From PhysOrg:

A study conducted to learn more about mimicry of facial features has found that people tend to mimic smiles directed at them by other people based on their own feelings of status and power. The team, led by Evan Carr of the University of California presented its findings at this year's Society for Neuroscience conference in New Orleans.

…In analyzing the results, the researchers found that those people who were feeling more powerful tended to smile in response to smiles on the faces of people that were deemed less powerful or lower in status, but didn't smile back when smiled at by someone that was deemed more powerful. Those that were feeling less powerful on the other hand tended to smile back at anyone that smiled at them. Carr suggested in his presentation that the results of the study show that people smile back at those that they feel are less powerful than them as a means of displaying their own status. And when they are feeling powerful, they hold back on smiling at others perceived as more powerful to avoid showing deference. When people are feeling low power they smile back at everyone as a sign of submission. The researchers also found that people tend to frown back when someone they view as having more power frowns at them no matter how powerful they themselves are feeling.

More here.

Another Night in the Ruins -7

How many nights must it take
one such as me to learn
that we aren't, after all, made
from that bird that flies out of its ashes,
that for us
as we go up in flames, our one work
is
to open ourselves, to be
the flames?

by Galway Kinnell

~~

Ring of Bone

I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it

and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through

and then heard
“ring of bone” where
ring is what a

bell does

Lew Welch
from Ring of Bone

Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

No sooner had Brutsch [a.k.a. Violentacrez, Reddit's top troll] been outed than fanboys started bleating about how it was unfair to expose him because what he was doing was perfectly legal. Which it largely was. The law, as they say, is a blunt instrument. It's easy to forget because it's so pervasive, but most antisocial behavior is held in check by social, rather than legal sanctions. Jerks don't get asked back. Liars and promise-breakers are shunned. The tactless get dirty looks. The indiscreet get elbowed.

In practice, our legal freedom to speak our minds is constrained by our accountability to the people around us. They know who we are, they know where we live, they will kick us under the table when we get out of line. In real life, we only have one body connected to one name, and we've got to weigh the satisfaction of speaking our minds against the long term effects on our reputations and relationships.

This is a pretty elegant system, albeit an imperfect one. It puts the “society” in “free society.” In real life, we have the legal right to say pretty much whatever we want, but we are enmeshed in a network of social checks and balances that keep us accountable for our speech. Nobody can force us to shut up, but lots of people can make their displeasure known to us. It's a good balance that allows people to share ideas freely without rending the fabric of the community.

Pseudonymity is great because it allows people to speak without the usual constraints, but it can also be terrible for the same reason. As ViolentAcrez, Michael Brutsch opted out of all social controls on his speech and ran amok. He could say things he would never have said under his real name because they're rightly regarded as horrifying. Until recently, he didn't have to live as that Hitler/Misogyny/Creepshot Guy (all subreddits he started). He didn't have to endure his neighbors crossing the street to avoid him.

This past March, Zakaria penned a Post column on how American energy security may benefit from shale gas—natural gas trapped within shale rock formations. Shale gas is abundant in many U.S. states and can be extracted through the application of highly pressurized fluids. This process, known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” is controversial for its alleged environmental hazards. It uses a lot of water and nasty chemicals; releases methane, a potent global-warming gas; generates residues that can leech into groundwater and poison wells; and may, some seismologists worry, cause earthquakes. Despite such concerns, Zakaria’s piece offers a strikingly optimistic endorsement, especially of shale gas’s implications for our energy security and for international politics. Since the United States has shale deposits in abundance, the threat of rising oil prices to our domestic economy, due in part to instability in the Middle East, can be reduced. And since shale gas deposits are widely dispersed globally, they provide the world leverage against menacing oil-producing nations such as Russia and Iran.

more from David V. Johnson at Boston Review here.

Teenie Matlock in American Scientist:

It is no surprise that language in political messages affect people’s attitudes about political candidates and more generally, elections. Just about anybody would form a low opinion of a politician who is described as a cocaine addict with a track record of accepting bribes, cheating coworkers and evading taxes by illegal means. What’s interesting is how language has this influence, especially when it comes to framing effects. Particlarly interesting is how the more subtle dimensions of language, including grammar and metaphor, can modify attitudes about political candidates.

