In science fiction and fantasy tales, there is a long running fascination with the idea of dramatically diminishing or growing in stature. In the 1989 classic, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Rick Moranis invents a device which accidentally shrinks both his own and the neighbor’s children down to a quarter-of-an-inch tall. Preceding this by more than 100 years, Lewis Carroll wrote about a little girl who, after tumbling down a rabbit hole, nibbles on some cake and then grows to massive proportions. Nearly 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift described the adventures of Gulliver while on the island of Lilliputan, on which he is a giant, and then on the island of Brobdingnag, where everyone else is a giant.
These kinds of experiences, however, have been limited to the world of fictional stories. The world around us does not actually change in size. Nor, with the exception of too many late-night Chinese deliveries, do our bodies become appreciably larger or smaller.
Or at least, they were mythical until recently. A research group at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has managed to make people feel as though they actually inhabited bodies of vastly different size – either that of dolls or of giants.
Ma doesn't hear it. She's asleep, snorin' like an old brown bear after a dogfight. Don't know how she manages that. 'Cause I can hear it. The whole valley can hear it. The machines are huntin' tonight.
There ain't many of us left. Humans I mean. Most people who could do already escaped. Or tried to escape anyways. I don't know what happened to 'em. But we couldn't. Ma lost her leg to a landmine and can't walk. Sometimes she gets outside the cabin with a stick. Mostly she stays in and crawls. The girls do the work. I'm the man now.
Pa's gone. The machines got him. I didn't see it happen but my uncle came back for me. Took me to see Pa gettin' buried in the ground. There wasn't anythin' of Pa I could see that let me know it was Pa. When the machines get you there ain't much left. Just gristle mixed with rocks, covered in dust.
I slip outside. Omar's there waitin'. “What took ya so long?” he says. He's a boy like me but he's taller so he acts like he's older. “Ya got it?”
“Yeah,” I say. I take it out from under my shawl. It's a piece of mirror from the white pickup we found all flattened next to the stream. Truck looked like a giant gone stepped on it. I'd asked Omar how big the machines were and he'd said not that big. Not the ones we had 'round here. But he'd said talk was there be bigger machines out there. Out in the southlands. Machines that could walk. So big each step sound like thunder.
Suicide is contagious. Psychologists call it The Werther Effect, and its influence is easily measurable: after a well-publicized suicide, not only does the overall rate of suicide increase, but there is also a dramatic spike in the rate of single-driver car crashes. Psychologists offer various theories to explain the phenomenon, but no one can really know why this deathly consensus is wired into our thinking, why the compulsion to death can pass so easily and so subtly from one person to another. I still can’t explain the Plano suicides, why they began that year and why they stopped, and I don’t know if my own near-fatal collision was bound to those deaths by some algorithm of social cognition. More than a decade has passed, and when I talk to my Plano friends about that grim year, none of us can agree on the numbers of the dead, and we have trouble remembering the causes that we explained so certainly when we were sixteen. But I can still see that human figure, leaping in front of my car, even if the wind finally erased him into Plano’s immaculate sky.
more from Stefan Merrill Block at Granta here. (PS 93% to our fund raising goal and only about a day left. This is the perfect opportunity for the lazy, the indifferent, and the self-absorbed to step in and really close the gap. Your moment of redemption is here! Please take a minute or two to give something, even the smallest amount will help us continue to be what you would like us to continue being. Thanks.)
