From Guernica:

The professor Glenn Beck loves to hate speaks with Cornel West about waitressing, black nationalism, how the radical right helped her define her politics, and why she’s gloomy about America’s future.

The conservative media stalwart Glenn Beck may be partially responsible for reinstating Frances Fox Piven into mainstream sociopolitical discourse. Nary a mention of Piven goes by without referring to Beck’s tirades against her and social activist Richard Cloward, Piven’s late husband and collaborator, as well as the death threats made against her by users of Beck’s website The Blaze. He has repeatedly targeted Piven as a catalyst for, among other things, the “unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system” and “an overarching left-wing plot” against America. Due to one essay in particular, which she wrote over forty years ago, Beck has stated that Piven is “the enemy of the Constitution.”

Unfortunately for Piven, the controversy surrounding her scholarship largely exists because her most zealous critics never fail to distort her findings. Peter Dreier of Dissent astutely points out that her studies on protests encourage not the use of violence as a measure of civil disobedience but rather “the combined power of voting and grassroots protest to bring about change.” In her attempts to empower the disenfranchised and understand the impetus behind social unrest, she has been blamed for seeking to completely uproot America’s democratic ideals while, in fact, she strives to make the best of America accessible to more people. Among other works, Piven’s notorious 1966 Nation article “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” and her 1972 book Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (co-written with Cloward) have been cited by conspiratorial demagogues as leading to Obama’s election to the presidency and the successful passage of his healthcare plan. More reasonably, her works reflect an activist attitude that forgoes passive resistance as a mode to bring about greater societal change.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The strength, flexibility, transparency and high electrical conductivity of single-layer graphene make it a potentially unique and valuable material for the next generation of electronic devices. Made of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern – think of a chicken-wire fence – it is 97 percent transparent and 1,000 times stronger than steel.

Researchers are working on ways to tune the properties of graphene for specific electronic applications. One way to do that is by doping – introducing small amounts of other elements, such as nitrogen or phosphorus, that either add or subtract electrons from the system. Widely used in silicon technology, doping has been carried out experimentally in single-layer graphene sheets; but until now, the details of how the dopant atoms fit into the sheet and bond with their carbon neighbors remained elusive. In a study reported Aug. 9 in Science, researchers from Columbia University, Sejong University in Korea and SLAC and Brookhaven national laboratories used a combination of four techniques to make the first detailed images of nitrogen-doped graphene film. They showed that individual nitrogen atoms had taken the places of carbon atoms in the two-dimensional sheet; that about half of the extra electron contributed by each nitrogen atom was distributed throughout the graphene lattice; and that this changed the electronic structure of the graphene sheet only within a short distance – about the width of two carbon atoms – from the dopant atoms. The ability to control the electronic structure at the atomic level has important implications for tuning the unique electronic properties of graphene for particular device applications.

“We’re not trying to work on existing systems and make them better. We’re looking for new directions that can potentially enable much higher efficiencies,” said paper co-author Theanne Schiros, a surface scientist at the Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Center at Columbia, who is investigating graphene as a possible electrode for novel photovoltaic devices.

More here.

Alexandria, Egypt: His name was Sayed Bilal, he was thirty years old, married, and his wife was pregnant. He was a practising Muslim, neither an activist nor an agitator. He had a job and did not stand out from the crowd in any way. He lived near the Thahereyya train station. On the evening of 5 January 2011, he received a phone call from state security agents telling him to report to the local police station in the Al Raml District at 10 p.m. to help with an inquiry. ‘Bring a blanket with you,’ he was told. ‘You might need one.’ Sayed Bilal is poor. A simple, unpretentious man, an average citizen. No one is happy to be summoned to the police station in such countries. But since he has nothing to reproach himself for, Sayed takes a taxi with a clear conscience and shows up at the appointed time. No one has come with him. He does not know that his last hour is fast approaching. And how could anyone have known that? Sayed Bilal has no criminal record at all and has never had to deal with his country’s police force. In fact, that is why he has been singled out: he is a perfectly ordinary man.

more from Tahar Ben Jelloun at Granta here.

