John Horgan in Scientific American:

I have first-hand experience of the devastation of depression, in myself and those close to me. Although I have been tempted to try antidepressants, I've never done so. Of course, like everyone reading this column, I know many people who have been treated with antidepressants—not surprisingly, because according to a 2005 survey, one in 10 Americans are now under such treatment. Some people I know have greatly benefited from their treatment. Others never find adequate relief, or they experience annoying side effects—such as mania, insomnia, emotional flatness or loss of libido—so they keep trying different drugs, often in combination with psychotherapy. One chronically depressed friend has tried, unsuccessfully, to stop taking his medications, but he experienced a surge of depression worse than the one that led him to seek treatment. He accepts that he will probably need to take antidepressants for the rest of his life.

We all, to greater or lesser degrees, have this kind of personal perspective on antidepressants. But what does research on these drugs tell us about their efficacy? The long-smoldering debate over this question has flared up again recently, with two medical heavyweights staking out opposite positions.

More here.

Misha Glouberman in The Paris Review:

I grew up in Montreal and went to an upper-middle-class Jewish day school where kids had parents who maybe owned a carpet store or maybe were dentists. And then I went to Harvard for college. And it was pretty weird. When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be more of them there. That was the main reason I thought it would be a fun place to be. I don’t think I was super ambitious or professional minded or even a very good student. The thing I figured out soon after I applied was that, on Gilligan’s Island, it wasn’t the Professor who went to Harvard, it was Mr. Howell, the rich man. That was something of a revelation. It’s funny, because what a lot of people talk about when they talk about going to Harvard is being really intimidated by the place when they arrive. I wasn’t at all intimidated by the place when I arrived—but I was really intimidated after graduating.

I arrived at Harvard from Montreal, which is a pretty fucking hip place to be an eighteen-year-old. I’d been going to bars for a while, and I was in a political theater company that did shows in lofts with homeless people and South American activists. And we went to pubs and got old gay men to buy us drinks. It was a pretty cool, fun, and exciting life for a kid in Montreal. It was a very vibrant place, and young people were really part of the life of the city. Then when I went to Harvard, the place was full of these nominally smart, interesting people, all of whom at the age of eighteen seemed perfectly happy to live in dormitories and be on a meal plan and live a fully institutional life. And that was completely maddening! This was the opposite of everything I’d hoped for from the environment I’d be in.

More here.

From Science:

What happened to the dinosaurs? For more than 100 million years, they ruled the world. Then, suddenly—poof—about 65 million years ago, they were gone. At least that's the way it looks to most scientists, who blame an asteroid hitting Earth for the ancient beasts' dramatic demise. Some researchers are still skeptical about the asteroid hypothesis, but a new fossil discovery in Montana may lend it new impact.

Back in 1980, when the late Nobel laureate physicist Luis Alvarez and his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, first tried to pin dinosaur extinction on an errant asteroid, they faced a major credibility gap. At the time, there was little firm evidence for such a catastrophic event. But then they and other researchers found an overabundance of iridium in geological formations at the 65-million-year transition line between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, known as the K-T boundary. Iridium is common in asteroids but rare in Earth's crust. Still, the Alverezes' hypothesis faced another hurdle: No dinosaur fossils had been found any higher than 3 meters below the K-T boundary, a gap which equates to about 100,000 years. Most researchers concluded that the dinosaurs went extinct before the asteroid impact and that they died off gradually. Alternative hypotheses for their demise included an increase in Earth's volcanic activity around the same time which threw ash into the atmosphere, diminished available sunlight, and affected the growth of plants that herbivorous dinosaurs ate, or a draining away of the shallow inland seas that dinosaurs relied upon for their vegetation-rich habitats.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg in Lapham's Quarterly:

Mary Shelley was nineteen when she wrote Frankenstein. We wonder how a teenager could come up with this uncanny tale of a young student who, becoming obsessed with the mysterious science of galvanism, drops out of school and transforms himself into a “Modern Prometheus,” a god who gives life to an artificial creature, composed of the stuff of man but larger than man, and far more dangerous. Perhaps the clue to Shelley’s creation lies in youth itself. Only the young can really give us our monsters. Only the young see shadows where there is sunshine, hear the march of drums when the rest of us hear a song we used to dance to. Only the young can see pure evil, because only the young believe in the power of purity. Only the young really know why monsters are so terrifying, and what they show us about ourselves.

