THE MEN WHO GATHERED in Srinagar on a bright Sunday morning in early July had all left their lives behind; not once, but twice. They sat, about 25 of them, on the lawn outside the historic Mujahid Manzil—once the epicentre of a movement for Kashmiri independence—trading stories, chain-smoking cheap filterless cigarettes, inspecting old wounds. More than 20 years ago, all these men left their homes in Kashmir to cross to the other side—to Azad Kashmir, a sliver of the former princely state under Pakistani control. They crossed the mountains to become militants; to be trained with guns and explosives and grenades in camps run by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Some returned as fighters; some never fired a shot. Within six or seven years, they had all ceased to fight; they left the camps, became refugees in Pakistan, and started new lives on the other side of the line. They married, had children, scraped together work. And then, two decades after they first crossed over, they began to return, in ones and twos—smuggling themselves back into the state they once dreamt of liberating from Indian rule.

more from Mehboob Jeelani at Caravan here.

Although Seward retired at the age of sixty-eight, in 1869, when Grant assumed the Presidency, he continued to be, as Frances had described him a quarter century earlier, “the most indefatigable of men.” He said, “At my age, and in my condition of health, ‘rest was rust,’ and nothing remained, to prevent rust, but to keep in motion.” Still suffering from pain in his face and neck, his hands crippled, and paralysis creeping up his arms, he went on a journey with his family on the newly opened transcontinental railroad—a cause that he had championed in the Senate—and then on to British Columbia, Alaska, Cuba, and Mexico. He returned home for five months before setting off for Japan, China, and Europe with the two daughters of an old political friend. There had been speculation that he would marry one of them, twenty-four-year-old Olive Risley, whom he had been seeing regularly in Washington. (One paper, alluding to the age difference, described Seward as “amiable, sportive, frisky, foxy.”) Instead, Seward adopted her, thus preëmpting any stories about the impropriety of travelling with two very young women. After the trip, he finally settled down in Auburn, where he worked with Olive on a book about their journeys, and received frequent visitors at home.

more from Dorothy Wickenden at The New Yorker here.

Kael’s taste tended toward quick pacing and a down-to-earth story that could grab an audience and make it feel something. A movie didn’t have to be hysterically funny to win her over; she found it especially thrilling when a loose, jocular tone somehow eloped with otherwise straight-faced genres—hence her lifelong allegiance to Jean Renoir and Robert Altman and Jonathan Demme. Praising a movie by another one of her favorites, Jean-Luc Godard, Kael wrote that its “fusion of attitudes—seeing characters as charming and poetic and, at the same time, preposterous and absurd—is one of Godard’s contributions to modern film.” Her most withering scorn was reserved for movies that she took to deny the possibility of laughter or pretended they were above it—her blacklist included much of Bergman, most of Kubrick, and pretty much all of Hitchcock.

more from Jana Prikryl at the NYRB here.

From Scientific American:

Feeling sociable or reckless? You might have toxoplasmosis, an infection caused by the microscopic parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which the CDC estimates has infected about 22.5 percent of Americans older than 12 years old. Researchers tested participants for T. gondii infection and had them complete a personality questionnaire. They found that both men and women infected with T. gondii were more extroverted and less conscientious than the infection-free participants. These changes are thought to result from the parasite's influence on brain chemicals, the scientists write in the May/June issue of the European Journal of Personality. “Toxoplasma manipulates the behavior of its animal host by increasing the concentration of dopamine and by changing levels of certain hormones,” says study author Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.

Although humans can carry the parasite, its life cycle must play out in cats and rodents. Infected mice and rats lose their fear of cats, increasing the chance they will be eaten, so that the parasite can then reproduce in a cat's body and spread through its feces. In humans, T. gondii's effects are more subtle; the infected population has a slightly higher rate of traffic accidents, studies have shown, and people with schizophrenia have higher rates of infection—but until recent years, the parasite was not thought to affect most people's daily lives.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

