Over at Philosophy Bites:

Manu Joseph in Open the Magazine:

There is a type of talented Indian who lives in the United States with his austere wife to whom he lost his virginity, and has two children who are good at spelling. He walks with a mild slouch. He is still intimidated by White waiters, but not Black waiters. In an elevator, chiefly in an elevator, he suspects he is probably small. He does not drive a Prius. He is acquainted with the word ‘generalise’ as something other people should not do. He is often a she. He is fundamentally a good person by almost all the definitions of that human condition—he is against genocide, burning people alive, including Muslims, and stabbing children, including Muslim children. And he loves Narendra Modi. ‘And’ not ‘but’, for ‘but’ will mean that he has considered all the facts and has made a moral decision. He loves Modi for honourable reasons. He loves the idea of a smart, tough and proud Hindu. He loves him because he loves Mother India. He was not always so traditional and patriotic.

He will give many reasons why he is so now, he will give abstract reasons. He will say love is abstract, love is inevitable. It is not, in reality. Love is calculated, always. In America’s caste system, he is nowhere at the top. In fact, at times he feels he is at the bottom. There are moments, he knows, when brown is the new black. Back home he was something by virtue of his birth, his lineage and education, which was clear to all in plain sight. And the riffraff, which knew its place, readily granted him his, unlike in the United States. That is why he loves India. That is why the Third World middleclass and the rich who live in the West are deeply in love with their homelands. Nations that are filled with the poor are feudal in nature, and so excellent homes for the middleclass. India is probably the best.

Resident Indians, despite all their reasonable grudges, experience the privileges every day. That is at the heart of the collapse of Team Anna’s apparent revolution, which called for a battle to the brink to overturn Indian politics, and asked informed Indians to dismantle what ignorant voters had erected.

Vidal rarely got angry. His characteristic outburst was a languorous sigh. “Rebirth of the novel? That seems unlikely.” Young people nowadays – this is 1976 again – “find the act of reading anything at all difficult and unrewarding”. As a preamble to his monumental effort to crush John Updike (10,000 words of TLS ordnance in 1996), he wrote: “What is the point to attacking writers in a period where they are of so little consequence? In observance of this law of a dying species, I have hardly mentioned, much less reviewed, Updike in the past . . .”. The burden of the sentence may be found in its finale: “. . . and he has observed the same continence with regard to me”. Yet – “the nicest of words in English”, Vidal once said (TLS, November 10, 2000) – gloom was but half of what is one of literature’s most durable double acts (Vidal’s career spanned eight decades). His vexation, over the state of the republic, the state of letters, of universities, Hollywood, had an opposing force: wit.

more from J.C. at the TLS here.

We know vanished civilizations by the biggest, brawniest, and most durable buildings they leave behind: Roman stadiums, Egyptian temples, medieval cathedrals, Renaissance châteaux. The last 200 years have bequeathed to us an ungainly legacy of industry, and what we make of that inheritance helps define who we are. At the peak of the machine age, factories were emblems of human might, and artists like Charles Sheeler hymned their majesty and ruthless purpose. Later, the decline of manufacturing in the West gave us a new Gothic landscape, and we have come to savor the poetics of abandonment: silent smokestacks, vaulted basilicas with missing windows, massive brick fortresses, looming silos, weed-mossed trolley tracks, great steel trusses furred with rust. At the same time, the word industrial has been trivialized into an aesthetic label, shorthand for restaurants done in polished concrete and brushed steel.

more from Justin Davidson at New York Magazine here.

The battles of the Syrian revolution are, among other things, battles of narrative. As I recount in “Welcome to Free Syria,” the regime has indeed committed grievous massacres, including one I saw evidence of in the northern town of Taftanaz. The Assad government also puts forth a narrative—the country is under siege from an alliance of criminal gangs, Al Qaeda, and the CIA—that is quite removed from reality. Yet there is also a powerful pull in the West to order a messy reality into a simple and self-serving narrative. The media, which largely favors the revolution, has at times uncritically accepted rebel statements and videos—which themselves often originate from groups based outside the country—as the whole story. This in turn provides an incentive for revolutionaries to exaggerate. A Damascus-based activist told me that he had inflated casualty numbers to foreign media during the initial protests last year in Daraa, because “otherwise, no one would care about us.”

more from Anand Gopal at Harper’s here.

Zofeen Ebrahim at the Inter Press Service News Agency:

As millions around the world enter the third week of the Ramadan fast, the fraternity that typically unites Muslims during the holy month does not extend to Pakistan’s Ahmadi community, which is facing worse persecution than ever before.

What little space there might once have been for this religious minority – who believe that their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, is the promised messiah and reformer whose advent was foretold by the Holy Prophet Muhammad – is quickly disappearing altogether.

