John Allen Paulos in the New York Times:

One way to get a clearer picture of an electorate’s preferences is to ask prospective voters to rank the candidates and not merely say which one is their first choice. Who is their second choice, third, fourth, fifth? Doing this allows us to get a better overall view of their appeal or lack thereof. It also makes clear that “Who’s ahead?” is not by any means a question with a single, simple answer.

Let’s imagine that likely Republican voters were asked to rank Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney (Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum, please accept my apologies). This is for illustration only, although it’s not that far off the mark, so let’s further imagine:

that 36.3% of them favored Romney to Gingrich to Paul to Cain to Perry;

and 27.3% of them favored Cain to Paul to Gingrich to Perry to Romney;

and 18.2% of them favored Perry to Paul to Gingrich to Cain to Romney;

and 9.1% of them favored Gingrich to Perry to Cain to Paul to Romney;

and 9.1% of them favored Paul to Gingrich to Perry to Romney to Cain.

Romney is clearly preferred by the highest percentage of voters so using the conventional method of plurality, Romney, the most conventional candidate, is the clear leader.

But impressed that the second highest percentage of voters prefer him (“Wow! 27.3% is almost exactly the sum of my 9-9-9 plan”), Cain might well argue that a runoff between him and Romney is appropriate. In such a runoff, the numbers above suggest that Cain would win since 54.6% all of the voters polled ranked him higher than Romney.

More here.

From Nature:

It has been a medical mystery for 67 years, ever since the British geneticist Anthony Allison established that carriers of one mutated copy of the gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia are protected from malaria¹. The finding wasn’t trivial: in equatorial Africa, where Allison did his work, up to 40% of people are carriers of this mutated gene. Since then, scientific sleuths have wondered how exactly the gene protects them. With a paper published today in Science², the answer — or a large part of it — seems to be at hand.

Michael Lanzer and his colleagues at Heidelberg University in Germany and the Biomedical Research Center Pietro Annigoni in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, used powerful electron microscopy techniques to compare healthy red blood cells both with 'normal' cells infected with the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and with infected cells from people carrying the mutated “S” gene that causes sickle-cell disease, as well as another mutation, dubbed “C,” which occurs at the same spot. Both mutations lead to the substitution of a single amino acid in the hemoglobin molecule, causing the haemoglobin to aggregate abnormally inside the cell. In people with two copies of the S mutation, they deform into a half-moon shape — the 'sickle cells' that give the disease its name..

More here.

Coolie Mother

Jasmattie live in bruk-
Down hut big like Bata shoe-box,
Beat clothes, weed yard, chop wood, feed fowl
For this body and that body and every blasted body
Fetch water, all day water like if the
Whole slow-flowing Canje river God create
Just for she one bucket.

Till she foot bottom crack and she hand cut-up
And curse swarm from she mouth like red ants
And she cough blood on the ground but mash it in:
Because Jasmattie heart hard, she mind set hard.

To hustle save she one-one penny,
Because one-one dutty make dam cross the Canje
And she son Harrilal got to go school in Georgetown
Must wear clean starch pants, or they go laugh at he,
Strap leather on he foot, and he must read book,
Learn talk proper, take exam, go to England university,
Not turn out like he rum-sucker chamar dadee.

by David Dabydeen
from Coolie Odyssey, 1988

J. Nicole Jones in Harper's Magazine:

For a philosopher who claims to eschew the carnivalesque, Slavoj Žižek creates quite a circus wherever he goes. After his concluding remarks as host of a recent conference in New York called Communism: A New Beginning?, the Marxist thinker, whose marriage of pop culture and theory has made him possibly the most famous Slovenian ever, was immediately mobbed by admirers. Like a rock star, he headed for the back door, leading me through a meandering underground passageway before we emerged to the streets of Manhattan. As we made our way to a nearby café, he collected a new entourage around him — mostly autograph-seekers and undergraduate fanboys grilling him for term-paper advice. He obliged the autograph-hunters, asked that aspiring intellectuals email him with specific questions, and initially insulted a man who wanted a photograph, saying “One idiot more!” The man withdrew his request with polite apologies, and a strange tug of war ensued as Žižek then insisted on being photographed.

