by Jonathan Halvorson

There has been a minor resurgence of interest in whether the social sciences live up to their billing as sciences. Economics in particular is going through well-deserved scrutiny from its ongoing failures of prediction and its inability to build consensus.

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by Hasan Altaf

Lately it seems we have revolution on the brain, so in that sense, Icíar Bollaín’s new film, También la lluvia (Even the Rain), came out in the US at the perfect moment. The context is different, the struggle and the outcomes are different, the actors and powers are different, but those differences only serve to bring into relief the similarities: It was impossible to watch the movie, set during the water riots in Cochabamba in 2000, and not think of the revolutions blooming today across other parts of the world.

The luck of timing was, I imagine, a surprise for the filmmakers, but the movie wears this accidental topicality lightly, perhaps because it has its own built-in reference point, a central conceit that is already strong. The water riots are not, at first, the central subject of Bollaín’s film – También la lluvia begins by being about a crew of Spaniards, led by an earnest, idealistic director named Sebastián (Gael García Bernal), making a movie about the first arrival of Columbus in the Americas, and Cochabamba is a cheap, convenient backdrop, full of Quechuas who will, for two dollars a day, play Taínos, much to the delight of Sebastián’s cost-cutting producer, Costa (Luis Tosar). The reality intrudes on Bollaín’s movie as it does on the movie within – Cochabamba becomes, suddenly, a city instead of a backdrop, and the “native extras” turn into stars of a very different drama.

If someone had described the movie to me beforehand, I would have avoided it. The juxtaposition of Columbus and the water riots seems, academically, too pat and perfect, too easy, almost simple-minded. Rapacious conquistadores, rapacious conglomerates; the same people suffering then and now; the obvious dichotomy of Davids and Goliaths – it’s a familiar paradigm, and one that tends to suffocate movies. (Although it did get used to good effect in Eduardo Galeano's Las venas abiertas de América latina, but that was a completely different project.) The great success of También la lluvia, in my view, is that it manages to use this conceit and rise above it – and so although I have described the movie in this way, I recommend highly that you go see it.

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by Julia Galef

If you wanted to teach people about science, you probably wouldn’t set out to write a fantasy novel. But the exceptional Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – an ongoing series of online “fan fiction” by Eliezer Yudkowsky – borrows J.K. Rowling’s world and uses it as a vessel for a sophisticated guide to scientific thinking, while simultaneously crafting a far cleverer and more imaginative story than the original.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality isn’t primarily interested in teaching readers the “what” of science, even though it is liberally sprinkled with interesting facts about genetics, game theory, quantum mechanics, and psychology, among other things. Instead, as the title suggests, it’s about the “how” of science, conceived of not in the narrow sense of research in a laboratory, but in the broader sense of the process of figuring out how anything in the world works.

Like his counterpart in the original series, this Harry Potter is a seemingly ordinary British boy who is thrust into the magic world at the age of eleven. But unlike the mistreated waif of the original series, this Harry has grown up with caring, intellectual parents who bought him all the books he wanted and encouraged his analytic instincts. So when he finds himself plunged into a new, magical world, he immediately starts using that training to find the answers to a host of new questions that confront him: Who can I trust? Why are some people able to do magic and others not? Is there an afterlife? What are ghosts? And how does magic actually work?

Magic may not operate by the logic we’re used to in our world, Harry reasons, but it must operate by some logic. His attempts to methodically figure out what that is are some of the most intellectually enjoyable parts of the series. For example, it appears that you can cause a target to levitate by uttering the magic phrase “Wingardium Leviosa.” But what’s doing the actual work: the sounds made by the spellcaster’s mouth, or the concept in the spellcaster’s head?

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by Meghan Rosen

One month ago, our new House of Representatives passed the long-awaited, much-heralded spending bill, H.R.1: Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011. Its name was bland but its purpose was bold. This was the bill that would usher in an era of fiscal restraint, rein in out-of-control government spending, and, in the words of Speaker John Boehner, ‘liberate our economy'. Freed from the shackles of costly governmental programs, House Republicans argued that jobs would flourish, and our economy would finally be allowed to grow.

