The late Kurt Vonnegut in Lapham's Quarterly:

I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].

This is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy. Okay. Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand [draws horizontal line extending from middle of G-I axis].

Now, I don’t mean to intimidate you, but after being a chemist as an undergraduate at Cornell, after the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology, and eventually I took a masters degree in that field. Saul Bellow was in that same department, and neither one of us ever made a field trip. Although we certainly imagined some. I started going to the library in search of reports about ethnographers, preachers, and explorers—those imperialists—to find out what sorts of stories they’d collected from primitive people. It was a big mistake for me to take a degree in anthropology anyway, because I can’t stand primitive people—they’re so stupid. But anyway, I read these stories, one after another, collected from primitive people all over the world, and they were dead level, like the B-E axis here. So all right. Primitive people deserve to lose with their lousy stories. They really are backward. Look at the wonderful rise and fall of our stories.

More here.

I mean, what has it done for the Flemish or the Walloons lately?

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

A war has been brewing in Europe and no one seems to care. Admittedly, the hostilities have been mild so far: hurt feelings, insults, diplomatic wrangling. Yves Leterme (a Flemish politician) questioned whether people in the French-speaking part of Belgium have the “intellectual capacity” to learn Dutch. Belgium, Leterme suspects, holds together as a nation only because of three things: “king, national football team and certain beers.” Not even all the beers.

Belgium is not the most obvious candidate for a unified state. It is, and arguably always has been, deeply and fundamentally divided between the French-speaking southern half of the country (Wallonia) and the Dutch-speaking northern half of the country (Flanders). The separation runs back to the Frankish invasions of the area back around the fifth century, which is a pretty longstanding divide even by European standards. Speaking of that era, Belgian historian Emile Cammearts wrote:

The Franks settled in the north, the Romanized Celts or “Walas” occupied the south. The first are the ancestors of the Flemings of today, the second of the Walloons, and the limit of languages between the two sections of the population has remained the same. It runs today where it ran 14 centuries ago, from the south of Ypres to Brussels and Maestricht, dividing Belgium almost evenly into two populations belonging to two separate races and speaking two different languages.

I can personally attest to the lack of Belgian national sympathies among many Belgians. The Belgian National Holiday on July 21 just passed by with little fanfare in Antwerp, where I have been living. It seemed largely an excuse to take a day off. This is in contrast to the holiday of Flemish pride on July 11, which was greeted with rock-and-roll performances in the city’s main square and general merriment in the streets. The holiday celebrates a 1302 battle, the Battle of the Golden Spurs, in which a bunch of proto-Belgian Flemish militiamen lured a group of French knights into a swamp and cut them to pieces. They kept the golden spurs of the French as trophies. The French knights were there in the first place because the citizens of Bruges had summarily executed everyone in the city who spoke French.

More here.

Michael Haederle in Miller-McCune:

The neuroeconomist Paul Zak is driving west along Interstate 10 on a gorgeous Southern California morning. As we pass emerald hillsides, glowing from recent rains, and the snow-blanketed ridges of the San Gabriel Mountains, Zak talks about how standard economics neglects the biological mechanisms of trust that underlie myriad human interactions. “Why people cooperate — why people are altruistic — is a huge question,” he says. “When you think about how much of the world works on a handshake or on holding a door open for somebody in an airport, all that kind of falls through the cracks in economics.”

Zak and his collaborators at Claremont Graduate University have found that oxytocin, a hormone produced in the brain that promotes human bonding, plays a powerful role in shaping how generous people are. He calls it “the moral molecule.” “It’s a whole different model,” Zak says. “It tells us why global commerce works — because there is a motivation to reciprocate.”

People release oxytocin (pronounced ok-si-toh-sun) in settings that promote feelings of trust and safety, Zak has found, and their behavior becomes more trusting and generous in return. He envisions workplaces structured to reinforce this cycle.

More here.

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

Prior to moving to Canada in 2003, I never really thought about the existence of Native Americans. Of course I'd heard the standard histories, seen the caricatures in old movies, was able to make some basic distinctions as to the names and locations of the different tribes. But the appropriation of the continent and the setting up there of a new and successful nation state seemed to me, from my American perspective, to be such a thorough fait accompli that any suggestion of the enduring moral obligation to reflect on and perhaps respond to past wrongs would have seemed to me as foreign as a proposal to reconstitute Gondwanaland. This very much in contrast with the legacy of slavery, which never escaped my notice as the gaping wound that defines my country's history and character.

