From the website of the Poetry Society of America:

I think of something Naomi Shihab Nye wrote, in 1999, in her response to the question “What's American About American Poetry?” Nye said, “When I was working overseas on various occasions, poets in other countries would remark that we American poets have a luxury they do not have: we are free to write about tiny “insignificances” any time we want to…We write about personal lives, minor idiosyncrasies, familial details, tomatoes—not feeling burdened to explore larger collective issues all the time, which is something writers elsewhere often consider part of their endless responsibility.”

There is a way in which all American life, American writing and poetry included, participates in the historical (and geographical!) amnesia inherent in the concept of “America.” What is the responsibility of the writer? When you look one place, there is another place you are not looking. We will have to think for a long time to figure out where we are and who are and what we are doing in this place, thought to be ours from “sea to shining sea,” ours by some form of “manifest destiny,” some form of “American exceptionalism.”

More here.

Harriet Hall in Science-Based Medicine:

From January through June of 2010 I wrote a column entitled “The Health Inspector” in O, The Oprah Magazine. Now, apparently, I have been fired; although they have not had the common courtesy to tell me so. The whole thing has been a bizarre, frustrating experience.

It started last fall, when I got an e-mail from Tyler Graham. He introduced himself as the new health editor for O, The Oprah Magazine, saying he had only been on the job for 2 weeks. He had read my work in Skeptic magazine and wanted me to write a column for O. I thought long and hard before accepting. I told Mr. Graham my opinion of Oprah and of her chosen medical expert Dr. Oz and why I was hesitant to associate my name with theirs, and he seemed to understand. Oprah has been widely criticized recently, even in the pages of Newsweek, for endorsing pseudoscientific and non-scientific health advice on her TV show. As for Dr. Oz, while he mostly gives good medical advice, he has appalling lapses into non-science-based practices like Reiki, and he has even invited energy healers into his OR to assist in open-heart surgery cases by waving their hands over the patients. I foolishly assumed Mr.Graham was trying to improve Oprah’s image by introducing more science and skepticism to the magazine.

More here.

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case.

In the Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the world's livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism “is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue”. I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book I'm about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.

In Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Simon Fairlie pays handsome tribute to vegans for opening up the debate. He then subjects their case to the first treatment I've read that is both objective and forensic. His book is an abattoir for misleading claims and dodgy figures, on both sides of the argument.

There's no doubt that the livestock system has gone horribly wrong.

More here. [Thanks to Pablo Policzer.]

David Sloan Wilson in Evolution For Everyone:

The evolutionary community is as active as an alarmed beehive over the critique of inclusive fitness theory recently published in the journal Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and E.O. Wilson. I do not agree with them in every respect but I'm glad that they have aroused the evolutionary community from its stupor. The general public and majority of evolutionary biologists have a pre-1975 understanding that hasn't even kept pace with modern inclusive fitness theory, not to speak of the debates that will be taking place among the cognoscenti. This is an opportunity for everyone to take stock of the core issues at stake.

It is important to realize that numerous issues are at stake that must be examined one by one. It doesn't help that Richard Dawkins continues to issue boneheaded statements about group selection, as I recount in my previous post. Inclusive fitness theorists should be joining me in pointing out the errors of these statements, just as I intend to join them in pointing out some errors in the Nowak et al. critique.

In this post I want to focus on a statement that Nowak et al. make in the caption to figure 3 that “inclusive fitness theory…is an alternative accounting method, but one that works only in a very limited domain.”

What does it mean for a theory to function as an accounting method?

More here.

Lust, violence, feuds, corruption, intrigue and romance – all the ingredients of any respectable blockbuster jostle for attention in a new film portraying the rags-to-riches story of a destitute young woman who rises to the very highest echelons of power and glory. But this heroine is no ordinary tycoon or gold-digger. She’s the Pope. Die Päpstin tells the story of a young woman from a poor clerical family who disguises herself as a man, pursues her studies in a monastery and ends up in Rome where she’s finally elected Pope. Only when she gives birth in the street while in a procession in full papal regalia is her true identity revealed. So far, the film has only been shown in Germany, where it was made, and in Italy where this summer it reached the top ten, just behind Robin Hood and Sex and the City 2.

more from Sally Feldman at Eurozine here.

