From Newsroom UCLA:

How do ideas spread? What messages will go viral on social media, and can this be predicted? UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called “buzz.” The research has a broad range of implications, the study authors say, and could lead to more effective public health campaigns, more persuasive advertisements and better ways for teachers to communicate with students.

There will never be more than a few people in each generation for whom literature has the force of law, for whom, as Bialik puts it, “real art” is “like Torah.” In Bialik’s generation, one of those few was surely Marcel Proust. The two writers are not often thought of together, but they were near-contemporaries; Bialik was born in 1873, Proust in 1871. And Proust’s seven-volume novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), is among many other things the story of an artist coming to realize his vocation—a vocation which he describes in religious terms, as an ethical and absolute duty. Proust’s greatest statement of this theme comes in the famous passage in The Captive describing the death of the writer Bergotte. Once a writer dies, Proust wonders, what does it matter whether he wrote well or badly, since he will never know the fate of his works in this world? What he is grappling with is the disparity between the artist’s sense of his commitment, which is absolute and infinite, and the finite, transitory nature of all human achievement. In other words, Proust is asking a religious question, and he ends up giving what is essentially a religious answer…

more from Adam Kirsch at Jewish Review of Books here.

What happened, briefly, is as follows. In Florida in 2002, when he was seventeen, Brodie hopped a train to go visit some friends. The train was going in the wrong direction, and so, like Sal Paradise making his first stab at hitching west in On the Road, Brodie ended up coming right back home. But this abortive excursion encouraged him to set out again and begin his real life on the rails. Over the next five years and fifty thousand miles, he took a ton of pictures of the people he met and the life he was living. At first he used a Polaroid that, depending on the account you read, was either found behind the seat of a car or given by a friend. When that camera’s film was discontinued, “the Polaroid Kidd”—as he’d become known on websites where he posted his pictures—switched to a 35-mm Nikon, the camera he used to take the photographs featured in A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. The pictures have the day-to-day intimacy and immediacy of a journal, but the journey they describe—the shared root helps—has a clear narrative, even if the route is irrelevant.

more from Geoff Dyer at Bookforum here.

Reconstruction at Ground Zero has been a delirium of quantification from the start. The prime number, of course, is the number of victims. But the human tragedy was rapidly overshadowed by a real estate soap opera: yes, 3,000 people may have died, but 10 million square feet of rentable space were destroyed! This quick reversion to business as usual was appalling, and I joined those opposed to any rebuilding on the site (among others, many families of the victims and, most improbably, Rudy Giuliani). There were plenty of other places in the city for office space, and none of the arguments I heard had adequately reckoned with the event’s aura. Here was an opportunity to express democratic values, to create a great place of free assembly rather than a real estate deal. This opinion has been reinforced as the first two replacement skyscrapers near completion, joining a third already built just north of the site and another across from it; a fifth is rising, the memorial is complete, and the PATH transit hub is emerging from the ground. In use and effect, the complex is a prime specimen of capitalist realism and its preferred forms of architecture and behavior. To judge these monolithic structures formally, the ratio of invention to bulk is an obvious criterion. Once you accept the minimalist premise, critique treads a narrow line. The three buildings now or nearly done are clad in identically proportioned mirror glazing (I omit the Goldman Sachs tower for the slight variation in its curtain wall).

more from Michael Sorkin at The Nation here.

From Delanceyplace:

In 1963, Judy Garland was a forty-one year old fading star just a few short years from her own premature death from a drug overdose, while Barbra Streisand was twenty-one and an emerging star who already had a cult following. Garland, always broke, needed her new television show to be a hit — and Streisand had a reputation as a guest star who could bring standout ratings and reviews. And so it was that Garland pieced together her own fragile self-confidence and invited the irrepressible Streisand to be a guest on her show: “At forty-one, Garland looked a decade older. Pills, alcohol, heartache, illness, roller-coaster dieting — and the recent ongoing battles with her husband over their children — had all taken their toll. This television show, for which she'd now taped eight episodes, was supposed to make her rich. That was what Begelman and Fields had promised. Garland was always broke, due to bad financial management and overspending. She envied male contemporaries such as Bing Crosby and Bob Hope who were rolling in the dough, much of it earned in television. This show, she hoped, would change all that. Her agents had never been wrong before. But problems had arisen almost from the start. …

