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.

More here.

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.

More here.

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.

More here.

Akhil Sharma in the Financial Times:

The idea that money reveals things that our words hide has been a part of me for as far back as I can remember. My mother tells a story of how, when my father was a child, his mother, my grandmother, cooked a dish with peas. Peas used to be meaningfully more expensive than other vegetables. This was in India in the 1940s and 1950s. My grandmother, who was a strange angry person, did not like my father as much as she did her youngest son and so she spooned the peas that were in my father’s portion of the dish and put them in my uncle’s.

My family came to America in 1979. I was eight then. To me the best thing about America was its vast wealth. Everything about the country screamed money: how people had cars; the fact that the buildings were tall; that stores turned on electric lights during the day. I remember how during one of our first days in America we opened our mailbox and found a shopping circular printed on coloured paper. We assumed this must have arrived by mistake because in India glossy paper was precious and could be sold for much more money to the recycler than newsprint. When we found it, we grabbed it and hurried back to our apartment.

There were four of us in our family: my parents, my older brother and me. Anup was four years older than I was. We didn’t have much money. I remember once going with Anup and my mother to buy a slice of pizza as a special treat and my mother asking the counter worker to cut the slice into three so we could share. My memories of those early years, though, are of an almost mad excitement. Everything was possible in America and that sense of possibility was like a constant roar. I used to wake in the middle of the night thinking of all the good things that were going to enter my life.

More here.

Robert Roten in Lariat.org:

“With a Friend Like Harry” is a complex psychological thriller about an old high school classmate who is more than a little strange. This French film with English subtitles is a little similar to some Hitchcock films like “Strangers on a Train.” It starts out with an average guy, Michel (Laurent Lucas), his wife and kids on a very unpleasant car trip on a very hot day. The kids are screaming in the back seat and one of the kids is repeatedly kicking the back of her father's seat while he is trying to concentrate on driving. There is no air conditioning in the car, and the car itself is making a lot of noise. Michel decides he's had enough and decides to go back home rather than continue on the trip to his parent's house. Then he meets an old high school classmate in a public rest room. Harry Ballestero (Sergi López) remembers Michel very vividly, but Michel has forgotten Harry altogether. It turns out that Harry is a big admirer of Michel's writings in some high school publications. He has even committed one of Michel's poems to memory. When he finds out that Michel has given up writing and he sees how family concerns are weighing on him, Harry decides to “help” Michel free himself from his worries and get back to writing. Harry and his girlfriend, Plum (Sophie Guillemin) stay at Michel's country home and Michel begins to learn more about Harry. He finds out that Harry is used to getting exactly what he wants, exactly when he wants it. He will do anything to get what he wants and he will not compromise. Harry is also rich, having inherited his father's estate, and can be quite generous. Harry buys a car to replace Michel's worn out vehicle. It is just part of Harry's plan to help Michel. Not all of Harry's plans are so benign.

The complexity of the plot has to do with the way Michel is changed by Harry.

More here. (Note: I will periodically post reviews of older films that I have recently enjoyed.)

Tom Barbash in The Rumpus:

Walter Kirn is one of those writers you read for the company of his mind. He is forever interesting, pointed, a literary bad-ass. If he was on a rival debate squad, I would run the other way. His range is capacious. He’s the author of five novels, a terrific story collection, a searing memoir,Lost In The Meritocracy, which lays to waste the myths about an Ivy League education. Two of his novels,Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, were made into excellent films, the latter nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture. He’s penned campaign coverage for The New Republic andGQ, driven the California Coast with Robert Downey, Jr. for a Rolling Stone cover story. And still he might be best known for his tough and intelligent book reviews over the years for New York Magazine and the New York Times Book Review.

Kirn’s latest book, Blood Will Out, is the story of an improbable acquaintanceship he shared with a man who called himself Clark Rockefeller, and who was convicted of murdering a man in Southern California. It’s a first-rate book about crime and class, identity, friendship, manipulation, and the difficult job of being a writer. It may well become a classic.

The Rumpus: One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the extent to which you explore your own role in the story, your desire for an adventure, and your self-described naïve acceptance of Clark’s mythology. When, in the course of writing the book, did you realize it would be in part about you? Or did you always intend to make it in part a memoir?

Walter Kirn: I always knew the book would largely be about me. It’s the anatomy of a con, and every deception is a dance, two-sided. Clark Rockefeller discerned in me—almost instantly, I have a hunch—a set of tendencies and vulnerabilities that allowed him to take me in. First, there was my social insecurity. I grew up in rural Minnesota and then went off to Princeton, where I didn’t feel I was treated very well. Being friends with a Rockefeller seemed to heal these wounds. Also, I’m a sucker for a good story, and he was a storyteller above all else.

More here.

Tom McKay in PolicyMic:

Civilization was pretty great while it lasted, wasn't it? Too bad it's not going to for much longer. According to a new study sponsored by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, we only have a few decades left before everything we know and hold dear collapses.

