If walks are themselves narratives, then their literature has to beguile the reader with an illusion of grounded actuality, of honest movement through space and time, or it loses us. Pain is part of the story, as it was (and still is) for pilgrims: in the “porcelain snow” of Tibet near the sacred mountain of Minya Konka, an altitude-sick Macfarlane follows routes sacred for thousands of years, where worshippers have performed the kora – body-length prostrations – “for thirty-two miles of tough rocky path, over the 18,000-foot Drolma pass”. Macfarlane’s own account of “pedestrian life at 15,000 feet” – all “ragged breathing” and cold felt in the bone – may not match the rigours of the polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s masterpiece The Worst Journey in the World (1922), the most extraordinary and compellingly written slog of them all, but it makes the pilgrims’ efforts seem yet more remarkable.

more from Adam Thorpe at the TLS here.

In sculpture, the inert becomes animate, or if not actually animate, certainly worked through by mind, infused with life, meaning and finality by mind. Although Aristotle’s example is of a sculptor working in bronze, maybe the paradigm sculptural case is the worker in stone. The typical sculptural instruments are chisel, hammer, knife, capable both of strength, necessarily so, but also delicacy. Aristotle would, of course, have known this well enough. Greek temples were virtual repositories of stone sculpture, both inside, with colossal statues of Athene, Zeus and other gods, and outside, as part of the architecture. And there were, of course, the kouroi, those astonishing marble figures, often life-sized, their faces and figures human in a way Egyptian sculpture is not, but without the illusionistic smoothness and softness of Hellenistic sculpture.

more from Anthony O’Hear at the Fortnightly Review here.

The café is synonymous with Egyptian society and, more generally, the Arab world. Unlike their European counterparts, Egyptian cafes are chaotic places of informal and raw discussion. Café Riche, once the intellectual and literary hangout of Cairo, awoke from its long slumber as a tourist attraction, with what seemed like eternal appeal, during last year’s revolution. The wood paneling and white tablecloths speak to a forgotten Cairo era; one unashamed of its colonial pedigree, catering to foreign journalists replete with a selection of imported alcohol. These days, in post-revolutionary, perhaps revolutionary Cairo, Egyptian intellectuals and activists once again filter in for interviews in various languages beneath the high ceilings of the cafe.

more from Joseph Dana at the LA Review of Books here.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:

This is not an unbiased piece. I became sceptical of the cult of Arundhati Roy at a time when the dams on the Narmada were still being debated. Even in agreement I was taken aback by the easy generalisations and overdose of capitalised words that marked her piece, The Greater Common Good. It seemed to me, though, that the real problems with her writing went much deeper, and these became apparent only once the breathlessness of the prose was set aside.

In a crucial section of the essay, she claims:

According to a detailed study of 54 Large Dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, the average number of people displaced by a Large Dam is 44,182. Admittedly, 54 dams out of 3,300 is not a big enough sample. But since it’s all we have, let’s try and do some rough arithmetic. A first draft. To err on the side of caution, let’s halve the number of people. Or, let’s err on the side of abundant caution and take an average of just 10,000 people per Large Dam. It’s an improbably low figure, I know, but …never mind. Whip out your calculators. 3,300 x 10,000 = 33 million. That’s what it works out to. Thirty-three million people. Displaced by big dams alone in the last fifty years. What about those that have been displaced by the thousands of other Development Projects? At a private lecture, N.C. Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought the number was in the region of 50 million (of which 40 million were displaced by dams). We daren’t say so, because it isn’t official. It isn’t official because we daren’t say so. You have to murmur it for fear of being accused of hyperbole. You have to whisper it to yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable. It can’t be, I’ve been telling myself. I must have got the zeroes muddled. It can’t be true. I barely have the courage to say it aloud. To run the risk of sounding like a ‘sixties hippie dropping acid (“It’s the System, man!”), or a paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex. But it is the System, man. What else can it be?

Fifty million people.

Go on, Government, quibble. Bargain. Beat it down. Say something.

