In 1962 Giorgio Bocca, a social commentator and essayist, fatalistically predicted the submergence of Italy’s rich diversity of regional and local identities under a tide of modern materialism. He wrote: “What the Medici’s pope-king, Dante’s emperor-messiah, Machiavelli’s prince, Cavour’s Piedmontese bureaucracy and Mussolini’s fascists all failed to accomplish is coming together under the auspices of the consumer civilisation and its television oracle. Before long the Italians will be a compact people with identical customs, habits and ideals, from Sicily to the Alps. They will dress, think, eat and enjoy themselves all in the same way, as the small screen dictates and imposes.” At the time it might have seemed a plausible forecast. During Italy’s “golden age of capitalism”, stretching from roughly 1950 to 1973, rapid economic growth and social modernisation produced a mass national market in which increasing numbers of Italians drove the same cars (Fiats), rode the same scooters (Vespas), watched the same television programmes (Carosello – a show that popularised TV commercial messages), drank the same coffee (Paulista) and ate the same pasta (Barilla). It was as if centuries of difference were disappearing in the solvent of a standardised prosperity. Today, as Italy marks its 150th anniversary as a nation-state, Bocca’s fears appear much exaggerated.

more from Tony Barber at the FT here.

From Orion:

WHEN MY HUSBAND AND I SET OUT to find a nursery school for our daughter, Faith, nearly ten years ago we took the decision seriously. I looked at large parent-run cooperatives and visited small home-based operations. Jeff studied the pink towers and chiming bells at the Montessori school on the hill and considered the wonder balls and wooden fairies at the Waldorf school in the valley. In the end, we chose a nursery school that operated out of a community center close to home. There was a frog pond out front and a play structure out back. The trees were full of chickadees and nuthatches. We had weighed many considerations in the decision-making process, and we all, Faith included, were happy about it.

That is, until I discovered that, like many of its kind, the school’s beloved play structure —with its wooden gangway, turrets, and tunnels —was made out of pressure-treated lumber, which, at the time, contained arsenic, a carcinogen. A bladder carcinogen, in fact. I am a bladder cancer survivor. I am familiar with this particular disease and all the ongoing medical surveillance it requires. So, after a lot of research and discussion, we eventually decided to move our daughter to a different nursery school. The risk of doing nothing just seemed too high.

More here.

From The New York Times:

To take on a reinterpretation of one of the greatest novels of the 20th century in one’s debut is, to put it mildly, a gutsy move. Victoria Patterson’s first novel, “This Vacant Paradise,” set in Newport Beach, Calif., in the expansive, bullish 1990s, is a modern take on Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth.” Patterson’s first book, a story collection, “Drift,” was also set in Newport Beach, but it concerned itself mainly with drifters, lowlifes and working stiffs rather than the upper crust. Southern California’s Orange County is known to viewers of reality television as the quintessentially upper-middle-class, suburban, mostly white, Christian and Republican enclave where class, social strictures and the pressure to “marry well” still pervade — it is, in other words, a world not so different from Lily Bart’s. In “This Vacant Para­dise,” Esther Wilson is a gorgeous, materialistic, self-absorbed college dropout who, at 33, fears that her beauty is on the cusp of fading. She works as a cashier at a boutique and embezzles small amounts of cash to augment her modest income. Occasionally she also receives handouts from her capricious, wealthy grand­mother, with whom she lives. Lonely and in debt, Esther feels desperate to snag a rich man soon, before she’s too old to cash in on her beauty.

Hanif Kureishi in The Independent:

I had wanted to be a writer – to devote myself to words and storytelling – from the age of 14. I can remember the moment it occurred to me, one day at school, and how differently I felt about the world after, the door to the future opening. But I hadn't given much thought as to how I would support myself, and later, a family. I seemed to believe that I'd get by somehow. The details didn't matter, particularly since I made the decision to write in 1968 – a time when creativity rather than “bread” was the key. And the writers I'd admired – Kafka, Beckett, Kerouac, Henry Miller, among others – hardly had “professional writer” on their passports.

