David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago,” the book begins. “It's eight hundred thousand words long.”

We live, of course, in a diaristic era. This April, Heidi Julavits will publish “The Folded Clock,” which uses the diary as a source of revelation and reflection; meanwhile, Karl Ove Knausgaard has become a lightning rod for his 3,600-page autobiographical “My Struggle” (the fourth volume is due out in the U.S. in early May).

Manguso's intent, however, is different — not to re-create her diary but to meditate on it, as both artifact and pathology. There is nothing in “Ongoingness” about the decision to come to Los Angeles, first in 2010 and then again, after moving back to New York, in 2013. There are no proper nouns, no names, few reference points other than the obsessive weight of the diary itself.

As she acknowledges in the early pages, “I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it.”

more here.

Lisa Jardine at the Financial Times:

We may not have entirely endorsed his contemporary Anthony Wood’s unkind assessment of Aubrey as “a shiftless person, roving and magoty-headed, and sometimes little better than crazed”. But neither did we take Scurr’s care to listen to his personal authorial voice.

Aubrey was born in north Wiltshire in 1626, to a gentry family whose precarious finances collapsed after his father’s death. He attended Oxford as a gentleman-commoner during the 1640s at the height of the English civil war, when the university was the headquarters of Charles I and besieged by the Commonwealth forces. The intellectual, social and emotional upheaval Aubrey experienced in his early years presaged a lifetime of disruption and disturbance, exacerbated by his frequent need to prevent his creditors from catching up with him.

He had an irrepressible urge to record everything around him that took his attention. His curiosity matched the intellectual ferment of the times. He was, wrote his friend George Ent, one “whose boundlesse mind/Scarce within Learnings compasse is confin’d”. He was an early Fellow of the Royal Society, a restless and insatiable pursuer of fragments of material and written culture from the past, and an inveterate compiler of obscure information. As Scurr has written, he was “an antiquary, collecting remnants of history to save them from the deluge of time.

more here.

Paul Tullis in The New York Times:

Jane Goodall was already on a London dock in March 1957 when she realized that her passport was missing. In just a few hours, she was due to depart on her first trip to Africa. A school friend had moved to a farm outside Nairobi and, knowing Goodall’s childhood dream was to live among the African wildlife, invited her to stay with the family for a while. Goodall, then 22, saved for two years to pay for her passage to Kenya: waitressing, doing secretarial work, temping at the post office in her hometown, Bournemouth, on England’s southern coast, during the holiday rush. She had spent her last few days in London saying goodbyes and picking up a few things for the trip at Peter Jones, the department store in Chelsea. Now all this was for naught, it seemed. The passport must have fallen out of her purse somewhere. It’s hard not to wonder how subsequent events in her life — rather consequential as they have turned out to be to conservation, to science, to our sense of ourselves as a species — might have unfolded differently had someone not found her passport, along with an itinerary from Cook’s, the travel agency, folded inside, and delivered it to the Cook’s office. An agency representative, documents in hand, found her on the dock. “Incredible,” Goodall told me last month, recalling that day. “Amazing.”

Excited and apprehensive, she boarded the ship, the Kenya Castle, with her mother and uncle, and together they inspected the vessel, circling its decks, looking out the porthole in the room she would occupy for the better part of a month. Then her family departed, and at 4 in the afternoon, the ship cast off. Twenty-four hours later, as most of the passengers were suffering from seasickness on their traverse across the Bay of Biscay, Jane Goodall was at the prow of the ship — “as far forward as one could get,” she wrote to her family. Her letter also recorded, in a detailed manner that foreshadowed the keen observational skills she would bring to her research as well as the literary bent she would deploy in reaching a broad audience, how the sea changed color as the bow rose and fell with the waves. “The sea is dark inky blue, then it rises up a clear transparent blue green, and then it breaks in white and sky blue foam. But best of all, some of this foam is forced back under the wave from which it broke, and this spreads out under the surface like the palest blue milk, all soft and hazy at the edge.”

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants. Details of the prize can be found here.

