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John Gray in New Statesman:

There can be little doubt that Nietzsche is the most important figure in modern atheism, but you would never know it from reading the current crop of unbelievers, who rarely cite his arguments or even mention him. Today’s atheists cultivate a broad ignorance of the history of the ideas they fervently preach, and there are many reasons why they might prefer that the 19th-century German thinker be consigned to the memory hole. With few exceptions, contemporary atheists are earnest and militant liberals. Awkwardly, Nietzsche pointed out that liberal values derive from Jewish and Christian monotheism, and rejected these values for that very reason. There is no basis – whether in logic or history – for the prevailing notion that atheism and liberalism go together. Illustrating this fact, Nietzsche can only be an embarrassment for atheists today. Worse, they can’t help dimly suspecting they embody precisely the kind of pious freethinker that Nietzsche despised and mocked: loud in their mawkish reverence for humanity, and stridently censorious of any criticism of liberal hopes.

Against this background, it is refreshing that Peter Watson and Terry Eagleton take Nietzsche as the central reference point for their inquiries into the retreat of theism. For Watson, an accomplished intellectual historian, Nietzsche diagnosed the “nihilist predicament” in which the high-bourgeois civilisation that preceded the Great War unwittingly found itself. First published in 1882, Nietzsche’s dictum “God is dead” described a situation in which science (notably Darwinism) had revealed “a world with no inherent order or meaning”.

More here.

Invited In
.
God. . . interesting, keeping
bees in your kitchen . . . why
not I guess when you've got so
many flowers around . . . they
certainly make a warm sound,
I said a warm sound . . . well,
loud really, yes I'd love some
tea, where should I put my
coat? I wouldn't want to smother
any, you're sure they never
sting even when they crawl
on your bare arms like that? No,
I'm not afraid . . . smoothly,
move smoothly, I understand, it
feels like 90 degrees in here . . .
and busy of course, I guess you
never feel lonely with this going on,
you do? How could you? And your
goldfish! I've never seen tanks
used as room dividers. Is it
okay to walk right in the pool
like that? no, I can see it's
shallow, but wait till I take
off my shoes and socks. An odd
place to have your table all
the same. How many kinds of
flowers have you ah!
I think I stepped on a fish,
no, ah-ah-ah! it was just
caught between my toes, even
when they're in your hair
they don't sting? Just some
milk please. Lovely croissant.
And when the fish cluster
around our chairs like this?
of course, they expect crumbs,
I know, I know, smoothly, but
how can you sit still with them
nibbling your feet? I keep
thinking it's jazz on your
stereo, I said I keep thinking
you've got some fabulous jazz
on your stereo . . . god,
I'm in love with you.
.
by John Steffler

Oliver Morton in More Intelligent Life:

The idea that the Earth and Moon might be made of the same stuff seems sensible at first glance; compared with most objects in the solar system, they are remarkably near each other. In the 19th and early 20th centuries there were various theories that they were formed together and subsequently separated. Unfortunately such arguments had a problem. The conservation of angular momentum means that spinning things go slower when pushed apart, faster when closer together (this explains why ice skaters spin so fast when they tuck their elbows in). The Earth-Moon system has a great deal of angular momentum, so if its two parts had been joined when they were created they would have had to spin as fast as an ice skater turning into a drill bit and boring her way down through the rink.

Hence suggestions that the Moon was created elsewhere and captured by the Earth’s gravity. But once the Apollo programme had shown how chemically earthlike the moon was, they seemed implausible too. In 1974 scientists hit on a new idea: that a wandering planet the size of Mars had struck the Earth a glancing blow. This, they suggested, caused the cores of each body to merge and part of their rocky mantles to be thrown into orbit, where the molten mess eventually condensed into the Moon. The catastrophic arrival of the impactor explained both why Moon rocks look earthly and why the Earth-Moon system has a lot of angular momentum—if one skater grabs another’s outstretched arm as he passes, the two will be set a-spinning. It was a simple idea, but radical. And it had profound implications. The fact that the Earth has a big moon stops its axis from wobbling about too much—Mars, which has titchy moons, swings its poles around like a drunken drum majorette. A stable alignment of the poles may have kept the Earth’s climate stable too, and thus hospitable towards life. So an accidental collision in the early solar system could have been crucial to the emergence of complex life on Earth. We could be the result of a planetary fluke.

More here.

