Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

Behind all those canned compliments for older adults — spry! wily! wise! — is an appreciation for something that scientists have had a hard time characterizing: mental faculties that improve with age. Knowledge is a large part of the equation, of course. People who are middle-aged and older tend to know more than young adults, by virtue of having been around longer, and score higher on vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles and other measures of so-called crystallized intelligence. Still, young adults who consult their elders (mostly when desperate) don’t do so just to gather facts, solve crosswords or borrow a credit card. Nor, generally, are they looking for help with short-term memory or puzzle solving. Those abilities, called fluid intelligence, peak in the 20s. No, the older brain offers something more, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science. Elements of social judgment and short-term memory, important pieces of the cognitive puzzle, may peak later in life than previously thought. The postdoctoral fellows Joshua Hartshorne of M.I.T. and Laura Germine of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital analyzed a huge trove of scores on cognitive tests taken by people of all ages. The researchers found that the broad split in age-related cognition — fluid in the young, crystallized in the old — masked several important nuances.

…The picture that emerges from these findings is of an older brain that moves more slowly than its younger self, but is just as accurate in many areas and more adept at reading others’ moods — on top of being more knowledgeable. That’s a handy combination, given that so many important decisions people make intimately affects others. No one needs a cognitive scientist to explain that it’s better to approach a boss about a raise when he or she is in a good mood. But the older mind may be better able to head off interpersonal misjudgments and to navigate tricky situations.

More here.

Raza Rumi in Fair Observer:

The brutal, cowardly murder of freethinker Avijit Roy on the streets of Dhaka is a reflection of embedded intolerance in many Muslim societies. Bangladesh, despite its secular credentials, is no exception. On February 26, Roy was hacked to death by extremists with machetes, while his hapless wife, Rafida Bonya Ahmed, was also injured. What’s even more shocking was the fact that a good number of people witnessed the crime but did not intervene. Many were taping the violence on cellphones. Worse, according to media reports, the attack took place near a police check-post, erected for traffic control. This incident left me deeply disturbed. As someone who was also subjected to (missed) bullets in 2014, Roy’s murder brought back memories of my close brush with death, subsequent exile and the fear of returning to my own country, Pakistan. Like Roy and many others, Islamist extremists found my views unacceptable to the extent that physical elimination was the only answer. I miraculously escaped the assassination attempt, but my driver was killed and another companion was injured. While a few gunmen were arrested, the trial lingers on. But from my experience as an analyst, Pakistani courts seldom punish attackers, and the masterminds are never apprehended or brought to book.

I had never met Roy, but I was aware of his powerful work. It is not easy to profess atheism when you belong to a Muslim country. Roy lived in the United States and ran a blog called Mukto Mona, (free mind), and he was vocal in opposing religious bigotry and intolerance. While he remained in the relatively safer climes of the US, he was still part of the discourse in Bangladesh, and this is why he was a threat to Islamist extremists. He received regular threats on social media — an irony of the ostensibly postmodern 21^st century. The online store that sold Roy’s books was also harassed, and later it stopped displaying them altogether. In 2014, an Islamist said that Roy would be killed when he returned to his native country. So the doomed blogger had gone back to Bangladesh for his book promotion when extremists found the right opportunity to attack and kill him. His latest book, Bishwasher Virus (The Virus of Faith), says it all.

More here.

For a few weeks, anthropologist and 3QD friend Scott Atran has been on the front lines with the Peshmarga fighters in Kurdistan facing ISIS troops just a few hundred meters away. He had sent me this report some days ago by email:

by Scott Atran

Scott Atran on the frontline of Kurd/ISIS fighting

Today we were near the front at Kirkuk. Peshmarga and and the Islamic State are separated by a narrow channel of water less than 100m wide with embankments and trenches on both sides. We were able to talk to 3 captured IS guys, at least two of whom will likely be executed in short order because they carried out pretty nasty killings. It is a hard war along a 1070 km front in Iraq alone. One of their Kurdish captors has been wounded 17 times, his brother killed. The other has a brother who was paraded by IS the other day in a cage with the captured Peshmarga fighters in Hawija. He knows his brother will be butchered and there is nothing he can do to save him. The three IS fighters were all young, in their twenties, two with wives and children and the eldest my son's age. A former senior US General in Iraq who was with me agreed that the failed security environment for their families created in the wake of the US invasion was in large part responsible for closing off any avenue of hope for these young people and making them susceptible for recruitment to IS. This is also the assessment of the senior Peshmarga (KDP/KRG) leadership. The stories these young fighters tell through our experiments and interviews help make this clear (but details later another time). One thing is clear, they know nothing about the Quran or Islamic history other than what they've heard in their upbringing and from AQ and IS. None have more than elementary school education.

