John Jeremiah Sullivan at Lapham's Quarterly:

The modern conversation on animal consciousness proceeds, with the rest of the Enlightenment, from the mind of René Descartes, whose take on animals was vividly (and approvingly) paraphrased by the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche: they “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” Descartes’ term for them was automata—windup toys, like the Renaissance protorobots he’d seen as a boy in the gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, “hydraulic statues” that moved and made music and even appeared to speak as they sprinkled the plants. This is how it was with animals, Descartes held. We look at them—they seem so full of depth, so like us, but it’s an illusion. Everything they do can be attached by causal chain to some process, some natural event. Picture two kittens next to each other, watching a cat toy fly around, their heads making precisely the same movements at precisely the same time, as if choreographed, two little fleshy machines made of nerves and electricity, obeying their mechanical mandate.

Descartes’ view drew immediate controversy. Writers such as the naturalist John Ray, in The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation(1691), protested on behalf of “the common sense of mankind” that if “beasts were automata or machines, they could have no sense, or perception of pleasure, or pain…which is contrary to the doleful significations they make when beaten, or tormented.”

more here.

Colin Dickey at The Quarterly Conversation:

Though his life was tragically cut short at the height of his creative powers, W. G. Sebald has been steadily churning out work since his death. Sebald’s posthumous publications have, by and large, followed a now-standard pattern: first were the works already or nearly finished and ready for print (On the Natural History of Destruction, After Nature), then the uncollected essays which offered polished, self-contained pieces (Campo Santo), then the book of interviews, along with the books of minor poetry for which he was not primarily known (Unrecounted, Across the Land and the Water). This last, released in 2012, would seem to have been the beginning of the end of this vast reserve—Sebald’s minor poetry is interesting at times, but far below the quality of his prose works or his masterful poetic work After Nature. Reaching the end of a finite supply, it would seem that the only place left to go would be to journals, fragments of essays, or other ephemera.

Instead, 2014 sees the release in the United States of A Place in the Country: a full prose work published originally in German in 1998, between The Rings of Saturn andAusterlitz—in other words, at the height of Sebald’s literary career. The book is a series of essays on five writers (Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, and Robert Walser) and one painter (Jan Peter Tripp), the product of what he describes, in the foreword, as an “unwavering affection for Hebel, Keller and Walser,” which in turn “gave me the idea that I should pay my respects to them before, perhaps, it may be too late.” A haunting phrase, given his death only three years after the book’s publication—but one that also accurately sums up the admiration and homage that runs through the book, a writer engaging with his forebears and tracing his own literary genealogy through the past two centuries.

more here.

A Coat

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

Willam Butler Yeats

Keith Gessen in The Guardian:

Grigory Rasputin was a Siberian peasant turned holy man with incredible charisma, bad teeth, questionable hygiene (he claimed that he once went six months without changing his underwear), and a strong animal odour – like a goat's (according to the French ambassador). He used these various attributes to ingratiate himself with the royal family of Russia and become, for about a year toward the end of the Romanov dynasty, the de facto power behind the throne. While doing all this he seduced thousands of women and still managed to get stone drunk several nights a week. It's an inspiring story, though it ends badly, and no wonder that the expatriated French actor Gérard Depardieu has played Rasputin in not one but two biopics in the last two years.

…Rasputin took advantage of the Russian tradition of the wandering peasant holy man, walking from village to village and reputed to have a direct connection with God (even Tolstoy, toward the end of his life, visited one). He also exploited the loneliness and isolation of the last Romanov couple, Nicholas and Alexandra – the tsar a polite, indecisive man and the tsarina a German-born and English-bred granddaughter of Queen Victoria (“The tsarina was as happy ordering chintzes from the latest Maples catalogue as she was cultivating mystics,” writes Welch), who never quite adjusted to Russian life or shed her accent (she communicated with Nicholas in English). And, finally, he made use of the vexed condition of the couple's son, Alexis, the heir to the Russian throne, who had inherited (from Queen Victoria) a terrible disease: haemophilia. Nicholas and Alexandra kept vigilant watch over the boy, employed two sharp-eyed sailors to accompany him everywhere and commandeered an army of doctors to try to make him well. None of them could do anything; as Welch points out, they may easily have done more harm than good, prescribing, for example, the new wonder drug aspirin, which we now know is an anti-coagulant, the exact opposite of what a haemophiliac needs. The disease was torture for both the boy and his mother. During bleeding episodes Alexis would suffer excruciating pain, and his mother, an empress but also, she knew, the carrier of the disease, would sit by him, helpless.