I don't know quite what changed; perhaps it was simply the little, symbolic things that the well-meaning Canadian government does to recognize the First Nations (including, by the way, calling them 'First Nations'), such as providing links on many government websites in Mohawk, Inuktitut, and so on. Perhaps it was the very absence of a legacy of slavery (which, I insist, has only to do with the different exigencies of a different sort of colonial economy: one without large-scale plantation farming), which leaves Canada with only one original sin, rather than two.

Whatever it was, over the past several years I have acquired what I take to be a distinctly Canadian sensibility about the First Nations issue, namely, one that supposes that it is not too late to do something about the wrongs that were done a long time ago; or, rather, that the colonial powers are not absolved of the need to do something simply because the wrongs were done a long time ago. It is still a live issue.

More here.

Old Woman With Protea Flowers, Kahalui Airport

She wears the run-down slippers of a local
and in her arms, five rare protea
wrapped in newsprint, big as digger pine cones.
Our hands can't help it and she lets us touch.
Her brother grows them for her, upcountry.
She's spending the day on Oahu
with her flowers and her dogs. Protea
for four dogs' graves, two for her favorite.
She'll sit with him into the afternoon
and watch the ocean from Koolau.
An old woman's paradise, she tells us,
and pets the flowers' soft, pink ears.

by Kathleen Flenniken

From The Washington Post:

From now on, anyone who dreams of becoming a novelist will need to read Tom Grimes's brutally honest and wonderful “Mentor.” While there have been plenty of books on how to write, or how to get published, or how to promote your work, as well as a number of triumphalist accounts of “making it,” this is a story of what it's like to just miss succeeding. It's also a superb reminiscence of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the late 1980s and of its celebrated director, Frank Conroy, author of the classic memoir “Stop-Time” (1967). At the age of 32, Tom Grimes was working as a waiter at Louie's Backyard in Key West. He'd already been writing fiction for years and seemingly getting nowhere fast. His childhood in Queens, N.Y., had been psychologically debilitating because of a cold, unloving father; a streak of depression ran in his blood; and he'd recently been divorced. Now, he was happily remarried and wondering what to do with himself. Time was passing. Should he go to law school? Instead, at the advice of his wife, Grimes applied to four creative writing programs. Three turned him down.

One day, though, just as he was about to ride his bicycle to work, the phone rang. ” 'This is Frank Conroy from the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' the voice said.” Conroy had loved the excerpt from Grimes's novel and announced that he was giving him the program's top scholarship. “See you in August.” That fall in Iowa, Conroy continued to sing the praises of Grimes's unfinished novel about baseball and the American dream. “I'll tell you. Your manuscript. Jesus Christ. . . . If you want, you can have the best agent in America tomorrow. I'll call her in the morning, if you want me to.” (At the time, this was Candida Donadio.) Later, Grimes learned that another student was referring to him as “Golden Boy,” and people were comparing his writing to that of Don DeLillo and the young Richard Ford. Surprisingly, Grimes turned down the scholarship and asked to teach courses instead, calculating that he might need such experience on his résumé. He knew himself to be a bundle of neuroses, prey to anxiety and depression, and deeply uncertain whether he could complete his book to his own satisfaction and that of his new mentor and friend. Indeed, Conroy quickly seems to have looked on Grimes as a foster son, even an heir. It's clear that their similar backgrounds — hardscrabble New York childhood, crummy jobs, drink, divorce and much else — might generate a spiritual kinship.

More here.

From Science:

Great Danes stretch more than a meter from paw to shoulder and can easily weigh more than 90 kilograms. A Chihuahua fits snugly inside a purse. Domestic dog breeds are more varied in body size and shape—not to mention coat color and fur length—than any other land-based mammal. Yet, according to a new study, a mere two to six regions in doggy DNA account for most of this diversity. Over the past few years, researchers have linked a number of canine traits—from size to coiffure—to specific mutations in dog DNA. This new line of research was made possible by the completion of the Dog Genome Project in 2005 by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland. But researchers lacked a large-scale analysis of these traits across a wide variety of breeds. As a result, they didn't know whether traits were governed by a large number of genetic regions, each contributing a small effect, or by a few regions with large effects.