Much has been written about foreign fighters, although their reality here on the ground is somewhat different than what has been widely presented by analyzing social media. In fact they come here to fight and die and almost none are ever captured: the westerners often die in suicide attacks; those from the former Soviet republics (Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Dagestan) with long fighting experience go on as operational leaders and snipers until they are killed, or captured and executed on the spot. Foreign fighters can return to home country only if they escape IS or are sent by IS, because IS will execute them under the slightest suspicion of defection. Peshmarga consider the foreign fighters to be the best, most committed and most dreaded.

IS used to pierce Peshmarga lines with suicide attacks in armored vehicles that barreled through barrages of RPGs. But now the Peshmarga have Milan anti-tank missiles from Europe that can stop this cold. Yet the US insists that the Peshmarga obtain permission from the central gov't in Baghdad (which is coordinating operations with Iran's Al Quds force Tikrit and elsewhere – a recipe for disaster on several planes) to keep the weapons flowing that keep the Kurds alive. All this to keep the Kurds tied to a gov't they hate and which hates them.

Some IS fighters are leaving the Tikrit front and infiltrating into Kirkuk with their families, but Kurdish forces do not expect major actions here.

Scott also has an article with Douglas M. Stone in the New York Times today:

The Islamic State continues to control a huge section of Syria. But in Iraq, its advance has stalled. While Shiite militias and their Iranian allies fight the Islamic State ferociously, the Kurds have held a 640-mile front against the Islamic State’s advance. Their steadfastness should prompt America to rethink its alliances and interests in the region and to deepen its relationship with the Kurds — who are sometimes described as the world’s largest stateless nation.

Last week, the Sunni town of Tikrit (Saddam Hussein’s hometown) fell to largely Shiite forces from Iraq, backed by Iran. An offensive to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the heart of Arab Sunni nationalism, is now within reach. The Kurds plan to enter eastern Mosul, where many Kurds lived before the Islamic State seized the city in June, but they say that moderate Arab Sunnis must lead the effort to retake the rest of the city — not Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite forces or the Iranian-backed Shiite militias. The Kurds point out that it was grievances against Shiite rule that helped drive Sunni support for the Islamic State in the first place.

Together with Lydia Wilson and Hoshang Waziri, our colleagues at Artis, a nonprofit group that uses social science research to resolve intergroup violence, we found that the Kurds demonstrate a will to fight that matches the Islamic State’s. The United States needs to help them win.

More here.

Scott Atran is an American and French anthropologist who is a Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University in England, Presidential Scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and also holds offices at the University of Michigan. He has studied and written about terrorism, violence and religion, and has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as political leaders.

Imtiaz Dharker. Untitled.

Drawing by a most talented poet!

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Nargis Raza.

Martha C. Nussbaum reviews ON OPERA and ESSAYS AND REVIEWS 1959-2002, by Bernard Williams, in The New Rambler:

Bernard Williams died in June, 2003, at the age of only 73, after a long and sometimes painful struggle with multiple myeloma.[1] I still dream that he is alive – not least while working on this review. He had a quality of vivid aliveness that makes it next to impossible to concede that he is not here any longer. So I shall not concede, but shall continue to use the present tense. Being in Williams’s presence is at times painful because of that intensity of aliveness, which challenges the friend to something or other, and yet it was, and is, not terribly clear to what. To authenticity, I now think: to being and expressing oneself more courageously and clearly than one had done heretofore. Given the tendency of his brilliance to expand, filling the whole space around him, individuality was, nonetheless, and is, one of the most difficult things one could possibly attempt in his presence, and the attempt was, and is, never without struggle.

