From The Smithsonian:

“Virtuosic.” “A prodigy.” “Genius.” These words were written in the 1760s about Mozart—Maria Anna Mozart. When she toured Europe as a pianist, young Maria Anna wowed audiences in Munich, Vienna, Paris, London, the Hague, Germany and Switzerland. “My little girl plays the most difficult works which we have … with incredible precision and so excellently,” her father, Leopold, wrote in a letter in 1764. “What it all amounts to is this, that my little girl, although she is only 12 years old, is one of the most skillful players in Europe.” The young virtuoso, nicknamed Nannerl, was quickly overshadowed by her brother, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, five years her junior. But as one of Wolfgang’s earliest musical role models, does history owe her some measure of credit for his genius?

“That’s a very interesting question,” says Eva Rieger, retired professor of music history at the University of Bremen and author of the German-language biography Nannerl Mozart: Life of an Artist in the 1800s. “I’ve never really considered that possibility, and I don’t know of anyone who has before.” Such a suggestion may seem far-fetched to Mozart fans and scholars. “To answer the question of how much Nannerl influenced Wolfgang musically, I would say not at all,” says Cliff Eisen, professor of music at King’s College in London and editor of the Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia. “I’m not sure there is evidence that the dynamic was in any way exceptional beyond what you might think between one relatively talented musician and one who far outshines the other.”

More here.

Mark Blyth over at Triple Crisis:

A week or so ago the FT published a piece that asked why, if social democracies are so nice, their crime fiction is so dark? It’s a fair point, and anyone sitting through the middle section of ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’ has probably asked the same question. I didn’t read the FT’s answer, but my own answer comes from being in Iceland last week; a trip that gave me an insight into intellectual capture that I didn’t really appreciate before: that some truths are harder to shake than others.

While in Reykjavik I asked the locals what they thought was the biggest problem facing Iceland post-bubble. Interestingly, they didn’t say ‘the banks,’ or even ‘the debt’ – they said ‘the consensus.’ That is, being a consensus democracy, like most Scandinavian social democracies, its really hard to talk openly about what happened. The consensus is what makes equalitarian redistribution possible: we can all agree without debating it. But it also limits the ability to question the foundations of the system itself. In such an environment post-crisis discussions become ‘passive-aggressive.’ Like an old couple that should have divorced years ago, they displace the event itself and focus instead on anything else while personalizing everything. In Iceland’s case this means hunting down ‘the greedy few’ rather than questioning the system as a whole: a system that allowed the banks to grow to, at their height, 1000 percent of GDP. To do so would be to question “the consensus.” That is, the truth as they saw it.

I mention this because while political capture gets a lot of the post-crisis press, rightly– with my favorite recent slip being Spencer Bachus (R-Al) cracker that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks”– it’s intellectual capture that, in my opinion, really does the damage (hence my last blog piece on Cowboys and Indians). Indeed, once you start to look for this, you begin to see its effects everywhere.

For example, my reliably ‘sound’ FT last Wednesday had a column by Alan Greenspan that wrote the crisis out of the history books in a most interesting way. Rather than deal with the crisis as it happened, or even address what it cost, Greenspan dealt with the crisis on a purely rhetorical level.

I mean rhetorical in the sense that Albert Hirschman identified twenty years ago in his fabulous book The Rhetoric of Reaction. (Really, if you haven’t read it, read it now – it’s like a Dan Brown crypex for crisis-newspeak). Hirschman pointed out that conservative arguments come in three distinct theses.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today.

More here.

Tom Pietrasik at his website:

My good friend and fellow-journalist Dilip D’Souza wrote to me a few days ago with the sad news that a man called Dhanga Baiga, whom we both met a year ago, died last Monday.

I was introduced to Dhanga while photographing the work of a group of doctors called the JSS who run a hospital in the small, dusty town of Ganiyari in Chhattisgarh, central India. The JSS stands for Jan Swasthya Sahyog which means People’s Health Support Group.

It was while photographing Dr Yogesh Jain as he ran an outreach clinic in the village of Bamhni that the wizened figure of Dhanga Baiga entered the consultation room.

