Ed Crooks in the Financial Times:

Rap music is the defining American art form of our time. In its showmanship, its exuberance, its hunger for innovation, its love of technology and its ruthless competitive discipline, it represents mass culture in the US like no other medium.

Country music, the only other contender, showcases a different set of equally American values: community, tradition, compassion, patriotism, resilience, faith. But it is principally a domestic phenomenon, largely ignored overseas. Hip-hop, meaning rap music and its associated culture, is both a global force and a central feature of the face America presents to the world. In Russia, for example, Vladislav Surkov, the powerful aide to prime minister Vladimir Putin, keeps on his desk a picture of Tupac Shakur, the Californian rapper murdered in 1996 who has become a global icon of non-specific militancy.

Artistically, rap is often said to be in decline. Aficionados talk wistfully about a golden age, typically dated from about the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, and now forgotten by today’s performers. Commercially, too, the music has slipped back from its peak around the turn of the millennium, with steadily declining sales through the second half of the 2000s. In 2010, though, hip-hop record sales made a comeback, and this year rappers provided eight of the 31 US chart-topping albums.

More here.

All you need is love
—John Lennon

Love is all there is,
it makes the world go round
— Bob Dylan

Without love nothing makes sense
—Roshi Bob

The Base of all Metaphysics

And now gentlemen,
A word I give to remain in your memories and minds,
As base and finale too for all metaphysics.

(So to the students the old professor,
At the close of his crowded course.)

Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems,
Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel,
Stated the lore of Plato, and Socrates greater than Plato,
And greater than Socrates sought and stated, Christ divine having
studied long,
I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems,
See the philosophies all, Christian churches and tenets see,
Yet underneath Socrates clearly see, and underneath Christ the divine I see,
The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to friend,
Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents,
Of city for city and land for land.

by Walt Whitman
from Leaves of Grass

From Harvard Magazine:

“It’s cross-pollination,” says magician and crossword connoisseur David R. Kwong ’02 about his unique one-man show. “I’m trying to combine my interests all the time.” Kwong’s interests in crossword puzzles and prestidigitation propelled him into the New York Times for his one-of-a-kind fusion of card trick and word game. He begins by asking an audience member to choose a card from a standard deck and keep it hidden from him. Then, standing in front of an easel holding a large blank grid of crossword squares, he asks the room for a word suggestion and fills the center of the grid with those letters to start things off. (“It all ripples outward from the middle,” he says of these performance-piece puzzles.) Next he tosses verbal clues to the crowd, seeking words common in Times crosswords.

Public participation is crucial in Kwong’s act. “A successful and engaging performance comes from performing for a sophisticated and savvy audience,” he notes. “The smarter the audience, the more fun it is, I think. I can start to stump them and give them more interesting clues.” As people solve his challenges, he fills the grid with their answers, riffing cleverly off the audience responses as he goes along and occasionally blocking out black squares in classic crossword style. When he’s completed the collaborative puzzle, he reveals the identity of the hidden card—miraculously embedded within the newly made crossword. Although Kwong’s beginnings in magic stem from simple sleight-of-hand tricks he learned as a kid from books and a magic set he received as a gift, the evolution of his conjuring skills to include crossword construction is a career milestone. “In the 25 years I’ve been a magician, I’ve never before invented my own brand-new trick,” he admits. Though a long-time magic aficionado, he didn’t become interested in professional magic until freshman year, when he attended a performance by Ricky Jay, who “gave an absolutely scintillating talk” on the history of magic. Kwong later wrote his history honors thesis on Oriental magicians and their impersonators: “I was captivated by stories of these magicians at the turn of the twentieth century, what’s commonly known as the Golden Age of Magic.” His love for magic extended outside the classroom as well. At one Arts First celebration, he reports, he performed Houdini’s “Metamorphosis” illusion before then Harvard president Larry Summers and taught Summers how to produce a bouquet of flowers from his sleeve.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In 1995 I traveled to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, which turned out to be a pep rally for psychologists, anthropologists and others who view humanity through the lens of evolutionary theory. Attendees heard Darwinian takes on lust, love, infidelity, status-seeking, mental illness, violence, patriotism, politics, economics and religion, as well as keynote addresses from such luminaries as Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker.

