Laura Miller in Salon:

Dad: Everyone has to finish the game, or no one wins.
Me: What?
Dad: No one wins unless everyone wins.
Me: So no one wins.
Dad: No, everyone wins.

That conversation perfectly captures the spirit of “Promise Land: My Journey through America’s Self-Help Culture,” Lamb-Shapiro’s deadpan, eyebrow-arched effort to comprehend the glass-half-full point of view despite her own half-empty propensities. There’s no shortage of books featuring “cultural history” and other quasi-sociological surveys of this terrain, but Lamb-Shapiro’s take is different. Part experiential journalism, part memoir, “Promise Land” is both funnier and more searching than detached forms of social commentary could ever hope to be.

…What Lamb-Shapiro does know a lot about is language, and even the self-help proponents she finds worthwhile have a tendency to put her off with their clichés and mushy terminology, buzzwords like “life-altering passage” and “healing circle.” Her “allergy” to this lingo derives in large part from her sensitivity to the way that words professing to name the truth can instead be used to mute it. Yet in the end, even Lamb-Shapiro finds herself recognizing that merit hides in the most banal self-help maxim of all (which you can guess easily enough with a glance at the book’s cover image of a kitten dangling from a twig). “Can even the most bastardized, laughable incarnations of self-help carry some kernel of redeeming value?” she asks herself. There’s the rub, because (as the late David Foster Wallace was wont to affirm), indeed they can. Sometimes even the smartest among us find ourselves with nothing to fight off the encroaching night but a well-worn incantation. And sometimes, even if only sometimes, it’s enough.

More here.

Teller in The New York Times:

“Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner” is the “disheveled memoir” of the beloved Scientific American columnist, journalist and author or editor of more than 100 books of philosophy, humor, mathematics, poetry, puzzles, fiction, science, anthologies and annotations (e.g., “The Annotated Alice”), and essays on topics from logic to literary criticism. Gardner, who died in 2010, wrote “Undiluted Hocus-Pocus” at the age of 95 in a one-room assisted-living apartment in Norman, Okla. He worked on an old electric typewriter and edited with scissors and rubber cement as he stood at the lectern from which he had long addressed the world in print. “I am given five pills every morning after breakfast,” he writes. “My blood pressure is low, my cholesterol is so-so, and my vision is perfect.” But, he adds, “at 95 I still have enough wits to keep writing.” Gardner was a child of faith and skepticism. His mother was “a devout Methodist”; his father, a Scripture-doubting science buff, a wildcatter who built a career on oil. When his mother spotted a rainbow, “she would hurry to the phone and call a dozen friends, urging them to go outside” and see the miracle. His father explained the rainbow’s optics and built Martin a science lab next to the kitchen.

“The wonderful thing about a rainbow,” Gardner writes, “is that it is not something ‘out there’ in the sky. It exists only on the retinas of eyes or on photographic film. Your image in a mirror is similar. It’s not a thing behind the looking glass. By the way, what does a mirror look like when there’s no one in the room? And why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down?” “Undiluted Hocus-Pocus” is full of such challenges, teasing the reader in a warm, friendly way, like a sly uncle. As a child and teenager, Gardner was drawn to anything that smacked of ingenuity. He studied and invented magic tricks. He played chess. He revered science. “Newton,” he observes, “did more to alter the world than any king or queen or great military leader. Einstein, sitting alone and thinking, changed the world more than any politician.” At the University of Chicago, he studied writing with Thornton Wilder and laughed at the crazy, competing academic movements.

More here.

Over at Skull in the Stars [via Jennifer Ouellette]:

The final installment in a series of posts on the size of the infinite, as described in mathematical set theory. The first post can be read here, the second here, and the thirdhere.

We have taken a long, strange journey into the properties of infinity. Over the course of three posts, we have seen that we can characterize the different “sizes” of infinity, though not in the way one might think. We have found, in fact, that there are an infinity of infinities! The smallest one we looked at was the infinite set of counting numbers (labeled ); the next largest we found was the continuum (labeled ): the set of real numbers between 0 and 1. We then found that, for any size infinity, we can construct a larger one.

This leads to an intriguing notion: if we arrange the different size infinities we have found in order, we might have a set of the form

This would seem to suggest a really elegant possibility: if these are all the infinities, then we could imagine that the set of all infinities form a countable infinity themselves, of size, and then we could build up the larger infinities again from this, continuing an endless cycle! For instance, the set of all subsets of the set of all infinities would then be of size , and so on.

