Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might.

Frank Thadeusz in Der Spiegel:

The entire country seemed to be obsessed with reading. The sudden passion for books struck even booksellers as strange and in 1836 led literary critic Wolfgang Menzel to declare Germans “a people of poets and thinkers.”

“That famous phrase is completely misconstrued,” declares economic historian Eckhard Höffner, 44. “It refers not to literary greats such as Goethe and Schiller,” he explains, “but to the fact that an incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany.”

Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion — unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today's level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers.

The situation in England was very different. “For the period of the Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation, we see deplorable progress in Great Britain,” Höffner states.

More here.

Zach Weiner in The Weinerworks:

The following is an idea I’ve been mulling over and talking to friends about for a few months. I thought I’d finally share it to see if anyone liked it or was interested in working on it.)

Warning: Evo psych just-so story to follow. Think of it as a parable, not as a theory. It’s just here to contextualize the idea that follows.

Suppose there’s a monkey. Suppose also that the monkey has evolved to have an inbuilt proto-toolmaking behavior.

For this specific example, let’s say he’s learned to snap a twig off a tree and stick it in an anthill. When he pulls it out, it’s covered with tasty protein-rich ants.

This monkey is unlike you and I in that he takes no pleasure in finding the right stick. He knows the stick must have certain qualities – long, thin, not too brittle. However, he does not experience any pleasure until he actually eats the tasty ants.

Suppose this monkey represents a species. This species does well because it has this one trick for getting protein out of the ground in abundance at a low cost.

Now, suppose one day a monkey is born who has a quirk. Instead of taking pleasure in the ant part, he takes pleasure in the stick selection part too. That is, when he finds an appropriate stick, his brain rewards him with premature pleasure. So, whereas his brethren experience pleasure only upon eating the ants, this one monkey gets pleasure from selecting an appropriate branch.

More here.

From The Guardian:

“I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”

“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so.”

“Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice like, Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.”

“Envy is the central fact of American life.”

“Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

For a decade, Lawrence Lessig, a mild-seeming legal scholar, pursued the intricacies of updating American copyright law to reflect the rise of the digital era, the Internet, and new means of producing and disseminating texts, music, images, and software. Based first at Harvard, then Stanford, he co-founded organizations such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit that gives people legal tools to control use of their creative output, and argued that mashups (of songs or YouTube videos, for example) are culturally important products that (in some circumstances) can be legal under the principle of fair use. He felt he was making progress: “The public was getting it. Businesses were getting it. Universities. Everybody had come to the recognition that ‘There is something wrong with the existing system,’ and that it needed to be updated—but we were making no progress in the context of policymakers.” At first, he was puzzled. But gradually he realized the problem lay in the sclerotic, gridlocked policymaking system itself—particularly in Congress. “We weren’t making any progress because money was so inherent and tied to decisions,” he says now. “The public domain had no lobbyists. The ideas of the public domain weren’t even on the table because there was no infrastructure for putting them there.”

As long as Congress remains in the thrall of “the economy of influence”—its members dependent on money to fund reelection campaigns—“no progress would be made on copyright or any other public-policy question,” he explains. “It wasn’t just esoteric areas like copyright, it was also fundamental issues like global warming, healthcare, or any number of others.” That set Lessig off in a new direction—including an exploratory, aborted run for Congress and, ultimately, in 2008, a return to Harvard. He now directs the Safra Center for Ethics, serves as Furman professor of law and leadership at Harvard Law School, and investigates the American government and what ails it. His findings, recently published in Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It, have led him to conclude that nothing less than overhauling the way elections are funded—involving a tool never before invoked in American democracy—is required.

More here.

Her Body is Private

ppppppppppppppp in spite of all
the sweet inducements to disrobe
in the public eye, to sunbathe
in the hot glow of the spotlight (not be
forgotten for a minute, maybe two);
ppppppppppppppp in spite of all
the cash that flows to those
who wear their heart, not on their sleeve
in that old innocence, but on their naked
wrist, or butt, like a tattoo;
ppppppppppppppp in spite of all
emoluments, of shrinks who swear
that secrets eat the lining from the guts
and that the more you tell, the less
you burn in hells intestinal;
ppppppppppppppp in spite of all,
her memory, like her body, is
her own, and serpents guard it
like a tree with treasure in a myth;
if you approach, she'll turn
the blank side of her words, a shield
to the light, to fix your face
in the bright circle
of its mirror. This time Medusa
has the shield, and the last word.

by Eleanor Wilner
from Reversing the Spell: New & Selected Poems
Copper Canyon Press, 1998

From The Telegraph:

Evan Selinger in The Atlantic:

Nudging is a distinctive way to help people make good decisions. It differs from the typical ways of attempting to change behavior: rational persuasion (e.g, providing new information), coercion (e.g., using threats to ensure compliance), adjusting financial incentives (e.g., paying students to get good grades) and bans (e.g., prohibiting smoking in restaurants). And, it has a limited domain of application: contexts where decisions need to be made, but we lack adequate time, information, or emotional wherewithal to know how to act in ways that further our best interests. In these cases, nudges work by subtly tweaking the contexts within which we make choices so that, on average, we will tend to make good ones.