So a team led by Carlos Bustamante, a comparative geneticist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and Elaine Ostrander, a comparative geneticist with NHGRI, analyzed genetic information from 915 domestic dogs representing 80 different breeds. The researchers compared the dogs' DNA, looking for sequences that differed by a single base, known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Once they found out where the DNA differed, they compared those differences between dogs with, for example, short versus long legs or perky versus droopy ears. All told, the researchers identified 51 regions in the genome that contributed to physical variation among the breeds. These regions can be clumped into larger areas of the genome called quantitative trait loci, which are known to contain genes that produce a specific physical effect, such as shaggy hair. Depending on which traits are compared, genetic differences in two to six of these regions—which include genes, many of which haven't yet been mapped to specific traits—can account for about 80% of the variation in physical characteristics among dogs, says Bustamante. That differs significantly from humans, he says, whose physical variation is scattered far more widely across their genome, often comprising hundreds or thousands of regions.

More here.

Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game you play for a living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no. But if you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although there certainly are some) and if you’re a politician it may not occur to you, as it did not at one time to Joe Biden, that you’re doing anything wrong when you appropriate the speech of a revered statesman. And if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself. It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.

more from Stanley Fish at The Opinionater here.

According to Pascal Bruckner, we in the west suffer from neurotic guilt, a condition imposed upon us by the high priests of the left. This secular clerisy are heirs to the Christian tradition of original sin, which universalised guilt by claiming that humans are fallen and must redeem themselves. Nietzsche denounced Christian guilt as a psychic evil which forces man’s will to power in on himself. Pascal Bruckner is a latter-day Nietzschean who gives no quarter when it comes to excoriating our new moral elite. Bruckner represents a distinct species of French intellectual. Born in 1948 and coming of age in the upheavals of 1968, he initially indulged the revolutionary fervour sweeping Paris but soon became affiliated with the nouveaux philosophes, a group of anti-Marxist intellectuals. Consisting of figures like Andre Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard-Henri Levy and Jean-Marie Benoist, this cenacle may be considered France’s second generation of anti-communist thinkers. Bruckner’s day job is that of novelist—one item in his bulging portfolio, Bitter Moon, even received film treatment at the hands of Roman Polanski. As a result of his literary background and immersion in the fiery French essayist tradition, he writes in a sparkling prose, captured well here by his translator, Steven Rendall. The resulting tone is redolent for Anglo-Saxon readers of an earlier era, when social critics like Marx or Nietzsche conveyed their ideas with combative gravitas.

more from Eric Kaufmann at Prospect Magazine here.

Are the writers receiving the major awards and official recognition really the best writers today? Or are they overrated mediocrities with little claim to recognition by posterity? The question is harder than ever to answer today, yet it is a worthwhile exercise to attempt (along with identifying underrated writers not favored by bureaucracy). It’s difficult to know today because we no longer have major critics with wide reach who take vocal stands. There are no Malcolm Cowleys, Edmund Wilsons, and Alfred Kazins to separate the gold from the sand. Since the onset of poststructuralist theory, humanist critics have been put to pasture. The academy is ruled by “theorists” who consider their work superior to the literature they deconstruct, and moreover they have no interest in contemporary literature. As for the reviewing establishment, it is no more than the blurbing arm for conglomerate publishing, offering unanalytical “reviews” announcing that the emperor is wearing clothes (hence my inclusion of Michiko Kakutani). The ascent of creative writing programs means that few with critical ability have any incentive to rock the boat–awards and jobs may be held back in retaliation. The writing programs embody a philosophy of neutered multiculturalism/political correctness; as long as writers play by the rules (no threatening history or politics), there’s no incentive to call them out. (A politically fecund multiculturalism–very desirable in this time of xenophobia–is the farthest thing from the minds of the official arbiters: such writing would be deemed “dangerous,” and never have a chance against the mediocrities.)

more from Anis Shivani at The Huffington Post here.

Over at NPR, you can listen to the 52 minute concert:

More than a half-century after big bands were popular, Argue reverse-engineers the popular music of today through his big band. His Secret Society ensemble takes a refreshingly original slant on the jazz tradition, full of driving energy. The band travels up from its New York home base to perform at the CareFusion Newport Folk Festival in Newport, R.I.

Andrew Dermont interviews Stephen Hawking on his Dangerous Idea, over at Big Think:

Let's face it: The planet is heating up, Earth's population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than we can replace them with sustainable alternatives. Even if the human race manages not to push itself to the brink of nuclear extinction, it is still a foregone conclusion that our aging sun will expand and swallow the Earth in roughly 7.6 billion years.

