From Edge:

As you march through or dance around in this book, you'll see that some of the entries describe the patterns of the world. Nicholas Christakis is one of several of scholars to emphasize that many things in the world have properties not present in their parts. They cannot be understood simply by taking them apart; you have to observe the interactions of the whole. Stephon Alexander is one of two writers (appropriately) to emphasize the dualities found in the world. Just as an electron has both wave-like and particle-like properties, so many things can have two sets of characteristics simultaneously. Clay Shirky emphasizes that while we often imagine bell curves everywhere, in fact the phenomena of the world are often best described by the Pareto Principle. Things are often skewed radically toward the top of any distribution. Twenty percent of the employees in any company do most of the work, and the top 20 percent within that 20 percent do most of that group's work. As you read through the entries that seek to understand patterns in the world, you'll run across a few amazing facts. For example, I didn't know that twice as many people in India have access to cell phones as latrines. But most of the essays in the book are about metacognition. They consist of thinking about how we think. I was struck by Daniel Kahneman's essay on the Focusing Illusion, by Paul Saffo's essay on the Time Span Illusion, by John McWhorter's essay on Path Dependence, and Evgeny Morozov's essay on the Einstellung Effect, among many others. If you lead an organization, or have the sort of job that demands that you think about the world, these tools are like magic hammers. They will help you, now and through life, to see the world better, and to see your own biases more accurately.

But I do want to emphasize one final thing. These researchers are giving us tools for thinking. It sounds utilitarian and it is. But tucked in the nooks and crannies of this book there are insights about the intimate world, about the realms of emotion and spirit. There are insights about what sort of creatures we are. Some of these are not all that uplifting. Gloria Origgi writes about Kakonomics, our preference for low-quality outcomes. But Roger Highfield, Jonathan Haidt, and others write about the “snuggle for existence”: the fact that evolution is not only about competition, but profoundly about cooperation and even altruism. Haidt says wittily that we are the giraffes of altruism. There is something for the poetic side of your nature, as well as the prosaic.

More here.

Written at the twilight high water of American modernism in the early Sixties, chapters scattered among obscure literary magazines like the limbs of Osiris, nearly published as a book by Black Sparrow in 1971, circulated incomplete among poets in samizdat photocopy from 1979, contracted for publication by University of California Press in 1986 and then banished for a quarter century into limbo (a delay which would have killed any other book of its kind, if there were one, but this one is wholly sui generis), Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, complete in print at last, now manifests the timeliness of its permanence. Centering on the work of Hilda Doolittle and her part in the invention of modernist poetry, it embraces an assay of modernist practice and tradition as well as a searching investigation of fundamental issues in poetics, with elements of literary autobiography and cultural history and salient reference to depth psychology, cultural anthropology, political economy, art history, philosophy, and religion.

more from Jim Powell at Threepenny Review here.

From Smithsonian:

Born in suburban Long Island, Morris graduated from the University of Wisconsin. After a stint of cello study in France, he talked his way into the Princeton graduate philosophy seminar of Thomas Kuhn, an icon of postmodernism, the man who coined the term “paradigm shift.” It wasn’t exactly a meeting of the minds. In fact, it almost cracked Morris’ skull, which is what Kuhn seemed to be aiming to do at the climax of an argument when the esteemed philosopher threw an ashtray at Morris’ head.

“The Ashtray,” Morris’ five-part, 20,000-word account of that episode and their philosophical clash over the nature of truth, is a good introduction to the unique kind of writing he’s doing now. (Don’t miss the section on the obscure Greek philosopher of irrationalism, Hippasus of Metapontum, a digression worthy of Jorge Luis Borges.) After the ashtray incident, Morris eventually did two stints as a private eye. If there is one subtext to all of Morris’ subsequent films and writings, it is the private eye’s creed, the anti-postmodernist belief that “the truth is out there.” Truth may be elusive, it may even be unknowable, but that doesn’t mean, as postmodernists aver, that reality is just a matter of subjective perspectives, that one way of seeing things is just as good as another.

More here.

The grand view of history has traditionally offered two paths for the interpretation of events. The first imagines social trends rising up from below to sweep humanity along in their irrepressible, all-powerful waves. The other dreams of iconic figures who shape history through their own vision and will. In the case of the United States during the War of 1812, we find neither. Instead, a third way emerges: history dominated by stupidity and impulse. From the revolution to the present moment, hardly a single generation of Americans has passed without giving rise to a bona fide military genius. The Civil War alone produced half a dozen. To Canada’s good fortune, the post-revolution US Army was stacked with bunglers and officers past their prime. It might have taken Canada easily, if not for the miraculously systemic idiocy among the top brass.

more from Stephen Marche at The Walrus here.