For this to be true, however, we need to know whether there are any other infinities between those we have been able to derive so far. We have shown that there are an infinite number of infinities, but we have not shown that these are the only infinities.

More here.

William Helmreich in Aeon:

When I was nine, my father found a new form of entertainment for me. Whenever our schedules were free, we took the subway from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to the end of the line and walked around, exploring the neighbourhood. We saw swampy marshes in Canarsie, Brooklyn, public housing projects in Astoria, Queens, and beautiful, forested Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. One time, my father poked his head into a pub and everyone scattered. We never found out why.

In this way, I learned to love New York City. I still do. And over the past four years, partly in homage to New York, but largely to furnish material for a book-length study, I’ve walked some 6,000 miles across the city’s built-up terrain — that’s 120,000 blocks. The question, for a professional sociologist such as me, is: was this the best way to study a city?

Approached correctly, walking forces you to slow down and really look at what you’re seeing. Like the flâneurs of times past, one needs to stroll leisurely and engage people in conversations about how they feel about where they live, what they do, and how they perceive the place is changing. Had I driven through the city, along its highways and thoroughfares, I would have missed 90 per cent of what I found: the teeming life of the city’s backstreets, its parks and playgrounds, its outdoor and indoor eateries — all this would have remained invisible to me. Besides, driving (and for that matter, cycling) tend to mark you as an outsider, even if you live there. When you cover ground quickly, people assume you’re just passing through. But when you walk through a neighbourhood, people assume you’ve got reason to be there.

With walking, it’s the journey that’s the destination. The minute you begin observing, you’re there.

More here.

Rick Lewis talks to Blackburn about his atheism in Philosophy Now:

Some theologians have followed the late John Hick in suggesting that religious claims aren’t really about asserting the truth of propositions such as ‘God exists’, but instead are claims about perceptions of God; in other words theism is about an attitude towards the world. Do you think something parallel could be said about some atheists?

I have a great deal of respect for the view that ‘onto-theology’, that is, religious doctrines associated with existence claims, should be abandoned, but that such things as rituals, poetry, metaphor, music and dance still have a role in welding people together into a congregation or a society. This was Durkheim’s view of the function of religious practices. I think they have other functions as well, but that substantially he was right. Of course, on this view the whole subject changes, and the question turns to the value of these practices as they manifest themselves in particular historical and cultural contexts. You can very effectively weld people together by magnifying their differences from other people, and that has always been an aspect of religion, and not at all a nice one.

Marx is admired by militant New Atheists for saying that religion is the opium of the people. But they forget what he said next, which is that “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” I think that is right, which is why moral and political questions should occupy all of us far more than ontological questions.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

The poet Kobayashi Issa suffered greatly in his life — suffered as we all, in time, suffer — and like us, Issa’s suffering informed his opinions about New Year’s. Beginning with his mother at age three, Issa’s loved ones seemed always to die — his grandmother, his children, his wife. No one Issa loved was immune. Issa’s body of work is a chronicle of loneliness and loss. It is not easy to laugh when everything in life goes wrong. Which is what makes Issa’s reputation as a funny poet even more significant. For example:

fallen among
the moonflowers …
horse turds

Issa was also a Buddhist and so had a Buddhist perspective on New Year’s. Meaning, he was inclined to view the big through the lens of the microscopic. (Issa wrote no less than 200 poems about frogs, around 230 on the firefly, over 150 about mosquitoes, 90 on flies, and over 100 on fleas, not to mention his gentle meditations on excrement and flatulence.) Issa began his autobiographical work The Spring of My Life with a New Year’s story. It went like this. Long ago, in Fuko Temple, there was a devout priest who was determined to celebrate New Year’s to the fullest. So on New Year’s Eve he wrote a letter to himself and asked a novice to deliver the letter back to himself — the priest — in the morning. On New Year’s Day, the novice entered the priest’s room and handed him the letter. The priest quickly opened the letter and read aloud. “Give up the world of suffering! Come to the Pure Land. I will meet you along the way with a host of bodhisattvas!” And then the priest began weeping so hard the tears soaked his sleeves.

more here.