Take ToneCheck, the emotional analogue to a spell checking tool. It is a nudge for those of us who can't resist sending flaming emails. Applying connotative intelligence research to “automatically detect the tone” of your email,” it offers the author a warning (that can prompt revision) if a draft exceeds the threshold for negative emotions (e.g., anger or sadness). The author has been nudged.

More here.

Steven Brint in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

It is odd to think that we live in a time when the college model may be in the process of breaking apart. So much suggests that college has never been more successful. Record numbers of students graduate every year. Every graduating class is more diverse than the one that preceded it. Foreign students flock to American quads. Harvard economists tell us that the college degree has never been worth more, relative to the high school degree, than it is today. Bill Gates and President Obama call for a doubling of the proportion of young adults with college degrees over the next decade. We seem to be heading for the day when we won’t have enough commencement speakers to go around.

And yet other indicators suggest that the college experience has never been more imperiled. Tuition has been increasing faster than inflation for more than 30 years. Some economists have begun to argue that college costs more than it is worth. Studies like Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift suggest that the bottom third of students are not developing their analytical skills or thought processes in college, largely because not much is required of them. The fastest-growing parts of college budgets have nothing directly to do with teaching, but instead go to administrators and student affairs staff. In their efforts to shift enrollments to two-year community colleges, politicians like Louisiana’s Governor Bobby Jindal have stated flatly that “most future jobs [in America] will require more training than a high school diploma but less than the traditional 4-year college degree.” More radical still are plans to break up degree programs into distinct, definable skills and to award badges for successful acquisition of each skill. Even institutions like Harvard and Stanford are hedging their bets on the future of site-specific four-year baccalaureates by sponsoring ambitious online projects.

More here.

Akiva Eldar in Haaretz:

Recently I had a heart-to-heart talk with a beloved relative who was born in this country, in an effort to persuade her to return and bring up her children in Israel. I was reminded of this conversation when I read the speeches made last week by the two leaders of the nation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, at the graduation ceremony of the National Security College.

In his speech Netanyahu presented the five leading challenges that threaten the country: the Iranian nuclear program, the missile threat, cyber warfare, problems near the borders and the stockpiling of weapons in the region. He promised Israel would do its utmost to stop the Iranian nuclear program. He vowed that, to the extent that it is necessary, Israel would surround additional parts of the country with security fences, alter the composition of its forces and increase the defense budget.

Barak went even further in enumerating the disasters that confront us and could destroy us. The challenges we face, he said, are among the most complex and complicated that the state has faced in its entire existence. He warned that the Iranian nuclear plan could turn into an existential threat against the state, prophesized that neither diplomacy nor sanctions would be able to stop it, and promised not to remove any option from the agenda to thwart it. For dessert, the minister promised that Israel would not stand by idly watching while sophisticated weapons systems are transferred from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

More here.

Next Morning Letter

Savoring each summer moment
lush and brief
I close my
eyes to see

your white robe, falling open

as you call for your scroll
and ink stone, a brush

As your brush passes over the paper

my body shivers

How closely now you watch
at the open lattice
as your
servant hurries away

the next morning letter

tethered to
a spray of clematis
whose blossoms will
not open

until they reach me

In the washbasin
your face is
the bridge that
spans

the floating world of dreams

Now you are yawning
Now you are reciting
sutras
bowing to the wind

When the letter arrives

all the leaves of the maple
outside my window
are
stirred

I read your words

just once, then once again
bringing my fingers
to my
lips, my hair

tucked back behind one ear

On the dawn's trellis
the scent of clematis
Now
smell your fingers
The petals of my body
gather in your empty arms

How shall I respond?
The cry of the stag
is so
loud

the echo answers

from the empty mountains
as if it were a doe
I tell
you only what you know

Clematis—the scent
of your teaching surrounds me
My
empty arms fill
Come night, the fragrant petals
fall in a heap at my feet
.

by Margaret Gibson
from Blackbird
Spring 2002, Vol. 1 No. 1

Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:

The nine are recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize, established by Yuri Milner, a Russian physics student who dropped out of graduate school in 1989 and later earned billions investing in Internet companies like Facebook and Groupon.

“It knocked me off my feet,” said Alan H. Guth, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was among the winners. He came up with the idea of cosmic inflation, that there was a period of extremely rapid expansion in the first instant of the universe.