Here are two well-known descriptions of what a poem is, and does, one by Wordsworth, one by Stevens: type a: Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. type b: The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully. These two assertions, though not opposed, place distinctly different emphases on the function of poetry. The first description, Wordsworth’s, suggests that poetry is a means of gaining perspective on primary experience: powerful emotions can be gathered, then dynamically relived, translated, and digested in the controlled laboratory of the poem—by proxy, such a poem also constructs perspective for the reader. In contrast, Stevens’s description implies that the poem and the reader engage in a sort of muscular struggle with each other—that struggle is how they become intimate, how they really “know” each other. Stevens suggests that a good poem, as part of its process, resists, twists, and enmeshes the reader (and perhaps the poet as well), an engagement in which perspective is challenged, and by no means guaranteed.

more from Tony Hoagland at Poetry here.

Never trust a Laura Newman vertical. It might be the edge of a house, the tilt of a glass plane, or a door handle; it might indicate a painting within a painting, or a skeletal tree trunk that grew in from somewhere, and, oh, by the way, it also doubles as the cord of a wrecking ball and a stray power line. Newman’s verticals and orthogonals function like unreliable narrators: they fool the eye and throw basic spatial frameworks into question. In her work, closeness looks far away, flat planes might be cut-outs, transparent windows open out to nothingness, clouds act as people, wisps of breeze arise from nowhere, and whole pictures are tilted off-kilter by triangular shims lurking in eccentric corners. Technically speaking, the parallax view is the apparent displacement or difference in the position of an object when it is viewed along the two different lines of sight. Newman pictures the world as a correspondingly parallax place. Newman never settles for a monocular kind of vision or a singular kind of meaning. If you scan your eye down any of her sightlines, you will find recurrent jump cuts and double entendres all along the way.

more from Amy Sillman at artcritical here.

From Salon:

In her new book, “Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference,” Cordelia Fine, a research associate and the author of “A Mind of Its Own” (also about brain science), discovers that, far from supporting the existence of vastly different male and female brains, much of the research on the topic is not only deeply flawed, but dangerously misleading. Women aren't worse at math (as Fine proves in the book, bad neurological research is one of the reasons women are still struggling to catch up in the field), and girls' preference for girlish toys probably has more to do with social expectations than what's in their skulls. Fine's book is a remarkably researched and dense work that, even while tackling highly complex subject manner, retains a light, breezy touch.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Psychologists have identified the key male dance movements that most arouse female interest — and all are to do with central body motions which send out primal signals of health, vigour and strength. A team led by Nick Neave of Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, northeastern England, filmed 19 men aged 18-35 in a lab as they danced to a standard disco beat. The men, none of whom was a professional dancer, wore reflective markers that studded their body and were filmed by a battery of 12 3D cameras. The footage was used to create a dancing avatar, or animated figure, that was faceless and genderless. Thirty-seven young heterosexual women were then shown 15-second clips of the avatars and were asked to judge which dance movements were the most attractive. Eight “movement variables” emerged which distinguished the trolls from the Travoltas. “Good” dancers did wider and bigger movements of the head, neck and torso, and did faster bending and twisting movements of their right knee (greater movements of the right knee rather than the left were to be expected, as 80 percent of the dancers favoured their right leg). In contrast, “bad” dancers tended to be stiff and plod — and throwing their arms around was no substitute for fast, variable movement of the central body region.

“Men all over the world will be interested to know what moves they can throw to attract women,” said Neave. “We now know which area of the body females are looking at when they are making a judgement about male dance attractiveness. If a man knows what the key moves are, he can get some training and improve his chances of attracting a female through his dance style.”

More here.

Eighty-Five

As I grow older, I feel younger
more eager, more full of love.
More alive the closer I move to death.
More whole the closer I move into blight.
The sweeter life grows as fervent
clamors of youth pass.
Passions of old age take deeper
flavor, ripened, more nuanced.
More easily words and affections
flow when the self-conscious gaucherie
of youth has passed.

Wholeness suddenly is mine;
ragged edges of fear hemmed.

Mirrors say Look. Do not
be afraid. You are what you are.

by Betty Lockwood
from A Matriach's Song
Peter Randall Publisher, 2001

Robert Fisk in The Independent:

It is a tragedy, a horror, a crime against humanity. The details of the murders – of the women beheaded, burned to death, stoned to death, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive for the “honour” of their families – are as barbaric as they are shameful. Many women's groups in the Middle East and South-west Asia suspect the victims are at least four times the United Nations' latest world figure of around 5,000 deaths a year. Most of the victims are young, many are teenagers, slaughtered under a vile tradition that goes back hundreds of years but which now spans half the globe.

