In the fall of 1965, a season that brought movies as distinct as “Alphaville” and “Thunderball” to the screen, Pauline Kael came to dinner at Sidney Lumet’s apartment, in New York. Lumet was then a prolific young director, having just finished shooting his tenth feature, “The Group,” for United Artists. Kael was a small-time movie critic who had recently arrived from Northern California. Her hardcover début, “I Lost It at the Movies,” had appeared that spring, to critical and popular acclaim, but she had never been on staff at any publication, and had only recently begun to write for major magazines. Lumet liked Kael’s work. Over the previous few weeks, he had allowed her on his set as a reporter, hoping she would learn something about shooting technique. Also present that night was the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, and after a few drinks—actually, after quite a lot of drinks—Hirschfeld and Kael started quibbling about the uses of movie criticism. Finally, Hirschfeld asked her point-blank what she thought critics were good for. Kael gestured toward Lumet. “My job,” she said, “is to show him which way to go.” The evening ended soon afterward. Lumet later explained, “I thought, This is a very dangerous person.”

more from Nathan Heller at The New Yorker here.

Ilyana Kuziemko and Michael I. Norton offer a psychological explanation of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Scientific American:

If ever Americans were up for a bit of class warfare, now would seem to be the time. The current financial downturn has led to a $700 billion tax-payer-financed bank bailout and an unemployment rate stuck stubbornly above nine percent. Onto this scene has stepped the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, which seeks to bring together a disparate group of protesters united in their belief that the current income distribution is unfair. “The one thing we all have in common is that We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” says their website. In an era of bank bailouts and rising poverty – and where recent data show that the top 1 percent control as much as 35 percent of the total wealth in America – it would appear that the timing of this movement to reconsider the allocation of wealth could not be more perfect.

Or, maybe not.

Support for redistribution, surprisingly enough, has plummeted during the recession. For years, the General Social Survey has asked individuals whether “government should reduce income differences between the rich and the poor.” Agreement with this statement dropped dramatically between 2008 and 2010, the two most recent years of data available. Other surveys have shown similar results.

What might explain this trend?

Douglass C. North in Business Economics:

FORMAL ECONOMIC theory has become increasingly mathematical, elegant, and precise. It also increasingly has failed to confront the economic problems of societies. Economics, in consequence, is slowly and painfully moving away from the formal mathematical models built around a frictionless, static conceptual structure. Frank Hahn, one of the pioneers of general equilibrium theory expressed it succinctly:

“…there will be an increasing realization by theorists that radical changes in questions and methods are required if we are to deliver, not practical, but theoretically useful results.” (Hahn, 1991, 47)

It is not as clear where economics is going. But the direction is suggested by two glaring shortcomings of neoclassical theory: it is a frictionless theory inn world in which the frictions are where the action is, and it is static in a world in which dynamic change is going on at an unprecedented rate. Remedying these defects requires that economics builds on its strengths, modifies the unrealistic assumptions that made it frictionless, and incorporates time into the analysis to confront the issues of economic change.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

Dismissing Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party as overhyped minority pursuits, Brooks stares into the tortured soul of Middle America and sees a born-again Calvinist tearing up her credit cards and bemoaning the culture of bailouts. “While the cameras surround the flamboyant fringes, the rest of the country is on a different mission,” Brooks writes. “Quietly and untelegenically, Americans are trying to repair their economic values … the moral norms that undergird our economic system.”

I am tempted to ask D.B. whether he has turned on prime-time television lately, or visited Las Vegas, the site of tonight’s Republican debate, but tacky reality shows, cavernous gambling halls, and upscale jiggle joints are, perhaps, part of the “flamboyant fringes” of American society. So let’s look at the evidence that Brooks cites, beginning with an opinion poll suggesting that three quarters of Americans think they would be better off with no debt and the fact that eight million people have stopped using bank-issued credit cards.

The figure for credit-card usage is accurate enough, but it has nothing reason to with values. The reason many people are carrying fewer pieces of plastic in their wallets is that banks, considering them to be bad lending risks in a deep recession, have cut off their access to credit.

