Fresno sits about two thirds of the way down California’s huge Central Valley, which runs almost the entire length of the state, bounded to the west by the coastal ranges and to the east by the Sierra Nevada mountains. This is the most fertile farmland in the United States. The central and nothern parts get plenty of rain, but the southern part, called the San Joaquin Valley, is dry and subject to droughts, though with a few nice months of green in fall and spring. It could not have looked very promising when Fresno first appeared as a small outpost along the San Joaquin River; the expansion of the California Pacific Railroad to Fresno in the 1870s helped, however. And soon enough it became clear that despite the difficulty of the land, the connection to the farming infrastructure being set up to the north, including the railroad, made settling there worthwhile. Dutch and German farmers built irrigation ditches to make the land farmable. They were soon followed by immigrants from Mexico, Armenia, China, and Japan.

more from Michael Thomsen at n+1 here.

June Gruber in Greater Good:

Clearly, happiness is popular. But is happiness always good? Can feeling too good ever be bad? Researchers are just starting to seriously explore these questions, with good reason: By recognizing the potential pitfalls of happiness, we enable ourselves to understand it more deeply and we learn to better promote healthier and more balanced lives. Along with my colleagues Iris Mauss and Maya Tamir, I have reviewed the emerging scientific research on the dark side of happiness, and we have conducted our own research on the topic. These studies have revealed four ways that happiness might be bad for us.

1. Too much happiness can make you less creative—and less safe.

Happiness, it turns out, has a cost when experienced too intensely. For instance, we often are told that happiness can open up our minds to foster more creative thinking and help us tackle problems or puzzles. This is the case when we experience moderate levels of happiness. But according to Mark Alan Davis’s 2008 meta-analysis of the relationship between mood and creativity, when people experience intense and perhaps overwhelming amounts of happiness, they no longer experience the same creativity boost. And in extreme cases like mania, people lose the ability to tap into and channel their inner creative resources. What’s more, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found that too much positive emotion—and too little negative emotion—makes people inflexible in the face of new challenges.

More here.

The fish pendant, on Dick’s account, began to emit a golden ray of light, and Dick suddenly experienced what he called, with a nod to Plato, anamnesis: the recollection or total recall of the entire sum of knowledge. Dick claimed to have access to what philosophers call the faculty of “intellectual intuition”: the direct perception by the mind of a metaphysical reality behind screens of appearance. Many philosophers since Kant have insisted that such intellectual intuition is available only to human beings in the guise of fraudulent obscurantism, usually as religious or mystical experience, like Emmanuel Swedenborg’s visions of the angelic multitude. This is what Kant called, in a lovely German word, “die Schwärmerei,” a kind of swarming enthusiasm, where the self is literally en-thused with the God, o theos. Brusquely sweeping aside the careful limitations and strictures that Kant placed on the different domains of pure and practical reason, the phenomenal and the noumenal, Dick claimed direct intuition of the ultimate nature of what he called “true reality.” Yet the golden fish episode was just the beginning.

more from Simon Critchley at the Opinionater here.

The great popular artists have an instinctive relationship with the audience. That was true of Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday at the age of 83. He followed his gut. He kowtowed to no one. He knew that when pop culture really matters, it’s grounded in personal experience—in something the artist feels so strongly that other people cannot help but feel it too. Sendak had been involved with more than 50 children’s books by the time he became a national sensation in 1963 with Where the Wild Things Are. But even after Max in his white pajamas became part of modern mythology, right up there with the Beatle’s Nowhere Man, Sendak refused to take the audience for granted. He was resolutely independent to the end, and he expected the same of the public that had made him famous. There was something of the nineteenth-century reformer about Sendak—an old-fashioned optimism about the capacity of popular art to change public opinion and make the world a better place. He worked hard to provide public theater for children. He took on the subject of homelessness in 1993, with We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, his old familiar cast of adorable child-gremlins now living in hideaways jerrybuilt from cardboard boxes.

more from Jed Perl at TNR here.

