“[W]ho are the owners of those major banks and corporations who figured out that if they want to make so much money, they need to get a psychopath in who will then turn the entire organisation into a ruthless money-making soul-destroying machine? That's pretty clever, isn't it? To find a psychopath to do that for you?

“In youth psychology there's a well-known phenomenon regarding collective self-harming. You have a shelter that's housing, say, 50 boys. All of a sudden and apparently out of nowhere, they all start mutilating themselves. A wave. It's only natural for outsiders to assume that something must be very wrong with that shelter. However, research and experience demonstrate that all you need to do is find the one person who started it. Isolate him from the group and lo and behold, the wave stops and everything goes back to normal.

“Individuals have very powerful influence over groups, and it makes you wonder about banks and financial firms; what if they were like the shelter, and you need to find that one switch, that one person, to turn a whole group around?“

Read the rest from Joris Luyendijk at The Guardian's Comment is free here.

Ezra Klein, via the The New Yorker:

What is notable about the conservative response to the individual mandate is not only the speed with which a legal argument that was considered fringe in 2010 had become mainstream by 2012; it’s the implication that the Republicans spent two decades pushing legislation that was in clear violation of the nation’s founding document. Political parties do go through occasional, painful cleansings, in which they emerge with different leaders who hold different positions. This was true of Democrats in the nineteen-nineties, when Bill Clinton passed free trade, deficit reduction, and welfare reform, despite the furious objections of liberals. But in this case the mandate’s supporters simply became its opponents.

In February, 2012, Stuart Butler, the author of the Heritage Foundation brief that first proposed the mandate, wrote an op-ed for USA Today in which he recanted that support. “I’ve altered my views on many things,” he wrote. “The individual mandate in health care is one of them.” Senator Orrin Hatch, who had been a co-sponsor of the Chafee bill, emerged as one of the mandate’s most implacable opponents in 2010, writing in The Hill that to come to “any other conclusion” than that the mandate is unconstitutional “requires treating the Constitution as the servant, rather than the master, of Congress.” Mitt Romney, who had both passed an individual mandate as governor and supported Wyden-Bennett, now calls Obama’s law an “unconstitutional power grab from the states,” and has promised, if elected, to begin repealing the law “on Day One.”

More here.

From UTNE Reader:

Do you overeat? Are you often tired or fatigued without knowing why? Do you consume caffeine and sugar to get through the day? Do you suffer from sinus headaches or chronic nasal congestion? If you answered yes to any of these questions, Dr. Elson M. Haas’s The Detox Diet (Ten Speed Press, 2012) can help you regain vitality and start you on a new path to life-long vibrant good health with his safe, effective detoxification diet and cleansing program. The following excerpt is from Chapter 1, “Why Detox?”

Detox Diets: Hoax or Healing?

I have used the process of detoxification and the information in this book for more than thirty-five years for my personal well-being as well as for many thousands of patients, with even more people benefiting from the process since the publication of the first edition of this book. Of course, there are many other practitioners who guide and observe people through similar processes of elimination diets, detoxification programs, and juice cleansing and have thousands of positive anecdotes. We still do not have much research that backs up what we see. It is challenging to first study the multi-dimensional programs people typically employ and then compare them with placebos or different diets. This research gold standard (double-blind, placebo-controlled study) is much easier when evaluating one substance, like a new medicine. Really, we are talking here about a complete lifestyle shift, as with diet, exercise activities, and attitudes. Thus, to skeptics, it’s all a bunch of talk. “Prove to me that it works,” states a scientific researcher. I say, “Let me put you on a program and we’ll see how you feel and look. And we can study your blood chemistry, such as your cholesterol level (especially when it’s high), or monitor your blood pressure. Many aspects of your health will get better, with many side benefits.” I know when people make lifestyle and habit changes they often have improved health results.

More here.

Evelyn Lamb in Scientific American:

Tractor beams, a staple of science fiction, may be moving closer to science fact. In a paper published earlier this spring, physicists have proposed a structure that may enable light to pull objects.

