Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is by common consent one of the masterpieces of political theory. Yet its greatness is hard to pinpoint. It lies partly, again by common consent, in the quality of its prose. Even readers horrified by Hobbes’s authoritarian arguments thrill to the manner of their expression. It is a prose as utterly individual as that of his contemporaries Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne and Milton – and as hard to categorise. Its darts and flashes, compressions and difficulties can call to mind the metaphysical poets, his other contemporaries. Yet metaphysical inspiration was one of Hobbes’s targets, bent as he was on the subjection of political argument to the realism of the scientific revolution, the area of thought where his prior interest lay. Anyway, the attraction of his prose can explain only so much. The impact of the work, especially on the Continent, was largely indebted to his Latin translation of it. The year of the English edition, 1651, also produced Milton’s Latin vindication of the execution of Charles I in 1649, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, another book whose literary properties dazzled readers shocked by its thesis. Hobbes was one of them. His own Latin deserved and commanded no such wonder.

more from Blair Worden at Literary Review here.

In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer. Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.

more from Austin L. Hughes at The New Atlantis here.

Joshua Foer in The New Yorker:

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.

More here.

Scott Huler in Scientific American:

You want to see my next vehicle? I’m going to get a TruckIt, a tiny little recumbent-bicycle deal with an electric motor — it’s called a velomobile, if you want to know. It costs $5,500, recharges its battery with its own rooftop solar panels, can legally take you on the road, on the sidewalk,* and on greenway trails, and has a 30-mile-per-charge range. Then you can either rely on those solar panels or you can take the little battery out and plug it in. And though it’s designed to carry me and up to 800 pounds of payload (guitar, amp, and groupie?), I can retrofit a little jumpseat so I can just haul around the groupie if I need to. You can read all about it in this story by the News & Observer of Raleigh.

And hokey smokes, it’s made right here in the U.S.A., by Organic Transit, in a renovated furniture warehouse in downtown Durham, NC.

The thing — and the Elf, its more carlike little sister — is limited to 20 mph on pure electricity (to remain classified as a bicycle), but it can take you up and down hills with or without your pedaling. Every New Urbanist, transit focused downtown renovation should all but give these things away for free. If you live and work in a walkable downtown that lacks — as so many do — a grocery store, instead of needing a second car, all you’ve done is given purpose to your workout. “Going out for a ride, dear — got that grocery list?”

More here.

Isaac Chotiner in The New Rebublic:

Isaac Chotiner: Are you working on anything at the moment?

V.S. Naipaul: I am far too old [laughs].

IC: So no more?

VSN: When you are eighty, you don’t have much more to say. Do you know any writers of eighty?

IC: I’m thinking. No.

VSN: Exactly. How can one? If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he’s got nothing more, you know?

IC: You wrote a number of books after age sixty, though.

VSN: Yes, yes, I had to. There were things I had to say.

IC: Martin Amis said that, when he went back to read his early work, he found a certain energy in it that was absent in his later work, but he also said that, in terms of form, he thought his later work was stronger, at the sentence level.

VSN: Who said this?

More here.

From Nature:

The causes of infertility, which affects around 10% of couples, are often unknown, but may in some cases result from the body's inability to produce viable gametes — also known as sperm and egg cells. The first study of the development of such 'germ cells' from humans could help scientists to learn how to create them in the laboratory instead. Even though the reproductive age for humans is around 15–45 years old, the precursor cells that go on to produce human eggs or sperm are formed much earlier, when the fertilized egg grows into a tiny ball of cells in the mother’s womb. This ball of cells contains ‘pluripotent stem cells’ — blank slates that can be programmed into any type of cell in the body — and researchers are hoping to use these stem cells to treat various conditions, including infertility. But little is known about the early developmental stages of human gametes — owing to the sensitivity of working with human tissue — and most work in this area has been conducted using mice. In a Nature Cell Biology paper today¹, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, trace the development of early germ cells in human fetuses of between 6 to 20 weeks and analysed when genes were turned on or off.

The DNA within these early germ cells carries 'epigenetic modifications' — structural changes that do not affect the DNA sequence itself but do affect the way that genes are expressed. These changes may have accumulated during the parents’ lives, and need to be erased during the fetal stage. The study found two major events that wipe out, or reprogram, epigenetic modifications. Most of this reprogramming happened before 6 weeks, but the authors found a second event that completes the reprogramming after 6 weeks. “This is an important and fundamental paper for understanding human germ-line cells and finding the basic information about human germ-cell biology,” says reproductive biologist Evelyn Telfer of the University of Edinburgh, UK. “The researchers are clearly working in an uncharted area.”

