Matt Bieber in The Wheat and Chaff:

Louis Menand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of English at Harvard and a staff writer for the New Yorker. His most recent book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, traces the rise of the modern university system and asks hard questions about whether higher education’s historical goals and structures are well-suited for today’s world.

In a June, 2011 New Yorker article, Menand expanded on Marketplace, laying out three theories that seek to answer the question: What is college for?

Theory 1 sees the university as a quality filter – a means of sorting young people according to their intelligence and capabilities and providing signals to society about the roles for which they might be well-suited.

Theory 2 is the classic liberal arts vision of the university – in Menand’s words, an opportunity to teach “the knowledge and skills important for life as an informed citizen, or as a reflective and culturally literate human being.”

Theory 3 is a more brass-tacks view: it sees the university as designed for professional or vocational preparation.

In this interview, Menand and I dig into Theory 2. What does an education designed to create “informed citizens” or “reflective and culturally literate human beings” actually look like? What books and pedagogical techniques might it include? How much will it seek to answer the ‘big questions’, and to what extent will it be content with simply asking them?

More here.

From Guernica:

Muslims agree that Shari’a is God’s law. But the mysticism surrounding Prophet Muhammed’s nearly 1,400-year-old words has solidified to a point where finding a consensus on the particulars of Shari’a is difficult. The debate has now saturated modern politics and pop-culture around the globe. London-born Sadakat Kadri, human rights Lawyer, travel writer, and journalist, took on this collective confusion in his new book Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslin World. As he traveled through South Asia and the Middle East to conduct research, Kadri began untangling the edicts of Shari’a and its interpretations, which could allow for a sex change but not apostasy. His finished product, full of travel experiences, written through the lens of his knowledge of the law and his connection to the subject matter, “provides a compelling overview of the historical events that shaped Islamic law,” wrote Ian Critchley, in the Sunday Times, and delivers “an admirably even-handed account of [Islamic law’s] often fraught position today.” At Asia House this February, Kadri sat with Mishal Husain to discuss Heaven on Earth, the history of Islamic law, and Islam’s interaction with the religious present—both Muslim and non-Muslim. Kadri earned a Master’s from Harvard Law and spent time in Prague during the 1989 Velvet Revolution. He has written a travel guide to Prague as well as the book The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson (2005), after his experience moving to New York City just before 9/11. He currently writes a column for the New Statesman. Mishal Husain was born in England and grew up in both the Middle East and the UK. She received a law degree from Cambridge and works as a BBC international news presenter on Impact Asia, BBC World News, as well as other programs.

—The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between Mishal Husain and Sadakat Kadri, published here courtesy of Asia House London.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

In 1933, James Hilton, a British novelist who read about travels in Yunnan Province in National Geographic magazine, wrote a novel called Lost Horizon, which describes a mythical kingdom set far, far away from the rest of time: Shangri-La. Three years later, Frank Capra turned Hilton’s paperback best-seller into a film. The place entered our lexicon as an earthly retreat from the worries of modern civilization.

The fictional Shangri-La appears to be an amalgam of Yunnan Province and Tibet. But the people of the Hunza Valley in Pakistan became, in the American mind, the closest thing to the real-life incarnations of the people of Shangri-La. The Hunzakut people reportedly lived to be 100 and had a practically illness-free existence in an inaccessible mountain valley. Paeans to healthy Hunza proliferated. President Eisenhower’s cardiologist reported that Hunza men could eat 3,000 apricots in one sitting. In 1960, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an editorial extolling the virtues of the Hunza diet as a harbinger of hope for human longevity and modern medicine.

More here.

The Big Mac isn't just a greasy hallmark of modern technological wizardry. It's also a tool for economists to measure the wealth of nations.

Derek Thompson in The Atlantic:

For thousands of years, families devoted the majority of their lives to food. Their waking hours were spent growing and harvesting crops, and most of their income from growing and harvesting went right back into eating. Deep into the late pre-industrial era, unskilled laborers worked grueling hours in fields to earn an income that could often barely feed their family. As Gregory Clark explained in his book A Farewell to Alms, up until the 1700s, the English diet consisted, monotonously, of mostly bread and beer, won only after hours that would make a modern i-banker blush. Food output per person was so meager that “British farm laborers by 1863 had just reached the median consumption of [primitive] forager and subsistence societies.”

