Richard Friedman in The New York Times:

Ever hear the joke about the guy who dreams of winning the lottery? After years of desperate fantasizing, he cries out for God’s help. Down from heaven comes God’s advice: “Would you buy a ticket already?!” Clearly, this starry-eyed dreamer is, like so many of us, a believer in old-fashioned positive thinking: Find your dream, wish for it, and success will be yours. Not quite, according to Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University and the University of Hamburg, who uses this joke to illustrate the limitations of the power of positive thinking. In her smart, lucid book, “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation,” Dr. Oettingen critically re-examines positive thinking and give readers a more nuanced — and useful — understanding of motivation based on solid empirical evidence.

Conventional wisdom has it that dreams are supposed to excite us and inspire us to act. Putting this to the test, Dr. Oettingen recruits a group of undergraduate college students and randomly assigns them to two groups. She instructs the first group to fantasize that the coming week will be a knockout: good grades, great parties and the like; students in the second group are asked to record all their thoughts and daydreams about the coming week, good and bad. Strikingly, the students who were told to think positively felt far less energized and accomplished than those who were instructed to have a neutral fantasy. Blind optimism, it turns out, does not motivate people; instead, as Dr. Oettingen shows in a series of clever experiments, it creates a sense of relaxation complacency. It is as if in dreaming or fantasizing about something we want, our minds are tricked into believing we have attained the desired goal.

More here.

Huw Price has picked the three winners from the nine finalists:

1. Top Quark, $500: Grace Boey, Is applied ethics applicable enough? Acting and hedging under moral uncertainty
   
2. Strange Quark, $200: Ryan Simonelli, Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and Rorty’s Strange Looping Trick
   
3. Charm Quark, $100: Marcus Arvan, The Case for Libertarian Compatibilism
   

Here is what Professor Price had to say about them:

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (remember, you must claim the money within one month from today—just send me an email). And feel free, in fact we encourage you, to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Many thanks also, of course, to Huw Price for doing the final judging and for his liking of 3QD.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed by me, Carla Goller, and Sughra Raza. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Kay Sekimachi. Kunoyuki; c.1968.

Nylon monofilament; quadruple and tubular weaves.

More here and here.

In a current show at the ICA, Boston.

Iwan Rhys Morus in Aeon (image by SSPL/Getty):

Before the beginning of the 19th century, the future was only rarely portrayed as a very different place from the present. The social order, like the natural order, was supposed to be static, with everything in its proper place: as it had been, so it would be. When Sir Isaac Newton thought about the future, he worried about the exact date of Armageddon, not about how his science might change the world. Even Enlightenment revolutionaries usually argued that what they were doing was restoring the proper order of things, not creating a new world order.

It was only around the beginning of the 1800s, as new attitudes towards progress, shaped by the relationship between technology and society, started coming together, that people started thinking about the future as a different place, or an undiscovered country – an idea that seems so familiar to us now that we often forget how peculiar it actually is.

The new technology of electricity seemed to be made for futuristic speculation. At exhibition halls in London, such as the Adelaide Gallery or the Royal Polytechnic Institution, early Victorians could marvel at electrical engines that promised to transform travel. Inventors boasted that ‘half a barrel of blue vitriol [copper sulphate] and a hogshead or two of water, would send a ship from New York to Liverpool’. People went to these places to see the future made out of the present: when Edgar Allen Poe in 1844 set out to fool the New York Sun’s readers that a balloon flight had just made it across the Atlantic, he made sure to tell them that the equipment used had been ‘put in action at the Adelaide Gallery’.

Bringing the future home, Alfred Smee, then surgeon to the Bank of England, told readers of his Elements of Electro-Metallurgy (1841) how they would ‘enter a room by a door having finger plates of the most costly device, made by the agency of the electric fluid’. The walls would be ‘covered with engravings, printed from plates originally etched by galvanism’, and at dinner ‘the plates may have devices given by electrotype engravings, and his salt spoons gilt by the galvanic fluid’. It was becoming impossible to talk about electricity at all without talking about the future.

More here.

Jared Downing in Roads and Kingdoms:

Today, Fred Stockwell, a white-haired Englishman, is the only Westerner out on the landfill, patrolling the garbage in a dusty pickup. The squatters, migrants from Myanmar, just across the border, come out of their bamboo and steel shacks and make hand signs for the boots, batteries, and medicine stacked in the truck bed. Stockwell tells me last week a woman gave birth in the truck; the next morning he filled it with kids and drove them to school.

