Sam Harris in his own blog:

Dear Dan,

I’d like to begin by thanking you for taking the time to review Free Will at such length. Publicly engaging me on this topic is certainly preferable to grumbling in private. Your writing is admirably clear, as always, which worries me in this case, because we appear to disagree about a great many things, including the very nature of our disagreement.

I want to begin by reminding our readers—and myself—that exchanges like this aren’t necessarily pointless. Perhaps you need no encouragement on that front, but I’m afraid I do. In recent years, I have spent so much time debating scientists, philosophers, and other scholars that I’ve begun to doubt whether any smart person retains the ability to change his mind. This is one of the great scandals of intellectual life: The virtues of rational discourse are everywhere espoused, and yet witnessing someone relinquish a cherished opinion in real time is about as common as seeing a supernova explode overhead. The perpetual stalemate one encounters in public debates is annoying because it is so clearly the product of motivated reasoning, self-deception, and other failures of rationality—and yet we’ve grown to expect it on every topic, no matter how intelligent and well-intentioned the participants. I hope you and I don’t give our readers further cause for cynicism on this front.

Unfortunately, your review of my book doesn’t offer many reasons for optimism. It is a strange document—avuncular in places, but more generally sneering. I think it fair to say that one could watch an entire season of Downton Abbey on Ritalin and not detect a finer note of condescension than you manage for twenty pages running.

More here.

Season of Lilac

in april you come to me again in lilac
fall on my cheek like rain
take my hair like wind.

it is the sense of you the heat
brings in august, when life glistens
on skin and earth's deep smell climbs
high, bursting the veins of leaves
with the kind of joy birds know
as night cocoons to day, seasons turning

and december falls with the clear breath of you
sweetened ice on my tongue;

fall is the time when days drift
to sea to smother sand with damp wings
and your eyes touch fire, causing spark.

the seasons are full with you
the calendar rattles its leaves
for a glimpse of time's reflection
racing through my blood—
leaves fall, grass strains for wind
the soggy sky shakes itself dry
like a dog in from the snow to the fire
and love climbs like smoke
seeking its own level.

in april, then, you come to me in lilac
fall on my cheek like warm rain
take my hair like gentle wind
call me to lie down in fragrance.
.

by Dave Margoshes
from Walking at Brighton, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Thistledown Press, 1988.

Diwas Kc in Himal [h/t: Chapati Mystery]:

Two years after the Indian state channel Doordarshan began daily broadcasting, when only Delhi-ites were lucky enough to get their first taste of television, a question was asked during a children’s quiz show: “Who was the mother of Ram?” The participating children, who had earlier effortlessly handled all the stumpers on Greek mythology, were now dumbfounded. Such was Kaushalya’s status in 1967. This rather inconsequential moment in India’s secular era would have simply passed by had one chance viewer not felt so deeply humiliated by the way “the glorious heritage of India” had once again been trumped. The viewer, Anant Pai, soon left his career with the Times of India, which brought American superheroes like Phantom and Mandrake to Indian readers through Indrajal Comics, and launched his own ­Amar Chitra Katha, through which he issued monthly and fortnightly comic books based on episodes from Hindu epics and puranas. Uncle Pai, as he is better known, thought of himself as an educator, and he must consider it an enormous feat that, after a sensational reception of his comics, golden boys and girls on Bournvita Quiz Contest no longer miss questions on Hindu legends.

In the following decades, Uncle Pai’s comics sold by the millions, which perhaps not astonishingly coincided with the resurgence of ‘Hindu values’ in Indian politics. Assembling the narratives of dazzling characters like Ram, Krishna and Hanuman from stories originating from different ends of India – dotingly ironing out the contradictions, and while at it ridding the ‘unpleasant’ bits – Uncle Pai had one eye on the Hindu past and the other on the post-Independence project of national integration. This double vision ofAmar Chitra Katha would prove to be remarkably self-legitimising, becoming imperative to subsequent raconteurs of Hindu legends. Uncle Pai, as it turned out, was only one of the many in modern India who was hoping to simplify the bewilderingly and boisterously diverse past for an emerging country. Following his success, in the late 1980s the triumphant creators of the Ramayana and Mahabharata serials on the by-then-pervasive Doordarshan heralded what can veritably be called a golden age of Hinduism – an uncanny kind of unification guided by the light of television screens, where millions of Hindus everywhere, of hitherto disparate traditions, could for the first time access, claim and share a uniform set of stories.