It’s surprising that Mary Shelley would make her horrible Monster a vegetarian. Surprising, because we think we know our monsters well. We’ve looked at Frankenstein’s monster a million times. But we never really listened to what he had to say. It shouldn't be surprising that Frankenstein’s monster is a vegetarian, because we've always known that vegetarians are monsters. Mary Shelley understood this. “Devil,” “fiend,” “insect,” Frankenstein calls his creation, but for Shelley he was Adam—purity before the Fall, goodness, gentleness, freedom, and also loneliness, failure, devastation. For all these reasons, Shelley made her Monster a vegetarian.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

In the early 1950s, Cy Twombly worked for the army as a cryptologist. That fact seems hugely significant since Twombly was one of the more elusive artists of his generation. That is what the conventional wisdom says, anyway. In this case, the conventional wisdom is probably correct.

Cy Twombly's art first acquired its distinctively elusive characteristics when he started using letters and words in his paintings. In a number of his paintings can be found the letter “e.” Twombly painted his “e”s in a cursive style most of the time, drawn with a freehand nonchalance. The “e”s in Twombly's paintings often look like something you would find in the notebook of a young person first learning to write in cursive. This person is drawing the same letter over and over again in loops in the attempt to get the form of the letter right. Maybe they have learned how to make one word and they are copying that word over and over again with varying success.

Letters, in general, are meant to make up words and words are meant to make up sentences and sentences are meant to convey meaning. Breaking sentences back down into individual words and words back down into individual letters has the opposite effect. Meaning is reduced, taken apart, decomposed. Still, the letters and the words contain a lingering residue of the meaning they are meant to lead toward even if they never get there. In Twombly's paintings, the individual “e”s looping off one another across the canvas contain a lot of promise. There is something tantalizing about the fact that they might mean something after all.

Cy Twombly seems to have enjoyed his stand-alone “e”s for just that reason. He liked to meditate on them as such. He liked the potential for meaning permanently forestalled. He must have liked the way, also, that his letter-and-word-scrawled canvases were a jolt to expectations.

More here.

From Salon:

So why not plan a vacation devoted exclusively to reading? Twice annually, Bill Gates schedules a week-long “reading retreat” during which he does nothing but pore over the books and papers he's set aside during the year. He's not alone: The idea seems particularly popular in the UK, where you can sign up at London's School of Life to receive a customized book list (they have “bibliotherapists” on staff to compile one based on a telephone consultation) and lodging in one of several modern country houses. The website promises “the perfect combination of great books and great architecture.”

Those who prefer a more social experience can enroll in book-club-style retreats in which an assortment of guests all read the same book during the day and discuss it over the evening meal. Deb Snow, an English teacher currently running a guest house in rural Bulgaria, hosts a reading week with a pre-set list of books and meals provided. Reading Retreats in Rural Italy has a grander setting — the 14th-century Castello di Galeazza in Emilia-Romagna — but the terms are more informal and spartan. Clark Lawrence, who has been running these retreats for 15 years, explains, “Staying here is very similar to staying at a friend's house. People have to share the two bathrooms. We cook meals and eat together.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Bet you can’t eat just one” (as the old potato-chip commercials had it) is, of course, a bet most of us end up losing. But why? Is it simple lack of willpower that makes fatty snacks irresistible, or are deeper biological forces at work? Some intriguing new research suggests the latter. Scientists in California and Italy reported last week that in rats given fatty foods, the body immediately began to release natural marijuanalike chemicals in the gut that kept them craving more.

The findings are among several recent studies that add new complexity to the obesity debate, suggesting that certain foods set off powerful chemical reactions in the body and the brain. Yes, it’s still true that people gain weight because they eat more calories than they burn. But those compulsions may stem from biological systems over which the individual has no control. “I do think some people come into the world, and they are more responsive to food,” said Susan Carnell, a research associate at the Columbia University Institute of Human Nutrition. “I think there are many different routes to obesity.” In the recent rat studies, by a team from the University of California, Irvine, and the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, the goal was to measure how taste alone affects the body’s response to food. Among rats given liquid diets high in fat, sugar or protein, the ones who got the fatty liquid had a striking reaction: As soon as it hit their taste buds, their digestive systems began producing endocannabinoids, chemicals similar to those produced by marijuana use.

More here.

