From The Economist:

Where do languages come from? That is a question as old as human beings’ ability to pose it. But it has two sorts of answer. The first is evolutionary: when and where human banter was first heard. The second is ontological: how an individual human acquires the power of speech and understanding. This week, by a neat coincidence, has seen the publication of papers addressing both of these conundrums.

Quentin Atkinson, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, has been looking at the evolutionary issue, trying to locate the birthplace of the first language. Michael Dunn, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, has been examining ontology. Fittingly, they have published their results in the two greatest rivals of scientific journalism. Dr Atkinson’s paper appears in Science, Dr Dunn’s in Nature.

The obvious place to look for the evolutionary origin of language is the cradle of humanity, Africa. And, to cut a long story short, it is to Africa that Dr Atkinson does trace things. In doing so, he knocks on the head any lingering suggestion that language originated more than once.

More here.

A response to “A Case for Hell” by Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

This enthusiastic stumping for the reality of Hell betrays not only a shriveled sense of human decency and a repulsive interest in pain inflicted on others, but a deplorable lack of imagination. People have a hard time taking eternity seriously. I don’t know of any theological descriptions of Hell that involve some version of parole hearings at regular intervals. The usual assumption is that it’s an eternal sentence. For all the pious musings about the centrality of human choice, few of Hell’s advocates allow for some version of that choice to persist after death. Seventy years or so on Earth, with unclear instructions and bad advice; infinity years in Hell for making the wrong decisions.

Hell isn’t an essential ingredient in humanity’s freedom of agency; it’s a horrible of invention by despicable people who can’t rise above their own petty bloody-mindedness. The thought of condemning millions of people to an eternity of torment makes Ross Douthat feel good about himself and gives him a chance to indulge in some saucy contrarianism. I tend to take issue with religion on the grounds that it’s factually wrong, not morally reprehensible; but if you want evidence for the latter, here you go.

More here.

Susie MacMurray. Promenade, 2010.

Site specific installation at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire; 105 miles of fine gold embroidery thread.

More here, and here.

“Susie MacMurray was an orchestral musician for some years before making the transition to artist and vestiges of this former life linger on.”

Amit Varma in India Uncut:

My post a few minutes ago about the misuse of the word populist reminded me of a list of suggestions VS Naipaul drew up many years ago for beginning writers at Tehelka. I first read that list in my friend Amitava Kumar‘s introduction to a fine collection of essays edited by him, The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V.S. Naipaul. Here it is, reproduced in full:

VS Naipaul’s Rules for Beginners

1. Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.

2. Each sentence should make a clear statement. It should add to the statement that went before. A good paragraph is a series of clear, linked statements.

3. Do not use big words. If your computer tells you that your average word is more than five letters long, there is something wrong. The use of small words compels you to think about what you are writing. Even difficult ideas can be broken down into small words.

More here.

Joseph Epstein reviews Sigrid Nunez's Sempre Susan, the WSJ:

Susan Sontag, as F.R. Leavis said of the Sitwells, belongs less to the history of literature than to that of publicity. Anyone with the least intellectual pretension seemed to have heard of, if not actually read, her. Outside of the movies and politics, Sontag must have been one of the most photographed women of the second half of the past century. Tall and striking, with thickish black hair later showing a signature white streak at the front, she was the beautiful young woman every male graduate student regretted not having had a tumble with, a fantasy that would have been difficult to arrange since she was, with only an occasional lapse, a lesbian.

A single essay, “Notes on 'Camp,'” published in Partisan Review in 1964, launched Susan Sontag's career, at the age of 31, and put her instantly on the Big Board of literary reputations. People speak of ideas whose time has not yet come; hers was a talent for promoting ideas that arrived precisely on time. “Notes on 'Camp,'” along with a companion essay called “Against Interpretation,” vaunted style over content: “The idea of content,” Ms. Sontag wrote, “is today merely a hindrance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.” She also held interpretation to be “the enemy of art.” She argued that Camp, a style marked by extravagance, epicene in character, expressed a new sensibility that would “dethrone the serious.” In its place she would put, with nearly equal standing, such cultural items as comic books, wretched movies, pornography watched ironically, and other trivia.

