Melissa Anderson at Bookforum:

Nearly twenty years ago, Susan Sontag, in “The Decay of Cinema,” lamented, “No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals—erotic, ruminative—of the darkened theater.” But a decade before this dirge was written, Boyd McDonald, who had largely abandoned going out to the movies in 1969 (for reasons never explained), proved that some of the most ecstatic cinephilic—and carnal—delights could be found sitting alone at home. McDonald lustily, discursively wrote about the films that aired at all hours on television, which he viewed in his single-room apartment on the Upper West Side, often focusing on minor or supporting actors, as in this tribute to Steve Cochran, a second-billed performer inWhite Heat (1949): “But I have digressed from my topic, and digressed so far that it may be necessary to remind the reader what my topic is: the size of Cochran’s meat.” Between 1983 and 1985, his lubricious cultural criticism ran as a column in the gay magazine Christopher Street; those pieces, along with others written for New York Native, Connection, andPhiladelphia Gay News, were published in 1985 by the Gay Presses of New York as Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV. McDonald’s essential but under-recognized book, reissued by Semiotext(e) in an expanded edition with previously uncollected articles, offers, in its beautifully articulated bawdiness, perverse pleasures and a radical, though nondidactic, political view. It is, in other words, a model critical text.

The expansive introduction to Cruising the Movies, by experimental filmmaker William E. Jones, provides a helpful biographical sketch of McDonald and places this singular writer in a larger homo-cultural context.

more here.

A Stonehold

she was the great baby sitter — tall dignified
rich warm brown

we’d scream her name pretend to be endangered
run and hide in mama’s clothes closet
she’d search house and yard
get angry and upset when she couldn’t find us
we’d pop out laughing while
she scolded us for wolfing

delicately she reported on our bursts into puberty
and experiments in sex

on visits to her home she made us family
after play with her nieces and nephews fed us
the best tuna sandwiches on the planet

love and love always for the only person
to ever comb my thick black kinks
without taking my hair out
in handfuls

i loved her coffee stained teeth flashing gold
her thick british honduras croon
how she always called her lover “Mr.”

so pretty inside
there was a joy about her i had to be a woman
to understand

by Wanda Coleman
from Mercurochrome, 2001

Corey Robin at The Nation:

St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both. Many other people have thought so too. In 1998 readers responding to a Modern Library poll identified Atlas Shrugged andThe Fountainhead as the two greatest novels of the twentieth century—surpassing Ulysses, To the Lighthouse and Invisible Man. In 1991 a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club found that with the exception of the Bible, no book has influenced more American readers thanAtlas Shrugged.

One of those readers might well have been Farrah Fawcett. Not long before she died, the actress called Rand a “literary genius” whose refusal to make her art “like everyone else’s” inspired Fawcett’s experiments in painting and sculpture. The admiration, it seems, was mutual. Rand watched Charlie’s Angels each week and, according to Fawcett, “saw something” in the show “that the critics didn’t.”

She described the show as a “triumph of concept and casting.” Ayn said that while Angels was uniquely American, it was also the exception to American television in that it was the only show to capture true “romanticism”—it intentionally depicted the world not as it was, but as it should be. Aaron Spelling was probably the only other person to see Angels that way, although he referred to it as “comfort television.”

more here.

Michael Fallon at Literary Hub:

At every moment we are bombarded by sound waves, light waves, gamma rays, x-rays, the solar wind. All around, through, and even inside of us is restless movement: the brain muses, nerve cells flare, hair grows, food becomes flesh, not to mention all that is going on at the subatomic level. Our senses can only register a narrow band of all this movement, but even what we can sense is far too much for us. To think, to function in the world, to survive, we have to ignore most of what we can see and hear. We need silence.

We need peace of mind to concentrate, which is not possible without silence. Music and poetry—without silence—impossible. Without silence, our dreams—sleeping or waking—are not possible. Without dreams, there can be nothing to imagine, nothing to hope for, no future. Even love is not possible without meaningful silences, and I would go so far as to say that, without silence, there is no freedom.

