Cécile Alduy interviews Philip Gourevitch, in Boston Review:

Cécile Alduy: In your writing, you always find a balance between bringing in the long history to understand the way things develop over time and the very detailed hour-to-hour reporting on how it happened. How is your job different from that of an historian?

Philip Gourevitch: Above all, I suppose, to be a good historian you don’t necessarily have to be a good storyteller. You can be a good historian by virtue of making a contribution to the field without making a direct contribution to literature or public understanding. What historians, or anthropologists, or political scientists are interested in can overlap considerably with my interests, but the methodology, discipline, and long-term purpose are really different. I mean, I’m first and last a writer. If I weren’t writing about Rwanda right now, I’d be writing about something else entirely; and if I weren’t writing reportage, I would be writing fiction or plays. That’s not true of most historians who are going to write about Rwanda. They’re going to be coming at it as Rwandanologists. They’re going to be Africanists. They’re going to be Genocide Studies people. They’re going to be legal scholars or professors of postcolonial studies. And their frame of reference will be largely prescribed by that academic discipline—which is, I guess, as it should be.

Another big difference is that as a writer-reporter I’m not so concerned with making explicit reference to the existing literature, the way academic writers are. I’m much more interested in what I see and what I hear directly; I work in a documentary vein. For instance in recent conversations about current affairs with senior government officials in Rwanda I started to notice that a number of them, completely unprompted, began making references to late-nineteenth century events in Rwanda. That’s the time when Rwanda, which had been a proudly isolated country, was colonized, and lost its self-determination as a state. So I started mentioning this to the people I was interviewing, “You know, it’s funny that you are all bringing up that same period.” And they all expressed complete surprise. “Really, who else?” Then I would maybe mention someone, and they’d all say, “Really? He was talking about this?” So, I thought, that’s interesting, there’s this common reference that each person thinks is his own, and which each uses to make different points. And then I thought, well, is this history they are talking about reliable? Are these stories they’re telling me correct?

From Salon:

Imagine a woman being able to convert her own eggs into “pseudo-sperm” to fertilize herself – or perhaps instead an artificial womb that will carry the pregnancy to term while she continues her uninterrupted climb up the career ladder. Picture an older woman harvesting eggs from her own bone marrow to beat her ticking biological clock. Lifelong fertility, artificial wombs, “pseudo-sperm” – it sounds like the stuff of dystopian sci-fi, but a new book suggests it’s an inevitable reality. In “Like a Virgin: How Science Is Redefining the Rules of Sex,” author Aarathi Prasad writes, “This would be the great biological and social equalizer, a truly new way of thinking about sex. The question is not if it will happen, but when.” It isn’t just women who stand to benefit, either: Artificial wombs will actually give men “more potential than women to make a baby without the opposite sex,” says Prasad, a biologist and science writer. The takeaway is that “male plus female equals baby will no longer be our only path forward.”

The potential social implications of such advances are fascinating, but Prasad leaves those imaginings to the likes of Aldous Huxley. She’s more concerned with reviewing how our reproductive knowledge developed and what technologies are being developed — but in a relatively digestible way (more Jared Diamond than Jonah Lehrer). That said, Prasad cautions against future-panic, arguing that these developments could actually improve on current ethical quandaries around reproduction. For example, which is less morally fraught: stem cell eggs and artificial wombs, or paying a poor woman in a third-world country as an egg donor or surrogate mother?

More here.