On the right is a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Ken Roth, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (in alphabetical order by blog or website name here)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Notes Of A Grand Juror
2. Abandoned Footnotes: The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm
3. Brown Pundits: Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…
4. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: Abandoning Ukraine
5. Los Angeles Review of Books: The Limits of Muslim Liberalism
6. Pandaemonium: Assimilation vs. Multiculturism
7. Religious Left Law: The Highlander Folk School: A Civil Rights Movement Halfway House
8. The Philosopher's Beard: The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Universal Basic Income
9. U.S. Intellectual History: How the CIA Bought Juan Rulfo Some Land in the Country

We'll announce the three winners on March 23, 2015.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

Corey Robin in Salon:

Facebook can be a weird place on Martin Luther King Day. Some of my friends post famous passages from MLK’s speeches. Others post statistics on racial inequality. Still others, mostly white parents, post photographs of their children assembled in auditoriums and schoolyards. These are always hopeful images, the next generation stirring toward interracial harmony. Except for one thing: nearly everyone in the photos is … white.

In her public school this year, my first-grade daughter learned that Daisy Bates helped integrate the Little Rock schools. She knows that Ella Baker, someone I’d never heard of till I went to college, was part of the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, her school has a combined black and Latino population of 15 percent, down from nearly 30 percent just seven years ago.

In school, white children are taught to be conscious of race and racism in a way I never was when I was as a kid in the 1970s. Yet they go to schools that are in some respectsmore segregated now than they were in the 1970s. In 1972, under Richard Nixon, 36 percent of black students in the South attended white-majority schools. By 2011, under Barack Obama, that number had plummeted to 23 percent. In every region of the country, a higher percentage of black students go to nearly all-minority schools than was the case in 1988. The same is true of Latino students in the South, the West and the Midwest.

Microsoft Word recognizes the word “desegregate.” It doesn’t recognize “resegregate.”

The way we live now is not reflected in the way we talk. Or type.

Maybe this gap between our words and deeds is a sign of vitality and promise. Shouldn’t our language always be one step ahead of our actions? Shouldn’t our children learn concepts in school that challenge realities they see in society? Maybe. Or maybe we’re forcing children to talk about inequities in school that we wouldn’t dare touch, much less transform, in society at large.

More here.

3QD friend Mark Blyth testified before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee yesterday. Here is his statement:

Good Morning Chairman Enzi, Ranking Member Sanders, and Members of the Committee.

My name is Mark Blyth and I am the Eastman Professor of Political Economy at the Watson Institute for International Studies and Brown University in Providence RI. I am also the author of a book entitled Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press 2013) a book, which oddly just received a national award in Germany, the country most associated with budgetary austerity. Given that irony is not a German national trait, it might be the case that even the Germans are re-thinking their stance on balanced budgets. As I shall show you today, it’s really not working out so well in Europe and it would be a disaster if it were tried here too.

And yet balancing the budget as a matter of principle is intuitive. After all, you can’t spend more than you earn. It is also appealing. After all, people want more money in their pockets rather than less, so spending ‘other people’s money’ now so that they would have less in the future because of debt interest repayments seems to be the height of folly. But balancing the budget because of these arguments is also folly. While they are intuitive, these arguments are systematically wrong, because they are based upon two faulty analogies: one drawn between households firms and states and another between savings always being good and spending always being bad. I begin by taking each in turn before giving more specific examples.

The flaw in the first analogy is that the national or federal government’s budget is nothing but the sum of the budgets of the households and firms that comprise it. This is wrong, and for the United States of America in particular, it is absurd.

First, national governments do not have income in the same way individuals have income. Rather, individuals only have income by virtue of the existence of the government. Think of earning a buck in a job. What makes that possible is not just the labor contract, but also the existence of property rights, courts, police, roads, airports, education, and a host of other state provided functions. Don’t believe me? Go look at Somalia’s rate of job growth. With no state to protect both parties to the transaction, it’s hard to make a buck.

More here. And here is video in which Mark's testimony starts at the 46:20 mark.

Melanie Moran in Medical Xpress:

Where in your brain do you exist? Is your awareness of the world around you and of yourself as an individual the result of specific, focused changes in your brain, or does that awareness come from a broad network of neural activity? How does your brain produce awareness?

Vanderbilt University researchers took a significant step toward answering these longstanding questions with a recent brainimaging study, in which they discovered global changes in how brain areas communicate with one another during awareness. Their findings, which were published March 9 in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge previous theories that hypothesized much more restricted changes were responsible for producing awareness.

“Identifying the fingerprints of consciousness in humans would be a significant advancement for basic and medical research, let alone its philosophical implications on the underpinnings of the human experience,” said René Marois, professor and chair of psychology at Vanderbilt University and senior author of the study. “Many of the cognitive deficits observed in various neurological diseases may ultimately stem from changes in how information is communicated throughout the brain.”

