Jenna Clark Embrey in McSweeney's:

Dear MTA Riders of the Male Persuasion,

I know you like to spread your chests wide, inhaling deeply and filling your lungs with that special patriarchal air that is your birthright. I know you need to place your legs in wide stances to give ample room to your massive testicles, which you have inherited after generations of Darwinism have assured only the largest and best scrotum survive. I know you need to mount your body against the entire center subway pole, claiming your land like Columbus. I get that.

Therefore, as a woman who is subordinate to your powerful Y chromosome, I will happily stand in the middle of the subway car, rudderless. A ship out at sea, if you will. Perhaps if I were a little taller, I could reach the bars that run across the ceiling of the cars. Alas, I am diminutive in stature, the result of poor nutrition during a starved adolescence in which I maintained the lowest possible body fat percentage in order to please and honor your standard of beauty in the hopes that you would choose me as your prom date.

More here.

Anne Rieman in The Morning News:

My father always fixed his own cars. He burned off suspicious moles he found on his body with acid he bought at Home Depot. He believed anyone who wasn’t family was a swindler. He speaks in a voice so low it’s hard to hear him, but there was always something angry and anxious about it that made cops reflexively touch their guns when he was pulled over. My sister once split her knee open on a rock and rather than take her to the hospital, my father stabilized her leg with a laminated placemat and wooden paint stirrers. She still has a little pink scar like a kiss in the middle of her kneecap. I didn’t see a doctor until college or go to the dentist until I was an adult because even after I left home, I saw needing help as weakness.

When I was a teenager and we moved, finally, delightfully, to a big box of a house in need of repair, my father set out to remodel it back to its original pre-war Craftsman splendor. He drew up sketches of the house that outlined rooms and balconies and a two-car garage. I believed he would build it and lived in that hope for years, but when I left for college all he had finished was two pillars for the porch. They stand, ruins of a dream, in the scattered lawn of the backyard. To my father, there has never been anything that couldn’t be learned from a book and done at home far better and more honestly than by a scam artist getting rich off your vulnerability. This is what I learned and still struggle not to believe—that all men are islands, that the highest form of success is not wealth and acclaim or the satisfaction of a life well lived, but simply not needing anything.

More here.

Rebecca Traister in The New York Times:

His name is Dalton Conley, and he’s a sociologist at New York University who’s taken his own fatherhood, put it in the blender with his professional interest in scientific inquiry, and produced “Parentology.” He characterizes his technique as the opposite of everything uptight, including “old-world parenting; traditional parenting; textbook parenting; tiger mothering; bringing up bébé.” He’s not into that ponderous, prescriptive stuff. His brand, he says, is more like “jazz parenting,” an “improvisational approach.” Conley describes himself as a “freak” whose parenting decisions are based on “flexibility and fluidity, attention to (often counterintuitive, myth-busting) research. . . . Trial and error. Hypothesis revision and more experimentation about what works. In other words, the scientific method.” He lets his children curse at him; he tells them they’re in special education classes because of the better student-­teacher ratio; they camp out around a hot plate while their apartment is renovated. He is a wild and crazy guy. Except that he has also spent his career “studying traditional measures of socioeconomic success” and is therefore not interested in any “hippy-dippy perspective where all I want for them is to be quote-unquote ‘happy.’ ” Conley has “long been obsessed with societal ‘merit badges’ . . . little markers that I was on the right path to please my elders. And my hopes for my kids were no different.”

Research suggests that “having a weird name makes you more likely to have impulse control,” and that impulse control is “even more important than I.Q. in predicting socioeconomic success, marital stability, and even staying out of prison.” So Conley names his firstborn daughter E and his younger son Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles. When Conley and his wife tackle the question of whether to put their baby girl in her own crib or a family bed, they decide to co-sleep: “Luckily, we had a significant body of science on our side.” Conley explains how stress in infants whose needs are unreliably met or who experience “parental abuse or trauma” leads to long-term physical and psychological consequences deep into life. “The goal,” he writes, “is not to have a baby who quiets herself down. . . . It’s to have a well-­adjusted adult in 20 years. We were going to just keep cuddling E on our air mattress, lowering her cortisol levels, no matter what anyone else said.”

