Marilynne Robinson in Guernica:

All thinking about the good society, what is to be wished for in the way of life in community, necessarily depends on assumptions about human nature. All sorts of things have been assumed about human nature, and have been found persuasive or at least have been accepted as true over the course of history. We have had a long conversation in this country about class, race, ethnicity, and gender, how the moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities attributed to those in favored or disfavored categories create the circumstances of their lives, and, as they do so, reinforce an acceptance of the belief that these qualities are real, these characterizations are true. When there were no women in medical school or law school, or in higher education, it was easy to believe that they would not be able to endure their rigors. We in this country are fortunate to have a moderately constant loyalty to the idea of equality that has moved us to test the limits imposed by these cultural patterns, some of them very ancient, some of them once virtually universal and now still deeply entrenched in many parts of the world.

Of course we have not realized anything approaching this ideal. The meaning of it is much disputed—does it mean equality of opportunity or equality of outcome? Frankly, if we were to achieve either we might find that it resembled the other nearly enough to make the question moot. In any case, our failures, real and perceived, sometimes manifest as an anger with the project itself, and this distracts attention from the fact that we have made a very interesting experiment, full of implication, in putting aside traditional definitions and expectations and finding that when they are not supported culturally, which is to say artificially, they tend to fade away. We can learn from our own history that the nature of our species, and our nature as individuals, is an open question.

More here.

From MIT's Technology Review:

The idea is simple. Psychologists have known for some years that it is almost impossible to speak when your words are replayed to you with a delay of a fraction of a second.

Kurihara and Tsukada have simply built a handheld device consisting of a microphone and a speaker that does just that: it records a person's voice and replays it to them with a delay of about 0.2 seconds. The microphone and speaker are directional so the device can be aimed at a speaker from a distance, like a gun.

In tests, Kurihara and Tsukada say their speech jamming gun works well: “The system can disturb remote people's speech without any physical discomfort.”

Their tests also identify some curious phenomena. They say the gun is more effective when the delay varies in time and more effective against speech that involves reading aloud than against spontaneous monologue. Sadly, they report that it has no effect on meaningless sound sequences such as “aaaaarghhh”.

More here.

Emily Colette Wilkinson in The Millions:

Once you have seen the astonishingly evocative portraits of the neo-Modernist painter Carl Köhler (1919-2006), you will wonder how he died relatively unknown outside of his native Sweden. Such are the vagaries of the art world: Andy Warhol‘s rather uninteresting 200 One Dollar Bills sells for over 40 million dollars, while the remarkable author portraits of Carl Köhler go all but unnoticed.

But this, perhaps, is changing. Thanks to the efforts of his son, Henry, Köhler’s work has made its way outside of Sweden for the first time. If you live in New York, you might have seen “Beyond the Words: The Author Portraits of Carl Köhler” at the Brooklyn Central Library this past winter and spring, or the write-up in The New York Times’ blog Paper Cuts. The show was also briefly at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library, in Washington, D.C., in July and August. Now, this exhibit is on its way to Canada: Its next stop is the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto (January-March 2010). After that, the show’s on to the University of British Columbia’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre in Vancouver (April-June/July 2010). With any luck, these shows will not be the last.

While Köhler’s figure drawings from his time in Paris in the 1950′s are remarkable, as are his abstract figural paintings, it is what he called his “authorportraits,” his paintings of European and American writers, intellectuals, and popular artists that I am most taken with—as much for their content as for their formal diversity. These portraits comprise an astonishing variety of media and styles, a variety that reflects the variety of Köhler’s subjects, who included James Joyce, Günter Grass, Joyce Carol Oats, Michael Jackson, Simone de Beauvoir, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among many others.

More here. [Photo shows portrait of Franz Kafka.]

From Guardian:

Most of us can only aspire to Ikea, but Alex Johnson's Bookshelf takes a beguiling look at the possibilities available if your budget, your rooms and your library are big enough. Here he takes us on a browse through some of the most beautiful.

Equilibrium
Colombia-born Alejandro Gomez Stubbs, the designer of Equilibrium, says 'The concept was to design a piece that contrasted stylish modern design with playfulness and animation'

More here.

