From Smithsonian:

In 1966, I stood outside my elementary school in Maryland, waving a sign for Spiro Agnew. He was running for governor against a segregationist who campaigned on the slogan, “Your Home Is Your Castle—Protect It.” My parents, like many Democrats, crossed party lines that year to help elect Agnew. Two years later, he became Richard Nixon’s surprise choice as running mate, prompting pundits to wonder, “Spiro who?” At 10, I was proud to know the answer. Agnew isn’t otherwise a source of much pride. He became “Nixon’s Nixon,” an acid-tongued hatchet man who resigned a year before his boss, for taking bribes. But “Spiro who?” turned me into an early and enduring student of vice-presidential trivia. Which led me, a few months ago, to Huntington, Indiana, an industrial town that was never much and is even less today. It’s also the boyhood home of our 44th vice president.

His elementary school is unmarked, a plain brick building that’s now a senior citizens center. But across the street stands an imposing church that has been rechristened the “Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center.” Inside the former chapel, you can see “Danny” Quayle’s report card (A’s and B’s), his toy truck and exhibits on his checkered tenure as vice president. He “accomplished more than most realize,” a caption states, noting Quayle’s visits to 47 countries and his chairmanship of the Council on Competitiveness. But the learning center isn’t a shrine to Quayle—or a joke on its namesake, who famously misspelled “potato.” It is, instead, a nonpartisan collection of stories and artifacts relating to all 47 vice presidents: the only museum in the land devoted to the nation’s second-highest office. This neglect might seem surprising, until you tour the museum and learn just how ignored and reviled the vice presidency has been for most of its history. John Nance Garner, for one, said the job wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.

More here.

Siren Song

This
is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is
irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in
squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody
knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can't remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me

out of this bird suit?

I don'y enjoy it here
squatting on this
island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery
maniacs,
I don't enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I
will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This
song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are
unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

by Margaret Atwood

Over at The Wilson Quarterly, Ethan Zuckerman examines the paradox of our increasing insularity in the era of globalization:

As we start to understand how people actually use the Internet, the cyberutopian hopes of a borderless, postnational planet can look as naive as most past predictions that new technologies would transform societies. In 1912, radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi declared, “The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.” Two years later a ridiculous war began, ultimately killing nine million Europeans.

While it’s easy to be dismissive of today’s Marconis—the pundits, experts, and enthusiasts who saw a rise in Internet connection leading to a rise in international understanding—that’s too simple and too cynical a response. Increased digital connection does not automatically lead to increased understanding. At the same time, there’s never been a tool as powerful as the Internet for building new ties (and maintaining existing ones) across distant borders.

The challenge for anyone who wants to decipher the mysteries of a connected age is to understand how the Internet does, and does not, connect us. Only then can we find ways to make online connection more common and more powerful.

Read the rest at here.

From The Browser:

It’s widely presumed that the English language will become entrenched as the world’s lingua franca and that minority languages will continue to die out. But you don’t really buy into this theory and have argued that new technology might allow minority languages to thrive. I wonder if you could expand on this?

I try to look at things from a historical perspective rather than just what’s happening in this decade or century. I look at the progress of languages over centuries and millennia – my book Empires of the Word starts in 3000 BC and ends in modern times. Each of us only lives two or three generations, so it’s quite difficult for us to get that perspective without really striving for it. When it comes to languages, we tend to be familiar only with the one that we use on a daily basis. When we are also conscious that in the last century or two that language has spread out all over the world, it gives us a very foreshortened perspective. What I’m trying to do is to correct that.

There have been many lingua francas and English, although it is the most widespread that we know of, is a relative latecomer. We still can’t tell the full form of its life history yet because if you look at a really established lingua franca like Latin it lasted for one and a half millennia. Just when it was thought that it was on its way out with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, it got a new lease of life through its association with the Catholic church. So these things are difficult to predict.

More here.

Liat Clark in Wired:

After repeatedly subjecting fruit flies to a stimulus designed to teach numerical skills, the evolutionary geneticists finally hit on a generation of flies that could count — it took 40 tries before the species' evolution occurred. The findings, announced at the First Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Canada, could lead to a better understanding of how we process numbers and the genetics behind dyscalculia — a learning disability that affects a person's ability to count and do basic arithmetic.

“The obvious next step is to see how [the flies'] neuro-architecture has changed,” said geneticist Tristan Long, of Canada's Wilfrid Laurier University, who admits far more research is needed to delve into what the results actually mean. Primarily, this will involve comparing the genetic make-up of an evolved fruit fly with that of a standard test fly to pinpoint the mutation.