At the core of the novel, which Nadas took 18 years to write, are the major catastrophes and upheavals of the last century. They are the magma that is always present but usually not visible. The book tells of deportations, the closing of a camp at the end of the war and marauding prisoners; both wars appear as traumatic memories for a number of protagonists, and anti-Semitism is shown in all its colourations. The Holocaust itself is not an explicit subject of the novel; neither are the waves of Stalinist terror. Nadas portrays the monstrosity of the century through its people, through the traces and scars it has left on their psyches and bodies. No one is indestructible in this book. They betray themselves and others, fight and love each other, wear themselves out. Everyone is frayed, terrible, maimed by this epoch. “Parallel Stories” is primarily set in the region of Central Europe in the period between the two wars. The years 1938, 1945, the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 are the focal dates. The novel is many things – also a product of scholarly research. While a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, Nadas combed through pertinent archives on the Third Reich to the point of exhaustion, but also examined those on architecture, criminology, fashion, those pertaining to any and all questions of this period in history. This is most noticeable in the brilliant and biographically grounded portrait of Otmar Freiherr von der Schuer, to name one of the most striking examples, who was the Director of the Institute for Hereditary Research in Berlin. The perfect German soldier, educated, disciplined, von der Schuer (in real life: Freiherr von Verschuer) had given orders for massacres in World War I and had gone through experiences that had destroyed his view of people and the world. But he never admits to this kind of “internal haemorrhaging”.

more from Joachim Sartorius at Sign and Sight here.

Over at The Guardian's Comment is Free, “Women from 11 countries give their thoughts on achievements where they live.” Orzala Ashraf Nemat from Afghanistan:

Afghan women have nothing to celebrate, except the continuous courage, dedication and determination of activists who despite all the challenges and barriers still continue their struggle.

Celebration of International Women's Day in Afghanistan over the past 10 years have turned into a fancy project sponsored by donors who have never made an attempt to understand the complex nature of women's position in Afghan society. These events all involve long, boring speeches most often by men, so-called top leaders (and no one knows how they treat their female relative) about women's rights. Yet few practical steps are taken to challenge the deep roots of violence against women, absence or the drop off in numbers of older girls from schools; lack of female teachers, doctors, judges and police officers all over Afghanistan.

Mari Marcel Thekaekara from India:

Urban Indian women are in the public sphere like never before. In Bengaluru and Pune, thousands zoom around on motorbikes, scooters and in cars. In Tamil Nadu, where free bicycles were distributed to village schoolgirls, they sail along with demurely plaited hair, in their ankle-length skirts with the wind in their faces. In the south, women now work in garages, the army and police. They're doing jobs once considered unseemly: waitressing, night shifts in IT companies and call centres. This year Indian women ranked 30th, beating Italian and Japanese women, in the league table of corporate world board members.

In Maharashtra state, the courts ruled women no longer have to take their husband's surnames. And the supreme court controversially recognised live-in relationships.

I had meant to post this a few days ago–Colin McGinn's proposal in the NYT (image by Leif Parsons):

Academic philosophy obviously falls under this capacious meaning. Moreover, most of the marks of science as commonly understood are shared by academic philosophy: the subject is systematic, rigorous, replete with technical vocabulary, often in conflict with common sense, capable of refutation, produces hypotheses, uses symbolic notation, is about the natural world, is institutionalized, peer-reviewed, tenure-granting, etc. We may as well recognize that we are a science, even if not one that makes empirical observations or uses much mathematics. Once we do this officially, we can expect to be treated like scientists.

Someone might protest that we belong to the arts and humanities, not the sciences, and certainly we are currently so classified. But this is an error, semantically and substantively. The dictionary defines both “arts” and “humanities” as studies of “human culture”—hence like English literature or art history. But it is quite false that philosophy studies human culture, as opposed to nature (studied by the sciences); only aesthetics and maybe ethics fall under that heading. Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics and so on deal not with human culture but with the natural world. We deal with the same things the sciences deal with — the world beyond human culture. To classify philosophy as one of the “humanities” is grossly misleading — it isn’t even much about the human.

