There’s an awesomely bad scene in the BBC movie of The Rothko Conspiracy where my father confronts the other two executors over their conflicts of interest. It takes place in the drawing room of Reis’s townhouse. Stamos says, “Screw you!” and my dad calls him a “son of a bitch!” and then he accuses Reis of being “arbitrary and high-handed.” The dialogue is based on Seldes’s account, which is in turn based on my dad’s testimony. He never doubted that Reis and Stamos had good intentions, apparently: Reis was already a millionaire and certainly didn’t need Marlborough’s $20,000 director’s salary. And Stamos had been negotiating with Marlborough even before Rothko died—a relationship Rothko himself had instigated. What my father was worried about was the appearance of a conflict of interest. Perhaps, as someone who had one foot outside the art world, he took less for granted and could foresee how bad the optics on these deals would be if they were ever contested before a broader public.

more from David Levine at Triple Canopy here.

Murray’s wholesale rejection of Modernism may seem to mark him as simply an isolated provincial conservative swimming against the tide of the times. But there was more substance to his response than that. For a poet to repudiate newfangled foreign fashions and stand up instead for a home-grown tradition that celebrated the life of the mounted frontiersman (or his outlaw cousin the bushranger) was, in its Australian context, a clear political statement. Since the 1890s, the lone horseman in the bush had been used, in agitation for union of the six British colonies in an Australian federation, as an icon of national identity. “The narrow ways of English folk/Are not for such as we;/They bear the long-accustomed yoke/Of staid conservancy,” wrote A.B.(“Banjo”) Paterson, much-loved poet of the bush. “We must saddle up and ride/Towards the blue hill’s breast:/And we must travel far and fast/Across their rugged maze.” In truth, even in Paterson’s time there was more than a little idealization in the picture of Australians as restless frontier spirits: by 1900 a majority were settled in towns and cities (compared with 40 percent in the United States). But in pitting the ballad tradition against the Modernists, Murray was calling on Australian poetry to follow its own native course and foster its own native values, including an optimistic expansiveness that turned its back on both the “narrow ways” of the old Mother Country and the cramped despair of the Modernists, and a no-nonsense egalitarianism, suspicious of all pretensions, including intellectual pretensions. (Of the three rallying cries of modern democratic revolutions, equality has always had more resonance in Australia than liberty.)

more from J.M. Coetzee at the NYRB here.

The idea of the library as theatrical set, where the content of books is secondary to the atmosphere books create, may gain more respect in coming years. This past May marked the centennial of the New York Public Library’s main branch building. The library is celebrating with a yearlong series of programs and exhibitions focusing on the library’s past as well as its next hundred years. These celebrations, launched with a “Find the Future” festival weekend in May, promote the idea of the library as a stage: an environment where things can happen and people can meet, and one that will retain public significance even if the physical books it holds do not. There has been a good deal of anxiety in recent years about technology rendering books—and with them libraries—obsolete. But there is also another story, one that the NYPL has invested in. It’s a story about the triumph of books through new media, about not choosing between technologies but integrating them. Amidst millenarian thinking about the death of the book, it’s important to bear in mind that the content of the New York Public Library is not obsolete, nor will it be anytime soon. There are people in all five boroughs who cannot afford to buy books or DVDs, much less laptops or e-readers. According to a national study sponsored by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation in 2010, 30 million people in the United States used library computers to access the internet last year, and of those, 40 percent did so to find jobs.

more from Minou Arjomand at n+1 here.

Patricia Churchland has picked the winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Terrence Tomkow, Self Defense
2. Strange Quark, $300: John Schwenkler, Has Molyneux's Question Been Answered?
3. Charm Quark, $200: Jussi Suikkanen, Williams, Thick Concepts, and Reasons

Here is what Professor Churchland had to say about them:

Each of the blogs was truly fascinating and productive in its own way, so choosing involves some arbitrariness. I liked the fact that they had to be succinct and so got straight to the point instead of horsing around.