“What space for Ahmadis are you talking about? They don’t have any,” Faisal Neqvi, a Lahore-based lawyer, told IPS.

Declared non-Muslims in 1974, the legal and social exclusion of Ahmadis was further enshrined in a 1984 law that prohibits them from proclaiming themselves Muslims or making pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia.

More here.

From Edge:

The advantage of neuroscience is being able to look under the hood and see the mechanisms that actually create the thoughts and the behaviors that create and perpetuate conflict. Seems like it ought to be useful. That's the question that I'm asking myself right now, can science in general, or neuroscience in particular, be used to understand what drives conflict, what prevents reconciliation, why some interventions work for some people some of the time, and how to make and evaluate better ones.

REBECCA SAXE is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She is also an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is known for her research on the neural basis of social cognition.

Our society is built of a bunch of minds trying to work together. It seems like having better, more scientific understanding of the mind is the only possible way to have a better functioning society. That's the big idea, which seems quite ludicrous. Then the question is to try to work it out in an example. The example is almost as ludicrous. The example I'm working on right now is conflict and conflict resolution: how to make groups of people that are suspicious of one another and on the brink of war with one another more tolerant, more accepting, more forgiving, and more capable of working together. There are a bunch of ways that the kind of neuroscience I've done could help in that context. The science that I do is on how our brains let us think about other minds. There's at least three ways that that kind of science could help us think about conflict. One is the idea that conflict is actually conflict about other people's minds. What conflict is, in part, is the suspicion of other people's motives, the inability to trust and forgive, and the way that our expectations of group boundaries make us less empathetic and more damning of other people's actions.

More here.

From Nature:

Fossilized skulls show that at least three distinct species belonging to the genus Homo existed between 1.7 million and 2 million years ago, settling a long-standing debate in palaeoanthropology. A study published this week in Nature¹ focuses on Homo rudolfensis, a hominin with a relatively flat face, which was first identified from a single large skull in 1972. Several other big-skulled fossils have been attributed to the species since then, but none has included both a face and a lower jaw. This has been problematic: in palaeoanthropology, faces and jaws function like fingerprints for identifying a specimen as a particular species (which is indicated by the second word in a Linnaean title, such as 'rudolfensis'), as opposed to the broader grouping of genus (the first word, as in'Homo').

Without complete skulls, it has been difficult to reach a consensus on whether specimens attributed to H. rudolfensis are genuinely members of a distinct species, or actually belong to other Homo species that lived around the same time, such as Homo habilis or Homo erectus. Understanding how many different Homo species there were, and whether they lived concurrently, would help to determine whether the history of the human lineage saw fierce competition between multiple hominins, or a steady succession from one species to another. But the latest result has dissipated much of this uncertainty. It concerns three fossils — two lower jaws and a juvenile’s lower face — that were found in a desert area called Koobi Fora in northern Kenya. The team that pulled them out of the ground, led by Meave Leakey, a palaeontologist at the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, describes how the dental arcade, the arch created by the teeth at the front of the mouth, is nearly rectangular, just like the palate structure of the 1972 skull. By contrast, the average modern human mouth has a curved dental arcade.

More here.

Elk Trails

Ancient, world-old Elk paths
Narrow, dusty Elk paths
Wide-trampled, muddy,
Aimless . . . wandering . . .
Everchanging Elk paths.

I have walked you, ancient trails,
Along the narrow rocky ridges
High above the mountains that
Make up your world:
Looking down on giant trees, silent
In the purple shadows of ravines—
Above the spire-like alpine fir
Above the high, steep-slanting meadows
Where sun-softened snowfields share the earth
With flowers

I have followed narrow twisting ridges,
Sharp-topped and jagged ass a broken crosscut saw
Across the roof of all the Elk-world
On one ancient wandering trail,
Cutting crazily over rocks and dust and snow—
Gently slanting through high meadows,
Rich with scent of Lupine,
Rich with smell of Elk-dung,
Rich with scent of short-lived
Dainty alpine flowers.
And from the ridgetops I have followed you
Down through heather fields, through timber,
Downward winding to the hoof-churned shore of
One tiny blue-green mountain lake
Untouched by lips of men.

Read more »

Mark Blyth over at the Harvard Business Review blog:

A metaphor attributed to John Maynard Keynes maintains that using monetary policy to fight a severe recession is like “pushing on a piece of string.” When the problem is inflation, pushing up interest rates (pulling on a string) is a pretty effective policy tool — ask anyone who lived through the Volcker recession of the early 1980s. But when rates are pushed down to stimulate economic activity the 'push' becomes less and less effective the closer to zero rates get.

The power of this “pushing on a string” metaphor is especially apparent today. The Federal Reserve's balance sheet shows that, since 2008, “deposits by depository institutions” (i.e. banks) have ballooned from about $30 billion to around $1.5 trillion. Why is all that money sitting at the Fed earning a meager 0.25% nominal interest when those same banks could make a lot more than that by lending it out?