De Kooning: A Retrospective,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is the most piercing, inexhaustible, and relentlessly intense full-on career survey I have ever seen in this country. It could only be better by being bigger. Packing the museum’s entire sixth floor with nearly 200 paintings, prints, sculptures, and drawings (these last the equals of Ingres, Seurat, and ­Picasso), this retrospective should permanently set the art-historical record straight on this artist. Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off. His work of the late fifties and sixties is maligned as facile or turgid, his sixties sculpture called kitsch, his ­abstract-figurative hallucinations of the seventies essentially ignored, his profound paintings of the eighties suspect. This show, organized by MoMA’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, proves that de Kooning started great and only got better.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Eighty years ago, faced with today’s economic events, nobody would have been in any doubt: we would obviously be living through a crisis in capitalism. Instead, there is a collective unwillingness to call a spade a spade. This is variously a crisis of the European Union, a crisis of the euro, a debt crisis or a crisis of political will. It is all those things, but they are subplots of a much bigger story: the way capitalism has been conceived and practised for the last 30 years has hit the buffers. Unless and until that is recognised, western economies will be locked in stagnation which could even transmute into a major economic disaster. Simply put, the world has trillions upon trillions of excessive private debt financed by too many different currencies whose risk is allegedly mitigated by even more trillions of financial bets which in aggregate do not minimise the systemic risk one iota. This entire financial edifice, underwritten by tiny amounts of capital, has been created over three decades backed by the theory that markets do not make mistakes. Capitalism is best conceived and practised, runs the theory, by hunter-gatherer bankers and entrepreneurs owing no allegiance to the state or society.

more from Will Hutton at The Observer here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Lisa Randall is a friend and collaborator, as well as a science superstar. She is one of the most highly cited physicists of all time, for a variety of contributions to field theory and particle physics, especially her work with Raman Sundrum on warped extra dimensions. Her first book, Warped Passages, was a major success, which naturally raises the question of what one does next. (Besides writing papers, I mean.)

So we’re very happy to welcome Lisa aboard to guest blog about her new book, just out today: Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. (Among other virtues, this book has the single most impressive collection of blurbers of any book ever written, from Bill Clinton to Carlton Cuse.) From personal experience I can verify that writing a book doesn’t just happen; it’s a tremendous commitment over an extended period of time, and once it’s done there’s not much chance to go back and change it. So deciding to write a book at all, and more importantly how exactly to target the writing, is a delicate and critical process.

While Lisa hasn’t yet become a regular blogger, she is active on Twitter, where you can follow her at @lirarandall.

—————————————-

In conjunction with the publication of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, I thought I’d take advantage of Sean’s kind invitation to post on Cosmic Variance to explain my motivations in writing my book. I haven’t done a lot of blogging myself but I am impressed at the care and interest that go into science blogs. They are a way of sharing developments as they happen and an opportunity to have meaningful discussion of results.

I talk about a lot of science in my book. So I thought rather than summarizing it all—at least in this post—I’d focus on the question of why I wrote this particular book. I waited several years before even considering embarking on a second book project. I certainly didn’t want to simply repeat the content of my previous book, and my own personal goal is always to branch out into new arenas—in this case into new types of writing–while still remaining true to my physics roots. I didn’t know the exact book I was after but I did know some of the topics I considered important and timely.

More here.

Kenneth Goldsmith in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” I've come to embrace Huebler's idea, though it might be retooled as: “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”

It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours.

The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term “unoriginal genius” to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, “moving information,” to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.

More here.

From The Talks:

Mr. Caine, what is it like to get older?

You are going to make every moment count. I mean, you better make every moment count. Live your life now; start in the morning. You mustn’t sit around waiting to die. When it happens you should come into the cemetery on a motorbike, skid to a halt by the side of the coffin, jump in and say: “Great I just made it.”

So death doesn’t scare the hell out of you?

Well I always get worried when people say to me, “Oh we’re having a retrospective of your work.” I always think it’s sort of a threat. You know, hurry up and die. So I always get a bit worried when those things happen and that makes me think of death, but I’m a stubborn bastard.

You just refuse to think about it too much?

You quite often see these middle aged people on television who’ve won the fight against cancer and now they want to live their lives differently and enjoy every moment. Before they just went along and now they’ve had this scare that they were going to die. I had that scare that I was going to die when I was nineteen when I was a soldier, so I have been living my life that way for sixty years now.

What happened to you as a soldier that made you appreciate every moment?