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” — is the antithesis of optimism. In a book called “Breaking Murphy’s Law,” Suzanne C. Segerstrom, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, explained that optimism is not about being positive so much as it is about being motivated and persistent. Dr. Segerstrom and other researchers have found that rather than giving up and walking away from difficult situations, optimists attack problems head-on. They plan a course of action, getting advice from others and staying focused on solutions. Whenever my husband, a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, said, “It can’t be done,” I would seek a different approach and try harder — although I occasionally had to admit he was right. Dr. Segerstrom wrote that when faced with uncontrollable stressors, optimists tend to react by building “existential resources” — for example, by looking for something good to come out of the situation or using the event to grow as a person in a positive way. I was 16 when my mother died of cancer. Rather than dwell on the terrible void her death left in my life, I managed to gain value from the experience. I learned to apply her lifelong frugality more constructively, living each day as if it could be my last, but with a focus on the future in case it wasn’t. Yes, I saved, but I also chose not to postpone for some nebulous future the things I wanted to do and could, if I tried hard, find a way to do now. And I adopted a very forthright approach to life, believing that if I wanted something badly enough, I could probably overcome the odds against me.

More here.

Dear Readers and Applicants,

I must confess that I am extremely gratified by the number of amazingly talented and intelligent and fascinating young persons from four continents who applied for our internship. I feel sad that I can only take a maximum of two people but I would like to express my gratitude also to all the other remarkable individuals in the excellent pool of candidates: thank you so much for making the effort to apply. I am sorry that it didn't work out this time but I am glad that I got to know you a little bit, and I want to assure you that it was not necessarily a matter of any applicant being “better” than any other, it is just that I was looking for some specific skills and experience in certain areas. I wish you the best and hope that we have the opportunity to work together sometime in the future.

And now without further ado here are the two 3QD interns for summer 2012:

Henry Molofsky

Proudly hailing from Washington, DC, Henry now lives in Connecticut where he studies philosophy and music at Wesleyan University. He has previously worked at the nationally syndicated public radio program Afropop. He has also spent time studying and being a middle-school English teacher's assistant in Israel. He writes a lot of essays, which sometimes he'll admit he enjoys, but he also enjoys running in the woods, playing crazy parties with his top-40 cover band, and banging on West-African drums with nearly-correct technique. And he is a pianist.

Zujaja Tauqeer

Zujaja is a DPhil student researching military power and medical aid in Pakistan at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. A graduate of Brooklyn College, she will study medicine at Harvard Medical School after completing her DPhil. Born in Lahore, Zujaja left Pakistan with her family to escape persecution against Ahmadi Muslims, and someday, when she's finally out of the classroom, she hopes to return there and work to create an equitable and sustainable healthcare system.

Welcome Zujaja and Henry and get ready for June 18th! You are now Associate Editors of 3QD. And thanks once again to all the brilliant people who applied.

Yours,

Abbas

Robert Irwin. Slant/Light/Volume.

More here, here, and here.

Sven Birkerts in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

It was the face of F. Murray Abraham playing Antonio Salieri in Milos Forman's film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus that finally touched me off. Who knew that envy had so many expressions, that it was such a great subject? Why hadn't I gotten it before? I had seen Amadeusseveral times over the years, but this is how it is with movies, with books, with everything — you need the eyes to see what is to be seen. But even so, how could I still have thought that it was about Mozart. About — what does “about” even mean? Centering on? Mapping to? Representing? Mozart in the film has nothing to do with the Mozart of artistic imagination or our received notions of greatness. He is a silly little grasshopper, a buffoon, even though sublime melodies are seen to issue from his every pen stroke. He very clearly cannot help his genius; it has been stuffed into him like an irrepressible filling. I never understood: how could the man, the boy-man, be such a fool? It made no sense. At least not if Amadeus was viewed as his movie, about him. But the other night — it took this long — I got that I'd been dense. Amadeus was about Salieri, first to last, and if Mozart came across as he unflatteringly did, it was because Salieri cast him so in his rancorous memory. The gulf between Mozart's personality and his gift was what his rival saw, what his jealous rage projected.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

It has often struck me that no greater misfortune can befall a natural history museum than for it to come into enough money for renovations. These typically take the form of interactive screens displaying 'fun facts' directed at eight-year-olds, and they require the removal of anything that reeks of the past, which is to say also the removal of the very idea of natural history, in favor of some eternally present, unceasingly entertaining, Chuck E. Cheese-like arcade.

Just think about it: what kind of adult goes to a nature museum these days? I mean an adult who does not have some child in tow: a child, it is presumed, in need of perpetual edification? I mean a proper, auto-edifying, end-in-him-or-herself adult. These days, museums that are not about art are about nature, nature is about science, science is about education, and education, as we know, is for the kids, insofar as they, finally, are the future.

