity 125 train and his London taxi cab, we sit at his bus stops and on his benches, and for decades we fed change into his parking meters. His output has had such a subtle and pervasive influence on our daily behaviour that it’s almost worrying.

more from Justin McGuirk at The Guardian here.

The Kiss

for David

Not the mosaic couple made famous by Klimt,
bodies cleaved close, so thin they could be
construed as one person.
Not the floating lovers Chagall lifted,
praised with brush strokes of color.
But us, seconds before
you were transported to surgery,
our kiss witnessed by a few
who dared not look away.
They still carry the moment like a postcard
purchased at the Louvre, a souvenir
against forgetting what might
or might not be, the last—our portrait
rendered without an artist, love
sculpted more naked than Rodin's nudes.
How my feet could not feel the ground.
How your heart refused letting go
all that between us shimmered.

by Donna Doyle
from JAMA, June 22/29, 2011