Austin Allen in Book Think:

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Percy Shelley wrote in 1821. Not surprisingly, this claim has earned some snickers from people who think of poets as barely able to legislate their own grooming habits. Fellow writers have made fun of it, too: in the twentieth century Auden shot back, “‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’ describes the secret police, not the poets.”

But Shelley was speaking metaphorically, of course, and also fairly broadly; his general point was that language is the decisive force in human affairs. Culture, religion, and politics derive from narrative, myth, and rhetoric—and all of these things derive from “poetry,” that is, memorable figurative language.

Even if you interpret Shelley’s words in the narrowest sense possible—“Verse writers are the secret movers and shakers of global politics”—you’ll find that Shelley himself, more than almost anyone else, has proven them true. Don’t believe me? Look up his poem “The Masque of Anarchy,” which, although now largely forgotten, has sparked some of the most sweeping historical changes of the past two centuries.

“Masque” was written in response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which British troops attacked a defenseless crowd of citizen protesters. The poem urges the “Men of England” to rise up—and stand still—against tyranny:

Let a vast assembly be,

And with great solemnity

Declare with measured words that ye

Are, as God has made ye, free.

…

Stand ye calm and resolute,

Like a forest close and mute,

With folded arms and looks which are

Weapons of unvanquished war,

And let Panic, who outspeeds

The career of armed steeds

Pass a disregarded shade

Through your phalanx undismayed.

More here.

Lessons learned: Americans are hotheads, Australians are drunks—and never say where you're calling from.

Andrew Marantz in Mother Jones:

Every month, thousands of Indians leave their Himalayan tribes and coastal fishing towns to seek work in business process outsourcing, which includes customer service, sales, and anything else foreign corporations hire Indians to do. The competition is fierce. No one keeps a reliable count, but each year there are possibly millions of applicants vying for BPO positions. A good many of them are bright recent college grads, but their knowledge of econometrics and Soviet history won't help them in interviews. Instead, they pore over flashcards and accent tapes, intoning the shibboleths of English pronunciation—”wherever” and “pleasure” and “socialization”—that recruiters use to distinguish the employable candidates from those still suffering from MTI, or “mother tongue influence.”

In the end, most of the applicants will fail and return home deeper in debt. The lucky ones will secure Spartan lodgings and spend their nights (thanks to time differences) in air-conditioned white-collar sweatshops.

More here.

Subhrajit Basu. The Cloud Hunter, Digha Beach, West Bengal. 2009

More here and here.

Phil Wilson in Plus Magazine:

I told a guest at a recent party that I use mathematics to try to understand migraines. She thought that I ask migraine sufferers to do mental arithmetic to alleviate their symptoms. Of course, what I really do is use mathematics to understand the biological causes of migraines.

My work is possible because of a stunning fact we often overlook: the world can be understood mathematically. The party goer's misconception reminds us that this fact is not obvious. In this article I want to discuss a big question: “why can maths be used to describe the world?”, or to extend it more provocatively, “why is applied maths even possible?” To do so we need to review the long history of the general philosophy of mathematics — what I will loosely call metamaths.

Before we go any further, we should be clear on what we mean by applied mathematics. I will borrow a definition given by an important applied mathematician of the 20th and 21st centuries, Tim Pedley, the GI Taylor Professor of Fluid Mechanics at the University of Cambridge. In his Presidential Address to the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in 2004, he said “Applying mathematics means using a mathematical technique to derive an answer to a question posed from outside mathematics.” This definition is deliberately broad — including everything from counting change to climate change — and the very possibility of such a broad definition is part of the mystery we are discussing.

The question of why mathematics is so applicable is arguably more important than any other question you might ask about the nature of mathematics. Firstly, because applied mathematics is mathematics, it raises all the same issues as those traditionally arising in metamaths. Secondly, being applied, it raises some of the issues addressed in the philosophy of science. I suspect that the case could be made for our big question being in fact the big question in the philosophy of science and mathematics. However, let us now turn to the history of metamaths: what has been said about mathematics, its nature and its applicability?