Žižek seems to thrive on contradiction. As we spoke, he veered from one stream of thought to another in his famously thick accent. Although he claimed at one point to prefer solitude, he delighted in making attention-drawing remarks — proclaiming with impish glee, for example, that Gandhi was technically more violent than Hitler, or advising me to tell panhandlers, “Yes I have some change. Fuck off!”

More here.

I had the chance to see Darcy James Argue's Secret Society and graphic novelist Danijel Zezelj's amazing show Brooklyn Babylon at BAM last night. Martin Johnson in Salon:

In the late ’50s and ’60s, during the peak of the civil rights movement, marches and meetings had a jazz soundtrack. Masterworks like Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite,” Charles Mingus’ “Fables of Faubus” and Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” were equal parts incendiary and innovative — brilliant music that reflected their times with precision and passion. As that era gave way to the heyday of Black Nationalism, political themes continued in the vibrant jazz of musicians like Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray and Julius Hemphill, among others.

Yet by the ’80s, fight-the-power odes died down in jazz, especially as rap and hip-hop emerged to carry the flag. Jazz veered toward easy listening instead. “I think jazz went through a period in the 1980s and 1990s where it was trying very hard to be ‘America’s Classical Music,’” says composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue. “The intentions behind this were laudable. The movement clearly succeeded in increasing respect for jazz in elite circles — but it also defanged the music by stripping away the social and political context, or by trying to frame it in broadly inoffensive terms.”

Argue is one of the most prominent of a growing number of jazz musicians whose work features overtly political themes. They are reflected in major shows upcoming on both coasts.

Christopher Ketcham in Orion Magazine:

For my daughter’s benefit, so that she might know the enemy better, know what he looks like, where he nests, and when and where to throw eggs at his head, we start the tour at Wall Street. It’s hot. August. We’re sweating like old cheese. Here are the monuments that matter, I tell her: the offices of Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon; the JPMorgan Chase tower up the block; around the corner, the AIG building. The structures dwarf us, imposing themselves skyward. “Linked together like rat warrens, with air conditioning,” I tell her. “These are dangerous creatures, Léa. Sociopaths.” She doesn’t know what sociopath means. “It’s a person who doesn’t care about anybody but himself. Socio, meaning society—you, me, this city, civilization. Patho, like pathogen—carrying and spreading disease.” Long roll of eyes.

I’m intent on making this a teachable moment for my daughter, who is fifteen, but I have to quit the vitriol, break it down for her. I have to explain why the tour is important, what it has to do with her, her friends, her generation, the future they will grow up into. On a smaller scale, I want Léa to understand what New York, my birthplace and home, once beloved to me, is really about. Because I’m convinced that the beating heart of the city today is not its art galleries, its boutiques, its restaurants or bars, its theaters, its museums, nor its miserable remnants in manufacturing, nor its creative types—its writers, dancers, artists, sculptors, thinkers, musicians, or, god forbid, its journalists. “Here,” I tell her, standing in the canyons of world finance, “is what New York is about. Sociopaths getting really rich while everyone else just sits on their asses and lets it happen.”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

A honey bee becomes a royal queen or a common worker as a result of the food she receives as a larva. While it has been well established that royal jelly is the diet that makes bees queens, the molecular path from food to queen is still in dispute. However, scientists at Arizona State University, led by Adam Dolezal and Gro Amdam, have helped reconcile some of the conflicts about bee development and the role of insulin pathways and partner proteins. Their article “IIS and TOR nutrient-signaling pathways act via juvenile hormone to influence honey bee cast fate” has been published in the December issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology. Central to the dispute within the scientific community about “who would be queen” has been a ground-breaking study published in the journal Nature by Japanese scientist Masaki Kamakura in 2011. He found that a single protein in royal jelly, called royalactin, activated queen development in larval bees through interaction with an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). Kamakura's work suggested that insulin signals do not play a role in queen development, despite previous studies suggesting otherwise, including work pioneered with the insulin receptor protein by Amdam's group.

