In Montana, you need not go far in search of wounds. The place is rife with them. All you have to do is look between the familiar postcards of The Last Best Place and you’ll see them: slick, deforested hillsides connecting at sharp angles in a quilt-pattern over every national forest; dams holding back decades of poisonous sludge, buried deep in some of the biggest waterways; trees cracking and listing in burns that are bigger than certain East Coast states; vast pits of toxic mineral water sidling right up to the highway. There is something satisfying about all of this. It’s a hard, unhidden truth, and the landscape runs wild with it. The first time I saw the Berkeley Pit was about two years ago during the National Folk Festival in Butte, Montana. I’d been itching to go. I get the same thrill looking at the wounds and scars left by extractive industry that other people get from looking at a mountain or the Grand Canyon, and I’d heard that the Pit really took the cake. It wasn’t a hard sell. After paying my two dollars, though, and stepping out onto the platform of the public viewing stand, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Frankly, the Pit didn’t look like much: a big, brownish-red lake, inside a crater. But on the way out I picked up a copy of Pitwatch and read the whole thing twice on the ride home. I was smitten.

more from Nathaniel Miller at Virginia Quarterly Review here.

Ancient egypt has been misunderstood since Herodotus put pen to papyrus in the fifth century B.C., though its appeal has never flagged. Exhibitions of Egyptian artifacts still draw large crowds at museums, and the “documentaries” on cable channels continue to flood in. But much of this attention feeds into an idea that Egypt is “other” and “exotic”—a changeless, mysterious world of tombs, temples and sorcerers. Hollywood is guilty of promoting this image, but so are scholars, who are prone to emphasize mummies and royal tombs to the exclusion of topics such as agricultural production, social organization and, broader still, economic history. In fact, ancient Egypt—a term encompassing a culture that lasted for more than 4,000 years—offers an incomparable opportunity to study how and why civilizations change over a long period of time. The comparison to China may be appropriate: Egypt, like China, has a long and extensively documented history. The ancient Egyptian language was written and spoken for two-thirds of recorded human history, and a great volume of economic and legal records are preserved in papyri and inscriptions, including some spectacular documents that go back to 2000 B.C. Remarkable, then, that Egypt has been given short shrift in the current trend for “big history.”

more from Joseph Manning at the WSJ here.

From The Telegraph:

The producers of the new BBC Radio 3 adaptation of Wuthering Heights say they want to recreate the 'shocking impact' of the book when it was published. Here is a summary of contemporary reviews.

Atlas, 22 January 1848

We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity. There is not in the entire dramatis persona, a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible … Even the female characters excite something of loathing and much of contempt. Beautiful and loveable in their childhood, they all, to use a vulgar expression, “turn out badly”.

Paterson's Magazine (USA), February 1848

We rise from the perusal of Wuthering Heights as if we had come fresh from a pest-house. Read Jane Eyre is our advice, but burn Wuthering Heights.

Graham's Lady Magazine (USA), July 1848

How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.

More here. (Note: This is one of my all time favorite novels. Read it again and again.)

From PhysOrg:

Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, led by Minrui Yu, have published an ACS Nano paper, “Semiconductor Nanomembrane Tubes: Three-Dimensional Confinement for Controlled Neurite Outgrowth,” in which they show that they have been able to successfully coax nerve cell tendrils to grow through tiny tubes made of the semi-conductor materials silicon and germanium. While this ground-breaking research may not portend cyborgs or even human brains enmeshed with computer parts, it does open the door to the possibility of regenerating nerve cells damaged due to disease or injury.

Yu and his team, led by Justin Williams, a biomedical engineer, created tubes of varying sizes and shapes, small enough for a nerve cell to glam on to, but not so big that it could fit all the way inside. The tubes were then coated with nerve cells from mice and then watched to see how they would react. Instead of sitting idly, the nerve cells began to send tendrils through the tunnels, as if searching for a path to something or somewhere else. In some instances they actually followed the contours of the tubes, which means, in theory, that the nerves could be grown into structures. Scientists have known for a while that nerve cells have a seek feature, but aren’t yet sure what it is they are seeking or if it’s just a random thing they do. By setting up nerve cells to follow pre-planned paths through tiny tubes, the research team hopes to find the answer to that by installing listening devices to record electrical emissions from nerves, which could in theory lead to recorded conversations between nerve cells. The hope of course, in this type of research, is that a way can be found to connect a computer of some sort to a group of nerve cells to reestablish communication that has been disrupted.