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was not burdened (nor did he burden his characters) with the morbidities of introspection. Delight, not psychological insight, was his stock-in-trade. Yet had he read the letter in which Wodehouse described himself as ‘a writing machine’, Jeeves might have said, as he once said to Bertie Wooster, rem acu tetigisti – ‘You’ve put your finger on the nub!’ The shy, socially awkward Wodehouse burned at a low wattage. The librettist Guy Bolton, recalling an innocent dalliance with a chorus girl, spoke of Wodehouse ‘sowing his one wild oat’. Not for him the bonhomie of the Drones Club and the distractions of the bright life, big city. Wodehouse and his wife had separate bedrooms and, when they travelled, they often had hotel rooms on separate floors. Ethel, a former chorus girl herself, may have been, as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, a ‘mixture of Mistress Quickly and Florence Nightingale with a touch of Lady Macbeth thrown in’, but to Wodehouse she was the perfect mate, ‘an angel in human form’ who looked after him and didn’t make demands. What Wodehouse craved was quiet and the company of his pipe, his pets and, above all, his typewriter. In 1902, when he was twenty, he published his first book, The Pothunters. On Valentine’s Day, 1975, he was discovered next to all the usual accoutrements, along with the manuscript of his half-completed last novel, published as Sunset at Blandings a couple years thence. Like the gnu he wrote about in ‘Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court’, he’d handed in his dinner pail, victim not of a crack shot but a heart attack.
Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ” It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, “We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.”
more from Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker here.
Jenny needed to go to A&E. Now. Martha grabbed her keys and glanced longingly towards the paprika-scented stew. Jenny, her new neighbour from two doors down, had called just as Martha and her husband Jim had begun eating dinner. Martha chided herself: what was she doing thinking of her own needs in this sort of situation? She remembered Jenny's moans on the phone. With a whisk of her coat and a bye-bye to her husband, Martha slipped out into the chill. Seven hours later, utterly exhausted, Martha returned from A&E. Jim smiled ruefully as he welcomed her. “Always the do-gooder,” he said, kissing her on her forehead. “You've such a good heart. Sometimes too good.” Martha felt better at the kind words. Still, she would go about exhausted all day tomorrow. But she loved the children she cared for – that's why she'd chosen nursing as her profession. The thought slipped in unbidden: “All this drama, just because Jenny had a migraine?” Stop that, Martha told herself. Migraines, she knew, could be dangerous. And the medications had reduced Jenny's pain.
A few days later, Jenny called from work. Her older son wasn't answering the phone. He must have slept through his alarm. More than that, he'd just taken a new job; it was important he be there on time. “Martha, could you please check on him? The key is under the doormat…” Martha was always happy to help. But this? It felt odd. Maybe Jim had a point – maybe she was too kind. But still, Martha hated to disappoint. She'd always been that way; even as a child, she had been a mainstay in caring for her mother, whose depression had ultimately led to alcoholism. Martha found Jenny's son snoring on his bed. “What are you doing sleeping in?” Martha demanded, her voice shaking with anger. Martha was surprised – she rarely got mad at anyone. Except herself.
Stomach acid has long been blamed for acid reflux, heartburn and other ills. But now some experts are starting to think that the problems may lie not just in the acid coming up from the stomach but in the food going down. The idea has been getting a lot of attention lately, notably in popular books like “Crazy Sexy Diet” and “The Acid Alkaline Food Guide” — which claim that readers can improve their health by focusing on the balance of acid and alkaline in the diet, mostly by eating more vegetables and certain fruits and fewer meats and processed foods. While the science behind such claims is not definitive, some research does suggest a benefit to low-acid eating. A handful of recent studies have shown a link between bone health and a low-acid diet, while some reports suggest that the acidity of the Western diet increases the risk of diabetes and heart disease.
This year, a small study found that restricting dietary acid could relieve reflux symptoms like coughing and hoarseness in patients who had not been helped by drug therapy, according to the journal Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology. In the study, 12 men and 8 women with reflux symptoms who hadn’t responded to medication were put on a low-acid diet for two weeks, eliminating all foods and beverages with a pH lower than 5. The lower the pH, the higher the acidity; highly acidic foods and beverages include diet sodas (2.9 to 3.7), strawberries (3.5) and barbecue sauce (3.7). According to the study, 19 out of 20 patients improved on the low-acid diet, and 3 became completely asymptomatic.
Mikael Levin. Solar Cartography. Chinati Foundation Residency Project. Dec 2005.
“… Using two bullet holes in the Locker Plant's front windows as reference points, Levin used tautly suspended pieces of multicolored string to track the December daylight's procession through the room. The resulting sculpture acted as a sort of free-floating sundial or three-dimensional photogram. In a related work, on the Locker Plant's west wall Levin displayed a series of photographs taken from a fixed point in Chinati's Arena building charting the movement of sunlight through the space.”