“Barbra [Streisand] was the most exciting, most talked-about guest they'd had on their brand new revolving stage since they'd started production. Everyone was hoping Barbra could bring a little of the razzle-dazzle she'd bestowed upon [shows like] Brasselle and Garry Moore and Dinah Shore — and the ratings and the reviews as well. “In her trailer at the end of the mock Yellow Brick Road, Garland, wasn't unaware of the excitement being generated by the arrival of this Streisand kid. She was 'nervous and anxious and jealous,' one friend, Tucker Fleming, observed. Looking at her face in the mirror, Garland ran her fingers down the wrinkles and creases she saw there, clearly aware of the youthful features of the singer she would soon be rehearsing with….

More here.

Robert Worth in the NYT Magazine:

Late one night in early May 2011, a preacher named Jerry DeWitt was lying in bed in DeRidder, La., when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard an anguished, familiar voice. It was Natosha Davis, a friend and parishioner in a church where DeWitt had preached for more than five years. Her brother had been in a bad motorcycle accident, she said, and he might not survive.

DeWitt knew what she wanted: for him to pray for her brother. It was the kind of call he had taken many times during his 25 years in the ministry. But now he found that the words would not come. He comforted her as best he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to invoke God’s help. Sensing her disappointment, he put the phone down and found himself sobbing. He was 41 and had spent almost his entire life in or near DeRidder, a small town in the heart of the Bible Belt. All he had ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea what I’m going through?” DeWitt told me.

As his wife slept, he fumbled through the darkness for his laptop. After a few quick searches with the terms “pastor” and “atheist,” he discovered that a cottage industry of atheist outreach groups had grown up in the past few years. Within days, he joined an online network called the Clergy Project, created for clerics who no longer believe in God and want to communicate anonymously through a secure Web site.

DeWitt began e-mailing with dozens of fellow apostates every day and eventually joined another new network called Recovering From Religion, intended to help people extricate themselves from evangelical Christianity. Atheists, he discovered, were starting to reach out to one another not just in the urban North but also in states across the South and West, in the kinds of places­ DeWitt had spent much of his career as a traveling preacher.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

After a decade of study, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be — it’s looking a lot better. Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety. It makes people more generous to strangers and more tolerant of outsiders. Couples feel closer and look happier when they’re sharing nostalgic memories. On cold days, or in cold rooms, people use nostalgia to literally feel warmer. Nostalgia does have its painful side — it’s a bittersweet emotion — but the net effect is to make life seem more meaningful and death less frightening. When people speak wistfully of the past, they typically become more optimistic and inspired about the future.

“Nostalgia makes us a bit more human,” Dr. Sedikides says. He considers the first great nostalgist to be Odysseus, an itinerant who used memories of his family and home to get through hard times, but Dr. Sedikides emphasizes that nostalgia is not the same as homesickness. It’s not just for those away from home, and it’s not a sickness, despite its historical reputation. Nostalgia was originally described as a “neurological disease of essentially demonic cause” by Johannes Hoffer, the Swiss doctor who coined the term in 1688. Military physicians speculated that its prevalence among Swiss mercenaries abroad was due to earlier damage to the soldiers’ ear drums and brain cells by the unremitting clanging of cowbells in the Alps.

More here.

Down to Sleep

Qalandar Bux Memon and Asif Akhtar interview Simon Critchley in Naked Punch:

QM – I want to ask you something that is rarely asked of a western philosopher (by which I mean someone who reads predominantly ‘white writers’). What effect do you think European colonialism has had on the tradition of philosophy and on philosophers of the European tradition? We are often told about the fracturing effect of the Holocaust on western philosophy and of the grand role of 1968, but what about colonialism?