Undeterred by Kamakura's findings, Dolezal, a doctoral student, and Amdam, a Pew Biomedical Scholar and professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences, looked for ways to resolve the disparity between the research studies. Amdam's team's first step involved taking control of the insulin receptor's partner protein, IRS, which the insulin receptor relies upon for signaling. The scientists found that by blocking IRS, they caused a central developmental hormone to crash, which forced larval bees into the worker mold despite their diet of royal jelly. Amdam's team then “rescued” the now worker-destined bees. They found that by giving the bees hormone treatments, the bees could then develop along the queen trajectory.

More here.

Emily Temple in Flavorwire:

“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” — A Man Without a Country, 2005

“If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again.” — a “composite self-interview” in The Paris Review, 1977

“We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.” — A Man Without a Country, 2005

“Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward — and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.” — “Palm Sunday”, a sermon delivered at St. Clement’s Church, New York City, originally published in The Nation as “Hypocrites You Always Have With You”

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” — the introduction to Mother Night, 1961

Kenan Malik in Eurozine:

In the warped mind of Anders Breivik, his murderous rampages in Oslo and Utoya earlier this year were the first shots in a war in defence of Christian Europe. Not a religious war but a cultural one, to defend what Breivik called Europe's “cultural, social, identity and moral platform”. Few but the most psychopathic can have any sympathy for Breivik's homicidal frenzy. Yet the idea that Christianity provides the foundations of Western civilisation, and of its political ideals and ethical values, and that Christian Europe is under threat, from Islam on the one side and “cultural Marxists” on the other, finds a widespread hearing. The erosion of Christianity, in this narrative, will lead inevitably to the erosion of Western civilisation and to the end of modern, liberal democracy.

The claims about the “Muslim takeover” of Europe, while widely held, have also been robustly challenged. The idea of Christianity as the cultural and moral foundation of Western civilisation is, however, accepted as almost self-evident – and not just by believers. The late Oriana Fallaci, the Italian writer who perhaps more than most promoted the notion of “Eurabia”, described herself as a “Christian atheist”, insisting that only Christianity provided Europe with a cultural and intellectual bulwark against Islam. The British historian Niall Ferguson calls himself “an incurable atheist” and yet is alarmed by the decline of Christianity which undermines “any religious resistance” to radical Islam. Melanie Phillips, a non-believing Jew, argues in her book The World Turned Upside Down that “Christianity is under direct and unremitting cultural assault from those who want to destroy the bedrock values of Western civilisation.”

Christianity has certainly been the crucible within which the intellectual and political cultures of Western Europe have developed over the past two millennia. But the claim that Christianity embodies the “bedrock values of Western civilisation” and that the weakening of Christianity inevitably means the weakening of liberal democratic values greatly simplifies both the history of Christianity and the roots of modern democratic values – not to mention underplays the tensions that often exist between “Christian” and “liberal” values.

Adam Kirsch in the Barnes and Noble Review:

After 100 years, the Loeb Classical Library is not just a repository of history — it is itself a historical document, through which you can trace the evolution of modern understandings of the ancient world. Take, for instance, the introduction to the 1931 Loeb edition of the Annals of Tacitus. The translator, John Jackson, grants that “the greatness” of the Roman historian's intellect and literary style can still “be felt after the lapse of eighteen centuries.” But “how long they will continue to be felt, one must at whiles wonder,” he goes on to write. On the whole, Jackson finds Tacitus' picture of corruption and political violence in imperial Rome too uniformly dark to be credible. He speaks of the historian's “wild exaggerations” and “poisoned” rhetoric, and complains that he lacked “a charity that thinks no evil.” At best, Jackson hoped that “as long as Europe retains the consciousness of her origins,” Tacitus would continue to find “some” readers.

