Bryan Appleyard in the New Statesman:

The book is in two halves – the first is Grayling’s case against religion; the second outlines the humanist alternative, which is “an ethics free from religious or superstitious aspects, an outlook that has its roots in rich philosophical traditions”.

First, to take the book on its own terms, this is a lucid, informative and admirably accessible account of the atheist-secular- humanist position. Grayling writes with pace and purpose and provides powerful – though non-lethal – ammunition for anybody wishing to shoot down intelligent theists such as Alvin Plantinga or to dispatch even the most sophisticated theological arguments, such as the ontological proof of the existence of God. That said, the first half, which is in essence analytical, is much better than the second half, which is rather discursive and feels almost tract-like in its evocation of shiny, happy people having fun in a humanist paradise. Nevertheless, this is rhetorically justifiable to the extent that it is an attempt to answer the question necessarily posed by any attempt to eliminate religion – what would be put in its place? Even the most rabid followers of the horsemen cannot seriously deny that religion does serve some useful purposes: providing a sense of community, consoling the bereaved and the suffering, telling a story to make sense of the world, and so on. Grayling tells a humanist story in the belief that it is perfectly capable of answering all these needs.

More here.

Greg Grandin in The Nation:

I first met Hugo Chávez in New York City in September 2006, just after his infamous appearance on the floor of the UN General Assembly, where he called George W. Bush the devil. “Yesterday, the devil came here,” he said, “Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.” He then made the sign of the cross, kissed his hand, winked at his audience and looked to the sky. It was vintage Chávez, an outrageous remark leavened with just the right touch of detail (the lingering sulfur!) to make it something more than bombast, cutting through soporific nostrums of diplomatese and drawing fire away from Iran, which was in the cross hairs at that meeting.

The press of course went into high dudgeon, and not just for the obvious reason that it’s one thing for opponents in the Middle East to call the United States the Great Satan and another thing for the president of a Latin American country to personally single out its president as Beelzebub, on US soil no less.

I think what really rankled was that Chávez was claiming a privilege that had long belonged to the United States, that is, the right to paint its adversaries not as rational actors but as existential evil. Latin American populists, from Argentina’s Juan Perón to, most recently, Chávez, have long served as characters in a story the US tells about itself, reaffirming the maturity of its electorate and the moderation of its political culture. There are at most eleven political prisoners in Venezuela, and that’s taking the opposition’s broad definition of the term, which includes individuals who worked to overthrow the government in 2002, and yet it is not just the right in this country who regularly compared Chávez to the worst mass murderers and dictators in history.

More here.

21 Short Poems or The Gun
.

*

There is a gun in the closet.
There are many things in the closet.

*

An extremely small man
may ride on a gun
like a horse,
a black horse.

*

If a monster with seven heads
stood at the gate,
I would shoot without hesitation,
but the open gate
scares me.

*

The judge always acquits the gun.
Naïve judge.

*

I had an unforgettable face
and a white gun.

*

A gun isn’t a metaphor.

Read more »

From The Independent:

The book explores the role played by smell in physical attraction (men can tell by the scent, even though they are not aware of it, when a woman is ovulating); analyses the significance of the wording of lonely hearts advertisements; examines the strange phenomenon of religious love for an invisible God; and weighs up the rival benefits, in terms of gene propagation, of males adopting the strategies of either monogamy or philandering.

Dunbar's quest is to find out why we evolved into a (generally) monogamous species; and the answer he turns up is unsettling. It appears that women are the choosers in our species, and they choose on the basis of which male is likely to offer the best protection for their offspring.

“Infanticide by males is a perennial risk for monkeys and apes,” says Dunbar, because killing a female's young offspring stops her lactating and makes her fertile again. Our distant female ancestors were therefore more likely to choose males as “hired guns” who would keep them and their children safe from the predations of other males. For this reason, women generally have more reason to maintain the pairbond than men do. It's painful to reflect that the splendour of love has such grisly origins.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Researchers at the University of Michigan have found a new potential benefit of a molecule in green tea: preventing the misfolding of specific proteins in the brain. The aggregation of these proteins, called metal-associated amyloids, is associated with Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative conditions.