SC: For me the history of colonialism is absolutely fundamental for understanding philosophy, for understanding what philosophy might do. Philosophical modernity from the 17th Century onwards is the history of European colonial expansion. To isolate philosophy from colonialism is simply to engage in a form of historical amnesia. Certain philosophers, like Locke, were bound up with the invention of the colonial project. Locke was involved in the writing of the fundamental constitutions of the Carolinas and invested heavily in plantation slavery. And we find many other examples. Modern philosophy has to be understood in relationship to the colonial and imperial projects of European modernity. To turn to the last part of the question—which is for me even more important—I don’t buy into the idea of the Holocaust as a novelty or a breaking of history. The Holocaust is the extension of the logic and practices of European colonialism—specifically French and British colonialism—into the European territory. The techniques of the Holocaust, such as the use of concentration camps, were picked up by the Germans in colonial wars, the Spanish Cuban war of 1896 and the British Boer Wars in South Africa in the early 20th Century. The ambition that Germany had in the 1930s was for their own space, what they called “Lebensraum” (‘habitat’ or, literally, ‘living space’). They wanted their own colonial space just like the French and the British. Africa had already been carved up, North America had been carved up and Asia had been carved up, so the Germans decided that Eastern Europe would become the German colonial domain. I see the Holocaust as simply the extension of the logic of European colonialism and we therefore have to understand the Holocaust as an event in the history of colonialism and to eradicate the idea of it being unique or exemplary just because it took place in Europe. I think this is nonsense, historical nonsense. There is a fantastic book by Sven Lindqvist called “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One man’s Odyssey into the heart of darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, which demonstrates this point in great detail, showing how the Germans picked up and appropriated the military hardware of the colonial project. German anti-Semitism is also peculiar: if any country was going to become a really anti-Semitic regime in the early 20th Century you would have put your money on France rather than the Germany.

Sarah Carr in Mada Masr (with some interesting discussions that follow in the comments) [h/t: Yogesh Chandrani]:

I voted for Mohamed Morsi in the second round of the presidential elections (to keep Ahmed Shafiq out).

I am one of the administrators of a blog called “MB in English” that features English translations of awful statements of a sectarian, conspiratorial or bonkers nature that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) intends for domestic consumption only.

I am against army intervention in politics.

I state all this because Egyptian politics and society in general are currently split along identity lines in a way that they have never been over the last three years. This problem is so chronic that the merits or flaws of an argument are almost entirely determined by who is making the argument, considered through a haze of fury and suspicion.

For the past week, I have been trundling between the pro- and anti-Morsi protests. It is like traveling between two planets. The pro-camp has significantly more men than woman — although there are women and children there — and it lacks the social diversity of the anti-camp. I have never seen one unveiled woman who is not a journalist there. I have never met a Christian or encountered any other journalist who has met one there (it is important to note that pro-Morsi protesters and pro-Morsi media have often claimed that there are Christians attending their sit-in). At the same time, they also allege that the church was behind the former Mubarak regime-US-Zionist plot to oust Morsi.

The point is that the pro-Morsi crowd is largely homogenous. Their opponents use this homogeneity as evidence that the MB is, at best, an organization that has failed to market itself to non-supporters; and, at worst, a closed group unconcerned with non-members.

While the MB’s opposition might be correct in this assertion, many go one step further. They suggest that Morsi supporters are all members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and all unthinking androids programmed by the Supreme Guide. The popular derogatory term for them is khirfan (sheep). The aim here is to dehumanize and deny agency, much in the same way the Muslim Brotherhood dismiss their opponents as kuffar (infidels) or feloul (Mubarak regime beneficiaries or loyalists).

L

Lee Bul. Amaryllis. 1999.

More here and here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

Justin is telling me a joke. I think.

Photo by Margit Oberrauch

I consider myself politically progressive, but there are a few major sticking points that keep me perpetually at odds with my would-be allies. I hold in utter contempt anyone who would attempt to dictate to me a list of things I am forbidden to say, and it is generally more from the left than from other quarters that such dictation comes. I am part of that minority that continues to consider political correctness a real threat, and not a momentary excess of the early 1990s, when we heard all that reactionary huffing about how soon enough they'll be making us say 'vertically challenged' instead of 'short' and so on. I speak not with Rush Limbaugh but with Vladimir Nabokov when I say that I am horrified by the limitation of free expression, by which I don't mean the usual 'expression of unpopular ideas' beloved of 'card-carrying members of the ACLU', but rather the creative use of language where a Schillerian free play of the imagination is the only source of regulation. I believe the desire to regulate externally stems not just from a misunderstanding of how political progress is made, but also of how language functions.