The research team, made up of geneticists from Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada and the University of California, repeatedly subjected test flies to a 20-minute mathematics training session. The flies were exposed to two, three or four flashes of light, with two or four flashes coinciding with a shake of the container the flies were kept in. Following a pause, the flies were again subjected to the flashing light, however none prepared themselves for a repeat of the shake since they could not discern a difference between two, three or four flashes. That is, until the key 40th generation of descendants were put to the test.

More here.

From the Moscow Times:

I never thought I'd write a column about the word агент (agent). What's there to write?

Both агент and agent come originally from the Latin, although агент probably entered Russian later than it entered English. Both агент and agent share pretty much the same range of meanings. Агент might be a representative of an organization or person who is empowered to act for them, like страховой агент (insurance agent) or литературный агент (literary agent). Or агент might be a substance that causes some kind of change, like активный агент (active agent) in a chemical process. And then агент might be a spy, like двойной агент (double agent). Interestingly, a dictionary from the 1930s lists the last meaning as разговорное, устаревшее (colloquial, archaic). My, how things change.

But still — so far, so good. For once, the two languages are in perfect harmony.

And then in its recent legislative bacchanalia, the Russian parliament proposed that the term иностранный агент (foreign agent) be used to identify any nongovernmental organization in Russia that receives foreign funding, insisting that this is a direct translation of the U.S. designation “foreign agent.”

And with that, harmony went out the window.

More here.

The Rolling Stones, it might be argued, were not even as radical as the Beatles. But their music was defiantly dirty, and it got better and better. The syncopated chops that kicked “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” into being were the prelude to a domination of the rock scene that perfectly mirrored the febrile times. The band members themselves still flirted with the accoutrements of gracious living, twisting its elegant ways to suit their own purposes. In 1969, guitarist Keith Richards and his then partner, the actress Anita Pallenberg, moved into a Queen Anne mansion in Chelsea bought from a Conservative undersecretary of state. “The study where government officials had debated the Suez crisis in 1956 was now occupied by a large hookah,” writes Sandford with no little relish. It wasn’t the Stones selling out to the establishment, so much as vice versa.

more from Peter Aspden at the FT here.

Darwin had anticipated the charge of plagiarism. Buried somewhere in his notes was a list of predecessors he had planned to acknowledge. With so many enemies lining up against him — venting the expected “disgust and outrage” at his theory of natural selection — he could ill afford to offend his allies. So in the first American edition of “Origin,” he appended a “Historical Sketch” crediting 18 others, including Powell. In subsequent editions, the roll expanded. Stott usefully includes as an appendix the version Darwin added to the fourth British edition, in 1866. It cites over 30 names, many now obscure. Stott, in her absorbing account, shows that Darwin, who had sat on his discoveries for 20 years, had good reason to worry about his book’s reception. Among many other cautionary tales, there was one very close to home: that of the doctor and poet Erasmus Darwin, his talented and outspoken grandfather.

more from Hugh Raffles at the NY Times here.

The year 1909 would be an important and traumatic one for Joyce, challenging him once again as a writer, and enticing him back to the novel over which he had laboured so long and which he had come to neglect. But it took a moment of mutual discovery to galvanize him. In February, Ettore Schmitz, his student, mentioned to him shyly that he too was a writer and had published two novels under the pseudonym “Italo Svevo.” These were “Una Vita” and “Senilità,” published ten years earlier. Joyce took them to read and was deeply impressed, telling him, “Do you know that you are a neglected writer? There are passages in ‘Senilità’ that even Anatole France could not have improved.” His words moved Schmitz almost to tears. From then on he talked to Joyce openly about his frustrated ambitions. Joyce’s enthusiasm had reignited his will to write, and he would soon embark on the novel that would bring him literary recognition. His brother, said Stanislaus, was more than a teacher to Schmitz, he was “an influence.”

more of the excerpt from Gordon Bowker’s new biography on Joyce at the LA Times here.

Michael Shapiro in Columbia Journalism Review:

Of the many and conflicting stories about how The Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic of virtually all the nation’s established news organizations and amass content so voluminous that a visit to the website feels like a trip to a mall where the exits are impossible to locate—the earliest and arguably most telling begins with a lunch in March 2003 at which the idea of an online newspaper filled with celebrity bloggers and virally disseminated aggregated content did not come up.

The invitation for the lunch came from Kenneth Lerer. He was 51 and casting about for something new, having recently left his position as executive vice president for communications at AOL. Lerer was a private man who was nonetheless comfortable in the presence of powerful people with whom he had earned a reputation for honing images in disrepair, most famously for the disgraced and subsequently rehabilitated junk bond trader Michael Milken. Lerer had made a good deal of money and a good many friends after having first made a name for himself in the quixotic 1974 New York senate campaign of Ramsey Clark (for which he was hired by the chairman of this magazine, Victor Navasky, who later recruited him for CJR’s Board of Overseers, which has no say in content). Lerer was splitting his time between New York and skiing at his vacation home in Utah when he came across a new book by a young sociologist, Duncan Watts. The book was called Six Degrees. Lerer was so taken by it that he took Watts to lunch.