I was a soldier in Korea and I got into a situation where I knew I was going to die – like the people know they are going to die of cancer, except then we got out of it. But it lasted with me – I was nineteen. That formed my character for the rest of my life. The rest of my life I have lived every bloody moment from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep.

More here.

From The Independent:

The Palestinians won't get a state this week. But they will prove – if they get enough votes in the General Assembly and if Mahmoud Abbas does not succumb to his characteristic grovelling in the face of US-Israeli power – that they are worthy of statehood. And they will establish for the Arabs what Israel likes to call – when it is enlarging its colonies on stolen land – “facts on the ground”: never again can the United States and Israel snap their fingers and expect the Arabs to click their heels. The US has lost its purchase on the Middle East. It's over: the “peace process”, the “road map”, the “Oslo agreement”; the whole fandango is history.

Personally, I think “Palestine” is a fantasy state, impossible to create now that the Israelis have stolen so much of the Arabs' land for their colonial projects. Go take a look at the West Bank, if you don't believe me. Israel's massive Jewish colonies, its pernicious building restrictions on Palestinian homes of more than one storey and its closure even of sewage systems as punishment, the “cordons sanitaires” beside the Jordanian frontier, the Israeli-only settlers' roads have turned the map of the West Bank into the smashed windscreen of a crashed car. Sometimes, I suspect that the only thing that prevents the existence of “Greater Israel” is the obstinacy of those pesky Palestinians.

But we are now talking of much greater matters. This vote at the UN – General Assembly or Security Council, in one sense it hardly matters – is going to divide the West – Americans from Europeans and scores of other nations – and it is going to divide the Arabs from the Americans. It is going to crack open the divisions in the European Union; between eastern and western Europeans, between Germany and France (the former supporting Israel for all the usual historical reasons, the latter sickened by the suffering of the Palestinians) and, of course, between Israel and the EU.

More here.

From Salon:

Karl Marx did not know what we know: he did not know that he was Karl Marx. Had this knowledge been available to him, it would have consoled him during the many moments when he wondered whether his life's work would matter to anyone, whether the sacrifices he and his family endured in the process of constructing the edifice of his thought would ultimately be justified by his role in history. Perhaps even we, with the benefit of hindsight, still cannot answer that question: whether the effects of his work have been good or bad, on the whole, is an impossible question to answer, given the impossibility of imagining a Marx-less twentieth century. It cannot be doubted, though, that Marx had a profound and radical impact on that century and will continue to matter for the foreseeable future. The man who sometimes expressed skepticism about the power of ideas to alter reality and who famously wrote, “Philosophers have tried to describe the world — the point is to change it,” could not possibly have known the extent to which his ideas would alter the course of world events.

The influence of Marx's ideas has been so momentous that at this point the name Karl Marx hardly even seems to attach to a person. It is easy to forget that a human being stands behind those voluminous and forbidding books, and the even more forbidding system of thought those books express. As Mary Gabriel's new biography of the Marx family, “Love and Capital,” makes clear, though, Marx was indeed human: a philosopher and revolutionary thinker, yes, but also a husband and father who loved his family and who experienced a tremendous anxiety over his failure to provide for them.

More here.

From The New York Times:

OXFORD, England —You walk out of a soft-falling rain into the living room of an Oxford don, with great walls of books, handsome art and, on the far side of the room, graceful windows onto a luxuriant garden. Does this man, arguably the world’s most influential evolutionary biologist, spend most of his time here or in the field? Prof. Richard Dawkins smiles faintly. He did not find fame spending dusty days picking at shale in search of ancient trilobites. Nor has he traipsed the African bush charting the sex life of wildebeests. He gets little charge from such exertions. “My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side,” he says, listing the essential questions that drive him. “Why do we exist, why are we here, what is it all about?”

It is in no fashion to diminish Professor Dawkins, a youthful 70, to say that his greatest accomplishment has come as a profoundly original thinker, synthesizer and writer. His epiphanies follow on the heels of long sessions of reading and thought, and a bit of procrastination. He is an elegant stylist with a taste for metaphor. And he has a knack, a predisposition even, for assailing orthodoxy. In his landmark 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene,” he looked at evolution through a novel lens: that of a gene. With this, he built on the work of fellow scientists and flipped the prevailing view of evolution and natural selection on its head.