But whether to classify ourselves as a science or an art is strictly not the issue I am considering — which is whether “philosophy” is a good label for what we do, science or not. I think it is clear that the name is misleading and outdated, as well as detrimental to our status in the world of learning. So must we just sigh and try to live with it? No, we can change the name to something more apt. I have toyed with many new names, but the one that I think works best is “ontics.” It is sufficiently novel as not to be confused with other fields; it is pithy and can easily be converted to “onticist” and “ontical”; it echoes “physics,” and it emphasizes that our primary concern is the general nature of being.

Alex Byrne in the Boston Review:

Star Trek–style teleportation may one day become a reality. You step into the transporter, which instantly scans your body and brain, vaporizing them in the process. The information is transmitted to Mars, where it is used by the receiving station to reconstitute your body and brain exactly as they were on Earth. You then step out of the receiving station, slightly dizzy, but pleased to arrive on Mars in a few minutes, as opposed to the year it takes by old-fashioned spacecraft.

But wait. Do you really step out of the receiving station on Mars? Someone just like you steps out, someone who apparently remembers stepping into the transporter on Earth a few minutes before. But perhaps this person is merely your replica—a kind of clone or copy. That would not make this person you: in Las Vegas there is a replica of the Eiffel Tower, but the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, not in Las Vegas. If the Eiffel Tower were vaporized and a replica instantly erected in Las Vegas, the Eiffel Tower would not have been transported to Las Vegas. It would have ceased to exist. And if teleportation were like that, stepping into the transporter would essentially be a covert way of committing suicide. Troubled by these thoughts, you now realize that “you” have been commuting back and forth to Mars for years . . .

So which is it? You are preoccupied with a question about your survival: Do you survive teleportation to Mars? A lot hangs on the question, and it is not obvious how to answer it. Teleportation is just science fiction, of course; does the urgent fictional question have a counterpart in reality? Indeed it does: Do you, or could you, survive death?

More here.

David McConnell in Prospect:

A history teacher of mine used to tell his pupils that he was teaching us scepticism—a habit of thought—rather than information. A wiry, brusque New Englander, he had us pore over first-person accounts of the first shot fired in the American revolutionary war. We concluded that this original “shot heard round the world” came neither from English nor American forces, but was likely fired by a farmer, an anonymous onlooker from the environs of Concord, Massachusetts. It was a pleasingly uncertain solution.

Years later, the same teacher took advantage of a Saturnalian program at our school. Teachers were invited to attend classes with their students, 60-year-olds at desks next to 14-year-olds. My old teacher put aside any scepticism about the capabilities of age. He chose to study algebra, but sadly, by all accounts, barely passed.

Maths poses difficulties. Like nature, its starkness is its beauty. There’s little room for eyewitness testimony, seasoned judgment, a sceptical eye or transcendental rhetoric. With maths, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t spare a teacher’s dignity by commenting, “What an interesting conclusion!”

I had strong anti-mathematical and sentimental leanings as a child. Maths seemed to reduce pretty things like the moon and roses to ugly things like orbital periods and Mendelian tables.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down and wildcards added. Thanks to all the participants. (Details about the prize here.)

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll and tell your friends.

So here is the final list that I am sending to Gish Jen who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners (given here in alphabetical order by blog name):

1. 3 Quarks Daily: The Last Novel
2. Guernica: Rape, Revisited
3. Numéro Cinq: My First Job
4. Occasional Planet: Navigating the waters of our biased culture
5. Philip Graham: What Casablanca Can Teach A Writer
6. Tang Dynasty Times: Leonardo in the Gilded Age
7. The Best American Poetry: Spend It All
8. The Millions: Sister Carrie
9. The Nervous Breakdown: Secret Theatres

We'll announce the three winners on March 19, 2012.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added up to three others that we also liked.

From Salon:

Just how relevant is an author’s private life to our appreciation or understanding of his or her work? Many would argue that we should disregard it entirely. Others (myself included) might point out that while you can thoroughly enjoy a novel or poem without knowing who wrote it, any deeper grasp requires at least some basic information. It matters that Edna O’Brien is Irish, certainly, and it’s almost impossible to imagine how the writings of Jack Kerouac or Charles Bukowski could be separated from their life stories. This question came up recently in the response to an essay about Edith Wharton that appeared in the New Yorker. The author of the essay, Jonathan Franzen, has been a tennis ball of sorts in recent debates about the relative prestige awarded to male and female novelists: Batted around by the combatants as an example of male privilege, he’s mostly refrained from weighing in with his own views. The Edith Wharton piece has offered that rare chance to assail him for what he has said, rather than what others have said about him.

