From PhysOrg:

Religious practices that strongly control female sexuality are more successful at promoting certainty about paternity, according to a study published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study analyzed genetic data on 1,706 father-son pairs in a traditional African population—the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa—in which Islam, two types of Christianity, and an indigenous, monotheistic religion are practiced in the same families and villages. “We found that the indigenous religion allows males to achieve a significantly lower probability of cuckoldry—1.3 percent versus 2.9 percent,” said Beverly Strassmann, lead author of the article and a biological anthropologist at the University of Michigan.

In the traditional religion, menstrual taboos are strictly enforced, with women exiled for five nights to uncomfortable menstrual huts. According to Strassmann, the religion uses the ideology of pollution to ensure that women honestly signal their fertility status to men in their husband's family. “When a woman resumes going to the menstrual hut following her last birth, the husband's patrilineage is informed of the imminency of conception and cuckoldry risk,” Strassmann said. “Precautions include postmenstrual copulation initiated by the husband and enhanced vigilance by his family.” Across all four of the religions practiced by the Dogon people, Strassmann and colleagues detected father-son Y DNA mismatches in only 1.8 percent of father-son pairs, a finding that contradicts the prevailing view that traditional populations have high rates of cuckoldry. A similar rate of cuckoldry has been found in several modern populations, but a key difference is that the Dogon do not use contraception.