They were artists, which was different, and none of them, to my knowledge, seemed concerned about the price of prams, or had children at private school – both of which, according to a rather arch idea of Cyril Connolly's, were lethal for writers: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway.”

Perhaps, for some people, becoming an artist implies abandoning ordinary life for the excitement of bohemianism, but I can't say I know many writers like that. Writing is as steady a job as any job can be. Routine makes the imagination possible. “Acting in”, you could call it, as opposed to acting out. Writers are envied because writing, or perhaps any form of art, is the most gratifying sublimation of all; it is one thing you don't have to leave the house to do – warm but not impressive underwear being the only requirement, apart from some talent.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian:

Two months ago, after Governor Salmaan Taseer's murder and the jubilant support for the policeman who killed him, religious scholars in Pakistan told us that since common people don't know enough about religion they should leave it to those who do – basically anyone with a beard.

Everyone thought it made a cruel kind of sense. So everyone decided to shut up: the Pakistan Peoples party (PPP) government because it wanted to cling to power, liberals in the media because they didn't want to be the next Taseer. The move to amend the blasphemy law was shelved.

It was an unprecedented victory for Pakistan's mullah minority. They had told a very noisy and diverse people to shut up and they heard back nothing but silence. After Pakistan's only Christian federal minister, Shahbaz Bhatti – the bravest man in Islamabad – was murdered on Tuesday, they were back on TV, this time condemning the killing, claiming it was a conspiracy against them, against Islam and against Pakistan. The same folk who had celebrated one murder and told us how not to get murdered were wallowing in self pity.

In a very short span of time, Pakistan's mullahs and muftis have managed to blur the line between what God says and what they say. The blasphemy law debate was about how to prosecute people who have committed blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an. Since repeating a blasphemy, even if it is to prove the crime in a court of law, is blasphemous, no Pakistani has a clear idea what constitutes blasphemy. Taseer had called the blasphemy law “a black law” and was declared a blasphemer. The line between maligning the Holy Prophet and questioning a law made by a bunch of mullahs was done away with. What would come next?

More here.

Bora Zivkovic in Scientific American:

Last week, two intriguing and excellent articles appeared in the journal Nature, demonstrating that the transcription and translation of genes, or even the presence of DNA in the cell, are not necessary for the daily (“circadian”) rhythms to occur (O’Neill & Reddy 2011, O’Neill et al., 2011). (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

The two papers received quite a lot of media coverage, and deservedly so, but very few science bloggers attempted to write in-depth blog posts about them, placing them in a broader historical, theoretical and methodological context. I had a feeling that everyone was waiting for me to do so. Which is why you are now reading this. I know it is a long “Explainer” (which is all the rage in science journalism these days) but I hope you have patience for it and that you find it informative and rewarding.

What I intend to do is to, first, briefly describe and explain the research in these two papers, though the press release and media coverage were quite accurate this time. Diana Gitig did the best job of it at Ars Technica – I highly recommend you read her piece for clear background information.

Then I will try to give you a historical perspective so you can get a feel for the context in which this research was performed. This look at the history will bring into sharp relief how powerful the scientific metaphors are in guiding the questions that researchers try to answer in their laboratories. Finally, a look at the media coverage will show that the lay audience (including journalists) is guided by other metaphors – not always the same ones that are used by researchers.

More here.

Colin McGinn reviews V.S. Ramachandran's The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, in the NYRB:

Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on—are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of the brain responsible for thinking?

Is thinking what the brain does in the way that walking is what the body does? V.S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, thinks the answer is definitely yes. He is a brain psychologist: he scrutinizes the underlying anatomy of the brain to understand the manifest process of the mind. He approvingly quotes Freud’s remark “Anatomy is destiny”—only he means brain anatomy, not the anatomy of the rest of the body.

