This is not a real comment policy but one written up for amusement by Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance in a moment of frustration with the rude behavior of a few commenters there. It does express the point of view of blog hosts rather well at times, though:

The best way to think about blog commenting has been formulated by Eugene Volokh: comment threads as cocktail parties. A good comment section is a cacophony of views, a bringing-together of different voices in the best possible way. But it is not a random collection of passers-by gathered in a public space to shout at each other. It’s a hosted space, with the bloggers as proprietors. This implies a minor form of social contract: the bloggers provide a common space for commenters to meet and converse, while commenters are expected to contribute positively and politely to the experience.

One goal of a good cocktail party is that you meet people you haven’t met before, and perhaps share an interesting conversation. But the guest list, and some broad expectations for personal behavior, are set the by organizers. Party crashers who are obnoxious, or disruptive, or even just deadly boring, may be asked to leave the party. Nobody has a right to attend whatever parties they like.

Consider, in terms of this analogy, the temptation to complain out loud about what the bloggers are choosing to blog about. That would be like showing up at a party, noticing that the only appetizers being passed around are spring rolls and bacon-wrapped dates, and proceeding to raise a ruckus about the absence of cocktail weenies.

No, come to think of it, it’s not like that. It’s like showing up at a party, noticing that spring rolls and bacon-wrapped dates are being passed around in addition to your beloved cocktail weenies, and loudly proclaiming how offended you are at the presence of such outré finger food at this event. You shouldn’t complain about the host’s taste in appetizers; if there’s nothing there you like, go to another party. And if there is, ignore the offerings you don’t like, and enjoy yourself some weenies. Delicious, delicious weenies.

More here. [See the post before this one for an example of demanding “cocktail weenies”.]

Here is a parody of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tatoo that she wrote in The New Yorker a couple of years ago:

The Girl Who Fixed The Umlaut

Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what. Etc.

“Please,” he said. “I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.”

He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.

“I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”

But where in Sweden were they? There was no way to know, especially if you’d never been to Sweden. A few chapters ago, for example, an unscrupulous agent from Swedish Intelligence had tailed Blomkvist by taking Stora Essingen and Gröndal into Södermalm, and then driving down Hornsgatan and across Bellmansgatan via Brännkyrkagatan, with a final left onto Tavastgatan. Who cared, but there it was, in black-and-white, taking up space. And now Blomkvist was standing in her doorway.

More here.

Alan Brody in Philosophy Now:

Thad held up his right hand and asked “See this?” He showed me gnarled and maimed fingers. Thad told me that while he was flying his plane into Turkey, the Turkish air force forced him to land, having gotten wind that he was running drugs. They jailed him, and in an attempt to extract a confession, his jailers broke his fingers. He didn’t confess.

Thad bribed his way out of jail. Eventually he came to the drug treatment center where I was working, to get help with his drinking problem. (Thad and other patient names are pseudonyms.) After discussing addiction as involving compulsive behavior, we concluded that Thad was suffering from alcoholism. Knowing he would be better off not drinking, Thad committed himself to abstinence. He told me that he didn’t need to go to Alcoholics Anonymous for support, explaining that if he could resist caving in from torture he could certainly resist whatever discomfort he would experience from not drinking. Thad thought that being able to follow through with his resolve was simply a matter of having the ability to resist succumbing to how bad it would feel to not drink.

When Thad came in for his next appointment he looked pained, shocked and confused. He told me that in spite of his decision to remain abstinent, he drank. It happened at the airport while he was waiting for his friend to arrive. Thad couldn’t understand how he would do such a thing, given his ability to handle pain when sticking to a resolution. I explained how a compulsive condition such as alcoholism can change how one evaluates what to do, so that someone who previously decided not to drink can come to temporarily think it’s okay to do so. After I explained how this kind of change of thought could produce a motive for drinking, Thad saw how his ability to endure suffering couldn’t be counted on to guarantee abstinence.

More here.

