El Anatsui. Earth's Skin, 2007.

Hanging made of aluminium bottle caps from a distillery in Nsukka, Nigeria.

More here and here.

From Kurzweil AI:

A world-first completed clinical study by an Australian team has found Kava, a medicinal South Pacific plant, significantly reduced the symptoms of people suffering anxiety. The study, led by the University of Melbourne, revealed Kava could be an alternative to pharmaceutical products for the hundreds of thousands of Australians who suffer from generalized anxiety disorders (GAD) “In this study we’ve been able to show that Kava offers a potential natural alternative for the treatment of chronic clinical anxiety; unlike some other options, it has less risk of dependency and less potential for side effects,” said lead researcher, Dr Jerome Sarris from Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne. The study also found that people’s genetic differences (polymorphisms) of certain neurobiological mechanisms called GABA transporters may modify their response to Kava. “If this finding is replicated, it may pave the way for simple genetic tests to determine which people may be likely to have a beneficial anxiety-reducing effect from taking Kava,” Sarris said.

An additional novel finding of the study, recently published in Phytotherapy Research, was that Kava increased women’s sex drive compared to those in the placebo group, believed to be due to the reduction of anxiety, rather than any aphrodisiac effect. Future studies confirming the genetic relationship to therapeutic response, and any libido-improving effects from Kava is now required. Dr Sarris said these significant findings are of importance to sufferers of anxiety and to the South Pacific region, which relies on Kava as a major export.

More here.

From The Atlantic:

The season finale marked the last regular SNL appearance of Seth Meyers (slated to succeed Jimmy Fallon as host of NBC's Late Night), Fred Armisen, and Bill Hader. (Jason Sudeikis's return remains uncertain.) The show sent them off with a mostly strong episode and some fitting farewell moments. Host Ben Affleck was joined by his wife, Jennifer Garner, during the monologue. Amy Poehler joined Seth Meyers for Weekend Update. Musical guest Kanye West performed “Black Skinhead” and “New Slaves.”

Picture: Seth Meyers beats out Anderson Cooper for Stefon's hand in marriage.

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Richard Marshall interviews Gordon Finlayson in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: A key discussion in contemporary liberal theory of ethics and politics is the relationship and differences between Habermas and Rawls. Can you say something about what you take the main points of dispute are and where you stand on this?

GF: Sure. In my view, despite the amount of ink that has been spilt on Habermas and Rawls in their respective fields, relatively little attention has been paid to the dispute between them. This is largely because influential commentators and critics were quick to judge their exchange in the Journal of Philosophy a damp squib.

This was in part because expectations ran high, at the time, because two of the greatest social and political theorists of the 20th century, although working in different traditions, roughly analytic political philosophy and German Social theory had engaged each other in debate. It was also because in truth neither thinker was sufficiently well apprised of the detail of the others theory – unsurprisingly really, since they worked in very different traditions and each had just spent the last few years writing their own major work of political theory. Finally, everyone at the time, including the disputants themselves, were seduced by the assumption that the salient point of comparison between their respective theories was Habermas’s principle (U) and his conception of the moral standpoint, and Rawls’s argument that the principles of justice are those that would be chosen by a rational and reasonable persons in the Original Position. Almost everyone who has written on Habermas and Rawls makes that particular mistake.

My take on that is straightforward. The debate between them concerns their respective political theories. It is basically a dispute between Rawls’s theory of Political Liberalism, and Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Law. It is not primarily a dispute between Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Habermas Discourse Ethics. Principle (U) is the central idea in Habermas’s Discourse Ethics, which is a moral theory, not a theory of law or of democratic legitimacy, while the argument from the Original Position takes a back seat in Rawls’s Political Liberalism. People who interpret the Habermas Rawls dispute in the light of the contrast between Habermas’s principle (U) and Rawls’s Original Position, are looking at the wrong thing and so miss the real points of dispute.

What people should have been asking is this. What are the central organizing ideas of their respective political theories, and on what significant points do these ideas conflict?

Mike Jay reviews Suzanne Corkin's Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World in the LRB:

Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder. Yet if we were somehow to freeze our memory at the youthful peak of its powers, around our late twenties, we would not create a polished version of ourselves analogous to a youthful body, but an early, scrappy draft composed of childhood memories and school-learning, barely recognisable to our older selves.

Christopher Benfey in the NYRB's blog:

Spring should be a time of portents and premonitions, winged harbingers (“I dreaded that first Robin, so,” as Emily Dickinson put it with characteristic ambivalence) and new beginnings.