Richard J. Salvucci in Miller-McCune:

Paper of Record is a Canadian website that boasts of building the world’s largest searchable archive of historical newspapers. It was conceived, appropriately enough, in a Mexican restaurant in Ottawa by R. J. (Bob) Huggins. Paper of Record is, to my knowledge, the most extensive searchable archive of Mexican historical newspapers in the world. There are more than 150 logged newspapers, some dating as far back as the 1840s. Paper of Record became, outside of the National Newspaper Library of Mexico, the single most important resource of its kind for scholars like me working in Mexican history — in Mexico, the United States, anywhere. With an excellent user interface and powerful search engine, Paper of Record made a vast collection of what had been nearly unusable and generally inaccessible primary sources searchable and exploitable, at no charge to users. For some scholars, especially those of us doing commercial, political or economic history, Paper of Record became literally indispensable.

Then Google bought it.

Google closed down Paper of Record, made the papers inaccessible, promised to make them available under Google News, but mostly didn’t, and then virtually refused to discuss what had happened with anyone. Research projects in Mexico and the United States came to a halt. Advanced graduate students were stymied. A Mexican colleague asked me over lunch what had happened to Paper of Record. Not having visited the site for a couple of weeks, I didn’t know it was gone. Neither Google nor Paper of Record had seen fit to give its users any notice. They just pulled the plug … and then darkness.

Andrei Platonov in New Left Review:

[Editor's introduction to the piece] The year 1934, his thirty-fifth, was a significant watershed in the life of Andrei Platonov. He had already written The Foundation Pit and Chevengur, the novels for which he is today best known, but neither had been published in full. Soviet readers knew him mainly for a few short stories and, above all, his semi-satirical account of collectivization, ‘For Future Use’, which had been met by a storm of official criticism when it appeared in 1931. For the next three years, Platonov was unable to publish anything. But in the spring of 1934, he was included in a brigade of writers sent to Turkmenistan to report on the progress of Sovietization, and the same year was asked to contribute to a series of almanachs. Under Gorky’s general editorship, these were to celebrate the completion of the second Five-Year Plan in 1937; but they never appeared. The text reproduced here was written for one of these, titled ‘Notebooks’; it arrived on Gorky’s desk in early January 1935—a month after the assassination of Kirov, an event which unleashed a wave of purges that presaged the terror to come. Within a few days Gorky had rejected Platonov’s text as ‘unsuitable’ and ‘pessimistic’; in early March the organizing secretary of the Writers’ Union publicly denounced the unpublished article as ‘reactionary’, ‘reflecting the philosophy of elements hostile to socialism’.…

[Platonov] One should keep one’s head down and not revel in life: our time is better and more serious than blissful enjoyment. Anyone who revels in it will certainly be caught and perish, like a mouse that has crawled into a mousetrap to ‘revel in’ a piece of lard on the bait pedal. Around us there is a lot of lard, but every piece is bait. One should stand with the ordinary people in their patient socialist work, and that’s all.

This mood and consciousness correspond to the way nature is constructed. Nature is not great, it is not abundant. Or it is so harshly arranged that it has never bestowed its abundance and greatness on anyone. This is a good thing, otherwise—in historical time—all of nature would have been plundered, wasted, eaten up, people would have revelled in it down to its very bones; there would always have been appetite enough. If the physical world had not had its one law—in fact, the basic law: that of the dialectic—people would have been able to destroy the world completely in a few short centuries. More: even without people, nature would have destroyed itself into pieces of its own accord. The dialectic is probably an expression of miserliness, of the daunting harshness of nature’s construction, and it is only thanks to this that the historical development of humankind became possible. Otherwise everything on earth would long since have ended, as when a child plays with sweets that have melted in his hands before he has even had time to eat them.

Where does the truth of our contemporary historical picture lie? Of course, it is a tragic picture, because the real historical work is being done not on the whole earth, but in a small part of it, with enormous overloading.

David Segal in the NYT Magazine:

In its first season, “Breaking Bad” seemed like the story of the nuttiest midlife crisis ever, told with elements that felt vaguely familiar. The structure — felonious dad copes with stress of work and family; complications ensue — owed an obvious debt to “The Sopranos,” and the collision of regular people and colorfully violent thugs nodded to Tarantino. The story and setting were an update of the spaghetti Western, minus the cowboys and set in the present.

But it was soon clear that “Breaking Bad” was something much more satisfying and complex: a revolutionary take on the serial drama. What sets the show apart from its small-screen peers is a subtle metaphysical layer all its own. As Walter inches toward damnation, Gilligan and his writers have posed some large questions about good and evil, questions with implications for every kind of malefactor you can imagine, from Ponzi schemers to terrorists. Questions like: Do we live in a world where terrible people go unpunished for their misdeeds? Or do the wicked ultimately suffer for their sins?

