Amitai Etzioni in Evonomics:

One of the first experiments to test the hypothesis that teaching economics is debasing people’s morality was conducted by Gerald Marwell and Ruth E. Ames. They designed a game where participants were given an allotment of tokens to divide between a private account and a public fund. If every player invested all of their tokens in the public fund, they would all end up with a greater return than if they had all put their money into their respective private accounts. However, if a player defected and invested in the private account while the other players invested in the public fund, she would gain an even larger return. In this way, the game was designed to promote free-riding: the socially optimal behavior would be to contribute to the public fund, but the personal advantage was in investing everything in the private fund (as long as the others did not catch on or make the same move).

Marwell and Ames found that most subjects divided their tokens nearly equally between the public and private accounts. Economics students, by contrast, invested only 20 percent of their tokens in the public fund, on average. This tendency was accompanied by a difference in the moral views of the economists and non-economists. Three quarters of non-economists reported that a “fair” investment of tokens would necessitate putting at least half of their tokens in the public fund. A third of economists didn’t answer the question or gave “complex, uncodable responses.” The remaining economics students were much more likely than their non-economist peers to say that “little or no contribution was ‘fair’.”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The announcement we wait for every year has finally come in, and the American Dialect society has chosen their Word of the Year! That word is: “they”. It beat out other finalists such as “ammosexual.”

You might think that dubbing “they” as the Word of the Year is some sort of lifetime-achievement award, since the plucky pronoun has been part of English for quite a long time. But the prize has been given, not for the word itself, but for a particular usage that has been gaining ground for a while now: the singular“they.” We most commonly use the word to stand for the plural: “Jack and Jill went up the hill, but once there they realized they had forgotten their pail.” More and more, however, we’re seeing it used to denote one person at a time, when their sex is unknown to us: “The robber left no fingerprints, but they did leave a note to taunt the police.”

It would be somewhat more traditional, in some circumstances, to say “he or she did leave a note.” It’s a bit cumbersome, however, and to be honest, the real tradition is simply to act like women don’t exist, and say “he did leave a note.” The rise of “he or she” has reflected our gradual progress in remembering that human beings come in both male and female varieties, and our language should reflect that. (We can also try to make it reflect the full diversity of sex and gender roles, but while that’s an admirable goal, it might not be realistic in practice.)

Using “they” instead of “he or she” or just “he” is a very nice compromise. It sounds good, and it’s a word we’re already familiar with.

More here.

Ian Buruma at The New York Review of Books (from 2013):

David Bowie: “My trousers changed the world.” A fashionable man in dark glasses: “I think it was more the shoes.” Bowie: “It was the shoes.”^* He laughed. It was a joke. Up to a point.

There is no question that Bowie changed the way many people looked, in the 1970s, 1980s, even 1990s. He set styles. Fashion designers—Alexander McQueen, Yamamoto Kansai, Dries van Noten, Jean Paul Gaultier, et al.—were inspired by him. Bowie’s extraordinary stage costumes, from Kabuki-like bodysuits to Weimar-era drag, are legendary. Young people all over the world tried to dress like him, look like him, move like him—alas, with rather variable results.

So it is entirely fitting that the Victoria and Albert Museum should stage a huge exhibition of Bowie’s stage clothes, as well as music videos, handwritten song lyrics, film clips, artworks, scripts, storyboards, and other Bowieana from his personal archive. Apart from everything else, Bowie’s art is about style, high and low, and style is a serious business for a museum of art and design.

One of the characteristics of rock music is that so much of it involves posing, or “role-playing,” as they say in the sex manuals. Rock is above all a theatrical form. English rockers have been particularly good at this, partly because many of them, including Bowie himself, have drawn inspiration from the rich tradition of music hall theater.

more here.

David Joselit at Artforum:

POP “WAS THE BIRTH OF THE NOW”: So claim curators Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan in the catalogue for their sprawling and ambitious show “International Pop” at the Walker Art Center, thus positioning the movement as a progenitor of our so-called post-Internet condition. Indeed, the curators write, Pop artists “were modeling behaviors that then seemed radical, but now are second nature: the image world as an extension of the self, the individual curating information via status feed, the rise of social media that is one of the most profound changes of our time.”

