From MSNBC:

The United States may be an iconic democracy, but every year many Americans don't bother voting at all — regardless of lower turnout caused by events like Hurricane Sandy. The United States ranks 120th of the 169 countries for which data exists on voter turnout, falling between the Dominican Republic and Benin, according to a January 2012 study from the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. (Not all countries ranked were democracies, a factor that could skew the results.) About 60 percent of eligible voters will likely cast ballots Tuesday, a lower percentage than in most other Western democracies, said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University. [ The Strangest Elections in US History ] Experts say the low turnout results from how often Americans conduct elections, the inconvenience of voting and the reality that each individual vote doesn't count for much.

Voting inconvenient
“Part of the issue is we have too much democracy,” McDonald said. “We're just voting a lot in the U.S.” With state, local and national races, as well as mid-term elections, most Americans have a chance to cast a ballot about once every year. Other Western democracies may only have an election every five years, McDonald told LiveScience. That frequency makes voting a hassle, he said.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

A vote in tomorrow’s presidential election could be viewed one of two ways. It’s either the culmination of months of weighing the arguments on countless issues and making a choice based on a commingling of knowledge and personal principle. Or you voted Republican or Democratic because, to paraphrase accidental pundit Lady Gaga, you were born that way. Okay, in the spirit of punditry, the latter is a bit of an oversimplification, but it does reflect the thinking of an emerging field called political neuroscience. Its focus has been on using brain scans to see if people of different political persuasions are different all the way done to their genes. Or put more bluntly, do their brains work differently?

Right brain, left brain

The latest research came out last week, a study at the University of South Carolina that concluded that the brains of self-identified Democrats and Republicans aren’t hard-wired the same. Specifically, the scientists found more neural activity in areas of the brain believed to be linked with broad social connectedness in Democrats (friends, the world at-large) and more activity in areas linked with tight social connectedness in the Republicans (family, country). This was in line with what previous studies have suggested, that people who say they’re Democrats tend to take a more global view on issues while those who call themselves Republicans tend to see things through more of an American filter. But the findings also ran counter to previous research suggesting Democrats are, by biological nature, more empathetic souls than Republicans. Not so, according to the South Carolina study; it’s just that Republicans are more likely to focus their empathy on family members or people they know.

More here.

You think our elections are tough? Tell it to the wolves.

Rob Dunn in Slate:

It is hard to escape the sensation that our electoral process is broken. Too much money. Too much bullshit. Perhaps we should turn to nature for insight, remedy, or just salve. The Book of Proverbs implored believers to go to the ant and consider her ways when it came to wisdom and industriousness. Can we also turn to the ant for lessons on democracy?

The idea that ants, honeybees, or other social animals might do a thing or two better than we do is ancient. The Bible, Torah, and Quran all invoke insect societies. In the Amazon, Kayapo children were once advised to follow the brave, social ways of the ant (and to eschew the more vulgar ways of the termite).

Most recently, Cornell University entomologist Tom Seeley has written a lovely and compelling book titled Honeybee Democracy which suggests we turn to the bees to see how they make decisions. Thanks to the work of Seeley and his collaborators, it is now clear that honeybee hives really are democratic. When it’s time to look for a new nest, options are weighted by the evaluations of many different bees about a site’s qualities—its size, its humidity, the density of surrounding flowers. Individual bees vote with dances, and when the number of dances in favor of some particular site is high enough, the masses are swayed. Together, citizen bees choose, if not perfection, the best possible option.

More here.

