From Nature:

An unsuspecting worker ant in Brazil's rainforest leaves its nest one morning. But instead of following the well-worn treetop paths of its nest mates, this ant stumbles along clumsily, walking in aimless circles, convulsing from time to time. At high noon, as if programmed, the ant plunges its mandibles into the juicy main vein of a leaf and soon dies. Within days the stem of a fungus sprouts from the dead ant's head. After growing a stalk, the fungus casts spores to the ground below, where they can be picked up by other passing ants.

This strange cycle of undead life and death has been well documented and has earned the culprit the moniker: “zombie-ant” fungus—even in the scientific literature. But scientists are just learning the intricacies of this interplay between the Ophiocordyceps parasitic fungus and the Camponotini carpenter ants that it infects. Fossil evidence implies that this zombifying infection might have been happening for at least 48 million years. Recent research also suggests that different species of the fungus might specialize to infect different groups of ants across the globe. And close examination of the infected ant corpses has revealed an even newer level of spooky savagery—other fungi often parasitize the zombie-ant fungus parasite itself. “We have advanced a great deal in understanding how the fungus controls ant behavior,” David Hughes, an assistant professor of entomology and biology at The Pennsylvania State University, says. Every few months scientists are discovering yet another peculiar trait that, added together, make this parasite one of the most insidious infections—or perhaps that honor goes to the parasite that ultimately kills the killer parasite.

More here.

From The New York Times:

If you could recommend one book to the American president, what would it be? To the prime minister of Turkey?

Many years before he was elected president, I knew Obama as the author of “Dreams From My Father,” a very good book. To him or to any American president, I would like to recommend a book that I sometimes give as a gift to friends, hoping they read it and ask me, “Why this book, Orhan?” “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values” is a great American book based on the vastness of America and the individual search for values and meaning in life. This highly romantic book is not a novel, but does something every serious novel should do, and does it better than many great novels: making philosophy out of the little details of daily life.

I respected the Turkish prime minister’s politics of pushing the army away from politics and back to the barracks, though I am not happy about going to courts for my political opinions like many, many others during his reign. He sued a cartoonist for picturing him as a cat, though as anyone who comes here knows we all love cats in Istanbul. I am sure Erdogan would enjoy the great Japanese writer Natsume Soseki’s book “I Am a Cat,” a satirical novel about the devilish dangers of too much Westernization, narrated by a smart cat.

More here.

Phillip Maciak on Film After Film: or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? and Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writing:

“Films mirror our reality. Let us look in the mirror.”

– Siegfried Kracauer

1.

There are two film critics. Each is in exile. Each makes his living review to review, lecture to lecture, amongst the journalistic hurlyburly of New York City. Each, in the prime of his intellectual life, writes a long, messy, virtuosic polemic about film and politics. The first traces how the political landscape of fear, paranoia, and violent nationalism in the critic’s homeland arose out of the aesthetic of popular cinema. The second, conversely, traces how the aesthetic of popular cinema arose out of the political landscape of fear, paranoia, and violent nationalism in the critic’s homeland. The first is Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film(1947), and the second is J. Hoberman’s new Film After Film, or What Became of 21^stCentury Cinema?

Admittedly, there’s a certain fuzziness to this comparison. For one thing, Kracauer, an elegant and path-breaking critic of film and mass culture, was in exile from Nazi Germany when he wrote his epic tome. He is rightly heralded, along with Andre Bazin, as one of the prime movers of modern film theory; his writings on German Expressionism still influence the way we think about Weimar film and culture, and he is one of the oldest standards for passionate cultural criticism of the cinema.

Hoberman, for his part, is merely in exile from The Village Voice. After almost 30 years as the paper’s senior film editor and columnist, he was laid off in January of this year, eliciting a collective cry from thousands of film buffs who had been introduced to a broad swath of international art cinema by Hoberman’s writing. (It is notable, however, that this cry was not reprised when Alan Scherstuhl replaced him as film editor earlier this fall.) While Hoberman has settled comfortably at venues like Tablet, Artinfo, and theNew York Review of Books (not to mention his day job as a professor at NYU) and is not, as far as we know, fleeing violent persecution, his displacement has, for a certain kind of cinephile, taken on the flavor of an existential crisis. If Hoberman is not at The Village Voice, then where are we?