The most influential thinker there, arguably, was a scruffily bearded fellow, wearing sunglasses and a knitted cap, who never gave a talk. He lurked around the margins of the conference; at one point I spotted him puffing a joint outside a meeting hall. This, at any rate, is how I remember Robert Trivers, although as he points out in “The Folly of Fools,” memory often tricks us. He also confesses to being a pothead, so I’m pretty sure my recollection is accurate. As a Harvard graduate student in the 1970s, Trivers wrote a handful of papers showing how our genes’ relentless drive to self-replicate underpins even our most apparently magnanimous impulses. According to his theory of reciprocal altruism, we occasionally act kindly toward strangers because our ancestors — over time and in the aggregate — received a quid pro quo benefit from acts of generosity. In other papers, Trivers proposed that families roil with conflict because parents share no genes with each other and only half of their genes with children, who unless they are identical twins also have divergent genetic interests. These concepts were popularized by others, notably Edward O. Wilson in “Sociobiology,” Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene” and Pinker in “How the Mind Works.” All have credited Trivers, whom Pinker has called “an underappreciated genius, and one of history’s greatest thinkers in the analysis of behavior and emotion.” If Trivers is not better known, that may be because he has struggled with bipolar disorder since his youth. He is also, by his own admission, an irascible anti-authoritarian, whose sharp tongue often gets him into trouble. He left Harvard in the late 1970s, eventually ending up at Rutgers. He also has a home in Jamaica. No doubt tired of seeing others crank out well-received elaborations of his work, Trivers has finally produced a popularization of his own. His topic is deceit, with which by his own admission he has wrestled — on a personal as well as professional level — throughout his adult life. Trivers’s scope is vast, ranging from the fibs parents and children tell to manipulate one another to the “false historical narratives” political leaders foist on their citizens and the rest of the world.

More here.

Sadly, for the second year in a row, Pakistan has been rated the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. Bob Dietz at the Committee to Protect Journalists:

Geo TV's most prominent television anchor, and one of the most prominent journalists in Pakistan, has just circulated a detailed email message of threats he has been receiving. Hamid Mir's open, public response to the threats is a textbook case of how to handle the steady stream of intimidation that journalists face, not just in Pakistan but in other parts of the world as well. His entire message is reproduced at the end of this post.

There is an additional sense of urgency in this case: Umar Cheema, The News reporter who was abducted and beaten in 2010, and who is no stranger to threats himself, told me in an email: “The reason for taking the latest threat [to Mir] seriously is that I have faced the trouble in same manner, so we suspect the same mastermind.”

CPJ has written a lot about threats in Pakistan, and their debilitating effect. At this moment CPJ's Journalists Assistance program is working with a few other Pakistani journalists who are under threat for specific reporting, but I do not have their permission to publicize the details of their cases.

While the threat to Mir appears to be from supporters of the military/security establishment, if not officials within the government itself, threats to journalists come from everywhere. Pakistani reporters are targeted by all sides to the country's conflicts — religious militants, political factions fighting turf battles in violent cities like Karachi, competing secessionist groups in Baluchistan, and all the militarily active parties along the border with Afghanistan, as well as drug runners and gun dealers.

More here.

Apropos of my fascination with listing, Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris talk to Umberto Eco in Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Eco, you are considered one of the world's great scholars, and now you are opening an exhibition at the Louvre, one of the world's most important museums. The subjects of your exhibition sound a little commonplace, though: the essential nature of lists, poets who list things in their works and painters who accumulate things in their paintings. Why did you choose these subjects?

Umberto Eco: The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

SPIEGEL: Should the cultured person be understood as a custodian looking to impose order on places where chaos prevails?

Eco: The list doesn't destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles. Think of the nature collections of the 16th century. My novels, by the way, are full of lists.

Cleis

Sleep, darling
I have a small
daughter called
Cleis, who is

like a golden
flower
I wouldn't
take all Croesus'
kingdom with love
thrown in, for her

—

Don't ask me what to wear
I have no embroidered
headband from Sardis to
give you, Cleis, such as
I wore
and my mother
always said that in her
day a purple ribbon
looped in the hair was thought
to be high style indeed

but we were dark:
a girl
whose hair is yellower than
torchlight should wear no
headdress but fresh flowers

by Sappho
translation by Mary Barnard

Source: gopher://gopher.OCF.Berkeley.EDU:70/
00/Library/Poetry/Sappho/sappho.Cleis

Patrolled by Predator drones, radar blimps, dogs, and scanners, the U.S./Mexico border is now a state unto itself: Borderworld.

