From Guardian:

David Foster Wallace, the most gifted and original American novelist of his generation, took his own life in 2008. His widow, the artist Karen Green, talks of the struggle to deal her loss and her decision to publish his unfinished work, The Pale King

The first piece of art that Karen Green made after her husband, David Foster Wallace, took his own life on 12 September 2008, was a forgiveness machine. She is standing in the neat, white studio at her house at Petaluma, north of San Francisco, explaining to me how the machine worked and how it didn't. “Before David died,” she says, “I had been working on some machines, with a five-year old – the son of a friend who had a gallery down the road from mine.” There had been a recreating-a-pig-from-bacon machine, and a prototype for a machine that cleverly pitted dates. The day that her husband hanged himself she had been working on a political machine that involved a bright-coloured circus tent, elephants and donkeys. For a long while after that, she says, she couldn't make any art at all, wondered if she ever would again, but eventually, tentatively, she developed the idea for her conciliatory Heath-Robinson. “The forgiveness machine was seven-feet long,” she says, “with lots of weird plastic bits and pieces. Heavy as hell.” The idea was that you wrote down the thing that you wanted to forgive, or to be forgiven for, and a vacuum sucked your piece of paper in one end. At the other it was shredded, and hey presto. Green put the machine on display at a gallery in Pasadena near the Los Angeles suburb, Claremont, where she and Wallace had lived in the four years they had been married. She was fascinated by the effect that it had on people who used it. “It was strange,” she suggests, “it all looked like fun, but then when the moment came for people to put their message actually in it, they became anxious. It was like: what if it works and I really have to forgive my terrible parent or whoever.”

More here.

Jolene H. Tan reviews John Teehan's In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence, in Evolutionary Psychology:

In the Name of God, by John Teehan, takes the evolutionary framework and applies it to the reading of religious texts. The result is a provocative discussion of the ubiquitous phenomenon of religious belief that can change the way we understand the role of religion in society. With a selected focus on the religious text of Judaism and Christianity—the Bible, Teehan persuasively argues that these religions evolved to solve the unique problems encountered as humans moved from small societies organized based on kinship, to larger complex societies made up of strangers. Religion, therefore, is an institutionalization of a moral code to implement large-scale cooperation beyond kin, in order to promote “social cohesion and individual striving” (p.192). Morality and violence, far from being contradictory concepts, are merely flip sides of the same coin.

Teehan’s analysis spans a wide range of material but his incisive and focused approach conveys arguments without overwhelming the reader. Drawing from the latest research in cognitive science, he provides a background of our evolved moral psychology (Chapter 1) and also explains the psychological basis of religious belief (Chapter 2). After setting the stage, the evolutionary lens is focused on the religious text of Judaism, as he examines the portrayal of Yahweh (God) through the Hebrew scripture and the Ten Commandments (Chapter 3), as well as on Christianity, with emphasis on the gospel teachings of Jesus Christ (Chapter 4). Finally, he addresses the critical issue of religious violence as culminated by the events of September 11 (Chapter 5) and tries to synthesize the lessons of the previous chapters with the environment of the modern day to show how a moral system that avoids the discussed pitfalls may be forged (Chapter 6).

Whereas the mention of religion and evolution in the same breath is usually accompanied by fierce criticism or emotionally charged arguments, Teehan’s take is refreshingly neutral. He sidesteps metaphysical issues of the existence of God, and instead discusses our evolved predisposition to believe in supernatural agents and the resulting conception of God. In particular, our instinct to view supernatural agents in the ontological category of person, and our ability to conceive of some minimally counter-intuitive super traits (e.g. invisibility, immortality, prescience) as plausible, led to the representation of God as a “full access strategic agent”—a divine moral enforcer who is privy to all moral lapses and capable of dealing out divine punishment.

Jerry Coyne, also in The Guardian:

Templeton plies its enormous wealth with a single aim: to give credibility to religion by blurring its well-demarcated border with science. The Templeton Prize, which once went to people like Mother Teresa and the Reverend Billy Graham, now goes to scientists who are either religious themselves or say nice things about religion.

Rees is no exception. Though a professed nontheist, he also claims to be an “unbelieving Anglican” who goes to church “out of loyalty to the tribe”. He has criticised Stephen Hawking for arguing that we don't need God to explain the origin of the universe, and supports “peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains”.