Mark Greif in n + 1:

Obama has been the best president in my lifetime. I know people speak of their disappointment with him. I, too, could say I feel disappointed in the purely literal sense. I had hopes for more. But I didn’t feel certain that a President could do all that much good, though I knew a bad one could do unbelievable harm. I’m not disappointed existentially, and that’s essential. Obama has been a better President than any other I’ve known outside of history books. He has been better than Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. Not just that: he’s been maybe forty to a hundred times better than Clinton, and something like a thousand to ten thousand times better than Bush II. I don’t remember Carter well; my impression is that Obama is either slightly better than Carter or doing better in some comparably terrible situations. Plus, when I wake up in the morning, I like getting up in a country where Obama is President. I like it a lot. I like thinking about him. I like his family. I like his style. Those are bonuses; but I’d be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that they make it easier to bear some strictly political “disappointments.” So, facing the decision: am I going to vote for the reelection of the best President of my lifetime, whom I also happen to enjoy seeing, every time I see him on television, which is something you have to suffer a lot of with any leader, or am I—what? Not going to vote? Certainly not; not after the stolen election of 2000. Or am I going to vote for Obama and not feel good about it? No. I feel pretty great about it. I’ve been looking forward to this Tuesday all year.

More here by Greif as well as others. [Scroll down to continue reading the piece by Mark Greif.]

Robert Wright in The Atlantic:

“The final Dispatch poll shows Obama leading 50 percent to 48 percent in the Buckeye State. However, that 2-point edge is within the survey's margin of sampling error, plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.”

That wording suggests that Obama's two-point edge has no meaning. And that's a common way for journalists to interpret results that fall within the “margin of error.” For example, in September a conservative columnist in the New York Post asserted that Obama's lead in state polls didn't matter because the “polls separating the two candidates are within the margin of error — meaning that there is no statistical difference in support between Obama and Romney.”

Explaining why it's wrong to say there's “no statistical difference” in such cases will take a couple of paragraphs, so please bear with me (unless you recently took a stats course, in which case you can skip these paragraphs if not more).

Here's what pollsters never tell you, except maybe in the fine print: When they say there's a margin of error of X, they don't mean there's no chance whatsoever that the poll is off by more than X. Typically, their margin-of-error calculations are based on a confidence level of 95 percent, which means the chances of the poll being off by more than X are 5 percent.

In the Columbus Dispatch poll, X was 2.2. So if the poll had found Obama was ahead by 2.21 points, the finding would have been “outside the margin of error” and thus treated with great respect — but the fact is that there would still have been a 5 percent chance that, in the actual voting population, Romney was ahead. (I'm assuming the Dispatch followed convention and used the 95 percent confidence threshold in calculating its margin of error — see postscript below.) The flip side of this coin is that the Obama lead of 2 points in the poll, though less than the margin of error of 2.2 points, is by no means devoid of significance. If you did the math — which, many years after taking quantitative analysis in college, I lack the brain cells to do precisely — you'd find that there's a probability of somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent that Obama is ahead in the voting population as a whole.

More here.

If the United States wants to curb terrorism and nuclear proliferation, it needs to fundamentally rethink its relationship with Pakistan.

C. Christine Fair in Foreign Policy:

Long after the last U.S. or NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan — and no matter who wins on Tuesday — Pakistan will continue to present fundamental challenges to U.S. regional interests and international security.

The self-proclaimed “land of the pure” has used Islamist militants as tools of foreign policy since its earliest days of independence. In the fall of 1947, tribal marauders from Pakistan's Pashtun areas, benefiting from extensive government support, rushed into the princely state of Kashmir in hopes of seizing it for Pakistan. Leaders of the newborn Pakistani state feared that the king of the Muslim-dominant state of Kashmir would seek independence or agree to join India. The strategy triggered the very event Islamabad was trying to prevent: The king, watching with apprehension as his own security forces failed to stave off the attackers, sought India's help. India agreed to come to his aid, provided that the maharaja join India's dominion. Indian troops thus joined the fight to defend its newly acquired territory. The eventual ceasefire left the princely state divided between the dominions of India and Pakistan.

