Cristina McDowell in LA Weekly:

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, dear Kings of Hollywood, but you have been conned.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Christina McDowell, formerly Christina Prousalis. I am the daughter of Tom Prousalis, a man the Washington Post described as “just some guy on trial for penny-stock fraud.” (I had to change my name after my father stole my identity and then threatened to steal it again, but I'll get to that part later.) I was eighteen and a freshman in college when my father and his attorneys forced me to attend his trial at New York City's federal courthouse so that he “looked good” for the jury — the consummate family man.

And you, Jordan Belfort, Wall Street's self-described Wolf: You remember my father, right? You were chosen to be the government's star witness in testifying against him. You had pleaded guilty to money laundering and securities fraud (it was the least you could do) and become a government witness in two dozen cases involving your former business associate, but my father's attorneys blocked your testimony because had you testified it would have revealed more than a half-dozen other corrupt stock offerings too. And, well, that would have been a disaster. It would have just been too many liars, and too many schemes for the jurors, attorneys or the judge to follow.

But the records shows you and my father were in cahoots together with MVSI Inc. of Vienna, e-Net Inc. of Germantown, Md., Octagon Corp. of Arlington, Va., and Czech Industries Inc. of Washington, D.C., and so on — a list of seemingly innocuous, legitimate companies that stretches on. I'll spare you. Nobody cares. None of these companies actually existed, yet all of them were taken public by the one and only Wolf of Wall Street and his firm Stratton Oakmont Inc in order to defraud unwitting investors and enrich yourselves.

More here.

Rowan Hooper in Slate:

Rowan Hooper: You have just published part one of your memoir. Is it intended as a humanizing exercise, to show you're not a mean, nasty baddie?

Richard Dawkins: I don't know how many people think I'm mean. I'm certainly not and I didn't consciously set out to do any image-cleaning or anything. I like to think it's an honest portrayal of how I really am. And I hope it is human, yes.

RH: Nevertheless, there's a gulf between the real you and the caricature Richard Dawkins. How has that come about?

RD: I have two theories which are not mutually exclusive. One is the religion business. People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face, they seem to identify personally with it. There is a historical attitude that religion is off-limits to criticism.

Also, some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.

RH: You definitely polarize people. How do you feel about the hate mail you get?

RD: I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the background. Sweet strains to contrast with this awful, “you fucking wanker Dawkins” and so on. Making comedy of it is a pretty good way of absorbing it.

More here.

David Derbyshire in The Guardian:

[…D]rawing on his background in statistics, [Robert] Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.

Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual “flight” of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson's findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine.

“The results are disturbing,” says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Wineryin Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. “Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year.

“Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win.”

These judges are not amateurs either. They read like a who's who of the American wine industry from winemakers, sommeliers, critics and buyers to wine consultants and academics. In Hodgson's tests, judges rated wines on a scale running from 50 to 100. In practice, most wines scored in the 70s, 80s and low 90s.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in theJournal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

More here.

Chen Tian in News China:

Trotsky’s Views was openly published in China in 1980, two years after the country embarked on its ongoing experiment with Reform and Opening-up, and 40 years after Leon Trotsky, who remains one of the world’s most contentious political thinkers, was assassinated.

Its predecessor was Excerpts of Trotsky’s Reactionary Views, compiled by the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau and printed by the People’s Press, as one of the “Gray Cover” books issued to a limited number of Party cadres in 1964.

Gray Cover books were classified into three categories. Category C included books by such European socialist thinkers as Alexandre Millerand of France and Otto Bauer of Austria who attempted revisions to perceived orthodox Marxism. These were generally available to Party functionaries, though banned from public sale. Category B covered more controversial works by figures such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, both revisionist leaders of the Second International, and were restricted to higher-level cadres.

Category A covered books published for the exclusive consumption of ranking officials above the ministerial level, and Excerpts of Trotsky’s Reactionary Views fell under this category. The name Leon Trotsky, as it had within the Soviet Union, became synonymous with revisionism in the official ideology of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which, modified by the unique political theories of Mao Zedong, based its core ideology on a Stalinist interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. During Party purges of the 1930s and 40s, branded “Trotskyites” within the Party ranks were purged in their hundreds.

More here.