What is striking about this genealogy of the present is that Alexander and Ryan keep a self-conscious distance, in their account of historical Pop art, from the term global—a word that also arguably describes “one of the most profound changes of our time.” They make a subtle distinction between a previous model of the world and that of the present, claiming that the show is “a project about internationalism that could only have been made in today’s global era.” In other words, “International Pop” was an account of the recent past in which individual national art histories (such as those of the United States, England, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, Hungary, and Italy) were set alongside transnational aesthetic or formal dynamics that indicated an emerging “global style”: The mobility of pictures, for instance, was addressed in a section called “The Image Travels,” while in “Distribution & Domesticity” we saw artworks that confront the postwar explosion of commodities in everyday life. The exhibition thus tracked the nation-state giving way to multinational networks, markets, and cultures—to globalization—as a framework for understanding and encountering world art.

more here.

Adam Mars-Jones at The London Review of Books:

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers insists on its status as a literary artefact from the title onwards, with that nod to Emily Dickinson, both homage and correction, since in her poem feathers accompany and denote hope. To be explicitly literary in this context is to be secondhand, insistently, even aggressively secondhand, and to disavow the raw subjectivity, unshaped by previous expression, that is the assumed precondition for the conveying of personal emotion – and this is only the first of a series of formal and tonal decisions, none of them obvious, that build up a jarring new harmony. The epigraph cites a different Dickinson poem (numbered 1765), crucial nouns from which, ‘Love’, ‘freight’, ‘groove’, have been replaced – visibly superimposed rather than simply substituted – with the word ‘Crow’. There’s no doubt that Hughes is the tutelary deity of this book, or the king to be slain in its sacred grove, and Crow its totem animal.

Dickens had a raven called Grip, in fact a series of birds bearing that name, and was on friendly terms with Edgar Allan Poe, who had admired the depiction of the raven inBarnaby Rudge (also called Grip) and was pleased to learn he had a real-life model. Poe knew (at least this is Guy Davenport’s contention in ‘The Geography of the Imagination’) that the raven was the device figuring on the banner of Alaric the Visigoth, so that a raven settling on a bust of Athene, as it does in the poem – ‘Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door’ – is a highly compressed image for the overthrow of reason. (Athens surrendered to Alaric in 395.) Hughes’s Crow retains the connection with the genus Corvus and with death but mixes in characteristics from Loki, the trickster who sometimes helps the gods and sometimes acts against them.

more here.

Joe Biden and Azra Raza at the VP's home

And I am proud to inform you that my sister and fellow 3QD editor Azra is one of a select few on Vice President Biden's task force to figure out how to do this!

This is Charlotte Alter in Time:

President Obama announced Tuesday in his final State of the Union that Vice President Joe Biden would spearhead an initiative to cure cancer.

“Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer,” Obama said, before noting that Biden has worked with Congress to add resources for the National Institutes of Health. “Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past forty years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”

More here.

An Age of Miracles

He walked to the window

stared down twenty stories to the street

gaseous and dizzy as a swamp

not visible at this height

but there had been a street down there

and he knew

It came with the apartment

and the guarded foyers and halls

and the doorman

holstered

beneath the uniform

the television split-screening

front and rear entrances

He knew it was all there

and he was here twenty stories above

the unsetteled swamp-mist

he knew the trucks bound for the bridge

were still passing near

he could feel them rumbling

in the soles of his feet

so he knew

the floor he walked on

was someone's ceiling

and it was all normal tonight

and countable

a two-year lease because

a desirable

with full view of

river-

a five-by-three balcony through the door is

$200 deposit

fully carpeted

self-defrosting refriger-

the balcony door is stuck but

He can stare twenty stories down

from the windowsill

watching the swamp smokes curl and thin

and the swamp lapping at the base

and the unpaid-for miracle

one inch at a time
.

by Joyce Carol Oates
from The Fabulous Beasts

Heidi Ledford and Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

US President Barack Obama isn’t going quietly. He began his final year in office by announcing a “moonshot” to cure cancer in his State of the Union address to Congress on 12 January. The effort will be led by vice-president Joe Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer last year. “For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all,” Obama said in a soaring speech that otherwise offered few new proposals. Instead, the president spent most of the address looking back at his accomplishments over roughly seven years in office. The details of the cancer moonshot are still fuzzy. Biden says that he has consulted with nearly 200 physicians, researchers and philanthropists in the past few months and plans to continue to seek such input. Thus far, he has pledged to increase the resources available to combat the disease, and to find ways for the cancer community to work together and share information. The goal is to double the rate of progress against cancer, achieving in five years what otherwise would have taken ten.