From MSNBC:

As the impresario behind the Ig Nobel Prizes, Marc Abrahams is skilled at sniffing out what seems to be silly science — but often, there's a practical point behind the seeming silliness. Take Elena Bodnar's bra, for example. No, really. Take it. The bra that Bodnar invented can be converted into two filter masks in the event of a Chernobyl-style radiation leak or other emergency. That combination of laughability and practicality is what earned the Ukrainian physician an Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health in 2009. Abrahams recounts Bodnar's achievement and many other Ig-worthy innovations in a newly published book, “This Is Improbable,” and he'll be adding to the store on Thursday night during the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Harvard University. The webcast gets under way at 7:15 p.m. ET. There'll be paper airplanes flying, Nobel laureates officiating, and opera singers premiering a work titled “The Intelligent Designer and the Universe.” You can expect this year's prizes to highlight improbable but not totally impractical scientific findings such as these nuggets from “This Is Improbable”:

• Which ear is better for detecting when someone is telling a lie? If you can only afford to listen with one ear, make it the left one. A 1993 study published in the journal Neuropsychologia found that people did marginally better at discerning truth and lies when they heard it with the left ear only, as opposed to the right ear only. “It works, to the extent it works, only when a man does the lying,” Abrahams writes.

• Which restroom stall should I choose? This is one of the great unresolved questions of sanitation science, along with the perennial controversy over toilet-paper orientation. One study suggested that in a four-stall restroom, the stalls on the end are most used. A different study saw indications that there was more action in the middle stalls. “The traces of these intellectual expeditions, deposited over many years in layers upon the ground, form a sort of mental compost,” Abrahams writes. “It sits, ripening, for future scholars to uncover.”

Abrahams chuckled when I brought up the restroom-stall research during a telephone chat this week. “I think back to that study, and it really doesn't matter,” he said. “There are lots of decisions in life you're asked to make every day where it doesn't matter. No matter what stall you choose, there's paper in all of 'em.” But in some cases, even Abrahams derives practical benefit from the strange studies that wind up on the Ig Nobel list. For example, Stanford University philosopher John Perry won the Literature Prize last year for his theory of structured procrastination. Simply put, if you're avoiding the No. 1 task on your to-do list, do task No. 2, 3 or 4 instead. It's even better if the unpleasant task on the top of your list is something you don't really need to do after all. “When I read that, it really did change things for me,” Abrahams said. “I adopted that as one of my personal guides every day. All day long, I'm cheating myself, happily.”

More here.

David Wolf in The Browser:

Sartre was also a novelist, and his novels are often described as philosophical. Do you think novels and novelists can really engage in philosophy, or is that only possible if you're a professional academic philosopher?

I think professional philosophers often like to make their subject smaller than it really is by setting arbitrary limits. As far as I'm concerned, philosophy is any human enterprise that involves critical thought about basic questions, like how we should live, what is the nature of reality and so on. Those questions can be asked seriously in all kinds of forms. So I don't see the subject as restricted to nerdy philosophical papers in refereed journals. Some of the most important contributions have been literary. If you think of classical philosophy, you have Plato's very literary dialogues, and Lucretius's On TheNature of Things is a poem! Some parts of TS Eliot's poems are very philosophical. Kierkegaard is a poetic writer who uses fictions, and Nietzsche uses aphorisms and poetry. They're all philosophers.

More here.

Howard Wainer in American Scientist:

The concept of replicability in scientific research was laid out by Francis Bacon in the early 17th century, and it remains the principal epistemological tenet of modern science. Replicability begins with the idea that science is not private; researchers who make claims must allow others to test those claims. Over time, the scientific community has recognized that, because initial investigations are almost always done on a small scale, they exhibit the variability inherent in small studies. Inevitably, as a consequence, some results will be reported that are epiphenomenal—false positives, for example. When novel findings appear in the scientific literature, other investigators rush to replicate. If attempts to reproduce them don’t pan out, the initial results are brushed aside as the statistical anomalies they were, and science moves on.