Using graph theory, a branch of mathematics concerned with explaining the interactive links between members of a complex network, such as social networks or flight routes, the researchers aimed to characterize how connections between the various parts of the brain were related to awareness.

More here.

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

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

1. Warscapes: Cold Remains in Greenland
2. The Philosopher's Beard: The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Universal Basic Income

3. 3 Quarks Daily: My Grandmother's Democratic Party (Part 2)
   

4. Brown Pundits: Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…

5. Pandaemonium: Assimilation vs. Multiculturism

6. Los Angeles Review of Books: The Limits of Muslim Liberalism
7. 3 Quarks Daily: The Evil That Republicans Do
8. U.S. Intellectual History: How the CIA Bought Juan Rulfo Some Land in the Country
9. Abandoned Footnotes: The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm
10. 3 Quarks Daily: The Undocumented Journey North, Through Mexico
11. Proof I Never Want To Be President: It's Not a Competition
12. 3 Quarks Daily: Free-Floating Anxiety, Teens, and Security Theatre
13. 3 Quarks Daily: Notes Of A Grand Juror
14. U.S. Intellectual History: The Culture Wars Are Dead, Long Live the Culture Wars!
15. Religious Left Law: The Highlander Folk School: A Civil Rights Movement Halfway House
16. 3 Quarks Daily: Delhi: the City of Rape?
17. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: Abandoning Ukraine
18. U.S. Intellectual History: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Charlton Heston
19. Jezebel: The Cops Don't Care About Violent Online Threats. What Do We Do Now?
20. Scientia Salon: Why not Cynicism?

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Ken Roth for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here later today.

Nimmi Gowrinathan in Guernica:

Jeya’s daughter is nine days old, unnamed, when I meet her in Sri Lanka. Miniscule compared to my chunky little boy, born only a few months earlier, she squirms beneath pink netting as I gingerly reach in to hold her hand. I don’t need to see her, Jeya says, turning away. That day, I was a human rights researcher, and I wondered what fresh trauma I would cause in the pursuit of documenting her story. Jeya’s daughter was born of rape. Half Singhalese, half Tamil. Half soldier, half civilian. She entered her world when a vicious cycle of violence had come full circle. They say the war is over now, the country is at peace. Discreetly positioned inside a church, sitting across from Jeya, I’m restless, intimately familiar with the pangs of guilt that interrupt my work and jar my sense of self. The last time I was here, I was a humanitarian worker. Then, at least, I could have carefully placed a tiny Band-Aid over the details of her damaged life. Now, I am intervening into local lives with only the promise of social justice in hand. I am an ill-equipped spy, sent to retrieve the most repressed memories from a repressed people. The stories will, at worst, incite a directionless moral outrage on behalf of the people, and at best, brand their government an international pariah. I am relieved Jeya will talk to me, as I have come looking for Victims of rape (Survivors, in aid parlance), but so far had only encountered Witnesses and Rumors. From inside the electrified fence of her internment, Jeya didn’t know which day the war ended. They never told us. Or maybe they did. None of us understood Singhalese.

It is a war the West knows little about, though its fighters became infamous around the globe.

More here.

Dale Peck in Book Forum:

IT'S BEEN YEARS SINCE I took Muay Thai; years, too, since I thought much about Stanley Crouch. Nevertheless, this was my obvious point of entry to Jonathan Gottschall’s The Professor in the Cage, which the author describes as “part history of violence, part nonfiction Fight Club, and part tour of the sciences of sports and bloodlust.” In fact, The Professor in the Cage is a straightforward work of popular science bookended by what Gottschall himself calls a “memoir stunt”: One day in his late thirties, Gottschall, a “cultured English professor,” decided to join the mixed-martial-arts gym that had opened across the street from his campus office, with the ultimate goal of engaging in at least one professional fight. By Gottschall’s account, the decision was motivated by dissatisfaction with his job as an adjunct teaching freshman composition, but the subsequent narrative complicates this explanation. Gottschall refers to his 2012 fight as “the culmination of a [two-year] journey,” yet he seems to have been “fascinated by fighting,” at least since the mid-’90s, when he watched a video of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s inaugural bout, between Teila Tuli and Gerard Gordeau. At the end of that twenty-second bloodbath, “Gordeau left the cage with . . . one of Tuli’s front teeth broken off inside his foot.” Gottschall likens the experience to watching porn for the first time. He was “sickened” by the spectacle but “couldn’t look away,” and “in the ensuing months I frequently visited the video store, where I guiltily lurked through the section that included UFC tapes.” Finally there is the admission that “from grade school through high school, I attracted bullies.” But lest you pity the younger Gottschall, he hastens to tell readers: “I probably would have behaved the same way if I’d had the fangs and the claws for it. I wasn’t a good kid, just a weak one. In high school I occasionally managed to identify someone even weaker and more isolated than me, and I did my small part to make his life even harder and sadder than it already was.”