More here.

Richard Friedman, M.D. in The New York Times:

In the wake of the terrible shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., national attention has turned again to the complex links between violence, mental illness and gun control. The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, has been described as a loner who was intelligent and socially awkward. And while no official diagnosis has been made public, armchair diagnosticians have been quick to assert that keeping guns from getting into the hands of people with mental illness would help solve the problem of gun homicides. Arguing against stricter gun-control measures, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan and a former F.B.I. agent, said, “What the more realistic discussion is, ‘How do we target people with mental illness who use firearms?’ ” Robert A. Levy, chairman of the Cato Institute, told The New York Times: “To reduce the risk of multivictim violence, we would be better advised to focus on early detection and treatment of mental illness.”

But there is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.

…Perhaps more significant, we are not very good at predicting who is likely to be dangerous in the future. According to Dr. Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and an expert on mass murderers, “Most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic. They tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage.”

More here.

First, Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian:

The possibility of friction with either the authoritarian state or non-state actors (political and religious extremists) often makes for a degree of self-censorship. At the same time, the need for obliqueness can also make the literary imagination more resourceful.

Such is the case with Mo Yan's deeply interesting fiction. His writing, however, has hardly been mentioned, let alone assessed, by his most severe western critics; it is his political choices for which he stands condemned. They are indeed deplorable, but do we ever expose the political preferences of Mo Yan's counterparts in the west to such harsh scrutiny?

In fact, we almost never judge British and American writers on their politics alone. It would seem absurd to us if the Somali, Yemeni or Pakistani victims of Barack Obama's drone assaults, miraculously empowered with a voice in the international arena, accused the US president's many literary fans of trying to put a human face on his unmanned killing machines; or if they denounced Ian McEwan, who once had tea with Laura Bush and Cherie Blair at 10 Downing Street, as a patsy for the Anglo-American nexus that is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions more.

Nevertheless, they would not be wrong to detect an unexamined assumption lurking in the western scorn for Mo Yan's proximity to the Chinese regime: that Anglo-American writers, naturally possessed of loftier virtue, stand along with their governments on the right side of history.

Rushdie responds, also in the Guardian:

Pankaj Mishra (Why Salman Rushdie should pause before condemning Mo Yan on censorship, Review, 15 December) makes a series of confused, dishonest and wrong-headed assertions. He misreads John Updike's “blue mailboxes” speech at the Pen congress of 1986. Updike was not talking selfishly about sending away his writing and receiving cheques in return. He was using the mailboxes as a metaphor of the easy, free exchange of ideas and information in an open society. One presumes Mishra is in favour of such a society.

He also misrepresents me. I have never made the claim that the Bush administration was resolved “to bring democracy through war in Afghanistan”. I did say that, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the reprisal attack against the al-Qaida-Taliban axis was justifiable, not to “bring democracy”, but to respond to an act of war. In Afghanistan a terrorist group had taken over the levers of a nation state and used that state as a base from which to attack the United States. For all I know, Mishra may feel that instead of fighting back, America should have apologized to al-Qaida for its foreign policy misdeeds and accepted that those killed in the Trade Centre towers deserved to die. I do not accuse him of that. Neither should he accuse me of what I did not say.

But Mishra has stranger fish to fry. Not content with attacking Nabokov, Bellow, Updike, Martin Amis and myself for “selective humanism”, he states: “Of course, violence and exploitation underpin all nation states, democratic or not.” This – what shall I call it? – this satanic view of human society as invariably founded upon evil is his reason for proposing the existence of a moral equivalence between powerful democracies and powerful tyrannies, and between writers' responses to living in free and unfree societies.

Mo Yan in the NYRB blog:

Getting into the People’s Liberation Army was hard, but not as hard as getting into college. So, starting in 1973, I sent in my application and took a physical exam at the commune every year, and every year I was rejected. But then, in February 1976, with the help of some important people, my persistence paid off—I received my enlistment notice. Soon after that, on a cold, snowy day, I walked some fifteen miles to the county town. There I put on an army uniform and climbed into the back of a military truck for the trip to Huang County, where I moved into the famous “Ding Family Compound” barracks and began basic training. (I would not revisit the site until the fall of 1999, after Huang County had evolved into the city of Longkou and Ding Family Compound had been converted into a museum. What had originally impressed me as the magnificent home of a wealthy landlord I now saw was little more than a squat building, proof that my horizons had broadened.)

