Christopher Chabris in the New York Times Book Review:
The human brain gets a lot of press these days, but not all the publicity has been good. Its reviews are reminiscent of Barack Obama’s during the 2008 presidential campaign, when one side said he was a socialist Muslim foreigner and the other thought he was a savior from on high. To its detractors, the brain is a kludge, a hacked-up device beset with bugs, biases and self-deceptions that undermine our decision making and well-being at every turn. To its admirers, it contains vast potential we can all unlock to improve our lives, thanks to “neural plasticity” that enables the adult nervous system to change in more dramatic ways than previously thought. Lately, a growing army of Chicken Littles retorts that this very plasticity has been hijacked by the Internet and other forms of technological crack that are rewiring our brains into a state of continual distraction and intellectual torpor.
The “your brain, warts and more warts” genre is well represented by the new book “Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives,” by Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. He takes readers on a lively tour of systematic biases and errors in human thinking, citing examples that are staples of psychology courses and other popular books. What is new, however, is Buonomano’s focus on the mechanisms of memory, especially its “associative architecture,” as the main causes of the brain’s bugs.
The book has been described as “one of the finest collections of short stories to come out of South Asia in decades”.
From The Express Tribune:
A retired civil servant nearing 80 may not sound like the most obvious debut author to take the international publishing world by storm, but Jamil Ahmad has done precisely that.
Over a cup of tea and a glass of lime juice, he talked about a career as an administrator along Pakistan’s desolate borders with Afghanistan and Iran, and how he turned those memories into a book that has earned rave reviews.
“The Wandering Falcon”, published this month, captures the raw romance of Pakistan’s wildest terrain — associated today in the West with Taliban lairs and Al-Qaeda terror plots.
Seduced by tales of “cowboys and Indians” as a schoolboy, Ahmad quickly developed a lifelong passion for the tribal way of life in Balochistan and the tribal areas along the Afghan border in the northwest.
He joined the civil service in 1954 and later became commissioner of Swat and Waziristan. He served at the embassy in Kabul from 1978 to 1980, a crucial time for both Afghanistan and Pakistan, coinciding with the Soviet invasion of the former.
When he showed his German wife Helga some poetry, she dismissed it as “rubbish” and told him to write about something he knew — namely, the tribal way of life. The result was a manuscript finished in 1974 and tucked away in a drawer.
“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.” (Flaubert’s Parrot)
“The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.” (Flaubert’s Parrot)
“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.” (Flaubert’s Parrot)
“The first draft is fraught with difficulty. It’s like giving birth, very painful, but after that taking care of and playing with the baby is full of joy.” (Interview, Paris Review)
“(Literature is) a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that, literature is many things, such as delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet.
“And being a writer gives you a sense of historical community, which I feel rather weakly as a normal social being living in early twenty-first-century Britain. For example, I don’t feel any particular ties with the world of Queen Victoria, or the participants of the Civil War or the Wars of the Roses, but I do feel a very particular tie to various writers and artists who are contemporaneous with those periods and events.” (Interview, Paris Review)
Parents may be passing more to their offspring than their DNA. A new study shows some worms pass along non-genetic changes that extend the lives of their babies up to 30 percent. Rather than changes to the actual genetic code, epigenetic changes are molecular markers that control how and when genes are expressed, or “turned on.” These controls seem to be how the environment impacts a persons' genetic nature. For instance, a recent study on diet showed that what a mouse's parents ate affected the offspring's likelihood of getting cancer. Studies in humans have suggested that if your paternal grandfather went hungry, you are at a greater risk for heart disease and obesity.
The new study's results “could potentially suggest that whatever one does during their own life span in terms of environment could have an impact on the lives of their descendents,” study researcher Anne Brunet, of Stanford University, told LiveScience. “This could impact how long the organism lives, even though it doesn't affect the genes themselves.” The study was conducted in the model organism C. elegans, a small, wormlike nematode often used in experiments as a stand-in for humans because of their genetic similarities. Even so, the researchers aren't sure how their results would apply to human life span. They are currently studying fish and mice to see if their findings hold true in different species.
As the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) phenomenon grows, it has been expressing many truths, even while struggling to find a single over-arching message. The search for captions, slogans, and themes that illuminate the changes sought is characteristic of civil resistance campaigns. This is not merely branding, but a way to sharpen the concrete results that can result from such a dramatic outpouring of human aspiration, emotion, energy, protest, and yearning. Some observers have grown impatient with the evolving messaging coming out of OWS, but, historically, slogans have often changed as a campaign proceeds.