Moving with a caution that was in keeping with his fragile state, Dhanga, a member of India’s indigenous Baiga community, eased himself onto a plastic stool in front of Yogesh. It was clear that Dhanga knew and trusted Yogesh. Indeed, he owed his life to the intervention of the JSS medical team who had temporarily slowed the advancing tuberculosis that was gripping his hunger-ravaged body.

More here.

Saifedean Ammous in Project Syndicate:

In several Arab countries, most notably Saudi Arabia, rulers have sought to quell popular discontent by providing a combination of cash, subsidies, guaranteed jobs, and free goods and services. Such largesse betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the causes of today’s discontent, because it assumes that these causes are purely material.

But any examination of the protesters’ slogans and demands clearly indicates otherwise. The protests are much more about political and economic freedom than about material needs, reflecting a keen awareness that such needs are merely a symptom and consequence of the absence of political and economic freedom.

The dominant “handout approach” is not sustainable, and, if continued, would likely exacerbate the Arab world’s current economic malaise. Economic wealth cannot be created by government decree; it comes from productive jobs that create goods and services that people value.

Governments that hand out benefits are not making their citizens richer by generating new wealth; they are simply redistributing existing wealth. This also applies to government-created and guaranteed jobs: if a job is indeed productive, its output would be rewarded by other members of society who benefit from it, without the need for government subsidies and guarantees. The fact that government guarantees a job implies that its output is not wanted. Such jobs are a liability for society, not an asset.

As citizens start relying on redistribution, productive work is discouraged, and real wealth creation suffers. Economic rot sets in as the ranks of dependent citizens grow, productive citizens dwindle in number, and society eventually runs out of other people’s money.

More here.

In his new book Moonwalking With Einstein (Penguin), Joshua Foer teaches us tricks to remember phone numbers, and even their owners’ names—at least until we have a chance to write them down on a matchbook. His book, misleadingly subtitled The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, deals mostly with a handful of well-established methods for remembering numbers and sequences of playing cards. It is nonetheless delightful. Foer meanders through a history of memory, from the oral traditions of the Greek bards to the thankfully-not-yet-realised merging of neurons and nanochips by way of the intermediate technologies: stone tablets, scrolls, manuscripts, printed books, indexed volumes, searchable electronic files, the Googlenet. With each new technology, our ability to outsource the functions of memory has grown. For information to be useful over the long term, it has to be both stored and retrievable. Marble slabs are pretty good for long-term storage—much less likely to be ruined by a wayward coffee cup than a CD-Rom—but not terribly searchable. The papyrus scrolls of the Greeks were at least more portable but they were WRITTENALLASSINGLEWORDINCAPSWITHOUTSPACESORPUNCTUATIONANDWITH RANDOMLINEBREAKSANDREALLYHARDTOREADLETALONESEARCH. Indexing allowed us to find information in a book without having read the whole thing, but we still had to keep enough data in our heads to tell us which books to look in. Now, most of us have freed up the space in our brains that was given over to phone numbers, appointments and train timetables by leaving the information on some electronic device or other and accessing it only when we need to. Soon, poetry, literature and even the historical performance of sports teams will go the same way.

more from Elizabeth Pisani at Prospect Magazine here.

Belgrade’s motorists hit the accelerator hard but they’re not so heavy on their horns. They speed through the city, but they don’t hound the pedestrians. Then again, these two species barely come face to face in the city centre. The city fathers, as if possessed by the spirit of Corbusier, have rigidly separated the bipeds from the quadrupeds. On Brankova Street a line of cars snakes its way into a tunnel that passes under a tower-block to emerge in the maze of streets that comprises the city centre. At every other step there are passages for pedestrians to make their way between the concrete tower-blocks or tunnels under the roads. Everywhere in these ground-level and underground thoroughfares, small trade sprouts its luscious blooms; each pore of this unexpectedly gained public space is exploited. It takes a while for pedestrians to find their bearings after emerging from these artificial merchandise paradises. The streets of Belgrade are tortuous and winding. And not just the streets. “I publish a series with alternative Serbian authors,” says author Igor Marojevic, born in 1968. His punky hairstyle and T-shirt imprinted with “Boss” in skewered writing on the front somehow just refuse to fit in with the tastefully decorated rooms of the Serbian PEN centre in Terazije Street this morning. Which authors? “Sreten Ugricic for example,” says Marojevic, whose novel “Cut” investigates the Nazi past of Hugo Boss. “Sreten Ugricic, the director of the National Library, is an alternative author?” “Oh yes!” Vigorous nodding. Apparently quite a few things are different here in Serbia.

more from Jörg Plath at Sign and Sight here.