In college he “hit the weights,” building himself into “a 210-pound heavyweight who could bench-press more than 300 pounds”; afraid that strength alone wasn’t enough, he “took up karate” and studied it for more than fifteen years.

More here.

Human Wishes

from the Latin of Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis),
c.AD 50-c.127, Satires X

No one in his right mind would want to be
a big fish gobbling up the smaller fry;
it’s the big fish who attract hostility
like Seneca and the rest in Nero’s day.
You’re better off to sit tight in your room
than be conspiring in the rising steam
among the towels of the baths and gym;
take change if you go out walking after dark,
avoid the war zones and the periphery
and keep your wits about you in the park
where a knife gleams behind each shadowy tree.
All pursue riches in our modern Rome,
gardens, a coach-house and a second home
bought with the revenue from untaxed income
at Capua, Aquinum, Trevignano or Tivoli;
but poison’s seldom served in the wooden cups.
Beware the crystal glass and the golden bowl,
be careful when you raise wine to your lips
dining with colleagues on the Palatine Hill
or old friends in the Caffè Giovenal’
or swan and flamingo, antelope and stuff.
So which philosopher would we rather know
– the one who, staring from his portico,
laughs, or the one who weeps? Easy to laugh,
if we started weeping there’d be no end to it.
Democritus would shake with continual mirth,
even in his primitive times, at life on earth
and showed that stoicism spiced up with wit,
some candour and good sense, can mitigate
even the thick air of a provincial city.
Binge sex and fiscal heroin, discreet
turpitude flickering in a brazier light –
all anyone does now is fuck and shit;
instant gratification, entertainment, celebrity
we ask, but mumbling age comes even so,
the striking profile thick and stricken now,
the lazy tackle like a broken bough,
the simian features and the impatient heir.
What else can you expect from your white hair,
your voice like cinders under a kitchen door?
What use to you the glittering cleavages,
the best box in the house above the stage
when blind and deaf? Now fever and disease
run riot through our waste anatomies,
the old mind dithering in its anecdotage,
the joints all seizing up with rheumatism,
seek guidance of the heavenly gods who treasure
our lives more than we do ourselves. Subdued
by protocol and the fear of solitude,
you wed in haste and now repent at leisure
even as your hands shake in their final spasm.
Ask for a sound mind in a sound body
unfrightened of the grave and not demented
by grief at natural declension; study
acceptance in the face of fate; and if
you want to worship mere materialism,
that modern god we have ourselves invented,
I leave you to the delights of modern life.

Derek Mahon
from Adaptations
The Gallery Press, Oldcastle, 2006

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

The writer R.K. Narayan was not prone to supernatural thoughts. He understood as well as anyone why The English Teacher — his 1944 novel about a grieving professor who learns to communicate with his recently deceased wife through trance writing — would inspire bewilderment in his readers, and even rage. In the first half of the book (the “domestic” half), a benignly self-absorbed English teacher of thirty, Krishna, living in the fictional Indian town of Malgudi, decides to devote himself more fully to his wife and child. In the second half (the “spiritual” half), the happy domestic picture dissolves into — as Narayan wrote in his memoir My Days — “tragedy, death, and nebulous, impossible speculations.” Readers might feel, wrote Narayan, as if they had been baited into the second half by the first. But he hoped readers would find an explanation knowing that, of all his novels, The English Teacher was the most autobiographical.

Months after his own wife’s death from typhoid, Narayan found himself walking down a private road in Mylapore, toward the house of a cousin’s friend. Narayan, convinced that his writing days were done, had taken to idle walks. He had no curiosity, no inspiration, no interest in the future nor anything related to the world of the living, save the life of his young daughter.

more here.