Normally, light pushes on objects, albeit weakly. In the field of optical manipulation optical tweezers employ this pushing force to move microscopic objects from atoms to bacteria. The ability to pull as well would increase the precision and scope of optical manipulation. For spaceflight, engineers have proposed sails to capture the force exerted by light.

Rather than towing space vessels, the newly proposed tractor beam might be more useful in biology or medicine. “If you want to pull something towards you, you just reduce the pressure,” says Mordechai Segev, a physicist at Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, who describes his team's idea in an April Optics Express paper. “You make a little bit of vacuum,” he adds. The problem is that in sensitive medical applications, such as lung surgery, it is important not to change the pressure or introduce any new gases. “Here, the light will be the suction device,” he says, “so the pressure would not change at all. It is just the light.”

Previous ideas for a “tractor beam” have often focused on creating new gravitational fields to drag objects, heating air to create pressure differences or inducing electric and magnetic charges in objects so that they move against the direction of an incoming laser beam.

The latest proposal takes advantage of a phenomenon called negative radiation pressure. Russian physicist Victor Veselago first theorized its existence in his 1967 paper about materials with an unusual property called negative refraction index. An index of refraction is a number that describes the way light is bent when it goes into a glass lens or other medium, and at the time of the paper nobody knew if this number could be negative in any material. But in the past couple of decades several teams of researchers proved that negative refraction can occur in specially made substances called metamaterials, which have led to limited invisibility cloaks and distortion-free “super” lenses.

From Science:

Try doing this on your iPhone: Researchers have developed a prototype “supercamera” that stitches together images from 98 individual cameras (each with a 14-megapixel sensor) to create a 960-million-pixel image with enough resolution to spot a 3.8-centimeter-wide object 1 kilometer away. Applied to a 120°-wide, near-fisheye view of the Seattle skyline (main image), the 93-kilogram camera (inset, upper left) captured enough detail to read the fine print on signs as much as two blocks away (bottom row, third and fourth from left). The camera's optics occupy only 3% of the volume of its 75-centimeter-by-75-centimeter-by-50- centimeter frame—a size needed both to contain the camera's circuit boards and to keep them from overheating, the researchers report online today in Nature. While other camera systems can generate gigapixel-and-larger images, those composite views are stitched together from individual images taken sequentially with one camera as it is panned across the scene; the new system takes all 98 images simultaneously, providing a “stop action” view of a scene. Future, more compact versions, could inaugurate the era of handheld gigapixel photography. Such cameras could be useful for any number of military, commercial, or scientific purposes, the researchers suggest, changing the central challenge of photography from “Where should we point the camera?” to “How do we extract useful data from these superhuge images?”

More here.

Raghuram Rajan in Project Syndicate:

[S]uccessive governments understood the imperative of economic growth, so much so that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) contested the 2004 election on a pro-development platform, encapsulated in the slogan, “India Shining.” But the BJP-led coalition lost that election. Whether the debacle reflected the BJP’s unfortunate choice of coalition partners or its emphasis on growth when too many Indians had not benefited from it, the lesson for politicians was that growth did not provide electoral rewards.

In any event, that election suggested a need to spread the benefits of growth to rural areas and the poor. There are two ways of going about that. The first, which is harder and takes time, is to increase income-generating capabilities in rural areas, and among the poor, by improving access to education, health care, finance, water, and power. The second is to increase voters’ spending power through populist subsidies and transfers, which typically tend to be directed toward the politically influential rather than the truly needy.

In the years after the BJP’s loss, with a few notable exceptions, India’s political class decided that traditional populism was a surer route to re-election. This perception also accorded well with the median (typically poor) voter’s low expectation of government in India – seeing it as a source of sporadic handouts rather than of reliable public services.

For a few years, the momentum created by previous reforms, together with strong global growth, carried India forward. Politicians saw little need to vote for further reforms, especially those that would upset powerful vested interests. The lurch toward populism was strengthened when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance concluded that a rural employment-guarantee scheme and a populist farm-loan waiver aided its victory in the 2009 election.