Scientific tradition sets an initial acceptance criterion for much research that tolerates a fair number of false positives (typically 1 out of 20). There are two reasons for this initial leniency: First, it is not practical to do preliminary research on any topic on a large enough scale to diminish the likelihood of statistical artifacts to truly tiny levels. And second, it is more difficult to rediscover a true result that was previously dismissed because it failed to reach some stringent level of acceptability than it is to reject a false positive after subsequent work fails to replicate it. This approach has meant that the scientific literature is littered with an embarrassing number of remarkable results that were later shown to be anomalous.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:

Last July, former Obama justice department official Marty Ledermanhighlighted the arrest of a 22-year-old former Penn State student for – inthe FBI's words – “repeatedly using the Internet to promote violent jihad against Americans” by posting comments on a “jihadist” Internet forum including “a comment online that praised the [October, 2010] shootings” at the Pentagon and Marine Corps Museum and “a number of postings encouraging attacks within the United States“. He also posted links to a bomb-making manual.

Regarding the part of the indictment based on “encouraging violent attacks”, Lederman argued that it “does not at first glance appear to be different from the sort of advocacy of unlawful conduct that is entitled to substantial first amendment protection under the Brandenburg line of cases.”

As for linking to bomb-making materials, Lederman wrote: “the first amendment generally protects the publication of publicly available information, even where there is a chance or a likelihood that one or more readers may put such information to dangerous, unlawful use.” As a result, Lederman concluded, the indictment “would appear to be very vulnerable to a first amendment challenge”.

Such blatant assaults on the free speech rights of Muslims in the US, and in the west generally, are common. In 2009, a Pakistani man in New York was sentenced to almost six years in federal prison for the “crime” of including a Hezbollah news channel in the cable package he offered for sale to television viewers in Brooklyn. Just this month, a British Muslim teenager, Azhar Ahmed, was convicted of the “crime” of posting a Facebook message which said: “all soldiers should die and go to hell.”

More here. [Thanks to Cyrus Hall.]

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Nobody who is familiar with the literature on this will be surprised, but it’s good to accumulate new evidence and also to keep the issue in the public eye: academic scientists are, on average, biased against women. I know it’s fun to change the subject and talk about bell curves and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally. And they are not.

That’s the conclusion of a new study in PNAS by Corinne Moss-Racusin and collaborators at Yale. (Hat tipDan Vergano.) To test scientist’s reactions to men and women with precisely equal qualifications, the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.

Results: female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, hireability, and mentoring (whether the scientist would be willing to mentor this student). Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower.

Richard Marshall interviews Huw Price in 3AM Magazine:

Huw Price is an ice cool pragmatist philosopher with global expressivist deflationary thoughts that he writes about in his many books. He thinks about time and causation and truth but isn’t a metaphysician. He doesn’t think there’s a time’s arrow. He thinks Stephen Hawking gets things wrong. He thinks Bertrand Russell is an armchair anarchist. He is indubitably a groovy jive.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Was it always something you felt drawn to or was it a surprise?

Huw Price: A surprise. In my first year as an undergraduate at ANU I added philosophy after signing up for the maths and physics courses I thought I needed. Later, when I wanted to drop physics and concentrate on pure maths, I had to make up another major, so I did a couple more philosophy courses. That’s when I started to get drawn into it (though it was a couple more years before I made the switch – my first year at graduate school was in maths).

3:AM: You argue in ‘Facts and the Function of Truth’ that usual ways of making a distinction between factual truths and non-factual truths fail. Before looking at your own position, can you outline the main difficulties with the alternatives?

HP: At this distance it’s hard not to be anachronistic, but what I was criticising was the common view that there is a ‘bifurcation’ in language between those declarative utterances that are genuinely ‘descriptive’, or ‘fact-stating’, and those that have some other function. Traditional non-cognitivists employed this distinction, arguing say that moral claims lie on the latter side of the line, not the former (and hence that there is no metaphysical issue about the nature of moral facts). I was (and am) sympathetic to that anti-metaphysical move, but I think the bifurcation thesis turns out to be unnecessary to it, confusing, and ungrounded.