To wrest all of Kashmir from India, Pakistan has since then raised and nurtured numerous Islamist militant groups. In 1989, an indigenous insurgency erupted in Kashmir in response to gross Indian malfeasance. Pakistan swiftly took advantage of the surge of so-called mujahideen who had trained in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets. Pakistan's “foreign” militants overtook the Kashmiri insurgency. By the mid-1990s, the violence in the valley was mostly conducted by Pakistani terrorists — predominantly ethnic Punjabis — ostensibly on behalf of Kashmiris.

More here.

In the Gilded Age, many of the banks that have recently played important and devastating roles in our financial life—Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers—were guided by men who had a passion for painting. J. P. Morgan’s collection was legendary. Paul Sachs, an early partner at the family firm, left banking to become a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, and to found the program in curatorial studies at Harvard. Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, each of whom ran Lehman Brothers, together assembled one of the great collections of Florentine and Sienese art outside Italy. Even the bank established to bail these other banks out, the Federal Reserve, had at its inception Paul Warburg. Warburg, often referred to as the “father” of the Federal Reserve, was the brother of Aby Warburg, one of the greatest scholars of the Italian Renaissance. In much the same way that aptitudes for math and music seem to descend together in families, so do there seem to be lineages for those gifted in the representation of value: the bankers and the painters. Not only did Gilded Age bankers study and collect art, their financial inventions were structurally quite like those of painters working at the same time. In particular, the financiers, as was true of Cézanne and his followers among the cubists, were interested in new representations of the future.

more from Rachel Cohen at The Believer here.

When the Red Army reached Poland, in the summer of 1944, it waited on the banks of the Vistula, just outside Warsaw, while the S.S., under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, killed fifteen thousand Polish partisans, who had staged an armed uprising, and more than two hundred thousand civilians. At the end of the fighting, half a million Poles were sent to camps, and the rest were deported as slave laborers to Germany. On Hitler’s orders, the city was razed. When the Red Army finally entered Warsaw, in January, 1945, the streets were filled with dead bodies. No one living remained. Except in Bulgaria, which has cultural ties to Russia, Soviet soldiers not only looted but raped, almost systematically, in the countries they passed through. In eastern Germany alone, up to two million women are believed to have been raped by Soviet soldiers. But, apart from complaining about Stalin’s refusal to come to the aid of the Warsaw Poles, Britain and the United States did nothing to stop the pillage of Eastern Europe.

more from Louis Menand at The New Yorker here.

Science and its practical consort Engineering mostly come out of this week with enhanced reputations. For some years now, various researchers have been predicting that such a trauma was not just possible but almost certain, as we raised the temperature and with it the level of the sea—just this past summer, for instance, scientists demonstrated that seas were rising faster near the northeast United States (for reasons having to do with alterations to the Gulf Stream) than almost anyplace on the planet. They had described, in the long run, the loaded gun, right down to a set of documents describing the precise risk to the New York subway system. As nature pulled the trigger in mid-October, when a tropical wave left Africa and moved into the Atlantic and began to spin, scientists were able to do the short-term work of hurricane forecasting with almost eerie precision. Days before Sandy came ashore we not only knew approximately where it would go, but that its barometric pressure would drop below previous records and hence that its gushing surge would set new marks. The computer models dealt with the weird hybrid nature of the storm—a tropical cyclone hitting a blocking front—with real aplomb; it was a bravura performance.

more from Bill McKibben at the NYRB here.

Bait Goat

There is a
distance where
magnets pull,
we feel, having
held them
back. Likewise
there is a
distance where
words attract.
Set one out
like a bait goat
and wait and
seven others
will approach.
But watch out:
roving packs can
pull your word
away. You
find your stake
yanked and some
rough bunch
to thank.
.

by Kay Ryan
from Poetry, Vol. 192, No. 5

From New Statesman:

It has been a bad few weeks for girls’ schools in Pakistan. The shooting of 15 year old educational activist Malala Yousafzai in October sent shockwaves through the country. Other female activists spoke out about being targeted, and the spotlight has been placed on the Taliban’s numerous attacks on girls trying to get an education. The latest incident was the burning down of the Farooqi Girls’ High School in Lahore on Thursday. This was not the doing of the Taliban, but an angry mob. Why? Because a teacher, Arfa Iftikhar, had allegedly set a piece of homework that contained derogatory references to the Prophet Muhammad. Iftikhar has been forced into hiding, while the 77 year old principal of the school, Asim Farooqi, has been detained for 14 days on blasphemy charges. At the protests on Thursday, the mob distributed photocopies of the offending homework, and broke and burnt everything they could lay their hands upon. Unsurprisingly, the school has been closed ever since.