More here.

Erika Check Hayden in Nature:

Sequencing a person’s entire genome can reveal potentially life-saving information about the presence of mutations associated with diseases. But there are drawbacks — a study published this week finds that current sequencing technology does not always capture the complete genome, and illustrates the challenges of interpreting what the results mean for an individual patient¹. “There are many steps that have to be worked out to ensure that we gain the most health-care benefit,” says William Feero, a physician at the Maine Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency in Fairfield, Maine, who was not involved in the study. Researchers at Stanford University in California, examined whether a whole-genome scan could identify disease risks in healthy people — a use of the technology that is within financial reach as the cost of sequencing drops. The team of doctors, genetic counsellors and scientists report today in the Journal of the American Medical Association that it sequenced the whole genomes of 12 people with no diagnosed genetic diseases, looking for genetic mutations that might cause disease. Every patient was found to have 2–6 such mutations, and one woman found out that she carried a mutation in the gene BRCA1, which is linked to greater risk of ovarian and breast cancer. She opted to have her ovaries removed as a result.

But the researchers, led by cardiologists Euan Ashley and Thomas Quertermous, also found that between the two genome sequencing services they used — Illumina, based in San Diego, California, and Complete Genomics, based in Mountain View, California — 10–19% of genes known to be linked to disease were not adequately sequenced. So doctors might have missed finding harmful mutations in these genes. The two services also disagreed two-thirds of the time about the presence of a particularly worrisome type of mutation — the addition or deletion of parts of genes linked to disease. Deciding what these results meant for patients was not easy. The study clinicians often disagreed about what patients should do in light of the findings about their genomes — for instance, whether a particular mutation meant that the patient should undergo further testing.

More here.

John Kaag in Harper's:

Dozens of times over the past four years, I’ve made the drive from my home in Boston to a long-forgotten library in the middle of New Hampshire, accessible only by dirt road and hidden behind White Mountain pines. It once belonged to William Ernest Hocking, the last great idealist philosopher at Harvard, and though it contains irreplaceable volumes, it was known until recently only to a few of Hocking’s relatives and one very fastidious thief. And me.

I had come to Chocorua, New Hampshire, in 2009, to help plan a conference on William James. But I’m not a particularly dedicated philosopher and in general bore easily, so I soon found myself elsewhere: specifically, considering the virtues of theSchnecken at a German pastry shop. And this is where I found, browsing the scones, a man of ninety, wiry and sharp, who introduced himself as Bun Nickerson. Nickerson moved slowly, like most old philosophers do, but unlike most old philosophers his hobble wasn’t a function of longstanding inactivity. Instead, he explained, it was from farming and professional skiing.

I’m normally hesitant to say what I do for a living — “I teach philosophy” is often prelude to awkward silence — but Nickerson found my profession intriguing, because he’d grown up in a little house on a corner of a philosopher’s land. “Doctor Hocking’s land,” as he put it. Today, philosophers have arguments, office hours, books, articles, committee meetings, and the occasional student. Few of us have “land.” Nickerson made Hocking’s sound impressive and permanent, like the proper realm of a philosopher king: one stone manor house, six smaller summer cottages, two large barns, and one fishing pond with three beaver hutches, all situated on 400 acres of field and forest. Most seductively, Nickerson mentioned a library. Getting to see it struck me as a very good reason to skip out on my conference-planning responsibilities, so I climbed into Nickerson’s pickup and we bumped our way up the hill.

More here.

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis in Aeon:

What is music? There’s no end to the parade of philosophers who have wondered about this, but most of us feel confident saying: ‘I know it when I hear it.’ Still, judgments of musicality are notoriously malleable. That new club tune, obnoxious at first, might become toe-tappingly likeable after a few hearings. Put the most music-apathetic individual in a household where someone is rehearsing for a contemporary music recital and they will leave whistling Ligeti. The simple act of repetition can serve as a quasi-magical agent of musicalisation. Instead of asking: ‘What is music?’ we might have an easier time asking: ‘What do we hear as music?’ And a remarkably large part of the answer appears to be: ‘I know it when I hear it again.’

