The rise of the foundations in the 20th century coincided with the ascendancy of an East Coast liberal internationalist milieu determined to impose its progressive capitalist vision on an insular and backward-looking traditional elite. In the 1920s & 30s, the United States was experiencing what Richard Hofstadter has called a ‘psychic crisis’, characterised by social convulsions: industrialisation, mass immigration, rapid urbanisation, and large-scale protest movements including violent strikes and industrial unionism. Against a backdrop of growing popular interest in utopianism and socialism alongside the rise of the Christian social gospel, the more attuned sections of the ruling class coalesced around a doctrine of moderate reform in order to militate against the spread of radical politics and usher in a new era of responsible nation-building. By the time the country was back on its feet, the foundations had become a prominent fixture in public affairs, and were well placed to spearhead America’s increasingly assertive global role in the wake of the Second World War.

more from Houman Barekat at the Berlin Review of Books here.

Political consulting is often thought of as an offshoot of the advertising industry, but closer to the truth is that the advertising industry began as a form of political consulting. As the political scientist Stanley Kelley once explained, when modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, “So far,” he wrote, “Big Business has won every skirmish.”

more from Jill Lepore at The New Yorker here.

From Discover:

“Take Taiwan,” says Birt. “Its fertility rate has gone from about 7 in 1950 to less than 1 today. This trend applies to any country on the development escalator. It’s inevitable.” As a country develops, initially its death rate declines because of a rising standard of living and better medical care. Next, almost automatically, fertility goes down. “Japan got on the escalator first, and the emerging countries, like Brazil, will get there,” Birt continues. “The religion of the country is irrelevant. It’s happening now in Iran. It’s happening in Catholic countries that oppose birth control, like Italy and Spain. In Mexico the fertility rate is under 3, approaching replacement level.” The replacement rate is the number of children that the average woman must produce in order to replace herself and her mate. Demographers normally define the replacement rate as 2.1 children, the 0.1 increment allowing for infant mortality. It is a pivotal number, indicating that a population is stable, not expanding, and very likely to shrink. Among the 222 countries and territories in the world, two-thirds now have fertility rates below 3, while one-third have slipped under 2 and have begun to contract. Japan, the poster child for extreme trends in aging and fertility, is projected to lose a third of its population in the next 50 years. The most populous nation, China, has a fertility rate of 1.5. Though China’s strict one-child-per-couple decree obviously has holes, the policy is having the desired result. India, the second most populous nation, has brought down its growth to 2.6 children per woman. The United States stands at the cusp of population decline because American females are having an average of only 2.06 children apiece.

In those figures lies the turnabout in world population that Glick predicts, and also its senescence, because when people are taken off the population escalator—at the front end, by not being born—those already on it become more conspicuous as they near the top. There is no stopping the process. “That’s why we say demography is destiny,” Glick remarks. “There’s only one exit: death.” Birt describes a favorite graphic of his, derived from a 2007 United Nations publication. He calls it “Solving for X” because of the problem it raises for the world’s health-care systems. Two lines are crossing, the percentage of people over 65 and the percentage under 5. Back in 1950, children predominated in the world; in 2050 the seniors will be on top. “The percent over 65 and under 5 are trading places,” Birt says. “We’re almost at the X spot.” The forecast date for global X to occur is 2017, but each country will arrive at the transition at a different time. “Japan blasted through its intersection years ago,” he notes.

Was there a single factor to account for this world-shaking reversal? “Yes,” Glick says. “You start educating girls.” Birt agrees. “You start educating women, and they delay marriage and have fewer children,” he says. “It’s all due to not having children in societies that let women loose.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

More than 30 million of the Americans classified as obese or extremely obese might benefit from surgery that reconstructs the stomach to accommodate less food. A new study shows that gastric bypass surgery, which leads to weight loss and improvement of related health problems, may yield long-term health benefits. Earlier research had shown improvements but most patients were tracked for shorter intervals. A report published online September 18 in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association tracked hundreds of extremely obese patients for six years (body mass index (BMI) above 40 or greater than 35 with health complications) and found that even after this lengthy period of time, those who received the surgery had significantly better health outcomes than those who did not. Preexisting type-2 diabetes went into remission more than half of the time (62 percent of cases). Researchers were unsure if gastric bypass, in which the stomach is reattached farther down on the digestive tract allowing for less food absorption would lead to better long-term health without other interventions, such as dietary or exercise assistance. For the study, the researchers enrolled 835 extremely obese patients who were seeking a from of gastric bypass known as Roux-en-Y. About half of those patients ended up getting the procedure. As an additional control group, the researchers enrolled 321 extremely obese people from the community who were not trying to get the surgery.