Today, food is faster. The Big Mac takes very little work for any one person. It is a product of as much automated manufacturing as human labor. Even U.S. food-prep workers, by some measures the poorest-paid major occupation in America, earn enough to buy more than two Big Macs — that's 1,000+ calories — in just an hour of their work.

McDonald's is a restaurant, but it functions much like a factory. Labor is supported by a deep well of technological innovation, such as vacuum packing, exceptional preservatives, deep freezing, vibrant artificial flavors, and high-speed microwaves. Workers assemble specific parts at great speed to deliver dependable and replicable products. “[McDonald's doesn't] put something on the menu until it can be produced at the speed of McDonald's,” CEO James Skinner said in 2010, sounding not unlike Henry Ford from a century earlier.

In addition to being a technological marvel, the Big Mac moonlights as an economic tool. Every year the Economist calculates a Big Mac Index for the purpose of (being cheeky and) testing what currencies are overvalued compared to the U.S. The results are often illuminating.

More here.

Esther Inglis-Arkell in io9:

It seems that the brain, in specific situations, literally gets bored and starts scaring you. The easiest way to prove this is to perform the simple experiment of looking steadily into a mirror, for a few minutes at a time. Soon, you're very likely to see a monster. That monster is a combination of your face and your brain. Does that make it better or worse?

There are a lot of creepy situations that start happening when you look in the mirror. Low light and a fearful mood certainly help, but the primary reason why people have so many mirror related freak-outs, and why it's become such a big game at slumber parties, is straight biology. The brain doesn't have the energy or the processing power to notice everything all the time.
Sitting at your computer now, you're probably unaware of the feel of the seat under you, your clothes against your skin, and any lingering smells you might have noticed (no judgement) when you walked into the room. Your mind mostly tunes them out. But the sense that most of us rely on almost all the time, sight, has also been narrowed down. You are probably unaware of anything outside of the range of the computer screen, and you probably haven't noticed minor changes to that. That is why most updates on computers come with a sound or a blinking light.

The brain, when faced with a lot of stimulation, only some of which is considered relevant, will tune out the non-relevant parts, filling in what it can from the general area. It's a little like how the blind spot works, except this is a dynamic process. The brain will zoom in on a desired area, and the rest of the space will fade away. This is called the Troxler Effect, or Troxler Fading. It was discovered way back in 1804 by Ignaz Troxler, a physician and philosopher. Take a look at the circle to the left. Focus on the red dot at the middle. After less than thirty seconds, the circle should just fade away.

More here.

E. L. Doctorow in the New York Times:

To achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world, do the following:

PHASE ONE

If you’re a justice of the Supreme Court, ignore the first sacrament of a democracy and suspend the counting of ballots in a presidential election. Appoint the candidate of your choice as president.

If you’re the newly anointed president, react to a terrorist attack by invading a nonterrorist country. Despite the loss or disablement of untold numbers of lives, manage your war so that its results will be indeterminate.

Using the state of war as justification, order secret surveillance of American citizens, data mine their phone calls and e-mail, make business, medical and public library records available to government agencies, perform illegal warrantless searches of homes and offices.

Take to torturing terrorism suspects, here or abroad, in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment. Unilaterally abrogate the Convention Against Torture as well as the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war.

More here.

American conservatives have rarely dwelt on the idea of class. It comes up only twice in Patrick Allitt’s The Conservatives (2009), for example. Conservatives held that slavery could eliminate the possibility of class conflict by “linking masters and slaves together in extended families”; later on, they thought that fascism might get us “complete centralization and rational economic planning… without the communist resort to class warfare.” If, for the Left, class-consciousness was central to the battle for the various rights and privileges that we take for granted today, the Right thought that class consciousness disrupted an otherwise peaceful society (if it thought about it at all). So you know something odd is going on when the popular public policy book of the moment is by a conservative and concerns the emergence of class conflict. Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 builds on his previous bestseller, The Bell Curve (1994). That book caused a stir because it claimed that black people were, on average, less intelligent than white people. Murray used IQ tests as evidence, leading even conservatives like Brigette Berger to accuse him and his co-author of “methodological fetishism.” A less well-known argument of Bell Curve is that a permanent white underclass would develop just like the urban black underclass. Coming Apart, among other things, shows that Murray was right about that.

more from Justin Evans at The Point here.