These essays arrived as the 1960s were about to come to their tumultuous fruition and provided an aesthetic justification for a retreat from the moral judgment of artistic works and an opening to hedonism, at least in aesthetic matters. “In place of a hermeneutics,” Sontag's “Against Interpretation” ended, “we need an erotics of art.” She also argued that the old division between highbrow and lowbrow culture was a waste not so much of time as of the prospects for enjoyment. Toward this end she lauded the movies—”cinema is the active, the most exciting, the most important of all the art forms right now”—as well as science fiction and popular music.

These cultural pronunciamentos, authoritative and richly allusive, were delivered in a mandarin manner. They read as if they were a translation, probably, if one had to guess, from the French. They would have been more impressive, of course, if their author were herself a first-class artist. This, Lord knows, Susan Sontag strained to be. She wrote experimental fiction that never came off; later in her career she wrote more traditional fiction, but it, too, arrived dead on the page.

Raymond Tallis in New Atlantis:

There has been much breathless talk of late about all the varied mysteries of human existence that have been or soon will be solved by neuroscience. As a clinical neuroscientist, I could easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that I believe has a better claim than mathematics to being Queen of the Sciences. For a start, it is a science in which many other sciences converge: physics, biology, chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, and psychology, among others. In addition, its object of study is the one material object that, of all the material objects in the universe, bears most closely on our lives: the brain, and more generally, the nervous system. So let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.

What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. Its descriptions of what these phenomena are and of how they arise are incomplete in several crucial respects, as we will see. The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. While to live a human life requires having a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this fact that to live a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order. This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities, and the present epidemic of such neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines as neuroaesthetics, neuroeconomics, neurosociology, neuropolitics, neurotheology, neurophilosophy, and so on.

The failure to distinguish consciousness from neural activity corrodes our self-understanding in two significant ways. If we are just our brains, and our brains are just evolved organs designed to optimize our odds of survival — or, more precisely, to maximize the replicative potential of the genetic material for which we are the vehicle — then we are merely beasts like any other, equally beholden as apes and centipedes to biological drives. Similarly, if we are just our brains, and our brains are just material objects, then we, and our lives, are merely way stations in the great causal net that is the universe, stretching from the Big Bang to the Big Crunch.

In Spiegel Online:

SPIEGEL: The underlying theme of “Modernist Cuisine” is that we are witnessing a revolution in cooking. What does it entail?

Myhrvold: The book is about pushing the boundaries of cooking using science and technology and laying the foundations for 21st-century cooking. Most of it has its roots in the mid-1980s, when people realized that science was important to cooking and that technology was relevant, too. My friend Ferran Adria of the restaurant El Bulli, in Spain, started very early on to experiment with these new techniques. My co-authors, Chris Young and Maxim Billet, and I document this revolution. And we did invent some new dishes and techniques.

SPIEGEL: The book features, for example, recipes of faux eggs made with parmesan cheese, “caviar” made from melon and “cherries” made of foie gras. Is this sheer childish curiosity?

Myhrvold: The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. In the book, for example, we have some very traditional American food, like maccaroni and cheese. They taste better but basically look the same. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before. That's what I call cooking in a modernist aesthetic. Let's do a risotto made with pinenuts instead of rice, for example. Pinenuts are a traditional Italian ingredient, but they have never been used this way. By doing so, however, you make something that is delicous, fresh and new and that has an interesting culinary reference.

SPIEGEL: You are a mathematician and a physicist. Does your enthusiasm for cooking stem from the fact that it is reminiscent of experimenting in a laboratory?

Myhrvold: Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice — or, in other words, make mayonnaise — you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better. And I was fascinated by this very early on.

Mark Juergensmeyer in The Immanent Frame:

It has been a season of earthquakes, and the political ones in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East may have shifted the moral high ground within Islamic opposition movements. Put simply, Tahrir Square may have trumped jihad.