Psychologists have understood that people prefer things they’ve experienced before at least since Robert Zajonc first demonstrated the ‘mere exposure effect’ in the 1960s. It doesn’t matter whether those things are triangles or pictures or melodies; people report liking them more the second or third time around, even when they aren’t aware of any previous exposure. People seem to misattribute their increased perceptual fluency – their improved ability to process the triangle or the picture or the melody – not to the prior experience, but to some quality of the object itself. Instead of thinking: ‘I’ve seen that triangle before, that’s why I know it,’ they seem to think: ‘Gee, I like that triangle. It makes me feel clever.’ This effect extends to musical listening. But evidence has been accumulating that something more than the mere exposure effect governs the special role of repetition in music.

More here.

Goran Blix at nonsite:

It’s clear from Jameson’s latest book that a great deal remains to be said about the emergence and dissolution of the classical realist novel. Concepts like Auerbach’s mimesis and Bakhtin’s dialogism have hardly exhausted the problem, nor have more strictly historical accounts seeking to situate this hybrid form along a spectrum of modes and genres running from romance and epic to melodrama and modernism. Moreover, as Jameson recalls, discussions of realism sadly tend to get bogged down in narrow-minded aesthetic partisanship—realism, for or against?—as if the form could somehow intrinsically reinforce the dominant ideology through its apparent reification of existing reality, or, on the contrary, necessarily point toward the future by capturing the clashing forces working to undermine the status quo. Refreshingly, Jameson here tries to steer clear of any normative assessment and seeks to understand realism instead as a unique and fragile aesthetic constellation that flared up briefly within a larger dialectical movement, which then also ended up dissolving the form.

more here.

George O'Brien at The American Scholar:

The final years of the 17th century and the early years of the 18th were turbulent times in England. The fate of the crown itself seemed to be in the balance, as did those of other institutions, Parliament and the Church of England. Yet, oddly, this period is also known as the Augustan Age of English literature—oddly, because the label connotes classical balance and proportion. And indeed such qualities are to be found in the period’s architecture as well as in the heroic couplets of its most accomplished poet, Alexander Pope. But expressions of neoclassical order were hard won, and for an idea of the challenges and complications of this decisive period in the evolution of the British polity, the life and works of Jonathan Swift are a very good place to start. Swift is not just the author of Gulliver’s Travels, though that most original and very alarming treatise on human nature would have been enough to make his name. He was also the author of a good deal of commentary, much of it bitingly satirical, on the manners and methods of the public scene in which he himself was immersed, partly in hopes of preferment. The fact that when these hopes were dashed he turned out to be an Irish patriot is only one of the many paradoxes of a career and a personality in which balance, order, establishment, and affiliation were problematic categories.

more here.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. in AlterNet:

It has become almost a cliché to speak of Gaza, the Palestinian territories on the Mediterranean controlled by Hamas and blockaded by Israel, as the largest open-air prison on the planet. Yet I am not sure I will any longer agree with the limits of that characterization. The Palestinians are all in prison. While Gaza may be a maximum security facility, the West Bank is nevertheless a prison. So little is actually controlled by Palestinians despite the formal notion of autonomy. Israeli military incursions can and do happen at any time convenient for the Israeli government and its military occupation. Palestinians are prohibited from using certain roads. The ominous and illegal separation wall, better known as the apartheid wall, spreads like a disease across the land, dividing the Palestinians not as much from the Israelis as from their own land.

For all of that, it is the sense of permanent insecurity and maximum humiliation that reinforces the feeling one gets of being in a prison. There are checkpoints at seemingly every turn; one is subjected to being stopped at any time. There is an attitude of arrogance and contempt on the part of most of the Israeli military personnel. With their submachine guns and their insistence on using Hebrew in communicating with the Arabic-speaking Palestinians, they invade the space of the indigenous population, always reminding them that there is no such thing as privacy in the Occupied Territories.

More here.

Jordan Michael Smith in The Christian Science Monitor:

Okay, that last name might not be as familiar as the others. But the details of the crime are almost certainly known to you. In New York City in 1964, the 29-year-old Genovese was stabbed to death in three separate attacks as 38 neighbors watched and declined to get involved. At least, that is commonly reported version of the story. But Kevin Cook explains in his new book Kitty Genovese why this simplified version of the story is not the true one. Cook, a freelance journalist, has accessed for his book the detective’s reports of their preliminary interviews with Genovese’s neighbors. He found that, rather than including 38 eyewitnesses, the police log contained 38 entries. Writes Cook: “It was a roundup of interviews with many of Kitty’s neighbors, not a definitive accounting of anything.” Far fewer eyewitnesses actually existed, and those that did were generally fearful of getting involved, rather than indifferent to the woman. The popular figure of 38 resulted from a clerical error provided to the police chief, who passed it along to the New York Times reporter who made the case famous. It was a consequential mistake. The murder shocked Americans, who were horrified and baffled that so many onlookers refrained from intervening to assist the woman. The idea of 38 people so self-obsessed and alienated from their neighbors reflected the anxieties of many citizens, who saw rising crime, feared the Civil Rights Movement, and felt alone in an urbanized America.