A Barred Owl

The warping night air having brought the boom
Of an owls voice into her darkened room,
We tell the wakened child that all she heard
Was an odd question from a forest bird,
Asking of us, if rightly listened to,
“Who cooks for you?” and then “Who cooks for you?”

Words, which can make our terrors bravely clear,
Can also thus domesticate a fear,
And send a small child back to sleep at night
Not listening for the sound of stealthy flight
Or dream of some small thing in a claw
Borne up to some dark branch and eaten raw.

by Richard Wilbur
from Collected Poems, 1943 – 2004

Maggie Jones in The New York Times:

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the 3-year-old girl with pigtail braids would end up on the stage. Her father was a traveling magician, and for seven generations before him, the men of the family were performers of a different sort: Brahmin priests and astrologers. So when the tiny, preschool-age girl named Shakuntala Devi effortlessly memorized an entire shuffled deck of cards at one of her father’s shows, he lifted her onto a table for her debut. In another time, in another place, in another family, the child prodigy might have honed her skills with tutors and math classes. But this was the 1930s in Bangalore, India, and Devi’s family was impoverished. Stage money was fast money; education, on the other hand, was a long-term investment her parents couldn’t afford. Every morning, Devi and her father headed out on foot to display her talents at schools and businesses. At 5, when other kids were learning to count to 100, she was extracting cube roots in her head and was the family’s sole money earner. Soon she started appearing at universities throughout southern India. By her teens, she had moved to bigger stages in England, saving just enough money to pay for her room and board and sending the rest home.

By adulthood, the duty to perform and travel had become a muscle that she couldn’t rest. For more than six decades, Devi packed her suitcase, often every several weeks, for England, the United States, Hong Kong, Japan, Sri Lanka, Italy, Canada, Russia, France, Spain, Mauritius, Indonesia and Malaysia. Before each performance, she needed an hour of silence. Then as soon as Devi stepped onstage in her flowing saris, her gold jewels and her pink lipstick, she was at ease and chatty. She asked for the birth years and dates of members of the audience: In one second or so, she pinpointed the day of the week on which they were born. Or she would rattle off the dates of, say, every Monday in a given year. “Is that correct?” she would ask. Yes, it was correct. Again and again, she was correct. She wowed the magician Ricky Jay on a CBS special, “Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women,” as she extracted roots from nine- and 10-digit numbers. She liked to see the numbers on a chalkboard, without commas, which interrupted their natural flow. The cube root of 849278123? The cube root of 2186875592? Then: Click. With a small shrug of her shoulders, she had the answer. On the BBC, she teased the host, David Frost, about the simplicity of her calculations. “You’ve got it?” she said, knowing full well he didn’t. “How do you do it?” TV hosts often asked. The question bored Devi, but she didn’t show it. “It’s a very automatic reaction. . . . I was born with this gift.”

More here.

Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj in Salon:

Michele Bachmann kicked off her 2012 presidential campaign in Waterloo, Iowa, where she was born and spent most of her childhood. During the speech announcing her candidacy, Bachmann emphasized her connections to the community, a theme she continued in subsequent interviews. In one interview with Fox News, Bachmann suggested that she shared the spirit embodied by John Wayne, Waterloo’s other native son. Unfortunately, the candidate’s facts were incorrect; John Wayne hailed from Winterset, Iowa, not Waterloo. This would have been a small detail, except that another nationally known John Wayne, John Wayne Gacy—who raped and murdered 33 boys in the 1970s—did, for a time, live in Waterloo. This left some in the media assuming that she had confused the two men. In an information environment rife with outrage outlets, it was more than a gaffe. It was political pornography. If you are an outrage-based liberal blog, headlines such as Wonkette’s “Michele Bachmann Launches 2012 Presidential Campaign by Praising ‘Killer Clown’ John Wayne Gacy,” are great for traffic, even if they are patently inaccurate. The video clip of Bachmann’s blunder hit YouTube and was posted on several liberal blogs including the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos, and reappeared on the left-leaning cable news analysis shows. After Keith Olbermann aired it on “Countdown,” he quipped (in response to Bachmann’s reference to her “spirit”), “The kind of spirit that mixes fact, fantasy, and often sheer stupidity in a potent blend that is really all her own.”