From Nature:

A tumour can be a hotbed of diversity, British scientists have discovered. Just as different types of tumours have distinct genetic mutations, so do separate parts of the same tumour. Findings in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine¹ help to explain why cancer is so difficult to study and treat. A clinician's conclusion about prognosis or the best course of treatment can be contradictory depending on which part of the tumour the biopsy is taken from. “This adds another layer of complexity,” says Charles Swanton from Cancer Research UK’s London Research Institute, who led the study. “It makes flying to the Moon look like a walk in the park.”

As part of a clinical trial, Swanton’s team did a detailed analysis of the tumours of four patients with kidney cancer. They collected samples from several parts of the main tumours at various times during the trial, as well as from the organs to which the cancer had spread. Then every sample was analysed to look at its mutations, patterns of genetic activity, chromosome structure. “We used every possible genomics technique available. Even then we were only scratching the surface,” says Swanton. The team used its results to reconstruct the evolutionary history of each cancer. For example, the first patient’s tumour had split down two lines. One small part had double the usual tally of chromosomes and had seeded all the secondary tumours in the patient’s chest. The other branch had spawned the rest of the primary tumour’s mass. Similar results were seen in the other patients.

More here.

A philosopher king Havel was not. The Czech presidency did not even entail enough power to make that possible. But if there ever was something like the “king of all dissidents”, Havel was it. No other active head of state has done more than Havel for those who have been politically persecuted – often at considerable political cost. Whether he was calling for more political freedom in Burma (he nominated Aung San Suu Kyi for the Nobel peace prize), supporting human rights activists in Belorussia, Cuba or Ukraine, his voice was heard. His inspirational actions found resonance well beyond the reach of a small country. It is often said that the problem in Russia has been that it does not have its own Havel.[11] It has always had Havel’s support though. One of the very last public interventions that Havel made through his writing was a contribution he wrote for the major Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta. It was only published after Havel’s death. As the newspaper commented, Havel was “hurrying to tell people something very important. He succeeded – read it.” In the short article, Havel urged his Russian counterparts to continue in their struggle for “basic rights and liberty”; a struggle that can only succeed if more and more people get involved in it. Echoing his argument in the “Power of the powerless”, Havel argued that “the most serious danger for Russia is people’s indifference and apathy”.[12]

more from Stefan Auer at Eurozine here.

The horrors of the twentieth century left artists and thinkers preoccupied with the problem of evil. How could Germans herd Jewish families into the gas chambers? How could Serbs turn on their Bosnian neighbors, or Hutus pick up machetes and carry out the bloody work of genocidaires? In Beautiful Souls, Eyal Press takes on a different challenge, more suited to the twenty-first century: He suggests that the true mystery is not what impels ordinary people into the moral abyss, but rather how some people manage to avoid the abyss altogether, by refusing to participate in atrocities. For every horror, there are courageous, conscientious resisters: Germans who hid Jews, Hutus who saved Tutsis, Serbs who saved Muslims. Even the more quotidian forms of evil always generate some resistance: Consider the Enron scandal’s whistle-blowers. But what enables some to resist while most go along? Beautiful Souls, Press writes, is about “nonconformists, about the mystery of what impels people to do something risky . . . when thrust into a morally compromising situation: stop, say no, resist.”

more from Rosa Brooks at Bookforum here.

“Whatever I wrote was surrounded by rays of light,” a young Raymond Roussel told his psychoanalyst, Pierre Janet. “I used to close the curtains, for I was afraid that the shining rays emanating from my pen might escape into the outside world through even the smallest chink; I wanted suddenly to throw back the screen and light up the world.” Roussel was speaking literally, and Janet, who would treat Roussel for years, was taking notes. Though nobody knows for sure, it’s suspected that Roussel first started seeing Janet in the years just before World War I, almost a decade after that first ecstatic experience he described in their early sessions. The manic spell coincided with the editing of La Doublure, a novel in verse that took most of Roussel’s adolescence to complete and that he believed “would illuminate the entire universe” when it was published. When it finally was published in 1897, La Doublure was ignored by critics. The reception to his obsessively detailed and obviously unsalable work ushered in a lifelong series of public disappointments for Roussel, a writer whose work was met—in his own words—with “an almost totally hostile incomprehension.”

more from Alice Gregory at Poetry here.