I’ve often thought of America as a nation forged in loneliness. That pioneer spirit, that radical self-reliance that claims to need nothing but itself, is another way of talking about a people dislocated, living off the fragments of each other’s traditions. Breaking ground in the rural wilds far from cities, settlers of the New World were forced to democratize the very idea of tradition out of necessity. Religion, science, Old World remedies brought from Europe on scraps of paper, New World cures just discovered — Americans were interested in any scrap of custom or ritual that could help them be more independent. Even magic and the occult were useful. In this, ritualized independence itself may be the primary tradition that Americans — a society of fragments — has produced. It can be found in all the important American texts, from the Constitution to Leaves of Grass. It is in the utopian health manifestoes of John Harvey Kellogg and Sylvester Graham whose message we literally devour every time we eat the cereals and crackers that bear their names. It is in our national anthem, in all our songs and jingles.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

The rise of the foundations in the 20th century coincided with the ascendancy of an East Coast liberal internationalist milieu determined to impose its progressive capitalist vision on an insular and backward-looking traditional elite. In the 1920s & 30s, the United States was experiencing what Richard Hofstadter has called a ‘psychic crisis’, characterised by social convulsions: industrialisation, mass immigration, rapid urbanisation, and large-scale protest movements including violent strikes and industrial unionism. Against a backdrop of growing popular interest in utopianism and socialism alongside the rise of the Christian social gospel, the more attuned sections of the ruling class coalesced around a doctrine of moderate reform in order to militate against the spread of radical politics and usher in a new era of responsible nation-building. By the time the country was back on its feet, the foundations had become a prominent fixture in public affairs, and were well placed to spearhead America’s increasingly assertive global role in the wake of the Second World War.

more from Houman Barekat at the Berlin Review of Books here.

Political consulting is often thought of as an offshoot of the advertising industry, but closer to the truth is that the advertising industry began as a form of political consulting. As the political scientist Stanley Kelley once explained, when modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, “So far,” he wrote, “Big Business has won every skirmish.”

more from Jill Lepore at The New Yorker here.

From Discover:

“Take Taiwan,” says Birt. “Its fertility rate has gone from about 7 in 1950 to less than 1 today. This trend applies to any country on the development escalator. It’s inevitable.” As a country develops, initially its death rate declines because of a rising standard of living and better medical care. Next, almost automatically, fertility goes down. “Japan got on the escalator first, and the emerging countries, like Brazil, will get there,” Birt continues. “The religion of the country is irrelevant. It’s happening now in Iran. It’s happening in Catholic countries that oppose birth control, like Italy and Spain. In Mexico the fertility rate is under 3, approaching replacement level.” The replacement rate is the number of children that the average woman must produce in order to replace herself and her mate. Demographers normally define the replacement rate as 2.1 children, the 0.1 increment allowing for infant mortality. It is a pivotal number, indicating that a population is stable, not expanding, and very likely to shrink. Among the 222 countries and territories in the world, two-thirds now have fertility rates below 3, while one-third have slipped under 2 and have begun to contract. Japan, the poster child for extreme trends in aging and fertility, is projected to lose a third of its population in the next 50 years. The most populous nation, China, has a fertility rate of 1.5. Though China’s strict one-child-per-couple decree obviously has holes, the policy is having the desired result. India, the second most populous nation, has brought down its growth to 2.6 children per woman. The United States stands at the cusp of population decline because American females are having an average of only 2.06 children apiece.

In those figures lies the turnabout in world population that Glick predicts, and also its senescence, because when people are taken off the population escalator—at the front end, by not being born—those already on it become more conspicuous as they near the top. There is no stopping the process. “That’s why we say demography is destiny,” Glick remarks. “There’s only one exit: death.” Birt describes a favorite graphic of his, derived from a 2007 United Nations publication. He calls it “Solving for X” because of the problem it raises for the world’s health-care systems. Two lines are crossing, the percentage of people over 65 and the percentage under 5. Back in 1950, children predominated in the world; in 2050 the seniors will be on top. “The percent over 65 and under 5 are trading places,” Birt says. “We’re almost at the X spot.” The forecast date for global X to occur is 2017, but each country will arrive at the transition at a different time. “Japan blasted through its intersection years ago,” he notes.

