From Salon:

Leslie C. Bell’s “Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom” argues that despite being the most liberated generation of women to date, today’s 20-somethings face wildly contradictory cultural messages about love and sex that can make it extremely difficult to freely and fully realize their desires.

…Bell’s main argument is that these women are bombarded with “vying cultural” messages: “Be assertive, but not aggressive. Be feminine, but not too passive. Be sexually adventurous, but don’t alienate men with your sexual prowess” — and so on. At the same time that they are encouraged to “live it up,” they “spend their twenties hearing gloomy forecasts about their chances of marriage if they don’t marry before thirty, and their chances of conceiving a baby if they don’t get pregnant before thirty-five.”

As a result of this, many young women seek to “resolve the internal conflicts they feel about their desires,” Bell argues, by developing a black-and-white, all-or-nothing view of sex and relationships. If a woman feels conflicted about her sexual desires, that typically manifests in a committed but perhaps sexually neutered relationship, she says: “They felt conflicted about having and expressing sexual desire and so gave it up.” If a woman feels more conflicted about her desire for a relationship, she’s likely to focus on no-strings sex over relationships: These twenty-somethings “feared losing their identities and independence through being in an intimate relationship,” writes Bell. But she also observed a middle-of-the-road approach in which women “used their conflicts to inform how they could pursue their desires; they were comfortable with and expressed their desires for sex and a relationship” — as well as an education and career. Many young women start out in either one of the first scenarios but grow into the third, which is how I’ve come to see my growing impatience with hookup culture. (Of course, this sort of framework only makes sense for those who do desire relationships. For those who don’t, that would actually be a regression.)

More here.

Charlene Gubash at NBC News:

It is the latest Internet phenomenon that has the world laughing, but in Egypt the Harlem Shake has caught the imagination of revolutionaries who are using it as a new way to challenge the country's new Islamist rulers.

“It’s a funny way to protest how [the Muslim Brotherhood] have taken control of the country,” said law student Tarek Badr, 22, who was one of more than 100 thrusting their hips in front of the political movement’s Cairo headquarters on Thursday. “People won’t be silent. They will protest in all ways and this is a peaceful way.”

One of his fellow white-clad protesters wore a Mickey Mouse head mask.

The unusual protest captured the attention of Egypt’s protest-weary press corps — who almost outnumbered the gyrating protesters -– as well as a dozen stern-faced members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement's figurehead Mohammed Morsi was named president in June after the country's first democratic election in decades.

Organizer Noor al Mahalaawi, a 22-year-old engineering student, and three friends started a group that they have dubbed the “Satiric Revolutionary Struggle”.

The group intends to stage innovative weekly protests in front of the party headquarters, which will be posted on its increasingly popular Facebook page.

More here.

3QD friend Sonali Deraniyagala's new book, released this week and Amazon's book of the month is a memoir of a horrible tragedy. An excerpt over at NPR, in text and in audio:

Economist Sonali Deraniyagala lost her husband, parents and two young sons in the terrifying Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. They had been vacationing on the southern coast of her home country Sri Lanka when the wave struck. Wave is her brutal but lyrically written account of the awful moment and the grief-crazed months after, as she learned to live with her almost unbearable losses — and allow herself to remember details of her previous life. In this scene, Deraniyagala revists both the house of her parents in Colombo, which has been emptied and closed up since the tsunami, and Yala National Park, where she was when the wave struck. Wave will be published March 5.

Sri Lanka, July – December 2005

Someone had removed the brass plate with my father's name on it from the gray front wall. It had his name etched in black italics. I sat in the passenger seat of my friend Mary-Anne's car, my eyes clinging to the holes in the wall where that brass plate was once nailed.

This had been my parents' home in Colombo for some thirty-five years, and my childhood home. For my sons it was their home in Sri Lanka. They were giddy with excitement when we visited every summer and Christmas. Vik took his first steps here, and Malli, when younger, called the house “Sri Lanka.” And in our last year, 2004, when Steve and I had sabbaticals from our jobs and the four of us spent nine months in Colombo until September, this house was the hub of our children's lives.