Over at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, long but interesting, especially the section on P.T. Anderson’s ‘The Master’ starting at 01:00:46:

This is the first episode of the second season of our podcast series, “The Podcast for Social Research.” We recorded this episode on Friday, October 23 with an eye towards relevance to the upcoming election, and also to return to film criticism to inaugurate our second season, much as we began our first.  As such, this was recorded long before any of us realized that by this weekend, with a mere 4 days till the election, most of our city’s attention would be focused on displaced people, power outages, destroyed infrastructure, climate change, and the politics of crisis response. However, there is still an election on Tuesday, and there is still a place for discussion even in a crisis. So whether you are stuck at home because of the subways or heading out to Far Rockaway, Staten Island, Red Hook, or any of the other neighborhoods still in critical need, or anywhere else in the world, we hope you enjoy our discussion of political movements and elections and our friendly critique of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.” As always, please see our Notations section after the jump for some references, asides, and more. Although we have a bibliography in our customary style, our own time constraints to post this before the election will keep this episode’s Notations largely without time stamps. We promise to return to our full, thorough style of Notations for next episode. Until then, share, enjoy, stay safe, and warm.

(You can download here by right-clicking and “save as” or look us up on iTunes)

Perhaps the closest predecessor for Taylor’s arguments is Max Weber, though Taylor’s differences with Weber are still major. Like Weber, Taylor argues that the Reformation attempted to obliterate the difference between the religious (in the sense of monastic) life and daily life by giving the latter a profound religious meaning in the doctrine of the calling—an effort that, to the extent that it succeeded, ended up undermining the very tension that the Reformation itself generated. But he diverges from Weber in maintaining that the success of the drive toward Reformation, mirrored to more than a small degree by the Counter-Reformation initiative, gave rise to new problems. On the one hand, the very success of these efforts seemed to imply that their religious underpinnings were no longer necessary—that secular “progress” could take over from religious impulses. Yet, as the book’s Part III shows, the new secularity produced its own problems, sometimes but not necessarily leading to a retrieval of religious belief. What we have now is a situation in which neither belief nor unbelief can be taken for granted and where ever more numerous examples of both continue to appear on the scene.

more from Robert Bellah on Charles Taylor in the first essay published at The Immanent Frame 5 years ago here.

China’s Communist Party is the world’s largest political party, with more than 80 million members. With its unmatched reach, the party is the most influential instrument in contemporary Chinese society. Its influence extends across cities, towns, villages, universities, schools and workplaces. Members of the party include government officials, army officers, farmers, workers and employees of state-owned companies. China is a one-party state, so all political participation must occur through the Chinese Communist Party. Dissent or difference of opinion can invite severe consequences. The party has a pyramid structure, with village members at the bottom and Beijing-based decision-making bodies at the top. Party members choose delegates to attend the National Congress.

more from Al Jazeera (with helpful video) here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

It's been a busy few weeks for announcements about how smart non-human life-forms are. First there was the talking beluga in California, then there was the elephant in Korea who could articulate a few words, then, finally, the report on a lowly slime mold's ability to make sophisticated decisions. All three of these reports repeated many of the conventional tropes for talking about animal intelligence; both trumpeted as wholly new and unheard-of the sort of data that have long been a staple of science reporting; and both are sure to leave everything exactly the same: with anti-anthropocentrists shouting see! See!, and with those who believe that human beings are something special in the cosmic scheme insisting that anything they are shown can be explained in terms of mimicry, stimulus, and other automatisms.