More here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Express Tribune:

Japan’s near tragedy has reminded the world that situating reactors close to a city can be exceedingly dangerous – even more than storing nuclear bombs within it. While a nuclear reactor cannot explode like a bomb, after one year of operation even a rather small 200MW reactor contains more radioactive cesium, strontium, and iodine than the amounts produced in all the nuclear weapons tests ever conducted.

These devastatingly deadly materials could be released if the containment vessel of a reactor is somehow breached.

As the Japanese continue their struggle to bring Fukushima’s reactors under control, they know they had falsely gambled that nuclear reactors could be safe against earthquakes. Still, there was some logic to this risk-taking: Japan’s energy hungry economy gets about 30per cent of its electricity from its 55 nuclear reactors.

Pakistan has much less reason to risk Karachi, its largest city. The Karachi Nuclear Power Plant, (KANUPP) located by the seashore, produces little electricity. This Canadian supplied reactor has been in operation since December 1972, but according to IAEA statistics, has been unavailable for power production 70.4 per cent of the time. Even if it had operated as per design (120MW of electrical power), it could supply only six-seven per cent of Karachi’s total electrical power needs – barely enough for Golimar and Lyari.

Nevertheless KANUPP puts the Karachi’s population at risk. Sabotage, terrorist attack, equipment failure, earthquake, or a tsunami could result in large scale radioactive release. As in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the instinctive reaction of the authorities would be to cover up the facts.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Twenty percent of art can now be explained by neuroscience. That, at least, is what V.S. Ramachandran thinks. Ramachandran is the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, and Distinguished Professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego. He is, in short, one of the top neuroscientists around at the moment. He is also a clear and engaging writer. His 1999 book, Phantoms in the Brain, brought him much popular attention and his most recent book, The Tell-Tale Brain, is doing more of the same.

Much like Oliver Sacks, his friend and admirer, Ramachandran comes to many of his insights about the human brain by observing its dysfunction. Problems in the brain can tell us meaningful things about what is going on in a normal brain. Take, for example, people who claim that one of their arms belongs to someone else due to damage to their brain; they become lessons in how complex and multi-layered are the functions of consciousness. We seem to ourselves, when everything is going well, to be fully unified “selves.” In fact, when we look at various disorders of the mind, we see how tenuous is the ground upon which that feeling rests. In looking at the disordered mind, Ramachandran gets the impression that he is looking “at human nature through a magnifying glass.”

That is also why Ramachandran devotes two whole chapters of his book to the subject of art and aesthetics. Making art and appreciating art seems to be universal in the human species. From prehistoric cave paintings to modern conceptualism, where you find human beings you also find art. At the same time, no one has ever been able to give a very good definition of art, to explain in any rigorous and satisfying way what it is that human beings are up to when they make art and when they like art. It is a subject that touches on the strangeness of consciousness, the felt sense of being human that all of us experience every day but that is so resistant to explanation or analysis. Art is thus a kind of Holy Grail to those who seek to explain the murkiest aspects of human consciousness. But it is this very fact — the experiential and intangible nature of art — that would seem to preclude the possibility that science can intrude into the domain of art. As Ramachandran himself admits, “One is a quest for general principles and tidy explanations while the other is a celebration of the individual imagination and spirit, so that the very notion of a science of art seems like an oxymoron.”

More here.

Anna Sussman in The Nation:

White-haired and feisty, the 80-year-old Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi has been protesting against various Egyptian regimes for decades. A medical doctor by training and a prolific author by disposition, she has tackled difficult topics such as prostitution, female genital mutilation and discriminatory family laws in nearly fifty works of fiction and non-fiction. The Nation spoke to the “Simone de Beauvoir of Egypt” in advance of her appearances at New York University on March 22 and 24.

Were you involved in the planning or the social media activities leading up to the revolution?

There were many groups of young people, and I was communicating with some of them. There are some young people who have a forum; they come to my home regularly to discuss philosophy, literature, politics. So I knew there was going to be a revolution, but I was not following it very closely.

You camped out in Tahrir Square day and night. Did you see or hear anything that surprised you?

I didn’t expect 20 million people on the streets. This has been my dream since I was child, that one day the Egyptian people would wake up and revolt against slavery and colonization. I’ve participated in many demonstrations since I was a child. When I was at medical college, I was fighting King Farouk, then British colonization, against Nasser, against Sadat who pushed me into prison, Mubarak who pushed me into exile. I never stopped. It was like a dream; it was the accumulation of small revolutions.