More here.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

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1. 13.7: Physics Vs. Philosophy: Really?
2. 3 Quarks Daily: In the Kingdom of Decay
3. Above the Market: We Suck at Math
4. Accidental Blogger: Psychology’s Quest for Scientific Respectability
5. Aetiology: Hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS): history and implications
6. Alien Plantation: Agave de Mayo
7. Amy Shira Teitel: Was NASA’s First Launch Delay its Most Significant?
8. Antimatter: A tribute to Stephen Hawking
9. Astrobites: Let’s Lasso Us Some Space Rocks: Asteroid Mining And You
10. Astrobites: The WISE way to deal with 2.7 million images: a public data release
11. Astrobites: This star lives in exciting times, or, How did Betelgeuse make that funny shape?
12. Astronomy Picture of the Day: Red Aurora Over Australia
13. Azimuth: Information Geometry
14. Backreaction: The hunt for the first exoplanet
15. Baloon Juice: I’m Shocked! Shocked To Find That There Are Neutrinos Going On Here
16. Basic Space: Supernova turns inside out and kicks neutron star
17. Beach Chair Scientist: An important call for more forage fish to remain in the sea
18. Big in Science: Why Your Next Doctor May Be A Computer
19. Boing Boing: What Fukushima can teach us about coal pollution
20. Boundary Vision: Do scientific explanations have to ruin wonder? Stargazing and more with songwriter Jim Fitzpatrick
21. Cedar’s Digest: Purple Doesn’t Exist: Some thoughts on Male Privilege and Science Online
22. Context and Variation: Vaginal pH Redux: Broader Perspectives on Douching, Race… and Lime Juice
23. Cool Physics: Einstein, Darwin & the 21st Century…
24. Cosmology Science Blog: Cosmic Microwave Angular Resolution Surprise
25. Cosmology Science Blog: Observation of two early yet mature galaxies: Rare objects or is Big Bang model inaccurate?
26. Delfikorakle: Pizza and Panini
27. Denim and Tweed: Baby steps versus long jumps: The “size” of evolutionary change, and why it matters
28. Disease Prone: Antibiotics with a side of steak
29. Do the Math: Can Economic Growth Last?
30. Doing Good Science: Methodology versus beliefs: What did Marcus Ross do wrong?
31. Don’t Mind the Mess: The Whole Truth About Autism
32. Double X Science: From alchemist to chemist: What kind of chemistry is that?
33. Double X Science: Pregnancy 101: Peas made me puke, but not just in the morning
34. Double X Science: Real science vs. fake science: How can you tell them apart?
35. Double X Science: The path from science to alarmism: How science gets twisted before it gets to you
36. Eastern Blot: Make history, not vitamin C
37. Empirical Zeal: The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains
38. Empirical Zeal: What it feels like for a sperm, or how to get around when you are really, really small
39. Eruptions: The Mysterious Missing Eruption of 1258 A.D.
40. Eruptions: The Right (and Wrong) Way to Die When You Fall Into Lava
41. From the Lab Bench: Old News for Carbon Dioxide, New Threats for Climate Change
42. Gaines, On Brains: Seeing into the future? The neuroscience of déjà vu
43. Galileo’s Pendulum: Is Cosmology in Shambles?
44. Good Thinking: Mammograms and PSA Tests: What Your Doctor Needs to Tell You
45. If We Assume: Plots as Art
46. Information Processing: “Only he was fully awake”
47. Inkfish: Life Advice: Think More about Death
48. Inspiring Science: Through the gut: how plants in food regulate genes in animals
49. Katie Ph.D.: What exactly is a genetically modified plant?
50. Not Exactly Rocket Science: A world within a tumour – new study shows just how complex cancer can be
51. Nottingham Science Blog: Interview : Prof Alfonso Aragón-Salamanca
52. Of Particular Significance: What’s a Proton, Anyway?
53. Percolator: Birds Lose Their Magnetic Maps as Scientists Reverse Direction
54. Physics Buzz Blog: Physicist Uses Math to Beat Traffic Ticket
55. Puff the Mutant Dragon: Do vaccines contain toxic chemicals?
56. Quantum Diaries: Helicity, Chirality, Mass, and the Higgs
57. Resonaances: How to make a line
58. Science Sushi: Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming > Conventional Agriculture
59. Science Sushi: Time – and brain chemistry – heal all wounds
60. Scientific American: Why Is Memory So Good and So Bad?
61. Scientific American Guest Blog: Catalytic Clothing–Purifying Air Goes Trendy
62. Scientific American Guest Blog: Reflections on biology and motherhood: Where does Homo sapiens fit in?
63. Scientific American Guest Blog: The educational value of creative disobedience
64. Scientific American Guest Blog: Too Good to Be True: Sea Mammals, Plastic Pollution and a Modern Chimera
65. Scientific American Guest Blog: Trayvon Martin’s Psychological Killer: Why We See Guns That Aren’t There
66. Scientific American Guest Blog: Your Appendix Could Save Your Life
67. Sentence First: “Who to follow” is grammatically fine
68. Shtetl-Optimized: My visit to D-Wave: Beyond the roast-beef sandwich
69. Side Effects: Antidepressant Withdrawal Syndrome: Findings, Recommendations, and Resources
70. Skulls in the Stars: The secret molecular life of soap bubbles (1913)
71. Southern Fried Science: Climbing Mount Chernobyl
72. Starts With A Bang!: So, you’ve learned that the Sun is going to explode…
73. Starts With A Bang!: The Most Astounding Fact About The Universe
74. Starts With A Bang!: Why is there something instead of nothing?
75. Talk Nerdy To Me: My Evening With Stephen Hawking
76. The Beast, the Bard, and the Bot: Are Humans Still Evolving?
77. The Crux: What Is the “Bible of Psychiatry” Supposed to Do? The Peculiar Challenges of an Uncertain Science
78. The Dayside: Sine-wave speech recognition in Mandarin
79. The Hammock Physicist: Einstein Got It Wrong, Can You Do Better?
80. The Loom: Neanderthal Neuroscience
81. The Mermaid’s Tale: Forget bipedalism. What about babyism?
82. The Neurocritic: Little Evidence for a Direct Link between PTSD and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy
83. The Neurocritic: The Disconnection of Psychopaths
84. The Primate Diaries: Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence
85. The Scorpion and the Frog: Decisions, Decisions
86. The Scorpion and the Frog: Snakes Deceive to Get a Little Snuggle
87. The Scorpion and the Frog: The Love Hormone of 2012
88. The Scorpion and the Frog: Why This Horde of Idiots is No Genius
89. The Sky’s the Limit: Saturn’s Rings Explained…
90. The Spectrum of Riemannium: Time of Flight
91. The Stochastic Scientist: Carbon monoxide as therapy?
92. The Thoughtful Animal: Can You Hear Me Now? Human Noise Disrupts Blue Whale Communication
93. The Thoughtful Animal: Contagious Yawning: Evidence of Empathy?
94. The Thoughtful Animal: Four Loko Is Just Like The Copenhagen Philharmonic
95. The Thoughtful Animal: Hyenas Give Up Eating Garbage for Lent, Hunt Donkeys Instead
96. The Thoughtful Animal: Music and Memory: Robert Sherman, Voice of Your Childhood, Dies at 86
97. The Trenches of Discovery: The War of the Immune Worlds
98. Theobrominated: How can a flower like this exist?
99. Three-toed Sloth: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You
100. Uncertain Principles: Watching Photons Interfere: “Observing the Average Trajectories of Single Photons in a Two-Slit Interferometer”
101. viXra log: Higgs Boson Live Blog: Analysis of the CERN announcement
102. Weird Things: Oh quantum causality, we hardly knew ye…
103. Where is Yvette?: Artie Aardvark’s Amazing ASTRON Adventures
104. Why We Reason: Does Pinker’s “Better Angels” Undermine Religious Morality?
105. World Science Festival: E.O. Wilson’s Controversial Rethink of Altruism
106. Write Science: Pigeons, the Internet, and the Meaning of Science
107. Write Science: Smartphones and the Enduring Silence of the Cosmos

Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books:

In 1972, I found myself on a panel whose subject was the poetry of the future. It was at the Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia. I wasn’t scheduled to participate, but the American poet who was supposed to, W.S. Merwin, begged me to take his place, since he wanted to visit some monastery with his girlfriend. Being older, much more famous, and immensely admired by me, he couldn’t be refused and I went to the morning panel without any idea of what I was going to say. To my horror, the other panelists had come well-prepared, reading either from copious notes or as in the case of a poet from the Soviet Union, from a lengthy typewritten text that confidently predicted a golden age of poetry in a world turned Communist and living in harmony for the first time in human history.

My turn came next, though I was in near-comatose condition from uninterrupted drinking, smoking and talking since my arrival to the festival after a twenty-hour long journey from San Francisco with barely any sleep. Nevertheless, roused back to life by the drivel of the previous speaker, I said that predicting the future of poetry is a total waste of time, because poetry has not changed fundamentally in the last twenty-five centuries and I doubted it would do so in the next hundred years. Since that was all the energy I had, I fell silent and didn’t open my mouth again for the rest of the session. As for my fellow-panelists, I have no memory of any of them responding to anything I said as they continued arguing with each other about the future of poetry.

What I said that day was as much of a surprise to me as it must have been to the other people in the room, for I was then known as a surrealist poet, someone who routinely proclaimed a belief in the avant-garde. I and my friends were like those old-time Marxists who were sure that they understood the laws of history. We were convinced that abstract painting was an advance over figurative painting, that free verse was superior to meter and rhyme. To me, novelty was an essential requirement in the arts, and it still is.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Probably the biggest single misconception I come across in popular discussions of dark matter and dark energy is the accusation that these concepts are a return to the discredited idea of the aether. They are not — in fact, they are precisely the opposite.

Back in the later years of the 19th century, physicists had put together an incredibly successful synthesis of electricity and magnetism, topped by the work of James Clerk Maxwell. They had managed to show that these two apparently distinct phenomena were different manifestations of a single underlying “electromagnetism.” One of Maxwell’s personal triumphs was to show that this new theory implied the existence of waves traveling at the speed of light — indeed, these waves arelight, not to mention radio waves and X-rays and the rest of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum.

The puzzle was that waves were supposed to represent oscillations in some underlying substance, like water waves on an ocean. If light was an electromagnetic wave, what was “waving”? The proposed answer was the aether, sometimes called the “luminiferous aether” to distinguish it from the classical element. This idea had a direct implication: that Maxwell’s description of electromagnetism would be appropriate as long as we were at rest with respect to the aether, but that its predictions (for the speed of light, for example) would change as we moved through the aether. The hunt was to find experimental evidence for this idea, but attempts came up short. TheMichelson-Morley experiment, in particular, implied that the speed of light did not change as the Earth moved through space, in apparent contradiction with the aether idea.

So the aether was a theoretical idea that never found experimental support. In 1905 Einstein pointed out how to preserve the symmetries of Maxwell’s equations without referring to aether at all, in the special theory of relativity, and the idea was relegated to the trash bin of scientific history.

More here.

In a written exchange, associate professor Michael Alfaro and postdoctoral scientist Sharlene E. Santana described their investigation with American Scientistsenior editor Catherine Clabby.

Catherine Clabby in American Scientist:

What inspired your research into primate faces?

When you see the faces of primates, you see an extraordinary diversity of shapes, colors and patterns, so we wondered what were the factors behind this diversity. Social behaviors seemed to be a very likely candidate underlying the diversity of primate faces, so that drew us in to further explore how behaviors can shape the evolution of anatomy in these mammals. Neotropical primates were ideal to start our studies of facial diversity because they are a single evolutionary radiation spanning a wide variety of habitats and social systems, and they have an extraordinary variation in their facial features.

Are the faces of primates really that different from the faces of other mammals?

