Linda Holmes on psychologist Robin Rosenberg's new book, from NPR's Weekend Edition:

Perhaps the problem, she suggests, doesn't lie in the gifted Bruce Wayne, but in the people who assume something has to be wrong with him in the first place. Perhaps we're just not accustomed to his kind of self-sacrifice. “People who are truly selfless,” she says, “who have given so much of themselves, are confusing to most of us. And I think some of us, in cynical moments, say, 'There must be something the matter with someone who would do that.'”

She argues that our confusion at why Bruce Wayne would throw himself in the path of all manner of catastrophes misses the point that there's something in it for him, too. “I think it misses that it's about getting a whole life,” she says. “He experienced something that is terrifying as a kid, but his decision to become Batman gave his life meaning and purpose. It found a silver lining in tragedy.” And perhaps there's something in it for the rest of us: “The idea of superheroes that we carry around in our heads may help us to actually do good in our own lives.”

More here.

Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian talks to Paul Zak, an expert on oxytocin, aka 'the moral molecule':

The American academic Paul Zak is renowned among his colleagues for two things that he does to people disconcertingly soon after meeting them. The first is hugging: seeing me approach across the library of his club, in midtown Manhattan, New York, he springs to his feet, ignoring my outstretched hand, and enfolds me in his arms. The second is sticking needles in their arms to draw blood.

…What drives Zak's hunger for human blood is his interest in the hormone oxytocin, about which he has become one of the world's most prominent experts. Long known as a female reproductive hormone – it plays a central role in childbirth and breastfeeding – oxytocin emerges from Zak's research as something much more all-embracing: the “moral molecule” behind all human virtue, trust, affection and love, “a social glue”, as he puts it, “that keeps society together”. The subtitle of his book, “the new science of what makes us good or evil”, gives a sense of the scale of his ambition, which involves nothing less than explaining whole swaths of philosophical and religious questions by reference to a single chemical in the bloodstream. Being treated decently, it turns out, causes people's oxytocin levels to go up, which in turn prompts them to behave more decently, while experimental subjects given an artificial oxytocin boost – by means of an inhaler – behave more generously and trustingly. And it's not solely because of its effects on humans that oxytocin is known as “the cuddle hormone”: for example, male meadow voles, normally roguishly promiscuous in their interactions with female meadow voles, become passionately monogamous when their oxytocin levels are raised in the lab.

Read more here.

Sonali K in Open:

Being a sex columnist is a double-edged sword; you never know which side it’s going to fall on any given day. Some days it turns a conversation into a beautiful relationship, other days it automatically casts you in the role of a one-night-stand. There have been as many bitter epiphanies as exciting moments on this journey.

Being a sex columnist means…

» Getting used to mild cardiac arrests on a daily basis. Like when my little brother grabs my laptop before I’ve cleared my browser history. It also means sackfuls of emails from lecherous men each time a new issue hits the stands. “No, I’m not available for sex at 2300 hours next Saturday, Sir. That’s right, not even if you pay me by the minute.”

» Directing porn films starring friends. How do you stop a hysterical friend from describing her lover’s erectile problem in graphic detail? And how do you look at said paramour in the eye when you meet him at a party two days later?

More here.

The battle between Delhiites and their monkeys has been going on for some time now. As frustrated Delhiites look for solutions, others are trying to understand the reasons behind the increase in monkeys and monkey chutzpah. Loss of habitat due to the vast expansion of the city is one. What now belongs to the streets once belonged to the monkeys. Others point out that the Hindu citizens of New Delhi have been feeding the monkeys on Tuesdays and Saturdays even as they complain about them on other days of the week. They do this to honor Hanuman, the monkey god and a symbol of strength and devotion. (Ironically, the langurs that have been employed to intimidate Delhi’s monkeys are called “Hanuman langurs.”) Authorities plead with Delhiites and threaten them with fines in the hope that this will curb the wanton public feeding of the monkeys. But it is to no avail. A few years back, food collection centers to regulate monkey feeding were set up near Hanuman temples. The collection boxes remained empty. It was not enough for Hanuman worshipers to know the monkeys would be fed in their honor. For it is the direct relationship between human and monkey that makes the act of worship meaningful. A spokesperson for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi told the Indo-Asian News Service that “religious sentiment” was the campaign’s biggest challenge.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

When we think of modern architecture, two modes come to mind. The first is the sleek, planar, glass-and-steel style established by Mies Van Der Rohe and his interpreters at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and elsewhere, epitomized by Mies’s Seagram Building (1958). The second is heavy, sculptural steel-reinforced concrete, with much of its artistry in the treatment of the cast concrete surface, most closely associated with the late work of Le Corbusier. The architectural term brutalism is said to have its origins in Corbusier’s use of the phrase béton brut, or “raw concrete,” the brut connoting not brutality or brutishness (although critics would play up that association) but the decision to leave the concrete’s surface rough and unfinished, and often impressed with the wood grain, joints, and other irregularities of the boards with which it was cast. The concept of “the New Brutalism” was brought into being by the critic Reyner Banham’s 1966 book of that name, which highlighted the work of postwar British architects Alison and Peter Smithson.

more from Thomas de Monchaux at n+1 here.