Was there a single factor to account for this world-shaking reversal? “Yes,” Glick says. “You start educating girls.” Birt agrees. “You start educating women, and they delay marriage and have fewer children,” he says. “It’s all due to not having children in societies that let women loose.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

More than 30 million of the Americans classified as obese or extremely obese might benefit from surgery that reconstructs the stomach to accommodate less food. A new study shows that gastric bypass surgery, which leads to weight loss and improvement of related health problems, may yield long-term health benefits. Earlier research had shown improvements but most patients were tracked for shorter intervals. A report published online September 18 in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association tracked hundreds of extremely obese patients for six years (body mass index (BMI) above 40 or greater than 35 with health complications) and found that even after this lengthy period of time, those who received the surgery had significantly better health outcomes than those who did not. Preexisting type-2 diabetes went into remission more than half of the time (62 percent of cases). Researchers were unsure if gastric bypass, in which the stomach is reattached farther down on the digestive tract allowing for less food absorption would lead to better long-term health without other interventions, such as dietary or exercise assistance. For the study, the researchers enrolled 835 extremely obese patients who were seeking a from of gastric bypass known as Roux-en-Y. About half of those patients ended up getting the procedure. As an additional control group, the researchers enrolled 321 extremely obese people from the community who were not trying to get the surgery.

Following up with the participants two years later, the researchers found dramatic results. Those who had the surgery experienced a roughly 35 percent weight reduction—for many as much as 100 pounds or more under their baseline weight—whereas the control groups remained extremely obese. Even after six years and without other interventions, the patients who had the surgery were still about 28 percent lighter on average than before and experienced improved quality of life scores compared to the control groups. Stunningly, the procedure lead to at least an 80 percent reduction in the risk of developing type-2 diabetes and a 20-times larger chance that existing diabetes would go into remission. It also lowered risks for cardiovascular disease and hypertension. Those without surgery had increased risk for all of these conditions after six years.

More here.

Jonathan Meades in The Guardian:

Architecture, the most public of endeavours, is practised by people who inhabit a smugly hermetic milieu which is cultish. If this sounds far-fetched just consider the way initiates of this cult describe outsiders as the lay public, lay writers and so on: it's the language of the priesthood. And like all cults its primary interest is its own interests, that is to say its survival, and the triumph of its values – which means building. Architects, architectural critics, architectural theorists, the architectural press (which is little more than a deferential PR machine) – the entire quasi-cult is cosily conjoined by mutual dependence and by an ingrown, verruca-like jargon which derives from the more dubious end of American academe.

From early in its history, photography was adopted by architects as a means of idealising their buildings. As beautiful and heroic, as tokens of their ingenuity and mankind's progress, etc. This debased tradition continues to thrive. At its core lies the imperative to show the building out of context, as a monument, separate from streetscape, from awkward neighbours, from untidiness. A vast institutional lie is being told in architectural magazines the world over, in the pages of newspapers and in countless television films. It's also being told on the web – which is significant, and depressing, for it demonstrates how thoroughly the convention has seeped into the collective.

The mediation of buildings can never be neutral. As long ago as the 1930s, Harry Goodhart-Rendel observed: “The modern architectural drawing is interesting, the photograph is magnificent, the building is an unfortunate but necessary stage between the two.”

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in The New Republic:

Early morning one day this past July, a bomb went off two streets from my house in Karachi. I was asleep. “There was a bomb blast outside the Chinese consulate,” my wife informed me when I woke up. Nobody had died, I was told. It was a motorcycle bomb—as in someone had fitted a bomb into a motorcycle and parked it outside the consulate. My first reaction was, why would anyone explode a bomb outside the Chinese consulate? Since our childhood, we have been told that the Chinese are our best friends and our friendship is taller than the Himalayas and deeper than the Arabian Sea. Maybe someone was jealous of our friendship. It didn’t really occur to me that the bomb had gone off in my own neighborhood.