June 16

It's Bloomsday in Dublin
and wherever Ulysses works
as an advertizing man
with an unfaithful wife
as I sit here listening
to a lecture on Flannery
O'Conner, Frank O'Conner
and Frank, I think of going
to Dublin with you and buying
a toy wedding ring at
Woolworth's and the phrase
'mock funeral' comes
to me I don't know what it
means though I remember being
the groom at a mock wedding
with a girl named Ann in 1956
I was eight and so was she
and all the other children
were in the procession it was
the first hot night in June and
yes she said yes I will yes

by David Lehman

From New Scientist:

Why wait to be born to develop a healing hand? Mouse fetuses will give up stem cells to repair their mother's heart. The discovery could explain why half the women who develop heart weakness during or just after pregnancy recover spontaneously. Hina Chaudhry of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City mated normal female mice with males genetically engineered to produce a green-fluorescing protein in all their body cells. Half the resulting fetuses also produced the protein, making it easy to spot any fetal tissue in the mother. Chaudhry's team inflicted a heart attack on the pregnant mice and killed them two weeks later to take a look at their hearts. They found some fluorescent cells in the mothers' damaged heart tissue, where they had accelerated repair by changing into new heart cells, including beating cardiomyocytes and blood vessel cells. Chaudhry says that the phenomenon is an evolutionary mechanism: the fetus promotes its own survival by protecting its mother's heart. Because the cells are easy to obtain from the placenta and unlikely to cause immunological reactions, they could provide a new and potentially limitless source of stem cells for repairing damaged hearts.

“The study is the first to show conclusively that fetal cells contained in the placenta assist in cardiac tissue repair,” says Jakub Tolar, director of stem-cell therapies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

More here. (Congratulations to dear friend Hina on her groundbreaking work.)

Santorum says that 62 percent of people who go to college lose their “faith commitment” there. (Odd, isn’t it, how even people who believe in the old values have to flop back on social-science talk—“faith commitment” for plain religion?) Some have questioned those statistics, which come from a 2007 report that found even greater decline among those who don’t attend college. I do not know how one measures such things, but I think it inevitable that questioning of childhood beliefs should take place at various stages of adolescence. This does not happen in junior year or senior year on campus. It is part of a long process called growing up. At some point, late or early, children disengage themselves from the stories crafted for them. Their loss of belief in the tooth fairy is only slightly behind their loss of teeth. There is a slow motion race to disappear between Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. The Stork undergoes, for some, a lengthier demise—and “the birds and the bees” do not long outlast it. Others, I hope, soon disabuse themselves of belief in their parents’ infallibility. Certain religious myths are discarded without necessarily losing faith. That I do not believe in Noah’s Ark does not mean that I must stop believing in God—though certain home schooling parents force that connection on their kids.

more from Garry Wills at the NYRB here.

Percy’s medical career was cut short in 1942, when he contracted tuberculosis six months into an internship at Bellevue Hospital. He spent the next two years recovering in a sanatorium in the Adirondacks, observant and restless as ever but largely confined to bed. While both his brothers and his best friend were serving their country honorably, he was flat on his back, dramatically detached from action of any kind. Percy had always been somewhat reserved — unsurprising for a boy who had sustained such huge losses so early. In the hospital, cut off from friends and family and any feeling of connection to world events, he turned further inward, and, as always, found escape in books. Rather than medical texts, though, Percy picked up Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, and then Camus, Sartre, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and Tolstoy. The answers he was seeking, he realized, were not necessarily to be found in science, and the questions he was forming were new as well. As he would later explain in an essay titled “From Facts to Fiction” in his collection Signposts in a Strange Land, What began to interest me was not so much a different question as a larger question, not the physiological and pathological processes within man’s body but the problem of man himself, the nature and destiny of man; specifically and more immediately, the predicament of man in a modern technological society.

more from Lisa Peet at The Millions here.

Adam Weinstein in Mother Jones:

As you weave through interstate traffic, you're unlikely to notice another plain-looking Peterbilt tractor-trailer rolling along in the right-hand lane. The government plates and array of antennas jutting from the cab's roof would hardly register. You'd have no idea that inside the cab an armed federal agent operates a host of electronic countermeasures to keep outsiders from accessing his heavily armored cargo: a nuclear warhead with enough destructive power to level downtown San Francisco.

That's the way the Office of Secure Transportation (OST) wants it. At a cost of $250 million a year, nearly 600 couriers employed by this secretive agency within the US Department of Energy use some of the nation's busiest roads to move America's radioactive material wherever it needs to go—from a variety of labs, reactors and military bases, to the nation's Pantex bomb-assembly plant in Amarillo, Texas, to the Savannah River facility. Most of the shipments are bombs or weapon components; some are radioactive metals for research or fuel for Navy ships and submarines. The shipments are on the move about once a week.

The OST's operations are an open secret, and much about them can be gleaned from unclassified sources in the public domain. Yet hiding nukes in plain sight, and rolling them through major metropolises like Atlanta, Denver, and LA, raises a slew of security and environmental concerns, from theft to terrorist attack to radioactive spills. “Any time you put nuclear weapons and materials on the highway, you create security risks,” says Tom Clements, a nuclear security watchdog for the nonprofit environmental group Friends of the Earth.

More here.