1. Tomkow: Self Defense. This is an insightful and pithy piece that shows how claims about rights can go wrong. Taking a seemingly water-tight right, namely the right to self-defense, Tomkow shows that life can actually get messy as conditions drift from the prototypical examples of permissible self-defense where we all (pretty much) agree. If, as I suspect, virtually all moral concepts are anchored by proptypical cases and we extrapolate as best we can to nonprotoypical cases (see Mark Johnson), then it should not be surprising if deciding the merits of cases far from the prototype center is difficult. Worse, in some borderline cases there may be no right answer. I realize Tomkow keeps winning these contests, but I aimed to adhere to the merits of the writing.

2. Brains: Has Molyneux’s question been answered? Hard-headed, careful, and empirically up-to-date, this looks at Richard Held’s recent results of a study of congenitally blind children who gain sight after surgical correction (Project Prakash in India). Held’s report was published in Nature Neuroscience, and concluded that the answer to Molyneux’s question is likely negative. In his blog, John Schwenkler shows that the question is still open, given the way the experiment was set up. I had been convinced by Held’s report, but I now think Schwenkler’s criticism is dead on. This is progress in philosophy. I hope Held takes Schwenkler's advice on the right way to do the experiment.

3. PEA Soup: Williams, thick concepts, and reasons. This is very useful as it shows some internal tensions in Bernard Williams’ approach to reasons and motivation. Supposedly, thick concepts such as “ingrate” or “coward”, if applied to a person, will provide a reason for him to cease and desist from his ungrateful or cowardly behavior. Typically such terms carry disapproving connotation, as most linguistically fluent humans know, and most humans most of the time respond negatively to disapproval by those they respect. Hence, if you wanted to, I guess, you could say that being called a coward provided you with a reason to stiffen your spine. Or a motive? Whatever. Obviously not all humans respond with negative affect to disapproval. It may be because they have no respect for the person judging, or perhaps because their current affective state blocks the response, or even because their brain is such that they have abnormal social responses in general, not merely transiently. Or sometimes what you may regard as a negative epithet, I do not — e.g. “pragmatist”, “feminist”.

4. Leonardo Ferreira Almada's blog: Epistemology of Neurosciences and Psychiatry. I know the rules —I am obliged to restrict myself to three blogs, but I want to give an honorable mention, if I may. Almada is a Brazilian philosopher, with a richly informative blog. He addresses issues such as how to integrate in an explanatory framework affective factors (e.g. feeling fear, pain or hunger) and cognitive factors (seeing a raccoon, expecting a hailstorm, planning an escape). His work is very well-informed by neuroscience and psychology, and he is asking really good questions. I am reasonably sure that all of the nine submissions on the short-list are from North America or England, and because there is excellent philosophy being done elsewhere, and in South America in particular, I wanted to use this occasion to give a shout out to that philosophical community.

Many thanks to all of you for giving me such great reading, and now that I know about your terrific blogs, I shall visit often.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (I will send the prize money later today or tomorrow–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Patricia Churchland for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Sughra Raza, Carla Goller, and me. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Bruce Davenport, Jr. This Some Bad Shit. 2010.

Archival marker on paper.

More here, and here.

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

As I was watching the local New York City news coverage of Hurricane Irene before “she” made landfall…

…I found myself feeling a kind of perverse pleasure in telling just about anyone who would listen that the approaching storm was good training for the world we are about to enter due to global warming—rising oceans, flooding of coastal cities and towns, black-outs, food shortages, general pandemonium. As I offered my interpretation of the coming storm, I realized—with far less pleasure—that I had been inspired by one of George Orwell’s “London Letters” to the Partisan Review that he wrote regularly during World War II. I had read them years ago but could still recall Orwell informing his American readers that the many shortages and rationing of foods and goods that Londoners were forced to endure during the war would turn out to be good training for the inevitable hard times ahead when Britain became a socialist country following the war. As I was telling this to my husband, I began to have doubts about what Orwell actually said. Luckily, I had made xeroxes of the London letters that I found most striking and was able to locate them. Sure enough, in one that was published in the November-December 1942 issue of the Partisan Review, I found what I was looking for. Orwell did say that due to rationing,

We are growing gradually used to conditions that would once have seemed intolerable and getting to have less of the consumer mentality which both Socialists and capitalists did their best to inculcate in times of peace. Since the introduction of Socialism is almost certain to mean a drop in the standard of living during the first few years, perhaps this is just as well.