“No smile from you, huh?” Stockwell says to a man in rubber boots who pauses to scowl while rummaging the trash for recyclables. “He doesn’t like me because he didn’t get any rice the other day.” A group of volunteers from Australia had handed it out by the sack-full, but Stockwell got stuck with the blame for the villagers who missed out. He’s been growling about it all morning. “They’ll come in, throw out rice, throw something out, shoot photographs, lots of dirty kids. They want to see misery,” he sighs. “They ruin everything I’ve set up here.”

When he came to Thailand seven years ago, Stockwell’s community-based organization, Eyes to Myanmar, was the only one serving the roughly 400 migrant squatters settled on the mountain of trash. Decades of strife in Myanmar had already made the border city a philanthropic boomtown, but only in the last few years has the city’s landfill caught the attention of the smattering of NGOs, community-based organizations, religious ministries, and volunteer teams who come bearing rice, shoes, toys and, of course, their own cameras.

They all encounter Stockwell—or as they sometimes call him, the King of the Dump. The 70-year-old is a key figure in a philanthropic turf war that began when first newcomers planted their flags in the garbage. The trash heap a notorious graveyard of failed humanitarian projects.

Christina Jordan insists that Piglets for Progress, which supplied young pigs to village families, isn’t the dump’s latest causality, but it’s hard not to think of it that way. When she told her local consultant that the project wouldn’t continue, “He just sort of smiled and said, ‘They never do.’”

Read the rest here.

Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post:

The #CancelColbert kerfuffle earlier this year never seriously threatened either Colbert’s current job at Comedy Central or his move up the ladder to one of broadcast television’s prized late-night spots. But the incident, in which Colbert was criticized for a bit that invoked anti-Asian animus to mock Washington football team owner Dan Snyder’s attempts to buy off opposition to his team’s name, signaled a shift. “The Daily Show” (once Stewart arrived at the anchor’s desk) and “The Colbert Report” became hugely popular precisely because they were insurgent voices, aiming Rube Goldberg-style verbal slingshots at the George W. Bush administration, conservatives in Congress and on the Supreme Court, and emerging powerful right-wing donors such as the Koch brothers. Whatever differences existed on the left (or in the frustrated center), viewers could unite around the genius of a concept like “truthiness.” But as the Obama years have faded into frustration and obstructionism, the left has turned inward. #CancelColbert grew out of the idea that no matter how much Colbert had done to target racism on the right, he didn’t have standing to employ anti-Asian sentiment, even in jest and even in service of a larger point about the continuing cultural and material discrimination against Native Americans.

This is a difficult environment for a satirist of good will to operate under, though the turn toward sincerity has produced plenty of other pieces of great pop culture. One of the biggest hits of 2014 has been the breakout podcast sensation “Serial,” in which Sarah Koenig struggles to be fair in her assessment of an old murder case. In superhero movies, the wisecracks of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) have given way to the moral meditations of Captain America (Chris Evans) and the unabashed enthusiasm of Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who goes by the decidedly unselfconscious moniker Starlord. Lorde’s achingly direct album “Pure Heroine” continued to be a refuge from the wearisome posturing of rapper Iggy Azalea. And rather than be rendered irrelevant, Colbert is in a strong position to fit right in.

More here.

Mark Brown in The Guardian:

The Pakistan-born British poet Imtiaz Dharker has been awarded the Queen’s gold medal for poetry, joining an illustrious roll call that includes WH Auden, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Buckingham Palace announced on Wednesday that Dharker would be the 2014 recipient of a prestigious prize created in 1933 by George V at the suggestion of the then poet laureate John Masefield. The current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, selected this year’s committee “of eminent men and women of letters” who selected Dharker; chosen on the basis of her new collection, Over the Moon, and a lifetime’s contribution to poetry. Duffy paid tribute. “Whether Imtiaz Dharker writes of exile, childhood, politics or grief, her clear-eyed attention brings each subject dazzlingly into focus,” she said. “She makes it look easy, this clarity and economy, but it is her deft phrasing, wit and grace that create this immediacy.” Dharker was born in Lahore in 1954 and grew up in Glasgow as what she calls a “Muslim Calvinist” before eloping with an Indian Hindu to live in Bombay. She later moved to Britain when she married the late Simon Powell, the founder of Poetry Live! Duffy said Dharker drew together her three countries, Pakistan, Britain and India, to create “writing of the personal and the public with equal skill”.

…Mumbai? Kissmiss?

Of course! Who is not knowing this,

that after Happy Diwali comes Merry Kissmiss!

Impossible to miss, when allovermumbai,

Matharpacady to A to Z Market, rooftops

are dancing in chorus

and alloversky

is fully full with paper stars.