A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explained how U-M Life Sciences Institute faculty member Mi Hee Lim and an interdisciplinary team of researchers used green tea extract to control the generation of metal-associated amyloid-β aggregates associated with Alzheimer's disease in the lab. The specific molecule in green tea, (—)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate, also known as EGCG, prevented aggregate formation and broke down existing aggregate structures in the proteins that contained metals—specifically copper, iron and zinc. “A lot of people are very excited about this molecule,” said Lim, noting that the EGCG and other flavonoids in natural products have long been established as powerful antioxidants. “We used a multidisciplinary approach. This is the first example of structure-centric, multidisciplinary investigations by three principal investigators with three different areas of expertise.”

More here.

Deep into Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave, she describes herself as a “shocking story, a wild statistical outlier.” A chatty woman on a plane tries to draw her out: Is she married? Does she have children? She cannot answer these questions. In 2004, she was holidaying with her family on the southeast coast of Sri Lanka when the Indian Ocean tsunami came ashore. Her husband, her two sons and her parents all died in the wave. At the end of Moby-Dick, the narrator explains in a brief epilogue how he alone came to be rescued from the water, to recount his ship’s fateful voyage. It is as though even a tale of epic proportion cannot contain that last part of the story. Sonali Deraniyagala’s book is all epilogue. It is a meditation through grief and a meditation on grief. It is courageous, truthful and, above all, generous. In the first place, it dares to tell an impossibly difficult story.

more from Sunila Galappatti at The Globe and Mail here.

By November of 1820, after months of a prosperous voyage and a thousand miles from the nearest land, whaleboats from the Essex had harpooned whales that dragged them out toward the horizon in what the crew called “Nantucket sleigh rides.” Owen Chase, the 23-year-old first mate, had stayed aboard the Essex to make repairs while Pollard went whaling. It was Chase who spotted a very big whale—85 feet in length, he estimated—lying quietly in the distance, its head facing the ship. Then, after two or three spouts, the giant made straight for the Essex, “coming down for us at great celerity,” Chase would recall—at about three knots. The whale smashed head-on into the ship with “such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on our faces.” The whale passed underneath the ship and began thrashing in the water. “I could distinctly see him smite his jaws together, as if distracted with rage and fury,” Chase recalled. Then the whale disappeared.

more from Smithsonian here.

Over at Edge:

I'm interested in how the languages we speak shape the way we think. The reason I got interested in this question is that languages differ from one another so much. There are about 7,000 languages around the world, and each one differs from the next in innumerable ways. Obviously, languages have different words, but they also require very different things from their speakers grammatically.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you want to say even the simplest thing, like “Humpty Dumpty sat on a …” Well, even with a snippet of a nursery rhyme, if you try to translate it to other languages, you'd immediately run into trouble. Let's focus on the verb for a moment. Sat. To say this in English, if this was something that happened in the past, then you'd have to say “sat.” You wouldn’t say, “will sit” or “sitting.” You have to mark tense. In some languages like in Indonesian you couldn't change the verb. The verb would always stay the same regardless of whether this is a past or future event. In some languages, like in Russian, my native language, you would have to change the verb for tense, but you would also have to include gender. So if this was Mrs. Dumpty that sat on the wall, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was Mr. Dumpty.

In Russian, quite inconveniently, you have to mark the verb for whether the event was completed or not. So if Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall for the entire amount of time that he was meant to sit on it, that would be one form of the verb. But if he were to say “have a great fall” that would be a different form of the verb.

In Turkish, and this is one of my favorite examples, you have to change the verb depending on how you came to know this information. If you actually witnessed this event with your own eyes, you were walking along and you saw this chubby, ovoid character sitting on a wall, that would be one form of the verb. But if this was something you just heard about, or you inferred, from say broken Humpty Dumpty pieces, then you would have to use a different form of the verb.