Over at the NYRB's blog, Paul Krugman, George Soros, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and Edmund S. Phelps discuss:

Edmund Phelps: People see the fix that Greece is in as a moral parable that is a warning to the rest of the West. But the parable has flaws or mistakes in it. It’s far too crude to lay the crisis in Greece on an over-large welfare state, or on pandering after the votes of public employees. Germany, Holland, and Sweden have the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, despite huge welfare programs and well-paid civil servants, too. They’re saved by their horror of under-taxation. There is no such horror among the Greeks. Greece allowed its public debt and its public outlays to soar in relation to tax revenue. So the correct moral to be drawn here is spend what you like, but pay your bills on time.

Now, press reports tell us that ordinary citizens in Greece did not know of [their government’s] now scandalous under-reporting of the under-taxation. The reports say that the crisis results from—or they imply that the crisis results from—the unpreparedness of the country to determine how the costs ought to be shared and the benefits adjusted. Tax increases or roll-backs of civil service pay, or some give-backs in pensions for a while, or what? Everybody is at loggerheads. So I think the correct moral of this story is do not keep the truth from the public. We need openness, transparency. It has nothing to do with the size of the welfare state or [the level of] pay for civil servants.

Expert, finely wrought and unique (as Philip Hensher has noted, “no page of his could be mistaken for anyone else’s”), Amis’s style is so dear to him that he is unwilling to discard it even for a paragraph or a sentence, as if he cannot bear to adopt a mask of any sort. Style is the means by which he filters and interprets the world Unless, of course, his high style is itself the mask that Amis wears – has always worn. Style is the means by which he filters and interprets the world, its traumas and most savage extremes. It often seems as if the application of that remarkable prose helps him to make sense of disaster, even perhaps to feel safe. It is suggestive that his style grows still grander, and the register still higher, when it is applied to those things which are most painful to him. In his memoir, Experience, while waiting to meet his hitherto unknown daughter for the first time in the Hotel Rembrandt, he fusses over the establishment’s name: “A potent name and a challenging spirit, for students of the human face; and very soon two human faces would be opposed, as in a mirror, each addressing the other with unprecedented curiosity”.

more from Jonthan Barnes at the TLS here.

When Yeats arrived in London in 1887, the vogue for spiritualism was at its height, and the young poet was immediately sucked into the vortex. The implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had sunk in and were undermining basic assumptions of the established social order. In 1867 Matthew Arnold had heard the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith in retreat, and cults sprang up to fill the gap, to satisfy those who, like Yeats, were searching for something to believe in beyond the material world. Yeats was already familiar with the basic occult narrative: the magical wisdom of antiquity, predating even the civilizations of Egypt and Babylon, was preserved by an elite brotherhood of seers that handed down intact the doctrines of alchemy, astrology, and the path to eternal life. Belief in this hermetic revelation had flourished at least since the early Renaissance. One of the principal motives of the humanists who ransacked the cloisters of Europe for classical manuscripts was the quest for the treatises of Hermes Trismegistus, first among ancient magi, often identified with Olympian Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth (and from whom the word hermetic derives). Cosimo de’ Medici, fifteenth-century patron of the humanists, hoped to cheat death with the aid of scripture more ancient than that of Christian religion.

more from Jamie James at Lapham’s Review here.

A brilliant illustrator can transform any story, revealing its possible meanings and sometimes changing them. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass would be less scary without John Tenniel’s drawings (especially those of the Duchess and the Jabberwocky), and Winnie-the-Pooh less lovable without the help of Ernest Shepard. Maurice Sendak brought his artistic talents to over seventy works by other writers, always making them more interesting. Most popular illustrations of the Grimms’ fairy tales, for instance, soften and prettify them. Sendak turns them into crowded dreams full of strange birds and beasts, in which there is understanding for the villains, including the crippled witch in “Hansel and Gretel” and Snow-White’s stepmother with her fading beauty and fixed stare. He also notably illustrated three collections of tales by Isaac Bashevis Singer with drawings full of wise animals and flying demons that heighten their fantastic side and recall the paintings of Marc Chagall. As well as interpreting classic tales, Sendak could make something wonderful out of almost nothing.

more from Alison Lurie at the NYRB here.

Aaron Weiner at Slate reviews the first ever theater adaptapion of the DFW magnum opus, produced with over 12 writers, 3 directors, and 8 sets throughout Berlin in a day-long event. Caffeine was apparently provided.