CBS’s Mike Wallace narrated a segment on “The Apathetic Americans.” The murder spurred officials to create the 911 emergency-phone system. States created Good Samaritan laws. Victim-compensation laws, witness-assistance programs, neighborhood watch groups – the list of public policy changes that resulted from reaction to the case is extraordinary. Equally more remarkable has been the lasting influence the murder – particularly the false figure reported – has had in academia. One professor tells Cook that the murder is “the most-cited incident in social psychology literature until the September 11 attacks.” Cook manages to maintain an impressive level of tension in a book about a half-century old case about which everyone thinks they know the outcome. He assumes, surely correctly, that while many readers may have heard of the case, they don’t recall the specifics aside from the number of eyewitnesses. So he treats Genovese’s murder like something of a mystery – we may know that she was killed, but not why.

And who was Kitty Genovese, anyway? She was, in fact, a lesbian, a fact that likely would have drastically affected the public’s response to the crime, had it been reported at the time.

More here.

What Makes a Poem

.
The barley
and the manner of its malting
its standing up to the wind
its sprouting and drying
its gradual ripening

The water
and the manner of its flowing
traces of peat and mineral
its floral and honey notes

The mash tun
and the manner of the yeasting
where malt and water mix
starch turning to sugar
the draining of the wort

The still
and the manner of its tending
its shape—column or pot—
the ancient skill of the coppersmith

The cask
and the manner of its keeping
the flavors of the wood
the subtle art of the cooper
its tempering of sublimities

Time
and the manner of its passing
of its passing

The maltmaster
and the manner of his knowing
the manner of his loving
the grain, the water, the copper, the wood,
and the slow ferment of years.

.
David Solway

Albert Sun in The New York Times:

For years, health advocates have been telling us to move more. But just how much more? A multitude of activity tracking devices now promise to answer that question. Generally, these digital monitors, which can be worn around the wrist, on collars and belts, even as jewelry, record how and how much you move throughout the day. Some aim to do a great deal more. Makers of the devices have begun intensive campaigns aimed at convincing the large population of “worried well” consumers to get wired and start recording their every move. How well do these work? Curious about the benefits and limits, I’ve been testing as many different models as possible — wearing them day and night for six months, 11 models in all, sometimes four at once. I’ve learned a great deal about these gadgets. And about myself.

I’d thought I was a fairly active person: I bike to work most days and hit the gym or get other physical activity two or three times a week. The trackers, on the other hand, showed that aside from those spates of exercise, for the vast majority of each day I was completely sedentary. But that may not be the whole story. Activity trackers typically combine a wearable device with a website or smartphone app to view data collected about your movements. The goal is to measure not only your steps from the parking lot to your desk, but also your sedentary down time at work or in front of a television, bursts of intense exercise and even your sleep habits — all to create a complete picture of your most and least healthful behaviors. Some models also offer tips and set goals based on your data.

More here.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Can America Survive What Our 1% And Their Useful Idiots, The GOP And The Dems, Have Done To Us?
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Enduring Sharedom
3. Abandoned Footnotes: Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment
4. Another Amateur Economist: Walmart, Oligopoly and Community Economy
5. Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing: What’s the Matter with Artificial Intelligence?
6. Corey Robin: Jews Without Israel
7. Family Inequality: State of Utah falsely claims same-sex marriage ban makes married, man-woman parenting more likely
8. Forbes: How Putin Invented The New Authoritarianism
9. Huffington Post: Love in the Syrian Revolution
10. In Search of Enlightenment: Ottawa Talk on “Bridging the Gap”
11. Los Angeles Review of Books: I Am Malala : The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
12. Monkeypicked Aspie: Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky and Me
13. New Economic Perspectives: Bow down to the Bubble: Larry Summerian Endorses Bubbleonian Madness and Paul Krugman Embraces the Hansenian Stagnation Thesis
14. Open Democracy: A Cuban Diary
15. Oxford Human Rights Hub: Malaysia’s Dangerous Path Towards “Allah”
16. Pandaemonium: In Defense of Diversity
17. Religious Left Law: Hugo Chávez and Chavismo: The Venezuelan Transcendence of Neo-Liberalism
18. Save the Post Office: Betrayal without remedy: The unwinding of the Postal Service
19. Social Pulses: Democratic Austerity: Semi sovereign states, semi sovereign peoples
20. The Belgravia Dispatch: An Epidemic of Putin Derangement Syndrome
21. The New Yorker: The Trial of Pervez Musharraf
22. The Philosopher’s Beard: Britain’s sudden and bizarre resentment of migration
23. The Philosopher’s Stone: How to Do History
24. Unreported: The Poster Boy For Unending War
25. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Gramsci, Our Contemporary, Part II
26. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: History, Memory, and THE ACT OF KILLING
27. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: How American Studies Matter
28. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Not Everyone Wants to Hear Lee Atwater Sing the Blues
29. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Signs of the Times
30. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Thinking Like a Gramscian Historian: An Introduction, a Provocation, and Guide to the Basics
    