Daniella Cheslow in First Post:

Israeli newspapers warn daily of the Iranian nuclear threat, but for the past week-and-a-half, Israeli filmgoers have packed movie theatres to watch a drama set in Tehran.

A Separation, a domestic drama directed by Iranian Asghar Farhadi, bested an Israeli rival and three others to win the award for best foreign film.

Israelis were rooting hard for their own Oscar contender, Joseph Cedar’s Footnote, a Talmudic scholar saga. But their interest in A Separation was piqued by the rare glimpse it offered into the living rooms of a country they regard as a threat to their very survival.

“It’s very well acted, exceptionally well-written and very moving,” said Yair Raveh, film critic for Israel’s leading entertainment magazine, Pnai Plus. “Ultimately you don’t think about nuclear bombs or dictators threatening world peace. You see them driving cars and going to movies and they look exactly like us.”

Israel, like the West, accuses Iran of using its nuclear programme as a cover to build bombs, and is afraid they would be turned against the Jewish state. Tehran insists it is producing energy, not weapons.

A Separation takes viewers far away from the nuclear showdown, chronicling the drama of an Iranian woman who wants to divorce her husband because he refuses to move abroad with her, preferring to stay behind to tend to his ailing father.

More here.

John Cotter in Open Letters Monthly:

In literature as in life, there is something to be said for indeterminacy, poetical ambiguity, and the aching, open synapses of incomplete ideas. But the essays of Gore Vidal are a break from all that, a weather station in the Alps. When the air is clear, you can see across borders; when it’s cloudy, chats by the fireside agitate and charm.

Atypically for a critic of the 20th century, Gore Vidal does not subordinate his perceptions to any school or ideology. This is why he can be trusted. For models, he looks to the worldly, progressive belletrists of the late 19th and early 20th century: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams. Note the absence of their immediate predecessors: Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson. Vidal is not a romantic—his mind is empirical. Though he reads with a sympathetic eye, his judgments are sonorous with authority.

Though he often writes of politics, he is a critic and a satirist rather than a pundit, and much of even this work comes by way of book reviewing. “I start from the premise that the creator is ‘right,’” he notes, in the introduction to his second collection of essays, Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship. “I try to inhabit his work, to enjoy it, to be—very simply—had by the artist. Only later does one attempt to answer the question: to what extent has the maker of the world accomplished what he set out to do?” Mark that try. Vidal is a natural skeptic, and one of the pleasures of his criticism is the extent to which he refuses to be had by certain writers, try as they might. He claims to feel no pinch of sadism, and though his dismissive aperçus are rightly famous (on John Barth: “This isn’t bad, except as prose”; on Theodore Roosevelt: “Give a sissy a gun and he will kill everything in sight”), I don’t want to go on quoting them here, because they fill up space all too often in newspaper profiles and what Martin Amis calls the “shithead factfile” that precedes interviews. Isolated, these blow-gun darts of observation shock and amuse, yes, but they also diminish the author, show him only as a drawing-room wit and not the serious reader and thinker that, on more thorough perusal, he reveals himself to be.

More here.

Hello,

The period for nominating entries for the 3QD Arts & Literature Prize is over.

To browse the full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

Good luck to all! The voting round closes on Tuesday, March 6, 2012, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on March 7, 2012. Winners of the contest will be announced on March 19, 2012.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

PLEASE BE AWARE: We have multiple ways of detecting fraud such as multiple votes being cast by the same person. We will disqualify anyone attempting to cheat.

Cheers,

Abbas

Change

Change is the new,

improved

word for god,

lovely enough
to raise a song

or implicate

a sea of wrongs,
mighty enough,

like other gods,

to shelter,
bring together,

and estrange us.

Please, god,
we seem to say,

change us.
.

by Wendy Videlock
from Poetry, Vol. 193, No. 4, January
publisher Poetry, Chicago, 2009

From Phys.Org:

Attention, star scientists: Pierre Azoulay is watching you. Not literally, of course: Azoulay, an economist, inhabits an office tucked away in the MIT Sloan School of Management, far from any lab. But his forte is original research about how life scientists work — or, more precisely, what makes them work well. Which kinds of grants lead to the most creative scientific research? When elite scientists die or switch jobs, what happens to the output of their former colleagues and co-authors?

Information about those questions is just not readily available. Except to Azoulay: The hard numbers supporting his findings come from a unique database charting the careers of 12,000 scientific stars, which he has painstakingly built up over nearly a decade in collaboration with Joshua Graff Zivin, an economist at the University of California at San Diego. The database paints a kind of pointillist picture, with statistical dots representing those star scientists: It’s a complete record of their jobs, awards, patents, papers, their papers’ citations and more. If a life scientist has achieved almost any measure of acclaim in the United States during the last half-century, Azoulay knows about it. “In some sense I have a dossier on each of them and have become intimately familiar with all of them,” says Azoulay, a voluble Frenchman who talks about his own work with good-humored detachment. “I am a glutton for punishment in terms of data. I have never done a project that uses readily available data.”