Grammar is something we learned in elementary school. We learned that sentences have a subject, a verb and, in some cases, an object. We learned about irregular verbs, such as “went” and “flew.” We learned about parts of speech, including nouns, verbs and adjectives. We learned about active versus passive sentences. We learned that tense signals when events happened in time: past, present or future. And more. What we did not learn is that grammar has meaning, and that it is linked to mental experience and physical interactions with the world. Although grammar is poorly understood and uninteresting to folks other than linguists and grammar teachers, it plays a critical role in our everyday reasoning.

Grammatical aspect occurs in English and many other languages. Its main purpose in a language is to express how events unfold in time. Grammatical aspect works with tense, modality and other systems in a language to provide the reader or listener with information about whether an event has started, whether it has finished, whether it has continued over a significant period of time and more. In English, a person can describe past events in a variety of ways. For instance, you see your friend Maria cycling one evening across campus, and the next morning you report, “Maria was riding her bike last night” or “Maria rode her bike last night.” Both statements are perfectly acceptable English, and express the same event. However, there is a slight difference in how the action is construed.

More here.

Peter M. Nardi in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Illusion is real, even if not actually truthful. Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie begins: “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” Illusion is magicians’s product, their craft, their tool. And central to its “appearance of truth” is a social system of secrets and surprise. Two recent books reveal the journeys and expertise needed to enter and participate in this unusual world.

Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks & the Hidden Powers of the Mind begins with him having flamed out performing at a Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques’ (FISM) World Championships of Magic event (which he strangely calls the Magic Olympics). Undeterred in his desire to become a skilled magician, Stone realizes he needs to learn more about not just the techniques, but the secret subculture, to learn about the world of magicians in greater depth.

The details of his progress are described in Fooling Houdini, as he leads us through various kinds of deception: mentalism, pickpocketing, three-card Monte scams, and mathematical magic. Along the way, side trips are taken to introduce us to Richard Turner, a blind close-up magician who amazes with his hypersensitive touch; to observe a psychology experiment at the New School illustrating misdirection and selective attention; and to exchange secrets with magicians at the back of a pizza parlor, in a magic store, in Las Vegas classes, and at Los Angeles’s famous Magic Castle.

More here.

Three subjects that are fundamental to leading an examined life go unaddressed in the college curriculum: money, leisure, and death. All students should be required to take a single course that considers these subjects together. Money, you will say, is already taught in college. More students than ever enroll in business programs, and economics is among the most popular academic majors. But I am speaking about money in personal and philosophical ways that these academic subjects don’t take up. This means thinking about money in a larger context: How important is it to you, and how much of it do you need to lead the life you want? Tolstoy addresses these questions cogently in his short story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” In it, a peasant farmer is told that he can own as much land as he can encircle in a day. The man sets his sights high, pushing himself to run around a very large space, and when he finishes, drops dead.

more from Paula Marantz Cohen at The American Scholar here.

One of the most moving evocations of the female dilemma can be found in Nobel Prize winner Jane Addams’s The Long Road of Woman’s Memory. In her study of the uprootings, dislocations, and cruelties attendant upon late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American life—the wave upon wave of desperate immigrants who crowded into this country’s tenements by the hundreds of thousands—Addams was led to reflect upon civilization itself. Her own life experience had convinced her that the past is always present in human cultures: In each of us, there is an ongoing echo of the entire historic movement of civilization. Addams rejected the moral dualism of a strict male-female divide: man as odious ravager, damaged goods; woman as graced with generosity, sympathy, and tenderness. It was far too simple.

more from Jean Bethke Elshtain at VQR here.

Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Times:

In 1754 George Washington, then an officer in the Virginia militia, found himself hotly debating charges that he had committed what today we would call a war crime.