But there is a prima facie hitch with this approach: the relationship between mental function and brain anatomy is nowhere near as transparent as in the case of the body—we can’t just look and see what does what. The brain has an anatomy, to be sure, though it is boneless and relatively homogeneous in its tissues; but how does its anatomy map onto psychological functions? Are there discrete areas for specific mental faculties or is the mapping more diffuse (“holistic”)?:

Hello,

Sorry for the slight delay in the opening of the voting round.

The period for nominating entrees for the 3QD Philosophy Prize is over.

To browse the full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

Good luck to all! The voting round closes on Sunday, September 11, 2011, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on March 11, 2011. Winners of the contest, as decided by Laila Lalami, will be announced on March 21, 2011.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

Cheers,

Abbas

P.S. If you notice any problems, such as a nominee is missing from the list below, please leave a comment on this page. Thanks.

BEWARE: We have various independent ways of keeping track of attempts at voting multiple times, which I am deliberately not revealing publicly. Any attempts at fraud will be thoroughly investigated, and anyone caught trying to vote multiple times will be instantly disqualified. I don’t think I really need to say this, but there are always a couple of bad eggs who will try!

Besides the Bible
there are other books
Besides the Koran

It's not good to be cooped-up in any one book during the winter
of our discontent: cabin fever.
………………………………… –Roshi Bob
Dreamtime

The first homo sapiens is
we aborigines.
The different ideas ’bout origins
only you running human like people
present state
This old naturally wise earth
not their scientific knowledge
Brothers million love remains
outside nowadays
But savage are there commonly believed
Theory of evolution we developed
things living as original forms of lifes.
Sisters modern human existence
not in there mixed.
Come brief kindly born earth
making scientist naive
the related common ancestors.
WE NOT APES
maps are in your sapiens
unwise species.
Don’t we create spirits
the first and everlasting two
every Murri distribution of wealth
we done in this country
so we mustn’t pay tax
on our homing wealth
that stays within.
We are the first or last
human being
homo sapiens, aborigines
Well tell we deep
private thoughts.

by Lionel Fogarty
from Ngutji
publisher: Cheryl Buchanan, Brisbane, 1984

From The Paris Review:

Adrienne Rich needs no introduction. One of the twentieth century’s most exhaustively celebrated poets and essayists, she counts among her many honors a National Book Award, a Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Robert Hass has ascribed to her work the qualities of salt and darkness, praising its “relentless need to confront difficulty.” But Rich’s latest collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, ranges from dismay to joy, the outraged to the erotic. Over e-mail, Rich shared her thoughts on poetry and power, the search for a more nuanced wartime aesthetic, and the meaning of the “woman citizen.”

Let’s start with the title, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve.

The book has an epigraph from Webster’s Dictionary: definitions of the verb “to serve.” It’s an interesting range of meanings, from the idea of obedient servitude to the authoritative (from law, the military, a prison sentence), to the meeting of another’s needs, to being of use. The title poem begins with an erotic moment registered in a world of torture and violence. It turns, midway, from the sensual and “poetic” to an official grammar, parsing violent policies as you might diagram a sentence in a classroom. The poem was inflected, you could say, by interviews I was hearing on Amy Goodman’s program, Democracy Now!—about Guantánamo, waterboarding, official U.S. denials of torture, the “renditioning” of presumed terrorists to countries where they would inevitably be tortured. The line “Tonight I think no poetry will serve” suggests that no poetry can serve to mitigate such acts, they nullify language itself. One begins to write of the sensual body, but other bodies “elsewhere” are terribly present.

More here.