After getting through basic training, I was sent, along with three other recruits, to a so-called Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Defense. People back home complimented me on my good luck of having been assigned to such a fine unit, but it actually turned out to be a major disappointment—it was only a radio-monitoring station that was about to be phased out.

Desiree Dolron. Te Di Todos Mis Suenos series. 2002.

More here and here.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

In making his annual Autumn Statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was forced to admit that his government has failed to meet a series of targets it set for itself back in June of 2010, when it slashed the budgets of various government departments by up to thirty per cent. Back then, Osborne said that his austerity policies would cut his country’s budget deficit to zero within four years, enable Britain to begin relieving itself of its public debt, and generate healthy economic growth. None of these things have happened. Britain’s deficit remains stubbornly high, its people have been suffering through a double-dip recession, and many observers now expect the country to lose its “AAA” credit rating.

One of the frustrations of economics is that it is hard to carry out scientific experiments and prove things beyond reasonable doubt. But not in this case. Thanks to Osborne’s stubborn refusal to change course—“Turning back would be a disaster,” he told Parliament—what has been happening in Britain amounts to a “natural experiment” to test the efficacy of austerity economics. For the sixty-odd million inhabitants of the U.K., living through it hasn’t been a pleasant experience—no university institutional-review board would have allowed this kind of brutal human experimentation. But from a historical and scientific perspective, it is an invaluable case study.

At every stage of the experiment, critics (myself included) have warned that Osborne’s austerity policies would prove self-defeating. Any decent economics textbook will tell you that, other things being equal, cutting government spending causes the economy’s overall output to fall, tax revenues to decrease, and spending on benefits to increase. Almost invariably, the end result is slower growth (or a recession) and high budget deficits. Osborne, relying on arguments about restoring the confidence of investors and businessmen that his forebears at the U.K. Treasury used during the early nineteen-thirties against Keynes, insisted (and continues to insist) otherwise, but he has been proven wrong.

More here.

Basharat Peer interviews William Dalrymple about his new book in the Hindustan Times:

William Dalrymple can be deceptive. He cultivates an image of nonchalance. It is rare to see him pontificate about the difficulties of research across languages, and the art of popular history in a social setting. He is most likely to speak about a hike or a trip to Istanbul. Then, a few years pass and he has produced another tome of meticulously researched history. Dalrymple's gregarious exterior hides a disciplined writer, who disappears from public view for months, looking for unused manuscripts, finding the right translators, and typing for hours on a wooden desk in a hut in a corner of the garden of his house in Mehrauli. For his new book, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42, Dalrymple worked in archives in Delhi, Lahore, and Kabul, and found the most important Afghan accounts of the first British-Afghan war in an old Kabul bookshop. Here are excerpts from an interview:

What made you write this book?

There are a lot of books about Afghanistan, but few about Afghan history. What brought me to write this book was thinking about Afghan history after rereading Peter Hopkirk's classic The Great Game. It is a bit dated and features a lot of “treacherous Orientals”. Return of a King is the first book about the first Afghan war using Afghan sources, telling the stories from an Afghan point of view as well. It is the defining conflict that the Afghans remember as the source of their independence that they alone in this region never succumbed to colonial rule. 18,000 soldiers of the East India Company marched into Afghanistan in 1839 and, according to legend, one man returns alive from this debacle. The British army is destroyed at the peak of the British Empire.

More here.

Annie Maccoby Berglof in the Financial Times:

Armed with a mug of tea, Pinker seats himself on a contemporary, Danish-designed sofa in the middle of his open-plan loft to discuss his most recent book, The Better Angels of Our Nature , which makes surprising claims about our species: that we’ve become gentler and less aggressive than our ancestors. The proof, argues Pinker, is in comparative statistics on violence so convincing that not even two world wars can dent the evidence. “Conventional wisdom is that we’re living in violent times. The data sets say otherwise. Contrary to stereotyping – and I’ve confirmed the stereotype in a survey – the Middle Ages were much bloodier.”