The vice-president also pointed to what he sees as key problems that must be tackled. Only 5% of people with cancer participate in clinical trials, he noted in a statement released during the State of the Union speech, and many community oncologists have limited access to the latest treatment advances. Biden’s commitment to the programme, which he first hinted at three months ago, has been hailed by patient advocates, researchers and the biotechnology industry. Advances in cancer therapy, including treatments that harness the immune system and target specific tumour mutations, have brought cancer research to an inflection point, says José Baselga, a cancer researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and president of the American Association for Cancer Research. “Now is the time for a major new initiative in cancer science that supports and builds upon our basic science foundation,” Baselga says.

More here.

An 18-year-old said she was attacked at knifepoint. Then she said she made it up. That’s where our story begins.

T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong in Pro Publica:

She had reported being raped in her apartment by a man who had bound and gagged her. Then, confronted by police with inconsistencies in her story, she had conceded it might have been a dream. Then she admitted making the story up. One TV newscast announced, “A Western Washington woman has confessed that she cried wolf when it came to her rape she reported earlier this week.” She had been charged with filing a false report, which is why she was here today, to accept or turn down a plea deal.

Her lawyer was surprised she had been charged. Her story hadn’t hurt anyone — no suspects arrested, or even questioned. His guess was, the police felt used. They don’t appreciate having their time wasted.

The prosecution’s offer was this: If she met certain conditions for the next year, the charge would be dropped. She would need to get mental health counseling for her lying. She would need to go on supervised probation. She would need to keep straight, breaking no more laws. And she would have to pay $500 to cover the court’s costs.

Marie wanted this behind her.

She took the deal.

More here.

Jennifer Oullette in Gizmodo:

Excited rumors began circulating on Twitter this morning that a major experiment designed to hunt for gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein—has observed them directly for the very first time. If confirmed, this would be one of the most significant physics discoveries of the last century.

Move a large mass very suddenly—or have two massive objects suddenly collide, or a supernova explode—and you would create ripples in space-time, much like tossing a stone in a still pond. The more massive the object, the more it will churn the surrounding spacetime, and the stronger the gravitational waves it should produce. Einstein predicted their existence in his general theory of relativity back in 1915, but he thought it would never be possible to test that prediction.

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) is one of several experiments designed to hunt for these elusive ripples, and with its latest upgrade to Advanced LIGO, completed last year, it has the best chance of doing so. In fact, it topped our list of physics stories to watch in 2016.

More here.

John Quaintance in The New Yorker:

December 5, 1791
James Madison
House of Representatives

Dear James,

How is it almost 1792?! Quick question on the right to bear arms thing in your “Bill of Rights”—the wording and punctuation are slightly confusing. Did you mean that the right of the people serving in the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, or people in general? I’m assuming the former, but don’t want to make an ass of you and me! (Franklin made that up, but I’m using it everywhere!) Could you please send me a quick note whenever to clarify?

TJ

P.S. To be honest, I’m still meh about “Bill of Rights” as a name.

* * *

December 7, 1791
Thomas Jefferson
Office of the Secretary of State

Dear Tom,

I know, it’s so crazy how fast this year has gone—I just got used to writing 1791 on my deeds of purchase (of slaves)!

As far as the amendment, of course it’s the former. If every private citizen had the right to carry a musket, a thousand people would’ve shot Patrick Henry by now, am I right? Don’t worry about it. Everyone will know what it means.

JM

P.S. You’re not back on “The Ten Amendments” are you? It’s trying way too hard to sound Biblical.

More here.