THEY ARE, in their very different ways, monuments of American civilization. The first is a building: a grand, beautiful Beaux-Arts structure of marble and stone occupying two blocks’ worth of Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The second is a delicate concoction of metal, plastic, and glass, just four and a half inches long, barely a third of an inch thick, and weighing five ounces. The first is the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the main branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). The second is an iPhone. Yet despite their obvious differences, for many people today they serve the same purpose: to read books. And in a development that even just thirty years ago would have seemed like the most absurd science fiction, there are now far more books available, far more quickly, on the iPhone than in the New York Public Library. It has been clear for some time now that this development would pose one of the greatest challenges that modern libraries—from institutions like the NYPL on down—have ever encountered. Put bluntly, one of their core functions now faces the prospect of obsolescence.

more from David A. Bell a TNR here.

Sam Harris at Big Think:

Question: What is religion?

Sam Harris: Well I think we are misled by this very term “religion”. We use that word “religion” as though it meant a distinct thing….as though it meant one phenomenon in human discourse. And there’s really a range of infatuations and practices that go by the name of religion. And therefore many points on this continuum don’t have much in common with others. So if you take a religion like “Jainism” – a religion in India – its core principle is non-violence. Now there is where Gandhi got his conception of non-violence. And the Jains are vegetarian. They have no doctrine of holy war. In fact, they don’t even have a doctrine – a proper doctrine of self-defense. I mean they’re pacifists. They don’t want to hurt a fly. And then on the other end of the continuum, you have something like Islam where it has explicitly a doctrine of holy war, and a notion of….Combat and death, in certain contexts, is actually the highest obligation a religious person can fulfill. So these are both religions. And so religion is a word like “sport”. You have a sport like badminton, and you have a sport like, you know, boxing. They’re not….they’re both sports that, you know, one is much more dangerous. So I’m concerned….I’m obviously more concerned about religions like Islam that….wherein you have this marriage of a variety of spiritual and ethical concerns; but also certain kinds of metaphysical certainties that inspire people to not only die, but to kill others in the process. And you don’t have that in other religions. So I think that we have to be clear about how this term religion can mislead us.

More here.

Jessica Valenti in The Nation:

Believe it or not, jokes about rape can be funny. (Yes, even feminists think so.) But Daniel Tosh’s hotly debated “joke” aimed at a female heckler was far from humorous—in fact, it was a perfect example of hownot to joke about rape.

Tosh has come under fire this week after a woman blogged about her experience seeing Tosh at a comedy club. According to her, Tosh was talking about how rape jokes were always “hilarious.” She called out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…”

Her post has since gone viral, prompting Tosh to write a tepid apology on his Twitter account:

all the out of context misquotes aside, i’d like to sincerely apologize j.mp/PJ8bNs

— daniel tosh (@danieltosh) July 10, 2012

In the meantime, hordes of fans and other comedians have come to his defense, some in the most violently misogynist way possible.

Elissa Bassist at The Daily Beast gets to the heart of why what Tosh said wasn’t funny—in fact, why it wasn’t a joke at all.

Tosh says he was joking. Comedians make rape jokes every day, so why is this one getting so much attention? Because Tosh was more than “just kidding.” He was angry. His “joke” was reactive to the so-called heckler who called him out in front of an audience. He used humor to cut her down, to remind her of own vulnerability, to emphasize who was in control. The “joke” ignited a backlash because it was not a joke; it was vastly different from other jokes about rape.

Jokes about rape that work—those that subvert rather than terrify—do exist. Sarah Silverman has one about being raped by a doctor: “…so bittersweet for a Jewish girl,” she says.

More here. See also this.

Terrance Tomkow in his own excellent blog:

You are travelling to a lawless third world country to do good works. You make preparation for your journey: You get the appropriate shots. You increase your health insurance in case the shots don't work. To protect the family you are leaving behind, you increase your life insurance and add a double indemnity clause.

Friends advise you to arm yourself, but you are not comfortable with guns. Instead, you visit the office of a private security agency (“The Agency”) to investigate the possibility of hiring bodyguards. The Agency's sales rep explains to you that because of the prevalence of violence and the total absence of law in this country the demand for private security there is high and so the service is very expensive. Looking at their rate sheet you realize it is far more costly than you can afford. As you rise to leave, the sympathetic rep offers you a brochure for one of The Agency's other services. They call it “Revenge Insurance”.

The brochure explains that Revenge Insurance does not provide any protection to its policy holders. However, in the event that a subscriber is the victim of wrongful injury while in-country, the agency will undertake to use its considerable resources to track down the wrongdoer. When they find him, The Agency's operatives will not try to have the wrongdoer pay the policy holder compensation or recover stolen goods. That is a separate service and, given the general poverty in the country, rarely worth the cost. But, if you have Revenge Insurance, what the agency will do to the bad guy who injured you is hurt him.