How would Malevich, who was fascinated by the discoveries of physics about the incorporeal energy of the universe (gravitation, electricity and radioactivity), have regarded the recent x-ray of his iconic canvas, which revealed that Black Square was painted at urgent speed over another composition made up of polychromatic geometric forms? With time, these underlying colours have begun to show through the craquelures on the square’s surface. The artist had been working on another abstract canvas when he had an overwhelming vision of the black plane. The verbal leitmotif ‘partial eclipse’, which appears in his Fevralist canvases Englishman in Moscow and Composition with Mona Lisa and which had been nagging at him for months, was suddenly transformed into a ‘total eclipse’, the world as nonobjectivity. Although this was a solitary moment of creative intuition, Malevich worked among other artists. Shatskikh analyses his collaborations with avant-garde poets and artists in theatrical productions, exhibitions and the Supremus project, which incorporated a journal (Supremus) and a creative society. Malevich’s legacy is caught up in the chaos of the 20th century, which scattered and erased so much historical treasure.

more from Rachel Polonsky at Literary Review here.

From The Telegraph:

From Slate:

Going Home

He came home. Said nothing.
It was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.
He lay down fully dressed.
He pulled the blanket over his head.
Tucked up his knees.
He’s nearly forty, but not at the moment.
He exists as he did inside his mother’s womb,
clad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.
Tomorrow he’ll give a lecture
on homeostasis in megagalactic cosmonautics.
For now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from Poems New and Collected
Harcourt, 1998

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

This is a story about the discovery of an organ that measures twelve feet long and four inches wide. You might well assume that this is old news. After all, how could something the size of a lamppost go unnoticed by anatomists? And yet, in fact, it’s only just come to light.

The discovery emerged out of a blood-drenched confusion. Alexander Werth, an anatomist, was standing on an ice sheet miles off the coast of Alaska’s North Slope. He was watching Inupiat whale hunters dismember bowhead whales they had caught in the Bering Sea. This government-sanctioned hunt is one of the best opportunities for whale anatomists to get hold of fresh tissue from the animals.

To take apart the head of a whale, the hunters would slice off the lower jaws and the tongue, which could be as big as a minivan. They would then climb onto the roof of the whale’s mouth and cut away the baleen–the hair-like growths that the whale used in life to filter small animals from the water. On the roof of the mouths of bowhead whales, Werth and his colleagues noticed something strange: a peculiar rod-like organ stretching down the midline of the palate.

It had never been described in the bowhead before. What made the organ particularly peculiar was that, as the Inupiat cut the whales apart, it poured forth huge amounts of blood. Why, the scientists wondered, should a bowhead whale have an organ in the roof of their mouth? And why should it be so bloody?

More here.

Laura Miller in Salon:

Deraniyagala had been vacationing with her family in a seaside hotel near a national park when, through a terrace window, she saw the sea rising rapidly past its familiar bounds. With her husband, Steve, she grabbed Vikram, 8, and Malli, 5, and rushed out the door and up the drive. They jumped in a passing jeep, but soon the wave overwhelmed even that. The last time Deraniyagala saw her husband’s face, he was looking in horror at something over her shoulder. Then the jeep overturned, and for Deraniyagala the next few hours were chaos, violence and filthy water, the tsunami tossing her miles inland and then sucking her out again. Just before she would have been swept out to sea, she grabbed an overhanging branch and felt the ground materialize under her feet. She never saw her family again.

“Wave” is Deraniyagala’s account of this nightmare, but the tsunami itself only takes up a handful of this spare, radiant book’s pages. The rest is what came after, months in that darkened room contemplating suicide, then a period of getting drunk every day and conducting a demented campaign of harassment against the Dutch family to whom her brother rented her parents’ house. Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, had been living with Steve and the boys in London, but she wasn’t able to set foot in their English house for two years.

The extremity of Deraniyagala’s story seizes the attention, but it’s the beauty of how she expresses it that makes it indelible. Who knew that the ranks of academic economics harbored a writer of such extraordinary gifts? Deraniyagala grasps that seemingly unteachable truth: just how much you can (and should) leave out when you have given your reader the one detail that will make your world real to her. “Wave” is a small, slender book, but it is enormous on the inside.