Gilligan has the nerve to provide his own hopeful answer. “Breaking Bad” takes place in a universe where nobody gets away with anything and karma is the great uncredited player in the cast. This moral dimension might explain why “Breaking Bad” has yet to achieve pop cultural breakthrough status, at least on the scale of other cable hits set in decidedly amoral universes, like “True Blood” or “Mad Men,” AMC’s far-more-buzzed-about series that takes place in an ad agency in the ’60s. The total audience for “Breaking Bad” is only slightly smaller than that of “Mad Men” — 19.5 million versus 22.4 million cumulative viewers in their respective third seasons — but the top three markets for “Breaking Bad” are Albuquerque/Santa Fe, Kansas City and Memphis; neither New York nor Los Angeles are in its top 10. The show, in other words, doesn’t play on the coasts. It gets chatter, just not among what has long been considered the chattering class.

Mark Jay Mirsky reviews Lev Loseff's Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, in Ha'aretz:

Brodsky, who was born in 1940, dropped out of high school at 15 and worked at a series of low-level jobs, including apprentice machinist and hospital attendant, but also joined geological expeditions to the Soviet Far East beginning in 1957, where he came in contact with a group associated with the Mining Academy. Brodsky would claim that he found his way as a poet when he stumbled on the work of Evgeny Baratynsky, a 19th-century elegist, in 1959, but he was already writing poetry in 1957 and 1958. He never attended university, though he did enroll in evening classes and audit university lectures. As an autodidact, he pumped his university-educated friends regularly for information, Loseff relates.

Brodsky was not part of the establishment; he didn't belong to the Writers' Union of the USSR and wasn't involved in academia. He did, however, enjoy a deep friendship with the doyenne of Russian poetry, Anna Akhmatova, who was also a victim of Soviet persecution. Though Brodsky was an outsider with no regular employment, his work began to enjoy significant popularity but he also rubbed a number of established poets the wrong way. “His performances … were the loudest and most emotional … [Brodsky] left early … without listening to the rest of the readings,” writes Loseff. Publishing in the underground Samizdat journal Sintakis, as well as participating in a hare-brained scheme to hijack a plane and jump the USSR border, also put him in ill odor with the KGB. His growing reputation as a poet attracted the attention of a malicious informer, who denounced him to the authorities.

Loseff gives us a chilling account of the young Brodsky's kangaroo trial, in 1964, in which he was convicted of “parasitism,” after a futile attempt to hide in a brutal Soviet mental institution. Despite the nightmare of the exile to which he was sentenced, he would write some of his best work in the remote Siberian village of Norenskaya, and after he left it, he recalled its landscape and denizens in verse.

Dudley Clendinen in The New York Times:

I HAVE wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul. One gave me a box of hand-crafted chocolates. Fifteen of them held two rousing, pre-posthumous wakes for me. Several wrote large checks. Two sent me a boxed set of all the Bach sacred cantatas. And one, from Texas, put a hand on my thinning shoulder, and appeared to study the ground where we were standing. He had flown in to see me.

“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

“Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”

I loved him for that.

I love them all. I am acutely lucky in my family and friends, and in my daughter, my work and my life. But I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., more kindly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, for the great Yankee hitter and first baseman who was told he had it in 1939, accepted the verdict with such famous grace, and died less than two years later. He was almost 38. I sometimes call it Lou, in his honor, and because the familiar feels less threatening. But it is not a kind disease. The nerves and muscles pulse and twitch, and progressively, they die. From the outside, it looks like the ripple of piano keys in the muscles under my skin. From the inside, it feels like anxious butterflies, trying to get out. It starts in the hands and feet and works its way up and in, or it begins in the muscles of the mouth and throat and chest and abdomen, and works its way down and out. The second way is called bulbar, and that’s the way it is with me. We don’t live as long, because it affects our ability to breathe early on, and it just gets worse. At the moment, for 66, I look pretty good. I’ve lost 20 pounds. My face is thinner. I even get some “Hey, there, Big Boy,” looks, which I like. I think of it as my cosmetic phase. But it’s hard to smile, and chew. I’m short of breath. I choke a lot. I sound like a wheezy, lisping drunk. For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying.

More here.

From Allvoices: