John Tierney in The New York Times:

In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems. Consider, for instance, these three words: eye, gown, basket. Can you think of another word that relates to all three? If not, don’t worry for now. By the time we get back to discussing the scientific significance of this puzzle, the answer might occur to you through the “incubation effect” as your mind wanders from the text of this article — and, yes, your mind is probably going to wander, no matter how brilliant the rest of this column is.

Mind wandering, as psychologists define it, is a subcategory of daydreaming, which is the broad term for all stray thoughts and fantasies, including those moments you deliberately set aside to imagine yourself winning the lottery or accepting the Nobel. But when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering.

More here.

The concrete, material presence of books on our bookshelves transports us back to the time and place where we first read them, we sometimes are pleased and other times shudder when we think of what a book meant to us then, what it has come to mean to us now, we are sometimes comforted to see the continuity of ourselves when we read our earlier marginalia, sometimes disconcerted by its now-alien quality, and occasionally we have dreams about books, like the one I had after my mentor died. When I was in graduate school, he used to lend me his books, their margins overflowing with neat, handwritten questions, objections, notes to himself (I can still picture the fine purple line quality of his felt-tip pen), teaching me how to read in conversation with the author, that is, when I paid attention to the author and not, as I was inclined to do, to the always more interesting thoughts of my mentor. When he died, I dreamt that he had left me a book that he had annotated especially for me and how grateful I was to have it (“who touches this touches a man”) and how sorry I was to wake up.

more from Rochelle Gurstein at TNR here.

RUSTENBURG, South Africa—If you drive outside the main cities in South Africa, you will always find a fire burning. Beside a highway. In a field. On a dirt patch, men huddled around its warmth. I saw many such blazes on the road from Pretoria to Rustenburg as I made my way to the round of 16 match between the United States and Ghana. On Saturday night, the smoke from all of these fires seemed to pool in this hardscrabble mining town. It burdened the air, reducing visibility to a few feet, even with a full moon low in the sky. My traveling companions and I felt the hoodoo: Whatever happy energy once fueled the American adventure here had been replaced by apprehension. Perhaps my mood was colored by the fact that pickpockets had stolen my tickets the day before. With FIFA’s help, I found new ones outside of the U.S. supporters’ section. It didn’t matter. Most American fans had already gone home. Exactly two weeks ago, I’d had to push my way past Donovan and Dempsey jerseys into a nearby bar. Now the place was all but empty. In the smoke outside, I kept bumping into haunted-looking Englishmen who’d banked on their team winning Group C and playing its knockout game here. “Extra England ticket?” they whispered. “Trade? Trade?” We even saw a handwritten sign pleading for tickets, left on the ground, pinned down by rocks. But where were the Yanks? Maybe American fans felt their team wouldn’t make it this far. Maybe fewer of them gave a damn than I thought.

more from Luke O’Brien at Slate here.

Studies show a host of physiological benefits to having high status, whether you’re a senior partner at a bank or the alpha male in a baboon troop. But while that may come as no surprise, there are also findings that suggest people derive psychic benefits from being low-status, as long as there’s no question about where they stand. In a 2003 study by Larissa Tiedens and Alison Fragale, both then at Stanford University, subjects who displayed submissive body language were found to feel more comfortable around others who displayed dominant body language than around those who also displayed submissive body language — and to like those with more dominant posture better, as well. People, it seems, prefer having their evaluation of social hierarchy confirmed, even when they see themselves at the bottom of it. These two linked findings — that people derive comfort from an established hierarchy and that they react particularly strongly to those who buck it — may help explain why McChrystal’s insubordinate comments and the French soccer mutiny were so compelling as public dramas: They were conflicts over who is in charge, and over what punishment the loser would suffer.

more from Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe here.

Taysir Batniji. Undefined. 1997

Oil on paper.

More on this Palestinian artist here and here.

Thanks to my sister Azra for introducing me to this artist's work.

Editor's Note: In the spirit of The New Yorker's popular caption contest, we will be presenting original cartoons done for 3QD by the very talented Robert Pichler. Unlike The New Yorker, we are not running a real contest, but just for fun, we encourage you to suggest captions in the comments area.

Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate:

For decades, Keynesianism was associated with social democratic big-government policies. But John Maynard Keynes’s relationship with social democracy is complex. Although he was an architect of core components of social democratic policy – particularly its emphasis on maintaining full employment – he did not subscribe to other key social democratic objectives, such as public ownership or massive expansion of the welfare state.

In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes ends by summarizing the strengths and weaknesses of the capitalist system. On one hand, capitalism offers the best safeguard of individual freedom, choice, and entrepreneurial initiative. On the other hand, unregulated markets fail to achieve two central goals of any civilized society: “The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.” This suggested an active role for government, which dovetailed with important strands of left-wing thought.