An interview with Chris Lydon (listen here):

I arrived in the States twenty years ago, to the month. When I look at the wealth and income distribution in the United States today, I’m looking at Mexico in the 1970s and Brazil in the 1960s. This is not America. This is not a land of opportunity. You can’t talk about opportunity when 60 percent of the population can’t afford to go to college, where the costs of basically a middle-class education far outstrip the resources of the average family; when you have 54-million people living, in a family of four, on less than $22,314 a year; and meanwhile, the top one percent have trebled their share of income…

Over at signandsight:

Joachim Güntner: It used to be that when people heard about hackers, especially ones in a Chaos Club, they had an image of scatterbrains, social nuisances.

Constanze Kurz: The image of the club has changed for the better, but there are still people who talk about hackers without differentiating between those who do it with criminal intent and those with ethical standards.

The Chaos-Computer-Club recently discovered a trojan on hard drives that seemed suspicious to their users, a trojan apparently launched by government authorities. In what way did this online spy-service violate the rights of the citizens affected?

Kurz: In fact it gave a kind of general authorisation to technically sniff out the infiltrated computers. It was not only able to divert data, but additional malware could be uploaded and executed by remote control. The entire hard drive of the targeted person was open to search by investigators. It was also possible to activate the camera, the microphone, or perform a keypad protocol. It went as far as acoustic and visual surveillance of the person's home.

From The Telegraph:

From The New York Times:

The October night before he learned he had won the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine, the biochemical researcher Jack W. Szostak says he slept like a log. “I wasn’t going to lose a night’s sleep because of work I’d done in the 1980s,” Dr. Szostak, 58, said with a laugh during a recent two-hour interview at his laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It was old work.” That “old work,” for which he had already won the Lasker Prize, was to help identify the nature and biochemistry of telomeres, the tips at the ends of chromosomes. Understanding them may be the key to unlocking the mysteries of cancer and cell aging. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Was telomere research your life’s work?

It was somewhat of a side project. Before I began working on telomeres, I’d been studying DNA recombination. What do cells do when they see a broken piece of DNA? Cells don’t like such breaks. They’ll do pretty much anything they can to fix things up. If a chromosome is broken, the cells will repair the break using an intact chromosome. That process is called recombination. And that’s what I was looking at. Now, telomeres: They are the ends of chromosomes, the caps, and they don’t recombine. One day in 1980, I heard Liz [his colleague Elizabeth H. Blackburn] at a conference talking about how telomeres behaved. It was the contrast between the DNA she was working with and the material I was studying that caught my attention. I wanted to understand what was going on. So I wrote Liz right afterward.

More here.

December at Yase

You said, that October
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
“Again someday, maybe ten years.”

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were–
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.

by Gary Snyder

In a way, new technologies have made us all like Baudelaire. We are intoxicated by the multitude but cannot ignore its troubling aspects. Like Baudelaire, we are trying to find our private life in the crowd while protecting our “real” selves in a public persona. Blogs and social networking sites are like diaries with broken locks. They are confessions written for an audience. They let us feel as if we can fabricate a personal world for ourselves, a world we can control. We listen to music no one else can hear and read emails while standing on a crowded bus because we are looking for privacy. Baudelaire used poetry and fashion; we use PDAs and e-readers and the Internet. With boundless access to information, we can easily observe the crowd. But we cannot escape being observed. And we wonder if we can find the private life we’re looking for, either in the public space of the real world or in the virtual one. Baudelaire wrote about the romance of throwing oneself alone, directionless, into the crush of public life. And it is exhilarating — spending your days wandering from shop to shop, fact to fact, video to video, stranger to stranger. But his poetry was a reminder. The passion for roaming means a love of masquerades and a hatred of home. Baudelaire, too, wanted to protect his privacy. But he feared he had lost the very thing he wanted to protect.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

When future generations look back, they will remember 2011 as the year of end of dictators in the Middle East and the Maghreb. Libya’s Muammar Khaddafi has now joined the Middle East parade of fallen despots. Practically nine months after Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was ousted after 23 years of authoritarian rule and the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was thrown out of power by a few weeks of protests in Tahrir Square, Khaddafi is at the end of his reign after 42 years of dictatorship. The year 2011 could indeed be considered the starting point of a paradigm shift in the Middle East that will bring the downfall of the remaining despots in the region while restructuring the way energy resources are priced and supplied around the globe. However positive regime change may be in the longer term, the short-term social and political consequences are likely to be quite challenging. It goes without saying that the overthrow of dictatorial regimes in the Maghreb and the Middle East will have proved easy compared to the difficult and uncertain establishment of secular and democratic governments.

more from Ramin Jahanbegloo at NPQ here.