Ivan Kreilkamp at The Millions:

What does “in a weird way” mean, and why did it become so much more prevalent in the late-20th century? The first uses of “weird” in English refer to “weird sisters,” as made famous by Macbeth (though the usage precedes the play), and in its earliest 19-century citations, “in a weird way” invariably means in an uncanny, creepy, or supernatural way. Some of the things that most often occur “in a weird way:” trees or leaves rustling in the wind, fires blazing up, and people muttering, singing, or murmuring. From an 1888 collection of sermons, describing the prophet David: “The demon was cast out, and the dark powers of the creation were mightily stirred up by it, and David, on his way home that night, felt them all about him in a weird way.” From an 1897 article in The American Archaeologist called “Notes on Delaware Indian Village Sites:” “The stone cists once occupying the eastern side of the burial place have been destroyed by the plow; the white oaks whose leaves rustled in the fall winds in a weird way have been cut down by the avaricious lumber man.” From “Catching the Wild Horse in South America,” in the Report of the Rugby School Natural History Society for the Year 1879: “A couple of the fattest mares captured are slaughtered, and without troubling themselves to skin them, the men cut up the carcases in huge joints, ribs, loins, back, etc., and pile them on the fires, which blaze high up in a weird way, owing to the quantities of fat and grease burning.” From the Wide World Magazine of 1898: “the native divers had tumbled out of their boats, and were swimming in a weird way down to the bottom of the translucent sea.” From a 1910 female traveler’s Journal of Japan: “I saw a most interesting method of laying a foundation of a native building — two dozen women pulling on a fan of ropes, and singing in a weird way, half drawing and twisting between each pull.”

more here.

Thomas Meaney at The Nation:

The account of democracy in Political Order is one piece of Dunn’s puzzle. Like Dunn, Fukuyama is concerned with the “pseudo-democratic authorization of almost everything in the United States.” His book is a remarkably levelheaded and empirically grounded account of how certain homegrown ideas about democracy in America have created daunting obstacles to effective governance. To his credit, Fukuyama has not written a new entry in the fashionable genre of American decline. Nor is he concerned with conservative critiques of American society and culture, which go back at least as far as Brooks Adams’s The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895). Instead, Fukuyama has tackled something more precise and disturbing: the political decay of American political institutions. In the 1960s, Samuel Huntington used the term “political decay” to explain political instability in many newly independent countries after World War II, but for Fukuyama the problem that once afflicted the international periphery now bedevils the core. Central to his argument is the assumption that the United States in particular has lost the balance between democratic oversight and bureaucratic capacity. The problem is not that there is too much bureaucracy, or too much state power, or anything resembling an imperial presidency, but rather that each of these institutions has deteriorated beyond recognition and suffers from a deficit of legitimacy.

As Fukuyama sees it, the American state, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, stopped running according to Madisonian principles, in which the disarray of interest groups was supposed to produce something recognizable as the public interest.

more here.

H. Allen Orr reviews David Sloan Wilson's Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others in the NYRB (illustration designed by Linley Sambourne and engraved by Joseph Swain, from Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, 1885):

David Sloan Wilson has focused on these twin biological problems for several decades. Wilson, the SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University, is widely regarded by biologists as a partisan in this debate. He has been the indefatigable champion of one particular theory, “multilevel selection,” for much of his career. This theory, it seems fair to say, has been a minority view among evolutionists. Ask one how altruism evolves and you are very unlikely to hear “by multilevel selection.”

But Wilson, who has written several books on evolution, does something unexpected in his new book. He announces that the problem of altruism has been definitively solved and that the levels-of-selection debate has been finally resolved. In fact it’s so resolved, he tells us, that it remains of interest only to historians of science. Does Altruism Exist?aims to present this “postresolution” view of how natural selection acts to the general reader.

As you might guess, Wilson’s own theory fares well in this postresolution view. Wilson thinks that multilevel selection (which I’ll explain below) not only accounts for altruism, it also provides a powerful way to think about, and even to help guide, the evolution of human social institutions like economies. The connection between how natural selection shapes the biological world and how human social institutions are arranged may not be obvious, but Wilson believes that the connection is both deep and important.

To begin at the end, Wilson’s answer to his titular question is yes, altruism exists. But getting to this answer requires some work. Wilson starts by distinguishing actions from thoughts. Thoughts, feelings, and rhetoric matter when it comes to altruism only insofar as they motivate actions that actually improve the welfare of a group. The actions that most matter are those that contribute to “group-level functional organization”: altruistic behavior by an individual can contribute to the smooth functioning of some group, whether an ant colony or a band of human hunters.