During a campaign against the French in the Ohio Valley, Washington was said to have stood by while his troops killed a captive ambassador, leading a French official to declare, in the outcry that followed, “There is nothing more unworthy and lower, and even blacker, than the sentiments and the way of thinking of this Washington.”

The story is the opening anecdote in “Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History,” John Fabian Witt’s sweeping history of American engagement with the idea that the brutality of war should be constrained by humanitarian rules. But if the French outrage calls to mind international reaction to the wartime behavior of a more recent president named George, Mr. Witt hardly aims to give aid and comfort to contemporary partisans.

The book is “an equal opportunity offender,” Mr. Witt, 40, said during a recent interview in his Yale office here, where he is a professor in the law school and the history department.

In “Lincoln’s Code” he argues against two competing and, in his view, equally false notions: on the left, the idea that George W. Bush’s war on terror represented a radical break with the American past; and on the right, the idea that Americans started caring about the laws of war only when pointy-headed Europeans forced them to.

But the respectful reviews that the book is already drawing from neoconservatives andhuman-rights advocates alike suggest that we may have reached, if not a truce, at least an easing of the past decade’s intense partisan wrangling over the conduct of the war on terror.

More here.

Call to Prayer

In a city hillocked and covered
with cherry blossoms
this time of the year
the runner
carrying the message of war
has reached

before
bales of cotton

Caravans bringing sugar and rice

The elders in their white gowns
have been moved
from their perch in the mosque

A cloud of quiet departs

The women are busying themselves
with salves
with feeding the horses that will carry
their men

The next call for prayer
will be made in full armor

Arrows threading the men’s bodies
will be removed during prayer

Shadab Zeest Hashmi
from Contemporary World Poetry Journal
Spring 2011

From Harvard Magazine:

Morton C. Bradley Jr. ’33, G ’40, had family ties, extending back to great-grandfather Theophilus Wylie, to Indiana University. But the campus community where he spent nearly all of his life was Cambridge, not Bloomington. The Harvard where he was educated had since the 1870s featured pioneering studies in experimental psychology and the physiology of perception (stemming from William James and Hugo Münsterberg) and the fine arts (Charles Eliot Norton), and in ensuing decades the flowering of logic in philosophy (in the persons of Josiah Royce and the towering figures, then still in the other Cambridge, of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell). The strands of formalist aesthetics, of the Bauhaus at Harvard, of music and mathematics and still other influences, are teased out in the essay, “Morton Bradley: An American Formalist,” by Lynn Gamwell, who is also responsible for the volume Color and Form: The Geometric Sculptures of Morton C. Bradley Jr. (Indiana University Art Museum/Indiana University Press, $30).

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in The New Yorker:

The shooting of Malala Yousafzai, a fourteen-year-old student, along with her two friends by Pakistani Taliban has created intense anger in Pakistan. Pakistanis have spent days in prayer for her life as she lay comatose in an army hospital in Rawalpindi and, Monday, was put on a plane to London, under tight security, for a brain operation (the Pakistani government will pay her expenses), and have held vigils and marches in support of her vision of education for all girls. But they are now also calling on the army to carry out its much delayed offensive in the tribal territories of North and South Waziristan to wipe out the ever growing networks of extremists, including Mullah Fazlullah, who is believed to be the mastermind of the attempted murder of Malala. I live in Lahore and, like my neighbors, have spent this time watching the news and hoping that Malala survives. This is a simple human reaction, but one affected, too, by a sense of what she means for Pakistan. Malala may become a role model not just for girls in the region but also for peace. Her story now has the potential, if fully utilized, to bring about a serious geo-political change in the region that could actually help stabilize both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

For several years, the United States and NATO forces based in Afghanistan have demanded that the army carry out just such operations, but Pakistan has declined. After the shooting of Malala, there is unprecedented domestic pressure to finally do so. Pakistanis want to make it clear that they, the majority, do not support this brand of Islamic fundamentalism. If the army refuses to act now it may find itself ostracized by the very public whose support it seeks.

More here.

Sughra Raza. From the Daewoo window enroute to Rawalpindi. 2010.

Digital photograph.