With the recent wave of popular uprisings in the Middle East, Western observers have had the chance to face up to an important realization: that the oldest of clichés about Middle Eastern politics, “the Arab street,” is both a pernicious myth and a dynamic reality. For decades, Orientalist stereotypes about Arab culture and attitudes imbued this so-called street—a crude and monolithic metaphor for Arab public opinion and popular political sentiment—with almost uniformly negative connotations, which would then segue into dire warnings about the consequences of its eruption. Now the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and antigovernment protests in many other Arab states have demonstrated that the Arab street most certainly does exist—but it bears no resemblance to the bogeyman so long cultivated in the Western imagination. Western commentators supplemented their hand-wringing about the Arab street with anxiety about “our Arab allies,” generally autocrats whose rule was considered vital to American interests in the region: the maximization of US power and influence, the control and pricing of energy, Israeli security, and regional stability. It’s true, of course, that the future complexion of the Arab political landscape remains uncertain, but the character of the rebellions has already been the strongest possible refutation of this traditional calculus and the mythology that misinformed it.

more from Hussein Ibish at Bookforum here.

Disappearing Act

No, soul doesn't leave the body.

My body is leaving my soul.
Tired of turning fried chicken and
coffee to muscle and excrement,
tried of secreting tears, wiping them,
tired of opening eyes on another day,
tired especially of that fleshy heart,
pumping, pumping. More,
that brain spinning nightmares.
Body prepares:
disconnect, unplug, erase.

But here, I think, a smallish altercation
arises.
Soul seems to shake its fist.
Wants brain? Claims dreams and nightmares?
Maintains a codicil bequeathes it shares?

There'll be a fight. A deadly struggle.
We know, of course, who'll win. . . .

But who's this, watching?

From Scientific American:

Doctors routinely urge their patients to quit smoking and exercise regularly. But what if there were a blood test that could show smokers and couch potatoes the damage their lifestyle was actually wreak­ing on their chromosomes?

Two groups of prominent researchers have started companies to provide just such a test, which would measure the length of one’s telomeres. Telomeres are caps on the ends of chromosomes, protecting them much as plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces keep the laces from fraying. Whenever chromosomes—the store­houses of our genes—are replicated in preparation for cell division, their telomeres shorten. That shrinking has led many scientists to view telomere length as a marker of biological aging, a “molecular” clock ticking off the cell’s life span, as well as an indicator of overall health. Studies comparing the telomere length of white blood cells among groups of volunteers show distinct correlations between telomere length and lifestyle. Those who exercise regularly have longer telomeres than those who do not. Folks who perceive themselves as the most stressed have shorter telomeres than those who see themselves as the least. Certain diseases, too, correlate with shorter telomeres, including cardiovascular, obesity and Alzheimer’s.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Over the past 540 million years, life on Earth has passed through five great mass extinctions. In each of those catastrophes, an estimated 75 percent or more of all species disappeared in a few million years or less. For decades, scientists have warned that humans may be ushering in a sixth mass extinction, and recently a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, tested the hypothesis. They applied new statistical methods to a new generation of fossil databases. As they reported last month in the journal Nature, the current rate of extinctions is far above normal. If endangered species continue to disappear, we will indeed experience a sixth extinction, over just the next few centuries or millennia.

The Berkeley scientists warn that their new study may actually grossly underestimate how many species could disappear. So far, humans have pushed species toward extinctions through means like hunting, overfishing and deforestation. Global warming, on the other hand, is only starting to make itself felt in the natural world. Many scientists expect that as the planet’s temperature rises, global warming could add even more devastation. “The current rate and magnitude of climate change are faster and more severe than many species have experienced in their evolutionary history,” said Anthony Barnosky, the lead author of the Nature study.

More here.

Trevor Paglen. Unmarked 737s at Tonopah Test Range, NV, 12:36 p.m. Distance: 18 miles.

C-print, 2005.

More here, here and here.