The answer is simple: uncertainty about the future. Not uncertainty over Obamacare, or “regulation,” or any of the other bêtes noires of moment, but uncertainty over the lack of demand in an economy whose consumers and producers are paying back debt. After all, who opens a factory in the middle of a recession? But if we all think this way then investment expectations fall, which hits borrowing and lending activity, thereby bringing about the very recession that we all wanted to avoid in the first place.

Alexander Cooley in Foreign Affairs:

In the last decade, the world has started taking more notice of Central Asia. For the United States and its allies, the region is a valuable supply hub for the Afghanistan war effort. For Russia, it is an arena in which to exert political influence. For China, it is a source of energy and a critical partner for stabilizing and developing the restive Xinjiang province in the Middle Kingdom's west. Some commentators have referred to Washington, Moscow, and Beijing's renewed activity in the region as a modern iteration of the Great Game. But unlike the British and Russian empires in their era of competition and conquest, the Central Asian governments are working to use renewed external involvement to their sovereign advantage, fending off disruptive demands and reinforcing their political control at home. Accordingly, the Central Asian case today is not a throwback to the past but a guide to what is to come: the rise of new players and the decline of Western influence in a multipolar world.

The first lesson to take from China, Russia, and the United States' involvement in Central Asia is that it has strengthened the hand of rulers, who have been able to play the suitors off one another to extract economic benefits and political support where possible. Most dramatically, in 2009, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan, host to the Manas Transit Center, initiated a bidding war between the United States and Russia by threatening to close the base.

But none of that explains why, 50 years after her death, she is latent, current, mysterious yet known. When she died, the popular explanation was suicide, and it has always been easy to believe that lovely, uneducated kids often get found out by fame and stardom. But any examination of her death teaches the lesson that hers is the first death in that haunting line of the ’60s that includes the Kennedy brothers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Lee Harvey Oswald. How can such notable people die in uncertainty? Are there really infinite intrigues in the world, or do we refuse to accept simple and obvious answers? It is a kind of religion. So the collection of stories attending her death are more potent than her films, and they provide an occult explanation for that gorgeous, plaintive look she had: “What do you think happened to me?” We tell ourselves now that we are known in so many oppressive ways: Our identity is laid out in numbers ready to be stolen; all our e-mails are retrievable; increasingly, we are subject to surveillance, all meant for our “security,” but all contributing to its opposite. Monroe stands for this unlikely possibility: that in an age of mounting data and information storage, it is possible for someone beautiful and famous to be unknowable.

more from David Thomson at TNR here.

This seems to be a moment when art needs to take stock of itself, to reassess its position both historically—that is, in relation to the art of the past—and functionally, in the sense of reconsidering what distinguishes it from (and links it to) other cultural practices. After all, this is not some eccentric byway that Christov-
Bakargiev has followed blindly; it can’t be a coincidence that this year’s Manifesta and Paris Triennale are both as steeped in anthropology and art history as Documenta. Perhaps because Documenta is the largest—and most distended—of the three exhibitions, it is also the one that seems to have no decisive sense of what contemporary art can be. And yet there are artists re-examining the nature and function of art today; some of them are even included in Documenta. One is Kader Attia, whose installation includes sculptures he commissioned from African craftsmen: he asked them to copy photographs of hideously disfigured World War I veterans, with the result that the “grotesque” anatomical distortions we admire in tribal sculpture are reframed as nearly naturalistic attempts to render an almost unbearably poignant reality. And I should mention here too, among others, the videos of William Kentridge and Wael Shawky and a typically interrogative performance piece by Tino Sehgal.

more from Barry Schwabsky at The Nation here.

Jonathan Shainin in The New Yorker:

As world news events go, the biggest power failure in history—which struck India Tuesday afternoon, plunging almost seven hundred million people into hypothetical darkness—may have been less momentous than advertised. There was chaos, of course: gridlocked traffic, stalled trains, and stranded commuters. Water supplies were interrupted, hospitals ceased all but essential services, and at least a few hundred unlucky miners in two eastern states were trapped underground for several nerve-wracking hours.

But power cuts are hardly uncommon in India, which is why offices and factories have diesel generators and the homes of the better-off come equipped with battery backup systems. (Basharat Peer has written about how strategies for shortages are woven into daily life.) Many people caught in the middle of the world’s biggest power outage experienced it as a brief flicker of the lights. And many others didn’t experience it at all. Though the headlines announced that seven hundred million people across twenty-one states had lost power, only about three hundred and twenty million of those had any electricity to begin with: in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state and one of its poorest, sixty-three per cent of households, or about a hundred and twenty-five million people, lack access to electricity. Nationwide, about one third of households (roughly four hundred million people, more than everyone in the United States) don’t have electricity—which sounds like an astonishing number, until you consider that twenty years ago fifty-eight per cent of households were without electric power.