So, according to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. “I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,” Hawking tells Big Think. “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”

Hawking says he is an optimist, but his outlook for the future of man's existence is fairly bleak. In the recent past, humankind's survival has been nothing short of “a question of touch and go” he says, citing the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as just one example of how man has narrowly escaped extinction. According to the Federation of American Scientists there are still about 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons scattered around the planet, 7,770 of which are still operational. In light of the inability of nuclear states to commit to a global nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the threat of a nuclear holocaust has not subsided.

Mark Blyth over at Triple Crisis:

As George Soros noted in his recent NY Review of Books piece, before the recent G20 meeting in Toronto, Germany’s deflationist stance was the minority position. By the end of the meeting the American reflationary stance was the minority position. Abruptly, and against the apparent ‘we are all Keynesians now (again)’ love-fest of 2008-2009, the G20 signed up to halve their budget deficits by 2013. Government spending, it seems, has to stop.

Now the G20 does have a point. There is too much debt in the system, from consumers, to corporations, banks, and sovereigns. But as I blogged in a recent piece for Foreign Affairs, the G20’s endorsement of “growth friendly fiscal consolidation” relies on the same fallacy of composition that brought on the banking crisis. Back in the glow of the ‘Great Moderation’ regulators assumed that by making individual banks safe you make the system as a whole safe. Unfortunately, as the world discovered through learning terms like ‘CDS daisy-chains’ and ‘serial correlation,’ that turned out to be a really bad assumption. Now, in a re-run worthy of Nick-at-Night, we are about to simultaneously retrench in the middle of a recession in order to restore growth.

Those who warn of the dangers of debt argue that ‘normal service has been resumed.’ For all the Keynesian ferment the simple fact remains that markets react to bad policy, and bloating government debt to prevent a normal market correction was bad policy.

While appealing in a ‘bulimia bad/dieting good’ moralizing sense, such a view ignores that, according to the IMF, of the 39.1 percent (average) increase in government debt across the OECD only 12 percent of that increase was discretionary. The rest was a direct result of bailing out the banks. So it’s more than a little ironic to note that what the G20 are responding to – Eurobond market pressures – are coming from the same banks that used those bailout funds to buy super-cheap underwater assets while short-selling the government debt generated in the process of saving their assets.

Glenn Greenwald in Cato Unbound (via Andrew Sullivan):

Illustrating this More-Surveillance-is-Always-Better mindset is what happened after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005 that the Bush administration had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without the warrants required by law and without any external oversight at all. Despite the fact that the 30-year-old FISA law made every such act of warrantless eavesdropping a felony, “punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both,” and despite the fact that all three federal judges who ruled on the program’s legality concluded that it was illegal, there was no accountability of any kind. The opposite is true: the telecom corporations which enabled and participated in this lawbreaking were immunized by a 2008 law supported by Barack Obama and enacted by the Democratic Congress. And that same Congress twice legalized the bulk of the warrantless eavesdropping powers which The New York Times had exposed: first with the 2007 Protect America Act, and then with the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which, for good measure, even added new warrantless surveillance authorities.

Not even revelations of systematic abuse can retard the growth of the Surveillance State or even bring about some modest accountability. In 2007, the Justice Department’s own Inspector General issued a report documenting continuous abuses by the FBI of a variety of new surveillance powers vested by the Patriot Act, particularly the ability to obtain private, invasive records about Americans without the need for any judicial supervision (via so-called “National Security Letters” (NSLs). The following year, FBI Director Robert Mueller confirmed ongoing abuses subsequent to the time period covered by the initial IG report.

Again, the reaction of the political class in the face of these revelations was not only to resist any accountability but to further expand the very powers being abused. When then-candidate Obama infuriated many of his supporters in mid-2008 by announcing his support for the warrantless–surveillance expanding FISA Amendments Act, he assured everyone that he did so “with the firm intention — once [he’s] sworn in as President — to have [his] Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future.”

Richard Elwes in New Scientist:

Has the biggest question in computer science been solved? On 6 August, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, sent out draft copies of a paper titled simply “P ≠ NP”.

This terse assertion could have profound implications for the ability of computers to solve many kinds of problem. It also answers one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s seven Millennium Prize problems, so if it turns out to be correct Deolalikar will have earned himself a prize of $1 million.