The report, written by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center along with a team of natural and social scientists, explains that modern civilization is doomed. And there's not just one particular group to blame, but the entire fundamental structure and nature of our society.

Analyzing five risk factors for societal collapse (population, climate, water, agriculture and energy), the report says that the sudden downfall of complicated societal structures can follow when these factors converge to form two important criteria. Motesharrei's report says that all societal collapses over the past 5,000 years have involved both “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity” and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor].” This “Elite” population restricts the flow of resources accessible to the “Masses”, accumulating a surplus for themselves that is high enough to strain natural resources. Eventually this situation will inevitably result in the destruction of society.

More here.

Ayad Akhtar in The New York Times:

Ten days after 9/11, self-professed “Texas loud, Texas proud” Mark Stroman walked into a Dallas mini-mart, pulled out a gun and asked the brown man working behind the counter where he was from. The hesitation in the clerk’s reply was enough to unleash Stroman’s hatred for Muslims, whom he referred to as people with “shawls on their face.” Stroman pulled the trigger, but his victim, Raisuddin Bhuiyan, an enterprising immigrant from Bangladesh — and a Muslim, indeed — would survive. The other two victims from the fortnight’s vigilante shooting spree, immigrants from India and Pakistan, would not. So begins Anand Giridharadas’s “The True American,” a richly detailed, affecting account of two men bound, as it turned out, by more than just an act of violence.

Bhuiyan’s misfortune served as an introduction to certain stark realities of American life: The day after being admitted to the hospital, he was asked to leave. The injury was serious, yes, but he was told he would be fine. What Bhuiyan didn’t know was that, without insurance, the hospital assessors saw bills mounting that weren’t going to be paid. They saw a “fledgling immigrant and gas station clerk,” Giridharadas writes, and assumed he wouldn’t be good for the money. One of the many satisfying twists of this trauma-filled book is that he would be. Another is the conclusion Bhuiyan comes to about American debt: that it “contradicted those attributes of the republic for which he had left” Bangladesh. In America, debt “bound you to history, and kept you who you were, and replaced the metaphor of the frontier with that of a treadmill.”

More here.

Samanth Subramanian at the New York Times:

The financial heart of India has long been Mumbai, but it is Delhi, increasingly, that seems to be driven by money, galvanized by it, besotted with it. Delhi is India’s capital. It is where the nation’s networks of crony capitalism converge, where money seeks license to earn more money. Delhi talks to itself about money — about what money can buy, about the cabinet minister pocketing kickbacks, about the suburban swatch of land that a lawyer’s untaxed, all-cash fee has purchased and, in near-reverential tones, about the ingenious and illegal ways more money can be made. This last subject, in particular, exercises the city’s soul enormously. Delhi is flatulent with greed.

When Rana Dasgupta moved to the city from New York in 2000, the reimagination of Delhi had just begun, and there was, he writes toward the beginning of “Capital,” a thrilling anticipation and a “utopian clamor” to the city’s first paddles into the global market economy. Even as Dasgupta watched, however, the transition went off-kilter: “The land grabs and corruption-as-usual that became so blatant in those later years, the extension of the power of elites at the cost of everyone else, the conversion of all that was slow, intimate and idiosyncratic into the fast, vast and generic — it made it difficult to dream of surprising futures any more.”

more here.

Fiona Sampson at The Guardian:

At more than 600 pages, this new selection from 15 collections over 65 years ofDerek Walcott's poetry is clearly no taster. But then Walcott is a generous writer in every sense. The expansive, celebratory texture of his verse is instantly recognisable. It moves with ease between city and country, between “the snow still falling in white words on Eighth Street” and the way “Sunshine […] stirs the splayed shadows of the hills like moths”.

This vivid engagement with the sensory world doesn't desert Walcott even in elegy, of which the later books include an increasing amount. In “For Oliver Jackman”, in White Egrets: “They're practising calypsos, / they're putting up and pulling down tents, vendors are slicing / the heads of coconuts around the Savannah, men /are leaning on, then leaping into pirogues.” Poets have long pointed out that life continues in the face of death: WH Auden in “Musée des Beaux Arts” among them. But few capture that life in such full and affirming detail.

Much of this detail draws on the landscape and life of Walcott's native St Lucia.

more here.

Lisa Jardine at The Financial Times:

Eleanor Marx joked that she had inherited her father’s nose but not his genius and, if she anticipated that it was her fate to be overshadowed by the author of Das Kapital, then she could only be proved correct. Yet contemporaries who knew her work as an activist, writer and translator would have protested nonetheless at the injustice. Now, in Rachel Holmes’ fine biography, we have all the evidence we need to revise this modest self-assessment.

Eleanor was born on January 16 1855 in a two-room garret in Dean Street, London, the sixth child of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen. Only two of her siblings survived into adulthood – her sisters Jenny and Laura, 11 and 10 years older than her, respectively. The eldest son, Edgar, died of tuberculosis 12 weeks after Eleanor’s birth and from that point her father seems to have invested all his hopes and affection in the family’s most recent arrival. He and Eleanor would be soulmates until his death in 1883.

more here.