This was where we were to return to on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of December. My mother had already given Saroja, our cook, the menu for dinner. This was where they didn't come back to. Now, six months after the wave, I dared to set eyes on this house.

I was wary as I sat in Mary-Anne's car, which was parked by our front wall. I didn't want to look around. I was afraid of seeing too much. But I couldn't help myself, I peeked.

Apart for the now nameless wall, the outside of the house had not changed. The tall iron gates still had spikes on top to keep burglars out. The rail on the balcony was white and safe. The mango tree I was parked under was the same mango tree that gave me an allergic reaction when it flowered, that sickly tree, dark blotches on its leaves. I noticed some small black stones on the driveway, and I remembered. Vik would juggle with these stones when he waited out here for the New Lanka Caterers van to come by selling kimbula paan — sugarcoated bread rolls shaped as crocodiles.

It was a humid, sticky afternoon, and Mary-Anne rolled down the car windows. From its perch on a nearby telephone post, a bulbul trilled. And I recalled the pair of red-vented bulbuls that nested in the lamp that hung in the car porch, just over the front wall. In the hollow of the glass lampshade, there would be a nest built with dried twigs and leaves and even a green drinking straw. The boys were spellbound by the arrival of fidgety chicks, still part covered in pale red shell. They watched the first flutter from that lamp many times, shooing off the mob of crows that rallied on the wall waiting for an unready chick to drop to the ground. Now I could see the two of them, placing a chair under the lamp to stand on and get a better look. Shoving each other off that chair. My turn now. I wanna see the baby bird. Get off.

Aatish Bhatia in Empirical Zeal:

…as I watched this miniature world self-assemble on my windshield like an alien landscape, I wondered about the physics behind these patterns. I learned later that these patterns of ice are related to a rich and very active current area of research in math and physics known as universality. The key mathematical principles that belie these intricate patterns lead us to some unexpected places, such as coffee rings, growth patterns in bacterial colonies, and the wake of a flame as it burns through cigarette paper.

Let’s start with a simple example. Imagine a game similar to Tetris, but where you only have one kind of block – a 1 x 1 square. These identical blocks fall at random, like raindrops. Here’s a question for you. What pattern of blocks would you expect to see building up at the bottom of the screen?

You might guess that since the blocks are falling randomly, you should end up with a smooth, uniform pile of blocks, like the piles of sand that collect on a beach. But this isn’t what happens. Instead, in our make-believe Tetris world, you end up with a rough, jagged skyline, where tall towers sit next to deep gaps. A tall stack of blocks is just as likely to sit next to a short stack as it is to sit next to another tall stack.

This doesn’t look much like what I saw on my windshield. For one thing, there aren’t any gaps or holes. But we’ll get to that later.

This Tetris world is an example of what’s known as a Poisson process, and I’ve written about these processes before. The main point is that randomness doesn’t mean uniformity. Instead, randomness is typically clumpy, just like the jagged skyline of Tetris blocks that you see above, or like the clusters of buzzbombs dropped over London in World War II.

More here.

The personal essay has always been a stepchild of serious literature, seemingly formless, hard to classify. Lacking the tight construction of a short story or the narrative arc of a novel or memoir, such essays have given readers pleasure without winning cultural respect. Written in a minor key, they could be slight and superficial, but their drawbacks could also be strengths. The style of the first-person essay tends to be conversational, tentative — in tune with our postmodern skepticism about absolutes, the trust we place in multiple perspectives. Few writers have pursued this more resourcefully than Phillip Lopate, who started out as a novelist and poet but gained traction when he began writing lively first-person essays in the late 1970s, later editing a landmark anthology, “The Art of the Personal Essay” (1994). Lopate belongs to the generation — my own — that came of age in the ’60s, a dec­ade that gave a huge push to all sorts of self-expression, including the essay.

more from Morris Dickstein at the NY Times here.