Roger D. Hodge in Popular Science:

As a lone male in a rented minivan headed south on a remote stretch of border highway, I almost certainly fit some kind of profile. I passed several white pickups bearing the distinctive green stripe of the U.S. Border Patrol, but my first direct encounter with the authorities did not come until I pulled off the road to study with my binoculars a white speck that I had spotted high in the cloudless sky. It was not a Predator or any other UAV that I had ever seen or read about. It looked like a blimp. I put down my binoculars just as another of the green-and-white trucks pulled up. We both lowered our windows and I asked, in my best Texan, what that thing was floating up there in the sky. “It’s a weather balloon,” the officer said with a smile. I thanked him, and we both waved as I drove off, still headed south.

In El Indio, I stopped to buy a Dr Pepper and asked the old lady behind the counter, in my best Spanish, whether she knew anything about that white thing up in the sky. She did not. I decided to inquire at the post office, but it was closed. I was wondering what to do next when a minivan pulled up. I asked the driver if she knew what that white thing was up in the sky. “It’s a satellite for the drugs,” she said. “My brother-in-law works for it.” A boy chimed in from the backseat that if I kept driving south I’d see “the building that controls it.” I thanked the woman and her boy and continued on my way. Border Patrol vehicles continued to pass me coming and going, and, as I neared the base of what I could now see was in fact a tethered blimp, one of those trucks quickly pulled up right behind me and showed no sign of passing. Although I was doing nothing illegal, I began to sweat. Soon I drove by a couple of white buildings, in front of which was a sign: United States Air Force Tethered Aerostat Radar Site.

More here.

Ezra Glinter in Forward:

What if, in the face of entrenched financial, political and military power, progressive change brought about by ordinary citizens is not possible? What then can be done?

It’s a question that has been on the mind of the British novelist, essayist and art critic John Berger, not just for the past year, but for decades. In his latest book, “Bento’s Sketchbook,” he reflects: “What one is warning and protesting against continues unchecked and remorselessly. Continues irresistibly. Continues as if in a permissive unbroken silence. Continues as if nobody had written a single word. So one asks oneself: Do words count?”

In “Bento’s Sketchbook” Berger turns to an unexpected source for insight: the 17th-century philosopher Baruch, or Benedict, or “Bento,” Spinoza. The premise of the book is based on a sketchbook Spinoza is supposed to have kept, but which was lost or destroyed. Berger, who is an artist as well as an art critic, sets out to reimagine the lost works.

More here.

“Dominic Boudreault put many hours of work in to this incredible time-lapse of multiple cities. You’ll experience Montreal, Quebec City, Chicago, Toronto, and Manhattan while watching this beautiful montage.”

–From Photography Blogger:

Timelapse – The City Limits from Dominic on Vimeo.

From Spiked:

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick talks to James Le Fanu, the one-time scourge of those medical practitioners who blamed lifestyle or pollution for ill health, to find out if he really has made peace with the medical establishment.

Turning to the fall of modern medicine, Le Fanu diagnoses the onset of the current malaise of the world of medicine in the 1970s, when ‘the revolution faltered’ and ‘the age of optimism’ came to an end. Clinical science went into decline, the flow of new drugs slowed and technological innovation stalled. The resulting ‘intellectual vacuum’ has been filled by what Le Fanu regards as the specious notions of the ‘New Genetics’ and the ‘Social Theory’ (blaming lifestyle, pollution and poverty for much current ill health). He blames the twin influences of genetics and epidemiology for leading modern doctors (and their patients) down ‘blind alleys’.

Le Fanu’s exposure of the pretensions of the ‘genetic revolution’ and the hype surrounding the human genome project and all the claims for imminent dramatic developments in genetic engineering and gene therapy will strike a chord with many doctors. As he observes, we have witnessed ‘a relentless catalogue of failed aspirations’; despite a vast investment of energy, resources and hopes, the practical benefits of the ‘New Genetics’ in our surgeries are ‘scarcely detectable’. In his new edition Le Fanu brings the critique of the New Genetics up to date with an appraisal of the ‘wishful thinking’ of ‘personalised genomics’ and a discussion of the ways in which ‘genome-wide association studies’ have thrown up more new problems than potential solutions, particularly in relation to chronic diseases. Though he acknowledges the emergence of new cancer drugs such as Herceptin and Avastin, he neglects wider developments in cancer genetics where advances in molecular biology have led directly to therapeutic innovations. For example, the introduction of Imatinib (Gleevec) for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemia in 1998 has been followed by the development of more than 20 new drugs for the treatment of cancer, including myeloma (which until recently had a grim prognosis). ‘I accept that these drugs mark a major conceptual advance’, says Le Fanu, ‘but the problem here is that we have a handful of very expensive drugs which provide modest benefits to small numbers of people with relatively rare conditions. We were promised personalised treatments for common chronic conditions and these are still over the horizon.’