Hear! Horns are telling at midnight on every street,

Happy Happy Happy! We know very well

to make good festival, and Saint Santa is

our honoured guest in Taj Hotel.

We are not forgetting.

More here.

Murali Shanmugavelan in The Independent:

Booker Prize winner and activist-author Arundhati Roy was recently in London to launch her new book called The Doctor and the Saint, except, it’s not entirely her book.

Roy has written an introduction to the seminal text The Annihilation of Caste – a critique on Hinduism and caste, penned by the great Indian social reformist Dr B.R. Ambedkar. He wrote the piece for a lecture in 1936 which was not delivered: the upper caste organisers found the text too radical to ‘permit’ him to speak.

In March 2014, her book was launched in India triggering controversy. Roy, who is usually praised for her efforts in trying to represent the marginalised in her writing, found herself in an awkward position as well-known anti-caste activists and Dalit (formerly Untouchables) writers rejected her introduction. A popular YouTube Channel, Dalit Camera uploaded a series of interviews and critiques on Roy’s introduction, including an open letter to her. By August, an online media portal dedicated to anti-caste issues called Round Table India (RTI) had published several articles by a range of authors.

“We object to Roy’s text not because of her non-Dalit origin but due to her poor grasp of the seminal text and even shallower and sensational out-of-context introduction to the original text at risk of maligning Ambedkar” says Anu Ramdas, Editor of RTI.

Roy, in her introduction to The Annihilation of Caste, has described Ambedkar as being Anti-Adivasis (tribals) and pro-eugenics. “This is like calling Steve Biko a racist”, said Ravichandran, founder of Dalit Camera.

More here.

Sex

The one book where we never lose out place
spreads it's cover to a gooseflesh Braille.
We are bookmarks slipped into each other.
In that book, we read each night of a couple
who go without touching for hours on end;
then, the dishes put away, the toddler
powered down and set to charge for tomorrow,
they thumb a lock and make a greenhouse
where once there was a master bedroom.
Orchids push open the drawers. Honeybees
bother the reading lamp.
The carpet threads itself with grass
twitching higher in a sunset-sunrise time-lapse
as the house regresses to a forest,
the plumbing to brooks, the chandeliers to stars
and “mommy” and “daddy” to the first lovers ever
under a glazed glass dome the size of the sky,
no duty save sensation,
the scar from her Caesarian
his Tropic of Capricorn. At last the throbbing
vine that roped them flush to the bed
slink back into the box spring.
The greenhouse shatters into mist
to reveal a plaster ceiling. They pull apart,
fall open like the covers of a book,
their years together pressed, preserved,
petals they can place on their tongues.
.

by Amit Majmudar
from The New Republic, Jan. 30, 2013

Chris Mooney in the Washington Post:

“Moonbird,” they call him. Or sometimes, just “B95” — the number from the band on his leg. Moonbird is the most famous, charismatic member of a group of mid-sized shorebirds called Rufa red knots, whose numbers have plummeted so dramatically in the past several decades that they just became the first bird ever listed under the Endangered Species Act with climate change cited as a “primary threat.”

Rufa red knots are among the avian world's most extreme long range flyers (especially in light of their relatively small size). They travel vast distances — some flying over 18,000 miles — in the course of an annual migration that begins in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, and extends all the way up to the Canadian Arctic (and back again).

Which brings us to Moonbird's distinction: Because he is so old — he is at least 21 — he is believed to have flown as many as 400,000 miles in his lifetime. The distance to the moon varies, depending on where it is in its orbit, but the average distance is about 237,000 miles. Thus, Moonbird has not only flown the distance it takes to reach the moon — he has also covered the bulk of the return voyage.

We know Moonbird's age, explains nature writer Phillip Hoose (who has written an eponymous book about him), because he was originally banded in 1995. And even then, he was an adult bird, meaning he was at least 2 years old. Since then, the same bird, with the same tag, is still being spotted, most recently in May 2014 in New Jersey. That would make Moonbird at least 21 years old, a true Methuselah for his species.

More here.

Rebecca Bates at The Paris Review:

In a 1964 interview between The New Yorker’s Calvin Tomkins and Duchamp, the latter remarked, “The artist produces nothing until the onlooker has said, ‘You have produced something marvelous.’ The onlooker has the last word in it.”

