Certain places, for unknowable reasons, become socio-cultural petri dishes, and between 1960 and 1964 the area of Northern California extending from San Francisco to Palo Alto was one of them. San Francisco’s official bohemia was North Beach, where the Beats hung out at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookstore, and where espresso was sipped, jazz was worshipped, and hipsters did not dance. North Beach was not unique, however; it had strong counterparts, for example, in New York’s Greenwich Village, L.A.’s Venice Beach and Sunset Strip, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. What was unique was happening across town, where a group of young artists, musicians, and San Francisco State College students became besotted with the city’s past. “There was a huge romanticism around the idea of the Barbary Coast, about San Francisco as a lawless, vigilante, late-19th-century town,” says Rock Scully, one of those who rented cheap Victorian houses in a run-down neighborhood called Haight-Ashbury. They dressed, he says, “in old, stiff-collared shirts with pins, and riding coats and long jackets.” “Old-timey” became the shibboleth.

more from Sheila Weller at Vanity Fair here.

Untitled

The cliff is a wave of rock
that waits. Settled on top

is an albatross nestling, facing
the way its mother left at first light.

It will not move but to blink, adagio,
till she comes on the front of dusk.

You set me likewise on this rock
and ordered me to stay.

My heart a vessel
misemployed above the watermark,

the sea’s black pelt gleaming
in the light underneath.

Steady is the pulse of the promisee’s heart:
one beat mutinous; patient the other.
.

One of the more memorable encounters in the history of modern art occurred late in 1961 when the period’s preeminent avant-garde dealer, Leo Castelli, paid a call at the Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse-cum-studio of Andy Warhol, whose pioneering Pop paintings based on cartoon characters including Dick Tracy, the Little King, Nancy, Popeye, and Superman had caught the eye of Castelli’s gallery director, Ivan Karp, who in turn urged his boss to go have a look for himself. Warhol, eager to make the difficult leap from commercial artist to “serious” painter, decades later recalled his crushing disappointment when Castelli coolly told him, “Well, it’s unfortunate, the timing, because I just took on Roy Lichtenstein, and the two of you in the same gallery would collide.” Although Lichtenstein, then a thirty-eight-year-old assistant art professor at Rutgers University’s Douglass College in New Jersey, was also making pictures based on comic-book prototypes—an example of wholly independent multiple discovery not unlike such scientific findings as calculus, oxygen, photography, and evolution—he and Warhol were in fact doing quite different things with similar source material, as the divergent tangents of their later careers would amply demonstrate.

more from Martin Filler at the NYRB here.

Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker:

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)

For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort.

More here. And Tauriq Moosa adds some thoughts.

Austin Allen in Big Think:

One way to gauge Anderson’s achievement is to set him beside another celebrated auteur with the same initials. Critics who find Anderson’s work immature and Woody Allen’s sophisticated have things backward. (There are exceptions to this rule, but not many.) Anderson’s films are outwardly childlike but conceal mature emotional insight. Allen’s films play at urbane adulthood but are at heart sophomoric.

What has earned Allen his reputation as a sophisticate? Mainly scenes like the one in Manhattan in which he dictates, into a tape recorder, his list of things that make life “worth living”: Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Mozart’s Jupiter symphony, Cézanne’s still lifes, and so on. This is allusion as name-checking, and falls terribly flat. Joan Didion mocked it as “the ultimate consumer report”; it strikes me more as an earnest undergraduate essay. I haven’t seen Allen’s latest, Midnight in Paris, but the conceit strikes me as equally literal-minded: a screenwriter is transported back in time to meet his literary heroes, whose pantheon he aspires to join. You see? It’s a literate film.