From Nature:

There's more than one way for long-lived subterranean rodents to avoid cancer, and they might hold cellular clues to effective treatments in humans. Cell cultures from two species of blind mole rat, Spalax judaei and Spalax golani, behave in ways that render them impervious to the growth of tumours, according to work by Vera Gorbunova at the University of Rochester in New York and her colleagues¹. And the creatures seem to have evolved a different way of doing this from that observed in their better known and similarly cancer-resistant cousin, the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber). Some 23% of humans die of cancer, but blind mole rats — which can live for 21 years, an impressive age among rodents — seem to be immune to the disease. “These animals are subject to terrific stresses underground: darkness, scarcity of food, immense numbers of pathogens and low oxygen levels. So they have evolved a range of mechanisms to cope with these difficulties,” explains co-author Eviatar Nevo at the University of Haifa in Israel, who has published papers on the creatures since 1961. “I truly believe work with these animals will bring a dramatic revolution in medicine.”

Three years ago, Gorbunova was involved in another study that described the unusual way in which the cells of the naked mole rat behave in the lab². The authors say that this hints at how the rats resist cancer. When cells from most animals are grown in a culture dish, they divide until they form a single layer of cells covering the base of the dish. At this point, healthy cells stop dividing, whereas cancerous ones continue. But the cells of naked mole rats behave as if they are 'claustrophobic', ceasing to divide much sooner than cells from other species. “We thought the blind-mole-rat cells would use the same mechanism as those of naked mole rats,” says Gorbunova, “so the fact that they do not was a big surprise”. Rather than ceasing to divide, the cells of blind mole rats reach a point at which they die en masse in a bout of cell suicide that Gorbunova and her co-authors call “concerted cell death”. This seems to be triggered by the collective release of a signalling molecule called interferon-beta, although what causes this is unclear. “The cells have some way of sensing when they are overproliferating, but we still don’t know precisely how they sense that,” Gorbunova says. “This is what we need to find out next, because it could provide some clue as to how we could activate the same process in human cells.”

More here.

In sympathy and solidarity with all those on the eastern seaboard who have suffered at the hand of last week's superstorm, including the many flooded art galleries in Chelsea, there is no art post today.

Tip-o-the-hat to Lauren Shaw, who will recognize this photograph of water as we love it.

From Salon:

Oliver Sacks may be the father of the popular neurological best-seller, but he’s distinctly different from the current crop of authors, be they as substantive as Daniel Kahneman (“Thinking Fast and Slow”) or as dodgy as Jonah Lehrer. The latest iteration of the genre usually makes generalizations about human behavior on the basis of quantitative studies. The particular histories of the unnamed subjects of those studies are irrelevant; all that matters is the aggregate, because only in writing about the average person can today’s neuroscience author claim that his book is about you, the average reader.

Sacks, on the other hand, has always been fascinated by outliers. It’s his professed belief that the underlying structures and functions of the brain can be most captivatingly glimpsed in the experiences of the man who mistook his wife for a hat and the man who kicked his own leg out of bed. This approach, not incidentally, also makes for much better stories than, say, descriptions of studies in which college students were asked to memorize numbers under trying circumstances. There’s an aura of self-help surrounding most popular neuroscience books today, with all the banality that term implies. What the Sacks style lacks in personal applicability it makes up for in marvels. So much so, in fact, that filmmaker Wes Anderson offered a parody version of Sacks in “The Royal Tenenbaums”: a shrink, played by Bill Murray, whose career is built on exhibiting his clients’ freakishness to the public.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Dr Anton Desyatnikov from the Nonlinear Physics Centre at The Australian National University is part of an international team of scientists who are designing knots in light, with potential applications in advanced modern optics, laser beams and even quantum computing. Using concepts from mathematics and physics the model Dr Desyatnikov and his colleagues have explored creates optical vortices with dark cores in a bright laser beam, that can then tangle and form links and knots.