Sarah Larson at The New Yorker:

Like many of us who adored David Bowie, I’ve had his music in my head lately. In the past month, this has included a “Lazarus”-themed bunch of songs, including “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” “Life on Mars,” “All the Young Dudes,” and the ecstatic “Heroes”; “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” which I can’t stop listening to sometimes—needing to hear “Five Years” and be awed by it, and have it bop and shake into “Soul Love,” and then into “Moonage Daydream” (“I’m an alligator! I’m a mama papa coming for you!”) and then, good lord, into “Starman”; and, this weekend, songs from “Blackstar,” which just came out on Friday, Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday, and which is so good, so interesting and vital and weird that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I went to “Noises Off,” I got a massage, I went to a couple of parties and did errands and got a drink with a friend, and I kept hearing Bowie in my head, the haunting and wonderful “I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar,” or the hilarious lines “Man, she punched me like a dude,” or “Where the fuck did Monday go?,” delivered in that elegant, amusingly stylish David Bowie way, and I kept thinking, My God, David Bowie, you’ve done it again. Doing all of my pleasant weekend things, I was on some level also looking forward to solitude, and music, and being reunited with these haunting songs that were taking over my consciousness.

For many months Bowie had been known, or rumored, to be ill. He had announced that he would not tour again, would not interview again. Previously, he’d been one of those wonderful magical geniuses resident in New York who, as Lou Reed long did, lived a normal life as a townsperson, delighting people by shopping at bookstores and walking down the street.

more here.

Martin Amis at The New Statesman:

When Glam-Rock superstar David Bowie flounced on to the Hammersmith Odeon stage last Monday night, recognisably male and not even partially naked, it seemed that we would be denied the phenomenon-of-our-times spectacle which your reporter was banking on. The preludial ambience, too, was discouragingly humdrum: behind me in the audience upper-class slummers boomingly voiced their fears of having to endure a “really grotty” supporting band; in front of me teenage couples snogged with old-fashioned – not to say reactionary – zeal; beside me a joint was lit and furtively extinguished; and on stage, prior to curtain-up, a fat old teddy-boy appeared, asked Hammersmith if it was feeling good, wanted a louder answer, got one, and left us with a lie about the anticipated time lapse before Mr Bowie’s arrival. Once under way, admittedly, that musician went through various stages of déshabillé – now in orange rompers, now a miniskirt, now in hot-pants, now a leotard – but we never got to see the famous silver catsuit and pink jockstrap. Bowie did, it’s true, have a habit of turning away from the audience and sulkily twitching his backside at it before floating off to arouse each aisle in turn with his silky gaze – but there was no sign of the celebrated sodomistic routine involving lead guitarist Mick Ronson, no acts of stylised masturbation and fellatio with microphone and mikestand. Perhaps Mr Bowie just wasn’t feeling up to it that evening, or perhaps Mr Bowie was just a mild fad hystericised by “the media”, an entrepreneur of camp who knew how little, as well as how much, he could get away with.

more here.

David Bennun in More Intelligent Life:

Everybody has a Bowie story. This is mine. I’m a child living in Nairobi, Kenya – a world away, in the days before the Internet, from the pop music that already fascinates me. A visitor from America brings me a C-90 cassette. On one side is “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, which I do not then know to be David Bowie’s 1972 breakthrough record. Ten years after an earlier generation’s collective jaw dropped when he played “Starman” on “Top of the Pops”, this is my own “Starman” moment. To me, this fictive arrival from another planet is to all intents and purposes a real one. From the eerie syncopated pulse of “Five Years”, and that strange, strained vocal with its apocalyptic images of panic and catastrophe, to the sweeping finale of “Rock’n’Roll Suicide”, enveloping me like an exotic comfort blanket with the message that more of my kind are out there (“Just turn on with me and you’re not alone!”), I am transfixed by this alien artefact. It fills my Walkman earphones several times a day. At this point I barely have any idea who Bowie is or what he looks like (“Let’s Dance”, a global hit that reaches even the African equator, is still a year away). I grasp only that, as one outlander, I have somehow connected to another who speaks for and to me.