More here.

Akhil Katyal in Kafila:

Born on 4th February, 1949, Agha Shahid Ali would have been 62 next month. The Kashmiri-American poet who spent the last half of his life in the States (he migrated to Pennsylvania in the mid 70s) died in the winter of 2001 due to brain tumour. The next year had begun with papers and journals in the States, and in Kashmir and India, remembering Shahid. ‘Your death in every paper,’ Shahid had written for his own idol the singer Begum Akhtar after she passed away in 1974, ‘boxed in the black and white / of photographs, obituaries.’ In his new absence, he similarly reappeared in the words of his friends as an insurmountably beautiful poet, a gregarious Brooklyner, a near perfect cook, an impossibly good teacher and a lasting friend. Apocrypha started building around him very soon after his death. One could say this was the final proof that Shahid’s name would abide – that stories began to be spun around him as soon as he was not around. The Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie, Shahid’s creative writing student at Hamilton College in New York and then at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in the 90’s, and someone who always recounts his indelible influence on her writings (he coloured her drafts red), was one of the first to add to the stories that have multiplied since in this decade after Shahid’s death. Kamila’s friend, also a student of Shahid, had told her that some months after he was diagnosed with brain cancer, Shahid was riding the subway going to teach his class at NYU when he started to feel faint and began to black out. ‘For a moment,’ her friend told her, ‘he thought, “I’m dying,” and then he told himself, “No. First I’ll teach my class, then I’ll die.”’

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

Steven Pinker in Greater Good:

Ancient texts reveal a stunning lack of regard for human life. In the Bible, the supposed source of all our moral values, the Hebrews are urged by God to slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. “Go and completely destroy those wicked people, the Amalekites,” reads a typical passage in the book of Samuel. “Make war on them until you have wiped them out.” The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one’s parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.

But from the Middle Ages to modern times, we can see a steady reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence. Many conventional histories reveal that mutilation and torture were routine forms of punishment for infractions that today would result in a fine. In Europe before the Enlightenment, crimes like shoplifting or blocking the king’s driveway with your oxcart might have resulted in your tongue being cut out, your hands being chopped off, and so on. Many of these punishments were administered publicly, and cruelty was a popular form of entertainment.

We also have very good statistics for the history of one-on-one murder, because for centuries many European municipalities have recorded causes of death. When the criminologist Manuel Eisner scoured the records of every village, city, county, and nation he could find, he discovered that homicide rates in Europe had declined from 100 killings per 100,000 people per year in the Middle Ages to less than one killing per 100,000 people in modern Europe.

More here.

Alex Bradshaw in No Borders:

David Graeber has spent the last decade challenging the line drawn between scholar and activist. While many academics fancy themselves “radicals,” the anthropologist professor has been an active participant in anarchist and anti-authoritarian groups and organizing. Graeber has used his skill-set as an anthropologist to compile ethnographic data—far away from the classroom and campus, to be sure—regarding the contemporary anarchist movement in North America; the results were published in 2009 as Direct Action: An Ethnography. David Graeber is the author of several books, including Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and, most recently, Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Graeber currently teaches social anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Below, Graeber discusses his latest book, the concept of debt in detail, and how his involvement in the anarchist movement sparked his interest in the history of debt.

Alex Bradshaw: Your latest book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, explores the origins of debt. What were some of the implications for communities and individuals when debt became a significant factor in people’s lives?