It’s an instructive story – a reminder, among other things, of how the camp system eased from the late Forties – but above all it is a human one. Lev’s first letter to Svetlana’s family from Pechora – he dared not approach her directly for fear she would want no more to do with him – is heartbreaking in its need and delicacy. Hers in reply is blazingly brave and true. Neither is a great writer, Svetlana in particular tending towards what Figes admits is the ‘somewhat dry and spare’ language of the Soviet technical intelligentsia (her loneliness is that of a nucleus shorn of its electrons, and weeping means ‘losing a lot of H₂O’). But on both sides love shines through – in mutual reassurance and determined optimism, in the complicated, coded planning for their all-too-brief meetings, and in jokey chat about everyday life. From Svetlana, we hear of food shortages – ‘we don’t see any meat, but there are such things as vegetarians, and it’s said they often live to be a hundred’ – and her burgeoning career researching synthetic rubber. Lev speaks of breakdowns at the wood-combine, fellow prisoners in and out of the camp infirmary, and the otherworldly beauty of the far northern skies. She spares him her pain at her childlessness; he spares her his fear that some bureaucratic turn of the wheel will put him on a convoy to one of the ‘special regime’ logging camps upriver, from which no letters can be sent and few prisoners return.

more from Anna Reid at Literary Review here.

A maverick theater and industrial designer, Norman Bel Geddes is best remembered for creating the undisputed hit of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Mounted in the midst of the Great Depression, the Fair focused on America’s promise of a utopian tomorrow. Geddes’s Futurama, a piece of “immersion theater,” took six hundred visitors at a time on a swooping, simulated airplane ride across America circa 1960. Few people in 1939 had ever ridden in a plane. Looking down, they saw everything from experimental farms and “floating” airports to seven-lane highways, multi-decked bridges, and radio-controlled traffic moving beneath suspended pedestrian walkways—all radical concepts at the time. More than twenty-four million people waited for up to five hours, in rain and hot sun, to experience it. Today, Futurama is considered the most iconic Fair exhibit of all time. Sponsored by General Motors to the tune of seven million dollars, the equivalent of ninety-one million dollars today, it was the largest animated model ever built: 35,738 square feet. It required the labor of some three thousand carpenters, electricians, draftsmen, and model-makers, and the manufacture of five-hundred thousand miniature buildings varying in scale, two million handmade miniature trees (eighteen different species, with imported moss for foliage), and fifty thousand futuristic silver automobiles—ten thousand of them designed to move.

more from B. Alexandra Szerlip at The Believer here.

From The Telegraph:

From Science:

A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a “do not eat” signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells.

A decade ago, biologist Irving Weissman of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, discovered that leukemia cells produce higher levels of a protein called CD47 than do healthy cells. CD47, he and other scientists found, is also displayed on healthy blood cells; it's a marker that blocks the immune system from destroying them as they circulate. Cancers take advantage of this flag to trick the immune system into ignoring them. In the past few years, Weissman's lab showed that blocking CD47 with an antibody cured some cases of lymphomas and leukemias in mice by stimulating the immune system to recognize the cancer cells as invaders. Now, he and colleagues have shown that the CD47-blocking antibody may have a far wider impact than just blood cancers. “What we've shown is that CD47 isn't just important on leukemias and lymphomas,” says Weissman. “It's on every single human primary tumor that we tested.” Moreover, Weissman's lab found that cancer cells always had higher levels of CD47 than did healthy cells. How much CD47 a tumor made could predict the survival odds of a patient.

More here.

Anne

By day there’s not a peep
from Anne who lives
in widowhood overhead
– except when she dozes off
over her diary
drops it on the floor

Otherwise not a peep

It’s another matter at night
then there’s all hell of a hubbub
Anne’s friends pound up the stairs
hollering their hellos
and crack open a feast
Some with a bottle of buttermilk
others nursing eggs

Towards dawn the neighbours are fed up
of fiddles and folksongs
The guests depart in haste
melting into the walls

When the police force the door
Anne sits at the kitchen table
writing

by Gerður Kristný
from Höggstaður
publisher: Mál og menning, Reykjavik, 2007
© Translation: 2008, Victoria Cribb

In original Icelandic after the jump

Read more »

UPDATE: The application deadline has passed and we are no longer accepting any.

UPDATE: At my friend (and former 3QD columnist) Kris Kotarski's suggestion, we have decided to add a $500 honararium to the internship.

