Amartya Sen in the NYRB:

The steadily rising rate of economic growth in India has recently been around 8 percent per year (it is expected to be 9 percent this year), and there is much speculation about whether and when India may catch up with and surpass China’s over 10 percent growth rate. Despite the evident excitement that this subject seems to cause in India and abroad, it is surely rather silly to be obsessed about India’s overtaking China in the rate of growth of GNP, while not comparing India with China in other respects, like education, basic health, or life expectancy. Economic growth can, of course, be enormously helpful in advancing living standards and in battling poverty. But there is little cause for taking the growth of GNP to be an end in itself, rather than seeing it as an important means for achieving things we value.

It could, however, be asked why this distinction should make much difference, since economic growth does enhance our ability to improve living standards. The central point to appreciate here is that while economic growth is important for enhancing living conditions, its reach and impact depend greatly on what we do with the increased income. The relation between economic growth and the advancement of living standards depends on many factors, including economic and social inequality and, no less importantly, on what the government does with the public revenue that is generated by economic growth.

Some statistics about China and India, drawn mainly from the World Bank and the United Nations, are relevant here. Life expectancy at birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is 64.4 years. The infant mortality rate is fifty per thousand in India, compared with just seventeen in China; the mortality rate for children under five is sixty-six per thousand for Indians and nineteen for the Chinese; and the maternal mortality rate is 230 per 100,000 live births in India and thirty-eight in China. The mean years of schooling in India were estimated to be 4.4 years, compared with 7.5 years in China. China’s adult literacy rate is 94 percent, compared with India’s 74 percent according to the preliminary tables of the 2011 census.

Two decades ago, RCMP officers drove up a winding road through the Creston Valley of southeastern British Columbia, past fields of timothy hay and cottonwood stands, to an unmarked settlement known as Bountiful. It looked a typical rural town — homesteads bordered by well-kept yards full of children running and swinging and cycling — but, in fact, the officers had come to investigate a complaint that two local patriarchs, young gun Winston Blackmore and his fifty-seven-year old father-in-law Dalmon Oler, were polygamists — an offence under Section 293 of the Criminal Code. All 1,000 or so residents of Bountiful are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a Mormon sect that believes God’s chosen leaders should each marry several virgins and “multiply and replenish the Earth… that they may bear the souls of men.” Unashamed, Oler invited the officers into the fifteen-bedroom home he shared with his five wives and forty-eight children. Blackmore, who in addition to leading Canada’s FLDS operated a multimillion-dollar logging, trucking, and manufacturing business, was cagier about numbers, only admitting to having more than one wife. He was rumoured, however, to have at least twenty-five (many underage at the time he married them), and more than eighty children.

more from Elizabeth Abbott at The Walrus here.

The reason for E. M. Forster’s apparent abandonment of fiction after the publication of A Passage to India in 1924 is now well known: “Weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women & vice versa”. Forster had written down this explanation in June 1910 in what became known as “the Locked Diary”. This notebook, which could indeed be locked by a clasp and key (occasionally mislaid), was used by Forster between September 1909 and June 1967 to record those thoughts and observations he wanted to keep private. It now forms the “central column”, as he puts it, of Philip Gardner’s very welcome but problematic three-volume edition of Forster’s journals and diaries. Some previously published material apart, these volumes purportedly contain “everything by Forster that could reasonably be considered as a diary/journal, or which, though classifiable as a memoir, presents evidence of Forster not only in intellectual but in biographical terms”. As we shall see, this is not entirely accurate, but what Gardner does include covers some seventy years of Forster’s long life, running in fragmentary form from 1895 to 1965 and even reproducing brief and bald travel itineraries for holidays in France (1931 and 1955) and Italy (“possibly 1962”). The Locked Diary aside, the most interesting parts of the book are the “Incidents of War” memoir, an appropriately jagged, almost modernist mosaic created from the conversations Forster had with wounded soldiers while working for the Red Cross in Egypt during the First World War, along with extracts from their letters; the “Notebook Journal (1903–9)” and intermittent diaries kept in 1954, 1955 and 1958; and the innocently titled “West Hackhurst: A Surrey ramble”, in fact a score-settling account in Forster’s best feline manner of his eviction in 1946 from the house at Abinger Hammer his father had designed and where he had lived since 1924.

more from Peter Parker at the TLS here.