I feel like someone who’s just stumbled on a mass grave.

Rhetoric can win you the Booker, it can’t help you pass a course in elementary statistics.

The initial IIPA report she cites considers an average of 44,000 persons displaced per large dam. But it seems to have considered only the very largest of the dams in India, since even a dam like Bhakra displaced about 40,000 people. Roy, however, applies this figure to all of India’s ‘large’ dams, while condescending to reduce the number by a fourth to arrive at a figure of 10,000 per large dam.

She claimed, ‘It’s an improbably low figure, I know…’ Actually, it is an improbably large figure. The term ‘large’ she uses, applies to all dams whose height exceeds 15 metres. As far as displacement of people is concerned, what really matters is the area submerged by a dam, not its height. The vast majority of her ‘large’ dams have a reservoir area of less than 5 sq km, and to say each such dam displaces 10,000 people is a travesty.

More here.

Roald Hoffmann in American Scientist:

My first encounter with H₂ was typical for a boy in the age of chemistry sets that had some zing to them. My set, made by A. C. Gilbert Co., contained some powdered zinc. It had no acids, but it taught you to generate them from chemicals it included (for instance HCl from NaHSO₄ and NH₄Cl), or—the manual said—you could buy a small quantity from your local apothecary. Perhaps I got it there, asking politely for the acid in my best accented English a year or so after coming to Brooklyn from Europe. I poured some of the dilute acid on the zinc in a test tube, watched it bubble away, lit (with some fear) a match and heard that distinct pop.

Next, I encountered the gas, Henry Cavendish’s inflammable air, in a high school electrolysis experiment. We ran a current through water with a little salt dissolved in it, collected the unequal volumes of gases formed, each trapped in an inverted tube. Both gases gave small pyrotechnic pleasures—one, hydrogen, with that satisfying pop when a newly extinguished splint came near it; the other, oxygen, revived exuberantly the flame of the same splint.

Primo Levi, in an early chapter in his marvelous The Periodic Table, describes an initiation into chemistry that features the same experiment, with more fearsome results:

I carefully lifted the cathode jar and holding it with its open end down, lit a match and brought it close. There was an explosion, small but sharp and angry, the jar burst into splinters (luckily, I was holding it level with my chest and not higher) and there remained in my hand, as a sarcastic symbol, the glass ring of the bottom.… It was indeed hydrogen, therefore: the same element that burns in the sun and stars, and from whose condensations the universes are formed in eternal silence.

More here.

Patrick Clark in the New York Observer:

“The unethical tendency is a human universal,” said Paul Piff, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. But not everyone bends and breaks the rules equally.

Mr. Piff’s research shows that the rich are more likely to cut off other drivers, or cheat in games of chance, and subjects who identified greed as a positive value were more likely to cheat. But greed isn’t the only factor. Creative people are more likely to cheat, he told us, as are the highly educated.

Unethical behavior seems to be driven by rank—the more status you have, the less dependent you’re likely to be on social relationships—and self-focus. Meanwhile, watching other people cheat changes our understanding of what’s socially acceptable. Successful people are more likely to cheat, increasing the chances that they’ll become still more successful. And, we suppose, increasing the chances that they’ll be surrounded by successful people who are more likely to cheat themselves.

“It’s something called social proof, and it’s one of the strongest forces in society,” said Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and the author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, a book-length work on the motivations for cheating.

Which might explain why it’s so rare to find a lone lawbreaker. If one Libor submitter was rigging rates for traders, it’s only natural that the others would feel entitled to a little bit of Bollinger.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

From Scientific American:

The brain can be a messy place. Thankfully, it has good plumbing: Scientists have just discovered a cleansing river inside the brain, a fluid stream that might be enlisted to flush away the buildup of proteins associated with Alzheimer's, Huntington's and other neurodegenerative disorders. The researchers, based at the University of Rochester (U.R.), University of Oslo and Stony Brook University, describe this new system in the journal Science Translational Medicine today. The study adds to the evidence that the star-shaped cells called astrocytes play a leading role in keeping the nervous system in good working order.

