Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

“Could switching to Geico really save you 15 percent or more on car insurance? Was Abe Lincoln honest?” So intones the Geico commercial spokesperson, followed by faux vintage film footage of Mary Lincoln asking her husband, “Does this dress make my backside look big?” Honest Abe squirms and shifts, then hesitates and, while holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart, finally mutters, “Perhaps a bit,” causing his wife to spin on her heels and exit in a huff.

The humor works because we recognize the question as a disguised request for a compliment or as a test of our love and loyalty. According to neuroscientist Sam Harris in his 2013 book Lying (Four Elephants Press), however, even in such a scenario we should always tell the truth: “By lying, we deny our friends access to reality—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate. Our friends may act on our falsehoods, or fail to solve problems that could have been solved only on the basis of good information.” Maybe Mary's dressmaker is incompetent, or maybe Mary actually could stand to lose some weight, which would make her healthier and happier. Moreover, Harris says, little white lies often lead to big black lies: “Very soon, you may find yourself behaving as most people do quite effortlessly: shading the truth, or even lying outright, without thinking about it. The price is too high.” A practical solution is to think of a way to tell the truth with tact. As Harris notes, research shows that “all forms of lying—including white lies meant to spare the feelings of others—are associated with poorer-quality relationships.”

More here.

Roger Waters of Pink Floyd in Salon:

Seventy years ago, my father – 2nd Lt. Eric Fletcher Waters – died in Italy fighting the Nazis. He was a committed pacifist, and a conscientious objector at the start of the war, but as Hitler’s crimes spread across Europe, he swapped the ambulance he had driven through the London blitz for a tin hat and a commission in the Royal Fusiliers and he joined the fight against fascism. He was killed near Aprilia in the battle for the Anzio Bridgehead on Feb. 18, 1944. My mother – Mary Duncan Waters – spent the rest of her life politically active, striving always to ensure that her children, and everyone else’s children, had no Sword of Damocles in the form of the despised Nazi Creed or any other despicable creed hanging over their heads.

Last month, thanks to the good people of Aprilia and Anzio, I was able to pay tribute to the father I never knew by unveiling a memorial in the town where he died and laying a wreath to honor him, and all the other fallen. Losing my father before I ever knew him and being brought up by a single, working mother who fought tirelessly for equality and justice colored my life in far-reaching ways and has driven all my work. And, at this point in my journey, I like to think that I pay tribute to both my parents each time I speak out in support of any beleaguered people denied the freedom and justice that I believe all of us deserve.

After visiting Israel in 2005 and the West Bank the following year, I was deeply moved and concerned by what I saw, and determined to add my voice to those searching for an equitable and lawful solution to the problem – for both Palestinians and Jews.

Given my upbringing, I really had no choice.

More here.

Sean Carroll in the New York Times:

Nothing makes scientists happier than an experimental result that completely contradicts a widely accepted theory. The scientists who first invented the theory might not be tickled, but their colleagues will be overjoyed. Science progresses when a good theory is superseded by an even better theory, and the most direct route to building a better theory is to be confronted by data that simply don’t fit the old one.

Nature is not always so kind, however. Fields like particle physics and cosmology sometimes include good theories that fit all the data but nevertheless seem unsatisfying to us. The Hot Big Bang model, for example, which posits that the early universe was hot, dense, and rapidly expanding, is an excellent fit to cosmological data. But it starts by assuming that the distribution of matter began in an incredibly smooth configuration, distributed nearly homogeneously through space. That state of affairs appears to be extremely unnatural. Of all the ways matter could have been distributed, the overwhelming majority are wildly lumpy, with dramatically different densities from place to place. The initial conditions of the universe seem uncanny, or “finely tuned,” not at all as if they were set at random.

Faced with theories that fit all the data but seem unnatural, one can certainly shrug and say, “Maybe that’s just the way it is.” But most physicists take the attitude that almost none of our current models are exactly correct; our best ideas are still approximations to the underlying reality. In that case, apparent fine-tunings can be taken as potential clues that might prod us into building better theories.

More here.