For the past thirty years, the jihadi movement has crested on a wave of popular unrest and been propelled by the moral legitimacy given by their violent interpretation of the Muslim notion of ethical struggle. Though jihadi activists such as those associated with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network have been regarded from outside the region simply as immoral terrorists, much of their popularity within the Islamic world has been their moral appeal.

The jihadi ideology has had two dimensions, political and ethical. The political attraction was the alleged necessity of violence to end despotic regimes. Before the protests at Tahrir Square that toppled the Mubarak regime last month, many Egyptian activists were convinced that bloodshed was the only strategy that would work against such a ruthless dictator. They imagined that their acts of terrorism—against the regime and against the “far enemy” of America that they assumed was propping up the Mubarak system—would eventually lead to a massive revolt that would bring the dictatorship to an end.

They also thought that only the jihadi ideology of cosmic warfare—based on Muslim history and Qur’anic verses—provided the moral legitimacy for the struggle. Ideologists such as Abd al-Salam Farad and Ayman al-Zawahiri have written as if violent struggle—including ruthless attacks of terrorism on civilian populations—was the only form of struggle that was advocated by Islam.

These assumptions have been proven wrong.

From Smithsonian:

Brian Druker arrived at OHSU in 1993, years before the tram would be built and the hall-of-fame mural in the adjacent passageway would include a picture of him. Tall, as lanky and lightfooted as a greyhound, soft-spoken, Druker was 38 and had just spent nine years at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, part of Harvard Medical School, in Boston. “I saw cancer as being a tractable problem,” he recalled of the research path he chose after finishing medical school at the University of California, San Diego. “People were beginning to get some hints and some clues and it just seemed to me that in my lifetime it was likely to yield to science and discovery.”

At Dana-Farber, Druker landed in a laboratory studying how a normal human cell gives rise to runaway growth—malignancy. Among other things, the lab focused on enzymes, proteins that change other molecules by breaking them down (gut enzymes, for example, help digest food) or linking them up (hair follicle enzymes construct silky keratin fibers). Enzymes also figure in chain reactions, with one enzyme activating another and so on, until some complex cellular feat is accomplished; thus a cell can control a process such as growth or division by initiating a single reaction, like tipping the first domino. Under the lab’s chief, Thomas Roberts, Druker mastered numerous techniques for tracking and measuring enzymes in tissue samples, eventually turning to one implicated in CML.

More here.

From Guardian:

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle,” confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): “I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French. “At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance.” We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

Mr Hitchens isn't like that. Christopher and His Kind runs the title of one of Isherwood's famous memoirs. And yet this Christopher doesn't have a kind. Everyone is unique – but Christopher is preternatural. And it may even be that he exactly inverts the Nabokovian paradigm. He thinks like a child (that is to say, his judgments are far more instinctive and moral-visceral than they seem, and are animated by a child's eager apprehension of what feels just and true); he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius. As a result, Christopher is one of the most terrifying rhetoricians that the world has yet seen. Lenin used to boast that his objective, in debate, was not rebuttal and then refutation: it was the “destruction” of his interlocutor. This isn't Christopher's policy – but it is his practice.

More here.

Regarding Wave

The voice of Dharma
….. the voice
……. now

A shimmering bell
……. through all.

Every hill, … still.
Every tree alive. Every leaf.
All the slopes flow.
…… old woods, new seedlings,
…… tall grass plumes.

Dark hollws; Peaks of light.
. wind stirs.. the cool side
Each leaf living.
….. All the hills.

………The Voice
……… is a wife
……….. to
……….