A quarter of a century later I watch what turns out to be Bowie’s last appearance on a British stage, when he gives a surprise guest performance with David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall in May 2006. Bowie sings Pink Floyd’s “Arnold Layne”, and suddenly it seems the most natural thing in the world, his unmistakable London drawl lighting up this other-worldly yet utterly English song. My friend and I gawp at each other in our seats. This is the nearest thing to the second coming we are ever likely to encounter. Everybody has a Bowie story, and that’s the point here. The bereavement so many are feeling today may be one of the last shared experiences our increasingly atomised pop culture will know. We no longer undergo “Starman” moments – those pan-generational shocks which galvanise the young and appal their elders – and we are no longer producing musical artists who alter the entire course of their art, let alone the wider world, as Bowie did in his pomp, which lasted even longer than that of the only British pop act as momentous as he is, the Beatles.

More here.

Dan Piepenbring at The Paris Review:

Premature Burial runs to more than five hundred pages, and its most gripping sections are given over to accounts of interment gone awry, along with the many anxieties of the nineteenth-century deathbed. There’s the man who sank into such a prolonged lethargy that he was thought dead until he “broke into a profuse sweat” in his coffin; the young woman whose corpse was exhumed for reburial only to be discovered “in the middle of the vault, with disheveled hair and the linen torn to pieces … gnawed in her agony”; the man whose fear of premature burial was so severe that he instructed his family to leave his body undisturbed for ten days after death, “with the face uncovered, and watched night and day. Bells were to be fastened to his feet. And at the end of the second day veins were to be opened in the arm and leg.”

Tebb draws some of his most abject cases, fittingly enough, from The Undertakers’ and Funeral Directors’ Journal, a veritable storehouse of medical malfeasance. The Journal ran at least one story of a pregnant woman who gave birth in the grave. It also has an episode with one of the only happy endings in the whole book:

“Mrs. Lockhart, of Birkhill, who died in 1825, used to relate to her grandchildren the following anecdote of her ancestor, Sir William Lindsay, of Covington, towards the close of the seventeenth century:—‘Sir William was a humorist and noted, moreover, for preserving the picturesque appendage of a beard at a period when the fashion had long passed away.

more here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Narwhals and newts, eagles and eagle rays — the diversity of animal forms never ceases to amaze. At the root of this spectacular diversity is the fact that all animals are made up of many cells — in our case, about 37 trillion of them. As an animal develops from a fertilized egg, its cells may diversify into a seemingly limitless range of types and tissues, from tusks to feathers to brains. The transition from our single-celled ancestors to the first multicellular animals occurred about 800 million years ago, but scientists aren’t sure how it happened. In a study published in the journal eLife, a team of researchers tackles this mystery in a new way. The researchers resurrected ancient molecules that once helped single-celled organisms thrive, then recreated the mutations that helped them build multicellular bodies.

The authors of the new study focused on a single molecule called GK-PID, which animals depend on for growing different kinds of tissues. Without GK-PID, cells don’t develop into coherent structures, instead growing into a disorganized mess and sometimes even turning cancerous. GK-PID’s job, scientists have found, is to link proteins so cells can divide properly. “I think of it as a molecular carabiner,” said Joseph W. Thornton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the new study. When a cell divides, it first has to make an extra copy of its chromosomes, and then each set of chromosomes must be moved into the two new cells. GK-PID latches onto proteins that drag the chromosomes, then attaches to anchor proteins on the inner wall of the cell membrane. Once those proteins are joined by GK-PID, the dragging proteins pull the chromosomes in the correct directions. Bad things happen if the chromosomes head the wrong way. Skin cells, for example, form a stack of horizontal layers. New cells needs to grow in the same direction so skin can continue to act as a barrier. If GK-PID doesn’t ensure that the chromosomes move horizontally, the cells end up in a jumble, like bricks randomly set at different angles.

More here.

In That Year

And in that year my body was a pillar of smoke
and even his hands could not hold me.

And in that year my mind was an empty table
and he laid his thoughts down like dishes of plenty.

And in that year my heart was the old monument,
the folly, and no use could be found for it.

And in that year my tongue spoke the language
of insects and not even my father knew me.

And in that year I waited for the horses
but they only shifted their feet in the darkness.

And in that year I imagined a vain thing;
I believed that the world would come for me.

And in that year I gave up on all the things
I was promised and left myself to sadness.

And then that year lay down like a path
and I walked it, I walked it, I walk it.
.

by Erin Moore
from The Art of Falling
Seren Books, Bridgend