David Graeber: Well, one reason I wrote this book is that debt has come to pervade every aspect of our lives. International relations are all about debt, modern nation-states run on deficit financing, and consumer debt drives the economy—yet no one has, to my knowledge, ever written a history of the phenomenon. Even though people have written histories of almost anything else you can possibly imagine.

What I discovered was that in some ways, all this is nothing new. It’s probably fair to say that most human beings have been debtors at least at some point in their lives. Similarly, most uprisings, revolts, insurrections, mass political mobilizations in human history have been about debt—for instance, Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic largely emerged as a way of settling debt crises of one sort or another. Usually, in the end, enduring political regimes have had to come up with some solution to the debt trap, to avoid having the bulk of their population become effectively (or literally) slaves or peons to their creditors.

More here. [Photo of David Graeber from Wikipedia.]

John Washington in Upside Down World:

Sergio and I were sitting in torn-out bus seats under a hot January sky in Nogales, Sonora, talking about crawling through thorn bushes. We were in an outdoor bus station with a shade-screen ceiling. About thirty other recently deported men and women were sprawled on the concrete, hunched in the gravel, or slouching in other deconstructed pairs of faded but once colorfully-patterned bus seats. Most of them were carrying heavy duty plastic Homeland Security bags. Inside the bags were their effects, their pertenencias, that they had either crossed the border with or were carrying or wearing when they were arrested stateside.

I was interviewing Sergio (names are changed for privacy) about his two recent deportations. The organization I work with, No More Deaths (a migrant aid org), had reclaimed and returned Sergio’s pertenencias to him. After some struggle and lots of “lost” wallets and stacks of cash, we’ve set up a system with Immigration and Customs Enforcement so that we can retrieve apprehended migrants’ pertenencias. It works occasionally. Before Sergio and I started talking, I watched him change out of the soiled shirt he had been wearing for days and into a pink, tight polo shirt. The buckle of the belt he looped around his waist was a skull with red eyes. Sergio was young and chubby, but with strong looking hands and dark deep-set eyes. When he started telling me his story, his ordeal of the last two months, he spoke confidently and rapidly, describing the desert crossing and his time in prison and his wife back in New York in swift, hard details, without hesitation. But then, something came into his voice. It was when he was talking about his time in court. It was a voice I recognize. It was, I don’t know what to call it, a wetness that came to his voice. Not to his eyes, though it came there next. But first to his voice. A swelling or an opening. A hollowing of his voice.

More here.

David Maisel in lensculture:

[Editor's note: You'll discover a lot more detail when you look at these images in our high-resolution slide show. And the over-size book is exquisite.]

History’s Shadow comprises my series of re-photographed x-rays of art objects from antiquity. I have culled these x-rays from museum archives, which utilize them for conservation purposes. Through the x-ray process, the artworks of origin become de-familiarized and de-contextualized, yet acutely alive and renewed. My work as a visual artist concerns the dual processes of memory and excavation, and History’s Shadow provides for the continuation and expansion of these intertwined themes. During a residency at the Getty Research Institute in 2007, I began to explore the idea of images that were created in the processes of art preservation, where the realms of art and scientific research overlap each other. The ghostly images of these x-rays seem to surpass the power of the original objects of art. These spectral renderings seemed like transmissions from the distant past, conveying messages across time.

More here. (Note: For Ga who is the best artist/photographer/radiologist that I personally know…with love…)

From Nature:

The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters¹. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise. “The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real',” says Haynes. “We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before.” The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.

As humans, we like to think that our decisions are under our conscious control — that we have free will. Philosophers have debated that concept for centuries, and now Haynes and other experimental neuroscientists are raising a new challenge. They argue that consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person's actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion. “We feel we choose, but we don't,” says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London.

More here.

Andrew Anthony in The Guardian:

Human nature is a highly contested concept, but whatever it may amount to, it doesn't seem to involve a thirst for good news. Which may be a problem for Steven Pinker, who has dedicated much of his academic life to the study of human nature, because his latest book is full of good news.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, the celebrated evolutionary psychologist and bestselling author argues that we – the human race – are becoming progressively less violent. To the consumer of 24-hour news, steeped in images of conflict and war, that may sound plain wrong. But Pinker supports his case with a wealth of data.