Templeton funds many other scientists who study Big Questions – those areas of science that the foundation sees, contra Rees, as overlapping with religion. These include studies of cosmology, human altruism, spiritual healing, and the contribution of faith to human virtue. Established scientists, all too eager to take anyone's money in an era of reduced funding, are then paraded by Templeton like prize horses and permanently installed in its online stable.

Templeton's enterprises include a $200,000 “epiphany prize” for movies and television programmes that “increase man's understanding and love of God”. Winners include Mel Gibson's baleful and antisemitic The Passion of the Christ. There are also fellowships for journalists studying science and religion, and stipends for budding theologians.

Many of these awards show a cronyism that has always infected Templeton. As journalist Sunny Bains has shown, the organisation often awards money to the people who run it. At least 8 of the last 13 Templeton Prize winners, for instance, were on Templeton's board of advisers before receiving their award (Rees is not one of them).

Templeton's mission is a serious corruption of science. Like a homeopathic remedy, it dilutes the core of the scientific enterprise, which has achieved its successes by holding doubt as a virtue and faith as a vice. The situation in religion is precisely the opposite, which is why theology remains mired in the Middle Ages.

Seamus Heaney in The Guardian:

One of the words that recur in Miłosz's prose and poetry is “incantation”, meaning rhythmical language dictated, he would affirm, by a “daimonion”. And from beginning to end the poems do seem to arrive with an unforced certitude, to be touching down into the here and now out of an elsewhere, as if he were “no more than a secretary of the invisible thing”. And that brimming creativity gives credence to his traditional sense of himself as the inspired poet:

Whatever I hold in my hand, a stylus, reed, quill or a ballpoint,
Wherever I may be, on the tiles of an atrium, in a cloister cell, in a hall before the portrait of a king,
I attend to matters I have been charged with.

And yet the poem which opens on these long perspectives (“From the Rising of the Sun”) is suddenly dramatising the displaced person's predicament in an immediate heartfelt idiom:

Never again will I kneel in my small country, by a river,
So that what is stone in me could be dissolved,
So that nothing would remain but my tears, tears.

“I attend to matters I have been charged with”: having outlived many of his Polish contemporaries, having watched the Soviets clamp down in Poland, Lithuania and the other Baltic states, Miłosz saw it as his writerly responsibility to bear in mind the dead who had perished in the uprising and the concentration camps and those others who were still suffering in the gulags. Hence his poem “Dedication” and its much-cited lines, “What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people?”.

He was poised between lyricism and witness.

In the Economist:

ALMOST as soon as radios were invented, people speculated about using them to listen to—and maybe even talk to—extraterrestrial civilisations. Since the 1960s attempts have been made to do so by sifting through signals from outer space in search of alien chit-chat. More recently, the use of lasers in telecommunications has suggested to some that they might be a better way to communicate across vast distances, so searching for telltale flashes from the sky is now in vogue.

But techniques that work well on Earth are not necessarily ideal for talking across the vast chasms that separate stars. And for several years John Learned of the University of Hawaii and Anthony Zee of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been promulgating what they believe is a better idea. They suggest that any alien civilisation worth its salt would alight not on the photons of the electromagnetic spectrum—whether optical or radio-frequency—to send messages to other solar systems. Rather, it would focus its attention on a different fundamental particle, one that is rather neglected by human technologists. That particle is the neutrino.

Neutrinos, it must be confessed, are neglected for a reason. Though abundant (the universe probably contains more of them than any other sort of particle except photons), they are fiendishly difficult to detect. That is because they interact only occasionally with other forms of matter. But that is precisely why Dr Learned and Dr Zee like the look of them. Light and radio waves are absorbed and scattered by interstellar gas and dust. Neutrinos would pass straight through such obstacles, and could easily be detected by neutrino telescopes on Earth (which typically consist of giant vats of water or, more recently, huge chunks of Antarctic ice).

The two researchers go further. They argue that powerful beams of neutrinos could be used to turn entire stars into flashing beacons, broadcasting information across the galaxy. Outlandish as this sounds, it is an idea that can easily be checked, for astronomers are already sitting on the data that might contain these extraterrestrial messages. They just need to analyse those data from a new perspective. Dr Learned and Dr Zee are therefore trying to persuade someone who studies the data in question to take their idea seriously and spend a little time having a look.