This thought struck me as I read Megan Marshall’s sympathetic new biography of Margaret Fuller, which opens with a familiar phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid, one that inspired an essay Fuller wrote during her precocious childhood. Possunt, quia posse videntur means, roughly, “They can because they think they can,” and describes a team of rowers who, according to Marshall, “will themselves to win a race.” The phrase, which Fuller thought demonstrated “confidence in the future,” gives Marshall an overarching theme for Fuller’s fiercely driven life.

But Fuller also made use of the Aeneid when she was less confident of the future. She was known to perform the ancient form of divination in which a passage of Virgil selected at random is assumed to reveal what lies ahead. Sir Philip Sidney described the practice, with a dash of skepticism, in his Defence of Poesy:

And so far were they carried into the admiration thereof, that they thought in the chanceable hitting upon any such verses great fore-tokens of their following fortunes were placed; whereupon grew the word of Sortes Virgilianae, when by sudden opening Virgil’s book they lighted upon some verse of his making.

Enda O'Doherty in Eurozine:

Germans have featured prominently among those who have sometimes had difficulty in believing that their native tongue is quite up to the mark, or, as we say in our barbarous contemporary jargon, fit for purpose. The German invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century was certainly to give a boost to the prestige of vernacular languages (at the expense of the universal language, Latin). It was also to be important in spreading the new religion, Protestantism. Martin Luther enthused:

Printing is God's most recent gift and his greatest. Through it, in effect, God wishes to make known the true religion to the whole world, right to the extremities of the Earth.

And so it came to pass. But the Whiggish Protestantism (still alive in the popular cultural histories of Lord Bragg, formerly Melvyn) which celebrates the unstoppable spread of the Word, to be read and chewed over by the individual in private – an improving substitute for the “nonsense” mumbled by the priest in an incomprehensible language – tends to forget that in the short term virtually no one could read, whereas all could see and grasp the meaning of the wall paintings, statues and altarpieces in the church, which the Protestants for the most part were so keen to efface or destroy. The short term in this context, we should remember, was rather long. Mass literacy came to England only in the nineteenth century.Luther however, after his initial enthusiasm, seems to have had second thoughts about the wisdom of translating the Bible into German and making it available to everyone, or everyone who could read (he was to find, disturbingly, that they disagreed with him about what it meant).

John B. Thompson reviews Stephen R. Platt's Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom : China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War and Tobie Meyer-Fong's What Remains : Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China in the LA Review of Books:

The Taiping Civil War (1850­–1864) started with a dream. Hong Xiuquan, a young scholar from Guangdong, a province in southern China, aspired to the government position and the unassailable status guaranteed by success in imperial civil service examinations. However, in 1837, Hong flunked the provincial-level examination in Canton, the province’s major city, for the third time and returned home broken. He collapsed into episodic trances in which he traveled to a heavenly realm and met an old man in a black dragon robe. The man, whom Hong understood to be his “father,” stood grieving at the edge of heaven, dismayed by the people of his creation who had been led astray by demons. He dispatched Hong to earth, along with a middle-aged man identified as Hong’s “elder brother,” to slay these devils.

Until 1843, Hong had no vocabulary to explain his visions. That year, he rediscovered a collection of Bible passages he had obtained in Canton years before, and the meaning of his visions became clear: his heavenly father was God. His elder brother was Jesus. The demons were China’s false idols and Hong was China’s savior. Hong immediately began to preach his vision along with the New Testament in the mountains of southern China and quickly amassed a growing following among the farmers and villagers.

Over time, Hong resolved to establish on earth the kingdom he had seen in heaven. He redefined the demons from the idols of China’s cultural inheritance to the alien Manchu rulers of the Qing Dynasty. “God had divided the kingdoms of the world […] just as a father divides his estates among his sons,” Hong said. “Why should these Manchus forcibly enter China and rob their brothers of their estate?” In 1850, Hong and his Society of God Worshippers openly rebelled against Qing authorities. In 1851, Hong formally declared the existence of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with himself as Heavenly King. By 1853, his resourceful, ever-growing army had captured the old Ming Dynasty capital of Nanjing. From that point until the end of the civil war, there were effectively two states within China.

Claude S. Fischer in Boston Review:

Some observers respond to questions raised by the Flynn Effect by dismissing intelligence testing as an exercise in cultural domination. This ostrich-like response ignores the fact that IQ scores, whatever they measure, consistently correlate with important outcomes such as how well people perform their jobs and how long they live. Such dismissal also ignores the growing evidence that there is a physical, neurological basis to cognition and cognitive skills.