What is particular about primates is their high reliance on facial cues to interact socially, more so than many other mammals. Primates use characteristics of their faces and facial expressions to recognize individuals in their groups and to assess each other’s behaviors. Related to this, primates have evolved a very well-developed visual system and neural centers for facial recognition. Such an important role in communication has shaped the evolution of primate faces, along with ecological and physiological functions.

More here.

Mark Edmundson in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Who hasn't at least once had the feeling of being remade through music? Who is there who doesn't date a new phase in life to hearing this or that symphony or song? I heard it—we say—and everything changed. I heard it, and a gate flew open and I walked through. But does music constantly provide revelation—or does it have some other effects, maybe less desirable?

For those of us who teach, the question is especially pressing. Our students tend to spend hours a day plugged into their tunes. Yet, at least in my experience, they are reluctant to talk about music. They'll talk about sex, they'll talk about drugs—but rock 'n' roll, or whatever else they may be listening to, is off-limits. What's going on there?

When I first heard Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone” in 1965, not long after it came out, I was amazed. At the time, I liked to listen to pop on the radio—the Beatles were fine, the Stones were better. But nothing I'd heard until then prepared me for Dylan's song. It had all the fluent joy of a pop number, but something else was going on too. This song was about lyrics: language. Dylan wasn't chanting some truism about being in love or wanting to get free or wasted for the weekend. He had something to say. He was exasperated. He was pissed off. He'd clearly been betrayed by somebody, or a whole nest of somebodies, and he was letting them have it. His words were exuberantly weird and sometimes almost embarrassingly inventive—and I didn't know what they all meant. “You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat / Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.” Chrome horse? Diplomat? What?

More here.

Jim Holt in the New York Times:

A kerfuffle has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe’s existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it “moronic” and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.

This is hardly the first occasion on which physicists have made disobliging comments about philosophy. Last year at a Google “Zeitgeist conference” in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was “dead.” Another great physicist, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy “murky and inconsequential” and of no value to him as a working scientist. And Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that “philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.”

Why do physicists have to be so churlish toward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science. “Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of science fails us,” Voltaire wrote back in the 18th century. And in the last few decades, philosophers have come to see their enterprise as continuous with that of science. It is noteworthy that the “moronic” philosopher who kicked up the recent shindy by dismissing the physicist’s book himself holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics.

More here. [Photo shows David Albert.]

Robin McKie in The Guardian:

It was the sight of a young male Adélie penguin attempting to have sex with a dead female that particularly unnerved George Murray Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition. No such observation had ever been recorded before, as far as he knew, and Levick, a typical Edwardian Englishman, was horrified. Blizzards and freezing cold were one thing. Penguin perversion was another.

Worse was to come, however. Levick spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 observing the colony of Adélies at Cape Adare, making him the only scientist to this day to have studied an entire breeding cycle there. During that time, he witnessed males having sex with other males and also with dead females, including several that had died the previous year. He also saw them sexually coerce females and chicks and occasionally kill them.

Levick blamed this “astonishing depravity” on “hooligan males” and wrote down his observations in Greek so that only an educated gentleman would understand the horrors he had witnessed. Back in Britain he produced a paper (in English), titled Natural History of the Adélie Penguin. However, the section about the animal's sexual proclivities was deemed to be so shocking it was removed to preserve decency. Levick then used this material as the basis for a separate short paper, Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin, which was privately circulated among a handful of experts.

In fact, Levick's observations turned out to be well ahead of their time.

More here.

From The New York Times:

During the great performance that was her life, Lillian Hellman always addressed the 20th century from center stage. While she defended many causes — justice, loyalty, American civil liberties, anti-fascism and Soviet-style Communism among them — what she represented most staunchly was herself, and what she believed in most fiercely was her own unassailability. She was first and last a dramatist, with a genius for the concise phrase and the provocative gesture. Shrewd plotting and a talent for dialogue were hallmarks of the hugely successful plays, movies and memoirs she wrote. But two crystalline expressions of her own life’s high drama are more memorable than any story she ever spun: her pithy rebuke to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 (“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions”) and the 1976 Blackglama advertisement for which she posed, enrobed in mink, her 71-year-old face alight with both amusement and confrontation. From her earliest days she sought the spotlight. Once it was on her, she basked in it until the end. Her friend Richard de Combray commented that when she died in 1984 at age 79, “she wanted to pull all the scenery down with her.”