The P versus NP question concerns the speed at which a computer can accomplish a task such as factorising a number. Some tasks can be completed reasonably quickly – in technical terms, the running time is proportional to a polynomial function of the input size – and these tasks are in class P.

If the answer to a task can be checked quickly then it is in class NP.

So if P = NP, every problem that can be checked quickly can also be completed quickly. That outcome would have huge repercussions for internet security, where the difficulty of factorising very large numbers is the primary means by which our data is kept safe from hackers.

From The Guardian:

Peter Kellner writes: To those who did not know him well, Tony Judt was a bundle of contradictions: an idealist who could be scathingly critical of those who shared his ideals; a Jew, immensely proud of his heritage, who came to be hated by many Zionists; a very European social democrat who preferred to live in America.

To his friends, the contradictions disappeared. As with so many 20th-century Diaspora Jews, education provided the key to Tony's character: in his case, not education to serve the interests of any tribe or ideology, but education to understand and improve the world about him. His driving passions were evidence, rigour and truth. If his pursuit of those passions led him to reject earlier views, or to offend erstwhile allies, so be it. Hence his disillusion with kibbutz life and, later, the moral basis of the state of Israel. Hence his frustrations with the centre-left in Europe and his despair with so many facets of the country that he loved and where he chose to settle. His spell in Israel, immediately after the six-day war and between his first and second years at Cambridge, shaped him in many ways: not just his views of Zionism but his attitude to politics. He was always progressive, but never willing to surrender his judgment to groupthink. He loved few things more than to test arguments – leftwing, rightwing or non-political – with his King's College friends in his room late into the night.

More here.

From The New York Times:

SHE had so much.

A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people. Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. Working as a project manager with an investment management firm in Davis, Calif., and making about $40,000 a year, she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.” So one day she stepped off. Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.

Her mother called her crazy.

Today, three years after Ms. Strobel and Mr. Smith began downsizing, they live in Portland, Ore., in a spare, 400-square-foot studio with a nice-sized kitchen. Mr. Smith is completing a doctorate in physiology; Ms. Strobel happily works from home as a Web designer and freelance writer. She owns four plates, three pairs of shoes and two pots. With Mr. Smith in his final weeks of school, Ms. Strobel’s income of about $24,000 a year covers their bills. They are still car-free but have bikes. One other thing they no longer have: $30,000 of debt.

Ms. Strobel’s mother is impressed. Now the couple have money to travel and to contribute to the education funds of nieces and nephews. And because their debt is paid off, Ms. Strobel works fewer hours, giving her time to be outdoors, and to volunteer, which she does about four hours a week for a nonprofit outreach program called Living Yoga. “The idea that you need to go bigger to be happy is false,” she says. “I really believe that the acquisition of material goods doesn’t bring about happiness.” While Ms. Strobel and her husband overhauled their spending habits before the recession, legions of other consumers have since had to reconsider their own lifestyles, bringing a major shift in the nation’s consumption patterns. “We’re moving from a conspicuous consumption — which is ‘buy without regard’ — to a calculated consumption,” says Marshal Cohen, an analyst at the NPD Group, the retailing research and consulting firm.

More here.

Just about a month ago, when I was out of the country, I got a voice-mail from an old friend, Mo Cohen, who offered to show me a new Nabokovian objet d’art that is likely to touch off the next big Nabokov controversy. One that takes us deeper into the heart of the work of perhaps the greatest novelist of the past century than the dispute over Laura did. And one that’s similar to the Laura affair in that it once again tempts us into divining a dead author’s intentions. I’d met Mo years ago on the mean streets of SoHo (when he was running the lamented Spring Street Books) and knew that he now ran a distinguished art-book publishing house called Gingko Press on the West Coast. He said he wanted to send me something, an object, an icon of sorts. A black-bound mock-up of a stand-alone edition of the poem “Pale Fire,” the 999-line centerpiece of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, an edition that he and Manhattan artist Jean Holabird intended to publish this November. I realized as he described this unique object, part book, part artwork, part literary manifesto, that he was talking about something more than some coffee-table-deluxe-edition-type thing. With the publication of “Pale Fire” as a stand-alone poem, Mo was throwing down the gauntlet, challenging the world’s most avid Nabokov readers and critics, telling them that for 50 years, most of them had gotten a central aspect of, arguably, his greatest work flat wrong.

more from Ron Rosenbaum at Slate here.