Williams’s last consecutive book, Truth and Truthfulness, appeared in 2002, before his death. Three posthumous collections of essays have preceded these two books, gathering his major articles on moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. (Williams was a serious scholar of both ancient Greek literature and philosophy and Descartes’ rationalism.) These two collections, separated from one another by more than a decade, represent the last publications we may expect to see from him, so they seem unusually precious. Both exemplify to an unusually high degree a quality of willingness to put one’s whole intellectual and emotional character on the line that always characterized his way of doing philosophy.

More here.

Melissa Davey in The Guardian:

Homeopaths believe that illness-causing substances can, in minute doses, treat people who are unwell.

By diluting these substances in water or alcohol, homeopaths claim the resulting mixture retains a “memory” of the original substance that triggers a healing response in the body.

These claims have been widely disproven by multiple studies, but the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has for the first time thoroughly reviewed 225 research papers on homeopathy to come up with its position statement, released on Wednesday.

“Based on the assessment of the evidence of effectiveness of homeopathy, NHMRC concludes that there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective,” the report concluded.

“People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness.”

An independent company also reviewed the studies and appraised the evidence to prevent bias.

More here.

Preeti Dawra in Live Mint:

“One has to continually erase so much of what has been read and heard about this country in order to arrive at the messy truth of the present moment of Pakistan,” says Ayesha Jalal , one of Pakistan’s leading historians and an eminent global South Asian scholar.

“You really have to come here and live its daily contradictions to understand the reality of modern day Pakistan,” adds Jalal, who is the Mary Richardson professor of history at Tufts University in the US where she teaches both in the history department and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She has also taught at Harvard and Columbia University.

Jalal, an elegant woman in her mid-fifties with a feisty intellect and sharp tongue, was born in Lahore. Her father is Hamid Jalal, a senior Pakistani civil servant, and she is the grandniece of the renowned Urdu fiction writer Saadat Hasan Manto.

She explains that when she moved to New York as a teenager, where her father was posted at the Pakistan’s United Nations mission in 1971, she had difficulties reconciling the official narratives of the Pakistani state with daily news reports of atrocities perpetrated by the Pakistan army in then East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh.

“This led me to ask questions about Pakistan’s history and self-representations, which in time came to define my research interests.”

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Last summer, I met Granny. I was on a whale-watching boat that had sailed south from Vancouver Island, in search of a famous and well-studied group of killer whales (orcas). Two hours after we set off, we started seeing black fins scything through the unusually calm and glassy water. We saw a dozen individuals in all, and our guide identified them by the shape of their fins and the white saddle patches on their backs. Granny, for example, has a distinctive half-moon notch in her dorsal fin.

Seeing her, I felt an intense and solemn respect. She is the oldest member of the group, perhaps the oldest orca on the planet. Her true age is unknown, but a commonly quoted estimate puts her at 103, which would make her a year older than the Titanic, and far more durable. Imagine all that she has seen in that time: the generations of her children and grandchildren; the countless pursuits of fleeing salmon; the increasingly noisy presence of fishermen, scientists and gawking tourists. Decades of knowledge and wisdom live in her brain. Ad that knowledge might explain one of the most unusual features of killer whale biology—their menopause.

Animals almost always continue to reproduce until they die. There are just three exceptions that we know of: humans, short-finned pilot whales, and killer whales. In all three species, females lose the ability to have children, but continue living for decades after. That’s menopause. Female killer whales go through in their 30s or 40s. Why? Why sacrifice so many future chances to pass on your genes to the next generation?

More here.