Two pieces on the latest internet superphenomenon, Pinterest: first, Rob Horning in New Inquiry:

Pinterest has entered the mainstream, as a para-retailing apparatus presumed to appeal mainly to women. The site’s supposed femaleness has occasioned a lot of theorizing, some of which Nathan Jurgenson details in this post, as has its anodyne commerciality. Bon Stewart argues that Pinterest, since it discourages self-promotion and relies entirely on the appropriation of someone else’s creative expression, turns curation into passive consumerism; it allows for the construction and circulation of a bland sanitized “Stepford” identity. In other words, it becomes another tool for enhancing our digital brands at the expense of the possibility of an uncommodified self.

Give that emphasis on passive consumption, it’s not surprising that Pinterest has come to be associated with shopping fantasies. Pinterest’s great technological advance seems to be that it lets users shop for images over the sprawl of the internet, turning it into a endless visual shopping mall in which one never runs out of money. Chris Tackett suggests that sites like Pinterest are actually “anti-consumerist” because they allow people the instant gratification of choosing things without actually having to buy them. “Virtual consumerism means a real world reduction in wasteful consumption,” he writes, and that’s all well and good, though I’m not sure that making window shopping more convenient is in any way “anticonsumerist.” If anything that seems to reinforce the consumerist mentality while overcoming one of its main obstacles — people’s financial inability to perpetually shop. With Pinterest, they can at least simulate that experience, acquiring the images of things and associating them with themselves, appropriating the qualities the goods/images are thought to signify at that given moment. Pinterest allows for the purest expression of the Baudrillardian “passion for the code” that we’ve yet seen.

Second, Amanda Marcotte in The American Prospect:

It doesn’t take long for a blog-loving feminist to find the ugliness of the “ew, girly!” reaction. Women dominate on Pinterest—around 70 percent of users are female—and the site drives more traffic to commercial sites than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. Pinterest's popularity means that the male-dominated world of tech blogging has no choice but to pay attention, but they won't go down without a fight. Mean-spirited graphics and blog posts saying that women are an alien species one shouldn’t care to understand proliferated. The sexism prompted bloggers like Tracie Egan Morrissey, Kristy Sammis, and Rebecca Hui to write full-throated defenses of the site. And not despite its girliness, but because of it.

Stephanie Strom in the NYT:

The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees.

The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings.

The expense of obtaining a driver’s license after having passed the test in Karachi, Pakistan? 3,000 rupees.

Such is the price of what Swati Ramanathan calls “retail corruption,” the sort of nickel-and-dime bribery, as opposed to large-scale graft, that infects everyday life in so many parts of the world.

Ms. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.

About 80 percent of the more than 400,000 reports to the site tell stories like the ones above of officials and bureaucrats seeking illicit payments to provide routine services or process paperwork and forms.

“I was asked to pay a bribe to get a birth certificate for my daughter,” someone in Bangalore, India, wrote in to the Web site on Feb. 29, recording payment of a 120-rupee bribe in Bangalore. “The guy in charge called it ‘fees’ ” — except there are no fees charged for birth certificates, Ms. Ramanathan said.

Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over.

Richard Florida in The Atlantic:

What lies behind the inequality of American cities? The conventional explanation blames the rise of the globalized, knowledge economy which has eliminated family-supporting factory jobs and cleaved the workforce into high-paying, high-skill and low-paying, low-skill jobs. But, as I wrote in my previous post, wage inequality only explains a very small part of income inequality.

How to explain this apparent discrepancy? What other factors lie behind rising inequality across America's cities?

To answer that question, I reviewed several powerful theories that try to explain persistent economic and social disadvantage across cities.

The first focuses not just on trends in skills and wages, but on shifts in populations. Christopher Berry and Edward Glaeser noted the divergence of human capital levels across cities in 2005. In his book, The Big Sort, Bill Bishop shows how America is becoming increasingly sorted and divided by skill, economic position and political differences. Writing in the magazine, I dubbed this the “means migration.”

A detailed study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found inequality to be higher in larger cities and metros (which attract more highly skilled people). Size (measured as population) alone accounted for roughly 25 to 35 percent of the total increase in economic inequality across metros over the past three decades, after other key factors were taken into account.

A second calls attention to declining rates of unionization. In The Great U-Turn, economists Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone blame the attack on and the decline in unions for undermining wages not just for unionized workers but for reducing the so-called wage floor for workers in the broader economy.

A third focuses on the intersection of race, poverty and economic disadvantage.