More here.

Mossbawn Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose's wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past it's gleam
in the meal-bin.
.

by Seamus Heaney

Suzanne Berger in the Boston Review:

In May 2013 shareholders voted to break up the Timken Company—a $5 billion Ohio manufacturer of tapered bearings, power transmissions, gears, and specialty steel—into two separate businesses. Their goal was to raise stock prices. The company, which makes complex and difficult products that cannot be easily outsourced, employs 20,000 people in the United States, China, and Romania. Ward “Tim” Timken, Jr., the Timken chairman whose family founded the business more than a hundred years ago, and James Griffith, Timken’s CEO, opposed the move.

The shareholders who supported the breakup hardly looked like the “barbarians at the gate” who forced the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco. This time the attack came from the California State Teachers Retirement System pension fund, the second-largest public pension fund in the United States, together with Relational Investors LLC, an asset management firm. And Tim Timken was not, like the RJR Nabisco CEO, eagerly pursuing the breakup to raise his own take. But beneath these differences are the same financial pressures that have shaped corporate structure for thirty years.

More here. [Including responses.]

Slavica Jakelić in The Immanent Frame:

When Pope John Paul II visited Poland in 1979, he used his addresses and homilies to speak of faith and the moral renewal of the country, and of human dignity and religious freedom. Millions of Poles responded to his words with hymns and prayers. But aside from carrying crosses, they also waved Polish flags. For them, the pope’s appeals to the dignity of the human person did not resonate in an abstract theological sense, but within concrete historical experience: their opposition to Marxist atheism and Russian control, and their commitment to preserving the Catholic identity of the Polish nation.

How are we to understand this moment in the history of Polish Catholicism? Did John Paul II’s personalist theology, placed within the narratives of the distinctively Polish embodiment of Catholicism, constitute appropriation of religion for nationalistic purposes? Or did the papal visit to Poland, and the Solidarity movement that followed it, gesture toward a vision of Polishness that transcended the narrow political meaning of the religiously-colored national identity, by giving impetus to a discourse of Polishness as a moral category that embraced the dignity of every human person, and by affirming an ethics of belonging specific enough to shape a sense of solidarity, while also capacious enough to affirm differences?

These questions are important for scholarly and political reasons alike, yet it is impossible to ask them in the context in which the notion of religious nationalism is the dominant category for the study of religions and group identities. To be sure, this notion is useful for at least two reasons. Analytically, it correctly identifies important contemporary phenomena—the links between religions and national identities, or between religions and national ideologies. Normatively, the notion of religious nationalism provides a framework for critique of group-oriented religions when they incite, perpetuate, or justify social conflicts.

More here.

Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books:

There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: “The new normal.” “It’s the new normal,” I think, as a beloved pear tree, half-drowned, loses its grip on the earth and falls over. The train line to Cornwall washes away—the new normal. We can’t even say the word “abnormal” to each other out loud: it reminds us of what came before. Better to forget what once was normal, the way season followed season, with a temperate charm only the poets appreciated.

What “used to be” is painful to remember. Forcing the spike of an unlit firework into the cold, dry ground. Admiring the frost on the holly berries, en route to school. Taking a long, restorative walk on Boxing Day in the winter glare. Whole football pitches crunching underfoot. A bit of sun on Pancake Day; a little more for the Grand National. Chilly April showers, Wimbledon warmth. July weddings that could trust in fine weather. The distinct possibility of a Glastonbury sunburn. At least, we say to each other, at least August is still reliably ablaze—in Cornwall if not at carnival. And it’s nice that the Scots can take a little more heat with them when they pack up and leave.

Maybe we will get used to this new England, and—like the very young and recently migrated—take it for granted that April is the time for shorts and sandals, or that the New Year traditionally announces itself with a biblical flood. They say there will be butterflies appearing in new areas, and birds visiting earlier and leaving later—perhaps that will be interesting, and new, and not, necessarily, worse. Maybe we are misremembering the past! The Thames hasn’t frozen over for generations, and the dream of a White Christmas is only a collective Dickensian delusion. Besides, wasn’t it always a wet country?