A Walk With History

how do you write history in a language that has no
past tense?

i don’t ask for it
more than once
history stumbles over me

how is it that you are part of history
if you haven’t fine-dined with her?

it was the railroad worm in adam’s apple
it was the pine bark turned into rye bread
it was the rotten meat ration on the battleship potemkin
it was a hike in the price of oil
it was a viss of rice for a lot of vice
it was the iron chef in hell’s kitchen at fuli restaurant

what’s up in your hometown?

a turnpike,
a flyover is under construction
over the juncture of history

when did clio land?

this morning, about half past two

did she have anything to declare?

nothing
they strip-searched her anyway

what did they find on her?

a whistleblower, a conch-shell blower
a critically endangered cheroot industry
a pair of cheap putsches
the crowd psychologist dr. state with
his twin sons, racism and reverse racism
an albino cockroach, a fake hypocrite, and
an immigrant, whose name
you will never get

.
by ko ko thett
fromThe Postscript Journal, 2

____________________________________

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi in Harper's:

Penguins have lost the ability to taste fish. A South Korean woman’s hair was eaten by a robot, and U.S. conservatives were found to be culturally East Asian. Americans who enter the top 1 percent of earners are less likely to remain there if they are not white. Individualism in the United States was correlated with the rise of white-collar jobs. Hedge-fund managers who look trustworthy attract more clients than managers who look undependable, but the latter generate larger returns. Brides in 1930s Connecticut who were judged agreeable and emotionally stable by their bridesmaids lived longer. U.S. counties in which residents more frequently tweet “bitches,” “haters,” “jealous,” “drama,” “cunt,” “grrr,” “sooo,” “fucked,” and “Mondays” have more heart-disease deaths. The blindfolded lead the nonblindfolded in estimating the severity of everyday impairment caused by blindness. The legs of adult British Columbians cramp in the night twice as often during the summer. Swiss prison guards report contentedness. New Zealanders in a doctor’s office are fourteen times more likely to steal gossipy magazines than serious ones. Dutch chimpanzees who moved to Edinburgh now grunt like locals. Wolf society, not human domestication, gave dogs their social skills.

High school girls who underwent virtual-reality assertiveness training reported less sexual victimization, and college men who took online sexual-violence-awareness tutorials reported committing less rape. Old banned chemicals may be weakening polar bears’ penile bones. Sugary-drink consumption correlates with early menarche. Teen pregnancy rose by 30 percent between 2003 and 2010 in Iraq. Caesarean delivery, vacuum-assisted delivery, maternal fatigue, and violent partners were associated with pain in postpartum vaginal intercourse. Labor augmentation does not cause autism, but Romanian orphanages may. Dutch babies laugh, smile, and cuddle more than American babies. An Arizona toddler mistakenly given scorpion antivenin for methamphetamine poisoning exhibited immediate improvement. Targeted social rejection worsens asthma in popular adolescents. Teen boys who wrongly think themselves fat often grow up to be fat. A woman who received a fecal transplant from her obese sixteen-year-old daughter rapidly became obese herself. Repeated blows to the head were linked to cognitive impairment.

Camponotus fellah ants who become isolated from others walk around continuously, fail to digest their food, and have one tenth the life span of social ants.

More here.

Eric Ormsby in The New Criterion:

What language did Adam and Eve speak in the Garden of Eden? Today the question might seem not only quaint, but daft. Thus, the philologist Andreas Kempe could speculate, in his “Die Sprache des Paradises” (“The Language of Paradise”) of 1688, that in the Garden God spoke Swedish to Adam and Adam replied in Danish while the serpent—wouldn’t you know it?—seduced Eve in French. Others suggested Flemish, Old Norse, Tuscan dialect, and, of course, Hebrew. But as James Turner makes clear in his magisterial and witty history, which ranges from the ludicrous to the sublime, philologists regarded the question not just as one addressing the origins of language, but rather as seeking out the origins of what makes us human; it was a question at once urgent and essential.1 After all, animals do express themselves: they chitter and squeak, they bay and roar and whinny. But none of them, so far as we know, wields grammar and syntax; none of them is capable of articulate and reasoned discourse. We have long prided ourselves, perhaps excessively, on this distinction. But on the evidence Turner so amply provides, we might also wonder whether the true distinction lies not simply in our ability to utter rational speech, but in the sheer obsessive love of language itself; that is, in philology, the “love of words.”

This abiding passion for words, cultivated fervently from antiquity into modern times—or at least until around 1800, in Turner’s view—encompassed a huge range of subjects as it developed: not only grammar and syntax, but rhetoric, textual editing and commentary, etymology and lexicography, as well as, eventually, anthropology, archeology, biblical exegesis, linguistics, literary criticism, and even law. It comprised three large areas: textual philology, theories about the origins of language, and, much later, comparative studies of different related languages.