From Russ Rymer at National Geographic:

In an increasingly globalized, connected, homogenized age, languages spoken in remote places are no longer protected by national borders or natural boundaries from the languages that dominate world communication and commerce. The reach of Mandarin and English and Russian and Hindi and Spanish and Arabic extends seemingly to every hamlet, where they compete with Tuvan and Yanomami and Altaic in a house-to-house battle. Parents in tribal villages often encourage their children to move away from the insular language of their forebears and toward languages that will permit greater education and success.

Who can blame them? The arrival of television, with its glamorized global materialism, its luxury-consumption proselytizing, is even more irresistible. Prosperity, it seems, speaks English. One linguist, attempting to define what a language is, famously (and humorously) said that a language is a dialect with an army. He failed to note that some armies are better equipped than others. Today any language with a television station and a currency is in a position to obliterate those without, and so residents of Tuva must speak Russian and Chinese if they hope to engage with the surrounding world. The incursion of dominant Russian into Tuva is evident in the speaking competencies of the generation of Tuvans who grew up in the mid-20th century, when it was the fashion to speak, read, and write in Russian and not their native tongue.

Documenta’s American-born artistic director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, doesn’t even use the word “artist,” preferring “participant” instead. She says, “I am not sure that the field of art will continue to exist in the 21st century” — not meaning art itself, mind you, but our tidy roping-off of the field. To Joseph Beuys’s famous dictum “Everyone is an artist,” Christov-Bakargiev adds, “So is any thing.” The best parts of Documenta 13 bring us into close contact with this illusive entity of Post Art—things that aren’t artworks so much as they are about the drive to make things that, like art, embed imagination in material and grasp that creativity is a cosmic force. It’s an idea I love. (As I’ve written before, everything that’s made, if you look at it in certain ways, already is or can be art.) Things that couldn’t be fitted into old categories embody powerfully creative forms, capable of carrying meaning and making change. Post Art doesn’t see art as medicine, relief, or religion; Post Art doesn’t even see art as separate from living. A chemist or a general may be making Post Art every day at the office. One of the exhibitors at Documenta is the civil engineer Konrad Zuse, creator in the thirties of an early electromagnetic computer.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Big Baby behavior has coalesced with the new rhetorical style of the right — whining, entitlement, and victimization, a bad-faith aping of how the old regime understood the demands of anti-racism and the women’s movement — to give a mashed-carrots color to the politics of our era. Tantrums are in fashion. Are you ever at a loss now, flipping through the channels, to know what policies a TV commentator will advocate if he is boyish but old, thin-haired but incapable of growing a mustache, soft, truculent, khakied and floppy-collared, wide-eyed on a sugar rush and shouting for more candy? (In his case, the Pez will be prescription drugs and alcohol: there is a curious tie between Big Babies and abuse of painkillers.) Big Baby is easier to picture sitting than standing. Man-boobs shape his polo. Big Baby has wee little feet and appears on the cover of Cigar Aficionado. Big Baby issues insults, but only at a safe distance. You sense that, up close, he might smell like milk.

more from the Editors at n+1 here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

It may be that an older form of wisdom speaks to us through proverbs, the sort of wisdom that reeks of grandparents and people even older, that announces 'you are what you eat' as an existential truism, for example. But this sort of wisdom is for the most part drowned out by chatter, about good carbs as opposed to bad ones, about the exalted ideal ratio between carbs, proteins, and fats, about whether food should be free of some negative element or other, whether it should be raw or cooked, whether it is fitting that animals be slaughtered to produce it. And all of this chatter takes place in the mode of facticity: it is put forth as if it were entirely science, and had nothing to do with culture. The striving upper middle class thus avoids McDonald's not because it is where poor fat people go, but rather because the food served there is 'unhealthy', a term that can only conceal its normativity under a thick coat of false consciousness. And thus urban subcultures emerge that condemn gluten, or that advocate a diet based principally upon meat à la Tartare, as if there were no logic of social distinction at work, as if it were simply the case that their way of eating is the correct way, the natural way, the way cavemen ate, the way we ate before we were corrupted by the Agricultural Revolution, by modernity, by supermarkets, or some other hypothetical loss of innocence.

