From NPR:

Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You've probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they're a little less friendly to the people beneath them. So here's a question that may seem too simple: Why? If you ask a psychologist, he or she may tell you that the powerful are simply too busy. They don't have the time to fully attend to their less powerful counterparts. But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates. Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a new study showing evidence to support that claim. Obhi and his fellow researchers randomly put participants in the mindset of feeling either powerful or powerless. They asked the powerless group to write a diary entry about a time they depended on others for help. The powerful group wrote entries about times they were calling the shots. Then, everybody watched a simple video. In it, an anonymous hand squeezes a rubber ball a handful of times — sort of monotonously. While the video ran, Obhi's team tracked the participants' brains, looking at a special region called the mirror system.

The mirror system is important because it contains neurons that become active both when you squeeze a rubber ball and when you watch someone else squeeze a rubber ball. It is the same thing with picking up a cup of coffee, hitting a baseball, or flying a kite. Whether you do it or someone else does, your mirror system activates. In this small way, the mirror system places you inside a stranger's head. Furthermore, because our actions are linked to deeper thoughts — like beliefs and intentions — you may also begin to empathize with what motivates another person's actions. “When I watch somebody picking up a cup of coffee, the mirror system activates the representations in my brain that would be active if I was picking up a cup of coffee,” Obhi explains. “And because those representations are connected in my brain to the intentions that would normally activate them, you can get activation of the intention. So you can figure out, 'Hey, this person wants to drink coffee.' ” Obhi's team wanted to see if bestowing a person with a feeling of power or powerlessness would change how the mirror system responds to someone else performing a simple action. It turns out, feeling powerless boosted the mirror system — people empathized highly. But, Obhi says, “when people were feeling powerful, the signal wasn't very high at all.”

So when people felt power, they really did have more trouble getting inside another person's head.

More here.

From The Guardian:

A slender, beautifully bound blue hardback showed up on my desk. Its pages were creamy, its typeface clear in a formal, old-fashioned way. Each page number was picked out in scarlet. It was a book to put Kindle out of business, so covetable that, I almost thought, it scarcely mattered what it contained. It was then I noticed its curious title, Things I Don't Want to Know, and a quotation, picked out on the cover in pink type: “To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.” The writer is Deborah Levy, shortlisted last year for the Man Booker for her marvellous novel Swimming Home. Things I Don't Want to Know is published by Notting Hill Editions, a small, choice, independent publisher committed to “reinvigorating the essay as a literary form”. They came up with the idea of commissioning writers to respond to essays of distinction. Levy has had George Orwell's “Why I Write” (1946) at her elbow.

…The opening line hooks one instantly: “That spring when life was hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations.” She writes about depression, without naming it, in a blackly funny way. She describes directionlessness yet knows where she is going: the essay is immaculately planned. There are many wonderful lines: “When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.” Or: “A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.” Even the coat hangers in an irregular Mallorcan hotel are perfectly described: “four bent wire clothes hangers on the rail, they seemed to mimic the shape of forlorn human shoulders”.

More here.

Elizabeth Castelli in The Nation:

The “most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done,” in which anchor Lauren Green challenged the legitimacy of author Reza Aslan for writing Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, seemed to be popping up everywhere on social media last week. The absurdity of the spectacle was multifold: Why—why?!—would a Muslim want to write about Jesus, Green kept asking, as though a nefarious plot to undermine Christianity were somehow afoot. Meanwhile, Aslan made a show of insisting that he possesses not only the academic credentials and but also the professional duty to do so (“My job as a scholar of religions with a PhD in the subject is to write about religions”). The story was quickly framed as a battle between the right-wing Islamophobes of Fox News and Aslan, the defender of intellectual life and scholarship.

Then an article in the right-wing Catholic publication, First Things, challenged Aslan’s claims about his academic credentials (his 2009 PhD is in sociology and was awarded on the basis of a 140-page dissertation on contemporary Muslim political activism) and his academic position (he is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and does not hold either a doctorate nor a teaching position in the academic study of religion).

Those of us in the academic field of religious studies, especially biblical scholars and historians of early Christianity, found the whole business deeply cringe-worthy.

More here.