Anderson also harbors high-art ambitions, but mingles far more naturally with his influences. Allusion in his films is a background effect, assimilated in sly, organic fashion. It’s not necessary for him to tell us that J. D. Salinger’s spirit hovers overRushmore or that The Life Aquatic is a screwball Moby-Dick, because he simplyuses these materials and trusts his audience to understand.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

From Scientific American:

The poem “Maud Muller” by John Greenleaf Whittier aptly ends with the line, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” What if you had gone for the risky investment that you later found out made someone else rich, or if you had had the guts to ask that certain someone to marry you? Certainly, we’ve all had instances in our lives where hindsight makes us regret not sticking our neck out a bit more. But new research suggests that when we are older these kinds of ‘if only!’ thoughts about the choices we made may not be so good for our mental health. One of the most important determinants of our emotional well being in our golden years might be whether we learn to stop worrying about what might have been.

In a new paper published in Science, researchers from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany, report evidence from two experiments which suggest that one key to aging well might involve learning to let go of regrets about missed opportunities. Stafanie Brassen and her colleagues looked at how healthy young participants (mean age: 25.4 years), healthy older participants (65.8 years), and older participants who had developed depression for the first time later in life (65.6 years) dealt with regret, and found that the young and older depressed patients seemed to hold on to regrets about missed opportunities while the healthy older participants seemed to let them go.

More here.

The London blue plaque scheme began in 1866. There are over 850 plaques extant, of nearly a thousand total (the rest were on buildings since lost or demolished.) The first one commemorated Lord Byron’s birthplace in Holles Street. In order to be eligible to have a blue plaque put on the building in which you strove, suffered, were born or died, you must either have been dead for twenty years, or have passed the centenary of your birth, “whichever is earlier.” Then there is a long process, involving the submission of a complicated proposal to the Blue Plaques Team, then another hurdle in the panel review, a final detailed review by a historian, and finally, if you make the cut, consents are sought and granted by the building owner. Nine or so new plaques go up each year. So this whole procedure had been set in motion for Oscar Wilde’s famous house in Tite Street, in honor of the centenary of Wilde’s birth (1854), and Vyvyan Holland had written to Beerbohm in Italy in 1953 asking him to preside over the traditional plaque-unveiling ceremony, to take place the following year. Since Beerbohm couldn’t travel, in his response to Holland he suggested an alternate.

more from Maria Bustillos at The Awl here.

As a lover of famous correspondence, especially extraordinary love letters, and of Rainer Maria Rilke, I was instantly enamored with Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters (public library)—a magnificent collection of letters exchanged between Rilke and the Russian-born writer, intellectual, psychoanalyst, and “muse of Europe’s fin-de-siècle thinkers and artists” Lou Andreas-Salomé, 15 years his senior. The relationship, which began when 21-year-old Rilke met the 36-year-old and married Salomé, commenced with the all-too-familiar pattern of one besotted lover, Rilke, flooding the resistant object of his desire with romantic revelations, only to be faced with repeated, composed rejection as Salomé claimed to wish she could make him “go completely away.”

more from Maria Popova at The Atlantic here.

Near the end of this thick volume, the fourth in his celebrated saga of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Robert A. Caro describes the War on Poverty as the most sincere and boldest initiative of a normally cynical and utterly practical politician. It did not matter that LBJ’s advisers warned him the plan to uplift the nation’s forty to fifty million poor would gain him no additional votes in the next election. “That’s my kind of program,” the new president insisted just a day after he took office in late November 1963. “I’ll find money for it one way or another.” As was typical of the man, a personal motivation led him to take a political stand. Caro recounts how, at the age of nine, Johnson had to pick cotton in the summer heat of central Texas and wore patched clothing after his father’s ranch went bankrupt. LBJ “hated poverty and illiteracy,” a childhood friend remembered. “He hated it when a person who wanted to work could not get a job.” So passionate was Johnson about the issue that he doubled, to a billion dollars, the annual amount his budget writers had earmarked for the “unconditional” War on Poverty and made the program the centerpiece of his first State of the Union address, which he delivered in January 1964. It was, gushes Caro, “a program with goals so new and ambitious that it was necessary to go back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to find, perhaps not an equal, but at least a comparison.”

more from Michael Kazin at Bookforum here.