Drawing on the work of the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, Pinker recently concluded that the chance of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors meeting a bloody end was somewhere between 15% and 60%. In the 20th century, which included two world wars and the mass killers Stalin and Hitler, the likelihood of a European or American dying a violent death was less than 1%.

Pinker shows that, with notable exceptions, the long-term trend for murder and violence has been going down since humans first developed agriculture 10,000 years ago. And it has dropped steeply since the Middle Ages. It may come as a surprise to fans of Inspector Morse but Oxford in the 1300s, Pinker tells us, was 110 times more murderous than it is today. With a nod to the German sociologist Norbert Elias, Pinker calls this movement away from killing the “civilising process”.

More here.

Lisa Girion, Scott Glover, and Doug Smith in the Los Angeles Times:

Propelled by an increase in prescription narcotic overdoses, drug deaths now outnumber traffic fatalities in the United States, a Times analysis of government data has found.

Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While most major causes of preventable death are declining, drugs are an exception. The death toll has doubled in the last decade, now claiming a life every 14 minutes. By contrast, traffic accidents have been dropping for decades because of huge investments in auto safety.

Public health experts have used the comparison to draw attention to the nation's growing prescription drug problem, which they characterize as an epidemic. This is the first time that drugs have accounted for more fatalities than traffic accidents since the government started tracking drug-induced deaths in 1979.

Fueling the surge in deaths are prescription pain and anxiety drugs that are potent, highly addictive and especially dangerous when combined with one another or with other drugs or alcohol. Among the most commonly abused are OxyContin, Vicodin, Xanax and Soma.

More here.

Margaret Guroff in Johns Hopkins Magazine:

Today, Glen Carle is a recognized expert on antiterrorism. Retired from the CIA since 2007, he writes essays and appears on panels organized by think tanks such as the New America Foundation on the nature and reach of al-Qaida. In May, when headlines trumpeted Osama bin Laden’s killing, the New York Times was among the news outlets that turned to Carle for comment.

Then in July, Carle made headlines of his own, publishing The Interrogator: An Education (Nation Books), a damning memoir of his involvement in the CAPTUS case. Unusually candid in its portrayal of the CIA’s internal workings—and the toll the agency’s moral gray zones take on its operatives—Carle’s book sparked a new discussion on the excesses of the global war on terror. Though the agency has made no formal response to the charges raised in the book, some loyalists have mounted a whispering campaign claiming that Carle is misinformed about the CAPTUS case—or, worse, that he’s lying. Then, too, Carle also faces criticism from opponents of the CIA’s actions: that his confessional memoir is too little, too late.

As an agent, Carle was sworn to secrecy about whom he met and what he did. Everything he ever writes about the CIA must pass through an agency board of censors, who slashed about 40 percent of his original manuscript for The Interrogator, excising whole chapters and leaving scenes largely blacked out. To a lay reader, the book is baffling in places; one reviewer called it “by far one of the most frustrating books I have attempted to read in years.” But despite the challenges and criticism, Carle says, he felt he had to come forward. “I worked in, and know about, significant issues of national concern,” he says. “The public should know what we are doing—and most particularly, what we have done to ourselves.”

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain. This endurance need not necessarily be one's own: indeed, the experience of watching over a sibling or mate in extremis can be even more acute. But nothing, according to the experts, compares to the clutching, choking nightmare that engulfs the one who is slowly bereft of a child.

It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoléon Bonaparte said that.

What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripides said that.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

I said that.

Joan Didion, here slightly syncopating in the Bob Dylan manner, has striven with intense dignity and courage in Blue Nights to deepen and extend the effect of The Year of Magical Thinking, her 2005 narrative of the near-simultaneous sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the onset of the fatal illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael. In the course of setting it down, she came to realize that she could no longer compose in the old style: the one that she had “supposed to be like writing music.”

More here.