There is no more awareness in either the bourgeois or the Bohemian expressions of this chatter than there is in traditional folk cultures, with their highly prescriptive conceptions of how one ought to eat, that 'the natural' is a contested category, that in nutritional matters as in everything else, grand gestures and elaborate programs that spell out how to live in accordance with nature are at least as artificial as everything else we come up with. Whole Foods occupies a different cultural space than the McDonald's a few blocks away; both are however equidistant from Nature.

More here.

Hamilton Nolan at Gawker:

Fabulously wealthy CEO whisperer and newspaper columnist Thomas Friedman is little more than a human-shaped random word generator programmed with the “Computers and Internet” section of a fourth-grade vocabulary textbook and fitted with a mustache. He writes one single column, sometimes using different proper nouns or cycling through slightly new platitudes, in order to allow a new headline to be written. The Only Thomas Friedman Column That Exists—which ran right on schedule yesterday—opens like this:

TRAVELING in Europe last week, it seemed as if every other conversation ended with some form of this question: Why does it feel like so few leaders are capable of inspiring their people to meet the challenges of our day?

Whether traveling in Europe or Israel or Pakistan or The Arab Street, Thomas Friedman has astoundingly boring conversations with people who speak in vague, nonsensical phrases. He continues:

There are many explanations for this global leadership deficit, but I'd focus on two: one generational, one technological.

“There are many explanations for [broad phenomenon], but I'd focus on two: one [generational, cultural, or sociological], one [technological, biological, scientific, or economic].” Thomas Friedman knows how to write a freshman-year research paper at the last minute.

More hilarity here.

10. Keep Your Mind From Wandering

Keep your mind from its wandering
and regain first oneness.
Is it possible?

Let your body become supple
as a newborn’s. Is it possible?

Cleanse your inner vision
till you see nothing but light.
Is it possible?

Love people and lead
without forcing your will.
Can you?

Deal with vital matters
without interfering.
Can it be done?

Can you stand clear
of your own mind and so
make sense of things?

Give birth and nourish.
Have but not possess.
Act but don’t expect.
Lead but don’t control.
Accomplish this and even your virtue
will have virtue.

by Lao Tzu
from Adadptations of the Tao te Ching
by R. Bob

From The Paris Review:

Most mornings this past winter—the Boyagoda household already running late—I discovered my oldest daughter reading at the kitchen table: one boot on, gloves, hat, knapsack, and other boot nowhere to be found. So immersed was she, so indifferent to my pleas and threats, that finally I had to pull the book from her grasping hands just to make her finish dressing for the cold walk to school. This experience has made me more sympathetic to my mother, who once spanked me in a grocery store because I wouldn’t stop reading a book. It was by Enid Blyton, the British children’s writer who wrote some 400 nursery, fantasy, and adventure series titles that have sold more than six hundred million copies worldwide, mostly in Britain and the former colonies, including Sri Lanka—where as a girl my mother herself first encountered Blyton. I recently bought one of Blyton’s books for my own daughter. But before passing it on, I decided to reread it.