When he was told of the $3 million prize, he assumed that the money would be shared among the winners. Not so: Instead, each of this year’s nine recipients will receive $3 million, the most lucrative academic prize in the world. TheNobel Prize currently comes with an award of $1.5 million, usually split by two or three people. The Templeton Prize, which honors contributions to understanding spiritual dimensions of life, has been the largest monetary given to an individual, $1.7 million this year.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The Great Gatsby
by F Scott Fitzgerald
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Nick Carraway’s signing off after the death of Gatsby is my favourite last line in the Anglo-American tradition – resonant, memorable and profound. It is the magnificent chord, in a minor key, which brings this 20th-century masterpiece to a close. Somehow, it sums up the novel completely, while giving the reader a way out into the drabber, duller world of everyday reality.

Middlemarch
by George Eliot
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” This passage is almost a credo – a lovely, valedictory celebration of Dorothea’s quiet life, after she has renounced Casaubon’s fortune and confessed her love for Ladislaw.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

British psychologists from the University of Lincoln argue that people may actually be hard-wired to “love thy neighbor.” In conducting the study, the researchers analyzed the behavior of contestants in first-round episodes of the BBC quiz show, “The Weakest Link.” “In the show contestants must make a choice about who is the worst player based on two very different sources of information,” study leader Paul Goddard, senior lecturer in the School of Psychology, explained in a Lincoln news release. “The primary and most reliable source comes from the game itself. If one player gets all their questions wrong, it's a fairly straightforward decision to vote them off. The quandary for contestants arises when there is no clear consensus about who is the worst player, such as in rounds where several players get just one question wrong. In these circumstances, contestants have to rely on a secondary source of information — their own judgment. This is where bias can really come to the fore.”

The researchers calculated the probability of votes and compared these projections to what actually happened. The study found contestants showed a strong reluctance to vote for the person standing next to them. The researchers dubbed this pattern, 'the neighbor avoidance effect.' They noted this bias was stronger when the group of contestants didn't agree on which players was the weakest. When forced to make decisions, the study revealed people were less likely to vote off the people next to them and target other contestants who were standing farther away. The researchers said their observations drew parallels from a controversial social psychology experiment conducted in the 1960s. In this experiment, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram found people were more likely to punish people with an electric shock if they were in another room. If people were located in the same room however, they were more reluctant to administer this punishment.

More here.

Pinker’s remarkable inversion of reality in portraying the post-World War II period as a “Long Peace,” with residual violence stemming from communist ideology and actions, points up the relevance of Chalmers Johnson’s comment that “When imperialist activities produce unmentionable outcomes,…then ideological thinking kicks in.”[34] It kicks in for Pinker with communist expansionism and U.S. “containment.” It also kicks in with his notion that communism, but not capitalism, was both “utopian” and “essentialist,” “submerge[ing] individuals into moralized categories,” and causing some of the worst atrocities of the modern period. (328-329) But weren’t the racism and anticommunism of the Western powers and in particular the United States “essentialist” ideologies in the Pinkerian sense, and wedded to the “full destructive might” of these powers? And didn’t these ideologies justify exterminations and massive ethnic cleansings of inferior and threatening peoples, replacing them with advanced peoples and cultures who put resources to a higher use? Weren’t Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and many other members of the Chicago School of Economics “free-market” ideologues?

more from Edward S Herman and David Peterson at ZNET here. (h/t Gary L. Olson).

Sughra Raza. Returning home. 2012.

Digital photograph.

Jamie James in Lapham's Quarterly:

If the paramount project of W. B. Yeats’ professional life was the perfection of the art of poetry, it was intertwined with a personal preoccupation, the study and practice of magic— not in any metaphorical sense, but the dedicated pursuit of supernatural powers based upon the ancient traditions of alchemy and necromancy, which began in his youth and persisted to the end of his long life.

Yeats wrote frankly about his vocation as a magician in several memoirs and in A Vision, a dense astrological treatise he labored over for twenty years. A Protestant Irishman in Victorian Britain, Yeats as a young man was pulled in conflicting directions, but the occult always trumped worldly concerns, because it was so deeply connected with his poetic craft. In 1892, when the Irish patriot John O’Leary admonished the twenty-seven-year-old poet for his devotion to magic at the expense of the Cause, Yeats answered:

Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me “weak” or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life…If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book [The Works of William Blake, with Edwin Ellis, 1893], nor would The Countess Kathleen [stage play, 1892] have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

That’s plain speaking, which admits no ambiguity. If one would understand the works of the poet often described as the greatest of his age, it might seem necessary to come to terms with this lifelong passion. Yet apart from the prose works mentioned and a handful of supernatural tales in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, Yeats never directly addresses the practice of magic in the poetry and plays upon which his magisterial reputation rests. He alluded to it only rarely, with ambiguous metaphors and a select hoard of words charged with esoteric meanings.

Magic imbrued Yeats’ thinking so profoundly that it’s nearly impossible to disentangle the strands without rending the garment.