The ballyhoo around big data is a perfect example of what Evgeny Morozov would call “solutionism” – the urge to find internet-based solutions to problems that either don’t exist or are only likely to fester under its sticking plaster. Morozov is a relentless dragon-slayer in the puffed-up world of internet punditry: his previous book, The Net Delusion (2011), was a timely corrective to the notion that the internet could prove a game changer in the struggle to overthrow authoritarian regimes. To Save Everything, Click Here broadens this into a full-frontal critique of Silicon Valley verities – the gospel of “radical transparency”, the notion that online collaboration can serve as a template for government, the whole rogue’s gallery of idea salesmen who confuse real innovation with messing about on the internet. Morozov is a fine polemical essayist: glossy TED conferences, for example, are easily batted away as a “Woodstock of the intellectually effete”. He pours scorn on the “fact-checking” slots proliferating in the American media, in which argument and principle too easily give way to a nit-picking pantomime of claim and counter-claim.

more from James Harkin at the FT here.

Today, electricity is so inextricably woven into the fabric of our lives that we don’t even think about it: We flick a switch and a light comes on — until, as millions in the Northeast discovered during Hurricane Sandy, it doesn’t, and you learn that it can take days or even weeks to restore the complex electric grid inaugurated more than a hundred years ago. One of the many pleasures of “Age of Edison,” Ernest Freeberg’s engaging history of the spread of electricity throughout the United States, is that he captures the excitement and wonder of those early days, when “a machine that could create enough cheap and powerful light to hold the night at bay” promised “liberation from one of the primordial limits imposed by nature on the human will.” Freeberg sketches electric light’s transformative effect on everything from factory work and home life to shopping and entertainment, painting vivid pictures of this brave new world in evocative prose.

more from Wendy Smith at the LA Times here.

Mo over at Neurophilosophy:

MC: Autism is an umbrella term referring to numerous conditions. Can the broken mirror hypothesis account for all of them?

Ramachandran: Autism is characterized by a specific subset of symptoms. There may be three or four that are lumped together, but by and large it is one syndrome, as good a syndrome as any in neurology. It’s not like dyslexia, where there are half a dozen or a dozen types. With autism, people are debating whether high functioning and low functioning autistics should be lumped together or not. There’s a tendency to group them together rather than saying they’re distinct.

We have suggested that the mirror neuron system is deficient in autism, and there’s mixed evidence of that, but most groups support our view. [Marco] Iaconobi‘s group at UCLA did a brain imaging study showing that the mirror neuron system is deficient, but others claim that it’s normal. That may partly be based on the heterogeneity of autism. The mirror neuron system itself could be normal but its projections, or the regions it’s projecting to, could be abnormal. It’s still up in the air.

One of the things I say in my book [The Tell-Tale Brain] is that the mirror neuron system allows you to take an allocentric view of other peoples’ actions, to view the intentions to their actions. It may even be turning inwards and looking at one’s self from an allocentric perspective, so it may be partly contributing to self-awareness. In addition to an allocentric perceptual view, the same system then evolved into adopting an allocentric conceptual, or metaphorical, view – “I see your point of view”. This could have been an evolutionary step from perception to conception, but we don’t know exactly when than magic line was crossed.

Mark Mazower in the FT (via Crooked Timber) (image from Wikimedia Commons):

The turmoil produced by the Italian elections has directed attention back to where it should have been all along – to the politics of the eurozone crisis. We have had six months of complacency, rising stock markets and wishful thinking. The conventional wisdom was that the crisis had been contained, with Ireland recovering and the risk of a Greek exit from the eurozone reduced. But this view always ignored the politics.

Greece, in particular, showed that even if capital flows might be going in the right direction, the democratic deficit was widening. No one has much cared outside Greece that a neo-Nazi party could shoot to above 10 per cent in the polls. But it is a warning of what can happen to other eurozone members.

There is, fortunately, no parallel to the rise of Golden Dawn in Italy. But the crisis of democratic legitimacy has been shown to be equally deep there. As in Greece, the voters have a reasonably clear view: they want to remain in Europe and – knowing the defects of their own economic system – they may even accept some measure of austerity.

But the Rome-based political class has lost all credibility in their eyes – they were creators of the mess, and of the corruption that accompanied it. They cannot be trusted to clear it up. Those who have made no sacrifice themselves lack the moral credibility to ask them of others.