Until The General Theory was published in 1936, social democrats did not know how to go about achieving full employment. Their policies were directed at depriving capitalists of the ownership of the means of production. How this was to produce full employment was never worked out.

Kaleem Aftab in The National:

It was a request to use some footage from the Jacques Tati’s classic Jour de Féte that led to Sylvain Chomet being given the opportunity to make The Illusionist, a screenplay written by the legendary French filmmaker, who died from lung cancer in 1982.

There is a scene in Chomet’s 2003 animated film Triplets of Belleville where the principal characters are watching television, and Chomet thought that it would be more interesting and surprising if the characters were watching a live action movie. It immediately struck him that he should use footage from the man who is famous for making the universe look like a cartoon, the great master Jacques Tati.

To get permission to use footage wrote to the head of Tati’s estate, his daughter Sophie Tatischeff. He explains: “We had to show her some elements of Triplets, some graphics, the script, when it was only around a third done. Sophie said she really liked the idea and the style and everything and it made her think about this script written by her dad that had never been made.

“For her this script was really important because it was a message from a father to his daughter. She didn’t want the film to be done in live action, as she didn’t want someone else to play her dad’s role, so she thought it would be perfect as a cartoon. So just four months before she died – she died like her father of lung cancer, because they’re really heavy smokers – I finished Triplets and on my way to Cannes to present Triplets, I read the Tati script and fell in love with it. I never got to meet Sophie, or even speak to her about the script.”

The Illusionist is about a once popular stage magician who upon reaching the latter stages of his career realises that audiences are more interested in emerging rock stars than his vaudeville show.

Tony Judt in the NYRB blog:

I was seduced by the sheen of English prose at its evanescent apogee. This was the age of mass literacy whose decline Richard Hoggart anticipated in his elegiac essay The Uses of Literacy (1957). A literature of protest and revolt was rising through the culture. From Lucky Jim through Look Back in Anger, and on to the “kitchen sink” dramas of the end of the decade, the class-bound frontiers of suffocating respectability and “proper” speech were under attack. But the barbarians themselves, in their assaults on the heritage, resorted to the perfected cadences of received English: it never occurred to me, reading them, that in order to rebel one must dispense with good form.

By the time I reached college, words were my “thing.” As one teacher equivocally observed, I had the talents of a “silver-tongued orator”—combining (as I fondly assured myself) the inherited confidence of the milieu with the critical edge of the outsider. Oxbridge tutorials reward the verbally felicitous student: the neo-Socratic style (“why did you write this?” “what did you mean by it?”) invites the solitary recipient to explain himself at length, while implicitly disadvantaging the shy, reflective undergraduate who would prefer to retreat to the back of a seminar. My self-serving faith in articulacy was reinforced: not merely evidence of intelligence but intelligence itself.

Did it occur to me that the silence of the teacher in this pedagogical setting was crucial? Certainly silence was something at which I was never adept, whether as student or teacher. Some of my most impressive colleagues over the years have been withdrawn to the point of inarticulacy in debates and even conversation, thinking with deliberation before committing themselves. I have envied them this self-restraint.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Evans got his start working for the government. The Great Depression was on and the WPA was in full swing. The Farm Security Administration was looking, in particular, for photographic documentation of what the Depression was doing to the American farmer. Fortune magazine was interested in the same thing and, famously, notoriously, sent the writer and critic James Agee along with Walker Evans to produce a text with photographs. Fortune killed the story but it survived as the now iconic piece of work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

While Agee's text focused on the misery, it has often been remarked that Evans' photographs, bleak as they are, also capture something noble and unbowed in the individual faces he captured on film. Susan Sontag picked up on this fact in her own analysis of American photography from her classic work, On Photography. She saw a Whitman-esque spirit in Evan’s photography, a deeply democratic viewpoint that allowed each object, each person, to express the dignity of his own specific existence. She wrote, “American photography has moved from affirmation to erosion to, finally, a parody of Whitman's program. In this history the most edifying figure is Walker Evans. He was the last great photographer to work seriously and assuredly in a mood deriving from Whitman's euphoric humanism.” This Whitman-style exuberance was doomed to be shattered on the rocks of actual historical experience, thought Sontag. The happy American is also the childlike American. Whitman himself may have been special; he could sing the body electric all night long and still be humming the tune the next morning. The rest of us were not so lucky. The years pile up and do their dirty work.

More here.

Roger Ebert at his website:

In a way rarely seen, “Putty Hill” says all that can be said about a few days in the lives of its characters without seeming to say very much at all. It looks closely, burrows deep, considers the way in which lives have become pointless and death therefore less meaningful. It uses fairly radical filmmaking techniques to penetrate this truth, and employs them so casually that they seem quite natural.