This prologue is necessary to understand what the scholar Wendy Doniger, in her new work, means by ‘alternative’. Alternative to what? Doniger has in mind the overbearingly malicious and fanatical turn of contemporary Hinduism that has much beleaguered her; but even more so, her adversary here is the troubling standardisation of the general Hindu outlook.

More here.

Gina Kolata in the NYTimes:

One of the largest and most meticulous studies of mammography ever done, involving 90,000 women and lasting a quarter-century, has added powerful new doubts about the value of the screening test for women of any age.

It found that the death rates from breast cancer and from all causes were the same in women who got mammograms and those who did not. And the screening had harms: One in five cancers found with mammography and treated was not a threat to the woman’s health and did not need treatment such as chemotherapy, surgery or radiation.

The study, published Tuesday in The British Medical Journal, is one of the few rigorous evaluations of mammograms conducted in the modern era of more effective breast cancer treatments. It randomly assigned Canadian women to have regular mammograms and breast exams by trained nurses or to have breast exams alone.

The study seems likely to lead to an even deeper polarization between those who believe that regular mammography saves lives, including many breast cancer patients and advocates for them, and a growing number of researchers who say the evidence is lacking or, at the very least, murky.

Read the rest here. (Original BMJ article)

Anna Katharina Schaffner at The Times Literary Supplement:

One of the abiding refrains in exhaustion theories, both past and present, is the idea that modernity as such drains the individual’s energy. The aspects of modernity that are repeatedly identified as responsible include technological inventions that have dramatically increased the pace of life, as well as wider cultural developments such as the spread of capitalism, secularization, urbanization, industrialization, and, more recently, the imperative to be a constantly self-fashioning, entrepreneurial subject in a highly competitive environment. Symptoms are related to specific external developments, which are thus not just construed as drivers of pathology, but also pathologized in their own right. Even Freud, who generally aimed to establish transhistorical truths about the human psyche, assumed that modernity and exhaustion went hand in hand, as the demand to repress one’s desires became ever more complex.

Articles on burnout in the German supplements in recent years have been legion – in fact, so many have appeared that some observers are already complaining about “burnout burnout”. Academic publications, too, have mushroomed: in addition to the two books reviewed here, there is Stephan Grünewald’s Die erschöpfte Gesellschaft (2013), Patrick Kury’s Der überforderte Mensch (2012) and Byung-Chul Han’s Müdigkeitsgesellschaft (2010; and already in its eighth printing).

more here.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto at Literary Review:

In the course of his investigation Finkel sheds much light on philological and literary problems of ancient Mesopotamian cultures, but one revelation dwarfs all others: in the earliest surviving description, the ark was round. The text is unambiguous on this point and includes detailed instructions for building a giant coracle out of more than 300 kilometres of coiled palm fibres, strengthening the structure with wooden ribs and decking, and coating everything in a waterproof mixture of pitch and lard. Finkel's painstaking and lively investigation of coracle-weaving traditions on the Euphrates makes the concept intelligible. He also clears up a puzzle in the flood story that forms part of Gilgamesh, where the gods seem to ordain an obviously unwieldy square ark; a round shape, like a square, is as broad as it is long and really the Gilgamesh scribe intended a circle (or was perhaps himself deceived into squaring it). With a vivid eye for what life was like in the Euphrates valley 4,000 years and more ago, Finkel argues – riskily but plausibly – that his tablet represents a fragment from the script or record of a dramatised version of the story for court performance, and that the arithmetical precision of the calculations involved in determining the ark's dimensions and assembling the materials for its construction derives from ancient Mesopotamian schoolroom exercises. There are other remarkable scholarly insights to admire. Finkel argues convincingly that the British Museum's famous Babylonian world map contains an allusion to the resting place of the ark. His image of Sennacherib, the Assyrian king from 704 to 681 BC, engaged in the first hunt for relics of the foundered vessel is brilliant.

more here.

Moira Donegan at n+1:

In Washington Square, his 1880 novella, Henry James goes out of his way to tell us that Catherine Sloper is a little bit fat. The shy daughter of a well-off New York City physician, Catherine spends much of her free time embroidering, and when she has pocket money she uses it to buy sweets, which she eats alone. In The Heiress, William Wyler’s 1949 adaptation, the scope of her pleasures is just as narrow. When the film opens, Catherine, played by Olivia de Havilland, is a grown woman of 21, living in her father’s comfortable house in the company of a silly, giggling aunt. She is unmarried, and poised to inherit a lot of money when her widowed father eventually dies.

But for all her wealth and education, Catherine has not inherited any of the self-assured equanimity of the rich. Her father is openly disappointed in her, and it’s not hard to see why. Catherine is unsociable and childishly timid; she seems fearful, and unfit to cope with even the minor daily violences of adult life. In one early scene, she sheepishly asks a fishmonger to remove the head of a large cod, and averts her eyes as he chops it off with a thudding meat cleaver. When she is dragged to a party, the man she dances with offers to go get her a glass of wine, and never returns. Catherine waits on a bench for him for the length of a waltz, her eyes nervously scanning the crowd. One of the first statements that The Heiress makes about gender is that women are easier to taxonomize than men.

more here.

James Santel in The Hudson Review:

In 2000, Rolling Stone sent David Foster Wallace to report on John McCain’s presidential campaign. The resulting essay operates on a simple premise: that to just about anyone who came of age in what Wallace calls the “post-Watergate-post-Iran-Contra-post-Whitewater-post-Lewinsky era,” American politics is a kabuki of tired rhetoric and hollow promises. It is, Wallace writes, “an era in which politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their truth or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability,” one of the consequences being that young voters between 18 and 35 were voting in lower numbers than ever (of course, that would change in 2008). As if that weren’t enough, Wallace points out (following Joan Didion’s “Insider Baseball,” her classic essay on the 1988 national conventions) that it’s in the interest of the powers that be to preserve this status quo of indifference and cynicism, a task that proves easier than one might think, because politics is “complex, abstract, dry, the province of policy wonks and Rush Limbaugh and nerdy little guys on PBS, and basically who cares.” In other words: at the root of America’s political malaise lies a short attention span.

This is a central theme of The Pale King, the novel about IRS agents Wallace was working on at the time of his suicide in 2008. Part of the unfinished novel’s plot concerns an intra-agency struggle between old-guard employees who see their work as a public service and newcomers who are interested in maximizing revenue. The novel thus allegorizes the ascendancy of privatization and self-interest at the expense of the commonweal.

More here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

An ancient Norse code which has been puzzling experts for years has been cracked by a Norwegian runologist – to discover the Viking equivalent of playful text messages.

The mysterious jötunvillur code, which dates to 12th or 13th-century Scandinavia, has been unravelled by K Jonas Nordby from the University of Oslo, after he studied a 13th-century stick on which two men, Sigurd and Lavrans, had carved their name in both code and in standard runes. The jötunvillur code is found on only nine inscriptions, from different parts of Scandinavia, and has never been interpreted before.

“The thing that solved it for me was seeing these two old Norse names, Sigurd and Lavrans, and after each of them was this combination of runes which made no sense,” said Nordby, who is writing his doctorate on cryptography in runic inscriptions from the Viking Age and the Scandinavian Middle Ages. He then realised, he continued, that in jötunvillur, the rune sign is swapped for the last sound in the rune's name, so for example the “m” rune, maðr, would be written as the rune for “r”.

“I thought 'wow, this is the system, this is the solution, now we can read this text,” said Nordby. But the code turned out to be extremely confusing, because many runes end in the same sound, “so you have to decide which one to choose”.

More here.

From The Week:

Sunday Times columnist AA Gill has won the Hatchet Job of the Year award, presented by The Omnivore website for his scathing review of Morrissey's autobiography.

“It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability,” Gill wrote in his 1,200 word demolition of Morrissey's work, published in October last year. “It is a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness.”

Gill was also scathing about Morrissey's insistence that the book be released as a Penguin Classic. “Putting it in Penguin Classics doesn't diminish Aristotle or Homer or Tolstoy; it just roundly mocks Morrissey, and this is a humiliation constructed by the self-regard of its victim.”

The review was hailed as an “expert caning” by a panel of judges including Rosie Boycott, Brian Sewell and John Sutherland.

“The 30 reviewers on the long list were easily reduced to eight, and then, as we knocked them off the list from bottom to the top, the winner emerged without argument,” said Sewell.

More here.

Brendan Borrell in Nature:

Scientists have a crystal ball on their hands: bursts of activity in the energy-producing mitochondria in a worm’s cells accurately predict how long it will live. The findings, published today in Nature¹, suggest that an organism’s lifespan is, for the most part, predictable in early adulthood. Unlike other biomarkers for ageing, which work under limited conditions, these mitochondrial bursts are a stable predictor for a variety of genetic, environmental and developmental histories. “Mitochondrial flashes have an amazing power to predict the remaining lifespan in animals,” says study lead Meng-Qiu Dong, a geneticist who studies ageing in the Caenorhabditis elegans worm at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing. “There is truth in the mitochondrial theory of ageing.”