The irrelevance of empirical data for deciding the matter, in fact, long precedes the very existence of science journalism: it defines a clear rift already in 17th-century philosophy, while the 'new' discoveries themselves are for the most part only variations of what was already well documented in Aristotle's Historia animalium. And yet, the journalists always report as if until yesterday we were all fully committed to a hardcore version of the bête-machine doctrine. At the same time, however, they ensure that the topic will remain perpetually new by reinforcing, willy-nilly, the very doctrine their news item is supposed to be calling into question.

What do I mean by this? Consider the report from the New York Daily News, in which Koshik the Korean elephant is described as 'parroting' human speech.

More here.

Graeme Wood in Aeon:

For a while, it might well have seemed to outsiders as if anti-gay pogroms were imminent. But with the deft sidestep of a martial artist, the gay rights movement in Uganda has used that moment of ghastly bigotry to raise its public profile, and some of the more extreme elements of the anti-homosexuality brigade have retreated into strategic silence. The situation is still volatile, but the roles have switched in an unpredictable way. I came to Uganda to find out why.

I arrived in Kampala with the recommendations and introductions of Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Fairfax Wright, who made Call Me Kuchu, the latest and best of the documentaries about gay life in Uganda. Their film has debuted in festivals and cinemas across Europe and the United States, and the gay activists whom it features have often been present to introduce it to the audience in person. ‘Kuchu’ is slang for ‘gay’, and a term that gay Ugandans have appropriated for themselves — something like the word ‘queer’. On 19 June 2012, it premiered at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco — the centre of gay cinematic culture in the US — and the Ugandan guest at the event was Longjones.

When I met him later, back in Uganda, I heard a voice familiar from the film (and, I later realised, from a gay-bar scene in the BBC documentary, too). It was a soft tenor with a Fozzie Bear tone, very hard to mistake. The Castro Theatre audience moved him profoundly, he told me. ‘They gave me standing applause, and I cried and cried.’

More here.

A Lahore girls' school has been burned to the ground and an astronomer's family arrested because of this tool of intolerance.

Salman Hameed in The Guardian:

…on 31 October the school was burned to the ground by a crowd who had heard it was accused of blasphemy. Lab equipment and computers were looted. Hundreds of library books – obviously with little use to the mob – tossed into the fire. Some even tried to pull the marble tiles off the floor.

The blasphemy accusations are not related to astronomy. Instead, they centre on a teacher at the school, Arfa Iftikhar. In a rush for the start of the Eid holiday, she accidentally missed a page while copying a homework assignment for the class. Her mistake merged a line about the prophet of Islam with the lines of a chapter on beggars. A parent of one of the students in her class noticed it, and the chatter of blasphemy spread quickly.

It did not matter that this was an unintentional mistake. In the current climate, it is comically easy to accuse someone of blasphemy in Pakistan. In fact, in this instance, the blame was also extended to the school administrators, including Asim.

The accused teacher is now in hiding and the police have arrested the 77-year-old principal of the school.

More here. More information at Salman Hameed's blog here.

Untitled

Mystical?
Too clinical.
God?
The name has been
smoked down
to a stub.

For sixteen years
I have ransacked
the universe,
unsealing files,
lifting lyrics,
looking for a way
to say how it was.

Because we have
no word for light
we live in shadows.

by Demetria Martinez
from Breathing Between the Lines
University of Arizona Press, 1997

‘The whole pleasure of marriage’, according to G K Chesterton, ‘is that it is a perpetual crisis.’ He had no time for David Copperfield’s second wife, Agnes – an embodiment of lifeless perfection to be rated far below David’s charming, domestically incompetent first love: David Copperfield and Dora quarrelled over the cold mutton; and if they had gone on quarrelling to the end of their lives, they would have gone on loving each other to the end of their lives; it would have been a human marriage. But David Copperfield and Agnes would agree about the cold mutton. And that cold mutton would be very cold. Jane Austen, no fan of novelistic paragons either, wrote to her niece that ‘pictures of perfection … make me sick & wicked’. One of the many pleasures of John Mullan’s absorbing new book on Austen is how it handles the affectionate contempt of ordinary married life. Take Charles and Mary Musgrove in Persuasion: they bicker endlessly in public, but their quarrels also serve to unite them.

more from Freya Johnston at Literary Review here.