The historical irony could not be thicker; for within the decade, modern Europe would become an uncannily perfect reflection of Tacitus' Rome. With the rise of totalitarianism in Germany, Italy, and Russia, Tacitus' descriptions of Rome under the early Caesars would no longer seem like “wild exaggerations” but daily news reports. Secret police, anonymous denunciations, constant shifts of the government “line,” whole societies cowering before the whims of rulers: Tacitus described it all, two millennia earlier. The critic Lionel Trilling, writing about Tacitus in his 1950 book The Liberal Imagination, titled his essay “Tacitus Now”: “our political education of the last decades has given us to understand the historian of imperial Rome,” Trilling declared, with his litany of “dictatorship and repression, spies and political informers, blood purges and treacherous dissension.”

Somewhere around Bentota, you start to notice the graveyards. Small clusters of tombstones emerge here and there along the coastal road, grown over with tropical shrubbery and mold. Some of the graves fall back into the hills, where fishermen’s wives hang laundry, and some are right along the beach, not far from the little wooden shacks where locals mingle around tables of freshly caught fish. The graves look old. But they aren’t old — it just doesn’t take long for anything left alone in Sri Lanka to be invaded by the erosion of damp clingy natural stuff. When the bus slows down to avoid a stray dog or road bump, you see the date repeated: 26-12-2004, 26-12-2004. Everything here is so close to the shoreline: the road, the graves, the people, the small abandoned houses that are also covered with mold, plus shrubs and laundry and the morning’s fish haul. On one hand, the scene from the bus window is just daily life. Conversation, homemaking, the marketplace. The activities are innocuous. At the same time, civilization here is at its most vulnerable, because behind the road is the pounding, pulsing, thirsty Indian Ocean. You can imagine how, with one good push of the sea, life could easily come tumbling apart. Being an island, Sri Lanka is never far from the ocean in any direction. The water is always there and everybody knows it.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

When he found himself notorious after the publication of Naked Lunch in 1959, William Burroughs wrote to calm his mother and say “I hope I am not ludicrously miscast as the wickedest man alive, a title vacated by the late Aleister Crowley”. Crowley, who liked to be known as The Beast 666 after the monster in the Book of Revelation, seems fated to be a touchstone of wickedness – particularly after his vilification by the Beaverbrook press in the 1920s, under headlines such as “King of Depravity” and “A Man We’d Like to Hang” – but inevitably this has been part of his popular appeal. The main focus of Crowley’s immense energy was magick (as he liked to spell it, distinguishing it from conjuring) and it is also the central focus of these two biographies. Magick was a synthesis and reinvention of the occult tradition, making a sacramental use of sex, and taking as its springboard the nineteenth-century occult revival in general and the Order of the Golden Dawn, in particular. W. B. Yeats was another prominent member of the Golden Dawn, and his disagreements with Crowley led to its break-up, but Crowley went beyond the Golden Dawn.

more from Phil Baker at the TLS here.

Unable to imagine the past except in the form of costume dramas or to think of the future except in terms of far-off collapse, our era has suffered from a blocked political imagination. For twenty years we flattered or rued our condition as the end of history. But present-day civilization reflects arrangements exceptional in human history—and perhaps equally fragile. It is characterized in particular by an unprecedented dominance of fossilized labor (or capital) over living labor, and of fossil energy—oil, coal, and natural gas—over living energy. This reign of the fossils must and will end. Two special conditions that we’ve taken for granted are not long for this world: an ever-growing supply of fossil fuel and other non-renewable resources, and endless economic growth. The words ecology and economy share a root in oikos, Greek for household. This suggests the concerns they name must ultimately coincide: the establishment and maintenance of the human residence on earth. Yet economics and ecology are rarely taken seriously at the same time, and official opinion usually denies that a crisis exists in either sphere. Few professional economists and no prominent politicians will concede what was obvious to the classical economists: namely, that economic growth would eventually terminate in what John Stuart Mill called a “stationary state.”

more from Benjamin Kunkel at n+1 here.