Kenan Malik on Jonathan Israel's radical vision, in Eurozine:

Like many before him, Israel lauds the Enlightenment as that transformative period when Europe shifted from being a culture “based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority” to one in which “everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned in the light of philosophical reason” and in which “theology's age-old hegemony” was overthrown. And, yet, despite language and imagery that hark back to Kant, Israel is also deeply critical of much of the Enlightenment, and hostile to the ideas of many of the figures that populate the works of Cassirer and Gay. At the heart of his argument is the insistence that there were two Enlightenments. The mainstream Enlightenment of Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume is the one of which we know, which provides the public face of the Enlightenment, and of which most historians have written. But it was the Radical Enlightenment, shaped by lesser-known figures such as d'Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and, in particular, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, that provided the Enlightenment's heart and soul.

The two Enlightenments, Israel suggests, divided on the question of whether reason reigned supreme in human affairs, as the radicals insisted, or whether reason had to be limited by faith and tradition – the view of the mainstream. The mainstream's intellectual timidity constrained its critique of old social forms and beliefs. By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment “rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely”.

In Israel's view, what he calls the “package of basic values” that defines modernity – toleration, personal freedom, democracy, racial equality, sexual emancipation and the universal right to knowledge – derives principally from the claims of the Radical Enlightenment.

About an hour into The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s meditation on nature, grace, Brad Pitt’s crew cut, and the laying of the foundations of the Earth, I turned to my wife, snuck a Twizzler from the bag in her lap, and said, “I knew this was going to cover a lot of ground, but I really didn’t expect the dinosaurs.” I should have guessed that for a director obsessed with Big Questions, a family drama set in 1950s Texas would also be an epic about the birth of the universe, the origins of life, and, yes, frolicking CGI velociraptors, which give the film a Land of the Lost vibe that is at once sweetly awkward in its earnestness and strangely enjoyable in its chutzpah. From the big bang to suburbia by way of bubbling lava and primordial soup, it aims so high that getting halfway there might be enough. I had much the same sensation—minus the Twizzlers—reading Robert N. Bellah’s massive account of how such a peculiar thing as religion could have come to play an enduring role in human history. Despite its generic title, Religion in Human Evolution is not like so many other “science and religion” books, which tend to explain away belief as a smudge on a brain scan or an accident of early hominid social organization. It is, instead, a bold attempt to understand religion as part of the biggest big picture—life, the universe, and everything.

more from Peter Manseau’s 2011 review of Bellah’s religion book here.

Two of the great pessimistic proclamations of 20th-century literature — Adorno’s “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” and Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — have at least one thing in common. They both address the inadequacy of language to articulate reality. Better to say nothing, they both say, or at least that’s the first half of what they say. If Adorno leaves off the productive half of the equation — “I’ll go on” — other writers have supplied it for him, in the form of a very large body of work concerned with the Holocaust that is not only ethically accountable but also incredibly rich and inventive. In fact it is not too much to claim, of Holocaust literature, that the struggle to say what is unsayable has paradoxically yielded some of the most extraordinary literary works we have. There are the firsthand accounts by Levi, Wiesel, Borowski and others. There are the formally innovative novels of writers like Perec, Bernhard and Sebald, works written in the shadow of the Holocaust that take as their subjects memory, absence, how we perceive history and how our lives are continually reshaped by past events. More recently there are novels like Joshua Cohen’s “Witz,” a satirical attack on the kitschification of Jewish experience that can also be read as an earnest concern for the legacy of the Holocaust, as we quickly approach the time when there will no longer be any living witnesses. What’s remarkable about the Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian author Imre Kertesz is that his body of work spans all of these subjects.

more from Martin Riker at the NY Times here.

For all Berlin’s faith in the power of ideas, he saw imaginative leadership as crucial; indeed, he described himself as a “natural hero worshipper”. When introduced to John F. Kennedy, his anxiety was acute. As the president quizzed him about intellectuals in Russia, weighing up who had stayed strong and measuring men for their practical use, Berlin was both attracted and repelled. He viewed JFK occasionally as a latter-day Alexander the Great, more often as a Napoleon, and, while friendly with many of Camelot’s inner circle, Berlin remained reluctant to be publicly pinned down to any political position. In the sphere of academic politics he was a true master, bamboozling or silently targeting those who played Moriarty to his Holmes. One such figure was the Polish-Jewish Marxist émigré Isaac Deutscher, and Berlin’s back-channel attacks upon him are the subject of David Caute’s Isaac and Isaiah. Caute, a prolific historian, novelist and journalist, has written widely about the cold war, and was a fellow at All Souls with Berlin between 1959 and 1965.

more from Duncan Kelly at the FT here.