In most of the body, a network of vessels carry lymph, a fluid that removes excess plasma, dead blood cells, debris and other waste. But the brain is different. Instead of lymph, the brain is bathed in cerebrospinal fluid. For decades, however, neuroscientists have assumed that this fluid simply carries soluble waste by slowly diffusing through tissues, then shipping its cargo out of the nervous system and eventually into the body's bloodstream. Determining what's really going on has been impossible until recently. In this study, researchers led by U.R. neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard have identified a second, faster brain-cleansing system.

More here.

Mother to Son

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So, boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps.
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now—
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
.

by Langston Hughes
from The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
publisher: Vintage Classics

Massimo Pigliucci's critique of the skeptic, atheist, rationalist community, over at Rationally Speaking:

The problem is that my experience (anecdotal, yes, but ample and varied) has been that there is quite a bit of un-reason within the CoR. This takes the form of more or less widespread belief in scientific, philosophical and political notions that don’t make much more sense than the sort of notions we — within the community — are happy to harshly criticize in others. Yes, you might object, but that’s just part of being human, pretty much every group of human beings holds to unreasonable beliefs, why are you so surprised or worried? Well, because we think of ourselves — proudly! — as a community of reason, where reason and evidence are held as the ultimate arbiters of any meaningful dispute. To find out that too often this turns out not to be the case is a little bit like discovering that moral philosophers aren’t more ethical than the average guy (true).

What am I talking about? Here is a (surely incomplete, and I’m even more sure, somewhat debatable) list of bizarre beliefs I have encountered among fellow skeptics-atheists-humanists. No, I will not name names because this is about ideas, not individuals (but heck, you know who you are…). The list, incidentally, features topics in no particular order, and it would surely be nice if a sociology student were to conduct a systematic research on this for a thesis…

* Assorted nonsense about alternative medicine. Despite excellent efforts devoted to debunking “alternative” medicine claims, some atheists especially actually endorse all sorts of nonsense about “non-Western” remedies.

* Religion is not a proper area of application for skepticism, according to some skeptics. Why on earth not? It may not be a suitable area of inquiry for science, but skepticism — in the sense of generally applied critical thinking — draws on more than just science (think philosophy, logic and math).

* Philosophy is useless armchair speculation. So is math. And logic. And all theoretical science.

* The notion of anthropogenic global warming has not been scientifically established, something loudly proclaimed by people who — to the best of my knowledge — are not atmospheric physicists and do not understand anything about the complex data analysis and modeling that goes into climate change research.

* Science can answer moral questions. No, science can inform moral questions, but moral reasoning is a form of philosophical reasoning. The is/ought divide may not be absolute, but it is there nonetheless.

Stephanie Nikolopoulos in The Millions:

“You should sign up for this,” my sister said, showing me an article about a bookstore that doubles as a matchmaking service. At the Brooklyn indie, lovelorn bookworms choose their prospective romantic interests based on their list of favorite authors pinned to a cork board. The article went on to point out that women never wrote down Jack Kerouac as one of their coveted authors.

My decade-long enamor with the poets and writers of the Beat Generation was about to pay off. As the only woman who adored Kerouac, I would be the vixen of the literary matchmaking board.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a girly girl. My regular weekend activity includes clothes shopping, I feel naked without nail polish on, and my favorite color is pink. In fact, it was while reading the fashion magazine Seventeen my senior year of high school that I stumbled upon a mention of Ann Charters’s The Portable Beat Reader and quickly became obsessed with all things Beat related. After reading Jack Kerouac’s road-trip novel On the Road, it only seemed natural to pack my bags and move across the country for college. As Kerouac wrote, “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”

While attending Scripps, a women’s college in Southern California, my interest in Beat literature grew as I went on a San Francisco pilgrimage to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, infamous for its involvement in the obscenity trial over Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. When I returned, diploma in hand, to the East Coast, I attended talks by Beat writers at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. I tucked Gregory Corso’s poem “Marriage,” in which he asks “Should I get married? Should I be good?” into my heart. That would be the poem I want read at my wedding, I thought. When I read On the Road, I connected to Kerouac’s alter ego, Sal Paradise, shambling after friends, being nostalgic for events even as they’re happening, seeing beauty in the mundane, and hitting the road in his eternal quest for meaning — topics I thought both men and women could relate to.