In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests; in July, I talked to Spain’s indignados; from there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; and, a few weeks ago, I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: “We are the 99%.”
That slogan echoes the title of an article that I recently published, entitled “Of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%,” describing the enormous increase in inequality in the United States: 1% of the population controls more than 40% of the wealth and receives more than 20% of the income. And those in this rarefied stratum often are rewarded so richly not because they have contributed more to society – bonuses and bailouts neatly gutted that justification for inequality – but because they are, to put it bluntly, successful (and sometimes corrupt) rent-seekers.
This is not to deny that some of the 1% have contributed a great deal. Indeed, the social benefits of many real innovations (as opposed to the novel financial “products” that ended up unleashing havoc on the world economy) typically far exceed what their innovators receive.
But, around the world, political influence and anti-competitive practices (often sustained through politics) have been central to the increase in economic inequality. And tax systems in which a billionaire like Warren Buffett pays less tax (as a percentage of his income) than his secretary, or in which speculators, who helped to bring down the global economy, are taxed at lower rates than those who work for their income, have reinforced the trend.
Research in recent years has shown how important and ingrained notions of fairness are. Spain’s protesters, and those in other countries, are right to be indignant: here is a system in which the bankers got bailed out, while those whom they preyed upon have been left to fend for themselves.
Samuel McNerney over at a guest post at one of Scientific American's blogs:
Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. However, as George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez explain:
Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds… [the mind] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment… Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding.
What exactly does this mean? It means that our cognition isn’t confined to our cortices. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world. This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand; we are drawing upon the physical inability to not see something over our heads and the mental feeling of uncertainty. Or why we understand warmth with affection; as infants and children the subjective judgment of affection almost always corresponded with the sensation of warmth, thus giving way to metaphors such as “I’m warming up to her.”
Embodied cognition has a relatively short history. Its intellectual roots date back to early 20th century philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey and it has only been studied empirically in the last few decades. One of the key figures to empirically study embodiment is University of California at Berkeley professor George Lakoff.
Lakoff was kind enough to field some questions over a recent phone conversation, where I learned about his interesting history first hand.
The simplest description of a black hole is a region of space-time from which no light is reflected and nothing escapes. The simplest description of consciousness is a mind that absorbs many things and attends to a few of them. Neither of these concepts can be captured quantitatively. Together they suggest the appealing possibility that endlessness surrounds us and infinity is within.
But our inability to grasp the immaterial means we’re stuck making inferences, free-associating, if we want any insight into the unknown. Which is why we talk obscurely and metaphorically about “pinning down” perception and “hunting for dark matter” (possibly a sort of primordial black hole). The existence of black holes was first hypothesized a decade after Einstein laid the theoretical groundwork for them in the theory of relativity, and the phrase “black hole” was not coined until 1968.
Likewise, consciousness is still such an elusive concept that, in spite of the recent invention of functional imaging – which has allowed scientists to visualize the different areas of the brain – we may not understand it any better now than we ever have before. “We approach [consciousness] now perhaps differently than we have in the past with our new tools,” says neuroscientist Joy Hirsch.
“The questions [we ask] have become a little bit more sophisticated and we’ve become more sophisticated in how we ask the question,” she adds – but we're still far from being able to explain how the regions of the brain interact to produce thought, dreams, and self-awareness. “In terms of understanding, the awareness that comes from binding remote activities of the brain together, still remains what philosophers call, ‘The hard problem.'”
Like this alabaster box whose art Is frail as a cassia-flower, is my heart, Carven with delicate dreams and wrought With many a subtle and exquisite thought.
Therein I treasure the spice and scent Of rich and passionate memories blent Like odours of cinnamon, sandal and clove, Of song and sorrow and life and love.
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School , told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as The Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States . It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolph Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer.
