Jennifer Jacquet in Edge:

Financial executives received almost $20 billion in bonuses in 2008 amid a serious financial crisis and a $245 billion government bailout. In 2008, more than 3 million American homes went into foreclosure because of mortgage blunders those same executives helped facilitate. Citigroup proposed to buy a $50 million corporate jet in early 2009, shortly after receiving $45 billion in taxpayer funds. Days later, President Barack Obama took note in an Oval Office interview. About the jet, he said, “They should know better.” And the bonuses, he said, were “shameful.”

What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary? These are questions I'm asking myself. After all, it's not just bankers we have to worry about. Most social dilemmas exhibit a similar tension between individual and group interests. Energy, food, and water shortages, climate disruption, declining fisheries, increasing resistance to antibiotics, the threat of nuclear warfare—all can be characterized as tragedies of the commons, in which the choices of individuals conflict with the greater good.

Balancing group and self-interest has never been easy, yet human societies display a high level of cooperation. To attain that level, specialized traits had to evolve, including such emotions as shame.1 Shame is what is supposed to occur after an individual fails to cooperate with the group. Shame regulates social behavior and serves as a forewarning of punishment: conform or suffer the consequences. The earliest feelings of shame were likely over issues of waste management, greediness, and incompetence. Whereas guilt is evoked by an individual's standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in the context of other people.

Brian Thill in his blog:

Periodically the corporate headquarters would provide us with a new itemized inventory, and we would spend several days scouring the shelves to cull the proper number of books from the stock. Inevitably we would be left with great mounds of mass-market paperbacks that some obscure set of calculations had determined were no longer profitable for us to keep in stock. These were often books that had arrived in great numbers, loaded down with promotional displays, back-to-school promotional inserts, and more. What was necessary to have on hand in great numbers one month was literally garbage the next. The procedure in this case would be to rip the covers from each of the books, scan and bundle the covers and mail them to headquarters, and toss the piles of naked books in the trash compactor out behind the mall. In addition to being prohibited from selling coverless books, we were also forbidden to give them away; just as, each night, after having spent hours baking our fresh bread at the Italian restaurant where I worked every night cooking pasta, we were told to scoop up the heaping trays full of uneaten bread and throw them in the trash. When you’re poor, the pain of participating in the discarding of perfectly good things is particularly acute; it eats at you, you take it personally, as if that part of the world that can spare these things (a part you are kept from) is going out of its way to rub your face in it.

So I started making off with the coverless books. I’d volunteer to haul the great carts laden with garbage-books out to the compactor, and as I tossed the overstocked romance novels and spy thrillers into the bin, I would set aside the abject copies of Virginia Woolf or Philip K. Dick and tuck them behind the wall, retrieving them at the end of the night, when I would take them home and add them to my humble shelves. Neatly stacked, you could hardly tell they lacked covers. And who needed a cover anyway: hadn’t the old adage taught us how meaningless a cover was?

More here.

From The Guardian:

It may not be the most heart-pounding news of the moment, but boredom is coming back into fashion. Not boredom in the sense of lying around blank-faced in a brown study, a practice which in my experience has never really gone out of style, but boredom as a subject (rather than a product) of academic study. In recent years several scholarly books have reanimated a topic that had fallen into analytical torpor, the latest being Boredom: A Lively History by Peter Toohey, an Australian professor of classics who now lives and works in Canada – a country, alas, that bears an unfortunate reputation for being boring.

What is boredom? Is it a mood, an emotion, an affliction, a form of social protection, a gateway to the essence of the self, the human condition, or a modern affectation? These are questions that have concerned philosophers and thinkers dating back to the Enlightenment, not least because boredom occupies territory that overlaps with capital letter concepts like Being and Time. I can't pretend that my own interest in the matter has always been quite so elevated. Mostly when I think about boredom it is out of base self-interest, as a state that I'm very keen to avoid. Ever since I was a child, I have held an extreme aversion to situations that have the potential to be boring.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Two ring-tailed lemurs, perhaps a pair, perhaps just two guys out to catch a few rays, sit side by side tilted back as if in beach chairs, their white bellies exposed, knees apart, feet splayed to catch every last drop of the Madagascar sun. All they need are cigars to complete the picture.

There’s a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for this posture. Scientists use the term “behavioral thermoregulation” to describe how an animal maintains a core body temperature. But as the animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe points out in his exuberant look at animal pleasure, “The Exultant Ark,” they are also clearly enjoying themselves. A scientist through and through, Dr. Balcombe can’t help giving the study of animal pleasure a properly scientific name: hedonic ethology. True to its subtitle — “A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure” — “The Exultant Ark” showcases surprising, funny, touching, sad, heartwarming pictures by photographers all over the world. Dr. Balcombe’s text is a serious examination of the subject of animal pleasure, a study that “remains nascent and largely neglected in scientific discourse.” But it also delights us along the way with Dr. Balcombe’s observations and examples. On the subject of food as pleasure, for instance, he tells us, “Rats will enter a deadly cold room and navigate a maze to retrieve highly palatable food (e.g., shortbread, pâté or Coca-Cola).” If they happen to find rat chow instead, “they quickly return to their cozy nests, where they stay for the remainder of the experiment.”

More here.