…Like Sarah Palin’s “refudiate” or Anthony Weiner’s repeated sexting faux pas, Bachmann’s serial killer faux pas was tantalizing click-bait—a snarky jab at a favorite target—too good to pass up. Indeed, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index, a full third of the newslinks on blogs from the week of the John Wayne Gacy error were about Michelle Bachmann, with her candidacy and the John Wayne Gacy gaffe noted as sharing the spotlight. This political mudslinging is not new, but over the last 25 years outrage as a genre has grown exponentially. In this chapter we dispel the myth that the outrage we see today has always been present—an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of American democracy—showing that while outrage as a rhetorical style was not recently invented, its emergence as a genre is new.

More here.

Christian Jarrett in Wired, via Andrew Sullivan:

[A] pair of neuroscientists in London have published a welcome review in the respected journal Current Biology entitled “What we know currently about mirror neurons.” In contrast to the hype that usually surrounds these cells, James Kilner and Roger Lemon at UCL have taken a calm, objective look at the literature.

They acknowledge that it is difficult to interpret mirror neuron activity in humans (using brain imaging) and so they focus on the 25 papers that have involved the direct recording of individual brain cells in monkeys. This research reveals that motor cells with mirror-like properties are found in parts of the front of the brain involved in motor control (so-called premotor regions and in the primary motor cortex) and also in the parietal lobe near the crown of the head.

Reading their paper it soon becomes clear that the term “mirror neurons” conceals a complex mix of cell types. Some motor cells only show mirror-like responses when a monkey sees a live performer in front of them; other cells are also responsive to movements seen on video. Some mirror neurons appear to be fussy – they only respond to a very specific type of action; others are less specific and respond to a far broader range of observed movements. There are even some mirror neurons that are activated by the sound of a particular movement. Others show mirror suppression – that is their activity is reduced during action observation. Another study found evidence in monkeys of touch-sensitive neurons that respond to the sight of another animal being touched in the same location (Ramachandran calls these “Gandhi cells” because he says they dissolve the barriers between human beings).

Importantly, Kilner and Lemon also highlight findings from monkeys showing how the activity of mirror neurons is modulated by such factors as the angle of view, the reward value of the observed movement, and the overall goal of a movement, such as whether it is intended to grasp an object or place it in the mouth. These findings are significant because they show how mirror neurons are not merely activated by incoming sensory information, but also by formulations developed elsewhere in the brain about the meaning of what is being observed.

More here.

Ryan Bubalo in the LA Review of Books:

SOLDIER TALES produce their own tropes and metaphors, the unique hells of each war. World War I led us into the trenches. World War II carried us along for D-Day and dogfights. Vietnam was choppers, paddy field recons, and the smell of napalm in the morning. And now, while most of the country tries to forget the Iraq War ever happened, American Iraq fiction slams the doors on its underprotected Humvees and compels readers to take a perilous ride.

Fiction is, of course, serving rearguard here; the last decade has seen Iraq War films, poetry collections, documentaries, and non-fiction books too numerous to list, but part of what’s appealing about examining American Iraq War fiction now is that there isn’t that much yet. A common perspective unites this early wave of American Iraq War storytellers.“The war tried to kill us in the spring,” Kevin Powers writes in the elegant, elegiac opening of The Yellow Birds. Powers’ “us” could just as well include Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn, David Abrams’ Gooding and Shrinkle, Lea Carpenter’s SEAL operators, and most of the protagonists in Fire and Forget, a collection of “short stories from the long war.” That “us” is the wife of Siobhan Fallon’s Meg in You Know When the Men Are Gone and the son of Lea Carpenter’s Sara. Because the texts that comprise the current corps of American fictions about Iraq are not just war stories, they are soldier tales.

David Simon’s Generation Kill and other early American works explored the halcyon invasion days of the war when the enemy and objectives were clear: topple Saddam, free Iraq. American fiction, though, focuses primarily on the occupation, and for American soldiers in occupied Iraq, there was driving and there were IEDs.

More here.

Over at the Rationally Speaking podcast, Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef:

Few philosophers have as wide of an impact on the general public as ethicist Peter Singer, this week's guest on Rationally Speaking podcast. Singer's utilitarian arguments about how we should treat animals, why we have a moral obligation to give to charity, whether infants should count as “people,” and more have won him widespread fame — and notoriety — over the last few decades, and launched multiple movements. Tune in to hear his discussion with Massimo and Julia about why he's a utilitarian, and how his views of utilitarianism have recently changed (and find out how he influenced Massimo's life years ago).