“To read Hellman, even to read about her, is to start an argument,” one of her biographers has noted.

More here.

From The Friday Times:

Tahira Syed is beautiful. She has always been beautiful. Mustafa Khar to Javed Ghamidi and Altaf Gohar to Mark Tully, all were smitten by her. She can sing as well, though most of us have not paid as much attention to that over the years. She has remarkable songs to her credit and many suspect that Pakistan Television (PTV) has used these numbers to successfully seduce at least two generations of viewers. They argue that it would be disingenuous to pretend, given her profession, that her looks haven't played a part in her career success. My father used to say that one way of experiencing the Divine Watchmaker at work on the mathematics of life was to observe Tahira Syed's hand and neck move in tandem. Before my recent trip to Pakistan, my Anglicised son called me excitedly from the TV lounge to announce that he could be persuaded to marry the singer on PTV broadcasting semi-classical songs. No prize for guessing who it was!

For those of us who were children in the 1970s, Tahira Syed was much more than a beauty queen. Along with Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto, she slowly but surely emerged to become the face of Pakistan. It was perhaps a tribute to her natural beauty that she appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine. Our tears had just about dried following the debacle of 1971. Zulfi Bhutto was running rings round his adversaries and we were starting to have stars in our eyes. When we saw her on PTV, standing tall with her handsome figure, chiseled face and bright eyes, singing '…Hum Sa Hai Tou Samnay Aayay…' we believed we had no equal out there. Life seemed beautiful and we had hope that nothing was out of reach – we could have what we wanted and the future would turn out to be all right. Watching her removed the blinds of fear from our hearts and minds and let us see the big picture – like Helen of Troy, she could launch a thousand ships for us.

More here. (Note: For dear friend Tahira…you are the stuff of dreams…with love)

Jerusalem

When I leave you I turn to stone
and when I come back I turn to stone

I name you Medusa
I name you the older sister of Sodom and Gomorrah
you baptismal basin that burned Rome

The murdered hum their poems on the hills
and the rebels reproach the tellers of their stories
while I leave the sea behind and come back
to you, come back
by this small river that flows in your despair

I hear the reciters of the Quran and the shrouders of corpses
I hear the dust of the condolers
I am not yet thirty, but you buried me, time and again
and each time, for your sake
I emerge from the earth
So let those who sing your praises go to Hell
those who sell souvenirs of your pain
all those who are standing with me now in the picture

I name you Medusa
I name you the older sister of Sodom and Gomorrah
you baptismal basin that still burns

When I leave you I turn to stone
When I come back I turn to stone

.

by Najwan Darwish
published on Poetry International, 2012
translation: Kareem James Abu-Zeid

From The New Yorker:

Last week, Gallup announced the results of their latest survey on Americans and evolution. The numbers were a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere: forty-six per cent of adults said they believed that “God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.” Only fifteen per cent agreed with the statement that humans had evolved without the guidance of a divine power. What’s most remarkable about these numbers is their stability: these percentages have remained virtually unchanged since Gallup began asking the question, thirty years ago. In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012. Furthermore, the percentage of Americans that believe in biological evolution has only increased by four percentage points over the last twenty years. Such poll data begs the question: Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?

A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, helps explain the stubbornness of our ignorance. As Shtulman notes, people are not blank slates, eager to assimilate the latest experiments into their world view. Rather, we come equipped with all sorts of naïve intuitions about the world, many of which are untrue. For instance, people naturally believe that heat is a kind of substance, and that the sun revolves around the earth. And then there’s the irony of evolution: our views about our own development don’t seem to be evolving.

More here.

The persistence of biological understandings owes something to an unavoidable fact: race and health are inextricably intertwined. But this doesn’t mean biology produces race. It may be that race produces biology. A newer, but still embodied, view of human difference, one in which we conceptualize how social difference and deprivation change the body’s physiology, has yet to make inroads into public discussions of race. This is a concept that Roberts nails. In Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century, Roberts argues passionately and relentlessly—you can picture her making her case to a rapt jury—against the idea of race as a biological trait, which she calls, per her title, a fatal invention. Her evidence against biological causes (but not biological effects), and her insistence that believing in the biological basis of race is fatal to people of color, are compelling. Her case study of racial differences in breast cancer fatalities illustrates the point. In Chicago in 1980, black and white women died of breast cancer at the same rate. Today, despite being slightly more likely to get breast cancer, white female Chicagoans are half as likely to die from it. Could the difference in death rates be due to genetic differences between black and white women? A wealth of evidence suggests otherwise.

more from Anne Fausto-Sterling at Boston Review here.