The bill’s official title was long-winded and mildly vague, but overall, it appeared to represent routine, if not benign, spending policy: H.R.1: “Making appropriations for the Department of Defense and the other departments and agencies of the Government for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2011, and for other purposes.”

In non-legislative terms, the title suggested simple funding provisions for defense and governmental programs. It sounded tame; it sounded reasonable. (Although any bill that specifies appropriations ‘for other purposes’ is likely anything but straight forward.) The bill’s title provided not a hint of the outrage it would provoke on one side of the aisle, or the fervent acclaim it would see on the other.

Boehner took to twitter to tout the bill’s historic nature. He tweeted that H.R.1 would cut discretionary spending by $100 billion. He tweeted that the House GOP would stop job-crushing debt. He tweeted that the bill’s passage was for the good of our economy and democracy. His words were strong and his use of hashtags was prodigious. It was the GOP’s #pledge to bring #jobs back to America, and this bill was going to get us there.

On February 19th, the day of the bill’s passage, the GOP partyline was nearly unbroken. Only 3 of 238 Republicans voted against H.R.1. According to Boehner’s twitter account, ‘the People’s House had worked its will’ by passing one of the largest spending cuts in history. In the People’s House, not a single Democrat voted aye.

Why the hardline opposition? Though the bill was titled H.R.1, Democrats christened it with a pithy nickname, one that caught on quickly and, for many, stripped the bill of its meaningless bureaucratic wrapping to expose its true intentions. They called it: “The War on Women.”

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Scroll

From woodpile to the house
a scroll of arabesques in snow
ends maybe twenty feet
from an empty pile of pallets
and the steel stake against which
the first log had been set

The trail ends just there at that
cupped crater which marks the spot
a squirrel beneath a starlit sky
had stopped and sat

Between the crater and the house
untroubled snow lies pristine as the
road less traveled —untroubled as
the road untraveled— unused, sinless,
innocent, untrod. Unknown
as the road ahead of anyone who
as if startled from a stupor says, No
then turns and leaves a tale undone
marked only by a sinuous
signature in snow

by Jim Culleny
winter, 2009

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Whenever I pay taxes, I think of the fact that GE and Exxon paid no taxes in 2009, that Goldman Sachs pays under 2% taxes, and that billionaire hedge fund managers pay a tax rate of 15%. As Warren Buffett says, his secretary pays taxes at a higher rate than he does.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas talks about the face-to-face encounter with the Other that induces empathy and morality. Well, I feel like my little face is going face-to-face with the gnarly butt of big business. And there's about as much empathy to be gotten from that butt as a mouse gets from a snake.

Bizarrely, I hear everyone walking around saying America and its states are broke, while Wall Street is coining billions and criminally under-paying their taxes. I hear the GOP saying we don't have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem. I see Obama extending the Bush tax cuts, which created no new jobs in eight years. And I'm thinking, I have so little hair left, what's the use of tearing out the last few?

Then it occurs to me that Americans must be one of four things, or a combination of all four:

b) stupid victims of learned helplessness.

c) stupidly apathetic to the point of cowardice.

d) stupid masochists.

d) plain stupid.

That includes you and me, dear reader.

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by Sarah Firisen

My children’s school is hosting a panel discussion this month on Educating for 21st Century Success and anticipating this has caused me to pause and wonder what that term really means. What is success and what will it mean in the future? David Cameron, Britain’s Prime Minister, has decided to create a national happiness index, ”trying to measure the happiness of a society, rather than its growth and productivity alone”, perhaps in an attempt to persuade people that there’s more to life than material success in a time of weak national growth and productivity. And while is some real validity to the idea that there’s more to a successful life than a good job, possessions, and the other trappings of a capitalist culture, at the end of the day, a large part of success by most people’s standards involves a satisfying professional career that helps them provide for their family. But, as we plow ahead into the 21st century, how do we make sure that everyone can attain this goal?