Alan Wolfe reviews Lawrence A. Scaff's Max Weber in America, over at TNR's The Book:

MAX WEBER IN AMERICA? The idea seems almost preposterous. We often think of Weber as the quintessential European thinker: abstract, worldly, brooding, and difficult. The America of his period of greatest productivity, the first two decades of the twentieth century, comes down to us as isolationist, anti-intellectual, bombastic, and about to embark on flapperdom. How could one have any influence on the other?

But as Lawrence Scaff effectively shows in his new book, Weber cannot be understood without an appreciation of his experiences in this country, and America’s special path to modernity is difficult to grasp without a substantial dip into Weber’s extensive body of writing. Like Antonín Dvořák, who incorporated American spirituals and folk tunes into his symphonic and chamber compositions, Weber’s fascination with all aspects of American culture belies any notion that the new world and the old were incapable of meeting on equal terms.

Weber and his wife Marianne arrived in the United States in August, 1904 for a three-month stay. The reason for their visit was the Congress of Arts and Sciences, an offshoot of the World’s Fair in St. Louis. Once capable of generating massive fascination, World’s Fairs have lost their appeal. (The 2012 Expo will take place in Yeosu, South Korea and will be devoted to issues of coastal management.) In Weber’s day, by contrast, not only did the events in St. Louis inspire a famous musical comedy, they brought together an all-star list of American and European intellectuals to debate whether there exists a methodological unity linking the natural and social sciences. John Dewey and William James did not show up in St. Louis, which was too bad, because not only Weber but also such extraordinary German scholars as Werner Sombart and Ernst Troeltsch did.

Theodore Roosevelt invited the leading academics from St. Louis to the White House for a reception, much as the current president honors the annual March Madness champion. Weber did not attend because he preferred to go to Muskogee.

From Smithsonian:

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions,” Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. Already one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, he had caught the spirit of a new age. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment. “If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

We have become surrounded by information technology; our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays, and our skills include texting and Googling. But our capacity to understand the role of information has been sorely taxed. “TMI,” we say. Stand back, however, and the past does come back into focus. The rise of information theory aided and abetted a new view of life. The genetic code—no longer a mere metaphor—was being deciphered. Scientists spoke grandly of the biosphere: an entity composed of all the earth’s life-forms, teeming with information, replicating and evolving. And biologists, having absorbed the methods and vocabulary of communications science, went further to make their own contributions to the understanding of information itself.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

One possibility to spur people on to save energy: people punish selfishness more when their group is in competition with others. That which motivates a football team to committed teamwork could also benefit climate change. The members of a group act in a particularly selfless manner and for the benefit of the group, especially when their community is in competition with others. They are then more likely to accept disadvantages themselves in order to punish members of their group who behave selfishly. A research group headed by the economics researcher Lauri Sääksvuori at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena has gained this insight by conducting investigations involving game theory. This could result in a way of spurring people on to save energy.

A striker who is primarily interested in his own goal-scoring statistics is likely to cost his team a number of victories. But if he has to make a donation to the team kitty for each instance of reckless behaviour, he will probably let the striker picked by the trainer take the penalty kick, for example. It is possible that incentives can similarly be created to promote unselfish behaviour to protect the climate, for example. This is suggested by findings obtained by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena.

More here.

Don Belt in National Geographic:

In places you might expect to find solitude, there is none. There are no lonesome highways in Bangladesh.

We should not be surprised. Bangladesh is, after all, one of the most densely populated nations on Earth. It has more people than geographically massive Russia. It is a place where one person, in a nation of 164 million, is mathematically incapable of being truly alone. That takes some getting used to.

So imagine Bangladesh in the year 2050, when its population will likely have zoomed to 220 million, and a good chunk of its current landmass could be permanently underwater. That scenario is based on two converging projections: population growth that, despite a sharp decline in fertility, will continue to produce millions more Bangladeshis in the coming decades, and a possible multifoot rise in sea level by 2100 as a result of climate change. Such a scenario could mean that 10 to 30 million people along the southern coast would be displaced, forcing Bangladeshis to crowd even closer together or else flee the country as climate refugees—a group predicted to swell to some 250 million worldwide by the middle of the century, many from poor, low-lying countries.