The mitochondria are organelles that power the cells of plants, animals and other eukaryotic organisms. During energy production, they produce reactive oxygen molecules, such as free radicals, that can cause stress and damage the mitochondria. Although mitochondria break down over time, the mitochondrial theory of ageing, first proposed² in 1972, remains controversial and unproven. For instance, some long-lived organisms, such as naked mole rats, endure with high levels of oxidative damage. Nevertheless, many scientists think that mitochondria remain the primary drivers of ageing.

More here.

Jared McCallister in Daily News:

“The Black Power Mixtape: 1967–1975,” a new book by Sweden-born filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson and based on his 2011 documentary, looks at the Black Power Movement in America through archival information, color photographs, and historical speeches and interviews with Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Emile de Antonio, and Angela Davis. There is also new commentary in the book from Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Harry Belafonte, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Robin D. G. Kelley, Abiodun Oyewole, Sonia Sanchez, Bobby Seale, John Forte, and Questlove, in addition to a preface by actor/activist Danny Glover. “We have much to learn from these visionary organizers who sought to redefine and re-imagine democracy, whose sense of empowerment derived from the belief that the people could be the architects for change,” wrote Glover in the preface. The documentary was shot by Swedish journalists chronicling the Black Power Movement in the U.S., and edited by Olsson. In a review of the film, which screened in theaters and aired in PBS’ Independent Lens series, the Hollywood Reporter said, “If one of the roles of documentaries is to record and preserve history, The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 admirably performs its duty. Assembled from extraordinary footage uncovered in the Swedish Television archives and augmented by contemporary audio interviews, the film presents a powerful reminder of the black power movement, often neglected, misrepresented or forgotten in this country. This is a film that should be seen by anyone who wants to learn where we’ve come from as a nation. The Black Power Mixtape is not a static, talking heads record of the past.”

Picture: The art work “Malcolm Little “is a creation of Warren Lyons.

More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)

Rhys Southan in Modern Farmer:

I have no farming background. I was born and raised in the suburbs, and I spent more time in a shopping mall playing video games and eating fast food than I did outside. “Animals” meant cats and dogs. Of course I knew the McDonalds hamburger I ate came from a cow, but that cow had no real existence for me. It wasn’t until I started farming that livestock animals became real and individuated. And that’s when my ethical struggle began.

I pursued a PhD in political philosophy for a number of years. I focused on postmodernist and poststructuralist philosophies, and this and identity, power and symbolization are very much at the root of my ethical crises.

Watching the pigs shows me over and over again, in countless and sometimes very subtle ways, that there is much more to the life experiences of animals than most of us know or are willing to believe.

One morning, I woke up absolutely certain that killing animals to eat their meat was wrong. So it might seem like I’ve sided with animal-rights advocates, but the long view that I’m taking on this makes my position more complicated than that. My feelings about the ethics of livestock farming ebb and flow. I have no plans to stop eating meat or raising animals for slaughter. But I believe that we as a species need to evolve into the sorts of beings that do not kill to eat. For now, I justify non-industrial farming as a necessary compromise that will gradually shift how we think about using animals as food.

More here. [Thanks to John Ballard.]

Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal:

When I first picked up “The Hindus” — a tome seemingly rich with scholarship and, at 780 hardbound pages, as hefty as the legendary demon Kumbhakarna — I was struck most of all by the author's name on its cover: Wendy Doniger. A mist of apprehension spritzed my Hindu soul. Could this lady (a professor at the University of Chicago) be the same Wendy Doniger who wrote last year — in one of the more batty commentaries in an election season replete with unhinged scrivenings — that Sarah Palin's “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman”? If so, could this author really be trusted with a history of my people, the Hindus?

I should report that it is the same Wendy Doniger. But in the book in question, Ms. Doniger has eschewed the pamphleteering arts — perhaps because there is no trace of the Palin tribe in any Sanskrit yarn. She has, instead, concentrated her prodigious learning on making modern sense of the texts and tales of Hindu society, as well as of the rituals and symbols of the Hindu people.

Let us be clear: Ms. Doniger's book is not a history of Hinduism, still less an attempt to render the religion comprehensible to all. It is not a work of theology either but a loosely chronological cultural history of “the Hindus.” She begins, naturally, with an examination of their origins in the Indus Valley (now, ironically, in Pakistan) and is particularly illuminating on the relationship between humans, animals and gods in the “Rig Veda,” the most ancient Hindu sacred text, from 1,500 B.C. In keeping with her promise to deliver an “alternative history,” she pays as much attention to the role in ancient Hindu texts accorded to women, pariahs, ogres and the like — the beings on the margin, as it were — as she does to Brahmin and Kshatriya (warrior) males, the more conventional power-players in the Hindu tableau vivant.