BARRO COLORADO ISLAND, Panama — Here in the exuberantly dour understory of the Panamanian rain forest, the best way to find the elusive and evolutionarily revealing spotted antbird is to stare at your boots. For one thing, if you don’t tuck in your pant legs to protect against chiggers and ticks, you will end up a color plate in “Rook’s Textbook of Dermatology.” For another, sooner or later — O.K., much later, many, many hiking hours later — you will finally step into a swarm of army ants boiling out across the forest floor. At that point you should step right back out of the swarm and start looking for the characteristic flitting and hopping of the thrush-size antbird, listening for its vibrato “peee-ti peee-it” call. Because wherever there are army ants out on a hunting raid, peckish antbirds are almost sure to follow. The birds are not foolish enough to try to eat them: Army ants are fiercely mandibled and militantly cohesive. Instead, they hope to skim off a percentage of the ants’ labor, by snatching up any grasshoppers, beetles, spiders or small lizards that may jump to the side in a frantic attempt to elude the oncoming avalanche of predatory ants. It’s a gleeful reversal of the conventional notion of parasites as little, ticky things that plague large, poorly dressed hosts. Here the big vertebrates are the parasites, freeloading off insects a fraction of their size. And the parasitic strategy is so irresistible that according to recent research in the journal Ecology, the spotted antbirds on Barro Colorado Island just may be taking it professional. Whereas the species has traditionally opted for a mixed approach — filching from ant swarms but also finding food on its own — the island-bound antbirds appear to increasingly depend on army ants to scare up their every meal. Janeene M. Touchton a researcher associated with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Princeton, and the principal author of the report, is now trying to identify the personality traits that may facilitate a spotted antbird’s leap from amateur to polished parasite. Is it boldness, aggressiveness, a love of novelty? Or maybe a lack of aggressiveness, a nonchalance about territory and a refusal to pick a fight? She is collaborating on the project with Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology.

Dr. Touchton, who is 37, looks as if she could be Keira Knightley’s sister and has the field-hardiness of a Dr. Livingstone. In her view, studying spotted antbirds offers an extraordinary opportunity to catch evolution on the wing, to identify the precise steps behind the great mystery of how new species arise from old ones.

More here.

A Stranger's Arms

In any dream of confession
I enter the chapel barefoot
Having come straight
From a stranger's arms
On the crooked side of town
Where a song came to us in fragments
From a safe room.
“…down to Georgia
Gonna weep no more.”

It's okay
That I have lost my shoes
And wear only a crepe dress
Although it's 10 days
Before Christmas.
I am warm with wine
And crossing myself
With tepid holy water.

When I speak
To the smoke screen
Of the priest's face
I tell him
How the stars
Drag me down with wishing,
How I am reluctant to be
Only one song
In the whole universe.

by Corrine De Winter
from The Southern Cross Review #56

George Pfau. Act Four: Observer. 2010

More here and here.

It is time to restore the distinction between good and gold.

Michael Sandel in Prospect:

If I ruled the world, I would rewrite the economics textbooks. This may seem a small ambition, unworthy of my sovereign office. But it would actually be a big step toward a better civic life. Today, we often confuse market reasoning for moral reasoning. We fall into thinking that economic efficiency—getting goods to those with the greatest willingness and ability to pay for them—defines the common good. But this is a mistake.

Consider the case for a free market in human organs—kidneys, for example. Textbook economic reasoning makes such proposals hard to resist. If a buyer and a seller can agree on a price for a kidney, the deal presumably makes both parties better off. The buyer gets a life-sustaining organ, and the seller gets enough money to make the sacrifice worthwhile. The deal is economically efficient in the sense that the kidney goes to the person who values it most highly.

But this logic is flawed, for two reasons. First, what looks like a free exchange might not be truly voluntary. In practice, the sellers of kidneys would likely consist of impoverished people desperate for money to feed their families or educate their children. Their choice to sell would not really be free, but coerced, in effect, by their desperate condition.

So before we can say whether any particular market exchange is desirable, we have to decide what counts as a free choice rather than a coerced one. And this is a normative question, a matter of political philosophy.

The second limitation to market reasoning is about how to value the good things in life.

More here.

Nir Rosen in the London Review of Books:

Syria’s Alawite heartland is defined by its funerals. In Qirdaha in the mountainous Latakia province, hometown of the Assad dynasty, I watched as two police motorcycles drove up the hill, pictures of Bashar mounted on their windshields. An ambulance followed, carrying the body of a dead lieutenant colonel from state security. As the convoy passed, the men around me let off bursts of automatic fire. My local guides were embarrassed that I had seen this display, and claimed it was the first time it had happened. ‘He is a martyr, so it is considered a wedding.’ Schoolchildren and teachers lining the route threw rice and flower petals. ‘There is no god but God and the martyr is the beloved of God!’ they chanted. Hundreds of mourners in black walked up through the village streets to the local shrine. ‘Welcome, oh martyr,’ they shouted. ‘We want no one but Assad!’

It was April, my sixth month travelling through Syria. After I left I heard of another funeral not far away, in the village of Ras al-Ayn, near the coast. A village of seven thousand people now had seven martyrs from the security forces, six missing or captured and many wounded. ‘Every day we have martyrs,’ an officer said. ‘It’s all a sacrifice for the nation.’ Another talked about ‘their’ crimes, and said ‘they’ had killed the soldier because he was an Alawite. One of my guides berated him for speaking of the conflict in sectarian terms in front of me. ‘The opposition have left us no choice,’ another soldier said. ‘They accept nothing but killing.’