From The Guardian:

Florence Williams in The New York Times:

For a species so pleased with its own brain, we are surprisingly ambivalent about the rest of our body. We tend to admire other people’s bodies, especially if they’re Olympians or shirtless Russian presidents, but most of us are constantly seeking to improve our own by starving or stuffing, injecting, waxing, straightening, piercing, lifting and squeezing. In 2010 in the United States alone, we spent $10 billion on cosmetic surgery, and that’s not including Brazilian Blowouts.

We are also deeply uncomfortable with the bodily aspects of being human. Our brains light up in weird and remarkable ways at the sight of blood or fecal matter as if these weren’t, in fact, perfectly mundane. As Hugh Aldersey-Williams points out in “Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body,” even television cartoons portray the skin as a rubbery and impregnable barrier. Weapons and falling objects dent it or merely bounce off it. You never see Elmer Fudd hemorrhaging through the jugular. Prudery doesn’t really explain our discomfort, but Aldersey-Williams hints at what might, namely fear. We fear the fragility, illness and suffering that are native to our corporeality. In “Anatomies,” he seeks to study the body full-on, frontally. He tells us straightaway that he knew nothing about anatomy when he started. A science writer and art critic, he’s interested in the intersection of science and culture. He thinks we should know our bodies, but he’s less interested in telling us how they work than in exploring how they’ve been perceived through art.

More here.

The Horse Fell off the Poem

The horse fell off the poem
and the Galilean women were wet
with butterflies and dew,
dancing above chrysanthemum

This post is dedicated to our indefatigable and erudite and gifted and multi-talented poetry editor, Jim Culleny, whose birthday it happens to be today. Happy birthday, dear Jim!

From Arabic Literature:

Raja Shehadeh: Do you build on the work of others?

Mahmoud Darwish: Yes. Very much so. I feel that no poem starts from nothing. Humanity has produced such a huge poetic output, much of it of a very high caliber. You are always building on the work of others. There is no blank page from which to start. All you can hope for is to find a small margin on which to write your signature.

RS: What sort of continuity is there in your own poetry?

MD: I have found that I have no poem that does not have its seeds in a poem that preceded it. Several critics have brought this to my attention. There is always a line or a word in an earlier work that I manage to take up and develop. My worry is always what’s next.

RS: Have you been writing prose?

MD: I like prose. I feel that sometimes prose can achieve a poetic state more poignant than poetry. But time is passing and my poetic project is still incomplete. There is competition in my personality between prose and poetry, but my bias is toward poetry.

Much more here. And here is a poem.

From The Talks:

Pelé, when you are the best at something how hard is it not to get arrogant about it?

I used to tease the kids because I played better than them. But my father told me, “Don’t do this with the kids because you know how to play football; God gave you the gift to play football. You didn’t do anything. You have to respect people, because it is important to be a good man, a good person. From now on, you must be this example.”

I am not sure if it was only God who gave you that gift. Being at the top of the game must be hard work as well.

Of course the work is very, very important. That is exactly what my father meant: God gave you the gift to play football, but this is a present. You must respect people and work hard to be in shape. And I used to train very hard. When the others players went to the beach after training, I was there kicking the ball. Another thing I say is, if I am a good player, if I have a gift from God but I don’t have the physical condition to run on the field what am I going to do?

Did you ever feel like your abilities were super-human?

No, we are all human beings. I have to trust something that gives me power, I have to believe in something, but in my career I have a lot of moments I cannot explain with God. We went to Africa and we stopped the war in Africa because the people went to see Pelé play. They stopped the war. Just God can’t explain that. I don’t know why – it is impossible to know why – but they stopped the war. When we finished the game and we left they continue to fight.

More here.

