John Kenney in The New Yorker:

And I’m not alone in history.

Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, was a big fan of photographing his penis, and would pose for hours at a time. In Paris, in the twenties, it was all the rage. Hemingway’s little-known short story “Look at This Photo of My Penis” attests to it. Stalin often adorned his dacha with framed eight-by-tens, coyly saying to visitors, “Boy-oh-boy, is that a lovely penis, or what?” (The wrong answer proved costly).

Go back further, of course, and you’ll find the drawings. Jefferson was a madman for it, often sending John Adams dozens of sketches of his penis in a single day. Adams is said to have enjoyed them with his wife, Abigail, who was herself a fan of penis portraiture. Even further back, we find that Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian all made frequent charcoal sketches of their penises, giving them as gifts (a common practice in Florence to this day). And then there are the famous cave drawings at Lascaux, France, purported to be more than seventeen thousand years old, where one sees dozens of penis portraits, crudely drawn, but a statement in their own right: a plea, as if to say, one cave man to another, “My name is Dave. This is my penis. Let us be friends.”

More here.

From Salon:

A reader, prompted by last week's commentary on whether great books can make you a better person, wrote in to ask a related question. Her favorite author is Charles Dickens; his books have been beacons for her. While she'd like to know more about him, she recalls reading long ago that Dickens behaved badly in his personal life. Should she investigate further, even though she worries that this will lead her to “doubt the impression I always had of Dickens: that he was a kind, sensitive soul who had suffered as a child”? As if hell-bent on providing further illustration of this dilemma, Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul played the provocateur last week by announcing that he is a better writer than any woman who has ever lived. He offered a variety of reasons for this state of affairs, none of them worth repeating. While his remarks lacked intellectual content, his antics did inspire some thoughtful responses, many of which have pointed out that talented artists can be reprehensible people.

If Dickens sometimes behaved badly, Naipaul is unquestionably a bad man, notorious for his floridly abusive relationships and bigoted ideas. Does this diminish his work? Naipaul's fiction is not to everyone's taste, but the grace of his prose and the power of his early books, especially “A Bend in the River,” is hard to deny; I admired much of that novel even as I gritted my teeth over its blinkered depiction of Africans. “A House for Mr. Biswas” is a veritable touchstone for New Yorker critic James Wood, a tough crowd if there ever was one. For myself, I ended up feeling that Naipaul's prejudices (less glaring in his earlier books, but still evident and clearly fueled by cultural insecurity) bar him from the sort of insight that renders a novelist truly wise as opposed to merely smart. Other writers make for more ambiguous cases. T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite, Virginia Woolf a snob and Ezra Pound a flaming fascist, but I'm not ready to shrug off “The Waste Land,” “To the Lighthouse” or “The Cantos.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Dr. Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Cambridge and director of the university’s Autism Research Center, proposes that evil is more scientifically defined as an absence of empathy, exacerbated by negative environmental factors (usually parental, sometimes societal) and a genetic component. When these three exist in tandem they result in what he calls a Zero-Negative personality. Zero-Negative takes at least three forms (and possibly more), borrowing from terms used in psychiatry: Zero Type P (psychopathology), Zero Type B (borderline disorder) and Zero Type N (narcissism).

Whereas psychiatry groups these three loosely under the term “personality disorders,” Dr. Baron-Cohen proposes that they all share the characteristic of zero degrees of empathy. (His “empathy quotient” scale is available in the book or online, with an instant numerical score that is translated into degrees of empathy from zero to six, or super empathy.) Viewing these disorders in terms of empathy “has very different treatment implications,” he maintains. Psychopaths aside, people with low degrees of empathy can be taught empathy, as is done in schools concerned about bullying, and treated with standard psychiatric approaches.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants.

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll!

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Lisa Randall, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. Cosmic Variance: The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant
2. Dr. Carin Bondar: Sacrifice on the Serengeti
3. Empirical Zeal: Blind Fish in Dark Caves Shed Light on the Evolution of Sleep
4. Highly Allochthonous: Levees and the Illusion of Flood Control
5. Laelaps: The Pelican's Beak – Success and Evolutionary Stasis
6. Oh, For the Love of Science: Prehistoric Clues Provide Insight into Climate's Future Impact on Oceans
7. Opinionator: Morals Without God?
8. Scientific American Guest Blog: Serotonin and Sexual Preference: Is It Really That Simple?
9. Starts With A Bang: Where Is Everybody?

We'll announce the three winners on or around June 21, 2011.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

David Reed. #575 detail.

Oil and alkyd on polyester.

More here and here.