The narrative arc of “Wave” follows the evolution of Deraniyagala’s grief. At first, she alternates between rage and numbness. In the hospital where victims gathered after the wave receded, she turns away from a weeping boy, silently fuming, “You stayed alive in that water because you are so fucking fat. Vik and Malli didn’t have a chance. Just shut up.” At her aunt’s house, she recalls “pieces of me hovered in a murky netherworld, timeless day after timeless day.”

Paul Horwich over at the NYT's The Stone:

The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy — what is special about its problems, where they come from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can and cannot be accomplished by grappling with them. The uniquely insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific issues within the subject — concerning language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among them — a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others.

Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment — certainly not many professional philosophers. Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

Sit-in Against Shia Genocide Across Pakistan.

If you're in Karachi, please attend this to show the inept government of Pakistan that Pakistanis stand together against killing of our fellow countrymen. Shame the government into doing something, anything. But if you're not in Karachi, and happen to be in Boston please attend vigil against violence on Friday, March 8th at Copley Square at 6:30 PM.

Kenyans have in the last few weeks been outraged by the flood of negative coverage the country has received ahead of the elections. Veteran reporter Michael Holman offers this satirical examination of the activities of foreign correspondents in the country.

Michael Holman in Kenya's Nation:

Kenya was braced at the crossroads on Saturday amidst growing concern that the demand for clichés is outstripping supply.

Critical elections loom, say senior diplomats, and there is a pressing need not only for clichés, but for colourful phrases, authentic quotes and fresh sources. Without urgent action, warned a senior taxi driver, this strategic east African nation with close ties to the West, risks being driven to the brink of an uncertain future.

Analysts and observers, however, joined diplomats in dismissing fears that coverage of the forthcoming poll will be threatened by a shortage of clichés.

“Lessons have been learnt,” said a UN spokesman, and a strategic stockpile has been built up since the last time Kenyans went to the ballot box. With the help of an emergency airlift, which includes consignments of anecdotes and first person accounts, both chilling and inspiring, reporters will be able to do justice to a crucial test of democracy/a slow motion tragedy/a land gripped by tension.

“We are now prepared for any eventuality,” said the spokesman. “Our monitors have registered an early demand for 'fears rising', 'key ally', 'strategic partner' and 'ethnic violence', and fresh deliveries will arrive within days.”

“Tribal rivalries’, and ‘ethnic violence’ is also proving popular, the UN official added, as are ‘bloodstained machetes’, ‘pangas and rungus’, and ‘mindless violence’ ‘Bitter memories’ is also in great demand.

More here.

Evgeny Morozov in the NYT:

“WHEN your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting” is the reassuring slogan greeting visitors at the Web site for LivesOn, a soon-to-launch service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die. By analyzing your earlier tweets, the service would learn “about your likes, tastes, syntax” and add a personal touch to all those automatically composed scribblings from the world beyond.

LivesOn may yet prove to be a parody, or it may fizzle for any number of reasons, but as an idea it highlights the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley today: what could be disrupted should be disrupted — even death.

Barriers and constraints — anything that imposes artificial limits on the human condition — are being destroyed with particular gusto. Superhuman, another mysterious start-up that could enliven any comedy show, promises to offer, as its co-founder recently put it, an unspecified service that “helps people be superhuman.” Well, at least they had the decency not to call it The Übermensch.

Recent debates about Twitter revolutions or the Internet’s impact on cognition have mostly glossed over the fact that Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists have embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity. If they have their way, no individual foibles would go unpunished — ideally, technology would even make such foibles obsolete.

Even boredom seems to be in its last throes: designers in Japan have found a way to make our train trips perpetually fun-filled. With the help of an iPhone, a projector, a GPS module and Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, their contrivance allows riders to add new objects to what they see “outside,” thus enlivening the bleak landscape in their train windows. This could be a big hit in North Korea — and not just on trains.