Jessica Valenti in The Nation:

Women sent an unequivocal message to politicians on Tuesday. The gender gap was a whopping 18 percent; significantly higher than 2008’s twelve-point gap. Women made up a majority of the electorate, and unmarried women were 23 percent of voters.

There’s no doubt that an upswing in feminist activism had a demonstrable impact on the election. From the Komen/Planned Parenthood controversy to transvaginal ultrasounds to “binders of women”—the vociferous energy surrounding women’s issues is indisputable. But there’s an argument to be made that women’ssilence also contributed to Democrats’ resounding wins on Tuesday.

Despite the media and feminist focus on “war on women” this election season, women remain largely mum around their personal experiences with abortion and sexual violence. Feminists have long fought to end the stigmas surrounding rape and abortion—urging women to tell their stories. After all, more than one-third of American women will have an abortion in her lifetime. More than 600,000 adult women were raped in the United States in 2010. Still, most American women don’t talk about ending their pregnancies or being assaulted. Though this silence is not necessarily the best tactic for feminism or for women themselves, it may have been the final nail in the GOP’s coffin.

Richard Marshall interviews Herman Cappelen in 3:AM Magazine:

Herman Cappelen is mounting a fierce defence of his armchair against the crazyist gang over at X-phi – although he doesn’t want his counter-attack to be just about X-phi. He expects it to run and run. He writes about when language talks about language. He thinks analytic relativism a mistake and that truth is monadic. He thinks talk of possible worlds is the path to many errors. He thinks Kripke original, deep and almost entirely true. He thinks Lewis original deep and almost entirely false (but dangerously seductive because his errors are hidden). All in all this is one groovaciously pugnacious philosophical dude.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Was it something you always felt affinities with, or was it something you came to from elsewhere?

Herman Cappelen: I’ve always felt an affinity with philosophy. Put a bit pretentiously, philosophers think deeper and wider than anyone else and that’s intellectually liberating, satisfying, and of course endlessly frustrating at the same time. When thinking philosophically comes natural to you, then what’s puzzling and slightly bizarre is to not do philosophy. Whatever topic you’re thinking about, you’re never more than two to three ‘Why?’s away from a philosophical question. I’m always puzzled when someone lacks the curiosity to ask those two to three why-questions. Anyone who’s intellectually curious will care about the foundations of what they’re doing and those foundations are invariably, in part, philosophical. So I’m one of those who don’t think philosophising requires much of an explanation, excuse, or justification – lack of philosophical curiosity always strikes me as a pretty reliable sign of intellectual shallowness.

I was also lucky to be around good philosophers while growing up. As a teenager in Norway,Arne Naess was an inspiring role model and as an undergraduate at Balliol in Oxford, I hadJonathan Barnes as tutor for most of my courses. Barnes was an important influence – though I remember asking him whether it was worth going on with philosophy professionally and he said, ‘Only if there’s absolutely nothing else you can see yourself doing and you think you can do it better than anyone else’. I worked hard to ignore that advice or put severe restrictions on the domain of ‘anyone.’ That said, I think he was right.

Sam Anderson in the NYT Magazine:

N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some cases diagnosable sociopaths. Something about dominating your opponent, publicly, more or less every day of your life, in the most visible aspect of your sport, tends to either warp your spirit or to be possible only to those whose spirits are already warped. Michael Jordan, when he wasn’t busy scoring, was busy punching a teammate in the face and gambling away small fortunes. Allen Iverson, in his spare time, recorded an aesthetically and morally terrible rap album and gave an iconic speech denigrating the very notion of practice. Kobe Bryant is and shall forever be Kobe Bryant. Wilt, Shaq, Pistol Pete, Dominique, McGrady, McAdoo, Rick Barry — it’s a near-solid roster of dysfunction: sadists, narcissists, malcontents, knuckleheads, misanthropes, womanizers, addicts and villains. While it’s true that plain old N.B.A. superstars do occasionally manage to be model citizens (cf. Tim Duncan, Grant Hill, Steve Nash), there is something irredeemable about a scoring champion.