Until my sister showed me the matchmaking article, it had never occurred to me that the author of On the Road could be a cement divider on Lover’s Lane.

An old piece by Ernest Gellner in Eurozine:

Tonight I will try to explain a few of the major striking events of our century – some very surprising, some a little less surprising. Very surprising is the tremendous success of Islam in maintaining and strengthening itself. Most social scientists accepted the secularization thesis, which argued that in modern or industrial societies the hold of religion over society and over the hearts and minds of men declines. This seems more or less true with one striking exception: the world of Islam, where the hold of religion over society and over men in the past hundred years has certainly not diminished and seems to have increased.

The other equally surprising event of the century is the unexpected and total collapse of Marxism. Marxism is often and correctly compared to religion, sometimes even described as secular religion, as it had many of its features – total vision, the promise of righteousness on earth, etc. It did, however, lack one prominent feature of religion – that is, when religions are established, they retain a hold on the hearts and minds of men, and do not collapse easily. When they do collapse, there is some resistance and struggle; some people remain loyal to them. Marxism succeeded in retaining the loyalty of a remarkably small number (perhaps none at all). In the post-communist world, there is, of course, the frequently noted return of the ex-Communists. But these merely stand for the maintenance of their own position, less radical change, keeping the welfare provisions, and so on – they are basically conservatives. The really interesting thing about them is that none of them have returned under the “banner of Marxism”. In those societies that were under Marxist domination for forty to seventy years, the Bolsheviks utterly failed to emulate the Jesuits and other representatives of the Counter-Reformation in leaving deep marks in the souls and the societies of their adherents. This is also an interesting and important fact that is worth trying to understand.

Then there are some facts that are just slightly less surprising, though they were not properly anticipated: the strength of nationalism in this century (which is no longer surprising). But of course, for a long time the decline of nationalism was confidently predicted.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

What are the proper limits of religious freedom? Marianne Thieme, leader of the Party for the Animals in the Netherlands, offers this answer: “Religious freedom stops where human or animal suffering begins.”

The Party for the Animals, the only animal-rights party to be represented in a national parliament, has proposed a law requiring that all animals be stunned before slaughter. The proposal has united Islamic and Jewish leaders in defense of what they see as a threat to their religious freedom, because their religious doctrines prohibit eating meat from animals that are not conscious when killed.

The Dutch parliament has given the leaders a year to prove that their religions’ prescribed methods of slaughter cause no more pain than slaughter with prior stunning. If they cannot do so, the requirement to stun before slaughtering will be implemented.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Catholic bishops have claimed that President Barack Obama is violating their religious freedom by requiring all big employers, including Catholic hospitals and universities, to offer their employees health insurance that covers contraception. And, in Israel, the ultra-orthodox, who interpret Jewish law as prohibiting men from touching women to whom they are not related or married, want separate seating for men and women on buses, and to halt the government’s plan to end exemption from military service for full-time religious students (63,000 in 2010).

More here.