Alawites – the heterodox Shia sect to which the Assads belong and which remains most loyal to the president and his government – make up about 10 per cent of the population.

More here.

The doctors prescribing the drugs don't know they don't do what they're meant to. Nor do their patients. The manufacturers know full well, but they're not telling.

Ben Goldacre in The Guardian:

Reboxetine is a drug I have prescribed. Other drugs had done nothing for my patient, so we wanted to try something new. I'd read the trial data before I wrote the prescription, and found only well-designed, fair tests, with overwhelmingly positive results. Reboxetine was better than a placebo, and as good as any other antidepressant in head-to-head comparisons. It's approved for use by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the MHRA), which governs all drugs in the UK. Millions of doses are prescribed every year, around the world. Reboxetine was clearly a safe and effective treatment. The patient and I discussed the evidence briefly, and agreed it was the right treatment to try next. I signed a prescription.

But we had both been misled. In October 2010, a group of researchers was finally able to bring together all the data that had ever been collected on reboxetine, both from trials that were published and from those that had never appeared in academic papers. When all this trial data was put together, it produced a shocking picture. Seven trials had been conducted comparing reboxetine against a placebo. Only one, conducted in 254 patients, had a neat, positive result, and that one was published in an academic journal, for doctorsand researchers to read. But six more trials were conducted, in almost 10 times as many patients. All of them showed that reboxetine was no better than a dummy sugar pill. None of these trials was published. I had no idea they existed.

It got worse.

More here.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

If you’ve ever lived in Berkeley, Calif., that much-ridiculed college town on the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay, or even visited the place, you probably have highly specific associations with Telegraph Avenue, a historic street of political protests and retail commerce (legal and otherwise) that dead-ends against the University of California campus at Sather Gate. Michael Chabon’s new novel is pointedly not about that Telegraph Avenue, and its characters have no relationship to the university campus or to the 1960s explosion of left-wing activism that made Berkeley internationally famous – and, briefly, in my childhood, the locus of martial law as ordered by the governor of California, Ronald Reagan.

Chabon’s “Telegraph Avenue” calls our attention, literally and figuratively, to the other end of the street, where Telegraph crosses the city line and becomes the main drag of the Temescal district, a racially and economically mixed neighborhood in northwest Oakland. That’s where Archy Stallings, a 36-year-old African-American Gulf War vet who is the novel’s central character, and his Jewish partner Nat Jaffe (whose background resembles Chabon’s own) are not so slowly running a vintage vinyl emporium called Brokeland Records into the ground. It’s the summer of 2004, and a wealthy former NFL star and Oakland native, Gibson “G-Bad” Goode, is planning to open an immense new retail-entertainment complex – called, wonderfully, the “Dogpile Thang” – four blocks away, applying the coup de grace to Archy and Nat’s failing business.

More here.

Break

We put the puzzle together piece
by piece, loving how one curved
notch fits so sweetly with another.
A yellow smudge becomes
the brush of a broom, and two blue arms
fill in the last of the sky.
We patch together porch swings and autumn
trees, matching gold to gold. We hold
the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair
of brown shoes. We do this as the child
circles her room, impatient
with her blossoming, tired
of the neat house, the made bed,
the good food. We let her brood
as we shuffle through the pieces,
setting each one into place with a satisfied
tap, our backs turned for a few hours
to a world that is crumbling, a sky
that is falling, the pieces
we are required to return to.

by Dorianne Laux
from Awake, 2001
University of Arkansas Press

Eliot Weinberger in London Review of Books:

The racial message was clear enough to those eating their $50,000 dinners in Boca Raton, but broadcast into the larger and somewhat more reality-based world it took on another meaning. The vast majority of the 47 per cent (actually 46 per cent) are white and nearly all are extremely poor people or the retired elderly who are living off their savings and Social Security or the disabled (including veterans) or students or soldiers serving in combat zones (who don’t pay taxes – no wonder Mitt didn’t mention those spongers at the convention). Among those who pay ‘no income tax’ – meaning federal taxes – almost all pay state and local taxes, and payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare). Some pay property taxes; everyone pays sales taxes. The states with the highest number of 47-percenters traditionally vote Republican. ‘Those people’, in other words, include quite a few potential Romney voters – many of whom, one imagines, are now former potential Romney voters. Television has gone round-the-clock with tales of honorable people who found themselves in hard times and needed temporary help, including – it is perfect – the young George Romney, Mitt’s sainted Dad, before he made his millions. Trying to follow Republican logic can often induce vertigo. Mitt prides himself on his tax-avoidance skills, and thousands of 1-percenters (including six known multibillionaires) pay no federal taxes at all, thanks to their elaborate systems of loopholes and tax shelters, most of them legislated by Republicans. The Ryan budget proposes to eliminate entirely nearly all the taxes that the mega-rich pay. But, in the Mittopian universe, where the rich shouldn’t have to pay any taxes, the poor who don’t pay taxes are a bunch of moochers.