Glancing through news pieces I’ve collected over the last month or two, I've noticed an interesting thread: Watson, the IBM supercomputer beats Jeopardy champions and ushers in a new era of artificial intelligence; according to the New York Times, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software”; a piece reporting that, “American students no longer perform particularly well in global math tests. But Americans are among the world leaders when it comes to thinking that we are really good at math.”; and finally, ending with the recent denouncement from the political right of teachers as overpaid, part-time workers.

So, computers are becoming increasingly “intelligent” and automation is quickly encroaching on traditional white collar jobs. Meanwhile, Americans pat themselves on the backs, believing that we are the smartest best educated people in the world, all evidence to the contrary. In fact, we are so smart already that we don't even think teachers matters, which is why, as a McKinsey Quarterly report points out, American top students don’t want to teach. Contrast this with the world’s top-performing education systems, Finland, Singapore and South Korea which, “recruit 100 percent of their teaching corps from students in the top third of their classes.” They do this, not only by giving them good training and working conditions, but by cultivating an atmosphere where teaching is considered a prestigious, valued profession. McKinsey reports that, in the US, by contrast, “only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent of new teachers who come from the top third work in high-poverty schools, where attracting and retaining talented people is particularly difficult.” And this was before Republicans mounted a national campaign to “mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents”.

Basically, we’re stupider than ever, increasingly badly educated, but think that we’re the smartest.

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by Joy Icayan

I was home sick when the news of the Japan earthquake came in. I could only hear the television from the other apartment talking about something huge, because the local reporters started referring to CNN, when normally the news would be comfortably confined to local political bickering and showbiz chutzpah. It was on Twitter when I later learned about the magnitude of the earthquake’s damage, and the extent of the tsunami reports, which have also reached certain provinces of my country. In Facebook, a close friend in Tokyo sent us a picture of a burning building and said that while there still small tremors now and then, she was at least physically safe.

And as in every calamity, there was the usual phenomenon in social networking sites—the exchange of information, call for prayers, the expressions of worry, and then there were the more worrying status updates and messages—fairly decent people starting to justify the earthquake as an act of God, or much more worryingly, as something the people over there deserved, although in very very subtle tones.

PZ Myers, better known in the science blogging world as Pharyngula has compiled several Facebook messages of people saying that the Japan earthquake was due revenge for Pearl Harbor.

Psychologist Melvin Lerner first discussed the just world phenomenon in 1980 in “The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion”. The just world phenomenon explains the need to see the world as orderly, predictable and just, that people get what they deserve. It is the belief that good things happen to good people, and bad things to bad people. It is why we can afford to think that the poor are lazy, because really if they were not lazy, they wouldn’t be poor, or why we think rape victims are somehow deserving because they dress up rather provocatively. It’s why we feel pity for children with terminal cancers—those poor things, and yet scoff at gay men who get HIV, if you hadn’t been so slutty… if you hadn’t been gay…

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

The second shift began any like other: The usual checklist of procedures and some brief drive-bys of high value sites. Then, he could pretty much relax until just before the end of the shift. The long blocks of time were what made this such a great job for a college student. When he was diligent, he was effectively getting paid to study. When he wasn't so diligent, he was getting paid for doing very little. Not a bad gig, but lately his time at work had drifted more and more into the latter category. He had gradually begun working more and studying less. How many semesters had it been since he took a full load? He had forgotten why he was in school and wasn't really sure about anything anymore. He hoped he could get past whatever was holding him back, but he wasn't sure what that was exactly. Why for example, had he suddenly begun avoiding his academic advisor as though he had leprosy?

He was unscrewing the top of his thermos of coffee when the phone rang. This in itself was startling because that phone hardly ever rang. Surely the ringer was muted by cobwebs. It was his boss: A tenant in the upscale apartments near the beach had not been heard from in several days. Family members were concerned and could he meet the city police at the apartment and open the front door so they could have a look? So much for that problem set.

He drove the company pickup to the apartment complex where he met a squad car. The officers introduced themselves and they all went up to the apartment. They knocked several times. No answer. He reached for the pass key and waited expectantly for a signal from the officer in charge who paused a few more seconds and then nodded. He could practically feel the key flipping the tumblers in the lock as he opened the door to let them in. The stench of decaying flesh billowed out of the entrance and held them in place for a second. All three of them uttered their preferred expletives at the same time as they exhaled. The death of a total stranger was still a bit unnerving, and the prospect of a lot of paperwork was suddenly inescapable.

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by S. Abbas Raza

The Egetmann pageant and parade took place in the South Tyrolean wine-making town of Tramin this past Tuesday, on the day before Ash Wednesday, as it has every odd-numbered year since 1591. I was there and can report that it completely lived up to its reputation for spectacular Alpine zaniness. The parade comprises horsedrawn carriages and many huge floats pulled by tractors depicting or representing medieval trades (cobbler, fishmonger, blacksmith, etc.) and they somehow manage to make each one into a debauched frolic of some sort with lots of schnapps being drunk by those on board as well as being passed out to the crowd lining the town streets to watch. There are participants whose only job, it seems, is to annoy the spectators by smearing them (and their clothes) in black grease, rotten fish, flour, hay, water, wine, corn, and other messy stuff. This, plus the fact that only the men of Tramin, who conveniently have a reputation for macho drunken fighting even among the rougher mountain peasants in these parts, take part in the parade (about half dressed in drag), gives the event a slightly scary, dark edge, especially for children and, at least this time, a slightly confused and nervous Pakistani.

Here's a description of some of the main elements of the parade from the official website:

The parade is opened by the trumpeter, followed by farmers on horseback and their labourers and by farmers brandishing long whips (‘Ausschnöller’). These are then followed by the stewards whose job it is to keep the route of the pageant clean and free of obstruction. Behind them come all the rest of the farmers with their ancient implements for working the land, accompanying a cart containing seed-corn (symbolically depicted by wood-shavings, hay and dust). In turn these are followed by the central character, the Egetmannhansl, a dummy in a black jacket, top hat and white gloves travelling in an open carriage, accompanied by his servant. In front, next to the driver sits the bride, transforming the parade into a marriage procession. As in Shakespeare’s time, female characters can only be played by men dressed up as women!

It is strictly forbidden for the bride to quench her thirst by drinking wine; instead she is allowed to drink as much schnapps as she wants!

Behind the nuptial carriage come the councillors, the local dignitaries, each with a symbolic object: the Book of Protocol, a ladder, an umbrella, and two candlesticks (each composed of a wooden stick with a corn-cob as a candle). This group of dignitaries, dressed in black with top hats, is preceded by the town-crier.

The parade passes through the streets of Tramin, stopping at every fountain, where the ladder is erected and the councillor with the umbrella climbs up and opens it. The town-crier climbs half-way up the ladder and reads the Egetmann’s offer of marriage from the Protocol. The other two councillors remain at either side of the ladder with their candlesticks. Each sentence of the Protocol is cheered by the people present.

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by Michael Blim

“…When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.”

–Newton Minow, Former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, May 9, 1961

Kennedy Administration nostalgia is all the rage. For the next three years, we can count back by fifty years to our heart’s content, regardless of how banal or bloody the event, to a time when something happened then that could be used as a moral lesson now in the seemingly endless winter of our discontent.

I am using the Kennedy rhetorical ploy here with less reverence and more irony than currently in play. After all, how can one prattle on about the moral lesson of Vietnam without acknowledging that nothing was learned, and instead that Vietnam marked the moment in the postwar world when America took empire seriously on the road? Or that Kennedy’s sixties marked the high point of generalized American prosperity — not its beginning, but its last great act before the end?