The voting round of our politics and social science 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. Forbes: How Putin Invented The New Authoritarianism
2. Pandaemonium: In Defense of Diversity
3. Open Democracy: A Cuban Diary
4. Abandoned Footnotes: Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment
5. The New Yorker: The Trial of Pervez Musharraf
6. The Philosopher's Beard: Britain's sudden and bizarre resentment of migration
7. 3 Quarks Daily: Enduring Sharedom
8. 3 Quarks Daily: Can America Survive What Our 1% And Their Useful Idiots, The GOP And The Dems, Have Done To Us?
9. Corey Robin: Jews Without Israel
10. Social Pulses: Democratic Austerity: Semi sovereign states, semi sovereign peoples
11. Los Angeles Review of Books: I Am Malala : The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
12. The Belgravia Dispatch: An Epidemic of Putin Derangement Syndrome
13. The Philosopher's Stone: How to Do History
14. Unreported: The Poster Boy For Unending War
15. Whispers of Satan: Keeping Ukraine Together
16. Another Amateur Economist: Walmart, Oligopoly and Community Economy
17. In Search of Enlightenment: Ottawa Talk on “Bridging the Gap”
18. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: How American Studies Matter
19. XPostFactoid: What if the (Republican) dog catches the Obamacar(e)?
20. Family Inequality: State of Utah falsely claims same-sex marriage ban makes married, man-woman parenting more likely

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 Mark Blyth for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here on this coming Monday.

A classic early piece from my dear friend Matt Power, who died earlier this week on assignment in Uganda. I attach a typical photo of Matt, which I can barely stand to look at right now. Matt smiled stupidly like this more often than probably anyone I've ever known.

The first time I went to New York, I took my girlfriend to visit Allen Ginsberg in his Lower East Side walkup. He was sick in bed with a blood clot in his lung. We were walking down 12th Street in the East Village to get to his apartment, and halfway between 1st and Avenue A, we came across a community garden. It was beautiful, growing from the ruins of a torn down tenement that still had structural elements left behind. The entrance to the garden was the building's original door frame, but the facade was gone, replaced by a wrought iron fence and rows of blooming rosebushes. A wall was grown over with morning glories, and a sink had found new life as a birdbath. There were winding paths under fruit trees and huge sunflowers nodding in the breeze. None of us had any idea that such a thing could exist amid the concrete swelter of a New York summer.

We went up to Ginsberg's apartment where he lay in bed, gaunt in blue pajamas, surrounded by piles of books and newspapers. He guided us by memory through his home, describing the artwork on the walls. “That Blake print is God giving life to Adam,” he said. “Notice that God has Adam's face and Adam has God's face. And that silk painting behind the veil, that's my girlfriend.” The veil hid a terrifying painting of a fanged Hindu deity. “It's Kali, the goddess of death.” He directed us to another silk painting. “That's the wheel of Samsara. Attachment to the illusion of existence. Everyone's trying to get to Heaven-the soldier realm by force, and those are the hungry ghosts with the distended stomachs. Only the bodhisattvas make it out, through enlightenment. It's love that keeps everyone else on the wheel.”

more here fron Heeb Magazine.

Louis B. Jones at Threepenny Review:

As for magic’s nonexistence in the world, I think I haven’t missed it. Maybe there was—there surely must have been—one afternoon in childhood when (getting out of a sugary Disney movie, emerging into an Illinois parking lot’s dirty old snow) a pang of loss, or of exile, gave me pause. But mostly I’m an uncomplaining citizen of a desolate world. It’s possible I’ve never properly mourned magic’s departure, or grieved it. Because magic: what a wonderful life ingredient to have to forswear, to renounce and call tawdry!

If I’m able to be so peaceful in my disillusionment, the reason must be that I still do believe in magic, deep in the nerves and tissues, where all assumptions lie. Of course I know that the flourish of the playing-cards over the green baize will have seeded one faker in the fifty-two. I know the lady doesn’t really get sawn in half, and, moreover, I wonder if, after the show, she might be faced with the professional dilemma of whether as hired assistant she’d be a bad sport if she declined the invitation to visit the tuxedoed wizard’s dressing room for a drink, or a joint, and for whatever is supposed to ensue. That the great athletes are on steroids, that the spoon didn’t really bend, that the yogis on YouTube aren’t really levitating, that the gentle Galilean didn’t, on the third day, rise again, yes, yes, we all know what to mistrust. But, deep at an unexaminable level of muscle-memory, I still move and behave with a Master-of-the-Universe assurance.

more here.