Oscar Hijuelos in Newsweek:

Street Kid

The window opens to a field of sagebrush—
California country northeast of San Francisco.
The sun burns into the hill.
This night is his first taste
of a new ache in the adam's apple,
the hard, dry knot,
a fresh loneliness.
Twilight whirrs with meadowlarks
and insects crawling down the glass
between the bars, and he,
apart from the other boys,
the cool toughs playing ping pong
before lockup, hears his heart stop
the tear before it leaves the eye.
Injun Joe, the nickname given him
by the brothers, the blacks, the chicanos,
is not afraid of the heart of darkness,
but of his own soul beating like a fist
against the wall.

by Duane McGinnis
from American Indian Prose and Poetry
published by Longman Canada Limited,
Toronto, 1974

From Edge:

TIMOTHY D. WILSON, the Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, is author of Strangers To Ourselves (“the most influential book I've ever read”, Malcolm Gladwell), which was named by The New York Times Magazine as one of the Best 100 Ideas of 2002 He is also the coauthor of the best-selling social psychology textbook, Social Psychology, now in its seventh edition. His latest trade book is Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change.

“If liberating the unconscious had been Wilson’s only contribution to psychological science, it would have been enough. But it was just the start. Wilson has since discovered and documented a variety of fascinating ways in which all of us are “strangers to ourselves” (which also happens to be the title of his last book—a book that Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, correctly called the best popular psychology book published in the last twenty years). He has done brilliant research on topics ranging from “reasons analysis” (it turns out that when people are asked to generate reasons for their decisions, they typically make bad ones) to “affective forecasting” (it turns out that people can’t predict how future events will make them feel), but at the center of all his work lies a single enigmatic insight: we seem to know less about the worlds inside our heads than about the world our heads are inside.

The Torah asks this question: “Is not a flower a mystery no flower can explain?” Some scholars have said yes, some scholars have said no. Wilson has said, “Let’s go find out.” He has always worn two professional hats — the hat of the psychologist and the hat of the methodologist. He has written extensively about the importance of using experimental methods to solve real world problems, and in his work on the science of psychological change — he uses a scientific flashlight to chase away a whole host of shadows by examining the many ways in which human beings try to change themselves — from self-help to psychotherapy — and asking whether these things really work, and if so, why? His answers will surprise many people and piss off the rest. I predict that this new work will be the center of a very interesting storm.”

— Daniel Gilbert, Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University; Director of Harvard’s Hedonic Psychology Laboratory; Author, Stumbling on Happiness.

More here.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

“There's a Hassidic legend, that in any point of history, there are 36 pure souls for the sake of whom God doesn't destroy the world. And they don't know who they are,” Rebecca Newberger Goldstein tells me. It's early Saturday morning, and we're having breakfast in New York's Washington Square Hotel. The dining room is small, put in almost as an afterthought, and barely has room for the guests waiting anxiously for a fresh batch of coffee. Goldstein is dressed in a simple long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, not completely awake – the consequence of constant travel and an inability to sleep in unfamiliar surroundings. As a young girl, Goldstein suspected that her father, a cantor in White Plains, New York, was one of those 36 pure souls. In her latest novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, the figure of Azarya, a boy genius who has to choose between science and his orthodox Jewish community, is another one. Secular saints, Goldstein calls them both, comparable to Spinoza.

Goldstein, 61, has a powerful presence and a mind that seem too large for her petite figure. She is a philosopher, novelist ( “36 Arguments” is her seventh work of fiction), and author of two nonfiction books. Goldstein has received numerous awards and grants, including a MacArthur fellowship, or “Genius Award.” In 2011, she was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. She and her second husband Steven Pinker, professor of Psychology at Harvard, are considered one of Cambridge's true power couples.

More here.

If Rimbaud anticipated the Surrealists by decades, Ashbery is said to have gone beyond them and defied even their rules and logic. Yet though nearly 150 years have intervened since Rimbaud’s first declaration of independence, many readers in our own age, too, still prefer a coherence of imagery, a sameness of tone, a readable sequential message, even, ultimately, what amounts to a prose narrative broken into lines. Enough others, however, find the “crystalline jumble” intellectually and emotionally revitalizing and say, Yes, please do interrupt the reverie you have created for us to allow an intrusion of Popeye! Besides his early absorption of Rimbaud’s work, Ashbery brings to this translation a long and deep familiarity with French life, language and culture, particularly artistic and literary culture, and the experience of having translated many other French works over the years — by Pierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, Max Jacob, Pierre Martory (as well as at least one detective novel, as the amusingly renamed Jonas Berry). These translations are part of a larger body of Ashbery’s work that has served to offer us — his largely monolingual Anglophone readership — access to poets of another culture, either foreign or earlier in time. (Notable, for instance, is his keenly investigatory, instructive and engrossing “Other Traditions,” the six Norton Lectures that open our eyes to the work of such luminaries as John Clare and Laura Riding.) In tandem, then, with his own 20-plus books of poetry (not to mention his teaching and his critical writings on the visual arts), Ashbery has extended his generous explicating intelligence to the work of many others, most recently in “Illuminations.”

more from Lydia Davis at the NYT here.