When I write about this stuff, I know in advance I'm going to get a positive response from free-spirited avuncular types who to be perfectly honest are rather embarrassing to me, those 60-something men in Hawaiian shirts who remember when women liked to be complimented on their 'gams' and who are wary of that stuff they're teaching the kids in the colleges these days; and I know in advance I'm going to get silence from my peers. But what can I do? The principle of parrhesia cannot be grounded on prior calculations about who one would like to hang out with.

More here.

A new book says the famed atheist thinker's writing on religion is intellectually sloppy. It gets Hitch wrong.

Carlo Dellora in Salon:

Of all the criticisms that could be leveled at Christopher Hitchens – and there are many – a boring style is not one of them. Despite some controversial positions and persuasions, his writing was always exciting, entertaining and engaging. Regrettably, the same cannot be said for Curtis White. In an excerpt from his recent book “The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers” published in Salon last week, White accuses the “notorious” Hitchens of some of journalism’s worst crimes – lying, dishonesty, shamefulness and an all-round lack of “decency.” However, while running through a litany of examples apparently highlighting Hitchens’ intellectual turpitude, White manages something remarkable. Rather than convicting Hitch of “telling less than he knew or ought to have known’,”White shows how it is in fact he who is literarily lazy, inconsistent and mendacious.

White begins with some concessions, curiously feeling the need to acknowledge his own qualified atheism by rejecting the notion of a “CEO God” – whatever that means – he then concedes that religious extremism is “still very much a problem politically” and across the globe. Yet, after admitting that the “religious right is real, and international fundamentalism is dangerous and frightening,” White goes on to admonish Hitchens for reducing religion down “to a series of criminal anecdotes” – presumably ignoring all the good stuff it has done for the world.

In this way, White rehashes a well-worn criticism of the new breed of atheists – that they do not recognize the positive, progressive aspects of organized religion and instead focus only on the negative. This is neither new nor compelling.

More here.

From Seed Magazine:

Why do some people pay a 100,000 percent premium for a Rolex when a Timex is such a sleek and efficient timepiece? Why do others kill themselves at work just so they can get there in a Lexus? Why do we pay 1,000 times more for designer bottles of water when the stuff that gushes from our taps is safer (because it’s more regulated), often tastier, and better for the planet? And how do we convince ourselves that more stuff equals more happiness, when all the research shows that it doesn’t? In Spent, University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller contends that marketing—the jet fuel of unrestrained consumerism—“is the most dominant force in human culture,” and thus the most powerful shaper of life on Earth. Using vivid, evocative language, Miller suggests that consumerism is the sea of modern life and we are the plankton—helplessly tumbled and swirled by forces we can feel but not understand. Miller aims to penetrate to the evolutionary wellsprings of consumerist mania, and to show how it is possible to live lives that are more sustainable, more sane, and more satisfying.

…Critically, Miller’s point is that the human urge to put on a show is biologically inevitable—consumerist culture is not. By changing the way we display, we can reduce the high individual, societal, and planetary costs of rampant consumerism. Miller offers suggestions for modifying social norms to stigmatize crass consumerism, along with sensible, though unoriginal, advice about resisting the consumerist urge (“just don’t get it”). More boldly, he proposes tax reform that would inhibit, rather than promote, the impulse to consume—rendering unto Caesar as money leaves the wallet (a consumption tax) rather than as money enters the wallet (the current system of income taxation).

More here.

From Conservation Magazine:

For Antony Turner, pictures make a story come alive—and in the climate change story, one of the main characters is invisible. In 2009, together with artist/scientist Adam Nieman, he founded Carbon Visuals to help people “see” the carbon dioxide that’s trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. Their strategy: Transform the mass (tons and gigatons) of carbon dioxide emissions we hear about so much into volumetric representations and then show them as 3-D shapes in familiar landscapes. Carbon Visuals has worked with governments, schools, corporations, and others to help them make sense of carbon footprints, comparisons, and sequestration targets. Changing the trajectory of the climate story, Turner believes, starts with getting the antagonist in our sights.