More here.

Joe Kloc in Mother Jones:

Workers in Japan are still pouring seawater on overheating nuclear reactor rods at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in an effort to decrease the risk of further meltdowns. (Read Mother Jones' detailed and regularly updated explainer on the current situation.) Here's what they're up against, as Kate Sheppard and Josh Harkinson explained shortly after the emergency began:

There are six boiling-water reactors on the site, though only three were in operation at the time of the earthquake. These systems, designed by General Electric, rely on an influx of water to cool the reactor core. But the water systems require electricity that was cut off by the earthquake. It also appears that something—the initial quake, the tsunami, or aftershocks—knocked the site's back-up generators offline. Without the cooling system bringing in water, the core of a reactor will start to overheat—which in turn heats up the water already in the system and causes more of it to turn to steam. Emergency responders have been forced to vent some of the steam, releasing radiation, in order to prevent the containment domes from exploding. They are in a race against the clock to bring in new water supplies before the reacting nuclear fuel heats up beyond control.

When I couldn't find a schematic of that showed the Fukushima reactors' failed cooling systems in relation to their various other workings, I set out to remedy the problem in a visually accessible way. Think of the schematic diagram below like a New York City subway map.

More here.

There are only 41 of them, but they were the distillation of a lifetime’s thinking in poetry, continually reworked until his death in 1837 at 39. They include some of the most famous poems in Italian. Leopardi lived much of his life in Recanati, a backwater within the backward Papal States near Ancona. This spurred him on to become something of a literary prodigy: by 11 he had translated Horace’s Odes and was well on the way to having taught himself Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish and English. His father had already dismissed the priest who was instructing young Giacomo in Latin for having nothing more to teach him. Through his teenage years he embarked on what he later described as “seven years of insane and desperate study” in his father’s library of 16,000 volumes. He ruined his health and developed a serious hunchback. Leopardi is Italy’s great romantic poet, and while there are similarities with Wordsworth and Coleridge, the contrasts are more striking. Most of these stem from Giacomo’s cosmic pessimism. Leopardi looked to classical authors for ideals of rationality and stoicism to face the suffering and nullity of the world. For this he was at odds with his century’s frenzied rallying calls to nationalism and progress, and more in line with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, both of whom he influenced. For literary historian Francesco De Sanctis, Leopardi’s scepticism heralds the end of the world of theology and metaphysics and the inauguration of material nihilism.

more from Simon West at The Australian here.

THERE ARE so many things wrong with the Libyan intervention that it is hard to know where to begin. So, a few big things, in no particular order: First, it is radically unclear what the purpose of the intervention is—there is no endgame, as a U.S. official told reporters. Is the goal to rescue a failed rebellion, turn things around, use Western armies to do what the rebels couldn’t do themselves: overthrow Qaddafi? Or is it just to keep the fighting going for as long as possible, in the hope that the rebellion will catch fire, and Libyans will get rid of the Qaddafi regime by themselves? Or is it just to achieve a cease-fire, which would leave Qaddafi in control of most of the country and probably more than willing to bide his time? The size of the opening attack points toward the first of these, but success there would probably require soldiers on the ground, which no one in France, Britain, or the United States really wants. The second is the most likely goal, though it would extend, not stop, the bloodshed.

more from Michael Walzer at Dissent here.

The New York Times has just run an online series by war artist Michael Fay that is exceptionally moving and thought-provoking. Over the past decade, Fay has seen action as a war artist with US troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, but his latest journey was to a military veterans’ hospital in Richmond, Virginia. In the resulting New York Times blogs, he relays his meetings with three young men severely wounded in Afghanistan. His account of their injuries and rehabilitation is gripping, but what really deepens the reporting are his drawings, reproduced alongside the articles. Fay is clearly sympathetic with soldiers and his affinity with them is reflected in the very style of these drawings. “Strong and sensitive” would be the simplest way to characterise his on-the-spot observations. A bold, manly line delineates damaged faces and bodies, but with a softening edge of affection. There is real feeling in the sketches, as well as a painstaking accuracy that vindicates the idea of sending artists to war. Fay’s drawings have a disarming humanity that it is hard to imagine being captured by a TV camera. You feel – you hope – these drawings were therapeutic for the men themselves.

more from Jonathan Jones at The Guardian here.