The book seemed innocuous enough. As with all of Blyton’s adventure stories, it was about boys and girls drawn into mysterious doings while on summer holiday. Bickering but loyal, they best adults who are either distracted and dismissive, or criminals capable of outsmarting everybody but the kids. Working this premise for decades and dozens of stories, Blyton enjoyed great success—at the time of her death, a book club devoted to her work had some 200,000 members in Britain alone. But because that success depended upon such patterned writing, she was also accused by librarians, teachers, and academics of relentlessly dulling the imaginations of her young readers, and of unjustly encouraging those who were reading her from abroad to make identifications that race, geography, history, and politics preemptively denied them. This certainly seems to have been the case for the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; in a 2006 interview with The Times, she explained that her development as a writer was stunted by her early reading: “When I started to write, I was writing Enid Blyton stories, even though I had never been to England. I didn’t think it was possible for people like me to be in books.” Similar notions affect the eponymous protagonists of Jamaica Kincaid’s novels Lucy and Annie John, who both declare they wish they were named Enid, after their favorite author. For both the young Adichie’s and Kincaid’s characters, mimicry and the desire for renaming aren’t simple expressions of literary admiration; they’re also rejections of the children’s African and Caribbean worlds, which have been diminished by their very immersion in Blyton’s books. The Blyton reading experience likewise impacts a colonial child’s maturation in Rohinton Mistry’s novel Family Matters, in which an intelligent Indian boy grows up reading her books and from this develops a dismissive attitude towards the foods and places and names that figure in his Bombay life. When self-loathing and alienation begin to build, he stops reading her; later, noticing her books on his shelves, he admits, “I can’t bear to even open them. I wonder what it was that so fascinated me. They seem like a waste of time now.”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

While current American Heart Association heart failure prevention guidelines warn against habitual coffee consumption, some studies propose a protective benefit, and still others find no association at all. Amidst this conflicting information, research from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center attempts to shift the conversation from a definitive yes or no, to a question of how much. “Our results did show a possible benefit, but like with so many other things we consume, it really depends on how much coffee you drink,” says lead author Elizabeth Mostofsky, MPH, ScD, a post-doctoral fellow in the cardiovascular epidemiological unit at BIDMC. “And compared with no consumption, the strongest protection we observed was at about four European, or two eight-ounce American, servings of coffee per day.” The study published June 26 online in the Journal Circulation: Heart Failure, found that these moderate coffee drinkers were at 11 percent lower risk of heart failure.

Data was analyzed from five previous studies – four conducted in Sweden, one in Finland – that examined the association between coffee consumption and heart failure. The self-reported data came from 140,220 participants and involved 6,522 heart failure events. In a summary of the published literature, the authors found a “statistically significant J-shaped relationship” between habitual coffee consumption and heart failure, where protective benefits begin to increase with consumption maxing out at two eight-ounce American servings a day. Protection slowly decreases the more coffee is consumed until at five cups, there is no benefit and at more than five cups a day, there may be potential for harm.

More here.

Walter Kirn in The New Republic:

The problem with these small-stakes lotteries that are currently clogging up our inboxes isn’t that they cheapen politics (it is what it is, especially lately) but that they reveal, in a depressing way that makes the whole enterprise seem almost futile, just how insanely expensive it has become. They offer as prizes places at power’s table that simply aren’t available to anyone but the odds-beating elect. They ritualize a sense of mass despair at ever achieving influence in normal ways, from getting somewhat but not filthy rich (R) to getting organized (D). Whatever they generate by way of cash or names and addresses for campaign mailing lists is canceled out by the cynicism they spread (or partake of and embody).

At a time when political idealism is hard to come by at any price, suckerball is an extremely dangerous game. It doesn’t help that the hucksters who promote it, the Ed McMahons of this particular sweepstakes, are tied to the candidates by blood and marriage. Tagg Romney sent me a note the other morning that opened with an encomium to fatherhood, the holiest of conservative institutions next to the debt and equity markets themselves (“Dad taught us a lot of lessons, including the importance of having fun as a family, but the most important lesson he imparted to us was the joy in helping others”), and closed with an invitation to wager five bucks on a chance to rub shoulders with his “Papa,” a famously tight-fisted, high-stakes gambler who’d never take such lousy odds himself, not even if tickets were a penny a pop. The deal stirred doubts in me about Tagg’s upbringing as well as contempt for his estimation of mine.

More here.