Following up with the participants two years later, the researchers found dramatic results. Those who had the surgery experienced a roughly 35 percent weight reduction—for many as much as 100 pounds or more under their baseline weight—whereas the control groups remained extremely obese. Even after six years and without other interventions, the patients who had the surgery were still about 28 percent lighter on average than before and experienced improved quality of life scores compared to the control groups. Stunningly, the procedure lead to at least an 80 percent reduction in the risk of developing type-2 diabetes and a 20-times larger chance that existing diabetes would go into remission. It also lowered risks for cardiovascular disease and hypertension. Those without surgery had increased risk for all of these conditions after six years.

More here.

Jonathan Meades in The Guardian:

Architecture, the most public of endeavours, is practised by people who inhabit a smugly hermetic milieu which is cultish. If this sounds far-fetched just consider the way initiates of this cult describe outsiders as the lay public, lay writers and so on: it's the language of the priesthood. And like all cults its primary interest is its own interests, that is to say its survival, and the triumph of its values – which means building. Architects, architectural critics, architectural theorists, the architectural press (which is little more than a deferential PR machine) – the entire quasi-cult is cosily conjoined by mutual dependence and by an ingrown, verruca-like jargon which derives from the more dubious end of American academe.

From early in its history, photography was adopted by architects as a means of idealising their buildings. As beautiful and heroic, as tokens of their ingenuity and mankind's progress, etc. This debased tradition continues to thrive. At its core lies the imperative to show the building out of context, as a monument, separate from streetscape, from awkward neighbours, from untidiness. A vast institutional lie is being told in architectural magazines the world over, in the pages of newspapers and in countless television films. It's also being told on the web – which is significant, and depressing, for it demonstrates how thoroughly the convention has seeped into the collective.

The mediation of buildings can never be neutral. As long ago as the 1930s, Harry Goodhart-Rendel observed: “The modern architectural drawing is interesting, the photograph is magnificent, the building is an unfortunate but necessary stage between the two.”

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in The New Republic:

Early morning one day this past July, a bomb went off two streets from my house in Karachi. I was asleep. “There was a bomb blast outside the Chinese consulate,” my wife informed me when I woke up. Nobody had died, I was told. It was a motorcycle bomb—as in someone had fitted a bomb into a motorcycle and parked it outside the consulate. My first reaction was, why would anyone explode a bomb outside the Chinese consulate? Since our childhood, we have been told that the Chinese are our best friends and our friendship is taller than the Himalayas and deeper than the Arabian Sea. Maybe someone was jealous of our friendship. It didn’t really occur to me that the bomb had gone off in my own neighborhood.

Then a friend wrote from London: Heard there was a bomb blast in your neighborhood, hope the family is safe, and the dogs not too traumatized. It was nice of her to write, but my first reaction was that the blast was two streets away. For me, the explosion might as well have happened in another city. None of my friends in Karachi called to check on me. They had probably seen the news on television, had found out that nobody died in the blast, and had promptly forgotten about it. I hadn’t even heard the blast. Maybe I have learned to block out small motorcycle bombs.

More here.

Charles Larson reviews Macro Roth's new book The Scientists, in Counterpunch:

When Marco Roth was sixteen years old, his parents suggested that he begin seeing a psychiatrist. A couple of years earlier, the boy’s father (a noted hematologist) revealed that he was dying of AIDS and told his son that the diagnosis should be kept within the family. Years earlier, an accidental prick with a needle had infected him. Marco was an only child. Not only was his father a famous academic scientist, but the boy’s mother was a talented pianist. A sentence from the information on the book about the writer states that “Marco Roth was raised among the vanished liberal culture of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.” Jewish, cultured, highly educated. As a boy he was accustomed to house concerts, intellectual discussions with family and guests.

The sessions with the psychiatrist were intended to help Marco adjust to his father’s approaching death. During those final years of his life, Marco’s father aided his son with his high school science projects, provided him with scientific articles to read—especially about possible cures for AIDS—and kept up a running dialogue about literature. There were novels that Marco read because of his father’s recommendations. The tension keeping his father’s approaching death from his peers led the young man to make endless speculations about his parents and refer to the virus as his “microscopic sibling,” the second child his parents never had. His father had contracted the virus when Marco was in the second or third grade.