More here.

Sasha Archibald at Cabinet:

Cinema tends to make beautiful people look more beautiful, but it wasn’t always so. In its earliest days, film had an adversarial relationship to beauty, exaggerating the tonal and textural variations of the human face so that even the most stunning heroine became a blotchy caricature. Early black-and-white film stocks—first, orthochromatic film, dominant until 1927, and to a lesser degree its successor, panchromatic film—rendered dark colors darker and light colors lighter, turning features that seemed innocuous off camera (rouged cheeks, a constellation of moles) into distracting blemishes when seen on the screen. Pimples and freckles looked like spots of mud and blue eyes seemed colorless; lipstick made the mouth a cavernous hole and a complexion with sallow or pink undertones appeared, in the term of the time, “negroid.” Techniques borrowed from the stage also proved problematic: face paint used to suggest wrinkles to a theater audience, for example, read as tattoos on film. Cinematic makeup, then, was not born from vanity—it was a necessary antidote to the flawed medium of film.

more here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

To celebrate the opening of the Sochi Olympics, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, is staging “The Russian Avant-Garde and Sport”, an exhibition that shows just how close beneath the skin of sport politics has always been in Russia. It is a largely photographic show, because most Soviet artists regarded the camera as a truer implement of the machine age than paint and canvas. This was particularly true of Rodchenko, whose monochrome triptych in 1921 – squares of red, blue and yellow – represented, he thought, the end-point of painting: “It’s all over,” he said.

Having a camera in his hand did not, however, change his aesthetic. If, as a painter, his art involved the careful placing of geometrical shapes in space, then he looked for the same things through the viewfinder. Sport, with its bodily distortions and rapid spatial changes, provided the perfect subjects. He took his pictures from unusual angles and made a diver in mid-air, an athlete spinning off the high bar or a runner crossing the track’s grid of lanes into unfamiliar shapes in a void rather than recognisable bodies in motion. Rodchenko believed that art should be a part of everyday life but that didn’t mean he wanted it necessarily to resemble everyday life. His innovations have become sporting photography’s commonplaces.

more here.

Volodymyr Yermolenko at Eurozine:

There is the Europe that presents a more or less emotionless face of rules and regulations. This Europe ends somewhere along the frontier between Germany and Poland. A kind of Euro-protestantism prevails: it has lost faith in European civilization but preserved its sense of morality. The European idea has been transformed into a set of rules and a collection of institutional procedures. Where there is no faith, rules become paramount.

The other Europe is spontaneous and emotional, the Europe of faith. This is Young Europe, comprising in the main the countries of the former socialist bloc. For the people living in these countries, Europe is still a vision, an ideal, utopia. They believe in Europe but often ignore its rules. For them Europe is a kind of mystical ecstasy in which they can forget about legal codes. In the face of Euro-catholicism and Euro-orthodoxy, they are filled with faith and ready to die for Europe, but not always ready to live for it. For them rules are too trivial for them to be concerned with.

Us Ukranians, we are that other Europe.

more here.

Phone Survey

We're doing a phone survey, asking
average people like yourself, attractive, cynical, smart, etc.,
people who cook with garlic, who, if married,
it's not the first time. People who have had
two or more jobs in the last three years.
We want to know what your preferred response is
when you hear,
if in fact you do hear,
the voices. Shall I clarify?
Voices that converse
on the great unhappiness and failure
that is yours. How often
would you swear you're not drunk, no,
but the trees are swaying. We're calling to ask
if you ever get confused and mistake
the swaying of trees for the lapping of water,
until you can't get your bearing. Is that when
the voices advise you, smooth
as a nail going in? Are there certain words that,
can I say, sneak in from behind, know all
the back entrances? Would you agree
the secret of their strength
is that they will not let you give in
to your hunger? How often
all you've said and all you've done, torn
like meat from a bone. Is that when you go out, walk
past lighted windows? Go to a movie? Have a coke?
Or do you hang around, drift off
till the voices wake you with a jolt or slap: “Payback time.”
Like a street person in front of a diner, begging for change,
who will not let you go in and get your lousy cup of coffee
though the sign on the diner flashes: OPEN ALL NIGHT.
Are the voices familiar with, say,
streets you walked as a kid,
torn signs, dead trees?
We're asking if the voices, now or in the past,
have ever told you that you have to go back
to the path by the precipice. Because that is your path.
Would you mind answering? Or am I interrupting something?
Shall I call back later? What time would be best?
.

by Carole Glasser Langille
from Late In A Slow Time
Mansfield Press, 2003.