Having dissected the pain of others for decades, Didion has spent the last few years turning the scalpel on herself. This introverted late phase is as coherent and revealing as Philip Roth’s. The essayist who once reprinted her own psychological evaluation has always used her personal story, but in her early years she only feinted at confession on the way to observations of the larger world. Beginning with Where I Was From, which presents California’s history as her own, she’s reversed the bait-and-switch, writing about those close to her as a way of bringing herself, finally, into public view. “Writers are always selling somebody out,” Didion wrote at the beginning of her first essay collection, 1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. That warning, later echoed infamously by Didion’s contemporary Janet Malcolm, is a statement of mercenary purpose in the guise of a confession: not a preemptive apologia but an expression of grandiose, even nihilistic ambition. We think of memoirs, especially memoirs of grief, as a soft art, one that necessarily humanizes the writer. And Didion the memoirist is painfully human—heartsick, vulnerable, and honest about her fears. But she’s also as ruthless as she’s ever been, tearing down the constructs she’s built to protect herself and her family. If she’s selling anyone out with Blue Nights, it’s Joan Didion.

more from Boris Kachka at New York Magazine here.

Sughra Raza. Mt.Cinnamon Living Room. Mirissa, Sri Lanka. 2010

Digital photograph, cropped.

Mark Cuban over at his blog (h/t: Philip Gourevitch):

2. Push to Make All Financial Institutions Partnerships

We should make all investment banks become reporting partnerships (meaning they still have the same reporting requirements they have today ). I would have no problem with our government loaning money to the partners of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and other Too Big To Fail Institutions so that they can buy back all public shares of their stock. Of course all those partners would become personally liable for repaying that money back to the government. It would probably be about 120B dollars in total to take these 2 companies private. That is far, far less than a possible bailout would cost.

Those personal guarantees would change EVERYTHING in the banking industry. It would change the decision making process across the board. There would be a moral hazard to every decision. Today , a wrong decision and they vacation on their yacht. As a partner, the wrong decision and they are protesting right next to the OWS crowd as a 99pct er. It would be the definition of having “skin in the game”

3. Limit the Size of Student Loans to $2,000 per year

Crazy ? Maybe, maybe not. What happened to the price of homes when the mortgage loan bubble popped ? They plummeted. If the size of student loans are capped at a low level, you know what will happen to the price of going to a college or university ? It will plummet. Colleges and universities will have to completely rethink what they are, what purpose they serve and who their customers will be. Will some go out of business ? Absolutely. That is real world. Will the quality of education suffer ? Given that TAs will still work for cheap, I doubt it.

Now some might argue that limiting student loans will limit the ability of lower income students to go to better schools. I say nonsense on two fronts.

Tom Stern in The Point:

There is a device, known to students of literature and students of creative writing, called “defamiliarization.” In the creative writing course, the exercise might go like this:

Take something that is familiar to you (an object, an occasion). Now imagine you are an alien who has just landed on Earth and make a report on it to your alien superiors back home.

In this case, the defamiliarization is brought about by the alien narrator, the stranger in the strange land. Standard defamiliarizing narrators include the naive child, the animal or the inanimate object—other contenders might be the very clever or stupid, the very large or small. Using both of those latter two, Swift’s Gulliver—first colossal, then tiny—proves an ideal vehicle for defamiliarized observation. Gulliver also shows us the connection between defamiliarization and satire: both can provide a kind of distance from that which we see too closely ever to understand—from the speeches of politicians to the objects on our bedside tables. Viktor Shklovsky, the Soviet literary critic who coined the phrase, associated it strongly with a description of seeing something familiar as if for the first time. He uses the example of a Tolstoy story in which the horse- narrator fails to comprehend how he can belong to a person, how, as the horse puts it, “there was some sort of connection between me and the stable.”

More here.

Henry Blodget in Business Insider:

More here.

Peter Pesic in American Scientist:

Lisa Randall’s new book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, takes us 10 years past her initial conjectures and in some ways may be even more ambitious. As the subtitle indicates, she wishes to take up larger questions about the nature of scientific thinking, including its relation to religion and its reliance on probability. At the same time, she wishes to bring her audience up to date regarding the status of her theory within the larger ambit of particle physics and cosmology as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins its work, a monumental collaboration involving the whole world. (Americans are the largest single nationality involved in its operation, although the United States is not an official member state of CERN, its operating consortium.)