More here.

Scott Atran in Foreign Policy:

The era of world struggle between the great secular ideological –isms that began with the French Revolution and lasted through the Cold War (republicanism, anarchism, socialism, fascism, communism, liberalism) is passing on to a religious stage. Across the Middle East and North Africa, religious movements are gaining social and political ground, with election victories by avowedly Islamic parties in Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. As Israel's National Security Council chief, Gen. Yaakov Amidror (a religious man himself), told me on the eve of Tunisia's elections last October, “We expect Islamist parties to soon dominate all governments in the region, from Afghanistan to Morocco, except for Israel.”

On a global scale, Protestant evangelical churches (together with Pentacostalists) continue to proliferate, especially in Latin America, but also keep pace with the expansion of fundamentalist Islam in southern Africa and eastern and southern Asia. In Russia, a clear majority of the population remains religious despite decades of forcibly imposed atheism. Even in China, where the government's commission on atheism has the Sisyphean job of making that country religion-free, religious agitation is on the rise. And in the United States, a majority says it wants less religion in politics, but an equal majority still will not vote for an atheist as president.

But if reams of social scientific analysis have been produced on religion's less celestial cousins — from the nature of perception and speech to how we rationalize and shop — faith is not a matter that rigorous science has taken seriously. To be sure, social scientists have long studied how religious practices correlate with a wide range of economic, social, and political issues. Yet, for nearly a century after Harvard University psychologist William James's 1902 masterwork, The Varieties of Religious Experience, there was little serious investigation of the psychological structure or neurological and biological underpinnings of religious belief that determine how religion actually causes behavior. And that's a problem if science aims to produce knowledge that improves the human condition, including a lessening of cultural conflict and war.

More here.

Matt Bieber in The Wheat and Chaff:

Peter Hershock is the author of Buddhism in the Public Sphere, one of the most interesting books about public policy that I have ever read. The book presents a set of Buddhist perspectives on a series of political and policy challenges. Each chapter – which cover issues as varied as the environment and terrorism – is worth a read. The final chapter, which serves as the jumping-off point for this interview, is a tour de force of wide-ranging theory and fresh insight about the purposes and practices of contemporary education.

Hershock is an education specialist at the East-West Center in Honolulu. In addition to Buddhism in the Public Sphere, he has written or co-edited many other books, including Educations and Their Purposes: A Conversation Among Cultures.

MATT BIEBER: In your view, much of contemporary education concerns itself with three goals: transmitting information and knowledge, imparting “circumstantially useful skills”, and forming young people through “principle-structured character development and socialization.” Many educational theorists would argue that this forms at least a partial list, if not a complete list, of appropriate educational goals. For you, however, this educational paradigm is deeply inappropriate and, in fact, in crisis. Why?

PETER HERSHOCK: Well, that’s a big question, and we’re going to need a lot of history to be able to respond. Here are some quick thoughts, and then we can do more background if need to.

More here.

On the Table

I was taught to smooth the aura at the end
said my masseuse, hands hovering at the end.

Inches above my placid pummeled self
did I feel something floating at the end?

Is my naked body merely prone
to extoplasmic vapors to no end?

Many another arthritic has lain here
seeking to roll pain's ball end over end.

Herbal oils, a CD playing soft loon calls,
wave raps, bird trills now must end.

I rise and dress, restored to lift and bend,
my ethereal wisp invisible at the end.

by Maxine Kumin
from Ravishing Dis-Unities – Real Ghazals in English
Wesleyan University Press, 2000
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From Smithsonian:

Most of us think of memory as a chamber of the mind, and assume that our capacity to remember is only as good as our brain. But according to some architectural theorists, our memories are products of our body’s experience of physical space. Or, to consolidate the theorem: Our memories are only as good as our buildings. In the BBC television series “Sherlock,” the famous detective’s capacious memory is portrayed through the concept of the “mind palace“—what is thought to be a sort of physical location in the brain where a person stores memories like objects in a room. Describing this in the book A Study in Scarlet, Holmes says, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose…”

The mind palace—also known as the memory palace or method of loci—is a mnemonic device thought to have originated in ancient Rome, wherein items that need to be memorized are pinned to some kind of visual cue and strung together into a situated narrative, a journey through a space. The science writer and author Joshua Foer covered this technique in depth in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, in which he trained for and ultimately won the U.S. Memory Championship. To memorize long lists of words, a deck of cards, a poem, or a set of faces, mental athletes, as they’re called, fuse a familiar place—say, the house they grew up in—with a self-created fictional environment populated by the objects in their list.

More here.