Art for the grown-ups, then; nature for the kids. But education must be fun, so out with the rancid body parts in formaldehyde with calligraphic labels in Latin; in with the touch screens that tell you, as if you did not already know this since the age of two or so, that dinosaurs are birds, that Pluto is no longer a planet, and, in case you forgot this for a fraction of a second, that learning is fun. But all this thoroughly and disgustingly ideological rebranding requires money, which, as I've already suggested, the best museums of natural history do not have.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi in Scientific American:

One of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics is also among the easiest to grasp. The weak Goldbach conjecture says that you can break up any odd number into the sum of, at most, three prime numbers (num­bers that cannot be evenly divided by any other num­ber except themselves or 1). For example:

35 = 19 + 13 + 3
or
77 = 53 + 13 + 11

Mathematician Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now inched toward a proof. He has shown that one can write odd numbers as sums of, at most, five primes—and he is hopeful about getting that down to three. Besides the sheer thrill of cracking a nut that has eluded some of the best minds in mathematics for nearly three centuries, Tao says, reaching that coveted goal might lead mathematicians to ideas useful in real life—for example, for encrypting sensitive data.

The weak Goldbach conjecture was proposed by 18th-century mathematician Christian Goldbach. It is the sibling of a statement concerning even numbers, named the strong Goldbach conjecture but actually made by his colleague, mathematician Leonhard Euler. The strong version says that every even number larger than 2 is the sum of two primes. As its name implies, the weak version would follow if the strong were true: to write an odd number as a sum of three primes, it would be sufficient to subtract 3 from it and apply the strong version to the resulting even number.

More here.

Continue reading here.

Laura Miller in Salon:

The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later. The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.

A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured. The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Belgian artist Ben Heine blends photography and pencil sketches to create imaginary scenes. He explains: “I find a location, do a drawing, then take a photo to combine with the drawing.

One piece, Pencil Vs Camera 57, was created in London last year and features model Caroline Madison lying in the street with a bird swooping down on her.

More here.

Still Life
… —static: from the Latin sto, stare, to stand.

Once there were four green apples arranged
In a simple pyramid on a white china plate.

Once a painter rendered them on a cheap canvas
That was left hanging in the kitchen of the house

She bought soon after a truck plowed through
The windshield of the car her husband was driving.

In the remodeled kitchen that still let in a draft,
After toast and tea, she would stand before the frame.

From the shadow limning the apples’ bottom edges
She could almost hear a low hum, the static of objects

Pulled through time, the slight hiss of their resistance,
The one sound when everything is standing still.
.

by H.L. Spelman

Marjorie Perloff in the Boston Review:

The national (or even transnational) demand for a certain kind of prize-winning, “well-crafted” poem—a poem that the New Yorker would see fit to print and that would help its author get one of the “good jobs” advertised by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs—has produced an extraordinary uniformity. Whatever the poet’s ostensible subject—and here identity politics has produced a degree of variation, so that we have Latina poetry, Asian American poetry, queer poetry, the poetry of the disabled, and so on—the poems you will read in American Poetry Review or similar publications will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the following characteristics: 1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself or on what the Russian Formalists called “the word as such”; 2) prose syntax with lots of prepositional and parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor (the sign of “poeticity”); 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany, usually based on a particular memory, designating the lyric speaker as a particularly sensitive person who really feels the pain, whether of our imperialist wars in the Middle East or of late capitalism or of some personal tragedy such as the death of a loved one.

More here.

Justin Erik Halldór Smith in his blog:

I am in Iceland for the first time in many years, for no better reason than that Icelandair offers extended stopovers on transatlantic flights at no additional cost. I cross the Atlantic as casually as one might take the subway from borough to borough, but now that I am here, again, in Reykjavik, it seems to me that, if we have to fly at all, stopovers in Iceland should not just be possible, but mandatory. They make it all make sense.

This basalt island, really only a side-effect of the volcanic eruptions of only one segment of the vast Mid-Atlantic Range (which also includes something called the 'Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone', where by contrast I hope never to find myself): this island, I say, is not all that far from the Faeroes, which are in turn a short hop to the Hebrides, and from there another shorter one to mainland Scotland. In the other direction, there is really only a channel, and not open ocean, separating Iceland from Greenland, and again a smaller one separating Greenland from Baffin, and Baffin from Labrador.

A series of small hops then, brings one from Europe to North America, and even in the absence of archaeological evidence it is not hard to understand why, when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in the 1530s, local Iroquois ran out to greet the ship with furs in hand, ready, to all appearances, to resume a well established trade.

More here.