Paul De Grauwe and Yuemei Ji in Vox:

Southern Eurozone countries have been forced to introduce severe austerity programs since 2011. Where did the forces that led these countries into austerity come from? Are these forces the result of deteriorating economic fundamentals that made austerity inevitable? Or could it be that the austerity dynamics were forced by fear and panic that erupted in the financial markets and then gripped policymakers. Furthermore, what are the implications of these severe austerity programs for the countries involved?

The facts: Austerity and spreads

There is a strong perception that countries that introduced austerity programs in the Eurozone were somehow forced to do so by the financial markets. Is this perception based on a reality? Figure 1 shows the average interest rate spreads in 2011 on the horizontal axis and the intensity of austerity measures introduced during 2011 as measured by the Financial Times on the vertical axis. It is striking to find a very strong positive correlation. The higher the spreads¹ in 2011 the more intense were the austerity measures. The intensity of the spreads can be explained almost uniquely by the size of the spreads (the R-squared is 0.97). Note the two extremes. Greece was confronted with extremely high spreads in 2011 and applied the most severe austerity measures amounting to more than 10% of GDP per capita. Germany did not face any pressure from spreads and did not do any austerity.

Figure 1. Austerity measures and spreads in 2011

Source: Financial Times and Datastream.

There can be little doubt. Financial markets exerted different degrees of pressure on countries. By raising the spreads they forced some countries to engage in severe austerity programs. Other countries did not experience increases in spreads and as a result did not feel much urge to apply the austerity medicine.

Two theories about spreads

The next question that arises is whether the judgement of the market (measured by the spreads) about how much austerity each country should apply was the correct one. There are essentially two theories that can be invoked to answer this question. According to the first theory, the surging spreads observed from 2010 to the middle of 2012 were the result of deteriorating fundamentals (e.g. domestic government debt, external debt, competitiveness, etc.). Thus, the market was just a messenger of bad news. Its judgement should then be respected. The implication of that theory is that the only way these spreads can go down is by improving the fundamentals, mainly by austerity programs aimed at reducing government budget deficits and debts.

Ron Charles in The Washington Post:

The first thing you notice when you start Mohsin Hamid’s extraordinarily clever third novel is that it’s written in the second person. That’s rare, even rarer than the first-person plural, which we enjoyed in Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Virgin Suicides” and Eleanor Brown’s “The Weird Sisters.” In fact, you can’t remember reading anything narrated in the second person since Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” (1984), which you actually only pretended to have read after you saw the Michael J. Foxmovie. Why not just stick with the good old third person? Don’t you find the second person hard to tolerate — the way it constantly reaches off the page and pokes you in the I?

As it turns out, that sense of being directly addressed is what this author exploits so brilliantly in “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.” Hamid, who attended Princeton and Harvard and now lives in Pakistan, has taken the most American form of literature — the self-help book — and transformed it to tell the story of an ambitious man in the Third World. It’s a bizarre amalgam that looks like a parody of the genre from one angle and a melancholy reflection on modern life from another. With a wink to Dale Carnegie and Stephen Covey, Hamid’s chapter titles lead us inexorably toward success: “Move to the City,” “Get an Education,” “Learn from a Master.” And he often strikes a perfect imitation of that overconfident, just-between-us tone that has appealed to the desperate for generations: “To be effective, a self-help book requires two things. First, the help it suggests should be helpful. Obviously. And second, without which the first is impossible, the self it’s trying to help should have some idea of what help is needed.”

More here.

From Smithsonian:

So, we’re 42 years into the War on Cancer, and while the enemy remains formidable, our strategy is shifting into yet another phase. We’ve been through the equivalent of hand-to-hand combat–surgery–carpet bombing–radiation–and chemical warfare–chemotherapy. Now the fight is about stealth. Instead of concentrating on blasting away at cancer cells, or poisoning them, you’re more likely to hear cancer scientists talk about “Trojan horses” or “cloaking strategies” or “tricking” the immune system. All are cell-level ploys hatched through nanomedicine–medical treatment gone very, very small. How small? At the nano level, about 5,000 particles would be as wide as a human hair. Okay, so we’re in beyond comprehension territory here. But let’s not get hung up on size; let’s focus on deception. The latest example of microscopic trickery was laid out last week a paper from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the most appealing aspects of nanomedicine is that it allows scientists to deliver drugs directly to a tumor instead flooding the whole body with chemotherapy. Unfortunately, the immune system sees the nanoparticles as invaders and tries to clear them away before they can go to work on the tumor cells.