A more serious critique of the research attacks the definition of intelligence. Researchers in the intelligence field define it as a general capability to reason, understand complex ideas, think abstractly, and solve problems. You can measure it, they argue, using IQ tests. Critics consider these tests to be superficial and argue that they ignore other kinds of intelligence such as emotional intelligence or deeper traits such as wisdom. While researchers cannot track historical trends in wisdom, they are trying to wise up about the apparent historical increase in IQ.

One might suspect that the tests have gotten easier. They haven’t. In fact, the tests have gotten harder in order to keep the average IQ at one hundred. By reversing that process, Flynn showed the long-term rise in real performance.

Other challengers argue that we are not really smarter than our great-grandparents; it’s just that people today learn the answers to test questions in school or have become familiar with testing. However, scores on the parts of tests that are most easily taught and are the most culture-laden—say, recognizing vocabulary or knowing geography—have not changed much. Scores on those parts of tests that measure the most abstract, presumably culture-free thinking—say, drawing logical inferences from patterns in designs—have risen the most. The sorts of thinking that are supposedly most detached from classroom and cultural learning are the ones that have really improved.

So if a real increase in some kind of cognitive ability is under way, the question is why.

A conversation with Lee Smolin in Edge:

The main question I'm asking myself, the question that puts everything together, is how to do cosmology; how to make a theory of the universe as a whole system. This is said to be the golden age of cosmology and it is from an observational point of view, but from a theoretical point of view it's almost a disaster. It's crazy the kind of ideas that we find ourselves thinking about. And I find myself wanting to go back to basics—to basic ideas and basic principles—and understand how we describe the world in a physical theory.

What's the role of mathematics? Why does mathematics come into physics? What's the nature of time? These two things are very related since mathematical description is supposed to be outside of time. And I've come to a long evolution since the late 80's to a position, which is quite different from the ones that I had originally, and quite surprising even to me. But let me get to it bit by bit. Let me build up the questions and the problems that arise.

One way to start is what I call “physics in a box” or, theories of small isolated systems. The way we've learned to do this is to make an accounting or an itinerary—a listing of the possible states of a system. How can a possible system be? What are the possible configurations? What were the possible states? If it's a glass of Coca Cola, what are the possible positions and states of all the atoms in the glass? Once we know that, we ask, how do the states change? And the metaphor here—which comes from atomism that comes from Democritus and Lucretius—is that physics is nothing but atoms moving in a void and the atoms never change.

From New Statesman:

Given its successes, feminism today looks very different from the feminism of 1913. There is, wonderfully and rightly, something much less embattled, much more inclusive and much more relaxed about feminists now. Rather than chasing the chimera of the “perfect mother” and the “perfect citizen”, we can accept one another in our flawed variety. The humourlessness that sometimes characterised women’s politics in the early 20th century has disappeared and many leading voices in contemporary feminism, from Caitlin Moran to the Vagenda magazine, use humour as their main weapon. The new tone of feminism suggests that instead of being furious and earnest all the time, we can begin to enjoy how far we have come. This humour is hugely attractive to younger women and effective in divesting the enemy of much of his power simply by giggling at him. It rests very much on the progress that has already been made and the ability of the funny feminists to build their audiences through social media and the internet, rather than having to rely exclusively on editors who may not be in on the jokes. Yet I hope that, however much we love the funny feminists, we do not forget to love some of the other aspects of feminism – aspects that may be harder to find on one’s iPhone and harder to laugh about.

The unifying force of the movement for suffrage is not going to be seen again in our generation. But I can still see the power of activism and it is heartening to see women still coming together to dem­onstrate this power through action in everyday life, not just over the internet or through the published word. Over the past 12 months, I have taken part in a lobby of parliament organised by UK Feminista; in One Billion Rising, an international day of activism against violence against women organised by V-Day; and in a number of conferences and public gatherings at which women are learning from one another face to face. Such activity can sometimes feel time-consuming and frustratingly slow but it also leaves me with a renewed understanding of the process of creating change. And that is vital, because even though feminism has achieved so much, there is still so much to be done. While this government is making decisions on benefits, education and housing that are forcing more women and children into poverty, we have to protest. While women are still experiencing rape and sexual assault in their everyday lives and finding that the perpetrators walk free, we need to stand up for change. While women are still too often absent from public life, we need to make sure our voices are heard loudly, even angrily. The other crucial aspect of feminism that should not be forgotten is the importance of listening to stories about what goes on beyond the comfort of our lives. There is always time to make jokes about thongs and pubic waxing or about women’s magazines and bad sex but funny feminism is not always great at bringing in other issues. After all, there is not much to laugh about in women having to queue at food banks, or being trafficked into forced prostitution or being killed in the name of honour.

More here.