More here.

Johann Hari in Slate:

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that “the masses”—her readers—were “lice” and “parasites” who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is “evil” and selfishness is “the only virtue,” she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?

Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller—try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in the darkest corners of American political life.* But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging against: compassion.

More here.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo in Foreign Policy:

For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did.

But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India. We've also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. What we've found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn't necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.

But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. All too many of them still promote sweeping, ideological solutions to problems that defy one-size-fits-all answers, arguing over foreign aid, for example, while the facts on the ground bear little resemblance to the fierce policy battles they wage.

More here.

Moshe Behar in Middle East Studies Online Journal:

In all cases of Palestine/Israel‘s bordering states/societies, difficulties in consolidating a unitary secular-democratic state are evident notwithstanding that – in contrast to the territory comprising Mandatory Palestine – they do not include a sizeable (or miniscule) community of Jews (Zionist or anti-Zionist) who not only differ culturally, linguistically, religiously and (partially) ethnically but who are also (i) rabid anti-Arab Eurocentrics, let alone (ii) happen to think of themselves as a separate group possessing a right of national self-determination in their own state in the post-Holocaust world. Put differently, if Arab societies/states find it hard to amass secular-democratic entities even without the nationalist/statist presence of avidly-Eurocentric Zionists in their midst – what real material prospects are there for such a project to first evolve successfully in Palestine/Israel (while somehow circumventing societal complexities typifying such bi-national or bi-ethnic entities as Belgium, Sri Lanka, or the former Yugoslavia)?

In striking contrast to post-1967 Marxists – effectively all post-1993 tracts advocating for a secular-democratic or bi-national state are devoid of anything existing – or empirically taking place – beyond the (mandated) borders of their otherwise hopeful projection, i.e., a European-like secular-democratic-villa-state in a unified Israel/Palestine. Contemporary One-State scholars hypothesize that the secular-democratic island-state will ripen somehow within the surrounding ―womb‖ of neighboring states, all of which are neither secular nor democratic. For materialist readings of historical and contemporary affairs, such mandated imaginations in a regional void are bewildering: if the diagnosis is largely off the mark, then the corresponding prognosis runs the risk of becoming das Opium des Volkes.

H. Allen Orr reviews Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values in th NYRB:

Harris was trained as a neuroscientist and received his doctoral degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2009. He is best known as the author of two previous books. In 2004, he published The End of Faith, a fierce attack on organized religion. The book, which propelled Harris from near obscurity to near stardom—he has appeared on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The O’Reilly Factor—is one of the canonical works of the New Atheist movement, along with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006). Harris seemed mostly to play the part of polemicist in the movement. He possesses a sharp wit and an even sharper pen, and his attacks on mainstream religion had a scorched-earth intensity. In 2006, Harris followed this up with Letter to a Christian Nation, an uncompromising response to his Christian critics.

In his latest book, The Moral Landscape, Harris shifts his sights somewhat. He is now concerned with the sorry state of moral thinking among both religious and secular people in the West. While the former are convinced that moral truths are handed down from on high, the latter are perpetually muddled, frequently believing that morals are relative, the product of arbitrary tradition and social conditioning. Harris hopes to sweep aside both kinds of confusion, convincing his readers that objective moral truths exist and that we possess a (properly secular) means for discovering them.

It may not come as a surprise that Harris thinks these required means are scientific. Science, he insists, will someday show us the way to the good life. Harris’s claims are both bold and, as expected from his previous writings, plainly put: “I will argue that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.” Indeed, as the subtitle of his book promises, he will show “how science can determine human values.” Though Harris concedes that the science required for this task, particularly neurobiology, remains in its infancy, the requisite developments, he suggests, may be on the horizon. We must all face up to the fact that “science will gradually encompass life’s deepest questions.”