Eva Illouz, via Guernica:

One of the fundamental changes in modernity has to do with the fact that social worth is performatively established in social relationships. Another way to say this is to suggest that social interactions—the ways in which the self performs in them—are a chief vector to accrue value and worth to the self, thus making the self crucially depend on others and on its interactions with others. While until the middle or late nineteenth century the romantic bond was organized on the basis of an already and almost objectively established sense of social worth, in late modernity the romantic bond is responsible for generating a large portion of what we may call the sense of self-worth. That is, precisely because much of marriage and romance was solidly based on social and economic considerations, romantic love did little to add to one’s sense of social place. It is precisely the disembedding of love from social frameworks that has made romantic love become the site for negotiating one’s self-worth.

Read the rest of the exerpt from her forthcoming Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation here.

“I feel very good about what we did.
I think it was the right thing to do.”
—Dick Cheney

The fruits of torture are alive with worms.
—Harold Pintali

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Beatle Paul is 70 this week. Will we still feed him? Not sure about that, but we sure as heck still need him. And what better time to celebrate “the cute one” with our own Magical McCartney Tour: His Top 40 career highlights. Tag along with us on this guided tour (in no particular order) through the McCartney treasure trove.

1. 'Twenty Flight Rock' (single, 1957, by Eddie Cochran)

A song Paul didn't write nevertheless qualifies as one of his shining moments. When he first met partner-to-be John Lennon at a Liverpool church fete, 15 year-old McCartney whipped out his guitar and played a flawless rendition of Eddie Cochran's “Twenty Flight Rock.” John was mightily impressed. “I dug him…. he's as good as me!,” Lennon is reported to have said. Paul was invited to join John's group the Quarrymen the very next day.

Oh well, I've got a girl with a record machine
When it comes to rockin' she's the queen
We love to dance on a Saturday night
All alone, I can hold her tight
But she lives in a twentiest floor up town
The elevator's broken down

So I walked one, two flight, three flight, four
Five, six, seven flight, eight flight more
Up on the twelfth I started to drag
Fifteenth floor I'm ready to sag
Get to the top, I'm too tired to rock

More here.

From Scientific American:

What do Barry Bonds, Bernie Madoff, and James Murdoch have in common? They were all, in their respective areas, in it to win it – whatever the cost. Their appetite for success apparently disabled the moral compass that would have otherwise kept their dishonesty, greed, and hubris in check. The magnitude of these highly publicized ethical infractions may lead one to wonder whether folks like Barry, Bernie, and Jimmy were absent the day their kindergarten teachers talked about lying, cheating, and stealing. Recent research, however, suggests that ethical violations are somewhat predictable, that in fact there are specific circumstances, contexts, and individual characteristics that beckon us away from the moral high road.

One of the most notable risk factors for ethical laxity is one that all of the above offenders share: Being a man. A number of studies demonstrate that men have lower moral standards than women, at least in competitive contexts. For example, men are more likely than women to minimize the consequences of moral misconduct, to adopt ethically questionable tactics in strategic endeavors, and to engage in greater deceit. This pattern is particularly pronounced in arenas in which success has (at least historically) been viewed as a sign of male vigor and competence, and where loss signifies weakness, impotence, or cowardice (e.g., a business negotiation or a chess match). When men must use strategy or cunning to prove or defend their masculinity, they are willing to compromise moral standards to assert dominance.

More here.

Anish Kapoor named his colossal sculpture Cloud Gate, but everyone in Chicago calls it the Bean. One hundred and ten tons of polished stainless steel, it seems to float above its cement plinth like a visitor from a distant and exciting future. In the five years since it was installed atop the AT&T Plaza in Millennium Park, it has become a Chicago icon. It receives more visitors than any destination besides Navy Pier, while voters in a Chicago Reader poll ranked it as the city’s best attraction—ahead of Wrigley field and Lake Michigan. Endlessly photographed, featured in movies and advertisements, lauded by critics and embraced by the public, Cloud Gate has become the city’s chosen mirror and the face it puts forward to the world. It might be the most popular work of contemporary art in America, the one work of abstract post-minimalist sculpture you would take your mom to see. The success of Cloud Gate is especially surprising given the fate of other major works of public art in recent decades, such as Rachel Whiteread’s House and Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, both of which had to be torn down in the face of public opposition. So what is it about the Bean that makes it so different, so appealing?

more from Jacob Mikanowski at The Point here.