Rachael Allen interviews Charles Simic in Granta:

Charles Simic’s first poems were published in 1959 when he was twenty-one; he is now one of the most prolific poets writing today. He has published over thirty collections of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The World Doesn’t End, alongside fiction, essays and translations, having translated the works of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian poets. His poem ‘Eternities’ appears in Granta 124: Travel. Here he answers questions for online editor Rachael Allen about poetic movements, simple dishes and tragicomedy.

RA: Your poem in the magazine, ‘Eternities’, is a panoramic vision that travels across landscapes and time. It is a vast poem for its size. How do you balance the large thematic concerns – generational and geographical scope – with its eight-line constraint?

CS: Of all the things ever said about poetry, the axiom that less is more has made the biggest and the most lasting impression on me. I have written many short poems in my life, except ‘written’ is not the right word to describe how they came into existence. Since it’s not possible to sit down and write an eight-line poem that’ll be vast for its size, these poems are assembled over a long period of time from words and images floating in my head. A brief poem intended to capture the imagination of the reader requires endless tinkering to get all its parts right.

Helen Vendler described you as a ‘lover of food who has been instructed in starvation’, and you’ve called yourself, when it comes to writing, a ‘monk in a whorehouse’. It is as though you revel in the restriction of working with as few words as possible. What do you find is gained from this restriction, and how do you know when to stop?

It’s both a matter of temperament and aesthetics. In the kitchen, I like simple dishes cooked to perfection rather than elaborate culinary creations. In music, too, the fewer the instruments there are, the better. Someone practising a piece of Bach’s on a cello as one walks by under their window, or a late-night bluesy piano in a bar with hardly a customer left, is bliss to me.

Razib Khan in Gene Expression:

There is a new paper out of the Reich lab, Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India, which follows up on their seminal 2009 work, Reconstructing Indian Population History. I don’t have time right now to do justice to it, but as noted this morning in thepress, it is “carefully and cautiously crafted.” Since I am not associated with the study, I do not have to be cautious and careful, so I will be frank in terms of what I think these results imply (note that confidence on many assertions below are modest). Though less crazy in a bald-faced sense than another recent result which came out of the Reich lab, this paper is arguably more explosive because of its historical and social valence in the Indian subcontinent. There has been a trend over the past few years of scholars in the humanities engaging in deconstruction and intellectual archaeology which overturns old historical orthodoxies, understandings, and leaves the historiography of a particular topic of study in a chaotic mess. From where I stand the Reich lab and its confederates are doing the same, but instead of attacking the past with cunning verbal sophistry (I’m looking at you postcolonial“theorists”), they are taking a sledge-hammer of statistical genetics and ripping apart paradigms woven together by innumerable threads. I am not sure that they even understand the depths of the havoc they’re going to unleash, but all the argumentation in the world will not stand up to science in the end, we know that.

Since the paper is not open access, let me give you the abstract first:

Most Indian groups descend from a mixture of two genetically divergent populations: Ancestral North Indians (ANI) related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent. The date of mixture is unknown but has implications for understanding Indian history. We report genome-wide data from 73 groups from the Indian subcontinent and analyze linkage disequilibrium to estimate ANI-ASI mixture dates ranging from about 1,900 to 4,200 years ago. In a subset of groups, 100% of the mixture is consistent with having occurred during this period. These results show that India experienced a demographic transformation several thousand years ago, from a region in which major population mixture was common to one in which mixture even between closely related groups became rare because of a shift to endogamy.

I want to highlight one aspect which is not in the abstract: the closest population to the “Ancestral North Indians”, those who contributed the West Eurasian component to modern Indian ancestry, seem to be Georgians and other Caucasians.Since Reconstructing Indian Population History many have suspected this. I want to highlight in particular two genomebloggers, Dienekes and Zack Ajmal, who’ve prefigured that particular result. But wait, there’s more!