“Apart from their curiosity value, what's really interesting and useful about these knots of darkness is that they show you what the power flow is doing,” Dr Desyatnikov said. “It is part of the incredible progress science is making in the field of optics, we're beginning to do things with light that would have once seemed impossible.” “The idea of a knot of light is something scientists have been exploring for years and a few groups have managed to achieve just that by precisely engineering laser beams with “artificial” or “hand-made” knots. But what we've been working on are models in which the knots spontaneously form on their own, just like those annoying knots that you always get in electrical cables. “However unlike electrical cables which love to form knots, light doesn't. Scientists have found that inducing knots to form in laser beams by introducing perturbations in the form of laser speckle only very rarely induces knots. “Our models suggest that you have to get the key parameters of the light in a certain range before you can easily tie the light in knots but once you do, the knots are virtually guaranteed,” he said.

More here.

With a mind as formidable as his features, Colm Tóibín is now firmly a part of Ireland’s literary landscape. It’s both a blessing and a curse.

Nigel Farndale in The Telegraph:

‘Listen,” Colm Tóibín says. I listen, though there is nothing to hear. “And it gets even quieter at night,” he adds, “because nearly all the properties around here are used as offices.” We are standing in the upstairs study of his four-storey Georgian house in Dublin, the place where he does his writing in a hard-backed rattan chair, at night.

The 57-year-old author shows me a work-in-progress on his desk, written in longhand in a notebook. “I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second,” he explains. “John Lanchester and Philip Hensher do the same. I bumped into them the other night and we were all doing our pen talk.”

Tóibín talks in a strong but ponderous voice — which is, by the way, as Irish as whiskey with an “e”. The deliberation, he reckons, may be a compensation for a childhood stammer. He avoids starting sentences with hard consonants. In conversation with him you have to hold your nerve and not rush to fill the long silences, as he is probably half way through a thought.

“I was waiting to get money out of a machine last night,” he tells me, “and there were these two lads who were slightly drunk messing about in front of me in the queue. The cheekier one looked at me and said: ‘So you’re busy at the moment?’ I must have been looking quite severe and was about to say ‘Yes I am, and I want to get home’ when he added ‘with the writing?’ and I had to smile. I took out my ink pen, held it up and went ‘Yeah’.”

More here.

Anis Shivani in Big Think:

I’ve been contemplating the notion of a graduated return to normalcy for about a year. A few days from election, with Obama’s chances having dimmed considerably, would seem to be the most perilous time to put this idea forward, but I’ll go ahead and propose anyway that a slow but definite return to normalcy has been under way for a while, and that if Obama is reelected, this countertendency is likely to pick up steam in the next four years.

I assert this because before Mitt Romney chose the first debate to unveil his etch-a-sketch moment—very smart, because it left little time for the obvious deceit to be exposed, and because he’d already signaled his allegiance to the extreme right for much of the campaign—he was headed for a historic loss. If Romney has any chance in the election, it’s only because he’s temporarily assumed the posture of a Massachusetts moderate, a persona relatively low-information voters partly bought into, as he repudiated every single extremist policy position of his, both domestic and international, over the course of three debates.

Romney and the Republicans, it was clear by October 3, could not win on their terms; the Romney-Ryan agenda was dead in the water, if it was going to be presented for what it really was. Voucherization of Medicare is a loser, as is ending abortion in cases of rape and incest, or self-deportation for “illegals.”

More here.