When Tim Minchin – actor, comedian, confirmed atheist – decided to take his comedy to America's Bible belt, we were concerned he might be burnt at the stake. Here, he describes what happened next…
Tim Minchin in The Observer:
Whenever a friend or fan finds out I've started touring the States, there is an inevitable raising of the eyebrows (or eyebrow, if they are blessed with that most enviable of talents). There are two reasons behind such browular elevations, the first of which is born of comedy snobbery: Brits and Aussies are very fond of saying that Americans “don't get irony”. This is absurd; if anything, they don't get absurdity, which the Brits and the Irish probably “get” better than anyone else. Apart from that, I have observed a surprising consistency in what makes people laugh, notwithstanding geography-specific subject matter, which I avoid. (The only other cultural-comic quirks I have observed are that the English really like camp men making thinly veiled bum-sex double entendres, and Australians love swearing. We think it's fucking hilarious.)
The second thing that concerns people about me touring the US is that they fear my penchant for jaunty-but-vehement criticism of religion will at best result in empty auditoriums, and at worst get me shot. But the perception that the country is packed wall-to-wall with Christian fundies is as specious as the irony myth. There is no doubt that many Americans have what seems to be a near-erotic relationship with the two-millennium-dead Middle-Eastern Jewish magician-preacher we call Jesus. But there are frickin' loads of people in America, and even if the percentage of the population that is not religious is only 10% (it's a much greater number, surely), then there are still 33 million potential ticket-buyers.
MEASURING THE MINDS OF OTHER creatures is a perplexing problem. One yardstick scientists use is brain size, since humans have big brains. But size doesn’t always match smarts. As is well known in electronics, anything can be miniaturized. Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid—before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math. Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena’s is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.
Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. “It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.
Q What do you get if you cross a Jane Austen novel with a crime thriller? A The latest fiction from PD James- 'Death Comes to Pemberley'. Here the distinguished novelist explains why she decided to combine her two literary passions to produce a sequel which opens with a brutal murder at Pemberley.
A. Like many – probably most – novelists, I am happiest when plotting and planning or writing a new book, and the period in between, once the excitement of the publication is over, is usually spent considering what to write next. The prospect of becoming 90 was a time of important decision-making, since I had become increasingly aware that neither years nor creative energy last forever. After the publication of my latest Dalgliesh story, The Private Patient, in 2008, I decided that I could be self-indulgent and turn to an idea that had been in my mind for some time: to combine my two lifelong enthusiasms, namely for writing detective fiction and for the novels of Jane Austen, by setting my next book in Pemberley. My own feeling about sequels is ambivalent, largely because the greatest writing pleasure for me is in the creation of original characters, and I have never been tempted to take over another writer’s people or world, but I can well understand the attraction of continuing the story of Elizabeth and Darcy. Austen’s characters take such a hold on our imagination that the wish to know more of them is irresistible, and it is perhaps not surprising that there have been more than 70 sequels to Austen’s novels.
Pride and Prejudice, which was originally titled First Impressions, was written between October 1796 and August 1797. Austen’s father wrote to a London bookseller, Thomas Cadell, to ask if he had any interest in seeing the manuscript, but he declined by return of post. It was in 1811 and 1812 that Austen revised the novel, making it shorter, and it was published in 1813 under the title Pride and Prejudice. It is frustrating that the original manuscript has not been discovered as it would have been fascinating to see what portions were excised and which retained and possibly extended. In Death Comes to Pemberley, I have chosen the earlier date of 1797 for the marriages both of Elizabeth and her older sister Jane, and the book begins in 1803 when Elizabeth and Darcy have been happily together for six years and are preparing for the annual autumn ball which will take place the next evening. With their guests, which include Jane and her husband Bingley, they have been enjoying an informal family dinner followed by music and are preparing to retire for the night when Darcy sees from the window a chaise being driven at speed down the road from the wild woodlands. When the galloping horses have been pulled to a standstill, Lydia Wickham, Elizabeth’s youngest sister, almost falls from the chaise, hysterically screaming that her husband has been murdered. Darcy organises a search party and, with the discovery of a blood-smeared corpse in the woodlands, the peace both of the Darcys and of Pemberley is shattered as the family becomes involved in a murder investigation.