Bernard Porter at Literary Review:

Gandhi's years in South Africa were the making of him and could be said to mark the beginning of the unmaking of the British Empire. Ramachandra Guha's fine new book examining this time is the first of two projected volumes that will eventually cover the whole of the Mahatma's life. Usually this period is treated by biographers simply, and relatively sketchily, as a prelude to the much more important events that happened after his return to India in 1914. Guha thinks this does 'injustice to both man and place'. If he had been killed then, rather than in 1948, he would still have left a huge mark. Gandhi himself, when informed of an assassination plot against him in Johannesburg in March 1914, told a nephew that, if it succeeded, it would 'be welcome and a fit end to my work'.

We forget how celebrated he already was, in India and Britain as well as in South Africa, before the great events of the 1920s and 1930s. He was in South Africa for twenty years, after all. That was time enough not only for some great achievements on behalf of 'Asiatics' living and working there, but also for him to hone his broader ideas and strategies into the distinctive forms we are familiar with from his later career. Guha ends this book with some speculation ('counter-factual history') on what difference it might have made if he had never gone abroad. (If his father had still been alive, he probably wouldn't have done.) There can be no doubt that the experience was crucial – to him and, consequently, the world.

more here.

Mary Beard at The Times Literary Supplement:

The Emperor Augustus had a long life, dying at the age of seventy-five, in 14 AD – appropriately enough in August, the month that had already been renamed in his honour by the grateful (or sycophantic) senate. This 2,000th anniversary is now being commemorated in Rome by another exhibition just a few hundred yards away from the Palazzo delle Esposizioni: simply titled Augusto, it is on show in the Scuderie del Quirinale, the wonderful exhibition space created some fifteen years ago out of an eighteenth-century stable block on the Quirinal hill, from where in March it moves to the Grand Palais in Paris. Seventy-five years on, the curators of this new, and much smaller, show have clearly been concerned to distance it from its Fascist forebear. Indeed, in the first essay in the excellent catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Andrea Giardina takes great care to treat Mussolini’s Augustus with shrewd, analytic dispassion – and so to consign that Mostra to “history”.

The two shows are certainly very different. Where the Mostra Augustea celebrated the art of reconstruction, Augusto celebrates the artistic originality of the Augustan age (31 BC–14 AD), particularly in sculpture; though painting is discussed in the catalogue, there is none on display (no Livia’s Garden Room, for example, nor the exquisite decoration from the Villa della Farnesina). Even so, the show has managed to gather together in one place more of the most significant, original works of art of Augustus’ reign than have ever been assembled before – even in the ancient world itself. This makes it possible, for the first time, directly to compare portraits of the Emperor scattered across Europe (from London to Corinth, Ancona to Athens); and, no less important, to put side by side statues usually housed a short but inconvenient journey apart, the other side of the city of Rome.

more here.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Telegraph:

Charlotte Brontë wrote not one but two masterpieces. Most readers know Jane Eyre. Even non-readers feel they know it, because they have seen a film version, or just because it is a part of our common culture. But Villette, Brontë’s last and – to my mind – greatest novel, is less popular, perhaps because it is so uncompromising and so original. It is high time it was recognised as the blazing work it is. Reading it you enter an area of experience – of passion and disappointment and the violent return of the repressed – that has seldom been so lucidly articulated. It is also an astonishing piece of writing, a book in which phantasmagorical set pieces alternate with passages of minute psychological exploration, and in which Brontë’s marvellously flexible prose veers between sardonic wit and stream-of-consciousness, in which the syntax bends and flows and threatens to dissolve completely in the heat of madness, drug-induced hallucination and desperate desire.

…As Virginia Woolf wrote, Brontë was one of those writers whose “overpowering personality” means “they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things.” The Brontë myth would have us see Charlotte and her sisters as spinsters, timidly hiding behind male pseudonyms. Anyone who has read Villette knows that Woolf comes much closer to the truth. It is a fierce book, and an irrestibly compelling one.

More here.

Christof Koch in Scientific American:

For every inside there is an outside, and for every outside there is an inside; though they are different, they go together.
—Alan Watts, Man, Nature, and the Nature of Man, 1991

Taken literally, panpsychism is the belief that everything is “enminded.” All of it. Whether it is a brain, a tree, a rock or an electron. Everything that is physical also possesses an interior mental aspect. One is objective—accessible to everybody—and the other phenomenal—accessible only to the subject. That is the sense of the quotation by British-born Buddhist scholar Alan Watts with which I began this essay. I will defend a narrowed, more nuanced view: namely that any complex system, as defined below, has the basic attributes of mind and has a minimal amount of consciousness in the sense that it feels like something to be that system. If the system falls apart, consciousness ceases to be; it doesn't feel like anything to be a broken system. And the more complex the system, the larger the repertoire of conscious states it can experience.