Mark Halpern in The New Atlantis:

In the October 1950 issue of the British quarterly Mind, Alan Turing published a 28-page paper titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” It was recognized almost instantly as a landmark. In 1956, less than six years after its publication in a small periodical read almost exclusively by academic philosophers, it was reprinted in The World of Mathematics, an anthology of writings on the classic problems and themes of mathematics and logic, most of them written by the greatest mathematicians and logicians of all time. (In an act that presaged much of the confusion that followed regarding what Turing really said, James Newman, editor of the anthology, silently re-titled the paper “Can a Machine Think?”) Since then, it has become one of the most reprinted, cited, quoted, misquoted, paraphrased, alluded to, and generally referenced philosophical papers ever published. It has influenced a wide range of intellectual disciplines—artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, epistemology, philosophy of mind—and helped shape public understanding, such as it is, of the limits and possibilities of non-human, man-made, artificial “intelligence.”

Turing’s paper claimed that suitably programmed digital computers would be generally accepted asthinking by around the year 2000, achieving that status by successfully responding to human questions in a human-like way. In preparing his readers to accept this idea, he explained what a digital computer is, presenting it as a special case of the “discrete state machine”; he offered a capsule explanation of what “programming” such a machine means; and he refuted—at least to his own satisfaction—nine arguments against his thesis that such a machine could be said to think. (All this groundwork was needed in 1950, when few people had even heard of computers.) But these sections of his paper are not what has made it so historically significant. The part that has seized our imagination, to the point where thousands who have never seen the paper nevertheless clearly remember it, is Turing’s proposed test for determining whether a computer is thinking—an experiment he calls the Imitation Game, but which is now known as the Turing Test.

More here.

Ashley J. Tellis at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

Irrespective of how the coming security transition in Afghanistan pans out, one country is on a surprising course to a major strategic defeat: Pakistan. Every foreseeable ending to the Afghan war today—continued conflict with the Taliban, restoration of Taliban control in the southern and eastern provinces, or a nationwide civil war—portends nothing but serious perils for Islamabad. But judging from Pakistan’s behavior, it appears as if this fact has eluded the generals in Rawalpindi.

Ever since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan has had one simple strategic goal on its western frontier: ensuring that Afghanistan remains a stable but subordinate entity deferential to Pakistan’s sensitivities on all matters of national security. Such deference was sought for a host of reasons. Islamabad wanted a guarantee that Kabul would not reignite the dispute over the countries’ common border (the Durand Line) and would not seek to mobilize the region’s Pashtun populations in support of either absorption into Afghanistan or the creation of a new nation. The Pakistani leadership also aimed to ensure that Afghanistan would not enter into close geopolitical affiliations with other, more powerful countries, such as the United States or India, in order to increase Kabul’s autonomy from Islamabad.

Amid the chaos that emerged after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan settled on supporting the Afghan Taliban as its strategic instrument for securing Kabul’s compliance with its objectives.

More here.

Dan Duray in the New York Observer:

When news broke on Monday that the Germany-based tech company Artnet would immediately cease to publish its 16-year-old online magazine—the longest-standing online resource for visual art reporting and criticism—people in the art world took notice.

“I’m shaken,” New York magazine’s art critic Jerry Saltz, whose writing has appeared on Artnet since 1998, told The Observer yesterday. He added that he was considering sending back his “low-three figure” freelance check for this month. “A really dynamic, really open, unpredictable, chaotic species just became extinct.”

News of the magazine’s closure nearly eclipsed the larger story from within the company that day, that longtime CEO Hans Neuendorf—who had helmed Artnet since 1995 and built its signature product, a powerful auction-price database that is used daily by dealers worldwide and revolutionized the art market by essentially providing a “Blue Book” value for works of art—would step down at the beginning of next month.

The changes at the company are part of a larger power struggle between the current management and a group of shareholders that has recently been accumulating stock at a rapid clip. Until the announcement that Mr. Neuendorf would step down, and cede the title of CEO to his eldest son Jacob Pabst, 39, the family faced a proxy battle at its July 11 shareholder meeting, and still may lose the company. The threat to the Neuendorfs (Mr. Pabst takes his mother’s name) comes from a group of investors led by Russian art-market analyst and former investment banker Sergey Skaterschikov, founder of the art-market analysis firm Skate’s. In the matter of Artnet, Mr. Skaterschikov represents Redline Capital Management, where he sits on the board. Redline is owned by the Russian billionaire Vladimir Evtushenkov and has recently purchased enough stock to own at least eight percent of the company.