Ejaz Haider in The Express Tribune:

The father was killed because he supported a Christian woman. How does that fit in with the article’s thesis that the father hated India (and Pakistan has to hate India and be Muslim) because that religious distinction lies at the core of its ‘other’-isation of India? Or is Pakistan more complex than is hinted in the article?

Aatish’s father did not ‘hate’ India. He was one of those who did much to open up Lahore — to Indians — by using the Basant festival. There is not a single viable political party in Pakistan that does not want to normalise with India. That is a matter of record. But Salmaan Taseer (Aatish’s eye for detail doesn’t inspire much confidence since he gets the spellings of his father’s name wrong), like others, was a proud Pakistani. We don’t need to ‘other’ India to be Pakistanis but neither can we ignore real problems that need to be addressed. Tackling those problems requires mature analysis, not reducing everything to Pakistan’s identity crisis vis-a-vis India.

But what of the Pakistani military, the villains in all this? Since Aatish began with India’s failed GSLV rocket test, let me put in some facts here for him.

The Indian Army, standing at over 1.1 million active-service personnel and 1.8 million reserves, is configured under six area commands (operational) and one army training command (ARTRAC). Three of these area commands — western, northern and southwestern — are totally Pakistan-specific. A fourth, central command, with one corps (1 Corps) is also primarily Pakistan-specific. The Indian Army has 13 corps, out of which eight, including one from the central command, are specific to Pakistan.

More here.

Aatish Taseer in the Wall Street Journal:

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: “Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice.”

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

More here.

It pains me to say this, given that I don’t just admire Bloom, but also find him a surprisingly endearing cultural icon, half Eeyore, half Falstaff. When he’s not going around all sad-eyed and plangent, he’s likely to be complaining that “there live not three good critics unhanged in all America, and one of them is fat, and grows old.” Besieged by ravening hordes of ideologues, Bloom has long proclaimed himself the last champion of aesthetic criticism. When Childe Harold to the Ivory Tower Came, he soon discovered that the barbarians of ideology and political correctness were within the gates. In years past, he duly fretted about “theory” and cultural studies, though more recently he has begun to worry that “visual culture will end imaginative literature.” In one splendid diatribe, Bloom derides the academy’s current flood of “comma counters, ‘cultural’ materialists, new and newer historicists, gender commissars, and all the other academic impostors, mock journalists, inchoate rhapsodes, and good spellers.” Against their advocacy of what he calls “the New Cynicism,” he now argues—like any good Augustinian—that love should be the basis for all worthwhile criticism.

more from Michael Dirda at The American Scholar here.

Ann Wroe’s favourite activity, it seems, is to plunge into the lacunae between myth and reality, history and fable. As she proved by her lively descant on Pontius Pilate (who she dared to suggest might have been born in Britain), she has a flighty capacity to spin webs of words, anchored in myth and anecdote, which supply a bridge between what others have said and what fancy supplies. Both erudite and eclectic, in Orpheus she seems as much at home in Greek myth as she was, several books ago, dealing with life in the Middle Ages in the French city of Rodez, in the Aveyron. Like Dionysus, who shares some of his distracting characteristics (both led people a pretty dance), Orpheus was an alien enchanter. Never quite fully Greek, he was born in bristling Thrace, where his father was said by some to be the king and by others to be a ‘sheep-herder and a lone dweller in the fields’. The lyrical Orpheus was a marginal and, at times, a commanding figure. As keleustes on the voyage of the Argo, he stood by the mast and gave the beat to the rowers, who included the A-list of heroic and semi-divine celebrities (that other hell-raiser Heracles not least of them). When the Argo put in at Lemnos, a flat island populated by fatal women (they had all killed their husbands in an earlier episode), the crew pleasured the dangerous females, but Orpheus refrained. He was literally the guiding spirit in the quest for the Golden Fleece, and his well-timed steersmanship later squeezed the Argo between the clashing rocks of the Symplegades.

more from Frederic Raphael at Literary Review here.

THE LOVE AFFAIR between the intellectuals and the trashmeisters, now more than a hundred years old, has just overtaken the man who is by some measures the most popular painter in America. Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall is an essay collection that exudes a creepy fascination. While a number of the contributors manage to provide level-headed assessments of Kinkade’s place in the American imagination, I am not remotely convinced that such attention should be lavished on Kinkade’s sugar-drenched Middle America, with its frosted gingerbread domiciles, dew-kissed old-fashioned small-town Main Streets, and farmlands so fertile they look as if they’re on steroids. Alexis L. Boylan, who edited the book, would no doubt protest that the size of Kinkade’s reputation justifies the attention on sociological or cultural grounds, pure and simple. I know that many intellectuals believe we overlook middlebrow tastes at our own risk. But there is a large dose of reverse snobbery threaded through this collection. More than a generation after Pop Art became holy writ, it is rather tiresome to be announcing yet again that we live in a democracy where one person’s treasure is another person’s trailer trash, and that their masterworks are not necessarily inferior to the Picasso’s and Matisse’s in our museums. Many of the contributors to Boylan’s anthology want to devour every last bite of their middlebrow cake, but only after each tasty morsel has been skewered on a highbrow fork. The problem is not that they respect Kincade anthropologically, it is that they respect him as an artist.

more from Jed Perl at TNR here.

Sughra Raza. Port, Cape Town, South Africa. March, 2011.

Digital photograph.