Thanks Gilles Deleuze

They were quoting you
Murmuring your name like a prophet coming from afar
From whose mouth a unique music issues

My own French was not good enough even to purchase bread decently
But the ring of your name
In the sidewise discussions had a special magic
Which for long put my extreme ignorance to shame

Migration is a sacred right, you said once
Nobody said that before you, and no one dared say it after
In this country which we married for love
I, Mohamed, Abdelkader, and Fatima
And other Arabs whose dusty names this poem is too narrow to contain.
Until now I haven’t met anyone who could explain the mysteries of your obscure expression
Laws say the opposite from one government to the other
And the caretaker is French of Portuguese origin
Yet he looks down on philosophers

I was in the subway stealing glances at a newspaper someone was reading
When I saw your name printed in bold, and the headline your death
It seems you threw yourself from the window
But why all those who love you to blindness
Love life more than anything else
I felt ashamed of my ignorance once again
And hated myself in plain Arabic
Despite the grumblings of the coloured owner of the newspaper

Migration is a sacred right
An expression which is enough it was once said
For me every morning to pursue my own sacred right

by Abdel-ilah Salhi
translation: Norddine Zouitni
publisher: PIW, © 2004

Gilles Deleuze

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Suppose that Mark and Bill live in a deterministic universe. Everything that happens this morning — like Mark’s decision to wear a blue shirt, or Bill’s latest attempt to comb over his bald spot — is completely caused by whatever happened before it. If you recreated this universe starting with the Big Bang and let all events proceed exactly the same way until this same morning, then the blue shirt is as inevitable as the comb-over. Now for questions from experimental philosophers:

1) In this deterministic universe, is it possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for his actions?

2) This year, as he has often done in the past, Mark arranges to cheat on his taxes. Is he is fully morally responsible for his actions?

3) Bill falls in love with his secretary, and he decides that the only way to be with her is to murder his wife and three children. Before leaving on a trip, he arranges for them to be killed while he is away. Is Bill fully morally responsible for his actions?

To a classic philosopher, these are just three versions of the same question about free will. But to the new breed of philosophers who test people’s responses to concepts like determinism, there are crucial differences, as Shaun Nichols explains in the current issue of Science. Most respondents will absolve the unspecified person in Question 1 from full responsibility for his actions, and a majority will also give Mark a break for his tax chiseling. But not Bill. He’s fully to blame for his heinous crime, according to more than 70 percent of the people queried by Dr. Nichols, an experimental philosopher at the University of Arizona, and his Yale colleague Joshua Knobe.

More here.

From Research:

You might think it’s hard to have a conversation with theoretical physicist Brian Greene. His research specialty is superstring theory, the hypothesis that everything in the universe is made up of miniscule, vibrating strands of energy. Luckily for an interviewer, Greene has a knack for explaining difficult concepts to non-scientists. His first book, the best-selling The Elegant Universe, which explains the quest to unify all the laws of nature, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and led to an award-winning PBS series. He is a co-founder of the World Science Festival, an annual event in June whose aim is to make “the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating,” which pretty much sums up Greene’s modus operandi. “Science is a living, breathing, exciting, evolving subject,” he says. “A large part of my motivation in reaching out to a general audience is to show people that science is not this finished subject where all of the results are in these thick textbooks that you lug around when you’re taking a science course.” Greene, 48, grew up on the Upper West Side and spent many a rainy day at the Hayden Planetarium, when it was a dark and musty place and not the shiny glass cube it is today. “That definitely played a part in my excitement for these ideas.” But it was the pure beauty of mathematics that really grabbed him. “As a kid I was playing with numbers all the time,” he says. “And when I learned that those numbers could be more than a game, those numbers could actually describe stuff that was out there in the real world, that’s when I was hooked for good.” His latest book, The Hidden Reality, explores another mystery: whether there are other universes beyond ours.

Q. Your new book talks about the concept of a multiverse. Can you explain what that means?

When we hear the word “universe,” we think that means everything: every star, every galaxy, everything that exists. But in physics, we’ve come upon the possibility that what we’ve long thought to be everything may actually only be a small part of something that is much, much bigger. The word “multiverse” refers to that bigger expanse, the new totality of reality, and our universe would be just a piece of that larger whole.

More here.

Jane Alexander. Butcher Boys. 1985-86.

Sculpture using plaster, bone, horn, oil paint, wood.

More here, here, and here.