On the Pennsylvania State Road Atlas

I didn’t know where we were going
But that, I guess, was our goal.
He would say only it was time to go,
Saturday afternoons before he died.
Chambersberg. Bedford. Lockhaven.

We got in the car and drove until
It got dark, exits sounded exotic,
And a few turns found a stoplight,
A drive-through and a hotel.
Tarentum. Nazareth. Warsaw.

He knew that taking your leave
Takes practice. I remember headlights
Pulling us between two rows of pines,
The stiff smell of cleaned linens.
Shay. Freeport. Saxonberg.

But what did he tell my mother
Sundays when we came back?
“I want to wet my feet and wade
Into not being John of Swarthmore.”
Palmyra. Burbank. Spring.

I want these words to be the map, not
To steer him home but to get me back
To a town off I-80 where no one stops
Except relatives and whoever can’t go on.
Milton. Mifflinburg. Scotts Run.

I want to return to two beds, a curtain
Outside which windless rain fell,
The highway whispering with travel,
His sleeping breath, steady, certain.
Drakes Mill. Transfer. Mount Joy.

by H.L. Spelman
from Blackbird, Fall 2011

From Smithsonian:

Did anybody else see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel over the Memorial Day weekend? Somebody must have because the film, which opened on May 4, continues to do well at the box office, and that’s compared with a slew of big-budget blockbusters—Men in Black 3, Battleship, The Avengers—that have come along since then. Marigold’s popularity has been credited to John Madden, who also directed Shakespeare in Love, and to its 24-karat gold cast, including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson and Bill Nighy, all of them over 60. (The film is based on These Foolish Things, a novel by Deborah Moggach about a group of English oldsters who move to a retirement hotel in India.) But the movie’s reception is also seen as proof that there’s a market for movies about people who aren’t young and beautiful, just interesting—as are the characters in Marigold, coping with end-of-life transitions in a drastically foreign place.

And let’s not forget another major factor in Marigold’s success: India, specifically the western state of Rajasthan, long a favorite with travelers for its mighty hill forts, bedizened palaces, teeming markets and lost desert villages. The hotel in the book—Moggach called it the Dunroamin—is located in the dreamy lake city of Udaipur, though the movie was filmed in Jaipur to the north. I recognized the setting immediately because I began a tour of Rajasthan there ten years ago.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

In the past few weeks, there’s been a string of horrific tales of cannibalism and other zombie-esque behavior in the news. How to explain a handful of reports of people doing the unspeakable? One answer circulating around these days is that it must be parasites. And for some journalists, the question demands a call to the Centers for Disease Control to find out what they’re hiding from us!

1. Andy Campbell of the Huffington Post asked the CDC if some kind of zombie virus was to blame for the recent attacks. On June 1, he reported on HuffPo’s Politics page the following scoop:

“CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” wrote agency spokesman David Daigle in an email to The Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post entitled Campbell’s hard-hitting investigation, “Zombie Apocalypse: CDC Denies Existence Of Zombies Despite Cannibal Incidents.” That’s perhaps the finest deployment of the word despite in the history of journalism.

The story, by the way, received 65,797 likes on Facebook.

More here.

Labor unions underwrote the affluence of the American working class in the twentieth century. They ensured that manual work paid white-collar wages and gave a collective voice to workers in the political process. The story of labor’s decline is often told with an air of inevitability; unions became outmoded as American capitalism became more dynamic. In such an account, the consequences of deunionization — rising inequality, wage stagnation, and declining political participation — appear equally inevitable. But the story has not played out the same way everywhere. The turbulent economic conditions of the 1970s affected all the advanced economies. In the small, trade-dependent economies of Scandinavia, highly centralized unions were able to restrain wage growth, curb inflation, and maintain employment. In Germany, unions expanded their role in workplace governance and the training of skilled workers. Although the proportion of union members among workers did decrease in western Europe during this time, it did so far less than in the United States. And the coverage of collective-bargaining rights generally held steady. European labor unions still represent a broad constituency of workers and actively contribute to their countries’ economic success. Moreover, although some claim otherwise, unions have not made the global economic crisis there worse. Where national unions have historically had a role in macroeconomic management — in Belgium and the Netherlands, for example — negotiations over wages and working hours helped head off big increases in unemployment in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. American unions have faced the same challenges as European ones but have struggled far more.

more from Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld at Foreign Affairs here.