Dalton Conley in Nautilus:

In 1973, Robert Trivers and Dan Willard put forth the hypothesis that the sex of offspring is not, in fact, a random draw. The argument was based on the fact that, in many mammal species where investments in offspring are high, females are a safer evolutionary bet than males.

That is, with few exceptions, a female who wants to have offspring can pretty much accomplish that—they just need to rope a male in for a few moments. In a competitive environment, females want to choose the “best” sperm to produce their offspring (in balance with the desire to have a father around who will contribute to the care of said offspring).

So when resources are scarce, or when a female’s health is not in tip-top shape, or when she is at the bottom of the hierarchy, she skews toward the safer investment: daughters. This has been shown in red deer, cows, and even our cousins, the Barbary macaques.¹ I say, she skews, because the general theory is that such sex selection is accomplished by signaling within the mother’s body that leads to the spontaneous abortion of male blastocysts (early embryos). A lower level of blood glucose tells the womb that things are not pretty out there…

We found that—contrary to prior studies, which failed to exclude non-biological children—sons, not daughters, made parents (of both sexes) more liberal and more likely to vote Democratic. Curiously, while daughters made parents more Republican, they also made them more pro-choice. When we dug deeper, we found that the only issues on which the gender of offspring affected parental opinion were related to sexuality. Other partisan debates—guns, foreign policy, taxes, immigration, welfare, and so on—were unaffected. And while daughters caused parents to adopt more conservative views toward sexuality, they paradoxically made them more pro-choice. Or perhaps it isn’t so paradoxical but really just rational: Given that the costs of teenage, premarital childbearing are disproportionately born by the mother, parents of girls might prefer a more chaste sexual landscape and yet also prefer abortion to be legal just in case.

Of course, it’s hard to know whether our sons and daughters are actually changing us through social interaction. Does a baby girl’s actions make Mom and Dad see the world in a new light? Or does she merely tip the scales in terms of incentives? For example, Abigail Weitzman, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, finds that across the less developed world bearing a daughter carries what she calls a “tax” that is borne by the mother. Mothers of first-born daughters are not only more likely to be abandoned or abused, they have to go to work at higher rates. Evidently, fathers want the mothers of their sons to stay home and raise them. But they aren’t willing to forsake additional family income in the case of nurturing daughters.

Read the rest here.

My Aunts

Always caught up in what they called
the practical side of life
(theory was for Plato),
up to their elbows in furniture, in bedding,
in cupboards and kitchen gardens,
they never neglected the lavender sachets
that turned a linen closet to a meadow.

The practical side of life,
like the Moon’s unlighted face,
didn’t lack for mysteries;
when Christmastime drew near,
life became pure praxis
and resided temporarily in hallways,
took refuge in suitcases and satchels.

And when somebody died–it happened
even in our family, alas–
my aunts, preoccupied
with death’s practical side,
forgot at last about the lavender,
whose frantic scent bloomed selflessly
beneath a heavy snow of sheets.
Don’t just do something, sit there.

And so I have, so I have,
the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without sound.

by Adam Zagajewski
from Without End: New and Selected Poems
translation: Clare Cavanaugh
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002

Corey Robin in Jacobin:

Nikhil Singh said that more than any other figure in the African American canon, Malcolm X is someone who everyone thinks they know. Clarence Thomas, I’ve discovered in the past six months, is also a figure who everyone thinks they know. In the interest of dispelling that expectation, which I suspect many of you share, I’d like to present five facts about Clarence Thomas that perhaps you didn’t know.

1. The first time Clarence Thomas went to Washington, DC, it was to protest the Vietnam War. The last time that Clarence Thomas attended a protest, as far as I can tell, it was to free Bobby Seale and Erikah Huggins.

2. Clarence Thomas does not believe in color-blindness: “I don’t think this society has ever been color-blind,” he said in 1985, in the third year of his tenure as head of the EEOC. “I grew up in Savannah, Ga., under segregation. It wasn’t color-blind and America is not color-blind today … Code words like ‘color-blind’ aren’t all that useful.” Or, as he told Juan Williams in 1987, “There is nothing you can do to get past black skin. I don’t care how educated you are, how good you are — you’ll never have the same contacts or opportunities, you’ll never be seen as equal to whites.”

3. When Clarence Thomas was in college he memorized the speeches of Malcolm X; two decades later, he could still recite them by heart. “I’ve been very partial to Malcolm X,” he told a libertarian magazine in 1987. “There is a lot of good in what he says.”

4. There’s a law review article about Clarence Thomas that’s called “Clarence X?: The Black Nationalist Behind Justice Thomas’s Constitutionalism.”

5. Clarence Thomas resents the fact that as a black man he’s not allowed to listen to Carole King.

Now, the truth is that there’s nothing all that surprising about the fact that Clarence Thomas is black and conservative. There’s a long tradition of black conservatism in this country. And from Edmund Burke to Ayn Rand, conservatism always and everywhere has been the work of outsiders, men and women who hail from the peripheries or margins of the national experience.

More here.