Matthew Porterfield's film, which takes place in a poor, wooded suburb of Baltimore, involves the death by overdose of a young man named Cory. We never meet him, although we see his portrait at a memorial service. The portrait tells us nothing: He projects no personality for the camera. His family and friends gather for his funeral, and we meet them in unstructured moments that tell us much about them but little about Cory.

The sad truth is, nobody knew Cory that well.

More here. [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

The Bridge

I’ve had enough
I’m sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me
Right?

I explain my mother to my father
my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother
my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks
the Black church folks to the ex-hippies
the ex-hippies to the Black separatists
the Black separatists to the artists
the artists to my friends’ parents…

Then
I’ve got to explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I’m sick of it.

I’m sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
the isolation of your self-imposed limitations

Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners

Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches

Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your humanness

I’m sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I’m sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf of your better selves

I am sick
Of having to remind you
To breathe
Before you suffocate
Your own fool self

Forget it
Stretch or drown
Evolve or die

The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses

I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful

by Donna Kate Rushin
from This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Kitchen Table Press, 1983

From here.

From The Immanent Frame:

“Man dies again.” Or so might one entitle a tabloid version of Stefanos Geroulanos’s excellent work on the history of antihumanist thought in twentieth-century France. The phrase, of course, echoes a New York Post headline—“Pope dies again”—that supposedly appeared when Pope John Paul I died in 1978, a mere 33 days after Pope Paul IV’s passing. Like that likely apocryphal tabloid title, the simplistic formula is an apparently contradictory, but perhaps telling, misreading. First, it drastically reduces the density, richness, and rigor of Geroulanos’s argument, which retraces multiple—at once overlapping and competing—formulations of atheistic critiques of humanism in the politically and intellectually turbulent decades following World War One. And second, it draws an associative link between the Post’s unintentional précis of papal political theology and those strains of French thinking which most insistently worked against the divinization of “Man.” Both the condensation and the displacement at work in the phrase seem to distort the book’s aims and claims beyond recognition.

And yet, the exaggerated brevity of “Man dies again” does encapsulate what I take to be one of the central—and powerful—claims of this book, namely, that the “Man” who has been called into question by antihumanism is not always the same Man, but rather a historically shifting intellectual and political construct. Precisely because these philosophies do not always have the same target at the same moment, Man’s imminent effacement is invoked repeatedly, rather than once and for all. What might be understood as a negative anthropology in one context—for example, Kojève’s 1930s account of man’s negation with the end of history—is radically revised and reinterpreted as a Marxist anthropology in the postwar era.

More here.

Mark Dery in h+ magazine:

As H.P. Lovecraft devotees know, Cthulhu (“kə-THOO-loo”) is the octopoid horror that slithered across the intergalactic wastes, in the time before Time, and slumbers now in the ocean’s abyssal depths, dreaming of apocalypse. As described in “The Call of Cthulhu,” he’s a cosmic obscenity, a partial-birth nightmare of “vaguely anthropoid outline” with the scaly hide and “rudimentary wings” of a dragon. But his most memorable aspect is his cephalopod head, variously described as an “octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers,” an “awful squid-head with writhing feelers,” or just “pulpy” and “tentacled.”

When the stars align, Cthulhu will rise again to resume His dominion over the Earth, ushering in an age of frenzied abandon. Humankind will be “free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy” — Aleister Crowley’s idea of Primal Scream therapy, maybe, or what Burning Man might look like if the Manson Family were called in as rebranding consultants.

Recovering English majors will be reminded of the leviathan in Tennyson’s poem “The Kraken,” which rises from the abyss at the end of the age, when “fire shall heat the deep.” (The Lovecraft scholar Robert M. Price thinks the author drew inspiration from the Tennyson poem.)

As it happens, the many-tentacled One is rising these days, though less as an omen of apocalypse than as an emblem of the zeitgeist. The cephalopod — octopuses and squid, especially the giant squid, Architeuthis — has emerged, in recent years, as a tribal totem for geeks and hipsters of the Threadless T-shirt persuasion, celebrated in tattoos, skateboard decks, Gama-Go’s Giant Squid messenger bag, the Colossal Squid onesie retailed by Hipster Baby Tees, artist Adam Wallacavage’s tentacled chandeliers, Etsy seller OctopusMe’s sterling-silver rings cast from actual tentacles, and let us not forget the Screaming Octopus Mini Vibrator or the insertable silicone Tentacle from Whipspider Rubberworks, a “g-spot stimulator” studded with glow-in-the-dark suction cups. (Both go well with tentacle hentai, the only-in-Japan cartoon-porn genre devoted to fantasies of wide-eyed Lolitas ravished by cephalopods).