Is America anti-intellectual? The jury is still out. One could make equally plausible cases for our country as a hotbed of hostility to organized intelligence and as a sort of paradise for the cleverest, a place that elevates intellectual sophistication (especially when it has economic or technological applications) above basic moral decency. We oscillate wildly between demonizing our intellectuals and deifying them; they appear to us, in turn, as nuisances, threats, and saviors. We cut their funding and then study how their brains function. We trust them with our economy, our climate, our media and our institutions, then rage against them for their failures—and then trust them all over again. Of course, much depends on what is meant by “intellectual.” The term, which originated in France and entered the English language around the time of the Dreyfus Affair, is notoriously vague and unstable. Though in its most neutral sense it describes only a tendency toward speculative thought, it is very quickly made into a social category with determinate characteristics. Put a novelist, a philosopher, a physicist, a political analyst and a computer programmer in a room together and they’re likely to discover as many differences as similarities—provided they can understand each other at all—but all can be identified (for ease of condemnation, if nothing else) under this single heading.

more from Evan Kindley at The Point here.

We live at a time when consequentialism governs every aspect of human existence, tyrannically claiming authority over everything. Not just those matters where efficiency and results have a proper place, but over the humane realities as well. Sex. Family. Marriage. Health. Property. Community. Faith. Education. All must bow before the calculators and weighers of worth, all must kneel before “objectivity,” however ignorant they are of genuine value, of the first and permanent things, of that which matters most, of those things which are intrinsically good or evil. Their ignorance is matched only by their appetite to control, and they are destructive to their core. In addition to the content of the teaching, Veritatis Splendor reveals valuable truths for us in how it teaches, in the manner it proclaims. Keeping with his earlier work, John Paul II places himself firmly within the limits of tradition, turning ad fontes, to the sources of faith, both in the Scriptural revelation of Christ and to the ongoing tradition which remain ever ancient, ever new. But he is unafraid to rise to the level of his time, borrowing heavily not only from the patristic and medieval sources but also, although not uncritically, from modern philosophy, particularly phenomenology.

more from R.J. Snell at Front Porch Republic here.

What arises and lingers, in the end, is not only Kerouac’s gradual self-realization of his own cracking up, but the greater conflict of the highly sensitive, creative, sometimes manic introvert who yearns for solitude and must then battle loneliness, versus the insatiable thirst for kinship with fellow artists, and above all, recognition. By spring of ’58, he has inserted himself back in the Greenwich Village scene, but his romance with Joyce Johnson falters soon after—the beginning of his infamous downward spiral. Yet Kerouac’s Florida legacy remains strong. The bungalow in Orlando where he spent so many contented working days was left forgotten until the mid-1990s, when Bob Kealing, a reporter and freelance journalist, heard about Kerouac’s rumored stay and got the address from Kerouac’s relatives. A group of locals raised funds to purchase and remodel the property. Today, the quaint bungalow at 1418 Clouser Avenue hosts four writers a year and is known as the Jack Kerouac Writers-in-Residence Project. In 2012, the house was listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Kerouac’s typewritten scroll of The Dharma Bums is on display nearby in the Olin Library at Rollins College.

more from Vanessa Blakeslee at Paris Review here.

President Obama awarded the Medal of Freedom to Gloria Steinem yesterday. The following article from The New York Times was published last year but captures some aspects of Ms. Steinem's great contributions:

IN 1970, when the Senate was first debating passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, a featured speaker was Gloria Steinem, a 36-year-old magazine writer with a growing reputation as a forceful advocate of women’s issues. “During years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country,” Ms. Steinem told the almost exclusively male gathering. “I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals. All for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman.” Over the last 40 years, Gloria Steinem has almost always been at the other end of the phone when some member of the news media has sought comment about a pressing issue involving women’s rights, whether it was Roe v. Wade (“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” said Florynce Kennedy, a lawyer for Ms. Steinem in the 1970s), the tax problems that all but doomed the chances of the first woman to run for vice president on a major ticket (“What has the women’s movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy for vice president? Never get married.”) and even the presidency of George W. Bush (“There has never been an administration that is more hostile to women’s equality, to reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right”).

…The past year has been a time of reflection about Ms. Steinem’s legacy: she was the subject of a widely viewed HBO documentary, “In Her Own Words,” and the recipient of Glamour magazine’s lifetime achievement award. In the magazine, describing the influence of Ms. Steinem, Christine Stansell, a University of Chicago history professor, said she “was to the women’s movement what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights: the galvanizer.”

More here.