In East Germany in 1989, with 13 consecutive Monday-night demonstrations in Leipzig from September 25 to December 18, the largest public assemblies in German history occurred. Surges of demonstrators carrying candles flowed from the Protestant churches of Leipzig and other cities, bidding the government to reform and liberalize. Five million East German citizens eventually participated in these candlelit marches, exerting immense political pressure that led to the crumbling of the communist regime. Throughout that autumn, as I have written elsewhere, the slogan-writers adapted their messages to reflect the changing popular sentiments. In November, chants went from “We want to leave” to “We are staying here.” Other calls asked for popular sovereignty: “We are the people!” (Wir sind das Volk). Eventually, as the hoped-for reunification of East and West Germany increasingly became a possibility, the painted signs proclaimed of the two Germanys, “We are one people!” (Wir sind ein Volk).
My son, Ronan, looks at me and raises one eyebrow. His eyes are bright and focused. Ronan means “little seal” in Irish and it suits him.
I want to stop here, before the dreadful hitch: my son is 18 months old and will likely die before his third birthday. Ronan was born with Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disorder. He is slowly regressing into a vegetative state. He’ll become paralyzed, experience seizures, lose all of his senses before he dies. There is no treatment and no cure.
How do you parent without a net, without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by torturous bit?
Depressing? Sure. But not without wisdom, not without a profound understanding of the human experience or without hard-won lessons, forged through grief and helplessness and deeply committed love about how to be not just a mother or a father but how to be human.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is headed to Islamabad this week for what U.S. officials are billing as a last-ditch effort to patch up ties with Pakistan and urge the country's ruling generals to crack down on the Haqqani network, an Afghan insurgent group based in Pakistan's tribal areas that Washington is increasingly putting on par with al Qaeda and the Taliban as a threat to the United States.
The recent drumbeat of stories about the Haqqanis began when Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the Haqqanis “a veritable arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.” Although less frequently mentioned, the Pakistanis are also providing sanctuary to the other main Afghan Taliban group, Taliban leader Mullah Omar's Quetta Shura, based in Baluchistan province to the south. But very little has been written about why the Pakistanis support these groups. What possible motive, after all, could they have for supporting forces that are engaged in a nasty guerrilla war against their ostensible American allies in Afghanistan? The reason is simple: The Pakistanis fear that if these Taliban forces are defeated, the United States will abandon the country, leaving behind what they believe will be a hostile Afghan government allied to their mortal enemy, India. And if Clinton fails to understand this dynamic, the latest bid to salvage what's left of U.S.-Pakistani ties will end in failure.
Julian Barnes finally won the literary prize that has eluded him on three previous occasions when he was tonight presented with the Man Booker prize for his short novel, The Sense of an Ending.
His victory came after one of the most bitter and vituperative run-ups to the prize in living memory – not among the shortlisted writers, but from dismayed and bemused commentators who accused judges of putting populism above genuine quality. But few of those critics could claim Barnes' novel is not of the highest quality. The chair of this year's judges, former MI5 director general Stella Rimington, said it had “the markings of a classic of English Literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading.” Much of the row over the shortlist has stemmed from Rimington's own prioritisation of “readability” in the judging criteria. But tonight, she said quality had always been just as important. “It is a very readable book, if I may use that word, but readable not only once but twice and even three times,” she said. “It is incredibly concentrated. Crammed into this short space is a great deal of information which you don't get out of a first read.”
During thousands of elaborate restaurant meals over dozens of piggy years, I’ve received many exacting, even loopy, instructions. I’ve been prodded to dab a special scent on my wrist before savoring my salad. To proceed through the five microscopic canapés before me from left to right, as if they were words in a sentence that would lose all meaning if scrambled. To exhale a particular way as I chewed an avant-garde popcorn cluster so that the smoke inside it billowed from my nostrils. Romera New York is the first restaurant where I was told to “make a memory” of my water. Romera is Manhattan’s newest culinary oddity, an elegant hideaway whose conceits include the pairing of each dish in an 11-course meal with a lukewarm flavored water in a lidded grappa glass. One water might be infused with leek and radish, another with jasmine and dried seaweed. Most taste like indecisive teas, commitment-phobic broths or pond runoff. “Feel free to smell them,” said a server, as if I might otherwise feel jailed. “And to taste them.” He paused. “Make a memory of them.”