More here.

There’s an awesomely bad scene in the BBC movie of The Rothko Conspiracy where my father confronts the other two executors over their conflicts of interest. It takes place in the drawing room of Reis’s townhouse. Stamos says, “Screw you!” and my dad calls him a “son of a bitch!” and then he accuses Reis of being “arbitrary and high-handed.” The dialogue is based on Seldes’s account, which is in turn based on my dad’s testimony. He never doubted that Reis and Stamos had good intentions, apparently: Reis was already a millionaire and certainly didn’t need Marlborough’s $20,000 director’s salary. And Stamos had been negotiating with Marlborough even before Rothko died—a relationship Rothko himself had instigated. What my father was worried about was the appearance of a conflict of interest. Perhaps, as someone who had one foot outside the art world, he took less for granted and could foresee how bad the optics on these deals would be if they were ever contested before a broader public.

more from David Levine at Triple Canopy here.

Murray’s wholesale rejection of Modernism may seem to mark him as simply an isolated provincial conservative swimming against the tide of the times. But there was more substance to his response than that. For a poet to repudiate newfangled foreign fashions and stand up instead for a home-grown tradition that celebrated the life of the mounted frontiersman (or his outlaw cousin the bushranger) was, in its Australian context, a clear political statement. Since the 1890s, the lone horseman in the bush had been used, in agitation for union of the six British colonies in an Australian federation, as an icon of national identity. “The narrow ways of English folk/Are not for such as we;/They bear the long-accustomed yoke/Of staid conservancy,” wrote A.B.(“Banjo”) Paterson, much-loved poet of the bush. “We must saddle up and ride/Towards the blue hill’s breast:/And we must travel far and fast/Across their rugged maze.” In truth, even in Paterson’s time there was more than a little idealization in the picture of Australians as restless frontier spirits: by 1900 a majority were settled in towns and cities (compared with 40 percent in the United States). But in pitting the ballad tradition against the Modernists, Murray was calling on Australian poetry to follow its own native course and foster its own native values, including an optimistic expansiveness that turned its back on both the “narrow ways” of the old Mother Country and the cramped despair of the Modernists, and a no-nonsense egalitarianism, suspicious of all pretensions, including intellectual pretensions. (Of the three rallying cries of modern democratic revolutions, equality has always had more resonance in Australia than liberty.)

more from J.M. Coetzee at the NYRB here.

The idea of the library as theatrical set, where the content of books is secondary to the atmosphere books create, may gain more respect in coming years. This past May marked the centennial of the New York Public Library’s main branch building. The library is celebrating with a yearlong series of programs and exhibitions focusing on the library’s past as well as its next hundred years. These celebrations, launched with a “Find the Future” festival weekend in May, promote the idea of the library as a stage: an environment where things can happen and people can meet, and one that will retain public significance even if the physical books it holds do not. There has been a good deal of anxiety in recent years about technology rendering books—and with them libraries—obsolete. But there is also another story, one that the NYPL has invested in. It’s a story about the triumph of books through new media, about not choosing between technologies but integrating them. Amidst millenarian thinking about the death of the book, it’s important to bear in mind that the content of the New York Public Library is not obsolete, nor will it be anytime soon. There are people in all five boroughs who cannot afford to buy books or DVDs, much less laptops or e-readers. According to a national study sponsored by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation in 2010, 30 million people in the United States used library computers to access the internet last year, and of those, 40 percent did so to find jobs.

more from Minou Arjomand at n+1 here.

Patricia Churchland has picked the winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Terrence Tomkow, Self Defense
2. Strange Quark, $300: John Schwenkler, Has Molyneux's Question Been Answered?
3. Charm Quark, $200: Jussi Suikkanen, Williams, Thick Concepts, and Reasons

Here is what Professor Churchland had to say about them:

Each of the blogs was truly fascinating and productive in its own way, so choosing involves some arbitrariness. I liked the fact that they had to be succinct and so got straight to the point instead of horsing around.