Still Newton Minow’s Kennedy Administration condemnation of America’s television programming still possesses the ring of truth, even if by now we are so inured to the medium’s fearsome banality. Though a lifetime corporate lawyer and well-connected politico, as FCC Chair in 1961, Minow had something else important to say, and that he actually said it then shows us how far the profession of law has declined over the past 50 years:

“…the people own the air. And they own it as much in prime evening time as they do at six o'clock Sunday morning. For every hour that the people give you — you owe them something. And I intend to see that your debt is paid with service.”

Fancy that: “the people own the air.” Doubtless Rupert Murdoch believes, in addition to thinking that it is okay for Fox News to be a political party, that he owns the cognitive and auditory spaces in our brains. Reformers like Minnow not only insisted on regulating private broadcasters but also sponsored the growth of National Education Television and its transformation into the Public Broadcasting Service (1970).

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by Tom Jacobs

…our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.

–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)

DIALECTICAL THINGS

The fourth floor of the New-York Historical Society houses the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, a collection encompassing over 40,000 objects spanning from prehistorical to 21^st century New York. By adopting an “open storage” policy, the NYHS has opened what would otherwise be a warehouse to the public, so that the miles of shelved artifacts that would normally be languishing unseen in a storage area on the fourth-floor can now be observed (albeit, without placards or captions). Unless one consults the computer databases, one is left pretty much on one’s own to make sense of what one is seeing. This can be a productive scene of fascination, recognition, and misrecognition.

A few years ago I spent a long afternoon browsing through the glass-enclosed cases of objects ranging from a remarkable collection of apple peelers, Tiffany Lamps, American Indian pottery, a cot that George Washington slept on during the Revolutionary War (and which still bears something like his sweat stains), and various objects of historical interest that people found on the ground while walking the farms of northern Manhattan in the early 20^th century. It’s hard not to lose all sense of space and time as one leans over and into the cases trying to see at closer range some subtle and possibly revelatory detail (Washington’s sweat stains, for instance). Eventually I came upon a display of objects collected from the streets in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. A shoe, a pack of cigarettes, a few scraps of letterheaded paper, a fireman’s oxygen tank, bits of twisted metal of inscrutable but portentous provenance. Unexpectedly, and even against my better judgment, I found myself overwhelmed by a wash of powerful and contradictory feelings: sadness, anger, nationalism, and perhaps most of all: a deeply-felt connection to a moment in history and to the lives lost in the event (and to one in particular). I felt weepy. Actually weepy. I cried a little bit. In the presence of this display, material objects turned unsettlingly fluid, potent, and peculiar. Twisted metal was transformed into a startlingly beautiful artifact evoking an incoherent mixture of thought and feeling. A pack of cigarettes became excessively and strangely resonant, overdetermined, both sacred and completely mundane. While undeniably potent, this encounter left me wondering whether these transformations of matter into emotion and idea were warranted, useful, or dangerous. It led me to consider how it is that we do (and how we should) understand the meaning and significance of these types of experience?

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To the Members of the Royal Society:

'Tis with much Relish Regret that we announce the final and utmost Demise, yea, the certain and irreversible Decline, which the Latins call corruptio and which, being English'd, is the Corruption or Passing-Away of the corporeall Substance; the throwing off of the Mortal Coil, the giving up of the so-call'd Ghost, the final separation of the immaterial Soule, leaving, where it had once been, naught but a stinking and rotten Corpse; the Departure, the Egress, the Going: yea, I say, the DEATH of Dr. J^us. Smith, FRS, this Tues-Day last at his Home in Dulwich, having succumb'd to the Gout.