Bee Wilson at The London Review of Books:

Vegetarians themselves often argue that they make us feel uncomfortable because their existence is a reminder of the cruelty and carnage that the rest of us refuse to see; there’s probably some truth in this. But I suspect that the root of our hostility is more basic. It isn’t so much that they remind us of the slaughterhouse – meat itself does a pretty effective job there – as that they make a mockery of our unthinking preferences. What we’re protecting when we ridicule vegetarians isn’t our own ignorance about the way meat is produced – however it’s done, killing animals for food isn’t nice – but our taste for it: the smell of sausages sizzling in a pan, the charred umami crust of a good steak, the pink tender pieces of a rack of lamb. Meat tastes good, ergo vegetarians must be idiots.

It sounds a little selfish, though, to say that we’re prepared to squander the world’s resources and see animals die to satisfy our taste for savoury dinners, so we think up other excuses. We say we eat only small quantities or only free-range and ‘happy meat’ (unless we are buying take-out curry or a sandwich, when different moral rules seem to apply). We talk of ‘cuisine’ or ‘tradition’ or how it’s ‘in our nature’ as human omnivores to eat meat. When all else fails, we invoke what nutritionists call ‘the wisdom of the body’: we’d be happy to go vegetarian, if only our bodies weren’t telling us they needed meaty replenishment.

more here.

David Masciotra at The Daily Beast:

Twenty-first century philistines, suffering from a lack of imagination and curiosity, have seized upon understandable economic anxieties since the financial crash of 2008, to shepherd an increasingly large flock of American sheep into the livestock freight carrier Pulitzer prize winning historian, Richard Hofstadter, called “anti-intellectualism.”

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life—one of Hofstadter’s best, among many great books – was a pile of dynamite in 1963, when it was first published and blew a sizable hole in the house of America’s self-comforting delusions of intellectual superiority. In 2014, one can only hope that some of its initial blast still reverberates, as media commentators, university administrators, and even the President, have exposed themselves as adherents to what Hofstadter indicted as the “lowest common denominator criterion” of thought and “technician conformity” of lifestyle. Suspicion, and often outright hatred, of ideas is making American culture as riveting as oatmeal. By reading Hofstadter, one learns that the resurgence of a new anti-intellectualism isn’t new, at all. In fact, Hofstadter identified the particularly poisonous strain of the virus that now infects the American mind and kills the imagination.

More here.

Caroline Perry at the website of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences:

When the sun sets on a remote desert outpost and solar panels shut down, what energy source will provide power through the night? A battery, perhaps, or an old diesel generator? Perhaps something strange and new.

Physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) envision a device that would harvest energy from Earth’s infrared emissions into outer space.

Heated by the sun, our planet is warm compared to the frigid vacuum beyond. Thanks to recent technological advances, the researchers say, that heat imbalance could soon be transformed into direct-current (DC) power, taking advantage of a vast and untapped energy source.

Their analysis of the thermodynamics, practical concerns, and technological requirements will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s not at all obvious, at first, how you would generate DC power by emitting infrared light in free space toward the cold,” says principal investigator Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at Harvard SEAS. “To generate power by emitting, not by absorbing light, that’s weird. It makes sense physically once you think about it, but it’s highly counterintuitive. We’re talking about the use of physics at the nanoscale for a completely new application.”

More here.

Hugh Eakin in the New York Review of Books:

Rarely has an event framed around books and ideas felt so urgent. A few weekends ago, a group of writers, artists, and editors gathered in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s Punjab heartland, to defend the written word. People turned up from every part of the country to hear them—Karachi and Islamabad, but also Balochistan and the remote tribal regions along the Afghan frontier. Sometimes filling the aisles and stairways of the three venues where the gathering was held, they listened to debates on everything from the future of the novel to the future of Pakistan.

In an age in which international literary festivals have become commonplace, there is very little ordinary about the Lahore LitFest, starting with the location. “PK! What are you doing there?” a US immigration official wondered, when I set out from New York. My barber asked me if I had a bullet-proof vest. Even in the Middle East, in places that have plenty of tension of their own, a Pakistani destination seems to raise red flags. “It would be a shame if you got yourself kidnapped,” an Arab journalist who covers political unrest told me, during a visit to the Arabian Peninsula two days before my journey on to Lahore.

To anyone who has actually been there, such reactions may seem grossly unfair. With a sizable liberal elite, a strong tradition in publishing and the arts, and an old city filled with extraordinary Mughal architecture, Lahore arguably has more in common with the leading cities of India and Europe than with the dark image of Pakistan shown almost daily in the news.

More here.