And 3 other poems by Alan Page in bustrofedon:

They call us unfortunate / Nos dicen desafortunados

but there’s little to do here / pero aquí no hay mucho qué hacer

other than chew. / más que masticar.

What we lack in size / Lo que tenemos de chiquitos

we make up for in hunger, / lo tenemos de hambrientos,

[yes I will have that thank you] / [sí, qué rico muchas gracias]

and a kind of glacial / y una especie de paciencia

patience. / glacial.

This is just to say / Esto es sólo para decirte que

no one can stand necessity / a la necesidad nadie la aguanta

it tends to exaggerate / exagera

and the best you can do / y lo mejor que puedes hacer

is work on your mandibles, / es trabajar la mandíbula,

you know, chew. / masticarle, pues.

[I can help you with this] / [sí, yo también]

So you know, / Para que sepas,

(if it’s of comfort) / (si te sirve de consuelo)

here, / aquí,

between the dead leaves / entre las hojas muertas

and the lower greens / y el matorral

you’ll find friends. / encontrarás amigos.

:3 / :3

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

You may have noticed that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City contains strange rooms. They are tucked away in the European Interiors section or back in the American Wing. These rooms do not display simply art or artifacts; they display other rooms. Or you could say that the rooms themselves are the display. In the American wing, you can see the interior of an old colonial house, or something tasteful from the Edwardian era. There is an entire living room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, originally part of the Little House in Wayzata, Minnesota. In the European section of the museum, the interiors give you a glimpse of palace life in the 17th century and the salons of the 18th century.

You stand at an open doorway, or perhaps gaze through a window at the interior within. You see another age, another way of life. These rooms are a throwback to another era of the museum, a time when travel was more difficult, when other forms of media were less sophisticated, when panoramas and stereoscopes and other such devices were a legitimate way to gain access to otherwise inaccessible experiences.

These display rooms are, in a sense, life-sized models, rooms in a one-to-one scale with actual places that once existed or, in fact, still exist in the real world. Indeed, the situation in these rooms is even one degree more complicated since many of the objects and pieces of furniture in the rooms are the real deal. That Louis XVI armoire is, in fact, a Louis XVI armoire and it did, once, sit in a room exactly like this one. Except that the room wasn't this one. The room is a fabrication meant to recreate the surroundings in which these real objects once existed.

I always find these rooms eerie and otherworldly for precisely these reasons. It is the mixture of reality and fabricated reality that creates a third space that seems neither of the museum nor of the world outside the museum's walls.

More here.

Thomas Powers in the LRB:

The sun never shone more brightly and a boy’s dreams never seemed in closer reach, nor the girl next door prettier, nor his friends readier for bold adventure on a Saturday free of school than all did in the ‘white town drowsing’ on the Missouri shore of the mighty Mississippi River where Mark Twain in the 1840s drank deeply of the sweetness of life, and never forgot it. ‘Free’ was a word of powerful attraction for Twain. His friend Tom Blankenship enjoyed a glorious perfection of freedom, as Twain saw things: no mother or aunts to wash, comb, dress and civilise him; no expectations to fail to meet, no sermons in church to scare him and no school to crimp his style. He slept in a hogshead, smoked a corncob pipe, went barefoot in three seasons, knew how to make himself scarce when his father showed up drunk and mean. ‘He was the only really independent person – boy or man – in the community,’ Twain recalled in his seventies, ‘and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us.’

It was Tom Blankenship, rechristened as Huckleberry Finn, who whistled up ‘Tom Sawyer’ for night-time roving when the streets and back alleys were quiet in Hannibal, the village that became St Petersburg in the two novels that made Twain immortal. Not forgetting Hannibal was the work of Twain’s life. The adventures of Tom and Huck constitute the greatest of all American feats of memory. The original for ‘Tom’ was of course the original of Mark Twain, born Samuel L. Clemens, a deeply impressionable boy who resisted all entreaty to improve until the grave took him at 74 and closed the case. There is no point in trying to sort out fiction and reality in Hannibal-St Petersburg, or to distinguish ‘Huck’ from the real Tom, or ‘Tom’ from the real Sam. The life went into the books with such fidelity that the stories can be lifted out again as evidence of what ‘really’ happened or what the characters ‘really’ thought or felt.