My subjective experience (and yours, too, presumably), the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am,” is an undeniable certainty, one strong enough to hold the weight of philosophy. But from whence does this experience come? Materialists invoke something they call emergentism to explain how consciousness can be absent in simple nervous systems and emerge as their complexity increases. Consider the wetness of water, its ability to maintain contact with surfaces. It is a consequence of intermolecular interactions, notably hydrogen bonding among nearby water molecules. One or two molecules of H₂O are not wet, but put gazillions together at the right temperature and pressure, and wetness emerges. Or see how the laws of heredity emerge from the molecular properties of DNA, RNA and proteins. By the same process, mind is supposed to arise out of sufficiently complex brains.

More here.

Memoirs of a Mad Cook

Thre's no point kidding myself any longer,
I just can't get the knack of it ; I suspect
there's a secret society which meets
in dark cafeterias to pass on the art
from one member to another.
Besides,
It's so personal preparing food for someone's
insides, what can I possibly know
about someone's insides, how can I presume
to invade your blood?
I'll try, God knows I'll try
but if anyone watches me I'll scream
because maybe I'm handling a tomato wrong,
how can I know if I'm handling a tomato wrong?

something is eating away at me
with splendid teeth

Wistfully I stand in my difficult kitchen
and imagine the fantastic salads and soufflés
that will never be.
Everyone seems to grow thin with me
and their eyes grow black as hunters' eyes
and search my face for sustenance.
All my friends are dying of hunger,
there is some basic dish I cannot offer,
and you my love are almost as lean
as the splendid wolf I must keep always
at my door.

by Gwendolyn MacEwen
from The Armies of the Moon
Toronto: Macmillan, 1972

Andrew McConnell Stott at Lapham's Quarterly:

Is it a condition of comic genius to be perpetually wrestling with demons? From Canio, the iconic, stiletto-wielding clown of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera, Pagliacci, to modern greats like Richard Pryor, Andy Kaufman, and John Belushi, it would seem so. Even in Chaplin’s day, the depressed and often violent clown was a well-established trope, both offstage and on. Hollywood Pagliacci types included Frank Tinney, the blackface vaudevillian accused of brutally assaulting his mistress; Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, whose brilliant career was undone by the untimely death of Virginia Rappe, a bit-part actress who suffered a fatal trauma in his hotel room; and the suave French comedian Max Linder, brought in by Essanay Films to replace Chaplin after the tramp had departed the studio but who failed to replicate his predecessor’s success. Suffering from a severe depression that was deepened by service in the Great War, Linder claimed he could practically feel the ability to be funny seeping out from him. In February 1924, he and his young wife, Ninette, a wealthy heiress, made a suicide pact at a hotel in Vienna but failed to consume a sufficient dose of sleeping powders. The following autumn in Paris they were better prepared. Both drank large drafts of barbiturates before injecting morphine into their veins and slitting their wrists. Chaplin dedicated a film to his replacement, declaring himself Linder’s disciple.

more here.

Gerald Howard at Bookforum:

ABOUT FOUR-FIFTHS OF THE WAY through this vast and rich omnium-gatherum of epistolary activity by Malcolm Cowley, this almost throwaway line in a letter to Yvor Winters arrives: “I’m weak, deplorably weak, in knowledge of the sixteenth century lyric.” Nobody’s perfect! The remark doesn’t come off as disingenuous; instead, it reflects Cowley’s enduring engagement (he was then sixty-nine) with verse techniques and history as both a critic and a practicing poet himself.

“Poet” ranks just above “translator” at the bottom of the multiple job descriptions usually applied to Malcolm Cowley, one of the most important and influential men of letters (or freelance literary intellectuals, if you prefer) of the twentieth century. Yet his lifelong grappling with poetic matters (he was an acolyte of Amy Lowell’s at Harvard before and after World War I) speaks to the degree, impossible to imagine in our balkanized literary situation, to which literature in its every manifestation was all of a piece to him, something he regarded in its broadest, most inclusive vistas.

more here.

Quirin Schiermeier in Nature:

When pondering the best way to study the impact of climate change, researcher Hans Joachim Schellnhuber liked to recall an old Hindu fable. Six men, all blind but thirsty for know­ledge, examine an elephant. One fumbles the pachyderm’s sturdy side, while others grasp at its tusk, trunk, knee, ear or tail. In the end, all are completely misled as to the nature of the beast.