More here.

Paul Reitter at Jewish Review of Books:

The years before the First World War mark the highpoint of Salten’s career as a Zionist speaker. He was invited back by Bar Kochba’s leaders, and when, in 1911, he made another appearance in the festive evening series, he shone just as brightly as he had the first time. But even after Zionist lecturing was mostly behind him, Salten continued to write as a Zionist. In 1924, for example, he travelled to Palestine and published a largely admiring book about what he saw there. This was soon after Salten had produced the work that would win him international fame: Bambi.

Bambi first appeared in serialized form in Vienna’s stately paper of record, the Neue Freie Presse. The book version appeared in 1923, and by then the story had established itself as one that appealed to adults and children alike. The American edition was so hotly anticipated that the fledgling Book of the Month Club ordered 50,000 copies before it had even appeared. Translated into English by Whittaker Chambers, of all people, and published in the United States in 1928, the novel was both a critical and commercial success.

more here.

Éadaoín Lynch at Dublin Review of Books:

Gill Plain’s first line, “There are many ‘1940s’”, is an illustration of not only the complexities of the decade, but of the difficulty of dividing history into arbitrary digestible ten-year periods. Despite this difficulty, Plain’s study offers an accessible, engaging overview of the decade’s literature. By placing texts parallel to historical settings, she allows for a greater understanding of the ways in which they overlap, and offers succinct insights that could be subjects for further studies in their own right. Take for example this observation: “The horror of 1945 is both anticipated and avoided by literature.” This paradoxical viewpoint, which many authors of the 1940s adopted, is a useful starting point in understanding the tensions apparent in the literature of this decade, when combatants and non-combatants were facing a Second World War within the great shadow of the First.

The general preface to the book, written by series editor Randall Stevenson, advises that, “history in the twentieth-century perhaps pressed harder and more variously on literary imagination than ever before, requiring a literary history correspondingly meticulous, flexible and multifocal”. It was because of this felt need that Edinburgh University Press began its History of Twentieth-Century Literature in Britain.

more here.

Daniel Green at The Quarterly Conversation:

Purdy’s alienation from the dominant literary culture as represented by both publishers and reviewers ultimately became quite profound, prompted, no doubt, by his acknowledgment of the perceived irrelevance of his books, although publishers had demonstrated indifference, if not outright hostility, to his earliest fiction as well. (His first important work, 63: Dream Palace, was published in Great Britain after it could find no publisher in the United States.) Yet it is also the case that Purdy did very little on his part to ameliorate the situation. He gave few friendly interviews, did not participate in any efforts to better “position” his work in the literary marketplace, and above all never tried to write differently in order to make his fiction more amenable to conventional expectations of “literary fiction.” For readers, journalists, or critics who are more interested in writers than writing, more concerned about business than literature, Purdy’s attitude might have understandably been frustrating. Similarly, some readers and critics might rightly have found Purdy’s fiction stubbornly idiosyncratic, but dismissing it as idiosyncratic before determining if those idiosyncrasies actually amount to a sustained artistic vision hardly seems a very serious response.

Indeed, those of us who have read deeply into Purdy’s fiction quickly enough realize that what could be called its idiosyncrasies are in fact its greatest strengths and that Purdy didn’t merely write one or two individually adventurous, original stories or novels but instead created a comprehensively original body of work, each separate work providing a variation on Purdy’s themes and methods but also exemplifying his larger achievement.

more here.

Rafia Zakaria in Chapati Mystery:

A ripe 110 years ago, in the year 1903, the Second Imperial Durbar was held in Delhi, to celebrate the coronation of King Edward the VII and Queen Alexandria as Emperor and Empress of India. Neither could attend, but Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of the Indian colony, decided that it would be a great opportunity to appropriate the spectacle as homage to the British rule of India. To insure that the spectacle would be appropriately, spectacular he ordered all the minion Maharajas of the Empire to arrive in their traditional garb, with large retinues, silks and elephants and punkahs; so they would look like Maharajas. In this neat directive, the Indian love of protocol was thus successfully employed in the service of Empire. That the arriving “rulers’ were not “rulers” but vassals of Empire, that their retinues and turbans and everything else meant nothing at all in relation to their ability to rule themselves, was the farce behind it all. The British left and Pakistan and India exchanged their misgivings against the British Empire with petty barbs and nuclear weapons directed at each other. It is a consuming concern; and has occupied millions on either side with its continuing pettiness and puffery for a near century. On either side; the love of pomp and protocol has remained; flagellated into democratic norms on one side and military machinations on the other. Indians and Pakistani leaders are united in their love of appropriating the discriminatory racism that was once heaped on them on the lesser others of their respective countries. Importance, value, worth on either side of the border equals never being mistaken for those ordinary hordes; And nowhere is this most visible than in the constellations of power, the subcontinent elected office means command over convoys of cars, flashing lights, security details and never, ever, the ignominy of being treated “just like everyone else”