Kevin Durant, the star of the Oklahoma City Thunder, is the youngest scoring champion in N.B.A. history. At 24, he has led the league in scoring for three consecutive seasons, and all signs point to him keeping that up for the foreseeable future. It follows, then, that Durant should also be a prodigy of a head case. He should have been arrested for reckless driving at around age 9, broken his hand in a strip-club brawl at age 12 and accidentally shot his chauffeur no later than age 15.

Instead, Durant has a reputation roughly on par with Gandhi.

Samuel Moyn in The Nation:

The worst human tragedies of the twentieth century were certainly most deadly when sponsored or at least unleashed by totalitarian regimes, and food was a crucial element of their politics. Several years ago, the German journalist and scholar Götz Aly showed in books such as Architects of Annihilation (2003) the role of food in the horrors of National Socialist imperialism. More recently, Timothy Snyder has made the conquest of more productive agricultural territory—especially the Ukrainian “breadbasket”—an essential factor in the episodes of mass death occurring in what he calls the “bloodlands.” Soviet and Nazi planners both sought to occupy the region for the sake of food, and their macabre policies dictated that those on the home front would eat before the occupants of the newly conquered territory, who were deemed too numerous to feed with limited resources. In The Taste of War(2011), Lizzie Collingham has offered an accessible survey of how deeply the origins and course of World War II followed from the difficulty—real or perceived—of provisioning humanity. Even Americans soon became aware that the fight against totalitarianism in postwar Asia depended on filling empty stomachs at least as much as on winning hearts and minds, a policy that Nick Cullather, author of The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (2010), has elsewhere called “the foreign policy of the calorie.”

But the famines caused by totalitarian regimes can easily become a sensationalized distraction from considering the other causes of mass starvation. After all, mass hunger is older than totalitarianism, and in the most ancient records of human hunger, cannibalism is a depressingly common response to famine. In his already classic book Famine: A Short History (2009), Cormac Ó Gráda, the greatest contemporary historian of the topic, cites a Chinese woodblock from an 1870s famine that tells of a man who sells his daughter to avoid eating her; and many cases of cannibalism were reported in prior and later famines in China, under the rule of emperors and republicans alike.

More here.

Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

“When I find myself in the company of scientists,” W. H. Auden wrote, “I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.” Benoit B. Mandelbrot (1924-2010) had the kind of beautiful, buzzing mind that made even gifted fellow scientists feel shabby around the edges. Mandelbrot is said to have revitalized visual geometry and coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes that uncannily mimic the irregularities found in nature.

He prized roughness and complication. “Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness and hotness,” heonce said. “Each is the topic of a branch of physics.” He dedicated his life to studying roughness and irregularity through geometry, applying what he learned to biology, physics, finance and many other fields.

He was never easy to pin down. He hopscotched so frequently among disciplines and institutions — I.B.M., Yale, Harvard — that in his new memoir, “The Fractalist,” he rather plaintively asks, “So where do I really belong?” The answer is: nearly everywhere.

More here.

Think these guys are exaggerating? Have a look here.

Jennifer Ouellette in her blog at Scientific American:

Boo-yah! Behold the data, for it is mighty! Silver correctly predicted 50 states out of 50, and even nailed the popular vote within a few tenths of a percentage point. When the graphic above hit Twitter, Alaska’s returns hadn’t been recorded, but it went, as predicted, to Romney. The sole genuine toss-up state, Florida — which Silver had at 50/50 odds — is still technically not final (as of 5 PM EST on Wednesday, November 7), waiting on votes from Miami-Dade county, which heavily favors Obama, who already holds a slight lead. It’s expected Florida will also land in Obama’s column, so Silver’s controversial last-minute switch of Florida from light pink to light baby blue was justified.

More here.