Then a friend wrote from London: Heard there was a bomb blast in your neighborhood, hope the family is safe, and the dogs not too traumatized. It was nice of her to write, but my first reaction was that the blast was two streets away. For me, the explosion might as well have happened in another city. None of my friends in Karachi called to check on me. They had probably seen the news on television, had found out that nobody died in the blast, and had promptly forgotten about it. I hadn’t even heard the blast. Maybe I have learned to block out small motorcycle bombs.

More here.

Charles Larson reviews Macro Roth's new book The Scientists, in Counterpunch:

When Marco Roth was sixteen years old, his parents suggested that he begin seeing a psychiatrist. A couple of years earlier, the boy’s father (a noted hematologist) revealed that he was dying of AIDS and told his son that the diagnosis should be kept within the family. Years earlier, an accidental prick with a needle had infected him. Marco was an only child. Not only was his father a famous academic scientist, but the boy’s mother was a talented pianist. A sentence from the information on the book about the writer states that “Marco Roth was raised among the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.” Jewish, cultured, highly educated. As a boy he was accustomed to house concerts, intellectual discussions with family and guests.

The sessions with the psychiatrist were intended to help Marco adjust to his father’s approaching death. During those final years of his life, Marco’s father aided his son with his high school science projects, provided him with scientific articles to read—especially about possible cures for AIDS—and kept up a running dialogue about literature. There were novels that Marco read because of his father’s recommendations. The tension keeping his father’s approaching death from his peers led the young man to make endless speculations about his parents and refer to the virus as his “microscopic sibling,” the second child his parents never had. His father had contracted the virus when Marco was in the second or third grade.

First, David Remnick in the New Yorker:

Twenty-three years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his death warrant on Salman Rushdie and forced on the novelist a decade of hellish seclusion, Rushdie is publishing this week a brilliant memoir of those years of endurance, called “Joseph Anton.” (Rushdie’s security detail asked that he devise an alias and “Joseph Anton”—the first names of Conrad and Chekhov—is what he chose.) Readers of the excerpt from Rushdie’s new book that was published here earlier this month could readily sense the shaming helplessness of his experience and his astonishing capacity to tell the story straight. There is in the memoir a kind of absolute honesty, a willingness to pass clear-eyed judgment on everyone involved—including, most ruthlessly, himself. “Joseph Anton,” which is written in a deliberately distancing, yet scrupulously accurate, third-person voice, is, in its way, as important a book as “Midnight’s Children,” the novel that gave birth to the Rushdie phenomenon, in 1981.

Second, Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian:

There are fascinating details about Rushdie's parents in the memoir's early pages, which also appealingly evoke his years as a struggling writer with his first wife, Clarissa; few readers would fail, later in the book, to be moved by the account of her death and Rushdie's grief-tinged recall of his superseded self. Rushdie engagingly reveals the autobiographical energies that went into the making of such novels as The Satanic Verses and Fury. Anton's Herzog-style letters, addressed variously and randomly to famous people, critics, and even God, effectively evoke the mind of an isolated and hunted man.

Yet the memoir, at 650 pages, often feels too long, over-dependent on Rushdie's journals, and unquickened by hindsight, or its prose. Ostensibly deployed as a distancing device, the third-person narration frequently makes for awkward self-regard (“The clouds thickened over his head. But he found that his sentences could still form … his imagination still spark”). A peevish righteousness comes to pervade the memoir as Rushdie routinely and often repetitively censures those who criticised or disagreed with him. The long list of betrayers, carpers and timorous publishers includes Robert Gottlieb, Peter Mayer, John le Carré, Sonny Mehta, the Independent (evidently the “house journal for British Islam”), Germaine Greer, John Berger and assorted policemen “who believed he had done nothing of value in his life”. Small darts are also flung at James Wood, “the malevolent Procrustes of literary criticism”, Arundhati Roy, Joseph Brodsky, Louis de Bernières and many others.