Chris Knapp in The Paris Review:

Among the central occupations of Fellini’s work is what he wants from the women in his life. Near the end of 8½, his alter ego speaks of a kind of Ideal Woman:“She’s beautiful … young, yet ancient … child, yet already woman. Authentic, complete. It’s obvious she could be his salvation.” Between the breathy declaiming and 8½’s famouslayers of metafiction, you get the idea that even Fellini sees this isn’t exactly a healthy attitude. Still, throughout his work, the search for an ideal of womanhood is represented in a series of large and buxom temptresses: Anita Ekberg, Sandra Milo, Eddra Gale in an especially memorable dance sequence as La Saraghina. But pulling his films off the shelf one by one, my wife and I agreed the problem was most nearly solved, onscreen and in life, by his wife and best collaborator, the tiny and brilliant Guilietta Masina.

…Maybe it’s all married people who wonder how anyone ever finds each other. Giulietta Masina met her husband in the role of Pallina, in a radio serial he’d written about newlyweds; he didn’t visit the studio, but based on the sound of her voice when the serial aired, Fellini invited her to lunch in a fancy district of Rome. This was early spring. She was enrolled at La Sapienza and she was accustomed to coffee dates with broke fellow students—she brought along extra money in case he came up short, and ordered nothing but minestrone, while Fellini himself ate ravioli and ham. It was 1943—the war, Fellini said later, “made everything more urgent”—and by October they were married, in a secret ceremony in her aunt’s apartment, where he was soon installed, hiding indoors in the daytime to avoid the ubiquitous German patrols rounding up boys his age for service or labor. Fellini was twenty-three and Masina was twenty-two. In Fellini’s estimation, “Giulietta was really older, because she was more mature and better educated. She came from a more sophisticated background.” Still, he called her Lo Spippolo: a small, tender thing.

…Gelsomina was the role that made Masina’s career, and La Strada was the film that made Fellini’s. Of all the parts he wrote for her, Fellini said, “the character of Gelsomina is the one I most based on the character of Giulietta.” It’s easy to take the claim the wrong way: Gelsomina is childlike to the point of deficiency. And some of her expressive habits are in fact based on pictures Fellini had seen of Masina at eight or ten years old. But it was the woman he shared his life with that inspired him: “As a person, she was still that sheltered girl who looked with awe at the mysteries of life … She was open to finding delights, her own nature remained young, innocent and trusting.”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Before I left the house this morning, I let the cat out and started the dishwasher. Or was that yesterday? Very often, our memories must distinguish not just what happened and where, but when an event occurred—and what came before and after. New research from the University of California, Davis, Center for Neuroscience shows that a part of the brain called the hippocampus stores memories by their “temporal context”—what happened before, and what came after. “We need to remember not just what happened, but when,” said graduate student Liang-Tien (Frank) Hsieh, first author on the paper published March 5 in the journal Neuron. The hippocampus is thought to be involved in forming memories. But it's not clear whether the hippocampus stores representations of specific objects, or if it represents them in context. Hsieh and Charan Ranganath, professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Neuroscience, looked for hippocampus activity linked to particular memories. First, they showed volunteers a series of pictures of animals and objects. Then they scanned the volunteers' brains as they showed them the same series again, with questions such as, “is this alive?” or “does this generate heat?” The questions prompted the volunteers to search their memories for information. When the images were shown in the same sequence as before, the volunteers could anticipate the next image, making for a faster response. From brain scans of the hippocampus as the volunteers were answering questions, Hsieh and Ranganath could identify patterns of activity specific to each image. But when they showed the volunteers the same images in a different sequence, they got different patterns of activity.

In other words, the coding of the memory in the hippocampus was dependent on its context, not just on content. “It turns out that when you take the image out of sequence, the pattern disappears,” Ranganath said. “For the hippocampus, context is critical, not content, and it's fairly unique in how it pulls things together.” Other parts of the brain store memories of objects that are independent of their context, Ranganath noted. “For patients with memory problems this is a big deal,” Ranganath said. “It's not just something that's useful in understanding healthy memory, but allows us to understand and intervene in memory problems.”

More here.

August

low red
back
hawk
circling
slow
swings
wide
rides
the
sharp
bend
of an
altius
river
above
my
corn
field
thin
whisper
of cloud
hot
day
swim
ming
in warm
water
i'm
so
afraid
of
dying
alone

by Jim Bell
from Landing Amazed
Lily Pool Press, 2012
.

Eric Schlosser in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

The Mark 36 was a second-generation hydrogen bomb. It weighed about half as much as the early thermonuclears—but 10 times more than the new, sealed-pit bombs that would soon be mass-produced for SAC [the Strategic Air Command]. It was a transitional weapon, mixing old technologies with new, featuring thermal batteries, a removable core, and a contact fuze for use against underground targets. The nose of the bomb contained piezoelectric crystals, and when the nose hit the ground, the crystals deformed, sending a signal to the X-unit, firing the detonators, and digging a very deep hole. The bomb had a yield of about 10 megatons. It was one of America’s most powerful weapons.