Picture: In 2010, New York City emitted 54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. With a single day’s CO₂ emissions, the city “buries” the Empire State Building with 149,903 ten-meter-diameter spheres, each containing one metric ton of the gas.

More here.

Perry Anderson in New Left Review:

The American political scene since 2000 is conventionally depicted in high colour. For much native—not to speak of foreign—opinion, the country has cartwheeled from brutish reaction under one ruler, presiding over disaster at home and abroad, to the most inspiring hope of progress since the New Deal under another, personifying all that is finest in the nation; to others, a spectre not even American. For still others, the polarization of opinion they represent is cause for despair, or alternatively comfort in the awakening of hitherto marginalized identities to the threshold of a new majority. The tints change by the light in which they are seen.

For a steadier view of US politics, line is more reliable than colour. It is the parameters of the system of which its episodes are features that require consideration. These compose a set of four determinants. The first, and far the most fundamental, of these, is the historical regime of accumulation in question, governing the returns on capital and rate of growth of the economy. The second are structural shifts in the sociology of the electorate distributed between the two political parties. The third are cultural mutations in the value-system at large within the society. Fourth and last—the residual—are the aims of the active minorities in the voter-base of each party. The political upshot at any given point of time can be described, short-hand, as a resultant of this unequal quartet of forces in motion.

What remains unchanging, on the other hand, is the monochrome ideological universe in which the system is plunged: an all-capitalist order, without a hint of social-democratic weakness or independent political organization by labour. The two parties that inhabit it, Republican and Democratic, have exchanged social and regional bases more than once since the Civil War, without either ever questioning the rule of capital. Since the 1930s there has been a general, if not invariable, tendency for those at the bottom of the income pyramid—should they cast a ballot, which large numbers do not—to vote Democrat, and those at the top, Republican. Such preferences reflect the policies by and large pursued by the two parties: Democratic administrations have typically been more redistributive downwards than Republican, in an alignment shadowing, without exactly reproducing, divisions between left and right elsewhere. But these are rarely differences of principle. A salient feature of the consensus on which the system rests is the flexibility of relative positions it allows. Policies associated with one party can migrate to the other, not infrequently assuming forms in the cross-over more radical than they possessed in their original habitat. A glance at the history of the past half-century is a reminder of these eddies within the system.

Kimberly Kay Hoang in Contexts:

I first met Tram in 2006 in a tiny bar on Pham Ngu Lao Street in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), in a neighborhood frequented by backpackers from abroad.

Tram and other sex workers in the bar, disguised as bartenders, catered to Western budget travelers seeking brief encounters or longer relationships-for-hire. They were the bar’s key attraction, but the women received no wages from the owner; they were independent entrepreneurs in a niche of the sex trade.

Tram, 27 years old and adorned with bracelet, rings, and a diamond necklace, was a model of success and economic mobility. She lived in a brand-new luxury condo with two servants, a full-time housecleaner and a cook who prepared Western foods for her new American husband. Tram had come from a poor village, she told me, where the only jobs were in the rice fields. In Ho Chi Minh City, she worked first as a maid and then in a clothing factory. But after two years of earning no more than the equivalent of US$70 a month, Tram had saved no money, could barely cover food and rent, and saw no hope for improvement. “Life in the city is so expensive,’’ she said. She saw sex work as her best route out of poverty.

Tram met William, 70, as a client, and quickly began to develop a more intimate relationship with him, hoping that her emotional labor might lead to ongoing economic support—in a remittance relationship, or marriage. Many Western men come to Vietnam seeking wives, or they become attached to women they hired once there, sympathizing with their plight, and wanting to take them out of the sex trade and care for them. Six months after they met, William asked Tram to marry him and move to North America. They were married in 2007.

In 2009, I reconnected with Tram, along with William and their three children at an airport outside of Montreal, Canada. As we drove the three hours to their home, passing lumber farms, acres of undeveloped land, and pastures sprinkled with sheep, I commented on its beauty and tranquility. But Tram expressed no such sentiments. She had never intended to escape small town Vietnam, she said, only to end up in another small town in rural Canada. She had hoped to move to the United States, and had dreamed of living in Los Angeles or New York, “a big city, like the movies.”

Instead, she found herself isolated, in a cold climate and working long hours.