A post for Morgan Meis. This one makes me happy; despite my intellectual proclivities, I have liked Lev Shestov (finding him less, er, high-pitched than Simone Weil) ever since I came across the piece on him (and Weil) by Milosz. David Sugarman in Tablet:

Lev Shestov, né Lev Isaakovich Schwarzmann, was born in 1866 into a prosperous merchant family in Kiev. His father was very knowledgeable about Jewish law and literature but was not religious or observant. Shestov married in 1896 and began his career as something of a man of letters in Russia, writing about Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov through the prism of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The tumult of the early decades of the 20th century, however, brought tragedy and instability into Shestov’s life: His son was killed serving in the Russian military, and the October Revolution in 1917 forced his family to flee the country. Shestov would spend the next few years in exile, journeying through Crimea and Switzerland, until 1921, when he would finally settle in France. He died in Paris in 1938.

Shestov’s first sustained work of original philosophy, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905), explored what he termed the “groundlessness,” or irrationality and uncertainty, of man’s experience of the world. “We know nothing of the ultimate realities of our existence, nor shall we ever know anything,” he wrote. “Let that be agreed.” The world does not make sense, argues Shestov, and philosophy should not hope to find reason in it: “The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty … it is not to reassure people, but to upset them.”

Shestov’s view that philosophy needed to proceed from an axiom of groundlessness, from an understanding of the human condition as essentially absurd and pointless, was argued in opposition to philosophers who emphasized reason—and the supposedly rational nature of human existence—above all else. Rational and logical thinking clearly help humans understand certain aspects of the world, Shestov acknowledged; “to discard logic completely would be extravagant,” he wrote. But Shestov also believed that rational thought was merely one human ability among many. If used in every sphere of life, he believed, reason would corrode man’s ability to connect to a more spiritual realm. Shestov thus advocated that faith and reason, theology and science, needed to be regarded as two distinct entities. “It seems to me,” Shestov wrote, “that it is enough to ask a man, ‘Does God exist?’ immediately to make it impossible for him to give any answer to this question.”

Elizabeth Anderson on the overlap and disjunctures between liberalism and libertarianism, over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (via Corey Robin):

Let’s start with my points of agreement with Tomasi’s refreshing Free Market Fairness. (1) Political justification is broadly contractualist: just principles must be endorsable by those living under them. (2) They would endorse principles of social justice in the neighborhood of Rawls’s principles of equal basic liberties and fair opportunities, and require that socially instituted inequalities redound to the benefit of all, especially the least advantaged. (3) We should try to arrange the rules of economic life such that just outcomes are largely produced as the byproducts of fair, general, impersonal rules of property, contract, taxation, etc., which are applicable to all. (4) Principles of justice should honor people’s concern for the self-respect they attain through their agency: that they not only enjoy certain outcomes, but do so through their own activities. (5) The economy is an important domain of agency. A just regime should arrange the rules of economic life to ensure a rich set of opportunities for people to engage in market activities according to their preferences, consistent with honoring the self-authorship of others. (6) This includes the freedom to create, own, and operate private productive enterprises. Tomasi argues that 4-6 constitute important amendments to, or perhaps distinctive market democratic interpretations of, “high liberal” principles of social justice. I’ll sign on.

Now for the disagreements.

Tomasi argues that rights to economic liberty should be constitutionalized, with economic regulations subject to a high level of judicial scrutiny. Considerations of social justice may sometimes override economic freedom—but only if judges approve. I don’t think this is a sensible way to limit economic regulation. Consider the contrast between the rights to freedom of religion and freedom of movement. In political philosophy, both rights are equally fundamental. Legally, however, virtually no regulations on freedom of religion are permissible, but courts rightly defer to the other branches of government with respect to virtually all general regulations of movement on public roads. You must signal a turn or a lane change, but a law requiring you to publicize your religious conversion would be unconstitutional. You must wait for green at a stop light, but a law requiring a waiting period before you could leave or join a church would be struck down. You can pray as fast as you want, even while drunk, but don’t try driving that way.

And here is a response by Jessica Flanigan.