Sam Anderson in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

1. The Book of Jeter

The time has come, once again, for everyone to think about Derek Jeter. Don’t try to fight it: it is time. Here in the spring of Jeter’s 17th season, as he begins to play out what should be the last of his giant contracts, as he prepares to become the first career-long Yankee to amass 3,000 hits, as he melts the snow across the Northeast with the warmth of his intangible clutchness and coaxes the fresh blades of grass (which he spent his entire off-season individually planting across America) out of the dark and loamy soil — it is only right that our thoughts should turn back to the Captain.

But how do we even begin to think about someone who has been so thoroughly thought about? Jeter has been, since the middle of the Clinton administration, the signature player on the signature franchise in America’s signature sport — a sport that doubles as national mythology. He is the meta-Yankee: his legendary glories help us to experience, firsthand, the legendary glories of previous generations of Yankees. He’s like a wormhole to the world of our grandparents. His entire career might as well have been broadcast in sepia.

Jeter’s mythology is, at this point, basically impenetrable. His public image is almost scandalously banal — as Buster Olney once put it, he is “Jimmy Stewart in pinstripes.” He’s like an after-school special about the Protestant work ethic. His every motion expresses the quiet dignity of champion champion dignity champion dignity champion. (Sorry: my word-processing software figured out that I was writing about Derek Jeter and started automatically filling in the text.)

Robert Skidelsky on Niall Ferguson's new book Civilization: The West and the Rest:

Ferguson snazzily summarizes the reasons for this reversal in six “killer apps”: competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic. Against such tools – unique products of Western civilization – the rest had no chance. From such a perspective, imperialism, old and new, has been a beneficent influence, because it has been the means of spreading these “apps” to the rest of the world, thereby enabling them to enjoy the fruits of progress hitherto confined to a few Western countries.

Understandably, this thesis has not met with universal approbation. The historian Alex von Tunzelmann accused Ferguson of leaving out all of imperialism’s nasty bits: the Black War in Australia, the German genocide in Namibia, the Belgian exterminations in the Congo, the Amritsar Massacre, the Bengal Famine, the Irish potato famine, and much else.

But that is the weakest line of attack. Edward Gibbon once described history as being little better than a record of the “crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Imperialism certainly added its quota to these. But the question is whether it also provided, through Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” the means to escape from them. Even Marx justified British rule in India on these grounds. Ferguson, too, can make a sound argument for such a proposition.

John Mecklin in Miller-McCune:

[Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel's] More Than Good Intentions builds off the behavioral economics ideas widely publicized in Nudge, the Richard Thaler/Cass Sunstein book that explains how people can be encouraged to make better decisions by a society that makes good decisions easier to reach than bad ones. (Prototypical example: Students eat more fresh fruit and vegetable sticks when they are put in an appealing display next to the cafeteria cash register.) But Karlan’s book combines a keen sense of the quirks of behavioral economics with an insistence on the rigorous scientific testing of international development programs, using random, controlled trials to see whether the programs improve people’s lives.

The first sections of the book are fascinating, if less cheerful than the rest, as they take the shine off a category of aid that has been a darling of the development sector: micro-credit. In 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, which Yunus created, for their work over three decades to, as the Norwegian Nobel Committee put it, “create economic and social development from below.”

“Lasting peace cannot be achieved,” the committee opined, “unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means.”

Micro-credit programs — which offer small-scale loans to people (often women) in developing countries who then start or expand small-scale businesses — have spread to reach some 155 million people. More Than Good Intentions does not conclude that the micro-credit movement is a failure, but through a series of studies Karlan does show that, as he put it in a recent phone conversation with me, micro-credit “is the poster child for programs that are oversold.” In random, controlled trials aimed at testing the efficacy of several micro-lending programs, he finds that there are, indeed, amazing success stories, people who have taken small loans and, through entrepreneurial skill and hard work, lifted themselves out of poverty. But the studies show that this result isn’t the most common, that — as anyone with much experience in the for-profit world might guess — a poor population in a developing nation with a rudimentary educational system is unlikely to contain a far higher percentage of brilliant entrepreneurs than the general population of a richer, better-educated country.

But More Than Good Intentions doesn’t debunk international development mythology just for the sake of debunking. It tries, instead, to find a middle way between continuing to invest billions of dollars in aid programs with long, sad histories of accomplishing little and giving up on development aid as inherently ineffective.