There are 7 billion people on the planet, and nearly 1.2 billion of them live in India, making it famously the world’s biggest democracy by far. In the thriving, striving new Indian economy, businessmen make sudden, amazing fortunes, as the American robber barons did in the 19th century, and regularly place on the Forbes list of the world’s most wealthy. Yet at least 300 million Indians live in desperate conditions, many of them starving. The poor are sometimes literally bulldozed out of the way for developments, the underclass of the dispossessed and disenfranchised is huge: The go-go sub-continent might look like a democracy only for the elite. “With its overlap of extreme wealth and lavish poverty … its competing ideologies, its lack of uniformity, its kindness and profound cruelty, its complex relationships with religion, its parallel realities and the rapid speed of social change — India is a macrocosm, and may be the world’s default setting for the future,” writes Patrick French in “India: A Portrait,” in which he mingles historical analysis with on-the-spot reportage, aiming to capture the country in all its teeming, volatile complexity. The result is rich, engaging and indeed multi-hued.

more from Richard Rayner at the LAT here.

Why, if he so loves small-town America and its values, does he live in the liberal enclave of Los Angeles? “There is a lot of work. My wife works there,” he says and then he mentions his daughters. “They are very, very beautiful. It once occurred to me: being able to write is like being the pretty girl at the party. You can’t be diffident about it because that’s a lie but it’s nothing to be arrogant about.” The waitress returns and Mamet asks if she has any fresh fruit. She offers us two plates of berries, bananas and sliced apples. “Yum, yum,” he says appreciatively as the fruit arrives a few minutes later. We are discussing Hollywood and his liberal friends and colleagues. “It is very amusing to listen to some people of my acquaintance who not only own summer homes but transcontinental jets going on about greed and how greed is ruining our country,” Mamet says with a laugh. “You get rich through luck. You get rich through crime. You get rich through fulfilling the needs of another. You can be as greedy as you like. If you can’t do one of those three things, you ain’t going to get any money.” We close with his Phil Spector film and, as Mamet describes a monologue from it, it is clear how much he identifies with the defiantly eccentric and isolated producer – and with Lawrence of Arabia. “He [the Spector character] talks a lot about Lawrence. He loved Lawrence. Either he loved him or I do, I can’t remember. He says in the film Lawrence wanted the one thing that he couldn’t have, which was privacy. He simply wanted to be by himself. Did that make him a monster?”

more from John Gapper at the FT here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Himal South Asian:

Why was Pakistan’s warrior class never tamed by civilian rule? The answer must be sought in the foundation of Pakistan and the state of confusion into which it was born. Beyond the simplistic notion that Hindus and Muslims were incapable of living together, the idea of Pakistan was unclear from the outset. Although he made many speeches, Mohammad Ali Jinnah left no manifesto and authored no book before his untimely death. Critical questions were thus left unanswered: Would the new state be capitalist or socialist, liberal or theocratic, modern or tradition-based? On what basis would power be distributed between its different regions? How would defence, education, science, health, etc be prioritised?

With no clear answers, and lacking a clear basis for legitimacy or direction, the state quickly aligned with the powerful landed class: the army leadership and the economic elite joined forces to claim authority in a nation without definition or cohesion. The Kashmir dispute gave reason for the military to become powerful and to make the acquisition of modern weaponry an overriding priority. The Americans happily obliged, given the burgeoning cold war. A fatal attraction for guns steadily drew Pakistan into the US orbit.

More here.

From Misconception Junction:

Nearly all blood is removed from meat during slaughter, which is also why you don’t see blood in raw “white meat”; only an extremely small amount of blood remains within the muscle tissue when you get it from the store.

So what is that red liquid you are seeing in red meat? Red meats, such as beef, are composed of quite a bit of water. This water, mixed with a protein called myoglobin, ends up comprising most of that red liquid.

In fact, red meat is distinguished from white meat primarily based on the levels of myoglobin in the meat. The more myoglobin, the redder the meat. Thus most animals, such as mammals, with a high amount of myoglobin, are considered “red meat”, while animals with low levels of myoglobin, like most poultry, or no myoglobin, like some sea-life, are considered “white meat”.

Myoglobin is a protein, that stores oxygen in muscle cells, very similar to its cousin, hemoglobin, that stores oxygen in red blood cells. This is necessary for muscles which need immediate oxygen for energy during frequent, continual usage. Myoglobin is highly pigmented, specifically red; so the more myoglobin, the redder the meat will look and the darker it will get when you cook it.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In 1990, William Deresiewicz was on his way to gaining a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. Describing that time in the opening pages of his sharp, endearingly self-effacing new book, “A Jane Austen Education,” Deresiewicz explains that he faced one crucial obstacle. He loathed not just Jane Austen but the entire gang of 19th-century British novelists: Hardy, Dickens, Eliot . . . the lot. At 26, Deresiewicz wasn’t experiencing the hatred born of surfeit that Mark Twain described when he told a friend, “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone.” What Deresiewicz (who has considerable fun at the expense of his pompous younger self) was going through was the rebel phase in which Dostoyevsky rules Planet Gloom, that stage during which the best available image of marriage is a prison gate.