How can this smooth functioning of a group evolve? Wilson is certain that it’s not by selecting for the fittest individuals within a group, as the popular picture of natural selection would suggest. The reason is simple. Tradeoffs are the norm in life and when individuals act to further their own interests they generally don’t further the interests of the group. Indeed individuals can often do best by cheating, that is by shirking their group duties and looking out for numero uno.

More here.

Keith Gessen in the LRB:

It would be hard to imagine a less likely political martyr than Boris Nemtsov. He was loud, brash, boastful, vain and a tireless womaniser. My favourite story about him came from a Moscow journalist who once shared a cab with Nemtsov and a photographer whom he’d been wooing to no avail. It was late at night and he fell asleep. The photographer was the first to be dropped off, and Nemtsov suddenly woke up. ‘So what do you say?’ he asked. Receiving another no, he went back to sleep.

More here.

Erica Goode in the NYT:

Conservatives are happier than liberals, or so decades of surveys that ask about life satisfaction would suggest.

The existence of a so-called ideological happiness gap is so well established that recently social scientists have mostly tried to explain it.

But a new series of studies questions the gap itself, raising the possibility that although conservatives may report greater happiness than liberals, they are no more likely to act in ways that indicate that they really are happier.

“If it’s real happiness, it should show up in people’s behavior,” said Peter Ditto, a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of an article about the studies, which were led by Sean Wojcik, a doctoral candidate at the university.

“What our evidence suggests is that it’s limited to self-reports of subjective well-being,” Professor Ditto said. The article appears in the March 13 issueof the journal Science.

In fact, when behaviors rather than self-reports were examined, liberals seemed to have a small but statistically significant happiness edge.

The researchers examined two behaviors linked to happiness: smiling and using positive language. For their subject pool, they chose large groups whose political leanings could be identified with some reliability, including members of Congress and users of Twitter and LinkedIn.

One study analyzed the emotional content of more than 430 million words entered in the Congressional Record over 18 years. Liberal-leaning politicians, the researchers found, were more likely to use positive words and no more likely to use sad or negative words.

Political ideology in the study was defined by the speaker’s voting record or party affiliation.

The study also examined publicly available photographs of 533 members of Congress, finding that conservative politicians were less likely than liberals to display smiles involving facial muscles around the eyes, a measure that previous research has found to be associated with genuine emotion.

More here.

Troy Campbell and Justin Friesen in Scientific American:

“There was a scientific study that showed vaccines cause autism.”

“Actually, the researcher in that study lost his medical license, and overwhelming research since then has shown no linkbetween vaccines and autism.”

“Well, regardless, it’s still my personal right as a parent to make decisions for my child.”

Does that exchange sound familiar: a debate that starts with testable factual statements, but then, when the truth becomes inconvenient, the person takes a flight from facts.

As public debate rages about issues like immunization, Obamacare, and same-sex marriage, many people try to use science to bolster their arguments. And since it’s becoming easier to test and establish facts—whether in physics, psychology, or policy—many have wondered why bias and polarization have not been defeated. When people are confronted with facts, such as the well-established safety of immunization, why do these facts seem to have so little effect?

Our new research, recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, examined a slippery way by which people get away from facts that contradict their beliefs.

More here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

Researchers have changed the size of a handful of Florida ants by chemically modifying their DNA, rather than by changing its encoded information. The work is the latest advance from a field known as epigenetics and may help explain how the insects—despite their high degree of genetic similarity—grow into the different varieties of workers needed in a colony.

This discovery “takes the field leaps and bounds forward,” says entomologist Andrew Suarez of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who wasn’t connected to the study. “It’s providing a better understanding of how genes interact with the environment to generate diversity.”

Ant nests have division of labor down pat. The queen spends her time pumping out eggs, and the workers, which are genetically similar sisters, perform all the other jobs necessary to keep the colony thriving, such as tending the young, gathering food, and excavating tunnels. Workers in many ant species specialize even further, forming so-called subcastes that look different and have different roles. In Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus), for example, workers tend to fall into two groups. Minor workers, which can be less than 6 mm long, rear the young and forage for food. Major workers, which can be almost twice as long, use their large jaws to protect the colony from predators.

A team from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suspected that the mechanism involves DNA methylation: the addition of a chemical to DNA. Genome sequencing and other methods suggest that these physical differences don’t usually stem from genetic differences between individual ants. Instead, environmental factors help push workers to become majors or minors—specifically, the amount of food and coddling that young ants receive. But just how do these factors change the size of ants?

More here.