He brought the book with him and Watts would recall that the copy was dog-eared, the flatteringly telltale sign of a purposeful read. Lerer had a plan and he wanted Watts to help him. He had set himself an ambitious target. He wanted to take on the National Rifle Association.

He told Watts: “I know the answer to this is somewhere in these pages.”

A short story by Andrey Platonov, in Caravan:

THERE WAS ONCE AN OLD PEASANT who lived in a village with his wife and their two children. He came to the end of his life and he died. Then it was his old woman’s turn to get ready to die—her time had come too. She called the children to her, her son and her daughter. The daughter was the elder, the son the younger.

She said to her son, “Obey your sister in everything, as you have obeyed me. Now she will be a mother to you.”

The mother gave a last sigh—she was sorry to be parting from her children forever—and then died.

After the death of their parents, the children lived as their mother had told them to live. The brother obeyed his sister, and the sister took care of her brother and loved him.

And so they lived on without their parents, perhaps many years, perhaps few. One day the sister said to her brother, “It’s hard for me to keep house on my own, and it’s time you were married. Marry—then there’ll be a mistress to look after the home.”

But the brother did not want to marry. “The home has a mistress already,” he said. “Why do we need a second mistress?”

“I’ll help her,” said his sister. “With two of us the work will be easier.”

The brother didn’t want to marry, but he didn’t dare disobey his elder sister. He respected her as if she were his mother.

The brother married and began to live happily with his wife. As for his sister, he loved and respected her just as before, obeying her in everything.

At first his wife seemed not to mind her sister-in-law. And the sister-in-law, for her part, did all she could to be obliging.

But soon the wife began to feel upset.

George Watson in The American Scholar:

By his last years Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was often seen as a skeptic. Michel Foucault began Les mots et les choses (1966, published in English as The Order of Things) by acclaiming him for having defied certainty and demolished every familiar landmark of knowledge, since everything “bears the stamp of our age and our geography.” Foucault cited something Borges claimed to have found once in an old Chinese encyclopedia, a hilarious taxonomy of animals using the following categories: those belonging to the emperor, those that are embalmed, those that are tame, sucking pigs, sirens, stray dogs, et cetera. That was impressively credulous of Foucault, since Borges (as I once heard him say) often made up his quotations: “One is allowed to change the past.” Among the literal minded, however, his reward was to be thought to have sounded the death knell of all human hopes to know the world or to understand our place in it.

Nearly 30 years ago I wrote down my recollections of Borges’s visits to Cambridge, mainly in 1984, which was coincidentally the year Foucault died. Perhaps I should have published them sooner, since they suggest an unquenchable gaiety of mind: Foucault’s mistake would undoubtedly have amused him. He might even have made a story of it. Though blind, Borges was not sad. His name and fame survive as the author of several dozen stories; he never wrote a novel, and cheerfully called himself lazy.

He was a traditionalist—the last Victorian—mindful, perhaps, that when Queen Victoria died he was already in his second year of life. In a 1979 BBC radio conversation with Graham Greene, John Updike, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Carlos Fuentes celebrating Borges’s 80th birthday, he cheerfully conceded it. “What is the matter with being an old-fashioned storyteller?” he asked, and he politely disdained an accolade from Robbe-Grillet calling him the enemy of realism and father of the nouveau roman. Realism, after all, never confined itself to reality: it embraces coincidence, for example, and foreboding. “You don’t think of life as being like a realistic novel, do you?” he asked. All lives are rich in fantasy, and to depict fantasy is to depict life.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Utopian:

Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings. In this situation it is mankind’s dream that we should do away with both work and war. The only drawback is that the Americans will say that if we do so, we shall arm our enemies. And in fact, there is a kind of dominant stratum in the East compared to which John Foster Dulles is an amiable innocent.

Adorno: We ought to include a section on the objection: what will people do with all their free time?

Horkheimer: In actual fact their free time does them no good because the way they have to do their work does not involve engaging with objects. This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.

Adorno: Because people have to work so hard, there is a sense in which they spend their spare time obsessively repeating the rituals of the efforts that have been demanded of them. We must not be absolutely opposed to work.

Horkheimer: We ought to construct a kind of programme for a new form of practice. In the East people degenerate into beasts of burden. Coolies probably had to do less work than today’s workers in six or seven hours.

Adorno: ‘No herdsman and one herd.’ A kind of false classless society. Society finds itself on the way to what looks like the perfect classless society but is in reality the very opposite.