The composer John Cage was in search of silence when he entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951.

more here.

Last day of voting!

Browse the nominees in the list below and then go to the bottom of the post to vote.

Alphabetical list of nominated blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

1. Beauty Demands: Variations on a beauty theme: The uses of ‘normal’
2. Big Questions Online: Is Atheism Irrational?
   
3. Experimental Philosophy: Can we have free will and lack it too?
4. Feminist Philosophers: On How We Talk About Passing
5. Flickers of Freedom: Punishing with a Compatibilist Heart
6. Forbes: Why It's Unethical To Go Back In Time And Kill Baby Hitler
7. Imperfect Cognitions: Intellectual Humility: Interview with Duncan Pritchard
8. Jacob Archambault: On the future of research in the history of philosophy
9. Justice Everywhere: (One of) Effective Altruism’s blind spot(s)
10. Normlessness and Nihilism: How Metaethics Might Matter
11. NPR Cosmos and Culture: Should We Care About The Preservation Of Our Species?
12. NYT Opinionator: Can Moral Disputes Be Resolved?
13. Orienteringsforsok: Slow corruption
14. Oxford University Press Blog: Does the meat industry harm animals?
15. Pacificklaus: Sardines, Death and Fear
16. PBS Newshour, Making Sense: The case for employee-owned companies
17. Philosophical Percolations: Getting out of the philosophers’ rut
18. Practical Ethics: Should we intervene in nature to help animals?
19. Proof I Never Want To Be President (Of Anything): Rights Are Often Wrong
20. Quaeritur: Understanding Climate Change Denial through the Lens of Nietzsche
21. Samuel C. Rickless: A History of Western Philosophy in 108 Limericks
22. Scientia Salon: Brontosaurus and the nature of philosophy
23. Scientia Salon: Yes, terminal patients still have moral obligations
24. Slate Star Codex: Contra Caplan on Mental Illness
25. Sprachlogik: An Account of Necessity as an Attribute of Propositions
26. Step back, step forward: Hypocrisy in general, utilitarianism in particular
27. The Electric Agora: That's Not Funny
28. The Forum: Are Delusions Bad for You?
29. The Mod Squad: Understanding Sentences: Port-Royal, Locke, and Berkeley
30. The Philosopher's Beard: Children are special, but not particularly important
31. The Philosophers' Cocoon: Pink: The sweet spot of extended cognition
32. The Power of Language: Philosophy and Society: Some Arguments against Ethnocentrism
33. The World Knot: On Philosophy, Philosophobia and Mysticism
34. Thinking Of Things: A False Sense of Insecurity
35. University of Birmingham: “Them and Us” no longer: mental health concerns us all
36. Vihvelin: Counterfactuals: The Short Course
37. What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher? Interview with Michael Ruse

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Voting ends on December 14th at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most-voted-for posts) will be posted on the main page on December 15th. The finalists will be announced soon after and winners of the contest will be announced on December 28th, 2015.

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Thank you.

by Matt McKenna

The Good Dinosaur is the latest Pixar film based on an alternate history timeline in which the famed meteor that struck Earth resulting in the extinction of the dinosaurs instead zooms past our planet striking nothing. In the film, dinosaurs have happily survived for millions of years post-meteor and somewhat surprisingly evolved to speak English, develop stone-age technology, and create a culture based on nuclear families. This premise provides for an emotionally engaging narrative, and the filmmakers take full advantage of the creative license the movie’s alternate history timeline affords. While this alternate history structure works well for The Good Dinosaur, it turns out to be a misused if popular technique for spinning other kinds of yarns, especially those generated by our politicians and pundits attempting to elicit a rise out of their audience.