…… .. Him still.

by Gary Snyder

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic:

In somewhat different ways, Orwell and Larkin were phlegmatically pessimistic and at times almost misanthropic, not to say misogynistic. Both also originated from dire family backgrounds that inculcated prejudice against Jews, the colored subjects of the British Empire, and the working class. Orwell’s detested father was a servant of the Empire who specialized in the exceptionally nasty subdivision that traded opium between India and China, and Larkin’s detested father was a professional civil servant who came to admire the “New Germany” of the 1930s, attended Nuremberg rallies, and displayed Nazi regalia in his office. But these similarities in trait and background produced radically different conclusions. Orwell educated himself, not without difficulty, out of racial prejudice and took a stalwart position on the side of the workers. Larkin energetically hated the labour movement and was appalled at the arrival of immigrants from the Caribbean and Asia. Orwell traveled as widely as his health permitted and learned several foreign languages, while Larkin’s insularity and loathing for “abroad” were almost parodic. In consequence, Orwell has left us a memory that elevates English decency to one of humanity’s versions of grace under pressure, whereas the publication of Larkin’s Selected Letters in 1992, and a biography by Andrew Motion in 1993, posthumously drenched the poet in a tide of cloacal filth and petty bigotry that was at least somewhat self-generated.

More here.

Julia Galef in Measure of Doubt:

When you hear mathematicians talk about “searching” for a proof or having “discovered” a new theorem, the implication is that math is something that exists out there in the world, like nature, and that we gradually learn more about it. In other words, mathematical questions are objectively true or false, independent of us, and it’s up to us to discover the answer. That’s a very popular way to think about math, and a very intuitive one.

The alternate view, however, is that math is something we invent, and that math has the form it does because we decided that form would be useful to us, not because we discovered it to be true. Skeptical? Consider imaginary numbers: The square root of X is the number which, when you square it, yields X. And there’s no real number which, when you square it, yields -1. But mathematicians realized centuries ago that it would be useful to be able to use square roots of negative numbers in their formulas, so they decided to define an imaginary number, “i,” to mean “the square root of -1.” So this seems like a clear example in which a mathematical concept was invented, rather than discovered, and in which our system of math has a certain form simply because we decided it would be useful to define it that way, not because that’s how things “really are.”

More here.

From Discover:

The UC San Diego Brain Observatory would like your brain, please. Especially if you can provide a detailed life history—or, best-case scenario, have already had your biography written—and are just a little strange in the head. Can’t feel fear? Can’t form memories? Can’t smell? These are traits of the people the Observatory already has on its rosters (they have 20 brains and 7 still-living donors), but director Jacopo Annese of UCSD is looking to recruit 1,000 more prospective donors this year. Apparently one brain he’d love to get his custom-made brain-slicing machinery on is Donald Trump’s: The guy’s had an unusual life, he explains to Bloomberg News, and with more than 15 books and a reality show to his name, he is nothing if not well-documented.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Martin Amis, son of Kingsley, once remarked wittily that he had been name-dropping “ever since I first said, ‘Dad.’ ” The Amis family, which counted Philip Larkin and Anthony Burgess among its regular guests, had nothing on the Styrons. “My parents were invited on a day cruise out of Edgartown harbor with President and Mrs. Kennedy on the Patrick J,” Alexandra Styron writes. “My father and the president ­talked about ‘Nat Turner,’ which my father had just begun.” Truman Capote urged William Styron to marry Rose Burgunder (he would have anyway). Peter Matthiessen attended the wedding. James Baldwin stayed with the family in Roxbury, Conn., while writing “Another Country.” Alexandra — called “Albert” by her father — remembers Frank Sinatra “lathering up” in the outdoor shower at their summer retreat on Martha’s Vineyard. When James and Gloria Jones, “drinkers and swearers,” came to visit, Gloria wouldn’t let her husband pass the room where little Albert was watching television without snapping, “Give her a twenty!” Edward Kennedy risked his dignity on Vineyard dance floors. Nothing if not eclectic, Styron also counted Fidel Castro among his acquaintances.

In recording a family history as rich and fascinating as this, as any privileged author is entitled to do, the trick is to tell the tales without seeming to be showing off. Alexandra Styron has no difficulty in this respect. For her purpose in “Reading My Father,” by turns brilliant and shocking, is to play the high-society tune in counterpoint with another, harsh and discordant one: life with Father was practically unbearable.

More here.