First, David Remnick in the New Yorker:

Twenty-three years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his death warrant on Salman Rushdie and forced on the novelist a decade of hellish seclusion, Rushdie is publishing this week a brilliant memoir of those years of endurance, called “Joseph Anton.” (Rushdie’s security detail asked that he devise an alias and “Joseph Anton”—the first names of Conrad and Chekhov—is what he chose.) Readers of the excerpt from Rushdie’s new book that was published here earlier this month could readily sense the shaming helplessness of his experience and his astonishing capacity to tell the story straight. There is in the memoir a kind of absolute honesty, a willingness to pass clear-eyed judgment on everyone involved—including, most ruthlessly, himself. “Joseph Anton,” which is written in a deliberately distancing, yet scrupulously accurate, third-person voice, is, in its way, as important a book as “Midnight’s Children,” the novel that gave birth to the Rushdie phenomenon, in 1981.

Second, Pankaj Mishra in the Guardian:

There are fascinating details about Rushdie's parents in the memoir's early pages, which also appealingly evoke his years as a struggling writer with his first wife, Clarissa; few readers would fail, later in the book, to be moved by the account of her death and Rushdie's grief-tinged recall of his superseded self. Rushdie engagingly reveals the autobiographical energies that went into the making of such novels as The Satanic Verses and Fury. Anton's Herzog-style letters, addressed variously and randomly to famous people, critics, and even God, effectively evoke the mind of an isolated and hunted man.

Yet the memoir, at 650 pages, often feels too long, over-dependent on Rushdie's journals, and unquickened by hindsight, or its prose. Ostensibly deployed as a distancing device, the third-person narration frequently makes for awkward self-regard (“The clouds thickened over his head. But he found that his sentences could still form … his imagination still spark”). A peevish righteousness comes to pervade the memoir as Rushdie routinely and often repetitively censures those who criticised or disagreed with him. The long list of betrayers, carpers and timorous publishers includes Robert Gottlieb, Peter Mayer, John le Carré, Sonny Mehta, the Independent (evidently the “house journal for British Islam”), Germaine Greer, John Berger and assorted policemen “who believed he had done nothing of value in his life”. Small darts are also flung at James Wood, “the malevolent Procrustes of literary criticism”, Arundhati Roy, Joseph Brodsky, Louis de Bernières and many others.

Pankaj Mishra in The New Yorker:

Was the prophet Muhammad a pervert and a tyrant? Does Islam promote terrorism and enslave women? Does Islam oblige its followers to wage jihad on Westerners whose roots lie in the secular Enlightenment? Should Muslims consider converting to Christianity? For the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the answer to all these questions is a resounding “Yes!” Hirsi Ali, who renounced Islam in her thirties, speaks from experience of bigotry and intolerance among her former co-religionists: she was genitally mutilated as a child in Somalia, briefly radicalized by a preacher of jihad in Kenya, nearly forced into a marriage, threatened with death in the Netherlands by the Muslim assassin of her collaborator, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and is still hounded by murderous fanatics in her new home, America. In her latest book, “Nomad: From Islam to America” (Free Press; $27), she reminds her readers of the West’s tradition of intellectual revolt against clerical tyranny and warns of the insidious, intransigent enemies in their midst. “The Muslim mind today seems to be in the grip of jihad,” she writes. She is not hopeful that Americans will heed her warning. Her initial job interviews in the United States were discouraging: the Brookings Institution, she writes, worried that she might offend Arab Muslims. (The conservative American Enterprise Institute, however, immediately appointed her as a fellow.) On college campuses, Muslim students accuse her of wanting to “trash” Islam, while Western feminists, convinced that white men are “the ultimate and only oppressors,” lack the “courage or clarity of vision” to help her knock down the mental “hovels” of the East. Pointing to Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s murderous rampage in Texas, last November, she deplores the “conspiracy to ignore the religious motivation for these killings” in America. Muslims today, Hirsi Ali believes, must be forced to choose between the darkness of Islam and the light of the modern secular West.