31. Whispers of Satan: Keeping Ukraine Together
32. XPostFactoid: What if the (Republican) dog catches the Obamacar(e)?

Alphabetical list of nominated blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Can America Survive What Our 1% And Their Useful Idiots, The GOP And The Dems, Have Done To Us?
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Enduring Sharedom
3. Abandoned Footnotes: Francisco Franco, Robust Action, and the Power of Non-Commitment
4. Another Amateur Economist: Walmart, Oligopoly and Community Economy
5. Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing: What’s the Matter with Artificial Intelligence?
6. Corey Robin: Jews Without Israel
7. Family Inequality: State of Utah falsely claims same-sex marriage ban makes married, man-woman parenting more likely
8. Forbes: How Putin Invented The New Authoritarianism
9. Huffington Post: Love in the Syrian Revolution
10. In Search of Enlightenment: Ottawa Talk on “Bridging the Gap”
11. Los Angeles Review of Books: I Am Malala : The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
12. Monkeypicked Aspie: Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky and Me
13. New Economic Perspectives: Bow down to the Bubble: Larry Summerian Endorses Bubbleonian Madness and Paul Krugman Embraces the Hansenian Stagnation Thesis
14. Open Democracy: A Cuban Diary
15. Oxford Human Rights Hub: Malaysia’s Dangerous Path Towards “Allah”
16. Pandaemonium: In Defense of Diversity
17. Religious Left Law: Hugo Chávez and Chavismo: The Venezuelan Transcendence of Neo-Liberalism
18. Save the Post Office: Betrayal without remedy: The unwinding of the Postal Service
19. Social Pulses: Democratic Austerity: Semi sovereign states, semi sovereign peoples
20. The Belgravia Dispatch: An Epidemic of Putin Derangement Syndrome
21. The New Yorker: The Trial of Pervez Musharraf
22. The Philosopher's Beard: Britain's sudden and bizarre resentment of migration
23. The Philosopher's Stone: How to Do History
24. Unreported: The Poster Boy For Unending War
25. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Gramsci, Our Contemporary, Part II
26. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: History, Memory, and THE ACT OF KILLING
27. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: How American Studies Matter
28. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Not Everyone Wants to Hear Lee Atwater Sing the Blues
29. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Signs of the Times
30. U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Thinking Like a Gramscian Historian: An Introduction, a Provocation, and Guide to the Basics
    
31. Whispers of Satan: Keeping Ukraine Together
32. XPostFactoid: What if the (Republican) dog catches the Obamacar(e)?

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Thank you.

Seo Young Deok. Nirvana 2, 2010.

More here and here.

Dan Kahan at the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School:

Pediatrics published (in “advance on-line” form)an important study yesterday on the effect of childhood-vaccine risk communication.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers including Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, both of whom have done excellent studies on public-health risk communication in the past.

NR et al. conducted an experiment in which they showed a large sample of U.S. parents with children age 17 or under communications on the risks and benefits of childhood vaccinations.

Exposure to the communications, they report, produced one or another perverse effect, including greater concern over vaccine risks and, among a segment of respondents with negative attitudes toward vaccines, a lower self-reported intent to vaccinate any “future child” for MMR (mumps, measles, rubella).

The media/internet reacted with considerable alarm: “Parents Less Likely to Vaccinate Kids After Hearing Government’s Safety Assurance”; “Trying To Convince Parents To Vaccinate Their Kids Just Makes The Problem Worse”; “Pro-vaccination efforts, debunking autism myths may be scaring wary parents from shots”. Etc.

Actually, I think this a serious misinterpretation of NR et al.

More here. [Thanks to Hugo Mercier.]