The resulting book is valuable and engaging; like its predecessor, it is a tour de force of popularization. The good part about its wider ambition emerges in Randall’s clarification of the exact purport and scope of scientific work. But as she interweaves this with descriptions of theories and experiments, past and present, the reader may feel some tension between her somewhat divergent goals, which work together but also divide the reader’s attention and hence lead to organizational challenges.

Randall acknowledges in the preface that Knocking on Heaven’s Door is “in some respects . . . two books in one,” a statement that portends problems for the unity and cohesive force of the whole.

More here.

Hannah Gersen in The Millions:

After a couple days of hemming and hawing, I decided to join the protesters of Occupy Wall Street. I was hesitant to go because until very recently, I worked as an administrative assistant at a prominent Wall Street law firm. I didn’t know how, in good conscience, I could rail against The Man when my primary responsibility had once been to keep track of incoming phone calls from Goldman Sachs. But then I heard one of the protest’s organizers on the radio saying that the Occupy movement wasn’t against capitalism, corporations, or even big banking. He was for income equality. And democracy. The reporter pressed him to be more specific, but he refused.

“Why do they have to be more specific?” I yelled at the radio. “Isn’t it obvious why they’re upset?”

I was getting annoyed at the way Occupy Wall Street was being covered — as if it was insane to gather in a public space and protest. As if it had never happened in America before. Wasn’t the whole point of passive resistance to just be there? To not make any demands? As I tried to come up with a good parallel, I found myself thinking of Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s short story about an office worker, Bartleby, who decides out of nowhere that he doesn’t feel like working anymore, but continues to show up at the office every day. Bartleby’s idleness baffles and then infuriates his boss, who begs Bartleby to give some reason for his behavior. But Bartleby refuses to disclose his interests, and over the course of the story, his needs become so few that he dies of starvation. It’s a bleak, mysterious story, and as I returned to my copy to reread it, I was stilled to rediscover its subtitle: “A Story of Wall Street.”

More here.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee in The Guardian:

I've come to the Congress on Aesthetic Vaginal Surgery because I want to learn more about one of the fastest growing cosmetic procedures in the US. This newish industry consists of doctors and their clients (clients, not patients, because these surgeries are cash-only elective procedures) who believe the female nether area can be improved upon or remediated. Procedures offered include labiaplasty (trimming or completely removing labia), vaginal rejuvenation (tightening), hymenoplasty (“revirgination”) and clitoral “unhooding” – among others.

On my way to check out the exhibits, I pass a 4ft welcome poster of a woman's bare back and well rounded buttocks. At a cosmetic gynaecology conference at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas only six weeks earlier (yes, these surgeries are so popular there are two competing conferences), even the ads for post-surgical “compression garments” were made to look a little S&M sexy, while the mostly male doctors walked around with name badges festooned with identifying ribbons (“Presenter”! “Faculty”! “Attendee”!), looking like generals returning from battle with a chest full of medals.

As I browse, a surgical equipment salesman mistakes me for a doctor and eagerly tries to sell me his new radiostatic scalpel (“Less thermal collateral damage!”), demonstrating its precision by cutting slices out of a piece of raw steak.

Designer vagina surgery is big business: according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, in 2009 female consumers spent an estimated $6.8m (£4.4m) on these procedures (the figure counts only plastic surgeons, not gynaecologists).

More here.

From Gawker:

Steve Jobs had a mild form of cancer that is not usually fatal, but seems to have ushered along his own death by delaying conventional treatment in favor of alternative remedies, a Harvard Medical School researcher and faculty member says. Jobs's intractability, so often his greatest asset, may have been his undoing.

“Let me cut to the chase: Mr. Jobs allegedly chose to undergo all sorts of alternative treatment options before opting for conventional medicine,” Ramzi Amri wrote in an extraordinarily detailed post to Quora, an online Q&A forum popular among Silicon Valley executives. “Given the circumstances, it seems sound to assume that Mr. Jobs' choice for alternative medicine has eventually led to an unnecessarily early death.”

Amri went on to say that, even after entering conventional medical care, the Apple CEO seemed to eschew the most practical forms of treatment. Addressing the period when Jobs began to visibly shed weight, Amri wrote, “it seems that even during this recurrent phase, Mr. Jobs opted to dedicate his time to Apple as the disease progressed, instead of opting for chemotherapy or any other conventional treatment.”

More here.