More here.

Charles B. Brenner and Jeffrey M. Zacks in Scientific American:

The French poet Paul Valéry once said, “The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.” In that spirit, consider a situation many of us will find we know too well: You're sitting at your desk in your office at home. Digging for something under a stack of papers, you find a dirty coffee mug that’s been there so long it’s eligible for carbon dating. Better wash it. You pick up the mug, walk out the door of your office, and head toward the kitchen. By the time you get to the kitchen, though, you've forgotten why you stood up in the first place, and you wander back to your office, feeling a little confused—until you look down and see the cup.

So there's the thing we know best: The common and annoying experience of arriving somewhere only to realize you've forgotten what you went there to do. We all know why such forgetting happens: we didn’t pay enough attention, or too much time passed, or it just wasn’t important enough. But a “completely different” idea comes from a team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame. The first part of their paper’s title sums it up: “Walking through doorways causes forgetting.”

More here.

From Nature:

Ten people who mattered this year:

Essam Sharaf: Science revolutionary

As academics joined the millions protesting in Egypt's streets this spring, the voice of one engineer soon began leading chants. Essam Sharaf was in the thick of demonstrations in January, and he became the first prime minister of a post-revolution cabinet in March — promoting science as a solution to the country's woes. But by November, he had resigned amid a second surge of popular protest. The 59-year-old Sharaf was born in Egypt and earned degrees in engineering from Cairo University and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. By 2010, he was an academic engineer at Cairo University and a fierce critic of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's regime. Sharaf's stance during the uprising made him popular with the young revolutionaries. He was high on their list of candidates to lead the new transition government, along with Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail, a chemist from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. When Sharaf was chosen, hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries gathered to greet him in Tahrir Square. “If I can't bring the change you want, then I will return to the lines with you,” he told them.

More here.

P.Z. Myers over at Pharyngula (via Pandagon):

I suppose we could blame The Curse on The Fall, but then this phylogeny would suggest that Adam and Eve were part of a population of squirrel-like proto-primates living in the early Paleocene. That’s rather unbiblical, though, and what did the bats and elephant shrews do to deserve this?

There are many explanations floating around. One is that it’s a way to flush out nasty pathogens injected into the reproductive tract by ejaculating males — but that phenomenon is ubiquitous, so you have to wonder why only a few species bother. Another explanation is that it’s more efficient to get rid of the endometrium when not using it, than to maintain it indefinitely; but this is a false distinction, because other mammals don’t maintain the endometrium, they just build it up in response to fertilization. And finally, another reason is that humans have rather agressive embryos that implant deeply and intimately with the mother’s tissues, and menstruation “preconditions” the uterine lining to cope with the stress. There is, unfortunately, no evidence that menstruation provides any boost to the ‘toughness’ of the uterus at all.

A new paper by Emera, Romero, and Wagner suggests an interesting new idea. They turn the question around: menstruation isn’t the phenomenon to be explained, decidualization, the production of a thickened endometrial lining, is the key process.

All mammals prepare a specialized membrane for embryo implantation, the difference is that most mammals exhibit triggered decidualization, where the fertilized embryo itself instigates the thickening, while most primates have spontaneous decidualization (SD), which occurs even in the absence of a fertilized embryo. You can, for instance, induce menstruation in mice. By scratching the mouse endometrium, they will go through a pseudopregnancy and build up a thickened endometrial lining that will be shed when progesterone levels drop. So the reason mice don’t menstruate isn’t that they lack a mechanism for shedding the endometrial lining…it’s that they don’t build it up in the first place unless they’re actually going to use it.

So the question is, why do humans have spontaneous decidualization?

Amanda Marcotte considers what this means for some nature-based political arguments.