A 10-month investigation by The Independent in Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank has unearthed terrifying details of murder most foul. Men are also killed for “honour” and, despite its identification by journalists as a largely Muslim practice, Christian and Hindu communities have stooped to the same crimes. Indeed, the “honour” (or ird) of families, communities and tribes transcends religion and human mercy. But voluntary women's groups, human rights organisations, Amnesty International and news archives suggest that the slaughter of the innocent for “dishonouring” their families is increasing by the year.

Iraqi Kurds, Palestinians in Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey appear to be the worst offenders but media freedoms in these countries may over-compensate for the secrecy which surrounds “honour” killings in Egypt – which untruthfully claims there are none – and other Middle East nations in the Gulf and the Levant. But honour crimes long ago spread to Britain, Belgium, Russia and Canada and many other nations. Security authorities and courts across much of the Middle East have connived in reducing or abrogating prison sentences for the family murder of women, often classifying them as suicides to prevent prosecutions.

It is difficult to remain unemotional at the vast and detailed catalogue of these crimes. How should one react to a man – this has happened in both Jordan and Egypt – who rapes his own daughter and then, when she becomes pregnant, kills her to save the “honour” of his family? Or the Turkish father and grandfather of a 16-year-old girl, Medine Mehmi, in the province of Adiyaman, who was buried alive beneath a chicken coop in February for “befriending boys”? Her body was found 40 days later, in a sitting position and with her hands tied.

Robin Wells and Paul Krugman in the NYRB:

If the fundamental problem lay with a crisis of confidence in the banking system, why hasn’t a restoration of banking confidence brought a return to strong economic growth? The likely answer is that banks were only part of the problem. It’s curious that only one of the three books surveyed here so much as mentions the work of the late Hyman Minsky, a heterodox, long-neglected economist whose moment has come—in more ways than one. However, Roubini and Mihm give a good overview of Minsky’s views—and Richard Koo, whether he knows it or not, is very much a Minskyite.

Minsky’s theory, in brief, was that eras of financial stability set the stage for future crisis, because they encourage a wide variety of economic actors to take on ever-larger quantities of debt and engage in ever-more-risky speculation. As long as asset prices keep rising, driven by debt-fueled purchases, all looks well. But sooner or later the music stops: there is a “Minsky moment” when all the players realize (or are forced by creditors to realize) that asset prices won’t rise forever, and that borrowers have taken on too much debt.

But isn’t this new prudence a good thing? No. When one individual tries to pay down debt, that’s all well and good—but when everyone tries to do it at the same time, the consequences can all too easily be destructive for everyone involved. The process of destruction is easiest to see in the financial sector, where everyone’s attempt to pay off debt by selling assets all at the same time can lead to a vicious circle of plunging prices and rising distress. But the problem isn’t necessarily restricted to finance.

Tonight what I need most

is your open hand, a leaf
settling in the small of my back,
undistracted
by the noisy surround of sex,
the lappings of massage,
even your wordy velvet concern.
Just the quiet dapple of fingers mapping
the continent of grief
I can't reach on my own.

by Susan Middleton

from Seed Case of the Heart
Slate Roof Publishing 2007

From The Washington Post:

In “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams famously had his characters ask a computer to provide the ultimate answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything.” As Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow point out in their book “The Grand Design,” the computer's response — 42 — was less than helpful. Hawking, who needs no introduction, and Mlodinow, a Caltech physicist with a string of excellent books to his credit, have taken on that ultimate question in a somewhat more rigorous form by asking three related ones:

Why is there something instead of nothing?

Why do we exist?

Why does this particular set of laws govern our universe and not some other set?

More here.

From The New York Times:

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies). And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how. Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying. The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

More here.

AS AN ARTIST, I HAVE NEVER had an allegiance to any specific medium. In the 1960s, so-called medium-specific art prescribed the limits of what was permissible to express. This was the “repressive face of modernism.” My desire was to find a way to expand the range of philosophical, psychological, political, and visual ideas that my work could engage. New ideas evolved into new mediums. But these new mediums did not arise as mere acts of will. First, they were always contextual, based in actual situations and immediate needs. Second, they were oppositional, intended as an attack on the dominant aesthetic and critical hierarchy. For me, the medium was never transparent, never something to be seen through, never a neutral delivery system. No matter how reduced the means, they always remained something material, something to be taken apart and put back together, something to be confronted.

more from Mel Bochner at Triple Canopy here.