…The case of the Indian diplomat accused of victimizing her Indian maid in the United States could not end that way. After a few days of passion and petulance; the U/S Secretary of State, John Kerry, said he regretted the treatment of the diplomat. Indians happily declared victory They had won! The Americans would not be able to treat their diplomats poorly even when they happened to abuse their maids, diplomatic courtesy demanded delicacy (and perhaps even oversight, after all what’s a harried diplomat with kids to do without good help of the Indian kind!) In the fog of jubilation; they may have missed, like the decked up Maharajas of the Delhi Durbar; the ultimate irony of their fervently fought cause. Abusing a maid, lying on documents, foisting the inequalities of status operative at home on their servants abroad is none of it, worthy of serious punishment, of detention least of all the strip search required of everyone. What is more important is the South Asian love of protocol, of an affirmation by a superpower of the importance of an Indian diplomat, a vindication of the belief that those that get special treatment are somehow, in some special way inherently deserving of it.

More here.

Simon Baron-Cohen in The New York Times:

Is morality innate? In his new book, “Just Babies,” the psychologist Paul Bloom draws from his research at the Yale Infant Cognition Center to argue that “certain moral foundations are not acquired through learning. . . . They are instead the products of biological evolution.” Infants may be notoriously difficult to study (rats and pigeons “can at least run mazes or peck at levers”), but according to Bloom, they are, in fact, “moral creatures.” He describes a study in which 1-year-olds watched a puppet show where a ball is passed to a “nice” puppet (who passes it back) or to a “naughty” puppet (who steals it). Invited to reward or punish the puppets, children took treats away from the “naughty” one. These 1-year-olds seem to be making moral judgments, but is this an inborn ability?

…He also describes remarkable classic experiments, some of which left this reader stunned. One study by the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark involved presenting black children with black and white dolls. In the segregated South, a ­majority of children preferred the white dolls and used negative attributes to describe the black dolls. Bloom says this study, referred to in the Brown v. Board of Education decision to end school segregation, “might well be the most important developmental psychology finding in American history.” But how it fits into his theory of morality is less clear, since the experiment only really shows that, without exposure to people from different backgrounds, we have a tendency to judge others based on stereotypes.

More here.

Parade

Peter says if you’re going to talk about suffering
you have to mention pleasure too.

Like the way, on the day of the parade, on Forbes Avenue,
one hundred parking tickets flutter
under the windshield wipers of one hundred parked cars.

The accordion band will be along soon,
and the famous Flying Pittsburgettes,
and it’s summer and the sun is shining on the inevitable flags—

Something weird to admire this week on TV:
the handsome face of the white supremacist on trial.
How he looks right back at the lawyers, day after day
—never objecting, never making an apology.

I look at his calm, untroubled face
and think, That motherfucker is going to die white and right,
disappointing everyone like me
who thinks that punishment should be a kind of education.

My attitude is like what God says in the Bible:
Love your brother, or be destroyed.

Then Moses or somebody says back to God,
If I love you,
will you destroy my enemies?
and God says—this is in translation—, No Problemo.

Here, everyone is talking about the price of freedom,
and about how we as a people are united in our down payment.
about how we will fight to the very bottom of our bank account.

And the sky is so blue it looks like it may last forever
and the skinny tuba player goes oompahpah
and everybody cheers.

In the big store window of the travel agency downtown,
a ten-foot sign says, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.

The letters have been cut with scissors out of blue construction paper
and pasted carefully to the sign by someone’s hand.

What I want to know is, who will issue the ticket
for improper use of the collective pronoun?
What I want to know is, who will find and punish the maker
of these impossible promises?

by Tony Hoagland
from What Narcissism Means To me
Greywolf Press, 2003