More here.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Open Magazine:

In 1965, a book titled Vedic Mathematics was published in English. Since then, the subject has become an industry that shows no sign of diminishing. In its latest manifestation, parents who know no better are shelling out serious money in the hope that their children will become scientific geniuses. They really shouldn’t bother. The subject amounts to nothing more than a few cheap parlour tricks, and there is nothing Vedic about it. But the story of how it came to be makes for a fantastical tale.

Bharti Krishna Tirthaji was born in 1884 with some talent for science and mathematics. But he eventually paid heed to a passion for Sanskrit and philosophy, and joined the Sringeri math in Mysore to study under its Shankaracharya. In 1925, he became a Shankaracharya himself. All through these years, he’d kept up his interest in science and mathematics. Many scholars before him had dismissed the Atharva Veda as arcane and difficult to understand, but Tirathji decided to spend time studying it in the belief that he could excavate the knowledge that he felt must lie there.

After eight years of ‘deep’ contemplation, he claimed to have found 16sutras which explained all of mathematics. He, it is said, then wrote 16 volumes on Vedic mathematics, one on each sutra. Mysteriously, just before their publication, the manuscripts were lost. But in 1960, the last year of his life, Tirathji managed to rewrite one volume which was published in 1965 as Vedic Mathematics.

As stories go, this is not a bad one, but the evidence does nothing to support it.

More here.

Listen to the show:

More here.

John Gray in New Statesman:

There can be little doubt that Nietzsche is the most important figure in modern atheism, but you would never know it from reading the current crop of unbelievers, who rarely cite his arguments or even mention him. Today’s atheists cultivate a broad ignorance of the history of the ideas they fervently preach, and there are many reasons why they might prefer that the 19th-century German thinker be consigned to the memory hole. With few exceptions, contemporary atheists are earnest and militant liberals. Awkwardly, Nietzsche pointed out that liberal values derive from Jewish and Christian monotheism, and rejected these values for that very reason. There is no basis – whether in logic or history – for the prevailing notion that atheism and liberalism go together. Illustrating this fact, Nietzsche can only be an embarrassment for atheists today. Worse, they can’t help dimly suspecting they embody precisely the kind of pious freethinker that Nietzsche despised and mocked: loud in their mawkish reverence for humanity, and stridently censorious of any criticism of liberal hopes.

Against this background, it is refreshing that Peter Watson and Terry Eagleton take Nietzsche as the central reference point for their inquiries into the retreat of theism. For Watson, an accomplished intellectual historian, Nietzsche diagnosed the “nihilist predicament” in which the high-bourgeois civilisation that preceded the Great War unwittingly found itself. First published in 1882, Nietzsche’s dictum “God is dead” described a situation in which science (notably Darwinism) had revealed “a world with no inherent order or meaning”.

More here.

Invited In
.
God. . . interesting, keeping
bees in your kitchen . . . why
not I guess when you've got so
many flowers around . . . they
certainly make a warm sound,
I said a warm sound . . . well,
loud really, yes I'd love some
tea, where should I put my
coat? I wouldn't want to smother
any, you're sure they never
sting even when they crawl
on your bare arms like that? No,
I'm not afraid . . . smoothly,
move smoothly, I understand, it
feels like 90 degrees in here . . .
and busy of course, I guess you
never feel lonely with this going on,
you do? How could you? And your
goldfish! I've never seen tanks
used as room dividers. Is it
okay to walk right in the pool
like that? no, I can see it's
shallow, but wait till I take
off my shoes and socks. An odd
place to have your table all
the same. How many kinds of
flowers have you ah!
I think I stepped on a fish,
no, ah-ah-ah! it was just
caught between my toes, even
when they're in your hair
they don't sting? Just some
milk please. Lovely croissant.
And when the fish cluster
around our chairs like this?
of course, they expect crumbs,
I know, I know, smoothly, but
how can you sit still with them
nibbling your feet? I keep
thinking it's jazz on your
stereo, I said I keep thinking
you've got some fabulous jazz
on your stereo . . . god,
I'm in love with you.
.
by John Steffler

Oliver Morton in More Intelligent Life:

The idea that the Earth and Moon might be made of the same stuff seems sensible at first glance; compared with most objects in the solar system, they are remarkably near each other. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there were various theories that they were formed together and subsequently separated. Unfortunately such arguments had a problem. The conservation of angular momentum means that spinning things go slower when pushed apart, faster when closer together (this explains why ice skaters spin so fast when they tuck their elbows in). The Earth-Moon system has a great deal of angular momentum, so if its two parts had been joined when they were created they would have had to spin as fast as an ice skater turning into a drill bit and boring her way down through the rink.