Romney will never recover from Mouse Mouth, but there is something sinister that will linger on. The primary word that the right is using to characterise the 47 per cent, and the left is using to characterise the characterisation, is ‘parasite’. As Mary Matalin, an omnipresent Republican talking head, put it on CNN: ‘There are makers and takers, there are producers and there are parasites.’ Tens of millions will vote for Romney and many of them will be believers in this myth. Perhaps it’s worth remembering the last time a large segment of a population was vilified as parasites: Der Jude als Weltparasit (‘The Jew as World Parasite’). These things tend to stick.

More here.

Pierre Manent in City Journal:

We have been modern for several centuries now. We are modern, and we want to be modern; it is a desire that guides the entire life of Western societies. That the will to be modern has been in force for centuries, though, suggests that we have not succeeded in being truly modern—that the end of the process that we thought we saw coming at various moments has always proved illusory, and that 1789, 1917, 1968, and 1989 were only disappointing steps along a road leading who knows where. The Israelites were lucky: they wandered for only 40 years in the desert. If the will to be modern has ceaselessly overturned the conditions of our common life and brought one revolution after another—without achieving satisfaction or reaching a point where we might rest and say, “Here at last is the end of our enterprise”—just what does that mean? How have we been able to will something for such a long time and accept being so often disappointed? Could it be that we aren’t sure what we want? Though the various signs of the modern are familiar, whether in architecture, art, science, or political organization, we do not know what these traits have in common and what justifies designating them with the same attribute. We find ourselves under the sway of something that seems evident yet defies explication.

…We congratulate ourselves for the attenuation of party conflict while oddly treating transfers of power as matters of momentous importance. The political landscape has been leveled. The webs of feelings, opinions, and language that once made up political convictions have unraveled. It is no longer possible to gain political ground by taking a position. This is why all political actors tend to use all political languages indiscriminately. Political speech has become increasingly removed from any essential relation to a possible action. The notion of a political program, reduced to that of “promises,” has been discredited. The explicit or implicit conviction that one has no choice has become widespread: what will be done will be determined by circumstances beyond our control. Political speech no longer aims to prepare a possible action but tries simply to cover conscientiously the range of political speech. Everyone, or almost everyone, admits that the final meeting between action and speech will be no more than a meeting of independent causal chains.

More here.

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow in the New York Review of Books:

The United States has by far the largest prison system in the world. It is so large, in fact, so sprawling and dispersed, so administratively complex, that just how many people we keep locked up is uncertain. The most commonly cited statistic is that we have about 2.3 million inmates. This comes from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), a division of the Justice Department that surveys the national prison system and found that on June 30, 2009, the US had 203,233 federal prisoners, 1,326,547 state prisoners, and 767,620 detainees in local jails.

But then, in addition, more than 80,000 youth are held in juvenile detention facilities on any given day. Before being deported, about 400,000 people a year also pass through our immigration detention system, which is run mostly by the Department of Homeland Security. Hundreds of thousands more are held in halfway houses and police lockups; no one knows the exact number. The Bureau of Indian Affairs oversees jails in Indian Country, and the Department of Defense has its own network of more than sixty detention facilities all over the globe.

The people we imprison are overwhelmingly our most disadvantaged: the poor and the poorly educated, the black and the brown, the mentally ill. Typically, they’re given extraordinarily long sentences compared to prisoners in the European Union, often for infractions that would not warrant incarceration elsewhere. And while they’re imprisoned, appalling numbers of them are subjected to sexual abuse.

More here.

Julian Baggini and Lawrence Krauss in The Guardian:

Julian Baggini No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science. When physics is compared with the humanities and social sciences, it is easy for the scientists to feel smug and the rest of us to feel somewhat envious. Philosophers in particular can suffer from lab-coat envy. If only our achievements were so clear and indisputable! How wonderful it would be to be free from the duty of constantly justifying the value of your discipline.

However – and I'm sure you could see a “but” coming – I do wonder whether science hasn't suffered from a little mission creep of late. Not content with having achieved so much, some scientists want to take over the domain of other disciplines.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. Science was once natural philosophy and psychology sat alongside metaphysics. But there are some issues of human existence that just aren't scientific. I cannot see how mere facts could ever settle the issue of what is morally right or wrong, for example.

Some of the things you have said and written suggest that you share some of science's imperialist ambitions. So tell me, how far do you think science can and should offer answers to the questions that are still considered the domain of philosophy?

Lawrence Krauss Thanks for the kind words about science and your generous attitude. As for your “but” and your sense of my imperialist ambitions, I don't see it as imperialism at all. It's merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science.

More here.