Fifty years ago, on April 12, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth. Walter Famler in Eurozine:

On 12 April 1961, a rocket weighing 287 tons rises from the launching pad. However only a few people know the secret of the name of the world's first cosmonaut. Not even the wife and parents of the 27 year-old pilot have been informed as the space ship, marked Vostok 1, ascends into the sky. When it has circled the earth and 108 minutes later has landed on a Russian field, Gagarin becomes world famous. Immediately after the launch, the Soviet news agency TASS cables the announcement of the first manned space journey around the globe. The fact that the mission narrowly escaped disaster because the capsule almost burnt up on re-entering the earth's atmosphere becomes known only decades later.

Two days after his flight, Gagarin is received in the Kremlin by Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet Premier. His journey of several kilometres through Moscow in an open car adorned with flowers turns into a triumphal procession; masses of cheering people form an honour guard from the airport to the Red Square. While still in orbit, Gagarin has been promoted to major, and now the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union are pinned to his chest. Half a century later, when you look at the old newsreels, the youthful officer with open shoelaces walking down the red carpet and leaping up the steps to the Lenin Mausoleum, saluting with a smile and announcing his return, looks more than ever as if he comes from a different universe.

At first, Gagarin enjoys his popularity. Soon, however, he experiences the greatest possible contradiction between collective and individual. From nowhere he becomes a “pop star” in a system that defines the individual only as the product of society and in the long term is unable to cope with the singularity of a phenomenon of this dimension.

David Runciman reviews Nicholas Shaxson's Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World and Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, in the LRB:

Since the 1980s more and more corporations have moved to Delaware to take advantage of the state’s extreme laissez-faire attitude to the rights of shareholders and employees against company managements. If you took your business to Delaware (and this was often just a question of establishing a shell office and filling in some forms), it would be much harder for anyone to prove anything against you, because the Delaware courts did not think that much of what you did was any of their concern. Again, other states faced a choice: they could try to isolate Delaware by tightening up their own standards or they could try to compete for a share of the spoils. Enough of them decided to compete to start a race to the bottom. Offshore had moved onshore.

When officials from Delaware toured the globe in the late 1980s advertising their services (and hoping, among other things, to provide a haven for all the hot money that was expected to flow out of Hong Kong in the run-up to the handover to China), they did so under the slogan ‘Delaware can protect you from politics.’ Shaxson defines a tax haven as ‘a place that seeks to attract business by offering politically stable facilities to help people or entities get around the rules, laws and regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere’. But this is the crux: where is the politics? Why aren’t these moves more politically unstable, or at least politically contentious? In the case of Delaware, as with other goldfish bowl communities, size probably tells (for a long time Delaware politics was shaped by the influence of the Du Pont family, whose vast chemical operations dominated the local economy). What, though, about Washington, where the shift to an offshore mindset at the national level might be expected to run up against some serious political opposition? What happened to the representatives of all those people who don’t have lots of money to move around, who can’t relocate even if they wanted to, and who have an interest in a fair, open and broadly progressive tax system? Didn’t they notice what was going on?

This is the question that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson tackle in Winner-Take-All Politics. They don’t spend much time talking about offshore, but the story they tell has striking parallels with the one laid out by Shaxson. One of the ways you can identify an offshore environment, according to Shaxson, is that local politics gets captured by financial services.

From The Telegraph:

Hardy, who wrote his first three novels at the cottage, was forced out into the world by his marriage. For 10 years the couple moved between lodgings in London and the West Country, waiting for children who never came and dealing with the books that did. These were Emma’s years as muse and helpmeet to her husband, making fair copies of his manuscripts and taking dictation when he was ill. But increasingly Hardy was moved to establish a distance between his work and his wife, and decades of estrangement would pass before Emma, by virtue of her sudden death and the storm of remorse it provoked, became useful to her husband once more.

Is it possible that Emma was an essential buffer zone between Hardy and the background which continued to supply his material once he had left it behind? In the 10th year of the marriage the prosperous man of letters bought a plot of land outside Dorchester just an hour’s walk from his humble birthplace. He designed the house himself and commissioned his father and brother to build it. “They had just built a new house, which he recoiled from,” reported Fanny Stevenson in the autumn of 1885.