Hello,

We have decided to offer an unpaid summer internship for six weeks starting on June 18th and ending on July 27th of this year. You will work with me on all aspects of running the site and can expect to spend between ten and twenty hours per week on this work. It does not matter where you are physically located as long as you have a reliable broadband internet connection. Here's some of what you will be doing:

• Doing one of the daily posts Tuesday through Sunday of each week
• Writing one Monday column for 3QD, if you wish to do so
• Dealing with reader submissions, questions, technical problems, etc.
• Working with me and others on a major overhaul of the site's design and functionality
• Scheduling the Monday columns and working with our writers
• Working with advertizers
• Working on our next philosophy prize
• Coming up with new ideas to improve the user-experience of our readers
• Assisting me in whatever else comes up, as things always do

The ideal candidate will have:

• At least one year of college education
• At least a fundamental knowledge of HTML
• Facility with using computers and the internet
• Ability to write clearly and organize material
• Availability to speak with me by Skype each weekday between 9 am and 1 pm, EDT (we can be flexible about the timing)

The intern will gain valuable experience in everything that goes into running a weekly online magazine and one of the largest intellectual filter blogs in the world. If you would like to apply, please send a cover letter, a resume, and one letter of recommendation to me before May 19th. (The letter of recommendation should be emailed to me directly by whoever writes it.) My email address is on our “About Us” page. We will make a decision and announce it here on May 28th.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Abbas

Peter Dreier in The Nation:

Unlike the rest of the world’s democracies, the United States doesn’t use the metric system, doesn’t require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn’t abolished the death penalty, and doesn’t celebrate May Day as an official national holiday.

Outside the US, May 1 is international workers’ day, observed with speeches, rallies, and demonstrations. Ironically, this celebration of working-class solidarity originated in the US labor movement in the United States and soon spread around the world, but it never earned official recognition in this country. Since 2006, however, American unions and immigrant rights activists have resurrected May 1 as a day of protest. And this year, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the rebirth of a national movement for social justice, a wide spectrum of activist groups will be out in the streets to give voice to the growing crusade for democracy and equality.

The original May Day was born of the movement for an eight-hour workday. After the Civil War, unregulated capitalism ran rampant in America. It was the Gilded Age, a time of merger mania, increasing concentration of wealth, and growing political influence by corporate power brokers known as Robber Barons. New technologies made possible new industries, which generated great riches for the fortunate few, but at the expense of workers, many of them immigrants, who worked long hours, under dangerous conditions, for little pay.

More here.

Adam Frank in NPR's Cosmos and Culture blog, 13.7 [h/t: Jennifer Ouellette]:

Krauss is not alone in his blindly dismissive attitude concerning philosophy. There is also the case of Leonard Susskind.

Susskind is an accomplished theorist who has proposed changing the very nature of cosmological science in light of recent developments in String Theory. In his book The Cosmic Landscape, Susskind argued that physics must give up the ideal of predicting the nature of the one Universe we observe because String Theory can't make these kinds of predictions. It's a huge claim that draws upon a contentious idea known as the “anthropic principle.” Ironically Susskind does not exert much effort dealing with the deep and deeply philosophical objections to this perspective. Waving his hands, Susskind poo-poo's philosophy's perspective on his radical idea saying “Frankly, I would have preferred to avoid the Philosophical discourse the Anthropic Principle excites”. Yea, obviously.

Susskind and Krauss think they are channelling the great Richard Feynman in their dismissive attitudes toward philosophy. Richard Feynman was famously scornful of the philosophy of science. He thought it was immune to finding relevant results or making real progress. But the problem is that we aren't living in Richard Feynman's age of physics anymore. Something strange happened on the way to the modern intersection of cosmology and foundational physics. Some measure of philosophical sophistication seems helpful, if nothing else, in confronting this new landscape.

David W. Dunlap in the New York Times:

If the winds are forgiving enough over Lower Manhattan — up where workers can see the whole outline of the island’s tip — a steel column will be hoisted into place Monday afternoon atop the exoskeleton of 1 World Trade Center and New York will have a new tallest building.

More important, downtown will have reclaimed its pole star.

Poking into the sky, the first column of the 100th floor of 1 World Trade Center will bring the tower to a height of 1,271 feet, making it 21 feet higher than the Empire State Building.

After several notorious false starts, a skyscraper has finally taken form at ground zero. At first, its twin cranes could be detected creeping over the jumbled tops of nearby towers. Then, at the rate of a new floor every week, it began reshaping the Manhattan skyline as seen from New Jersey. By late last fall, it could be spotted from the control tower at La Guardia Airport, eight and a half miles away.

A tower has again become an inescapable presence at the southern end of Manhattan.

More here.