Sam Kean in Salon:

For most of recorded history, human beings situated the mind — and by extension the soul — not within the brain but within the heart. When preparing mummies for the afterlife, for instance, ancient Egyptian priests removed the heart in one piece and preserved it in a ceremonial jar; in contrast, they scraped out the brain through the nostrils with iron hooks, tossed it aside for animals, and filled the empty skull with sawdust or resin. (This wasn’t a snarky commentary on their politicians, either—they considered everyone’s brain useless.) Most Greek thinkers also elevated the heart to the body’s summa. Aristotle pointed out that the heart had thick vessels to shunt messages around, whereas the brain had wispy, effete wires. The heart furthermore sat in the body’s center, appropriate for a commander, while the brain sat in exile up top. The heart developed first in embryos, and it responded in sync with our emotions, pounding faster or slower, while the brain just sort of sat there. Ergo, the heart must house our highest faculties.

Meanwhile, though, some physicians had always had a different perspective on where the mind came from. They’d simply seen too many patients get beaned in the head and lose some higher faculty to think it all a coincidence. Doctors therefore began to promote a brain-centric view of human nature. And despite some heated debates over the centuries—especially about whether the brain had specialized regions or not—by the 1600s most learned men had enthroned the mind within the brain. A few brave scientists even began to search for that anatomical El Dorado: the exact seat of the soul within the brain.

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Ken Roth in Foreign Policy:

There is no denying Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's talent as a politician, or the considerable popular support he enjoys. But under this charismatic leader, Turkey is embarking on a dangerous experiment of undermining basic rights and the rule of law as constraints on majoritarian rule. As I saw on a recent visit to Turkey to meet with senior officials, a major corruption scandal has triggered Erdogan's worst autocratic reflexes, undermining the foundation of Turkey's democracy.

To give credit where due, Erdogan, during the 11-year rule of his Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), can boast of a booming economy and enormous political progress. The atrocity-ridden repression of a Kurdish insurgency has wound down, with talks under way to end the conflict and with growing respect for the cultural rights of the country's large Kurdish minority. Religious freedom for the Sunni majority has been enhanced: Bans on women wearing headscarves in public-service jobs and universities have been removed without imposing the religious puritanism of harsher forms of Islamic rule. Systematic torture in police custody has ended, though the police's use of excessive force remains a problem. Turkey is also being impressively generous to the estimated 700,000 refugees from the horrible atrocities being committed next door in Syria.

For several years, Turkey's hope of entering the European Union encouraged reform. But the opposition of some key EU states, articulated most clearly by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, undermined Turkey's accession hopes. The dashing of EU prospects slowed reform and contributed to some reversals, but it is only in the last year or so that Erdogan has begun to take major steps backward on basic rights.

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David Keys in The Independent:

More than five centuries after Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked in the Caribbean, archaeological investigators think they may have discovered the vessel’s long-lost remains – lying at the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Haiti. It’s likely to be one of the world’s most important underwater archaeological discoveries.

“All the geographical, underwater topography and archaeological evidence strongly suggests that this wreck is Columbus’ famous flagship, the Santa Maria,” said the leader of a recent reconnaissance expedition to the site, one of America’s top underwater archaeological investigators, Barry Clifford.

“The Haitian government has been extremely helpful – and we now need to continue working with them to carry out a detailed archaeological excavation of the wreck,” he said.

So far, Mr Clifford’s team has carried out purely non-invasive survey work at the site – measuring and photographing it.

Tentatively identifying the wreck as the Santa Maria has been made possible by quite separate discoveries made by other archaeologists in 2003 suggesting the probable location of Columbus’ fort relatively nearby. Armed with this new information about the location of the fort, Clifford was able to use data in Christopher Columbus’ diary to work out where the wreck should be.

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Slavoj Zizek at The London Review of Books:

What of the fate of the liberal-democratic capitalist European dream in Ukraine? It isn’t clear what awaits Ukraine within the EU. I’ve often mentioned a well-known joke from the last decade of the Soviet Union, but it couldn’t be more apposite. Rabinovitch, a Jew, wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: ‘Two reasons. The first is that I’m afraid the Communists will lose power in the Soviet Union, and the new power will put all the blame for the Communists’ crimes on us, the Jews.’ ‘But this is pure nonsense,’ the bureaucrat interrupts, ‘nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the Communists will last for ever!’ ‘Well,’ Rabinovitch replies, ‘that’s my second reason.’ Imagine the equivalent exchange between a Ukrainian and an EU administrator. The Ukrainian complains: ‘There are two reasons we are panicking here in Ukraine. First, we’re afraid that under Russian pressure the EU will abandon us and let our economy collapse.’ The EU administrator interrupts: ‘But you can trust us, we won’t abandon you. In fact, we’ll make sure we take charge of your country and tell you what to do!’ ‘Well,’ the Ukrainian replies, ‘that’s my second reason.’ The issue isn’t whether Ukraine is worthy of Europe, and good enough to enter the EU, but whether today’s Europe can meet the aspirations of the Ukrainians. If Ukraine ends up with a mixture of ethnic fundamentalism and liberal capitalism, with oligarchs pulling the strings, it will be as European as Russia (or Hungary) is today. (Too little attention is drawn to the role played by the various groups of oligarchs – the ‘pro-Russian’ ones and the ‘pro-Western’ ones – in the events in Ukraine.)