The Good Dinosaur is a classic Disney tale in that it is beautiful, has talking animals, and incites children’s fears about their parents’ mortality. The story follows Arlo, an undersized adolescent apatosaurus who is separated from his family and must find his way back home. Over the course of his journey, Arlo reluctantly befriends an eager caveboy who is both a source of survival wisdom for Arlo and comedic relief for the children in the audience who are likely horrified by the scarier aspects of the film. One interesting note about The Good Dinosaur is that although dinosaurs can communicate with each other via language, the caveboy cannot. This is a humorous reversal from many other animated films in which the humans have adorable mute animal sidekicks. This switcheroo is narratively coherent due to the alternate history timeline in which the dinosaur-killing meteor never collided with Earth thus giving dinosaurs an evolutionary head start compared to their late-blooming human counterparts. I realize that’s not how evolution works, but it’s a fun idea for a children’s film anyway.

Read more »

Amanda Schachter & Alexander Levi. Harvest Dome 2.0, 2013.

Made of 450 broken umbrellas and 128 bottles.

More here and here.

David R. Montgomery & Anne Bikle in Nautilus:

Let’s admit it. Few of us like to think, much less talk about our colons. But you might be surprised at the importance of what gets into your colon and what goes on inside it. This little-loved part of our bodies is actually less an onboard garbage can and more like the unlikeliest medicine chest.

There is abundant medical evidence that diet greatly influences health, and new science is showing us why this is so. It is also showing us that advocates of trendy paleo and vegan diets are missing the big picture of how our omnivorous digestive system works.

Your colon is the home for much of your microbiome—the community of microbial life that lives on and in you. In a nutshell, for better and worse, what you eat feeds your microbiome. And what they make from what you eat can help keep you healthy or foster chronic disease.

To gain an appreciation of the human colon and the role of microbes in the digestive tract as a whole, it helps to follow the metabolic fate of a meal. But, first, a word about terms. We’ll refer to the digestive tract as the stomach, small intestine, and colon. While the colon is indeed called the “large intestine,” this is a misnomer of sorts. It is no more a large version of the small intestine than a snake is a large earthworm.

More here.

Suzanne Goldenberg, John Vidal, Lenore Taylor, Adam Vaughan and Fiona Harvey in The Guardian:

Governments have signalled an end to the fossil fuel era, committing for the first time to a universal agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change.

After 20 years of fraught meetings, including the past two weeks spent in an exhibition hall on the outskirts of Paris, negotiators from nearly 200 countries signed on to a legal agreement on Saturday evening that set ambitious goals to limit temperature rises and to hold governments to account for reaching those targets.

Government and business leaders said the agreement, which set a new goal to reach net zero emissions in the second half of the century, sent a powerful signal to global markets, hastening the transition away from fossil fuels and to a clean energy economy.

The deal was carefully constructed to carry legal force but without requiring approval by the US Congress – which would have almost certainly rejected it.

After last-minute delays, caused by typos, mistranslations and disagreements over a single verb in the highly complicated legal text, Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, brought down a special leaf-shaped gavel to adopt the agreement. The hall erupted in applause and cheers. “It is a small gavel but I think it can do a great job,” Fabius said.

More here.

Jill Neimark in Aeon:

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, a professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey, is one of the most influential thinkers on evolution today. Four decades ago, he published a series of papers that teased out the intricacies of our relationships with parents, children, lovers and friends, and laid the groundwork for a Darwinian social theory. His hypothesis about reciprocal altruism explains the profound puzzle of why we help others who are not biologically related to us, even to our own temporary detriment. Quite simply: we expect that the other will return the favour at a later time. Trivers’s ingenious conception of parent-offspring conflict proposes that parents will want to invest equally in all their children (since they are all equally genetically related to the parent), while siblings will each try to get more of their parents’ investment, to the disadvantage of their brothers and sisters. He also came up with a novel explanation for why we so frequently deceive ourselves: the most convincing liar is one who believes his own lies. In the words of the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker at Harvard University: ‘It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that [Trivers] has provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.’ Trivers’s latest book, a memoir entitled Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, is published this month. Here, he discusses his two decades of research on symmetry, a phenomenon that seems to span all of nature, from physics to biology to art and architecture.