More here.

From Columbia.edu:

Sarah Sze, Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts, has been chosen to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia in 2013. Her work will be presented by Holly Block and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in the 55th International Art Exhibition. The work, titled Triple Point, will inhabit and directly comment upon the architecture of the 1930s Palladian-style structure of the U.S. Pavilion designed by famed architects William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich, appearing to modify the building’s structure without actual physical change. “Sarah Sze is a perfect choice to deftly engage the U. S. Pavilion,” said Carol Becker, Dean of Faculty. “Her site-specific work is dramatic, playful, seductive and filled with ideas about the fragility and durability of contemporary life. She’s a fantastic artist, a great teacher and we are proud to have her on our faculty.”

Sze has won acclaim for her minutely detailed, accumulative installations, in which everyday items such as coffee cups, plastic bottles and electrical fans become vital objects that defy the boundaries between the throwaway and the precious, the mundane and the monumental. Sze has always been known for work that challenges viewers to experience space in unexpected ways, and her installation at the U.S. Pavilion at the Biennale promises to do the same on a grand scale. Sze will create a sequence of constructed environments that will activate the Pavilion’s architecture and extend beyond the building and into the courtyard, blurring the perceptual boundaries between the site’s interior and exterior.
In conjunction with the installation, the Bronx Museum of the Arts will create a video stream documenting Sze’s process of conceiving, fabricating, and installing the piece. This will extend the project’s reach beyond the Giardini and link Sze with a worldwide audience.

More here.

The truth is that Keynes overwhelmed Hayek, simply by making more interesting and relevant statements. Of course, the roundaboutness of production under capitalism may sometimes lead to waste, but that does not justify government inactivity. Economists have squabbled about many things since the 1930s, including the relative effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policies in a world where governments “do something” about deep recessions. But the case for policy activism of some kind is fairly uncontroversial. The concepts and ideas that figured in the Keynes–Hayek debate of 1931 have hardly ever been mentioned in the subsequent debates. By the 1950s, Hayek was a marginal figure in Anglo-American macroeconomics. Wapshott tries to substantiate the significance of the 1931 spat by seeing it as the source of a later multiplicity of disputes between the Keynesians and free market enthusiasts. But this is neither correct as an account of how the various disputes began and developed, nor as an appreciation of Hayek’s greatness. (And my interpretation – which may be wrong – is that Wapshott is keener on Hayek than on Keynes. As with a good detective novel, the suspense is maintained to the very last page.) Hayek surrendered to Keynes and the Keynesians on money and macroeconomics, and from the mid-1940s rebuilt his reputation by magnificent contributions to political philosophy and the philosophy of law. These contributions have only a tenuous relationship with Austrian capital theory and theorizing about roundabout production methods. Wapshott should not pretend that there was some sort of continuity between Hayek’s early work on money and his later work on the philosophy of the State, or that the 1931 debate had a special role in initiating later arguments.

more from Tim Congdon at the TLS here.

The most important American psychologist since William James, and perhaps the most important psychologist altogether since Carl Jung, was Abraham Maslow (1908-1970). Maslow’s brainchild was the ideal of the “self-actualizing” person, the supreme human type who becomes everything he is capable of becoming. “Everything?,” one may justly ask. That has a Nietzschean ring to it, and leaves a lot of room for moral ugliness and even enormity. Thus self-actualization has drawn heavy fire, principally from conservative intellectuals, as typical Sixties folderol, a bad idea endlessly spreading, infesting the public mind like a colony of poisonous spiders, and contributing to the dangerous stupidity of our culture. Such censure is not entirely misguided. The predominant effect of Maslow’s key idea, at least as it has been transmitted by various acolytes, epigoni, and pseudo-philosophical beachcombers, is far from wholesome. And yet Maslow himself must be distinguished from his following. He was a serious thinker with a vision of human sublimity for a democratic age, revering the extraordinary and sometimes far from democratic minds with whom he consorted, and contended, throughout his life: Aristotle, Nietzsche, Freud. Maslow may indeed have a lot to answer for, even if he did not intend or foresee the worst consequences of his line of thought, but before he is pilloried as a false prophet or worse we need to measure him by his own ideas and not what others have made of them. Abraham Harold Maslow was born on April 1, 1908, in New York City, the first child of Samuel, a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a cooper, and Rose, his first cousin. Abe grew up in Brooklyn, fearing his father, a rough-hewn, hard-drinking man, and loathing his mother, whom he later described as “schizophrenogenic” — the type of mother “who makes crazy people, crazy children.”

more from Algis Valiunas at The New Atlantis here.