Perry Anderson in the London Review of Books:

By 1945, the era of Gandhi was over, and that of Nehru had begun. It is conventional to dwell on the contrasts between the two, but the bearing of these on the outcome of the struggle for independence has remained by and large in the shadows. Nor are the contrasts themselves always well captured. Nehru was a generation younger; of handsome appearance; came from a much higher social class; had an elite education in the West; lacked religious beliefs; enjoyed many an affair. So much is well known. Politically more relevant was the peculiar nature of his relationship to Gandhi. Inducted into the national movement by his wealthy father, a pillar of Congress since the 1890s, he fell under Gandhi’s spell in his late twenties, at a time when he had few political ideas of his own. A decade later, when he had acquired notions of independence and socialism Gandhi did not share, and was nearly forty, he was still writing to him: ‘Am I not your child in politics, though perhaps a truant and errant child?’ The note of infantilism was not misplaced; the truancy, in practice, little more than coquetry. Like so many others, dismayed by Gandhi’s scuttling of Non-Cooperation in 1922, in despair at his fast against the introduction of Untouchable electorates in 1932, baffled by his reasons for suspending civil disobedience in 1934, he nevertheless each time abased himself before his patron’s judgment.

More here.

Nathaniel Stein in The New Yorker:

Friend—When I decided to run for president, I had significantly fewer gray hairs than I do today. Michelle says I’ve earned them, which is the nicest possible way to say I’m getting older. In fact, I’m turning 51 in a couple weeks, and to celebrate I’m heading home to Chicago … Donate $3 or whatever you can to support the campaign, and you’ll be automatically entered to join me… Barack”
—Obama fundraising e-mail

Friend—Isn’t it amazing how time flies? It seems like just yesterday I was a spry senator of forty-five. Today, I experience joint and back pain, and my cholesterol is frankly not where it should be. Michelle’s no help: she tells me this is the kind of thing I can expect “now that I’m in my fifties.” Will you help, by donating $3 or more today? —Barack

Friend—Being President is a pretty tough job. And I’ll be honest: it isn’t made any easier by the fact that I have a hernia. I know there’s one thing that will make me feel better, though. That’s right. Just $3—or more. —Barack

Friend—There are two things that I can use the phrase “more than ever” about: 1) how often I now wake up in middle of the night to use the restroom, and 2) how much I need your help in the campaign. Donate today—and thank you. —Barack

Friend—This morning, I had a routine EKG. But I don’t want just anyone interpreting the results. That’s not the way I ran my campaign, and it’s not the way I conduct my Administration, or my personal life. If you’re a doctor: please, donate $3 or more for a chance to be automatically entered to take a look at my EKG. I know you’ll come through for me. —Barack

More here. [Thanks to Batool Raza.]

From The Telegraph:

From Nature:

Two neuroscientists have created a prosthesis that can partially restore the sight to blind mice. The device could eventually be developed for use in humans. More than 20 million people worldwide become blind owing to the degeneration of their retina, the thin tissue at the back of the eye that turns light into a neural signal. Only one prosthesis has been approved for treatment of the condition — it consists of an array of surgically implanted electrodes that directly stimulate the optic nerve and allow patients to discern edges and letters. Patients cannot, however, recognize faces or perform many everyday tasks.

Sheila Nirenberg, a physiologist at the Weill Medical College at Cornell University in New York thinks that the problem is at least partially down to coding. Even though the retina is as thin as tissue paper, it contains several layers of nerves that seem to encode light into neural signals. “The thing is, nobody knew the code,” she says. Without it, Nirenberg believes that visual prostheses will never be able to create images that the brain can easily recognize. Now, she and her student, Chethan Pandarinath, have come up with a code and developed a device that uses it to restore some sight in blind mice. The duo began by injecting nerve cells in the retinas of their mice with a genetically engineered virus. The virus had been designed to insert a gene that causes the cells to produce a light-sensitive protein normally found in algae. When a beam of light was then shown into the eye, the protein triggered the nerve cells to send a signal to the brain, performing a similar function to healthy rod and cone cells.

More here.

In Third Person

a haze a heron in a tide-pool
and for a long time out of time
two children push a giant yellow globe

coyotes come and every June the same
the unrequited loneliness the same
out-of-tune expressions herons dance
the same blue wings
it all made sense
the way he asked me for the Book of Job
to make some pattern make some rhyme
out of his life before he died
the way he scrutinized his patterned robe

when he did die it's simply that he sensed
there was no more to do no other dance
to be composed no present tense

by Maria Gapotchenko
from Clarion 15, 2012