1. Tomkow: Self Defense. This is an insightful and pithy piece that shows how claims about rights can go wrong. Taking a seemingly water-tight right, namely the right to self-defense, Tomkow shows that life can actually get messy as conditions drift from the prototypical examples of permissible self-defense where we all (pretty much) agree. If, as I suspect, virtually all moral concepts are anchored by proptypical cases and we extrapolate as best we can to nonprotoypical cases (see Mark Johnson), then it should not be surprising if deciding the merits of cases far from the prototype center is difficult. Worse, in some borderline cases there may be no right answer. I realize Tomkow keeps winning these contests, but I aimed to adhere to the merits of the writing.

2. Brains: Has Molyneux’s question been answered? Hard-headed, careful, and empirically up-to-date, this looks at Richard Held’s recent results of a study of congenitally blind children who gain sight after surgical correction (Project Prakash in India). Held’s report was published in Nature Neuroscience, and concluded that the answer to Molyneux’s question is likely negative. In his blog, John Schwenkler shows that the question is still open, given the way the experiment was set up. I had been convinced by Held’s report, but I now think Schwenkler’s criticism is dead on. This is progress in philosophy. I hope Held takes Schwenkler's advice on the right way to do the experiment.

3. PEA Soup: Williams, thick concepts, and reasons. This is very useful as it shows some internal tensions in Bernard Williams’ approach to reasons and motivation. Supposedly, thick concepts such as “ingrate” or “coward”, if applied to a person, will provide a reason for him to cease and desist from his ungrateful or cowardly behavior. Typically such terms carry disapproving connotation, as most linguistically fluent humans know, and most humans most of the time respond negatively to disapproval by those they respect. Hence, if you wanted to, I guess, you could say that being called a coward provided you with a reason to stiffen your spine. Or a motive? Whatever. Obviously not all humans respond with negative affect to disapproval. It may be because they have no respect for the person judging, or perhaps because their current affective state blocks the response, or even because their brain is such that they have abnormal social responses in general, not merely transiently. Or sometimes what you may regard as a negative epithet, I do not — e.g. “pragmatist”, “feminist”.

4. Leonardo Ferreira Almada's blog: Epistemology of Neurosciences and Psychiatry. I know the rules —I am obliged to restrict myself to three blogs, but I want to give an honorable mention, if I may. Almada is a Brazilian philosopher, with a richly informative blog. He addresses issues such as how to integrate in an explanatory framework affective factors (e.g. feeling fear, pain or hunger) and cognitive factors (seeing a raccoon, expecting a hailstorm, planning an escape). His work is very well-informed by neuroscience and psychology, and he is asking really good questions. I am reasonably sure that all of the nine submissions on the short-list are from North America or England, and because there is excellent philosophy being done elsewhere, and in South America in particular, I wanted to use this occasion to give a shout out to that philosophical community.

Many thanks to all of you for giving me such great reading, and now that I know about your terrific blogs, I shall visit often.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (I will send the prize money later today or tomorrow–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Patricia Churchland for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Sughra Raza, Carla Goller, and me. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Bruce Davenport, Jr. This Some Bad Shit. 2010.

Archival marker on paper.

More here, and here.

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

As I was watching the local New York City news coverage of Hurricane Irene before “she” made landfall…

…I found myself feeling a kind of perverse pleasure in telling just about anyone who would listen that the approaching storm was good training for the world we are about to enter due to global warming—rising oceans, flooding of coastal cities and towns, black-outs, food shortages, general pandemonium. As I offered my interpretation of the coming storm, I realized—with far less pleasure—that I had been inspired by one of George Orwell’s “London Letters” to the Partisan Review that he wrote regularly during World War II. I had read them years ago but could still recall Orwell informing his American readers that the many shortages and rationing of foods and goods that Londoners were forced to endure during the war would turn out to be good training for the inevitable hard times ahead when Britain became a socialist country following the war. As I was telling this to my husband, I began to have doubts about what Orwell actually said. Luckily, I had made xeroxes of the London letters that I found most striking and was able to locate them. Sure enough, in one that was published in the November-December 1942 issue of the Partisan Review, I found what I was looking for. Orwell did say that due to rationing,

We are growing gradually used to conditions that would once have seemed intolerable and getting to have less of the consumer mentality which both Socialists and capitalists did their best to inculcate in times of peace. Since the introduction of Socialism is almost certain to mean a drop in the standard of living during the first few years, perhaps this is just as well.

More here.