Hence suggestions that the Moon was created elsewhere and captured by the Earth’s gravity. But once the Apollo programme had shown how chemically earthlike the moon was, they seemed implausible too. In 1974 scientists hit on a new idea: that a wandering planet the size of Mars had struck the Earth a glancing blow. This, they suggested, caused the cores of each body to merge and part of their rocky mantles to be thrown into orbit, where the molten mess eventually condensed into the Moon. The catastrophic arrival of the impactor explained both why Moon rocks look earthly and why the Earth-Moon system has a lot of angular momentum—if one skater grabs another’s outstretched arm as he passes, the two will be set a-spinning. It was a simple idea, but radical. And it had profound implications. The fact that the Earth has a big moon stops its axis from wobbling about too much—Mars, which has titchy moons, swings its poles around like a drunken drum majorette. A stable alignment of the poles may have kept the Earth’s climate stable too, and thus hospitable towards life. So an accidental collision in the early solar system could have been crucial to the emergence of complex life on Earth. We could be the result of a planetary fluke.

More here.

The voting round of our politics and social science prize (details here) is over. Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

So here they are, the top 20, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Forbes: How Putin Invented The New Authoritarianism
2. Pandaemonium: In Defense of Diversity
3. Open Democracy: A Cuban Diary
4. Abandoned Footnotes: Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment
5. The New Yorker: The Trial of Pervez Musharraf
6. The Philosopher's Beard: Britain's sudden and bizarre resentment of migration
7. 3 Quarks Daily: Enduring Sharedom
8. 3 Quarks Daily: Can America Survive What Our 1% And Their Useful Idiots, The GOP And The Dems, Have Done To Us?
9. Corey Robin: Jews Without Israel
10. Social Pulses: Democratic Austerity: Semi sovereign states, semi sovereign peoples
11. Los Angeles Review of Books: I Am Malala : The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
12. The Belgravia Dispatch: An Epidemic of Putin Derangement Syndrome
13. The Philosopher's Stone: How to Do History
14. Unreported: The Poster Boy For Unending War
15. Whispers of Satan: Keeping Ukraine Together
16. Another Amateur Economist: Walmart, Oligopoly and Community Economy
17. In Search of Enlightenment: Ottawa Talk on “Bridging the Gap”
18. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: How American Studies Matter
19. XPostFactoid: What if the (Republican) dog catches the Obamacar(e)?
20. Family Inequality: State of Utah falsely claims same-sex marriage ban makes married, man-woman parenting more likely

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Mark Blyth for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here on this coming Monday.

A classic early piece from my dear friend Matt Power, who died earlier this week on assignment in Uganda. I attach a typical photo of Matt, which I can barely stand to look at right now. Matt smiled stupidly like this more often than probably anyone I've ever known.

The first time I went to New York, I took my girlfriend to visit Allen Ginsberg in his Lower East Side walkup. He was sick in bed with a blood clot in his lung. We were walking down 12th Street in the East Village to get to his apartment, and halfway between 1st and Avenue A, we came across a community garden. It was beautiful, growing from the ruins of a torn down tenement that still had structural elements left behind. The entrance to the garden was the building's original door frame, but the facade was gone, replaced by a wrought iron fence and rows of blooming rosebushes. A wall was grown over with morning glories, and a sink had found new life as a birdbath. There were winding paths under fruit trees and huge sunflowers nodding in the breeze. None of us had any idea that such a thing could exist amid the concrete swelter of a New York summer.