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James Wood at The New Yorker:

Rahman’s novel, astonishingly achieved for a first book, sometimes confesses its indebtedness to other novels. The example of Naipaul is never far away. Rahman leans fairly heavily on “The Great Gatsby”—the bland narrator, struggling to make sense of a lavishly talented enigma. Most obviously, particularly in the novel’s early pages, Rahman borrows from W. G. Sebald’s “Austerlitz.” In Sebald’s novel, a nameless narrator has a chance encounter with a talkative stranger. The two fall out of touch, and then meet many years later, again by chance. Austerlitz has discovered something about his origins—that he is Jewish, was born in Prague, and escaped the Holocaust by coming to England in the Kindertransport. He gradually tells this long story to his interlocutor, and so becomes the book’s true narrator. In Rahman’s novel—which carries an epigraph from “Austerlitz”—Zafar appears at the doorstep of his old friend one morning in 2008. The narrator hasn’t seen him for years, and doesn’t at first recognize him. He is “a brown-skinned man, haggard and gaunt, the ridges of his cheekbones set above an unkempt beard.” We later discover that he has spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. He lives at his friend’s house for more than three months, and the story he tells of his rise and fall—supplemented, so the narrator tells us, by extracts from Zafar’s notebooks—forms the bulk of the novel. (The many epigraphs, for instance, are supposedly taken from these idea-sown notebooks.)

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Margaret Drabble at The New Statesman:

On the surface, Twenty Thousand Leagues is an action-packed tale of adventure and exploration, precursor to and inspiration for Boy’s Ownclassics by British writers such as Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and John Buchan. In England Verne has been considered mainly a supreme storyteller. The very word “league” (both in English and in its French version) has a ring of the yarn or the tall story. Verne’s inventiveness of plot and boldness of characterisation are matched by a pleasure in daily details that bring his fantasies to life; he is particularly good, as perhaps a French writer should be, on food. Nemo is a gourmet, and Aronnax’s pleasure in the ingeniously contrived delicacies with which he is presented is delightfully portrayed: so is Ned Land’s hunger to get his teeth into a chop. The giraffe steaks and eland barbecues of Rider Haggard and the ham rolls, hard-boiled eggs and ginger beer of Enid Blyton pale in comparison to Captain Nemo’s fillets of emperor fish, soup of turtle, livers of dolphin and anemone jam. Ashore, Ned Land creates a feast of wood pigeons, wild boar, “rabbit kangaroos”, breadfruit and mangoes, a point at which Aronnax confesses that he has “become exactly like the Canadian. Here am I, in ecstasy at freshly grilled pork!”

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Justin Gillis and Kenneth Chang in The New York Times:

A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries. Global warming caused by the human-driven release of greenhouse gases has helped to destabilize the ice sheet, though other factors may also be involved, the scientists said. The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis. The only thing more frightening than what science has learned about climate change is the unanticipated consequences that we have yet to learn. “This is really happening,” Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research, said in an interview. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”

…The new finding appears to be the fulfillment of a prediction made in 1978 by an eminent glaciologist, John H. Mercer of the Ohio State University. He outlined the vulnerable nature of the West Antarctic ice sheet and warned that the rapid human-driven release of greenhouse gases posed “a threat of disaster.” He was assailed at the time, but in recent years, scientists have been watching with growing concern as events have unfolded in much the way Dr. Mercer predicted. (He died in 1987.)

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Architecture

I peer into Japanese characters
as into faraway buildings
cut from the mind’s trees.

In the late afternoon a small bird
shakes a branch, lets drop a white splash.

In the wind, in the rain,
the delicate wire cage glistens,
empty of suet.

Poetry’s not window-cleaning.
It breaks the glass.
.

by Chase Twichell
from The Snow Watcher
Copper Canyon Press, 1998

Nigel Cooke. I'm All Over It. 2010.

Oil on linen with sailcloth backing.

More here and here.

Thomas Wells in Aeon:

We already have a device with which to represent the wishes of past generations. Constitutions, the voices of our history, do not chain us to the past, for they can always be outvoted, but they do have a powerful influence on what our societies do now. We lack any such mechanism for considering the interests of future generations. And this is a trickier problem than might at first be obvious. Indeed, the very structure of reality seems to conspire against us.