…Nomad” is unlikely to earn Hirsi Ali many Muslim admirers. Neither will her recent support for the proposed French ban on face veils and the Swiss referendum outlawing minarets. In denouncing Islam unreservedly, she has claimed a precedent in Voltaire—though the eighteenth-century scourge of the Catholic Church might have been perplexed by her proposal that Muslims embrace the “Christianity of love and tolerance.” In another respect, however, the invocation of Voltaire is more apt than Hirsi Ali seems to realize. Voltaire despised the faith and identity of Europe’s religious minority: the Jews, who, he declared, “are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts,” who had “surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism,” and who “deserve to be punished.” Voltaire’s denunciations remind us that the Enlightenment was a much more complex and multifaceted phenomenon than the dawn of reason and freedom that Hirsi Ali evokes. Many followed Voltaire in viewing the Jews as backward, an Oriental abscess in the heart of Europe. Hirsi Ali, recording her horror of ghettoized Muslim life in Whitechapel, seems unaware of the similarly contemptuous accounts of Jewish refugees who made the East End of London their home after fleeing the pogroms.

More here.

From The New York Times:

A few years ago, Mercedes Carnethon, a diabetes researcher at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, found herself pondering a conundrum. Obesity is the primary risk factor for Type 2 diabetes, yet sizable numbers of normal-weight people also develop the disease. Why? In research conducted to answer that question, Dr. Carnethon discovered something even more puzzling: Diabetes patients of normal weight are twice as likely to die as those who are overweight or obese. That finding makes diabetes the latest example of a medical phenomenon that mystifies scientists. They call it the obesity paradox. In study after study, overweight and moderately obese patients with certain chronic diseases often live longer and fare better than normal-weight patients with the same ailments. The accumulation of evidence is inspiring some experts to re-examine long-held assumptions about the association between body fat and disease. Dr. Carl Lavie, medical director of cardiac rehabilitation and prevention at the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans, was one of the first researchers to document the obesity paradox, among patients with heart failure in 2002. He spent more than a year trying to get a journal to publish his findings. “People thought there was something wrong with the data,” he recalled. “They said, ‘If obesity is bad for heart disease, how could this possibly be true?’ ”

But there were hints everywhere. One study found that heavier dialysis patients had a lower chance of dying than those whose were of normal weight or underweight. Overweight patients with coronary disease fared better than those who were thinner in another study; mild to severe obesity posed no additional mortality risks. In 2007, a study of 11,000 Canadians over more than a decade found that those who were overweight had the lowest chance of dying from any cause. To date, scientists have documented these findings in patients with heart failure, heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, high blood pressure — and now diabetes. Experts are searching for explanations. One idea is that once a chronic disease develops, the body becomes catabolic, meaning it needs higher energy and caloric reserves than usual. If patients do not have those reserves, they may become malnourished even though their weight is normal, said Dr. Gregg Fonarow, one of the directors of the preventive cardiology program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

More here.

Demolition

everywhere they are demolishing old houses
in Beijing, Dalian, Shanghai, Ningbo, Guangzhou
everywhere the same mad stampede to be comfortably well-off
constant battling
the economy is like an ocean
like a misfortune no one survives
the economy suffers no nostalgia
the economy knows no ideal, no history
old-style courtyard homes
ancient fishing villages
the small windows and wooden doors of the South
the banner houses and old streets along the banks of the Pearl River
everywhere: demolition
the earth is covered in reinforced concrete
they try to outdo one another in height
opulence
uniformity
trying to be more cool
wherever you go
the fallen leaves are swept by autumn winds
and annihiliated

by Jun Er
translation: Simon Patton

Jason Palmer at the BBC:

The team, which included French and Spanish collaborators, used a variant of a technique called atomic force microscopy, or AFM.

AFM uses a tiny metal tip passed over a surface, whose even tinier deflections are measured as the tip is scanned to and fro over a sample.

The IBM team's innovation to create the first single molecule picture, of a molecule called pentacene, was to use the tip to pick up a single, small molecule made up of a carbon and an oxygen atom.

This carbon monoxide molecule effectively acts as a record needle, probing with unprecedented accuracy the very surfaces of atoms.

It is difficult to overstate what precision measurements these are.

The experiments must be isolated from any kind of vibration coming from within the laboratory or even its surroundings.

They are carried out at a scale so small that room temperature induces wigglings of the AFM's constituent molecules that would blur the images, so the apparatus is kept at a cool -268C.

More here.

Seth Anziska in the New York Times:

On the night of Sept. 16, 1982, the Israeli military allowed a right-wing Lebanese militia to enter two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. In the ensuing three-day rampage, the militia, linked to the Maronite Christian Phalange Party, raped, killed and dismembered at least 800 civilians, while Israeli flares illuminated the camps’ narrow and darkened alleyways. Nearly all of the dead were women, children and elderly men.