Question: Is it morally permissible for you to buy Revenge Insurance?

More here.

From The Economist:

Have Ms Williams and Mr Federer discovered a new method for older players to compete effectively? Both of them have unique skills that are unusually resistant to the ravages of ageing. Ms Williams’ greatest strength is her remarkably fast and accurate serve, which is easily the best in the history of women’s tennis. She hit 24 aces in her semi-final win against Victoria Azarenka, tying the single-match record on the women’s tour, and set a new record for total aces in a tournament with 102. Opponents can only take advantage of Ms Williams’ declining foot speed if they manage to return her serve. Moreover, the high number of points Ms Williams wins with a single shot prevents her from tiring too quickly.

Mr Federer’s corresponding advantage is his versatility. Whereas Mr Nadal often tries to wear down his rivals with his punishing strength and stamina, Mr Federer aims to disrupt the rhythm of fitter opponents by mixing up his shots. He has become better than ever at keeping his adversary guessing, even though he is much more likely to lose energy and focus over the course of a long match than he once was.

Yet it was no coincidence that Ms Williams and Mr Federer both ended their title droughts at the same tournament. Wimbledon is the only Grand Slam that is played on grass, where tennis balls bounce lower and retain more of their speed than they do on other surfaces. That leads to shorter rallies, reducing the physical demands on players, and favours the aggressive, risk-taking style of tennis that both Ms Williams and Mr Federer play.

More here.

In case you haven't read enough yet, more from Steven Weinberg in the NYTimes:

A case can be made for this sort of spending, even to those who don’t care about learning the laws of nature. Exploring the outer frontier of our knowledge of nature is in one respect like war: It pushes modern technology to its limits, often yielding new technology of great practical importance.

For instance, the new particle was produced at CERN in collisions of protons that occur at a rate of over a hundred million collisions per second. To analyze the flood of data produced by all these collisions requires real time computing of unmatched power. Also, before the protons collide, they are accelerated to an energy over 3,000 times larger than the energy contained in their own masses while they go many times around a 27-kilometer circular tunnel. To keep them in their tracks requires enormously strong superconducting magnets, cooled by the world’s largest source of liquid helium. In previous work at CERN, elementary particle physicists developed a method of sharing data that has become the World Wide Web.

On a longer time scale, the advance of technology will reflect the coherent picture of nature we are now assembling. At the end of the 19th century physicists in England were exploring the properties of electric currents passing through a near vacuum. Although this was pure science, it led to our knowledge of the electron, without which a large part of today’s technology would be impossible. If these physicists had limited themselves to work of obvious practical importance, they would have been studying the behavior of steam boilers.

More here.

From Vanity Fair, an adapted introduction by the late Christopher Hitchens to forthcoming Diaries by George Orwell:

As someone who had been brought up in a fairly rarefied and distinctly reactionary English milieu, in which the underclass of his own society and the millions of inhabitants of its colonial empire were regarded with a mixture of fear and loathing, Orwell also made an early decision to find out for himself what the living conditions of these remote latitudes were really “like.” This second commitment, to acquaint himself with the brute facts as they actually were, was to prove a powerful reinforcement of his latent convictions.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics. They furnish us with a more intimate picture of a man who, committed to the struggles of the mechanized and “modern” world, was also drawn by the rhythms of the wild, the rural, and the remote.

Read the rest here.

From lensculture:

“If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was thirty three years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography.”
—Duane Michals

This slender book is really a joy to behold, and one can sense the photographer's excitement at meeting and collaborating with one of the most influential masters of surrealism.

More here.

From The Independent:

When brothers and sisters are young, observed the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, they fight with each other for their parents' attention. When they are older, “siblings battle over who has the most truthful, accurate memory of their shared past”. Adult siblings generally do not face the same pressures as, say, married couples to agree on a story about their pasts. Individuals who have spent a lifetime trying to define themselves in opposition to each other are unlikely to be quite as motivated to settle their memory differences. And the fact is that adult siblings usually do not get as many opportunities as couples do to negotiate their memory disputes.

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, Boston University

From FT Magazine:

Perhaps it was the opium talking, but Thomas de Quincey once wrote that an evening in the company of Samuel Coleridge was “like some great river”. The poet “swept at once into a continuous strain of dissertation, certainly the most novel, the most finely illustrated, and traversing the most spacious fields of thought, by transitions the most just and logical, that it was possible to conceive”. Most of us have hopefully felt the unmoored elation of staying up all night talking with a friend or a lover. But Coleridge was that rare thing, a conversationalist: eloquent, witty, with a seemingly bottomless reservoir of cultural knowledge. Nor was he the only one back then who could claim his company was a performance art. David Hume once engaged in so much raillery at a dinner party he left Jean-Jacques Rousseau clinging to a table leg.

What makes a good conversationalist has changed little over the years. The basics remain the same as when Cicero became the first scholar to write down some rules, which were summarised in 2006 by The Economist: “Speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.” But Cicero was lucky: he never went on a first date with someone more interested in their iPhone than his company.

More here.