The apartment, a converted leather warehouse where Pinker lives with his third wife, the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, is located a few blocks from Boston’s financial district. “This was once an industrial space. There were tanneries in the area,” says Pinker. Divided into three rooms, it has 14ft-high ceilings and exposed brick walls. The supporting beams in the main room are from the original 19th-century construction. “They are nine inches across. You would be unlikely to see construction like this today,” he adds.

The building has an intriguing past. Pinker’s former sister-in-law once lived here. “She was here illegally,” Pinker says. “She was a painter and her partner was a sculptor. They put in their own plumbing. At some point the developers came in, young urban professionals started pricing them out and by sheer coincidence, decades later, we bought an apartment here, by which point all the artists had been driven out. This is a common urban sequence.”

More here.

From Newsweek:

Consider the view from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. On the one hand, Benjamin Netanyahu keeps doing things—like expanding settlements and refusing to accept the 1967 lines as the parameters for peace talks—that U.S. officials consider bad for America and catastrophic for Israel. On the other, every time President Obama has tried to make Netanyahu change course—in 2009 when he demanded a settlement freeze and in 2011 when he set parameters for peace talks—the White House has been politically clobbered. Administration officials might like to orchestrate Netanyahu’s defeat in next month’s Israeli elections, as Bill Clinton did when he sent political consultants to convince Israelis to replace Netanyahu with Ehud Barak in 1999. But they can’t because Netanyahu has no serious rivals for power. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert isn’t running; the centrist party he once led, Kadima, has largely collapsed, and the head of the center-left Labor Party is advertising her willingness to be a junior partner in another Netanyahu government.

So instead of confronting Netanyahu directly, Team Obama has hit upon a different strategy: stand back and let the rest of the world do the confronting. Once America stops trying to save Israel from the consequences of its actions, the logic goes, and once Israel feels the full brunt of its mounting international isolation, its leaders will be scared into changing course. “The tide of global opinion is moving [against Israel],” notes one senior administration official. And in that environment, America’s “standing back” is actually “doing something.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

A month ago scientists at the Large Hadron Collider released the latest Higgs boson results. And although the data held few obvious surprises, most intriguing were the results that scientists didn’t share.

The original Higgs data from back in July had shown that the Higgs seemed to be decaying into two photons more often than it should—an enticing though faint hint of something new, some sort of physics beyond our understanding. In November, scientists at the Atlas and LHC experiments updated everything except the two-photon data. This week we learned why. Yesterday researchers at the Atlas experiment finally updated the two-photon results. What they seem to have found is bizarre—so bizarre, in fact, that physicists assume something must be wrong with it. Instead of one clean peak in the data, they have found two. There seems to be a Higgs boson with a mass of 123.5 GeV (gigaelectron volts, the measuring unit that particle physicists most often use for mass), and another Higgs boson at 126.6 GeV—a statistically significant difference of nearly 3 GeV. Apparently, the Atlas scientists have spent the past month trying to figure out if they could be making a mistake in the data analysis, to little avail. Might there be two Higgs bosons?

More here.

This is Where we Were Born (#1)

The gaze adjusts itself to
the walls, the political commentators
in the newspapers
portrayed in dresses
with cats
and lovers
and the three-day stubble
intact

the tv news is a man
he says: everything is rags
he measures steps with herbs
lines with lines
water with lilies

we are called nothing
maybe we are called scream
or shot

we work on slogans
some people
think irony is the only thing power understands
others
want to know what exactly is meant by power
others again
sit still and fiddle with an old spoon
they later use to open cans of paint

the tv news is a man
he says: flood
he says: white knives don’t exist
he says: the arrests are nothing but propaganda
nothing happened
the day, on the other hand, was warm
bright, the parks were open
the population grilled salmon
kids climbed trees

our future: children who climb trees

power is invisible
a skinny middle-aged man says
power isn’t worth a scream
says another, oblivion
sleeps in the mouth of man

oblivion sits hunched over a small map
the city looks like plastic bags
cardboard and newspapers
two hundred thousand women remove their makeup
and get ready for their men
of glass in a bed
of glass

no one screams

the transport industry celebrates agreements
and shows the first steam aeroplanes
famous captains and pilots
from an era no one remembers

until now

Christ is a little chain
youth is Delphic

those who aren’t killed are shot
like cats
indifferent
and persistent

the white knives start to shine at midnight
corpses drift ashore

everything is rags

we are called nothing
we try to eat
sleep
under the moon
under the tv sets

Pedro Carmona-Alvarez
from Varmestafetten
publisher: Gyldendal, Oslo, 2009

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