We went up to Ginsberg's apartment where he lay in bed, gaunt in blue pajamas, surrounded by piles of books and newspapers. He guided us by memory through his home, describing the artwork on the walls. “That Blake print is God giving life to Adam,” he said. “Notice that God has Adam's face and Adam has God's face. And that silk painting behind the veil, that's my girlfriend.” The veil hid a terrifying painting of a fanged Hindu deity. “It's Kali, the goddess of death.” He directed us to another silk painting. “That's the wheel of Samsara. Attachment to the illusion of existence. Everyone's trying to get to Heaven-the soldier realm by force, and those are the hungry ghosts with the distended stomachs. Only the bodhisattvas make it out, through enlightenment. It's love that keeps everyone else on the wheel.”

more here fron Heeb Magazine.

Louis B. Jones at Threepenny Review:

As for magic’s nonexistence in the world, I think I haven’t missed it. Maybe there was—there surely must have been—one afternoon in childhood when (getting out of a sugary Disney movie, emerging into an Illinois parking lot’s dirty old snow) a pang of loss, or of exile, gave me pause. But mostly I’m an uncomplaining citizen of a desolate world. It’s possible I’ve never properly mourned magic’s departure, or grieved it. Because magic: what a wonderful life ingredient to have to forswear, to renounce and call tawdry!

If I’m able to be so peaceful in my disillusionment, the reason must be that I still do believe in magic, deep in the nerves and tissues, where all assumptions lie. Of course I know that the flourish of the playing-cards over the green baize will have seeded one faker in the fifty-two. I know the lady doesn’t really get sawn in half, and, moreover, I wonder if, after the show, she might be faced with the professional dilemma of whether as hired assistant she’d be a bad sport if she declined the invitation to visit the tuxedoed wizard’s dressing room for a drink, or a joint, and for whatever is supposed to ensue. That the great athletes are on steroids, that the spoon didn’t really bend, that the yogis on YouTube aren’t really levitating, that the gentle Galilean didn’t, on the third day, rise again, yes, yes, we all know what to mistrust. But, deep at an unexaminable level of muscle-memory, I still move and behave with a Master-of-the-Universe assurance.

more here.

Bee Wilson at The London Review of Books:

Vegetarians themselves often argue that they make us feel uncomfortable because their existence is a reminder of the cruelty and carnage that the rest of us refuse to see; there’s probably some truth in this. But I suspect that the root of our hostility is more basic. It isn’t so much that they remind us of the slaughterhouse – meat itself does a pretty effective job there – as that they make a mockery of our unthinking preferences. What we’re protecting when we ridicule vegetarians isn’t our own ignorance about the way meat is produced – however it’s done, killing animals for food isn’t nice – but our taste for it: the smell of sausages sizzling in a pan, the charred umami crust of a good steak, the pink tender pieces of a rack of lamb. Meat tastes good, ergo vegetarians must be idiots.

It sounds a little selfish, though, to say that we’re prepared to squander the world’s resources and see animals die to satisfy our taste for savoury dinners, so we think up other excuses. We say we eat only small quantities or only free-range and ‘happy meat’ (unless we are buying take-out curry or a sandwich, when different moral rules seem to apply). We talk of ‘cuisine’ or ‘tradition’ or how it’s ‘in our nature’ as human omnivores to eat meat. When all else fails, we invoke what nutritionists call ‘the wisdom of the body’: we’d be happy to go vegetarian, if only our bodies weren’t telling us they needed meaty replenishment.

more here.

David Masciotra at The Daily Beast:

Twenty-first century philistines, suffering from a lack of imagination and curiosity, have seized upon understandable economic anxieties since the financial crash of 2008, to shepherd an increasingly large flock of American sheep into the livestock freight carrier Pulitzer prize winning historian, Richard Hofstadter, called “anti-intellectualism.”

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life—one of Hofstadter’s best, among many great books – was a pile of dynamite in 1963, when it was first published and blew a sizable hole in the house of America’s self-comforting delusions of intellectual superiority. In 2014, one can only hope that some of its initial blast still reverberates, as media commentators, university administrators, and even the President, have exposed themselves as adherents to what Hofstadter indicted as the “lowest common denominator criterion” of thought and “technician conformity” of lifestyle. Suspicion, and often outright hatred, of ideas is making American culture as riveting as oatmeal. By reading Hofstadter, one learns that the resurgence of a new anti-intellectualism isn’t new, at all. In fact, Hofstadter identified the particularly poisonous strain of the virus that now infects the American mind and kills the imagination.

More here.