He is surviv'd by his Wife, Mary, and a Dozen of Children, not counting three Bastards, a Half-Wit, and one that is evidently a Changeling. His first Wife, Anne, died many years hence under suspicious Circumstances, when she, so 'tis said, slipt upon the Rind of a Fruit of the Mousa Tree, lately call'd by the Hottentotical name of Banana (Dr. Smith had been raising up this Fruit of the Torrid Zone right here in grey England, by means of an oven capable of regulating its own Heat, by the Light of Phosphorus channel'd thro' a powerfull Lamp, and othersuch alchemick Machinations), and she landed, poor Anne did, squarely upon her Skull. The servants present reported a strange comick Effect of this sad Event: tho' distraught to see their Mistress so suddenly despatch'd, they could not help but snicker at the very Improbabilitie of Slipping upon the Rind of this foreign Fruit. Experiments were subsequently perform'd within the Scientifickall Society to determine the precise Cause of the Banana's comœdickall Virtù, tho' we confess it remains to this day a great Mysterium.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

To our surprise, our February 3 Quarks Daily post has generated a good deal of comment from those who identify as New (or “Gnu”) Atheists, nearly all of it critical. It’s not that we don’t like criticism– we are philosophers, and criticism is our business. Our surprise rather derives from the way in which much of the criticism has been targeted. In fact, it seems to us that much of the criticism is mistargeted. Criticism that misses its mark is not a kind of criticism; it’s no criticism at all. And we’re happy to be criticized. So we’d like to clarify.

Our post began with a statement of fact. Reasonable Atheism is not yet available, yet we have been charged with accommodationism. What we failed to note is that shortly after Prometheus Books distributed a catalog announcing the publication of Reasonable Atheism, we received a handful of emails decrying our forthcoming book as accommodationist drivel. The author of one email characterized accommodationism as consisting in the very thought that religious believers are owed respect. In the first paragraph of our original post, we encapsulated the charge of accommodationism as it was brought in these emails. These provided the occasion for thinking about the charge of accommodationism.

We have been criticized for not citing our sources. For the record, most of the emails we received came from people who did not include surnames. Who are these people? We have no idea. And we’d like not to encourage them. Yet some critics have assumed that if we have been charged with accommodationism, and then have sought to respond to that particular way of wielding the charge, it must be that we believe that New Atheists are in some sense guilty of… well… something.

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by Edward B. Rackley

While other countries are rediscovering people power and casting out dictators, Haiti is allowing them back. ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier came and went last January; Aristide now has a passport and may return any moment. If Baby Doc’s mute visitation was a desperate bid to correct a country’s freefall, his affect conveyed the opposite: an unreadable face and inchoate gestures of a now pitiful, once grandiose despot. Aristide’s return will be neither silent nor impassive.

So ended 2010 in Haiti, surely the country’s worst year since independence in 1804. The massive quake in January, then Hurricane Tomas, followed by a crippling epidemic of cholera. The year ended with a rocky electoral contest, still unresolved. These unwelcome malheurs conspired to attract the gaze of international media, holding it momentarily. Other spectacles now crow for our attention. Eclipsed by Libya and her neighbors, Haiti’s grip remains tenuous, its silence ominous. Jokes about the depths to which it has sunk—now a platform for foreign dignitaries so low even Sarah Palin can step up—would be funny if they weren’t true.

Leveled to rubble in January 2010, Port-au-Prince is gradually reconstituting itself, but progress will be painfully slow. The city was already mired in failed urban policies long before the catastrophic shudder; the flight of human capital among the political class only advanced as Haiti’s crisis deepened. Today’s void means easy access for anyone of means seeking political office, including pop singers at home and abroad (Michel Martelly and Wyclef). Haiti’s exhausted political class requires new blood, but where are the viable candidates? Popular elections rarely mean the collective interest is served; instead, a leader’s wish becomes his followers’ command. State-sponsored thuggery is a Haitian specialty.

To a new arrival, as I recently was, the obstacles confronting the average Haitian appear to stack up, layer by layer, to a point of monolithic immobility.

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