This is also a tidy summary of Duchamp’s short lecture “The Creative Act,” given in Houston in 1957, in which he calls the artist a “mediumistic being,” one whose “decisions in the artistic execution of the work … cannot be translated into a self-analysis.” Analysis is the work of the spectator, who “brings the work in contact with the external world.” Posterity decides if an artist’s works are deserving enough of an extended solo show at the Whitney, or should be reprinted in every iteration of the Norton Anthology until the end of time. The “creative act” is a transaction between artist and onlooker, and in it, again, the onlooker has the last word.

This is literally true in Joe Milutis’s new conceptual project Marcel Duchamp’s The [Creative] Act, released last month via Gauss PDF. Milutis’s text is a free fourteen-page PDF file that takes Duchamp’s 1957 lecture and turns it into a sort-of Dadaist Mad Libs:

Millions of artists [verb]; only a few thousands are [passive verb] or [passive verb] by the [noun] and many less again are [passive verb] by [noun].

more here.

Alvin Powell in the Harvard Gazette:

Though the Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to find — far from it. “Out there” remains an open question, mostly.

Current models hold that the stuff we know about — ourselves, our cars, our houses, the solar system, interstellar dust, etc. — makes up just about 5 percent of the universe. A big chunk of the rest, 27 percent, is something called dark matter, whose gravitational effects astrophysicists see as they peer into the skies, but whose nature remains a mystery. The remainder — roughly 68 percent — is dark energy, about which scientists understand even less. (Chris Stubbs, the Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy, is one of the number who are on the case, albeit at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile rather than the LHC.)

Other mysteries include how gravity is related to the other three main forces in the universe: electromagnetism and the strong and weak forces that operate in the atomic nucleus. Today they’re explained by separate theories. A theorized particle, the graviton, that might carry the gravitational force, has never been seen. There’s also the question of whether supersymmetry — thought to include a whole new family of particles — is real. And then there’s the possibility that the Higgs boson hasn’t been fully described.

More here.

William Smith in Raseef22:

But while people may publically express their aversion and opposition to Internet pornography, their private viewing habits suggest something quite different. Put simply, porn is BIG in the Arab world. According toGoogle AdWords, the 22 Arab states account for over 10% of the world’s searches for “sex”; A total of 55.4 million unique monthly Google “sex” searchers in the 22 (ignoring a further 24 million searches for “sex” transliterated into Arabic) that matches both the United States and India, two countries often cited as world leaders in porn consumption.

What is even more striking is that, when these numbers are adjusted to reflect people’s ready access to the Internet (which ranges from 85% of the population in the UAE to just 1.4% in Somalia) Arab Google searches for “sex” outweigh those from almost anywhere else worldwide. As per AdWords, for every 100 Arab Internet users, an average of 52 searches are made each month, compared to 21 in the United States, 36 in India, 45 in France and 47 in Pakistan.

It also seems to be the case that viewing porn in the region is not simply big in absolute terms, but also relatively to all other things people search. Data obtained from the Internet analytics company Alexa shows that adult-themed sites account for seven of the 100 most visited websites in the US, a figure that is trumped by at least six Arab states – Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. Meanwhile, Google Trends, which shows how many searches for a particular keyword are made relative to all searches on Google, suggests that people in the region are more likely to search for “sex” than almost anywhere else in the world, with the exception of the Indian Sub-Continent.

More here.

Ali Minai in Brown Pundits:

Pankaj Mishra at The New York Times:

To this philosophical skepticism about modernity, Calasso has contributed a bracing genealogy of ideas, which transcends many contemporary conceits about literature and philosophy: Proust becomes a Vedic seer, and Prajapati, the Vedic deity of procreation, emerges as the predecessor of Kafka’s K in his form-defying books. Their ostensible range of subjects — from Talleyrand and Tiepolo to Greek and Indian myths — disguises a continuity of themes and preoccupations: the power and sovereignty of the mind and its relationship to the world, the basis of political and social order and the inescapable role of violence. He also has a reputation for mining arcane texts, which will no doubt be enhanced by his deployment in “Ardor” of the Satapatha Brahmana, a notoriously dense eighth-century B.C.E. commentary on Vedic rites.

Calasso uses it to range broadly on the Veda, its “self-sufficient, self-segregated world,” and “the rigor of its formal structure.” The Vedic Indians did not build great empires or monuments. Rather they sought an intense “state of awareness” that “became the pivot around which turned thousands and thousands of meticulously codified ritual acts.” Calasso is aware that most of his readers would regard the ritual of sacrifice as barbarous. But he sees in this contemporary recoiling an uneasy confession: that “this world of today is detached from and, at the same time, dependent on all that has preceded it.” Sacrifice was the means to acknowledge and contain violence through religious ritual and practice.

more here.