Manu Joseph in the New York Times:

As Britain celebrates six decades of Elizabeth II as monarch, it is the reign of another queen that contemporary India resembles.

It may be nearly impossible to accept that Victorian Britain, with its frock coats and parasols, had anything in common with present-day India, where “ladies” and “gentlemen” are primarily toilet signs. But, if the charades of appearances and manners are stripped away, and if only economic tumult and questions of conscience are considered, then mid-nineteenth-century Britain had much in common with India today.

In the England of that time, there were sharp increases in wealth, but the Industrial Revolution had also heaped a vast number of urban poor in plain sight. The accepted wisdom then was that poverty was the unavoidable curse of an unlucky majority. But that notion was slowly demolished by some brilliant men and women who, in their efforts to devise a cure, were building the rudiments of modern economics. A newly enriched society was beginning to accept that abject poverty in its midst was a morally indefensible paradox.

Sylvia Nasar, in her recent book “Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius ,” describes the observations of the 24-year-old mathematician Alfred Marshall on an unremarkable day in 1867, many years before he became one of the most influential economists of his time. In Manchester, she writes, Marshall found “the smoky brown sky, muddy brown streets, and long piles of warehouses, cavernous mills and insalubrious tenements — all within a few hundred yards of glittering shops, gracious parks and grand hotels. … In the narrow back streets he encountered sallow undersized men and stunted, pale factory girls. …”

This could be, without any changes, a scene in any major Indian city today.

David Samuels in Tablet:

How do you know Noam Chomsky?

That’s an interesting story, which tells you something about Professor Chomsky as a person. I don’t like to put him on a pedestal, because, you know, I’ve known him for more than a quarter of a century, and I was very close with his wife, closer than with Professor Chomsky. Because Professor Chomsky is in the cerebral world, and [his wife, the linguist] Carol [Schatz], who is brilliant, was also down to earth. We could talk bullshit. I went shopping with her, we would talk about prices in the supermarket, and she took out her coupons at the cash register.

Chomsky has his flaws, but the virtues are staggering. It’s not just that he made these linguistic discoveries; it’s the thousands of graduate students that he trained. He createdphysically a field. And you know, I travel a lot, I tell you every time everywhere I go, at least two people will say, “I read a book by Chomsky, and it changed my life.” But he has his flaws, like everybody else.

What are Chomsky’s biggest flaws?

I’m never going to say. Because Chomsky’s biggest virtue, you know what it is? Aside from his staggering intellect and absolute faithfulness, Professor Chomsky never betrayed a friend. He will defend them even though inside he knows that they’re completely wrong.

More here.

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers in Salon:

The earliest single-celled organisms on Earth simply cloned themselves. Some of their descendants still do. But as complex multicelled organisms evolved and eventually “discovered” the ability to mix their gametes, they gained a giant genetic advantage. Since these ancient creatures lived in the sea, the earliest sex was a straightforward process of spraying sperm and eggs into the water. The lucky few connected.

In that massive free-for-all, the fittest sperm reached the eggs and were rewarded with the prize of bringing their DNA into natural selection’s next round. Sometimes the fittest sperm were the strongest swimmers. Sometimes they were the ones deposited nearest the eggs. Others developed ways to follow molecular scent pathways to find the eggs. Or they bundled together in teams to improve their timing and accuracy. As sperm perfected ingenious rudders, tails, chemical markers and swimming strategies, the genital hardware that ejected them was evolving, too.

More here.

Andrew Russeth in the New York Observer:

Many of today’s superstar artists, like Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami (who also did a West record cover) and Damien Hirst not only do not shy away from publicity-rich spectacles, but embrace and engineer them with a vigor that would have impressed even Andy Warhol. Mr. Koons dreams of hanging a 70-foot-long smoke-puffing locomotive over the High Line, a public-art bauble par excellence; Mr. Murakami donned a plush flower costume and waved to fans from a float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. As for Mr. Hirst, he trumped his epic 2008 single-artist Sotheby’s auction (which garnered $200.7 million) with this year’s Spot Challenge, the globe-trotter’s version of the contest on the back of a cereal box, for which all 11 Gagosian galleries fell into line behind him. These artists demand the love—or at least the attention—of the masses.