The trick was to make the “sentry cells” of the body’s immune system think that the drug-delivering nanoparticles were native cells, that they weren’t intruders. The researchers did this by attaching to each nanoparticle a protein that’s present in every cell membrane. And put simply, it sent out a “don’t eat me” message to the body’s guard cells. The result, at least in mice, is that this technique dramatically improved the success rate of two different kinds of nanoparticles–one that delivered tumor-shrinking drugs and one filled with dye that would help doctors capture images of cancer cells. Meanwhile, earlier this year, scientists at the Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston announced that they had found their own way of letting nanoparticles fool the immune system. They developed a procedure to physically remove the membranes from active white blood cells and drape them over nanoparticles. And that “cloaking strategy” was enough to keep proteins that activate the immune system from doing their job and ordering it to go repel the invaders. The researchers believe it will one day be possible to harvest a patient’s own white blood cells and use them to cloak the nanoparticles, making it that much more likely that they’ll get to their target without being attacked. As magical as all this can sound, nanomedicine is not without risk. Much more research needs to be done on the long-term impact of nanoparticles inside the body. Could they accumulate in healthy body tissues? And if they do, what effect would it have? Can those tiny particles now seemingly so full of promise, eventually turn toxic?

Still plenty of questions about nanomedicine, but it’s feeling more like an answer.

More here.

Troy Jollimore in Aeon:

[W]hy do so many people believe that morality needs to be grounded in religion, when the arguments in favour of that view are so unconvincing? I suspect that something else is going on, and that in most cases these arguments are just rationalisations for the belief that morality depends on faith in God. The actual explanation, I believe, is something else.

The reality is, no system of secular ethics has managed to displace religious approaches to ethics in the contemporary popular imagination. It is worth asking why. We can start with the fact that the secular approaches that have dominated Western thought since the Enlightenment tend to share certain features. The two most significant post-Enlightenment secular theories are those derived from the work of the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, and utilitarianism, which originates in the work of the British philosophers Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill.

Utilitarian ethics claims that the right thing to do is always the one that will maximise happiness or well-being among the general population. The answers to our moral questions are, thus, to be determined by empirical research — what will make people happiest or best-off, on the whole? Kantian ethics — to put a highly complex theory into a very small nutshell — says that reason commands us to behave morally. Moral truths are, in essence, logical truths, so that the content of morality can and ought to be determined from the philosopher’s armchair.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

Scientists have connected the brains of a pair of animals and allowed them to share sensory information in a major step towards what the researchers call the world's first “organic computer”.

The US team fitted two rats with devices called brain-to-brain interfaces that let the animals collaborate on simple tasks to earn rewards, such as a drink of water.

In one radical demonstration of the technology, the scientists used theinternet to link the brains of two rats separated by thousands of miles, with one in the researchers' lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the other in Natal, Brazil.

Led by Miguel Nicolelis, a pioneer of devices that allow paralysed people to control computers and robotic arms with their thoughts, the researchers say their latest work may enable multiple brains to be hooked up to share information.

“These experiments showed that we have established a sophisticated, direct communication linkage between brains,” Nicolelis said in a statement. “Basically, we are creating what I call an organic computer.”

The scientists first demonstrated that rats can share, and act on, each other's sensory information by electrically connecting their brains via tiny grids of electrodes that reach into the motor cortex, the brain region that processes movement.

The rats were trained to press a lever when a light went on above it. When they performed the task correctly, they got a drink of water. To test the animals' ability to share brain information, they put the rats in two separate compartments. Only one compartment had a light that came on above the lever. When the rat pressed the lever, an electronic version of its brain activity was sent directly to the other rat's brain. In trials, the second rat responded correctly to the imported brain signals 70% of the time by pressing the lever.

More here.