Dick Ahlstrom in the Irish Times:

The world may soon see the first examples of synthetic life, artificial organisms constructed in a laboratory. These will be unique organisms, not close copies of existing cells, said their creator Dr Craig Venter…

He and his laboratory in California were well on the way towards assembling a unique living organism, one unknown to exist anywhere else on the planet.

Two years ago he reported having built a living organism. “This was a proof of concept,” Dr Venter said. “It wasn’t identical to any existing cell but we wanted it to live.” For that reason it was modelled on another cell.

Things had progressed significantly however. His team are currently designing three different organisms, adding blocks of DNA that have been seen to be essential for sustaining life, he said. They do not know what design will produce a living organism so they decided to produce several.

Once designed these would then be built using DNA sequencing machines and the genetic package would then be popped into a hollowed out cell.

The work was made particularly difficult because geneticists still do not know the function of many of the genes seen in living organisms. “We don’t know all the first principles,” he said.

He had no doubt however that they would achive their goal. “I am hoping it will happen this year.”

More here.

Evan Selinger and Thomas Seager in Slate:

From NYMag:

From The New Yorker:

In 2004, Carolina Izquierdo, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, spent several months with the Matsigenka, a tribe of about twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon. The Matsigenka hunt for monkeys and parrots, grow yucca and bananas, and build houses that they roof with the leaves of a particular kind of palm tree, known as a kapashi. At one point, Izquierdo decided to accompany a local family on a leaf-gathering expedition down the Urubamba River. A member of another family, Yanira, asked if she could come along. Izquierdo and the others spent five days on the river. Although Yanira had no clear role in the group, she quickly found ways to make herself useful. Twice a day, she swept the sand off the sleeping mats, and she helped stack the kapashi leaves for transport back to the village. In the evening, she fished for crustaceans, which she cleaned, boiled, and served to the others. Calm and self-possessed, Yanira “asked for nothing,” Izquierdo later recalled. The girl’s behavior made a strong impression on the anthropologist because at the time of the trip Yanira was just six years old. While Izquierdo was doing field work among the Matsigenka, she was also involved in an anthropological study closer to home. A colleague of hers, Elinor Ochs, had recruited thirty-two middle-class families for a study of life in twenty-first-century Los Angeles. Ochs had arranged to have the families filmed as they ate, fought, made up, and did the dishes.

Izquierdo and Ochs shared an interest in many ethnographic issues, including child rearing. How did parents in different cultures train young people to assume adult responsibilities? In the case of the Angelenos, they mostly didn’t. In the L.A. families observed, no child routinely performed household chores without being instructed to. Often, the kids had to be begged to attempt the simplest tasks; often, they still refused. In one fairly typical encounter, a father asked his eight-year-old son five times to please go take a bath or a shower. After the fifth plea went unheeded, the father picked the boy up and carried him into the bathroom. A few minutes later, the kid, still unwashed, wandered into another room to play a video game. In another representative encounter, an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, “How am I supposed to eat?” Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her. In a third episode captured on tape, a boy named Ben was supposed to leave the house with his parents. But he couldn’t get his feet into his sneakers, because the laces were tied. He handed one of the shoes to his father: “Untie it!” His father suggested that he ask nicely. “Can you untie it?” Ben replied. After more back-and-forth, his father untied Ben’s sneakers. Ben put them on, then asked his father to retie them. “You tie your shoes and let’s go,’’ his father finally exploded. Ben was unfazed. “I’m just asking,’’ he said.

More here.

From Nature:

Almost 30 million people live with Alzheimer’s disease worldwide, a staggering health-care burden that is expected to quadruple by 2050. Yet doctors can offer no effective treatment, and scientists have not been able definitively to pin down the underlying mechanism of the disease. Research published this week offers some hope on both counts, by showing that a lucky few people carry a genetic mutation that naturally prevents them from developing the condition¹. The discovery not only confirms the principal suspect that is responsible for Alzheimer’s, it also suggests that the disease could be an extreme form of the cognitive decline seen in many older people. The mutation — the first ever found to protect against the disease — lies in a gene that produces amyloid-β precursor protein (APP), which has an unknown role in the brain and has long been suspected to be at the heart of Alzheimer’s.

APP was discovered 25 years ago in patients with rare, inherited forms of Alzheimer’s that strike in middle age^2–5. In the brain, APP is broken down into a smaller molecule called amyloid-β. Visible clumps, or plaques, of amyloid-β found in the autopsied brains of patients are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s, but scientists have long debated whether the plaques are a cause of the neuro­degenerative condition or a consequence of other biochemical changes associated with the disease. The latest finding supports other genetics studies blaming amyloid-β, and it makes the protein “the prime therapeutic target”, says Rudolph Tanzi, a neurologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a member of one of the four teams that discovered APP’s role in the 1980s.

More here.