Sardonic students do not, as Deresiewicz points out, make suitable shrine-­tenders for a female novelist whose books, while short on wedding scenes, never skimp on proposals. Emma Bovary fulfilled all the young scholar’s expectations of literary culture at its finest; Emma Woodhouse left him cold. “Her life,” he lamented, “was impossibly narrow.” Her story, such as it was, “seemed to consist of nothing more than a lot of chitchat among a bunch of commonplace characters in a country village.” Hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse, garrulous Miss Bates — weren’t these just the sort of bores Deresiewicz had spent his college years struggling to avoid? Maybe, he describes himself conceding, the sole redeeming feature of smug Miss Woodhouse was that she seemed to share his distaste for the dull society of Highbury.

More here.

From Science:

Today, researchers at the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German center for disease prevention and control, confirmed the suspicion in what they call a “recipe-based restaurant cohort study.” “The problem is that many people do not remember exactly what was in the food they had for lunch or dinner days ago,” says Gérard Krause, head of infectious epidemiology at RKI. To address that problem, the researchers identified five travel groups that had eaten at a restaurant in Northern Germany. There were EHEC victims in all five groups; altogether, 19 of the 112 diners had become infected. (The name of the eatery has been kept secret.) On Tuesday and Wednesday, research teams swarmed out to interview the groups' members. Using order lists, bills, and photos, they managed to determine for most of the guests which items on the menu they had chosen. At the same time, three researchers went to the kitchen to find out how exactly the food was prepared and what ingredients went into each dish. “Only by bridging the memory gaps of the guests with the detailed knowledge of the chefs could we find out exactly what every guest had consumed,” says RKI President Reinhard Burger. “Those photos really helped us as well.”

The researchers returned to Berlin on Wednesday evening and started entering the data into their computers. A statistical analysis, ready at 6:00 Thursday morning, revealed that people who had eaten sprouts were 8.6 times more likely to have become infected with EHEC than those with sprout-free meals. All 19 guests who had fallen ill had eaten sprouts. On the strength of this evidence—and because a total of 26 EHEC clusters has been traced back to the sprout farm in Bienenbüttel—the BfR officially exonerated the other vegetables at a press conference here today. Households and restaurants were advised to destroy any sprouts they had in stock and any food that might have come into contact with them.

More here.

The Gift

To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he'd removed
the iron sliver I thought I'd die from.

I can't remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy's palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife's right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he's given something to keep.
I kissed my father.

by Li-Young Lee
from Poetry Out Loud Anthology
The Poetry Foundation, 2005

Hello,

The voting round of our science prize (details here) is over. A total of 2,018 votes were cast for the 87 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own blogs. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Southern Fried Science: Back from the Brink: Victories in Conservation
2. Georneys: Word of the Week: O is for Ophiolite
3. Cosmology Science Blog: International Astronomical Union has no definition for Big Bang
4. Neutrino Blog: Four Neutrinos? But You Said There Were Just Three!
5. (((1/f))): A Sunday Afternoon Watching Symmetry Break
6. Convergence: Ocean Acidifi-WHAT?!
7. Laelaps: The Pelican's Beak – Success and Evolutionary Stasis
8. Communicate Science: Is Féidir Linn: Obama was right
9. Oh, For the Love of Science: Prehistoric Clues Provide Insight into Climate's Future Impact on Oceans
10. Dr. Carin Bondar: Sacrifice on the Serengeti
11. Surprising Science: Rare Earth Elements Not Rare, Just Playing Hard to Get
12. Empirical Zeal: Blind Fish in Dark Caves Shed Light on the Evolution of Sleep
13. Bering in Mind: One Reason Why Humans Are Special and Unique: We Masturbate. A Lot
14. Anthropology in Practice: Power, Confidence, and High-Heels
15. ERV: Barnyard Week: White Chickens Are ERV Mutants
16. Highly Allochthonous: Levees and the Illusion of Flood Control
17. Doctor Stu's Blog: The Future of Nuclear Power after Fukushima: Thorium Reactors?
18. Observations of a Nerd: How Do You ID a Dead Osama Anyway?
19. Observations of a Nerd: Why do women cry? Obviously it's so they don't get laid
20. Scientific American Guest Blog: Seratonin and Sexual Preference: Is It Really That Simple?

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Professor Lisa Randall for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here on June 13, 2011.

Good luck!

Abbas