The analogy worked. Although many researchers had modelled various aspects of the global-warming elephant, there had been no comprehensive assessment of what warming will really mean for human societies and vital natural resources. But that changed last year when Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and other leading climate-impact researchers launched the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project. This aims to produce a set of harmonized global-impact reports based on the same set of climate data, which will for the first time allow models to be directly compared. Last month it published its initial results in four reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences^1–4. These suggest that even modest climate change might drastically affect the living conditions of billions of people, whether through water scarcity, crop shortages or extremes of weather. The group warns that water is the biggest worry. If the world warms by just 2 °C above the present level, which now seems all but unavoidable by 2100, up to one-fifth of the global population could suffer severe shortages.

More here.

An Aviary of Small Birds

My love is an aviary
of small birds
and I must learn
to leave the door ajar . . .

Are you the sparrow
who landed when I sat
at a slate table
sewing lettuces?

Webbs Wonder, Lollo
Rosso, English Cos . . .
Swift and deft
you flit and peck peck

quick as the light that
constitutes your spirit.
Yes, you were briefer
than Neruda’s octobrine.

So much rain that night.
Our room is an ocean
where swallows dive.
The bubble bursts

too soon, too late, too long:
all sorts of microscopia
swim upstream, float in
on summer’s storm.

The tenor of your heart
is true as a tuning fork struck
– and high! My love
is the bird who flies free.

by Karen McCarthy Woolf
from the Rain of Poems Project 2012

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

Around the same time English-language philosophers were debating whether or not you can know what it is like to be a bat (generally deciding that you can not), the Australian poet Les Murray was busy directly transcribing the thought-world of an imagined representative of this order. Here are the final six lines from his 1986 poem, “Bat's Ultrasound”:

ah, eyrie-ire; aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array
err, yaw, row wry—aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

Murray channels the inner language of other species as well. For instance, pigs, in his 1992 poem, “Pigs”:

Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.
Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughed
and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us
with weight-buried hooves. Or bristly, with milk.

While the individual pig refers to the collectivity as 'us', Murray imagines that cattle conceptualize that same first-person plural as 'me'. This from “The Cows on Killing Day” of 1998:

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human

and is angry. All me look nervously at her

as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy

of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

The individual 'me' (to the extent that these can be individuated), the cow that narrates the poem, ends up slaughtered by a blade, and now sees the blood, or perhaps the guts, running out of her as 'me' too:

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.

All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,

and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

Benjamin Bratton at AlterNet:

Let me tell you a story. I was at a presentation that a friend, an astrophysicist, gave to a potential donor. I thought the presentation was lucid and compelling (and I'm a professor of visual arts here at UC San Diego so at the end of the day, I know really nothing about astrophysics). After the talk the sponsor said to him, “you know what, I'm gonna pass because I just don't feel inspired … you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.”

At this point I kind of lost it. Can you imagine?

Think about it: an actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! This is beyond popularisation. This is taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. This is not the solution to our most frightening problems – rather this is one of our most frightening problems.

So I ask the question: does TED epitomize a situation where if a scientist's work (or an artist's or philosopher's or activist's or whoever) is told that their work is not worthy of support, because the public doesn't feel good listening to them?

I submit that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilizational disaster.

More here. [Thanks to Syed Tasnim Raza.]

From Gravity and Levity:

What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.

This startling fact was first noticed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825 and is now called the “Gompertz Law of human mortality.” Your probability of dying during a given year doubles every 8 years. For me, a 25-year-old American, the probability of dying during the next year is a fairly minuscule 0.03% — about 1 in 3,000. When I’m 33 it will be about 1 in 1,500, when I’m 42 it will be about 1 in 750, and so on. By the time I reach age 100 (and I do plan on it) the probability of living to 101 will only be about 50%. This is seriously fast growth — my mortality rate is increasing exponentially with age.

And if my mortality rate (the probability of dying during the next year, or during the next second, however you want to phrase it) is rising exponentially, that means that the probability of me surviving to a particular age is falling super-exponentially. Below are some statistics for mortality rates in the United States in 2005, as reported by the US Census Bureau (and displayed by Wolfram Alpha):

This data fits the Gompertz law almost perfectly, with death rates doubling every 8 years. The graph on the right also agrees with the Gompertz law, and you can see the precipitous fall in survival rates starting at age 80 or so.

More here.