From Nature:

“Wonderful, beautiful and unique” is how Gordon Kane describes supersymmetry theory. Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has spent about 30 years working on supersymmetry, a theory that he and many others believe solves a host of problems with our understanding of the subatomic world. Yet there is growing anxiety that the theory, however elegant it might be, is wrong. Data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27-kilometre proton smasher that straddles the French–Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland, have shown no sign of the 'super particles' that the theory predicts^1–3. “We're painting supersymmetry into a corner,” says Chris Lester, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who works with the LHC's ATLAS detector. Along with the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, ATLAS has spent the past year hunting for super particles, and is now set to gather more data when the LHC begins a high-power run in the next few weeks. If the detectors fail to find any super particles by the end of the year, the theory could be in serious trouble.

Supersymmetry (known as SUSY and pronounced 'Susie') emerged in the 1970s as a way to solve a major shortcoming of the standard model of particle physics, which describes the behaviour of the fundamental particles that make up normal matter (see 'The bestiary'). Researchers have now found every particle predicted by the model, save one: the Higgs boson, theorized to help endow other particles with mass.

More here.

See the stunning audio slideshow by photographer Timothy Allen at the BBC website here.

Our own Tolu Ogunlesi at CNN:

Nigerians, masters of the art of self-flagellation that they are, waste no time proclaiming that Tunisia or Egypt will never happen here; we are too cowardly, too obsessed with self-comfort. This revolution will not be coming to a city near you anytime soon, we gleefully tell ourselves.

But the more I think about it, the more I become convinced that the answer to that question should be: “Why would anyone imagine that Nigeria needs a Tahrir-Square-style uprising at this time?”

Anyone following the protests in North Africa will realize that what is at stake is freedom. After decades of iron-handed rule, the Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans deserve “freedom.”

Since democracy is supposed to guarantee this freedom (which is actually a melange of freedoms: of speech; of association; of having a say in the way one's country is being run and its wealth distributed), clearly what is happening across North Africa can be summarized as a push for democracy.

The only sub-Saharan African countries, therefore, that should be seeking to replicate Tahrir Square are those still in the grip of Egypt-style tyranny: for example Equatorial Guinea (where Teodoro Obiang has ruled since 1979), Gabon and Cameroon (where Paul Biya keeps altering the constitution.)

More here.

Mohsin Hamid in The Express Tribune:

There’s a nurse I know in Lahore. She’s tall and stocky, middle-aged. She is on call 24 hours a day and works six days a week. She’s also a freelance headhunter, placing cooks and drivers and maids. She sleeps little. She has five children she hopes to give better lives. Last year, she donated time and money to flood victims.

She is a Pakistani Christian. And on Wednesday, I saw her weep.

She was staring at a TV set. It was reporting the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s federal minister for minorities, a Roman Catholic. “What’s going to happen to Christians in this country?” she asked me.

I had no answer. But her question is searingly important. A country should be judged by how it treats its minorities. To the extent it protects them, it stands for the ennobling values of empathy and compassion, for justice rooted, not in might, but in human equality, and for civilisation instead of savagery.

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

The assassination on Wednesday of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s Federal Minister of Minorities, killed in broad daylight in Islamabad by four gunmen, is one of the most shameful acts of political violence committed by Pakistani extremists. That it comes just two months after the murder of Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab and one of the country’s leading liberal voices makes it all the more chilling. Yet the government and state’s reaction to the two killings has been even more shameful—raising the disturbing possibility that extremism is still being used by the security services in its efforts to oppose Western policies in the region.

The 40-year-old Bhatti was a Roman Catholic and the only Christian member of the cabinet of Prime Minister Yousf Reza Gailani. It was a death foretold. Taseer had been assassinated for his courageous struggle to amend Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which has been used to persecute minorities—a struggle to which Bhatti had also dedicated himself. Bhatti made a videotape some months ago that he wanted released to the BBC if he was killed. In it he said he would carry on the campaign to amend the blasphemy law.

“I will prefer to die for the cause [of defending] the rights of my community rather than to compromise on my principles,” Bhatti said in the tape. “The forces of violence, militants, banned organizations, Taliban and al-Qaeda, want to impose their radical philosophy in Pakistan and whosoever stands against it, they threaten him.”

More here.