When you use the term symmetry to describe life, what do you mean?

Trivers: I am referring to bi-laterally symmetrical creatures, that is, creatures that have an imaginary line running down the middle of the length of their body – distances from this to a place on each side are symmetrical if they are identical. Likewise, you can compare elements on each side, let us say, ears, and ask if length and/or width are identical.

What captivates you about symmetry?

Trivers: It’s very simple: it is the only trait in which we know what the optimal value is. We might think your kidneys look perfect, but we don’t have an actual measure for the optimal kidney. So we can never say that you have managed to create the ideal kidney your body was aiming for genetically, in spite of the early perturbations and stresses experienced during development. We just don’t know.

More here.

Lost Earring

A poet once told me that he wrote a poem simply
to write a poem—no other premise was required.
I found that freeing. Another poet recently explained
he had decided to study one word for a whole year.
This poet had chosen the word and. “How boring,”
I thought until I paused to assess how much an and
can connect: a carrot to a blushing radish: a melodramatic
sadness to a scissor-sharp glee. Even a diamond-studded
bride could be leashed tenuously to a cracked syringe
glittering in a parking lot by applying this one-
syllable conjunction. That’s when I realized and
was one of the primary colors in the language,
like one of Rothko’s blues receding further and further
into his canvas—an unstoppable hallway of blue,
an unraveling cobalt bandage. Each day constructed
from a series of ands, a chain-link fence of small mouths
opening: the lost earring shaped like a black tear
my husband gave me, and the wedding I wish
I had attended in northern Spain in my thirties,
with the region’s most famous cheese shaped
like a woman’s breast, and the trees so dense
they emitted a chartreuse fog in the evenings.

by Alexandra van de Kamp
from 32 Poems Magazine
hVol. 12 / No. 2 / Fall-Winter 2014

Christina Lupton in Avidly:

A recent NY Times piece by Tony Schwartz, chief executive of “The Energy Project,” a company dedicated to helping employers get their employees working better, deplores our addiction to electronic distraction. Get off line, he recommends, for good lengths of time. At least once a year, go read a book. This is fine, if increasingly familiar, advice. But it comes with a troubling idea of what literature is today: a salve for the distracted mind; a groove along which thoughts disordered by the bad habits of centripetal reading might fall back into line. A training ground for those trying to work better. It’s true, of course: for a very long time, books have been instruments of concentration. They have also mostly, though not exclusively, been written by those undistracted by ringing bells, the cries of children, the growling stomach, the fatigue of manual or secretarial labour. Reading is very closely associated with the pleasure of a state of non-distraction. And, for this reason, it has also been associated with privilege. Florence Nightingale, for instance, argues of women reading books in 1852 that no door is ever closed in favour of their seclusion; no protection ever erected to favour their concretion.

To be sure, there are plenty of stories of people finding ways to read and write late at night, between shifts or bouts of poverty, childbirth and manual labour. And while things like almanacs and abridgements and newspapers have made concessions to the distracted, novels, in particular, have evolved in tandem with the ideal of this kind of sequestration. We find the novel’s most honored readers holed up in closets and libraries; in childhood, sickness or old age, even as its lifetime supporters claim concentration through sinecure. Being absorbed in a book is easily romanticised — we may all feel individually and collectively that we once did that more and want to do it again — but there is no doubt that when we long for books in this way we also long for the sound of leisure talking to leisure.

More here.

Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times:

When I was doing my medical training nearly 20 years ago, there were two kinds of residents: those who were planning on specializing in oncology and those who couldn’t tolerate the subject for even a month. One night when I was on call, I worked with someone in the second camp. He told me about a patient of his, an elderly woman with pancreatic cancer that had grown into her bile duct and metastasized through her intestinal tract. She had been through several rounds of ­chemotherapy without success and was ready to quit treatment, but was afraid to tell her oncologist. “She told me, ‘I don’t want him to think I’m giving up,’ ” my colleague said, obviously disgusted that she didn’t feel comfortable speaking freely about her goals. He encouraged her to choose hospice care. Two weeks later, he said to me, his patient’s hospice aide came up to him on the ward. “She told me that my patient made her promise that the day she died, she would come find me and tell me. She said my patient wanted to thank me for encouraging her to die the way she wanted to.” I thought of this story at various points while reading “The Death of Cancer,” Vincent DeVita Jr.’s fascinating if hubristically titled new book, co-authored with his daughter, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, a science writer. Today, more than four ­decades after President Nixon declared war on cancer and with so many new weapons in our arsenal supported by big budgets and a decidedly aggressive posture, when is it O.K. to give up? When is it best to ­surrender? DeVita himself has been one of the top commanders in this war. He was in the vanguard of chemotherapists, engineering the first cure for Hodgkin’s disease and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Later, he was director of the National Cancer Institute, physician in chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan and president of the American Cancer Society. In DeVita’s telling, we are winning this war. Childhood leukemias are now almost completely curable. Death rates for almost all types of cancers are steadily decreasing. We have an array of new biological molecules and immunotherapies that put the old slash-and-burn cancer drugs to shame. When he says, “We have the tools to eradicate cancer,” he is someone we should listen to.

Sadly, however, his assertion flies in the face of certain facts. As DeVita himself notes, cancer cells frequently mutate, becoming smarter at neutralizing even the most aggressive chemotherapeutic cocktails. Cancer remains the second-biggest killer in the United States (after heart disease). It seems highly unlikely that a disease that has been documented for ­mil­lenniums, that is written into the very nature of our cells, will ever be eliminated.

More here.

Elijah Millgram in Aeon:

Everyone remembers Newspeak, the straitjacketed version of English from George Orwell’s novel 1984 (1949). In that dystopia, Newspeak was a language designed by ideological technicians to make politically incorrect thoughts literally inexpressible. Fewer people know that Orwell also worried about the poverty of our ordinary, unregimented vocabulary. Too often, he believed, we lack the words to say exactly what we mean, and so we say something else, something in the general neighbourhood, usually a lot less nuanced than what we had in mind; for example, he observed that ‘all likes and dislikes, all aesthetic feeling, all notions of right and wrong… spring from feelings which are generally admitted to be subtler than words’. His solution was ‘to invent new words as deliberately as we would invent new parts for a motor-car engine’. This, he suggested in an essay titled ‘New Words’ (1940), might be the occupation of ‘several thousands of… people.’

Now, I don’t have anything against the invention of new words when it’s appropriate. But Orwell was badly mistaken, and not just for ignoring the fact that English already picks up new words on a daily basis. His reasons for wanting that extra expressive power are, uncharacteristically, poorly thought-out. Language just doesn’t work in the way that either 1984’s Ministry of Truth or the more benign bureau of verbal inventors in ‘New Words’ presume. And understanding why that is will put us in a position to explain a lot of what goes under the heading of metaphysics.

More here.

Sameer Lalwani in Foreign Policy:

The recent revelations that the San Bernardino shooters had extremist ties to Pakistan might appear to confirm the narrative that Pakistan is consumed by a downward spiral of extremist violence. But over the past year, it has quietly made some important, costly, and under-appreciated strides in its counter-militancy efforts. Individually, none are groundbreaking, but together they point in a more promising direction for Pakistani society, regional stability, and the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

First, the Pakistani army has pursued more comprehensive military operations in tribal areas than initially expected. Although it has not directly targeted the Haqqani Network as the United States hoped, Pakistan has actively targeted a wide array of militant groups, not just the Pakistani Taliban (TTP).

Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the leader of the TTP and a longtime government tactical ally based in North Waziristan, may have only been displaced to Afghanistan during the early phases of the military’s operation, but the Pakistani army has made his life difficult. It reportedly targeted him, sidelined him operationally from his organization, and then eliminated some of his remaining commanders in airstrikes last fall.

More here.