More here.

From The New York Times:

What do colon cancer, ant colonies, language and global warming have in common? This might sound like the front end of a joke, but in fact it’s a serious challenge to the standard view of evolution. Martin A. Nowak, the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, has devoted a brilliant career to showing that Darwin, and particularly his followers, batted only two for three. Random mutation and natural selection have indeed been powerful motors for change in the natural world — the struggle for existence pitting the fit against the fitter in a hullabaloo of rivalry. But most of the great innovations of life on earth, Nowak argues, from genes to cells to societies, have been due to a third motor, and “master architect,” of evolution: cooperation.

“SuperCooperators” (written with Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist magazine) is an absorbing, accessible book about the power of mathematics. Unlike Darwin with his brine bottles and pigeon coops, Nowak aims to tackle the mysteries of nature with paper, pencil and computer. By looking at phenomena as diverse as H.I.V. infection and English irregular verbs, he has formally defined five distinct mechanisms that have helped give rise to cooperative behavior, from the first molecules that joined to self-replicate, to the first cells that formed multicellular organisms, all the way to human societies, which exhibit a degree of cooperation unmatched in all creation. In Nowak’s view, figuring out how cooperation comes about and breaks down, as well as actively pursuing the “snuggle for existence,” is the key to our survival as a species.

More here.

Afterlife

Older people are exiting this life as if it were a movie… “I didn’t get it,”
they are saying.
He says, “It didn’t seem to have any plot.”
“No.” she says, “it seemed like things just kept coming at me. Most of the
time I was confused… and there was way too much sex and violence.”
“Violence anyway,” he says.
“It was not much for character development either; most of the time
people were either shouting or mumbling. Then just when someone started
to make sense and I got interested, they died. Then a whole lot of new
characters came along and I couldn’t tell who was who.”
“The whole thing lacked subtlety.”
“Some of the scenery was nice.”
“Yes.”
They walk on in silence for a while. It is a summer night and they walk
slowly, stopping now and then, as if they had no particular place to go.
They walk past a streetlamp where some insects are hurling themselves at
the light, and then on down the block, fading into the darkness.
She says, “I was never happy with the way I looked.”
“The lighting was bad and I was no good at dialogue,” he says.
“I would have liked to have been a little taller,” she says.

by Louis Jenkins
from North of the Cities
Will o’ the Wisp Books, 2007
© Louis Jenkins.

more from The Guardian here.

What are the Illuminations? Originally an untitled, unpaginated bunch of manuscript pages that Arthur Rimbaud handed to his former lover Paul Verlaine on the occasion of their last meeting, in Stuttgart in 1875. Verlaine had recently been released from a term in a Belgian prison for wounding the younger poet with a pistol in Brussels two years earlier. Rimbaud wanted his assassin manqué to deliver the pages to a friend, Germain Nouveau, who (he thought) would arrange for their publication. This casual attitude toward what would turn out to be one of the masterpieces of world literature is puzzling, even in someone as unpredictable as its author. Was it just a question of not wanting to splurge on stamps? (Verlaine would later complain in a letter that the package cost him “2 francs 75 in postage!!!”) More likely it was because Rimbaud had decided already to abandon poetry for what would turn out to be a mercantile career in Africa, trafficking in a dizzying variety of commodities (though not, apparently, slaves, as some have thought). He had, after all, seen his previous book, A Season in Hell, through publication, though he had left the bulk of the edition with its printer, whom he wasn’t able to pay. Like Emily Dickinson, he had seen “the horses’ heads were toward eternity.” In the penultimate strophe of “Adieu,” the last poem of A Season in Hell, he had written: “Meanwhile, this is now the eve. Let’s welcome the influx of strength and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with burning patience, we will enter splendid cities.”

more from John Ashbery at Poetry here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

What is jewelry? We know what it is, of course. Jewelry is the pretty extras with which we adorn ourselves. But what is it really? There is no specific use to jewelry. Yet, humans in every culture on the planet wear jewelry of some kind. It is ubiquitous and pointless at the same time.

Here's something Art Smith said about jewelry:

A piece of jewelry is in a sense an object that is not complete in itself. Jewelry is a 'what is it?' until you relate it to the body. The body is a component in design just as air and space are. Like line, form, and color, the body is a material to work with. It is one of the basic inspirations in creating form.