More here.

What was so special about 9:26:53 am today? Well, the date is 3/14/15 and at that time, the date and time together would have been the same as the first ten digits of Pi: 3.141592653. It is also Albert Einstein's birthday today. Here's Steven Strogatz in The New Yorker:

Pi does deserve a celebration, but for reasons that are rarely mentioned. In high school, we all learned that pi is about circles. Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference (the distance around the circle, represented by the letter C) to its diameter (the distance across the circle at its widest point, represented by the letter d). That ratio, which is about 3.14, also appears in the formula for the area inside the circle, A = πr2, where π is the Greek letter “pi” and r is the circle’s radius (the distance from center to rim). We memorized these and similar formulas for the S.A.T.s and then never again used them, unless we happened to go into a technical field, or until our own kids took geometry.

So it’s fair to ask: Why do mathematicians care so much about pi? Is it some kind of weird circle fixation? Hardly. The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach. Even young children get this. The digits of pi never end and never show a pattern. They go on forever, seemingly at random—except that they can’t possibly be random, because they embody the order inherent in a perfect circle. This tension between order and randomness is one of the most tantalizing aspects of pi.

Pi touches infinity in other ways. For example, there are astonishing formulas in which an endless procession of smaller and smaller numbers adds up to pi. One of the earliest such infinite series to be discovered says that pi equals four times the sum 1 – + – + – + ⋯. The appearance of this formula alone is cause for celebration. It connects all odd numbers to pi, thereby also linking number theory to circles and geometry. In this way, pi joins two seemingly separate mathematical universes, like a cosmic wormhole.

But there’s still more to pi.

More here.

Questlove at The New York Times:

Sonic Youth has never had a reputation for shying away from unpleasantness in the search for truth and beauty, and the book does the same, opening with a scene in drizzly São Paulo, as the band played its last show together and Gordon and Moore’s marriage finally fully unraveled. “My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet ­Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it,” Gordon writes. “I don’t think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.” From here she takes the reader into her childhood. The organization of the book is as unconventional as you’d expect from an artist like Gordon (the first chapter is titled “The End”), and I’m a sucker for unconventional organization, especially early on, when you’re trying to pick up a rhythm as you read it. The chapters are short, no more than three or four pages, short enough that you might call them songs. They jump around a bit but run roughly chronologically. Gordon recalls growing up in Rochester, N.Y., and moving to Los Angeles when her ­sociologist father took a job at U.C.L.A. She paints a cleareyed portrait of her mother, who stayed at home and struggled to stay creative. She ­remembers her charismatic and mentally ill older brother, Keller — “brilliant, manipulative, sadistic” — her closest companion in childhood, “the person who more than anyone else in the world shaped who I was, and who I turned out to be.”

more here.

Charlie Kurth in Aeon:

But just how bad is anxiety, really? Is it just an unpleasant feeling to work through, or something worse? According to a very distinguished tradition, one that stretches all the way back through the Stoics and Aristotle to Plato, it is worse. Much worse. When we’re anxious, we fret and ruminate in ways that don’t just distract us, but consume us. What’s more, because anxiety tends to be so unpleasant, we act impulsively – doing whatever we think will make the feeling go away. For these reasons, the classical consensus has it that such emotions are to be avoided.

Immanuel Kant suggested an even graver problem with anxiety: it is incompatible with virtue. For Kant, the virtuous individual is someone who has brought ‘all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control’; therefore, he writes in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), the ‘true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind’. But when we’re anxious, our minds are anything but tranquil. We lack the rational control that’s distinctive of virtue: it is emotion, not reason, that determines our behaviour. That’s bad. This picture of anxiety as a dark and pernicious force certainly has illustrious supporters. Even so, I believe that it is mistaken. It goes against the grain to say this, but anxiety can be a good thing. Indeed, I hope to persuade you that it is central to our ability to successfully navigate moral and social life. I won’t go as far as to say that we need more of it, but we should cultivate it. Worry is important; we should get it right.

More here.