While we might feel a sense of solidarity with past and future generations alike, time’s arrow means that we must relate to each other as members of a relay race team. This means that citizens downstream from us in time are doubly disadvantaged compared with the upstream generations. Our predecessors have imposed – unilaterally – the consequences of their political negotiations upon us: their economic regime, immigration policies, the national borders that they drew up. But they were also able to explain themselves to us, giving us not only the bare outcome of the US Constitution, for example, but also the records of the debates about the principles behind it, such as the Federalist Papers (1787-88). Such commentaries are a substantial source of our respect for our ancestors' achievements, beyond their status as a fait accompli.

By contrast, future generations must accept whatever we choose to bequeath them, and they have no way of informing us of their values.

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Former 3QD writer, Sam Kean, in Slate:

On Sept. 13, 1848, at around 4:30 p.m., the time of day when the mind might start wandering, a railroad foreman named Phineas Gage filled a drill hole with gunpowder and turned his head to check on his men. It was the last normal moment of his life.

Other victims in the annals of medicine are almost always referred to by initials or pseudonyms. Not Gage: His is the most famous name in neuroscience. How ironic, then, that we know so little else about the man—and that much of what we think we know, especially about his life unraveling after his accident, is probably bunk.

The Rutland and Burlington Railroad had hired Gage’s crew that fall to clear away some tough black rock near Cavendish, Vermont, and it considered Gage the best foreman around. Among other tasks, a foreman sprinkled gunpowder into blasting holes, and then tamped the powder down, gently, with an iron rod. This completed, an assistant poured in sand or clay, which got tamped down hard to confine the bang to a tiny space. Gage had specially commissioned his tamping iron from a blacksmith. Sleek like a javelin, it weighed 13¼ pounds and stretched 3 feet 7 inches long. (Gage stood 5-foot-6.) At its widest, the rod had a diameter of 1¼ inches, although the last foot—the part Gage held near his head when tamping—tapered to a point.

Gage’s crew members were loading some busted rock onto a cart, and they apparently distracted him. Accounts differ about what happened after Gage turned his head. One says Gage tried to tamp the gunpowder down with his head still turned, and scraped his iron against the side of the hole, creating a spark. Another says Gage’s assistant (perhaps also distracted) failed to pour the sand in, and when Gage turned back, he smashed the rod down hard, thinking he was packing inert material. Regardless, a spark shot out somewhere in the dark cavity, igniting the gunpowder, and the tamping iron rocketed upward.

The iron entered Gage’s head point-first, striking below the left cheekbone. It destroyed an upper molar, passed behind his left eye, and tore into the underbelly of his brain’s left frontal lobe. It then plowed through the top of his skull, exiting near the midline, just behind where his hairline started.

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From The Editorial:

From which surroundings do you pull for imagery?

The ocean. And more beachside resort town than fisher folk. I like bars. I like boardwalks. I like to eat the things that live in the ocean. That idea of pleasure-seeking—and also hurricanes—of the New Jersey Shore. Also, the allure and romance of New York: after the ocean, I'd probably say the images and atmosphere of New York and its neighborhoods: that somewhat distant but powerful allure of the metropolis is probably second.

When did you realize you were onto something and recognize that you had a role to play in greatly influencing and chronicling American culture as you have today?

I am proud of the Favorite Poem Project, with the videos and the Poetry Institute for K-12 teachers.

Verbs I may prefer somehow to “influence” and that I guess feel more like what I want to do than “chronicle” might be “see,” “hear,” “remember” “understand,” “make,” “foster,” “encourage,” “understand” and “teach.”

What public opinion would you most like to change?

Arts education, in our public schools— I wish I could foster that. In my judgment, poetry and music are not ornamental activities on the outskirts of human intelligence: they are at its core.

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Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in The Guardian:

When put on the spot and asked how we'd behave in a situation that pits a private benefit against the greater good, most of us won't admit to favouring the private benefit. But as history clearly shows, most people generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people, it just makes them human. But this can be frustrating if your ambitions are larger than simply securing some small private victory. Maybe you want to ease poverty, or make government work better, or persuade your company to pollute less, or just get your kids to stop fighting. How are you supposed to get everyone to pull in the same direction when they are all pulling primarily for themselves?

Most people think there is a “right” way to think about solving a given problem and a “wrong” way too. This inevitably leads to a lot of shouting – and a lot of unsolved problems. We'd like to bury the idea that there's a right way and a wrong way, a smart way and a foolish way. The modern world demands that we all think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally; that we think from a different angle, with a different set of muscles, with a different set of expectations; that we think with neither blind optimism nor sour scepticism. That we think – ahem – like a freak. Thinking like a freak involves three relatively simple, core ideas. 1. Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them – or, often, deciphering them – is the key to understanding a problem, and how it might be solved. 2. Knowing what to measure, and how to measure it, can make a complicated world less so. There is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction. 3. The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

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