Carl Wilson at Bookforum:

As you can learn from Holly George-Warren’s new biography of Chilton, A Man Called Destruction—as well as previous accounts such as Rob Jovanovic’s 2004 book Big Star, Robert Gordon’s 1995 It Came from Memphis, and Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s recent documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me—the bizarre part of all this worship is that, even in its own brief heyday, Big Star as a band hardly existed.

The group seldom toured outside its Memphis home base and even there rarely played live. The blend of hubris and self-deprecation coded in its name (lifted from a local grocery-store chain) and in the title of its first album, #1 Record, extended to the conceit that it could function mainly as a studio band. Its members camped out all hours of day and night in the Ardent Records building in Memphis, precision tooling—and later precision demolishing—gems of rhythm and melody and attitude. Today we’d call its music “power pop,” but that phrase wasn’t in vogue at the time, when the band mainly seemed like an unfashionable throwback to the Beatles and Stones and Byrds, lacking the heaviosity of prog or Zeppelin or the chooglin’ bands popular in the South.

more here.

Gil Lawson at n+1:

This is hardly the first time Krasznahorkai has spent a novel grinding his readers up against the limits of reality. His earlier works explore the same themes as Seiobo, although to markedly different ends. Satantango (1985) and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989) are both set in post-communist Hungary, in modest towns beset by unexpected visitors. Both novels construct closed worlds in which entropy increases, all things tend downward, and any hope is shown to be futile. In Satantango, the characters are suckered out of their money; in Melancholy, the town erupts in disastrous rioting. Time plows onward, increasing rot, aging, rust, chaos, death. Here, Krasznahorkai’s long sentences feel like attempts at slowing down the steady encroachment of time, as though that might help prevent any further deterioration. Of course, there is no success. Everything crumbles eventually. There’s something admirable about Krasznahorkai’s willingness to write monstrous misery, and the relentless cataloguing of suffering in his earlier works makes for memorable stories. Nonetheless, it’s that same intransigence that ultimately limits his early novels: their ceaseless darkness proves anesthetizing when stretched across hundreds of pages. It’s a technique that is as likely to bore as to horrify.

more here.

From the CalTech website:

Caltech Professor of Physics Jamie Bock and his collaborators announced on March 17, 2014 that they have successfully measured a B-mode polarization signal in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole. This signal is an important confirmation of key aspects of the theory of cosmic inflation, about how the universe may have behaved in the first fractions of a second of its existence to create the universe we live in today. Inflation was first proposed in 1980 by Alan Guth, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to explain some unusual features of our universe, especially its surprising homogeneity. For all the clumping of stars and galaxies we see in the night sky, the universe seen through the CMB is extremely uniform—so much so that it has been difficult for physicists to believe that the various pieces of the sky were not all in immediate contact with one another at an earlier point in the universe's development.

Since the theory of cosmic inflation was first advanced, most physicists have come to agree that inflation is the best explanation we have for the observable universe. Yet the hope of acquiring direct evidence of inflation was for a long time regarded as a vain one. In 1997, MIT physicist Alan Lightman wrote that since “the extremely rapid cosmic expansion . . . happened so long ago, we will probably never know with certainty whether that event in fact occurred.”

And yet now, thanks to a set of bold experiments undertaken with the BICEP telescopes, we seem to be closing in on direct confirmation of the theory of inflation. Bock recently discussed the design of the BICEP instrumentation and how it detected a signal from the dawn of time.

How did the BICEP program begin?

It all started with tennis. In 2001 I played tennis every week with Brian Keating, a Caltech postdoc who is now at UCSD. After a few sets, Brian and I would talk about science for a while. He kept bugging me about doing a CMB polarization experiment that would study structures on degree angular scales—portions of the sky larger than the full moon.

More here.

Leo Robson in New Statesman:

There is a series of postcards by the Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte that applies the alarmist tone usually reserved for smoking to scenes of people reading. A sunbathing woman is going purple and the caption, set in black on white with a black border, says: “Reading causes ageing of the skin.” In other scenarios a man ignores the naked woman lying beside him (“Reading may reduce the blood flow and cause impotence”) and a mother pours huge quantities of salt into a meal (“Reading seriously harms you and others around you”). What makes the cartoons so flat and pointless, apart from Swarte’s winsome draftsmanship, is their apparent belief that the benevolence of reading is a stable fact, ripe for comic inversion, rather than a social attitude that we are free to dispute. It is the same ostensive irony that underpins George Orwell’s exercise in amateur accountancy, “Books v Cigarettes”.

Still, you can see where Swarte’s confusion came from. Reading has the best PR team in the business. Or perhaps it’s just that devoted readers have better access to the language of advocacy and celebration than chain-smokers or, say, power-ballad enthusiasts. Either way, somewhere along the line, an orthodoxy hardened: cigarettes will kill you and Bon Jovi will give you a migraine, but reading – the ideal diet being Shakespeare and 19th-century novels, plus the odd modernist – will make you healthier, stronger, kinder. With the foundation of Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous in 1976, reading became the last thing you can never do too often. Even the much-made argument that works of literature – Northanger Abbey, Madame Bovary – insist on the dangers of literature redounds to literature’s benefit, and provides yet another reason for reading.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

When scientists jubilantly announced last week that a telescope at the South Pole had detected ripples in space from the very beginning of time, the reverberations went far beyond the potential validation of astronomers’ most cherished model of the Big Bang. It was the second time in less than two years that ideas thought to be radical just decades ago had been confirmed (at least so the optimists think) by experiment. The first was the discovery of the Higgs boson, associated with an energy field that gives mass to other particles, announced in July 2012; physicists have said they will be studying the Higgs for the next 20 years at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe and perhaps at successor machines, hoping for a clue that will lead them beyond the Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last half-century. Now the South Pole telescope team, led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has presented physicists with another clue from what the Russian cosmologist Yakov B. Zeldovich once called the poor man’s particle accelerator — the universe itself.

The ripples detected by the telescope, Bicep2, were faint spiral patterns from the polarization of microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang. They are relics from when energies were a trillion times greater than the Large Hadron Collider can produce. These gravitational waves are the long-sought markers for a theory called inflation, the force that put the bang in the Big Bang: an antigravitational swelling that began a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the cosmic clock started ticking. Scientists have long incorporated inflation into their standard model of the cosmos, but as with the existence of the Higgs, proving it had long been just a pipe dream. Astronomers say they expect to be studying the gravitational waves from mountaintops, balloons and perhaps satellites for the next 20 years, hoping to gain insight into mysteries like dark matter and dark energy.

More here.

Shadowing the Medivac

He's already in the car, an hour's drive
he can't allow himself to think, just drive
in the helicopter's shadow peeling

silently over the hills, silently, like nothing
is happening inside, nothing going on,
can't think of anything newborn

zooming through the sky, an ounce of brain
racked by seizures, blue-skinned, underweight
and Swiss cheese for a heart.

What's in the rearview, eh? Anything coming?
Cars? Trucks? Glare and a crab-red face deformed
with thoughts of beats and breathing tubes,

and ahead, old magazines on tables, waiting rooms
where doctors lead men and women into offices to sob
oh my god oh god oh jesus no…

And some of the most beautiful scenery in this country
can be found along our many well-maintained highways.
Shield rock, tamarack swamp and pine groves

line the winding thoroughfares between our cities. He is still
driving, he can see the city coming up. The helicopter
must have arrived already, in Toronto, where they fiddle

inside her rib cage with the sanitary version of a bicycle tire
repair kit….and he's on his way to the hospital, he'll get there,
he's coming, he's keeping his eye on the road.
.

by Paul Vermeersch
from Burn
ECW Press, 2000.
.

Mark Blyth has picked the three winners from the nine finalists:

1. Top Quark, $500: Kenan Malik, In Defense of Diversity
   
2. Strange Quark, $200: Filipe Gracio, Democratic Austerity: Semi-sovereign states, semi-sovereign peoples
3. Charm Quark, $100: Philip Cohen, State of Utah falsely claims same-sex marriage ban makes married, man-woman parenting more likely

Here is what Professor Blyth had to say about them:

As is both necessary and customary, I would like to begin by thanking Abbas, Robin and the whole 3QD crew for asking me to do this.

Like most 40-somethings (uuugh!) while I could always do with more money, what I really would love is more time, which is of course harder to procure and cannot be printed, sadly. Consequently, I fail to read 3QD with the regularity it deserves. Yet being asked to do this allows me to use the hive-mind to filter out the best bits and enjoy them all in one morning of reading – so ‘yum' and thank you.

After reading I started to write, and I was immediately struck by the title of the prize – politics and social science – as if the latter can exist without the former? Thankfully, the finalists each in their own way show this separation to be fallacious at best and folly at worst.

I was also acutely aware of my own prejudices and interests in all of this as I pondered ‘what do I like here and why?'

I then remembered that trying to put that (self) aside and be ‘neutral' is its own form of politics and exclusion (like Connolly on secularism, social science ‘objectivism' – pick your poison) so I decided to embrace my flawed self as the frame for selection. That frame became three pots into which I put all nine pieces.

Pot A: The Bullshit Police

The first pot contains pieces that serve as great examples of social science writing that I call “charges from the bullshit police.” If social science has a public function this is it. Theory generation and hypothesis testing and all that grad school stuff is all fine and well, but at the end of the day the job is to take the claims of those that want us to think X is Y and sniff it to see if its bullshit.

Bullshit Police Contenders

• Family Inequality: State of Utah falsely claims same-sex marriage ban makes married, man-woman parenting more likely
• The Philosopher's Stone: How to Do History

Pot B: The Good Jeremiad

The second pot contains pieces that do more than complain about something, they tell us why it's worth complaining about and insist that we take it on board. They are at their best when they take what we think we know about something and then flip it around to show us that really, we don't know crap, because what we accept as being the truth is so far from reality we should be ashamed to have gone along with the status quo. This end up being the largest pot – what after all is the point of blogging if not to have a good Jeremiad?

The Good Jeremiad Contenders

• Forbes: How Putin Invented The New Authoritarianism
• The New Yorker: The Trial of Pervez Musharraf
• U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Not Everyone Wants to Hear Lee Atwater Sing the Blues
• Social Pulses: Democratic Austerity: Semi sovereign states, semi sovereign peoples

Pot C: Elpis' Helpers:

The third pot contains those pieces that give us cause for hope. For without hope there is only critique, which on its own becomes a thin gruel. This is the toughest pot to pick from since getting here requires not just mastery of the skills of spotting bullshit and doing a good Jeremiad, but also reminding us that change, and good change at that, is possible.

Elpis' Helpers Contenders

• Corey Robin: Jews Without Israel
• Pandaemonium: In Defense of Diversity
• Los Angeles Review of Books: I Am Malala : The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

And so to the winners from each pot (without a ranking, so far…)

The Bullshit Police

Robert Paul Wolff's distinction between historians that have too much data and those that have too little, and the ideological choices that go with either position, reminded me of the old quip about historians and economists on the same campus. Each group thinks anyone who is not one of them is an idiot, but they are willing to tolerate each other since they both at least know this essential truth.

But the winner in this pot is Philip Cohen for his family inequality piece on the state of Utah and same sex parenting. Take a causal argument. Test it. Test it again. Pronounce it bullshit. Move along. Move along. Fantastic stuff and first class ‘bullshit police' work.

The Best Jeremiad

Again, although I enjoyed all the contributions, from Melik Kaylan's debunking of Putin as in any way either normal or acceptable, to Omar Waraich's conclusion that the only reason for Musharraf returning to Pakistan is that he is still thinks, against any and all evidence, that he is the country's savior, to Andrew Hartman's take down of the racist double standards at play in the demonization of sexually explicit music, it was all good.

But, and this is of course due to my bias and I fully admit that, the winner in this pot is Filipe Gracio's Democratic Austerity.

That the ongoing economic slaughter of the lower classes of Europe's periphery continues to be both told and treated as a case of excessive spending, when it is in fact a slow motion banking crisis where the top 30 percent of the income distribution got their assets bailed out and stuck the bill on the 70 percent below them in the form of spending cuts is now known, but is still contested by the powers that be.

What this piece gives us is the political consequences of all this. Namely, that as “countries in the eurozone abdicated from having traditionally sovereign institutions,” which was fine until the crisis came, the political classes that did this passed the remit to fix the resulting mess to the bankers that caused the problem in the first place since those democratically elected had neither the necessary tools (nor the necessary ideas) about how to fix it. We need to remember that the bankruptcy of the European political elite is almost as bad as that of its banks, and it takes a great Jeremiad to remind us of that.

Elpis' Helpers

Finally, three pieces made it to the pot marked Elpis' Helpers. This was the toughest call of all. The simplicity of Corey Robin's observations belies the insight. That when a people no longer cares the way they used to, it opens up the possibility of positive transformation as much as it ignites fear for the old certainties that none can take for granted any longer.

Similarly, Shehryar Fazli's essay on Malala is so much more than an essay on Malala. It's a reaction to a life so nearly ended and an indictment of an entire system of politics that nearly ended it. And yet, it ends with hope in Malala's defiance, and her smile, despite the portrait of a society so badly governed and so badly defended.

And yet despite all that, the winner in this pot is Kenan Malik's wonderful essay in defense of diversity.

In this piece he not only does an excellent bullshit police take down of Goodhart, Collier, Caldwell and other immigration panic mongers, he also reminds us that such panics are historical commonplaces and all that is said now has been said before by the same forces of reaction. He also stresses, like Gracio, that what is causing the marginalization and immiserization of the British (and increasingly – by the argumentative extension of politicians everywhere) and the European working classes, are changes in the structure of labor, product and capital markets that have been 30 years in the making and have little to do with influxes of ‘foreignness' anywhere. But they are, like the Eurocrisis, portrayed as what they are not for political ends. And yet, although it is implicit, his essay carries hope at its end – that we have been through this before, and that both growth and democracy can triumph in such dark moments.

And now for the ranking:

1. Top Quark: Kenan Malik
2. Strange Quark: Filipe Gracio
3. Charm Quark: Philip Cohen

I know this is probably exactly what you would expect someone like me with interests like me and passions like me to pick, and so you are right. But it's the best call I can make, at least as me. All three posts are things I would want everyone to read. I write for a living and few of my utterances would ever reach their level. So I applaud the winners and ask you all to try and make that happen. Let's make sure everyone reads them.

Best to all,

Mark

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

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

Details about the prize here.

Walid Siti. Endless Encounters. 2013.

Installation.

More here and here.

Donovan Hohn in Harper's:

January 1998. In the windowless office shared by the Harper’s interns, I meet this hippie dude from Vermont: ponytail, spectacles of the sort favored by engineering students, lumberjack shirt. Matt Power. Others who’ve written remembrances of Matt have remarked on the poetry of his surname. In the spring of 1998, we treated it as if that were a thing — Matt power. If you had Matt power, you could recite entire episodes of The Simpsons by heart, along with passages fromMoby-Dick. You could get yourself photographed by the New York Times while up a tree across from City Hall, wearing some sort of goofy sunflower headdress — some sort of goofy sunflower headdress and that goofy grin, goofy but also beautiful and disarming, scrolling upwards into impish fiddleheads at the corners.

If you had Matt power, you could take up with a bunch of squatters in a derelict building in the South Bronx, as Matt did the year after we met. For some reason, I’ve always pictured him camped out on the building’s roof, hanging his flannel underwear out to dry on a telephone wire, perhaps, or roasting a pigeon on a spit.

For all of his brainy bookishness and street smarts, Matt in the spring of 1998 was a greenhorn. We all were, but there was an innocence about him, some portion of which he never lost. I was only two years older, twenty-six to his twenty-four, which at the time seemed like a big difference and now seems like nothing.

More here.

From MIT Technology Review:

One of the goals of anthropology is to understand the way that humans interact to form groups. Indeed, anthropologists have long known that human societies are highly structured.

But exactly what kinds of structures form and to what extent these groupings depend on the environment is still the subject of much debate. So an interesting question is whether humans form the same kinds of structures in online worlds as they do in real life.

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Benedikt Fuchs at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria and a couple of pals. These guys have studied the groups humans form when playing a massive multiplayer online game called Pardus.

Their conclusion is that humans naturally form into a fractal-like hierarchy in which people belong to a variety of groups on different scales. In fact, the formation of hierarchies seems to be an innate part of the human condition.

More here.

Mark O'Connell in The New Yorker:

Until about six months ago, when I finally fled the sinking ship of my academic career for the precarious lifeboat of freelance writing, I worked on the top floor of a sleek, contemporary building in the center of Dublin called the Long Room Hub. High and airy, it overlooked the venerable panorama of Trinity College. The building was intended as a home for innovative research across the various disciplines of the arts and the humanities, and one of the priorities of the research was to facilitate a relatively recent academic enthusiasm known as the digital humanities. My desk in the building came as part of a postdoctoral fellowship I was doing; the project had no connection to anything that could be considered digital, but I was happy to have a place to sit and put my books.

Occasionally, I would be cc’ed on an e-mail asking everyone in the building to provide brief outlines of our research projects so that they could be included in promotional materials for the Long Room Hub, but I consistently managed, without consequence, to avoid answering these. (A lot of the other postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers were working on forbiddingly technical-sounding projects involving things like the “systematic evaluation of archeological digital epistemology” and “digital genetic dossiers.” I was basically just trying to think of clever things to say about the work of John Banville.) When I mentioned to fellow literary academic types where I happened to work—or work from—they tended to suspect that this work of mine had something to do with the digital humanities, and to ask me what the mysterious business was supposed to be about. To this, I usually replied that I wasn’t totally sure, but that I thought it had something to do with using computers to read books. As far as I could tell, there was a general skepticism about the digital humanities, combined with a certain measure of unease—arising, perhaps, from the vague aura of utility, even of outrightscience, emanating from the discipline, and the sense that this aura was attracting funding that might otherwise have gone to more low-tech humanities projects.

Having read “Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture,” a new book by the scientists Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, I am now experiencing a minor uptick in my understanding of this discipline.

More here.

Daniel E. Pritchard in The Critical Flame:

In March 2008, a month shy of his forty-fifth birthday, the critic and poet Reginald Shepherd was battling an aggressive form of colon cancer. The disease had already metastisized to his liver. He was in a tremendous amount of pain, with complications related to a series of other illnesses. As he underwent chemotherapy Shepherd wrote about his ordeal at the Poetry Foundation blog, Harriet:

Cancer came as a highly unpleasant surprise […] but psychologically it just confirmed my sense of my body as frail and vulnerable at best, or set on betraying me yet again at worst. I’ve never really identified with my body, have always seen it as distinct and separate from, even in opposition to, my “self.” It has felt more like a burden than anything else. Perhaps all these illnesses are my body’s revenge, its way of reminding me that I am it and it is mine, that it is me. What, after all, would I be without a body, however frail and ailing?

A few weeks later, the poet Linh Dinh juxtaposed this confession with Kenneth Goldmsith’s conceptualist assertion that “Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one at all.” A person in pain, Dinh argued, could not possibly assent to the idea of an ultimately mutable self. Neither technology nor any poetic practice could actually disperse the stability at the center of lived experience. As Franz Kafka wrote, “people are sewn into their skins for life and cannot alter any of the seams.”

Displaying a typical largesse of intellect, Shepherd acknowledged in his response that “the most decentered self still has boundaries,” but wrote that “it is exactly the fact that I have other identities besides ‘a person with HIV’ or ‘a person with cancer’ that enable me to make it through my physical trials and travails.” The lack of stable identity was as a series of possibilities to be explored rather than a conflict to be resolved. Unfortunately, his illness placed boundaries before Shepherd that could not be overcome. By September of that year, he was gone.

More here.