Nevertheless, it is rarely the nature of cutting-edge contemporary art to offer itself up so easily to the general public, which accounts for a counterbalancing force, a way in which the avant-garde maintains the initiates-only atmosphere that has always defined it. So it was that just as the last of the 128 people to successfully complete the Spot Challenge card were having their cards stamped at the beginning of March, a painting of a musician by the British artist Merlin Carpenter was going on view at the Independent art fair in Chelsea, after having been locked away during a show at the Berlin gallery MD72 the year before. During that show, collectors willing to part with €5,000 (about $6,900 at the time) were afforded the privilege of viewing the work. Those among the general public interested in viewing Mr. Carpenter’s latest work were strictly excluded from the real painting, able to view it only in reproductions printed on playing cards.

Welcome to the world of secret art.

More here.

Christopher Mims in Mother Board:

If you think of the Earth as a space ship with an energy budget that equals the input of the sun, which is exactly what it is, then you can imagine that there is a total quantity of biological productivity of which our planet is capable. Estimates say that humans are already appropriating between one quarter and one half of this productivity. The total amount of land given to crops is tied with forests as the single largest terrestrial ecosystem. Our food production requires almost a quarter of the total land area of the planet.

We have basically killed most of the wildlife that was available to us only a single generation ago. Chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy Peter Kareiva has declared that while 13 percent of Earth’s landmass is now protected as some sort of park — an area larger than all of South America — we have completely failed to stop the eradication of the plant and animal inhabitants of these “wild” places. Much of this is due to the fact that wild things are apparently quite tasty. And if you think this is limited to the land, the evidence is that our oceans are in even worse shape, with global fishing stocks set to collapse by mid-century. Meanwhile, as we all know, climate change is only accelerating what scientists now call the “sixth extinction.” Or in other words, the sixth time in the 4 billion year history of life on earth that the entire planet was so challenged that a vast majority of life came perilously close to being snuffed out.

More here.

29. Naturally Sacred

The world’s naturally sacred
—a holy cup. Its way is blessed.
To sip its yield is best.

The world resists the shove at last;
its push-back is hard on meddlers
foolish enough to thrust their fists
into its cogs. It can’t be grasped.

Change comes without force in any case.
It can’t be stopped
……………..— —it goes from
down to up, from cold to hot,
from weak to strong, to sick or not,
from first to last, ahead, behind,
whichever way it’s so inclined.

The wise find their path between extremes.
Failures from excess; judgment for the judged.

The dizzy ride the wheel’s rim.
The centered, at its hub,
calmly watch the dizzy spin.

Lao Tzu
from Adaptations of the Tao Te Ching
by R.Bob

From The New York Times:

The extremes of animal behavior can be a source of endless astonishment. Books have been written about insect sex. The antics of dogs and cats are sometimes hard to believe. And birds, those amazing birds: They build elaborate nests, learn lyrical songs, migrate impossibly long distances. But “Gifts of the Crow,” by John N. Marzluff and Tony Angell, includes a description of one behavior that even Aesop never imagined. “On Kinkazan Island in northern Japan,” the authors write, “jungle crows pick up deer feces — dry pellets of dung — and deftly wedge them in the deer’s ears.” What!?

I checked the notes at the back of the book, and this account comes from another book, written in Japanese. So I can’t give any more information on this astonishing claim, other than to say that Dr. Marzluff, of the University of Washington, and Mr. Angell, an artist and observer of birds, think that the crows do it in the spirit of fun. Deer droppings, it must be said, are only one of the crows’ gifts. The authors’ real focus is on the way that crows can give us “the ephemeral and profound connection to nature that many people crave.” To that end, however, they tell some wild anecdotes and make some surprising assertions. Many of the behaviors they describe — crows drinking beer and coffee, whistling and calling dogs and presenting gifts to people who feed them — are based on personal testimony and would seem to fall into the category of anecdote rather than science.

More here.