As the indispensable historian Frances Yates writes in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, the words “Rosicrucian” and “Enlightenment” seem mortally opposed, the first tending toward “strange forms of superstition” while the latter toward a “critical and rational opposition to superstition.” She defines the Rosicrucian movement as being “concerned with a striving for illumination, in the sense of vision, as well as for enlightenment in the sense of advancement in intellectual and scientific knowledge.” For Rosicrucians, illumination and understanding were one. Enlightenment meant exploding the boundaries of natural human capacity, and transcending them. It makes perfect sense, then, that they would head straight into the realm of the supernatural to do so. The first real Rosicrucian novel is thought to be St. Leon, written by Shelley’s idol and would-be father-in-law William Godwin. At the center of St. Leon — like St. Irvyne, Frankenstein, and the many Rosicrucian romances it inspired — is the outcast, the discontent wanderer searching for meaning. Generally, the malcontent is so because he is spiritually bereft and feels that the limits of human existence are an impediment to greatness — great knowledge mostly, but the wanderer is also usually looking for great wealth and/or power. The Romantics were disgusted by these rationalist pursuits. Becoming immortal in a Romantic tale is, thus, always a curse. In St. Leon, the eponymous protagonist’s house is burnt down, his son abandons him, his servant and his favorite dog are killed, his depressed wife dies, and he is imprisoned in the dungeons of the Inquisition until, at last, the marriage of his son makes him realize that “there is something in this world worth living for.”

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume One: 1907–1922 covers the years of the future writer’s childhood, his schooldays, beginnings as a journalist first on the Kansas City Star and then the Toronto Star, and of course his adventure on the Italian front. Hemingway arrived in Europe to work with the American Red Cross Service in June 1918, and was posted to Fossalta, on the Piave river just north of Venice, the scene of intense fighting. On the night of July 8, having volunteered for the “rolling canteen” which delivered provisions to Italian soldiers holding off the Austro-Hungarian offensive, he was blown up by a trench mortar shell. He sustained more than 200 wounds to his legs and spent the next five months either in hospital or in recovery. He fell in love with his nurse, seven years his senior, who affected to be in love with him, while being attached to an older man at home, whom she called “Daddy” (Hemingway was “Kid”), at the same time welcoming the overtures of an aristocratic Italian officer closer to base. The shell-shocked happy patient wrote in fits of rapture to his sisters and friends about Agnes von Kurowsky, who has become a central figure in the legend. But it seems as though his love for her was as flimsy as hers for him. In December 1918 he was planning marriage; in March 1919 he received her “Dear Ernie” letter and was broken-hearted; by the middle of April he was “now a free man”, having “burnt it out with a course of booze and other women and now it’s gone”. She was, however, to aid his recovery in another way. Nurse von Kurowsky – who in spite of her name was American, and was soon to be jilted in turn by her Italian heir – was transposed to the “dream” world of fiction, as Catherine Barkley in Hemingway’s second novel, A Farewell to Arms, which ends with her death in childbirth.

more from James Campbell at the TLS here.

Olivier Blanchard over at the IMF's blog (via Paul Krugman):

Third, financial investors are schizophrenic about fiscal consolidation and growth.

They react positively to news of fiscal consolidation, but then react negatively later, when consolidation leads to lower growth—which it often does. Some preliminary estimates that the IMF is working on suggest that it does not take large multipliers for the joint effects of fiscal consolidation and the implied lower growth to lead in the end to an increase, not a decrease, in risk spreads on government bonds. To the extent that governments feel they have to respond to markets, they may be induced to consolidate too fast, even from the narrow point of view of debt sustainability.

I should be clear here. Substantial fiscal consolidation is needed, and debt levels must decrease. But it should be, in the words of Angela Merkel, a marathon rather than a sprint. It will take more than two decades to return to prudent levels of debt. There is a proverb that actually applies here too: “slow and steady wins the race.”

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Hitchens on George W. Bush:

“He is lucky to be governor of Texas,” Hitchens said. “He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

Hitchens on Israel

“I am an anti-Zionist,” Hitchens, who often spoke and wrote of his stance against Israel, said. “I'm one of those people of Jewish descent who believes that Zionism would be a mistake even if there were no Palestinians.”

Hitchens on North Korea

“North Korea is a country that still might give us a lot of trouble and it is, believe me, it is exactly like a '1984' state,” he said. “It is as if it was modeled on '1984,' rather than '1984' on it. It is extraordinary, the leader worship, the terror, the uniformity, the misery, the squalor.”

More here.