Could there be a project less suited for Kaufman then 1995’s Ned & Stacey? The ultra-generic sitcom centers on a couple named (wait for it) Ned and Stacey who have a sham marriage of convenience. The only thing they have in common? They irritate each other. And those last two sentences aren’t my purposefully hacky pitch of the show’s premise, that’s an actual quote from the voice-over that opens every single episode. (Every. Single. Episode.) It’s the ultimate mid-90s show, low on creative ambition but elevated by charismatic performances from leads Debra Messing and Thomas Haden Church. Kaufman was a producer on the show, but it’s not too hard to imagine that he was simply biding his time as the script for Being John Malkovich slowly gathered momentum. (Spike Jonze finally agreed to direct it in 1996.) Kaufman’s voice is nearly absent from Ned & Stacey, with one notable exception: The character of Ned’s best friend, Eric “Rico” Moyer.

more from Ben Josef at The Awl here.

In Maraniss’ telling, the teenage Obama yearned for the stable identity being a member of the black community could have offered him, but in fact was a product of a mélange of cultures, white and Asian, Polynesian and American, Kenyan and Kansan. Barack Obama, Sr., a Kenyan foreign exchange student, sired the president during a brief affair with seventeen-year-old University of Hawaii freshman, Stanley Ann Dunham, and then promptly left for graduate school at Harvard a few months after his son’s birth. He only reappeared in young Barack’s life once, when he visited Hawaii for a month during his son’s fifth grade year, by which time the elder Obama was a broken man, an alcoholic who had already burned through three marriages and drank himself out of the kinds of leadership positions his intelligence and education entitled him to. Without a father, Obama lived a lonely and peripatetic childhood, bouncing between Jakarta, where his mother moved to live with her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, and Honolulu, where he lived with his grandparents after that marriage broke up and his mother remained in Indonesia. In Hawaii, where Obama attended the academically rigorous Punahou School along with the island’s mostly white elite, he joined the self-styled Choom Gang (“Choom is a verb,” Maraniss explains, “meaning ‘to smoke marijuana.’”) and spent his teen years getting high and trying to make the school’s varsity basketball team.

more from Michael Bourne at The Millions here.

Over at Crooked Timber, Aaron Swartz reviews Chris Hayes’ new book:

In his new book, The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, Chris Hayes manages the impossible trifecta: the book is compellingly readable, impossibly erudite, and—most stunningly of all—correct. At the end, I was left with just two quibbles: first, the book’s chapter on “pop epistemology” thoroughly explicated how elites got stuff wrong without bothering to mention the non-elites who got things right, leaving the reader with the all-too-common impression that getting it right was impossible; and second, the book never assembled its (surprisingly sophisticated) argument into a single summary. To discuss it, I feel we have to start with remedying the latter flaw:

Our nation’s institutions have crumbled, Hayes argues. From 2000–2010 (the “Fail Decade”), every major societal institution failed. Big businesses collapsed with Enron and Worldcom, their auditors failed to catch it, the Supreme Court got partisan in Bush v. Gore, our intelligence apparatus failed to catch 9/11, the media lied us into wars, the military failed to win them, professional sports was all on steroids, the church engaged in and covered up sex abuse, the government compounded disaster upon disaster in Katrina, and the banks crashed our economy. How did it all go so wrong?

Hayes pins the blame on an unlikely suspect: meritocracy. We thought we would just simply pick out the best and raise them to the top, but once they got there they inevitably used their privilege to entrench themselves and their kids (inequality is, Hayes says, “autocatalytic”). Opening up the elite to more efficient competition didn’t make things more fair, it just legitimated a more intense scramble. The result was an arms race among the elite, pushing all of them to embrace the most unscrupulous forms of cheating and fraud to secure their coveted positions.