While blazers are optional at Romera, straitjackets would be a fine idea.
It’s the craziest example I’ve encountered of the way our culture’s food madness tips into food psychosis, at least among those with keen appetites and the means to indulge them. But it’s hardly the only illustration. Surf the cable channels and clock the time before you spy a spatula, a strainer, someone chewing, someone oohing or Gordon Ramsay. I bet it’s less than 11 seconds. Diners at the latest hot bistro or trattoria snap loving pictures of everything they eat, seeming to forget that it’s dinner, not “America’s Next Top Chicken Breast.” In New York, even the meatballs have paparazzi. Steaks come with discourses on breed, feed and dry versus wet aging; coffee with soliloquies about growing regions, grinding methods and the optimal pour-over technique; beer with overwrought tasting notes. We’ve tumbled far, far down the organic rabbit hole. And with Romera, which opened a month ago in Chelsea, we may have finally hit bottom.
Peter Singer is perhaps the world’s most influential philosopher and the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. In late August, I sat down with him to discuss his most recent book, The Life You Can Save.
At the outset of your recent book, The Life You Can Save, you lay out two goals: to challenge readers to think about their obligations to those trapped in extreme poverty, and to convince readers to choose to give more of their income to help the poor.
What do you mean by extreme poverty?
Well, when I talk about extreme poverty, I use the definition that the World Bank has, which is really based on people having enough income to meet their basic needs for food, shelter, and maybe to educate their children, or some very minimal, basic healthcare.
The World Bank has calculated that in order to do that, you need to have the purchasing power equivalent in your local currency of US $1.25. So, we’re really talking about people who have less than what you can buy for $1.25 in the United States. It’s not what you would get for US $1.25 if you went to a bank in Mozambique or Mauritania. It’s what would have the same purchasing power in those local currencies as $1.25 has in the United States, and that’s what you have to live on for a day. If you have less than that, the World Bank classifies you as being extremely poor.
They turn the light off, and its white globe glows an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then a rising. The hotel walls shoot up into heaven’s darkness.
Their movements have grown softer, and they sleep, but their most secret thoughts begin to meet like two colors that meet and run together on the wet paper in a schoolboy’s painting.
It is dark and silent. The city however has come nearer tonight. With its windows turned off. Houses have come. They stand packed and waiting very near, a mob of people with blank faces.
by Tomas Tranströmer from 20 Poems by Tomas Tranströmer Translated by Robert Bly Seventies Press (1970)
RB: I have found that the very mention of the words “religion” and “evolution” sets off a kind of reflex reaction among some, but fortunately not all, contemporary Americans. Among both religious fundamentalists and what might be called atheistic fundamentalists these terms set off a war to the death, with abusive language directed toward the supposed opposition. In that kind of atmosphere any rational discussion becomes impossible. What unites these two groups is the idea that religion and science are essentially the same thing: sets of propositional truths that can be judged in terms of argument and evidence. What surprised me when I began to read the work of leading scientists in the fields of cosmology and evolution is how many of them rejected this idea and argued instead that science and religion are really two different spheres that may at points overlap but that operate in accordance with different logics. Science operates with scientific method in terms of which different theories can be tested and proved or disproved, though if Karl Popper is right, proof is always problematic and we are safer to stick to disproof. Religion on the other hand is a way of life more than a theory. It is based on beliefs that science can neither prove nor disprove. Its “proof” is the kind of person the religious way of life produces.
more from the Robert Bellah interview at Big Questions here.
In 1970, shortly before the release of Led Zeppelin III, guitarist Jimmy Page invited his folk-singing chum Roy Harper up to his Oxford Street offices to have a look at the new album. ‘What do you think?’ asked Page. ‘It’s nice,’ replied Harper, toying with the amusing picture wheel built into the sleeve. ‘Look at it!’ said Page. ‘Yes, it’s nice,’ said Harper. ‘No. Look at it!’ said Page, growing exasperated. And then Harper noticed the title of track five, side two. ‘Oh. Oh! Thanks! I don’t know what to say.’ And this is the reason I’m sitting here with Harper 41 years on, in a café near Paddington station. As a long-standing Led Zep fan, I’d often wondered about the identity of the man namechecked in that song title ‘Hats Off to (Roy) Harper’. Just how good is his music? Can he really have been that important and influential? Now here’s my chance to find out.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