Thirty years later, the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila camps is remembered as a notorious chapter in modern Middle Eastern history, clouding the tortured relationships among Israel, the United States,Lebanon and the Palestinians. In 1983, an Israeli investigative commission concluded that Israeli leaders were “indirectly responsible” for the killings and that Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister and later prime minister, bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent them.

While Israel’s role in the massacre has been closely examined, America’s actions have never been fully understood. This summer, at the Israel State Archives, I found recently declassified documents that chronicle key conversations between American and Israeli officials before and during the 1982 massacre. The verbatim transcripts reveal that the Israelis misled American diplomats about events in Beirut and bullied them into accepting the spurious claim that thousands of “terrorists” were in the camps. Most troubling, when the United States was in a position to exert strong diplomatic pressure on Israel that could have ended the atrocities, it failed to do so. As a result, Phalange militiamen were able to murder Palestinian civilians, whom America had pledged to protect just weeks earlier.

More here.

Our very own prodigiously and multiply talented Jim Culleny sings a song:

Woman at the Well

Song by Jim Culleny
Copyright 1998
Recorder at Avocet Studio, Shelburne, MA
Producer/Engineer: Joe Podlesny

Vocals and rhythm guitar: Jim Culleny
All other tracks: Joe Podlesny

David Byrne in Smithsonian Magazine:

I listen to music only at very specific times. When I go out to hear it live, most obviously. When I’m cooking or doing the dishes I put on music, and sometimes other people are present. When I’m jogging or cycling to and from work down New York’s West Side Highway bike path, or if I’m in a rented car on the rare occasions I have to drive somewhere, I listen alone. And when I’m writing and recording music, I listen to what I’m working on. But that’s it.

I find music somewhat intrusive in restaurants or bars. Maybe due to my involvement with it, I feel I have to either listen intently or tune it out. Mostly I tune it out; I often don’t even notice if a Talking Heads song is playing in most public places. Sadly, most music then becomes (for me) an annoying sonic layer that just adds to the background noise.

As music becomes less of a thing—a cylinder, a cassette, a disc—and more ephemeral, perhaps we will start to assign an increasing value to live performances again. After years of hoarding LPs and CDs, I have to admit I’m now getting rid of them. I occasionally pop a CD into a player, but I’ve pretty much completely converted to listening to MP3s either on my computer or, gulp, my phone! For me, music is becoming dematerialized, a state that is more truthful to its nature, I suspect. Technology has brought us full circle.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants.

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll!

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Justin E. H. Smith, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: What Kind of Perspectivist is Nietzsche?
2. Bleeding Heart Libertarians: Recharting the Map of Social and Political Theory: Where is Government? Where is Conservatism?
3. Experimental Philosophy: Factive Verbs and Protagonist Projection
4. Meditations Hegeliènnes: Kritik des unreinen Gedankes
5. Opinionator: The Moral Hazard of Drones
6. Ratio Juris: Toward a Philosophically Sound & Bioethically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law
7. The Immanent Frame: Love's Ladder's God
8. The Philosopher's Beard: Democracy is not a truth machine
9. Tomkow: A Few Short Steps to the Gallows

We'll announce the three winners on or around September 24, 2012.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

Claire Cunningham, Ménage à Trois.

Awe-inspiring performance artist Claire Cunningham and Gail Sneddon in partnership with National Theatre of Scotland.

More here, here, and here.

Todd Freeberg, Jeffrey Lucas, and Indrikis Krams in American Scientist:

If you live in North America, Europe or Asia near a forest, suburban open woodlands or even an urban city park, chances are you have heard a member of the avian family Paridae—the chickadees, tits and titmice. Birds use calls to communicate with their flockmates, and most parids share a unique call system, the chick-a-dee call. The call has multiple notes that are arranged in diverse ways. The resulting variation is extraordinary: The chick-a-dee call is one of the most complex signaling systems documented in nonhuman animal species.

Much research on the chick-a-dee call has considered Carolina chickadees,Poecile carolinensis, a species common in the southeastern United States. We focus on this species here, but we also compare findings from other parids. We discuss how the production and reception of these calls may be shaped over individual development, and also how ecological and evolutionary processes may affect call use. Finally, we raise some key questions that must be addressed to unravel some of the complexities of this intriguing signaling system. Increased understanding of the processes and pressures affectingchick-a-dee calls might tell us something important about what drives signaling complexity in animals, and it may also help us understand the evolution of that most complex vocal system, human language.

More here.