A B-47 bomber was taxiing down the runway at a SAC base in Sidi Slimane, Morocco, on January 31, 1958. The plane was on ground alert, practicing runway maneuvers, cocked but forbidden to take off. It carried a single Mark 36 bomb. To make the drill feel as realistic as possible, a nuclear core had been placed in the bomb’s in-flight insertion mechanism. When the B-47 reached a speed of about 20 miles an hour, one of the rear tires blew out. A fire started in the wheel well and quickly spread to the fuselage. The crew escaped without injury, but the plane split in two, completely engulfed in flames. Firefighters sprayed the burning wreckage for 10 minutes—long past the time factor of the Mark 36—then withdrew. The flames reached the bomb, and the commanding general at Sidi Slimane ordered that the base be evacuated immediately. Cars full of airmen and their families sped into the Moroccan desert, fearing a nuclear disaster.

More here.

And another 3QD friend also died yesterday. He too will be missed. This is Matthew Rosenberg in the New York Times:

Two men shot a Swedish reporter on a crowded street in Kabul on Tuesday, in a rare assassination-style killing of a Westerner that raised new questions about the safety of the large international presence expected to remain here after American-led combat forces depart this year.

The reporter, Nils Horner, 51, a longtime foreign correspondent for Swedish Radio, was shot two blocks from the wreckage of a restaurant where suicide attackers killed 21 people, most of them foreigners, in January. Col. Najibullah Samsour, a senior police official, said that Mr. Horner was standing outside another restaurant talking to security guards when a pair of men in what was described as traditional clothing walked up.

One of the men then drew a pistol and fired a shot into the journalist’s face, Colonel Samsour said. The men fled, and no arrests had been made by day’s end. A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahid, denied that the group was involved, and no claim of responsibility was reported.

Another Afghan security official said the killer’s pistol was fitted with a silencer.

The daylight attack was the first time in years that a Westerner appeared to have been specifically targeted and killed in Kabul.

More here.

3QD friend Matthew Power died yesterday. He will be missed. This is Noam Cohen in the New York Times:

Matthew Power, a celebrated journalist whose writing took readers down the Mississippi with modern-day hobos, to the scenes of international disasters and inside the Lower East Side apartment where Allen Ginsberg spent his last days, died on Monday in Uganda. He was 39.

He was reporting on an explorer who is walking the length of the Nile when he was overcome by the heat and died, presumably of heatstroke, his wife, Jessica Benko, said.

A contributing writer at Harper’s Magazine, Mr. Power also wrote for other publications, including GQ, The New York Times and Men’s Journal, which had sent him to Uganda. His articles were in annual anthologies like “Best American Travel Writing” and “Best American Spiritual Writing,” and he was a three-time finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in international reporting.

For two Harper’s articles he visited the scene of incidents abroad that captured the attention of most Americans only briefly: the destruction of Buddha statues by the Taliban in 2000, and the collapse of a mammoth garbage dump in Quezon City, the Philippines, during heavy rains, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people living in shanties nearby.

More here. Harper's Magazine has made all his writings for them available for free here.

Adam Plunkett at Poetry Magazine:

It’s hard to shake the feeling, after reading the first volume of Robert Frost’s letters, recently published by Harvard University Press, of having come to know him somehow less than you would have after reading just the poems from those years. How could this be? Factually invaluable, the letters show much of Frost’s tortuous road from ambition to accomplishment, from newspaperman, factory worker, two-time Ivy League dropout, and middling poultryman to transatlantically acclaimed nature poet. But the more you learn about his personal life, the more it can obscure his inner life. You begin to lose him as the man becomes mannered, the private man becomes a public man, and his privacy retains its intimate vulnerability almost only in his very public poems.

Take, for example, “The Road Not Taken,” a poem written during the early excitement of his fame. Frost read it at the Phi Beta Kappa induction at Tufts in 1915, in what was likely the first of countless ingenuous ceremonial botchings of the deeply vexed and mischievous poem, only to complain to his dear friend Edward Thomasthat no one had gotten the joke. The last stanza (“the sigh”) “was a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing,” he wrote. “I doubt if I wasnt [sic] taken pretty seriously. Mea culpa.”

And yet even this admission, written in earnest to Frost’s closest friend, obscures as much as it reveals.

more here.