More here.

E.O. Wilson at NYTimes' The Stone:

Within biology itself, the key to the mystery is the force that lifted pre-human social behavior to the human level. The leading candidate in my judgment is multilevel selection by which hereditary social behavior improves the competitive ability not of just individuals within groups but among groups as a whole. Its consequences can be plainly seen in the caste systems of ants, termites and other social insects. Between-group selection as a force operating in addition to between-individual selection simultaneously is not a new idea in biology. Charles Darwin correctly deduced its role, first in the insects and then in human beings — respectively in “On the Origin of Species” and “The Descent of Man.”

More here.

From The Independent:

The Covent Garden Hotel off Seven Dials, London's 17th-century junction, is a fitting location in which to meet the perpetually inquisitive Carlos Ruiz Zafón. “The stranger who finds himself in the Dials for the first time,” wrote Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, “at the entrance of seven obscure passages, uncertain which to take, will see enough around him to keep his curiosity awake for no inconsiderable time.” Ruiz Zafón is no stranger to the allure of eerie alleys. In his bestseller The Shadow of the Wind, the master of Catalan gothic seized upon the seductive, sinister nature of Barcelona's maze of avenues and plazas during the chaos of the Spanish Civil War and its Francoist hangover. The Prisoner of Heaven, the third in a projected quartet of tales set around the city's mythical literary haven of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, is now being published in English. We settle into the hushed cocoon of the hotel's drawing room, where Ruiz Zafón cuts a gently commanding figure. He's a great bear of a man with a neat goatee and a voice lazing half way between Beverly Hills and the Ramblas of Barcelona. He's the physical opposite of Fermin Romero de Torres, the beanpole hero of The Prisoner of Heaven. Fermin is the skinny bookseller at Sempere and Sons, purveyors of fine volumes; a romantic with a quickstep wit and tango libido. Held in Montjuic castle by Franco's goons, his period of captivity holds the key to earlier mysteries and future retribution.

“What I want is that these stories are arranged as a labyrinth with different points of entry,” says Ruiz Zafón.

More here. (Note: For Sara Preisler who introduced me to this magnificent story teller.)

Not Leaving the House
.
When Kai is born I quit going out  Hang around the kitchen – make cornbread Let nobody in. Mail is flat. Masa lies on her side, Kai sighs, Non washes and sweeps We sit and watch Masa nurse, and drink green tea.  Navajo turquoise beads over the bed A peacock tail feather at the head A badger pelt from Nagano-ken For a mattress; under the sheet; A pot of yogurt setting Under the blankets, at his feet.  Masa, Kai, And Non, our friend In the garden light reflected in Not leaving the house. From dawn till late at night making a new world of ourselves around this life.   by Gary Snyder 

From The New York Times:

The signal public health achievement of the 20th century was the increase of the human life span. Now, as that achievement helps raise the proportion of the aged around the world, what once seemed an unalloyed blessing is too often regarded as a burden — a financial burden, a health care burden, even a social burden.

“It’s nuts,” said Dr. Linda P. Fried, an epidemiologist and geriatrician who is dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “To assume defeat from what every one of us as individuals wants suggests we’re not asking the right questions.” Findings from the science of aging, Dr. Fried said, should “reframe our understanding of the benefits and costs of aging.” From her perch at Mailman, a position she has held for four years, Dr. Fried is pushing students, professors and a wider audience to ask the right questions and ponder the right policies for coping with an aging world population. Dr. Fried’s mandate is to lead a school that will give a new generation the tools to deal with global challenges to public health, including environmental degradation, climbing health care costs and the pressure of rapid urbanization. But she believes that research on aging and health changes “across the life course” are central to designing solutions to public health problems in the 21st century.

More here.