1. Top Quark, $1000: Namit Arora, Joothan: A Dalit's Life
2. Strange Quark, $300: Edan Lepucki, Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction
3. Charm Quark, $200: Elliot Colla, The Poetry of Revolt

Here is what Dr. Lalami had to say about them:

The finalists for this year’s 3QD prize write in very different genres, but they were
all very impressive, which made the task of choosing just three difficult indeed.
Here are my selections:

Namit Arora’s powerful review of Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan: A Dalit’s Life for 3
Quarks Daily places this 1997 memoir in a personal, cultural, and literary context.
Arora gives a very moving portrayal of a kind of life I knew little about, an honest
reckoning of the privileges of his own upbringing, and a thoughtful analysis both of
Valmiki’s work in Hindi and its translation into English.

All too often, the subject of race is felt to be the sole purview of people of color—as if
white people were completely unaffected by racial history or reality. Edan Lepucki’s
candid piece for The Millions, in which she discusses her exposure to questions of
race and slavery through various novels, shows us how literature, which requires us
to have imaginative empathy, can also help us develop actual empathy.

Elliot Colla’s analysis of Egyptian revolutionary slogans for Jadaliyya is both
sensitive and original. In discussing how poetry is created, performed, and
remembered—not just right now in Tahrir Square, but also during earlier historical
periods—he reminds us that literature and life are not distinct or divergent spheres,
but indivisible aspects of the human experience.

Congratulations 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 Laila Lalami for doing the final judging.

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

Details about the prize here.

Over at the Boston Review, there is a forum on the promise of applying the lessons of behavioral economics to challenges in development, with the lead piece by Rachel Glennerster and Michael Kremer and comments from: Diane Coyle; Eran Bendavid; Pranab Bardhan; José Gómez-Márquez; Chloe O’Gara; Jishnu Das, Shantayanan Devarajan, and Jeffrey S. Hammer; and Daniel N. Posner. From the lead piece:

According to a standard economic model, a fourteen-year-old girl in Kenya will go to school if doing so will enable her to earn more than she spent on her education. A family will buy dilute-chlorine solution, measure out capfuls to treat their water, and wait for the chlorine to disinfect their water if the health benefits exceed the cost of the chlorine. Since a school uniform that lasts a year or two costs only six dollars, and a month’s supply of chlorine runs about $0.30, these costs should be fairly minor factors. Influenced in part by these arguments, many governments in the developing world and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned with development have maintained small charges for education and preventative health care.

However, in recent decades economists have increasingly come to recognize what most of us have long known: human beings don’t always make the best decisions.

A new type of economics, dubbed “behavioral economics,” seeks to understand deviations from the simple “rational agent” model that has dominated economics for most of its history—why people procrastinate, say, or why Americans don’t exercise or save enough.

In the developed world, these ideas are beginning to affect policy. For instance, the Pension Protection Act of 2006 encourages U.S. employers to establish automatic enrollment for retirement plans. Could such approaches help alleviate poverty in developing countries? If policies based on behavioral economics can help Americans save more, could they also help Indian children get vaccinated or Kenyan children get cleaner water?

Evidence from randomized evaluations in the developing world suggests they might.

Julia Felsenthal in Slate:

Slate tech columnist Farhad Manjoo argued recently that the fax machine lives on largely because of our attachment to the written signature. Manjoo's observation piqued the Explainer's curiosity: When did scribbling your name on a piece of paper become a means of authentication?

A long time ago. Signatures on written transactions have been customary in Jewish communities since about the second century and among Muslims since the Hegira (the migration of Muhammad and his followers to Medina) in 622. In Europe, the signature dates to the sixth century. But it didn't catch on widely there for another thousand-odd years, until the 16th and 17th centuries, when education and literacy were on the rise and more agreements were made in writing. In England, the 1677 Statute of Frauds—which stipulated that contracts must exist in writing and bear a signature—was pivotal. Signatures became a standard form of validating agreements—a practice that was also adopted in colonial America.

Between the sixth century, when signatures first appeared, and the 17th century, when signing became standard practice, Europeans used various customs to formalize contracts. Wax seals bearing an impressed or embossed figure were common, particularly among the French, who brought the tradition to England during the Norman invasion. (Seals also appear in the Bible, and to this day sealing, not signing, is standard practice in China, Japan, and Korea.) One popular way to create these impressions was to press a signet ring into beeswax. Signet rings themselves were also used as validation: A king might, for example, dispatch a herald bearing an oral message to a foreign power, and give him the royal signet ring so that the message's recipient would be confident of its origin.