Rennie Sparks in The New York Times:

I have a lot of notebooks full of scribbles. They often don’t lead to anything, but sometimes, on lucky days, the scribbles begin to connect into a mystery that I can not look away from until it is laid bare. What was once a jumble of words and ideas begins to feel magnetized and full of import. Oh, those are lucky days! Mostly I just sit on the couch and follow the sparks here and there until they disperse. That morning that began with a tap-tap-tapping led to an afternoon in which I learned a lot about woodpeckers. I found out that woodpeckers have very long tongues with barbs on the end. I found out that woodpeckers have specially designed skulls that protect them from impact, like a built-in crash helmet. I also found out that woodpecker hearing is amazingly acute. These birds can actually hear larvae slithering inside a tree trunk as they are flying past overhead. Yes! That fact resonated with me. I felt my head tingling with excitement.

I sat awhile and tried to imagine what it might be like to have hearing so acute that I could hear bugs wriggling through trees. At first it seemed a wonderful thing — to hear great orchestras within rocks and mountainsides, the secret songs of air and earth. And then I realized how distracting it would be. With such sensitive hearing wouldn’t we all end up lying for days with our ears pressed to dirt piles and knot holes, forgetting to eat, forgetting to sleep, utterly transfixed by the tiniest sounds? Why then, I wondered, aren’t woodpeckers driven to insane distraction by their acute hearing? How can these birds stand to hammer away at a tree trunk when their ears are sensitive enough to hear bugs crawling inside wood? Is the woodpecker brain, then, fine-tuned to hear some sounds acutely, but to ignore other sounds completely? What parts of reality do our own brains actively filter out as we try and perceive the world?

Suddenly, and seemingly without context, I thought of Mary Sweeney. Mary Sweeney was a woman briefly mentioned in Michael Lesy’s book, “Wisconsin Death Trip.”

More here.

The big, desert city of El Paso, on the US border with Mexico, for years felt like a lesson from the work of Giorgio Agamben. In his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben analyzes a law from the Roman Empire specifying that if a man committed certain crimes, all of his citizenship rights would be revoked. This punishment, oddly enough, rendered the criminal a homo sacer, a sacred man, whom it was forbidden to ritually sacrifice to the gods. Yet in the everyday world the sacred man could be killed by anyone, with no penalty at all invoked on the killer. He inspired the highest veneration and the basest contempt. He constituted yet another category from Agamben’s work: bare life, or human existence stripped of its social nature and reduced to the purely biological. Bare life defines brutes. Homo sacer, brutes fetishized.

more from Debbie Nathan at n+1 here.

When Italo Calvino was becoming a big name in the English-speaking world in the 1970s and 1980s, he was seen as a somewhat rarefied figure: an Italian master of French-style abstraction who seemed to observe life from a serene ironic distance. And because of the timing of his death – at 61, after a cerebral haemorrhage, in 1985 – the prevailing image of him outside Italy has more or less stayed that way. His witty meta-novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) has for years been used to teach the rudiments of postmodernism, while Invisible Cities (1972) – “a totally decadent book”, he wrote casually in a letter – has acquired the status of a fetish among architects, urban theorists and purveyors of art-speak. Yet the role of chic metropolitan guru wasn’t one that Calvino sought or felt comfortable in. An agronomist’s son from the Ligurian Riviera, he started out as a writer under the auspices of the Italian Communist party, having joined while fighting as a partisan during the second world war. Hemingway and Chekhov were his first literary models and, early on, he was stymied by his unsuccessful efforts to write a novel documenting social conditions in industrial Turin.

more from Christopher Tayler at the FT here.

“America has odd ways of making one feel one’s self a failure. And looking over the fragments of our correspondence assembled, I am just terribly struck at the consistency, from my end, of howls about money, and from yours of reassurances, hopes, encouragement: of course this isn’t really news (and probably hardly unique in your file of writers), but seeing it so all at once did overwhelm me with a clearer sense of what I’ve put you through year after year, and I wish to Christ it had finally come up on the note of triumph you have hoped and worked so hard for.” Like most sensible serious writers, Gaddis never actually planned for his “triumph” to be posthumous; nor was he trying to write books that would be considered unreadable (usually by people who hadn’t read them). “What pained me most about the reviewers,” he writes in 1960, referring to the notoriously inadequate reception for “The Recognitions,” “was their refusal — their fear — to relax somewhat with the book and be entertained.” To be fair, one can understand why your average reviewer might not have been able to “relax” when faced by a thousand-page novel packed with theological allusions, inventive (but consistent) punctuation, dense, tiny typography and huge, tree-trunk-wide paragraphs. It’s a daunting task just lifting one of Gaddis’s best novels — let alone reading it.

more from Scott Bradfield at the NY Times here.