Reviewed by Chandrahas Choudhury in the New York Times:

No writer in modern India has held a novelistic lamp to the subcontinent’s densely thicketed past as vividly and acutely as Amitav Ghosh. Since the publication of “The Circle of Reason,” in the mid-1980s, Ghosh’s work has been animated by its inventive collages and connections. “River of Smoke,” the second volume of his ambitious Ibis trilogy, is the work of a writer with a historical awareness and an appetite for polyphony that are equal to the immense demands of the material he seeks to illuminate.

Like its predecessor, “Sea of Poppies,” this new novel fashions narrative pleasures from narcotic ones, exploring the fizzing currents of language, politics, trade and culture that swept through the vast opium network operated by the British East India Company in the 19th century. “Sea of Poppies” was set almost entirely in the cities, harbors and plains of India, the source of the poppies from which the opium was made. “River of Smoke” takes the action forward to the same opium’s destination, the Chinese trading outpost of Canton.

Although convincing in its reconstruction of early-19th-­century India and revelatory in its linguistic ventriloquism, “Sea of Poppies” often labored under its own weight. Improbable plot turns too often tied its narrative threads together; its pastiches too frequently lapsed into stretches of creaking comedy. Superficially less dramatic, “River of Smoke” is much more evenly written and engaging.

More here.

Sam Harris in his blog:

Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places.

The primary goal of self-defense is to avoid becoming the victim of violence. The best way to do this is to not be where violence is likely to occur. Of course, that’s not always possible—but without question, it is your first and best line of defense. If you visit dangerous neighborhoods at night, or hike alone and unarmed on trails near a big city, or frequent places where drunken young men gather, you are running some obvious risks.

I once knew an experienced martial artist who decided to walk across Central Park late at night. He was aware of the danger, but he thought “I have a black belt in karate. Why shouldn’t I be able to walk wherever I want?” As it happened, this rhetorical question was answered almost immediately: My friend hadn’t ventured more than a hundred yards into the darkness of the park before he was confronted by three men, one of whom plunged a hypodermic needle into his thigh without a word. Our hero bolted and escaped, otherwise unharmed, but he spent the next three months wondering whether he had been infected with HIV, hepatitis, or some other blood-borne disease. (He was fine.) The lesson: Whatever your training, you needn’t be foolish.

Similarly, all men should learn to recognize and shun status-seeking displays of aggression. This is one problem that women generally don’t have to worry about. It is, for instance, very rare for a woman to find herself party to an exchange like this:

“What are you looking at, asshole?”

“Who are you calling an asshole?”

“You, bitch. What are you going to do about it?”

Nevertheless, young men are easily lured into social dominance games from which neither party can find a face-saving exit. The violence that erupts at such moments is as unnecessary as it is predictable. If you want to preserve your health and stay out of prison, you must learn to avoid or defuse conflict of this kind.

More here.

Sean Carroll in his inaugural column at Discover:

Theoretical cosmologist isn’t one of the more hazardous occupations of the modern world. The big risks include jet lag, caffeine overdose, and possibly carpal tunnel syndrome. It wasn’t always so. On February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno, a mathematician and Dominican friar, was stripped naked and driven through the streets of Rome. Then he was tied to a stake in the Campo de’ Fiori and burned to death. The records of Bruno’s long prosecution by the Inquisition have been lost, but one of his major heresies was cosmological. He advocated that other stars were like our sun, and that they could each support planets teeming with life. Orthodox thought of the time preferred to think that Earth and humanity were unique.

These days, cosmologists like me may be safer, but our ideas have grown only more radical. One of the most controversial but widely discussed concepts in the field resembles a hugely amplified version of Bruno’s cosmology: the idea that the thing we call “the universe” is just one of an infinite number of regions in a much larger universe of universes, or multiverse. A big focus of my own research asks whether a multiverse can help explain the arrow of time.

Also like Bruno, cosmologists are reaching far beyond what observational evidence can tell them. At the time of Bruno’s death, Galileo had not yet turned the very first telescope upward to the stars. Today, nobody has looked beyond the boundaries of the known universe. In fact, such a far-reaching vision seems impossible by definition.

More here.