Art Smith was a Brooklyn man. He died in 1982 after a lifetime spent making jewelry. He had a shop on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village back in the 1940s. He was influenced quite clearly by the broader trends in Modernism that characterized the era. One of his necklaces was, famously, inspired by the mobiles of Alexander Calder. You can see that piece and others, along with some of Art's tools and drawings, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art right now.

I like Art's statement about jewelry because it offers an interesting “third way” out of the art-versus-craft dilemma. In the last century or so, a dividing line between art and craft was drawn according to whether or not the object in question was “useful.” Crafts — such as weaving or carpentry or glass making — could be artful, but the fact that they were still geared toward the production of useful and usable objects meant that they were not art as such. Fine art distinguished itself by having no other purpose except to be art. A painting, for instance, cannot be used for anything else. Taken out of its context, a painting ceases to function.

More here.

Jason Palmer at the BBC:

A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.

The find must be more fully confirmed, but researchers at the Tevatron are racing to work through existing data.

If proved, it will be a completely new, unanticipated particle; researchers say it cannot be the much sought-after Higgs boson.

It could also signal a new fundamental force of nature, and the most radical change in physics for decades.

Researchers at the Tevatron formally announced the find on the collaboration's website, after posting an as-yet unreviewed account of the research on the Arxiv repository.

The team was analysing data from collisions between protons and their anti-matter counterparts antiprotons. In these collisions, particles known as W bosons are produced, along with a pair of “jets” of other particles.

It was in these jets that the unexpected “bump” in the team's data came to light, potentially representing a particle that the current understanding of the zoo of subatomic particles – the Standard Model – does not include.

More here.

The Bridge

© 2006, Leanne O’Sullivan

Porochista Khakpour in The Paris Review:

I discovered James Salter just late enough, in grad school, at the suggestion of a brooding alcoholic, the best writer in the room, with whom I’d become entangled in a very Salter-esque doomed affair. I was the writer who’d gush about the stylists, steer the conversations from plot and story to diction and syntax, the one who’d make over-earnest pleas about art over mechanics, always to the rolled eyes of the Ivy Leaguers who made up most the program. Most everything I wrote failed on a story level as much as it succeeded on a sentence level, and so this writer-fling of mine one day said, “You should read Salter. Because he does that thing you like. But he also tells stories. He can help you.”

I dashed to Light Years—Salter’s fourth novel, published in 1975—as I did to any of his suggestions. Up to that point, stylists meant maximalists, hysterical realists, the breathless and the sprawling: William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Stephen Dixon. I had never encountered a minimalist I could live inside of. But as minimal as Light Years was aesthetically, it was maximal emotionally. The sentences were sharp and piercing, alarmingly brief, and yet they contained entire lifetimes rendered in stream of consciousness within three-word observations about the seasons. “I’m a frotteur, someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible,” Salter said in his Paris Review interview. I lived for that poet’s spirit in my storytellers. That taut and yet tender surface simplicity was applied to amplifying the elemental in this world destroyed me, as if trees and desks and fog and smoke are their own metaphors in a universe that is essentially figurative:

The trees are naked. The eels sleep.
…
Life is weather. Life is meals.
…
Dreams and work.
…
The mornings were white, the trees still bare.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

FeldmanHall’s study showed that what people say they will do in a given situation and what they really do are two very different things. If given a hypothetical situation of a choice of giving someone an electrical shock for money or walking away, most people answered they would never be able to inflict pain on another person. However, in a real-life scenario, with real money and real electric shocks, the actions were much different. In FeldmanHall’s study, subjects were placed in an MRI scanner and then given the choice to either administer an electrical shock to a person located in another room and make money (one British pound) or not inflict pain and receive no money. They also broke down that one pound into percentages based on the severity of the shock, so they would receive the full pound for administering a severe shock and less for more mild shocks.

The subject in the MRI was shown a video of the person receiving the shock and would either see just the person’s hand jerk or be shown both the hand jerk and the person’s face. Each participant was given the choice to shock another person 20 times, with the opportunity to make 20 pounds. In the hypothetical scenario, 64 percent of participants said they would never administer a shock to someone else for money. However, in the real world that number changed, and in a big way. When faced with real money, 96 percent chose to shock the person in the other room for money.

More here.