The Tom Blankenship of history left few traces. He was a few years older than Twain, he remained in Hannibal, he was twice arrested for stealing food, he died of cholera about 1889. So far as we know, Blankenship never escaped down the Mississippi with a runaway slave but we know he was the kind of boy who would have sprung to do it. Did he not acknowledge, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that Jim ‘had an uncommon level head, for a nigger’? And did he not say of the slave Uncle Jake, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: ‘Sometimes I’ve set right down and eat with him’?

Night Rider

Where do you go when sleep takes you away from me?
Even as I speak, the blinds are falling shut.
Failing against the inexorable escape, you slide into the deep;
simply a body beside me, tossing off the gathering heat,
murmuring in somnolent tongue –
I almost catch a word before it folds up
behind the minuscule distance between here and there,
between me and you in a place where lions become horses
and gallop around in a city in which you have found yourself
lost and unprepared for the journey.
I could call you back when your brow furrows
and your teeth make the sound like marbles
rolling against each other in a small sack made of orange netting,
but suddenly you laugh and turn away, hand on your heart and a smile.
This is how the sun discovers you in its first light
and slowly brings you back to steady breathing,
softly stepping on the surface of what divides us.

by Blessing Musariri

From Salon:

Obama's is not the old-fashioned, Clintonesque story of the small town kid who made good, nor is he that other old-fashioned tale, of the young lion from a Kennedy or Bush political dynasty. He is a new — and increasingly more common — 21st-century boy. The knee-jerk disdain so many of his critics have for him can be traced largely to his worldliness: He's a man who, of necessity, was brought up not to be Joe the Plumber but a citizen of the planet. Obama's mother, who died in 1995, has been, up to this point, largely a shadowy figure in his narrative. She's been portrayed as a quiet girl swept up in an exotic life, a woman who made the seemingly unthinkable choice to send her 10-year-old son far away to live with his grandparents so he could get a better education. Yet Scott's account reveals her as another kind of familiar American archetype: She's the girl who ran away. Every town has one — the one whose personality and curiosity are too big to stay in one place, who eternally fascinates everyone she left behind.

Dunham was the smart girl who sacrificed for her family but who stayed true to her own ambitions, who married the men she loved even when cultural taboos stacked the deck against them. She went to school and made a career for herself, making her a powerful example of how strong, working mothers can raise strong men. She told her daughter “not to be such a wimp.” And though she surely had pains and regrets, she told her son, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.” Clearly, it often wasn't easy, for either Dunham or her son. But Scott's narrative shows that an interesting life is a priceless thing. It's not just one of the greatest gifts a mother can offer her child — it's one of the best she can hope for herself.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

In a paper published in Nature, Japanese researcher Masaki Kamakura describes a process he used to determine that the protein royalactin, is at least one of the components responsible for turning an ordinary female bee, into a queen. In a simple process of elimination experiment, Kamakura, was able to separate the different substances that comprise royal jelly, which then allowed him to feed those substances individually to a female bee to see which caused her to take on queen bee traits. In the simple but brilliant experiment, the individual components that make up royal jelly were obtained by allowing the jelly to decompose under different temperatures. Since the components decomposed at differing rates, Kamakura was able to separate them at each stage, which then allowed him to whip up a diet comprised of just the individual substance (mixed with other nutrients) that he fed to his test female bees, until he came upon the one that finally did the trick.

To prove his point, Kamakura also fed the royalactin mix to female fruit flies, a rather close cousin on the genetic tree, and discovered it caused queen bee like effects on them as well. They grew larger than normal, became better procreators and lived longer. A thick white milky solution, royal jelly is excreted by female nurse bees, who deposit it for the queen to eat, and that’s all she eats, which is a good thing for her, since it causes her to grow larger, weigh more, and perhaps more importantly, to live far longer than anyone else in the hive. Because of its so-called magical properties, royal jelly has also been used by us humans for thousands of years for a variety of reasons, and while some claim it can help slow the effects of aging on skin, there is no evidence to suggest it can cause people to grow larger, live longer or produce more offspring.

More here.