Mark Grotjahn’s large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another. Noses and mouths appear in kaleidoscopic furrows. Eyes, too—sometimes in clusters, other times alone. Often these eyes are gouged out, opaque, blank, like those of some simian being or blind oracle. There are echoes of Cubism here and Vlaminck’s Fauvism, of mid-century abstraction, German and neo-Expressionism, rock painting, folk art, and fabric design. I’m tantalized by the facture and physicality of these paintings. What Grotjahn (pronounced groat-john) paints doesn’t stay put on these variegated surfaces; instead, it shifts around the involuting centerless space. You can discern the ways in which this work is made, yet no formal system appears. (I surmise that the artist himself is sometimes caught off guard by what he’s produced.) His strangely shamanic art gives me a remnant of the pow I get from those ancient eternal faces in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The winding rows of oil paint have been carefully laid on, wet-on-wet. Sometimes these lines look like colored grubs or raffia, in tones that are rich and saturated, ranging from mauve and apple to emerald and blood red. I think of magic carpets and magnetic fields. I spy networks of Martian canals and landscapes folding over themselves. I glimpse one of painting’s oldest purposes: the uncanny ability to conjure beings and invoke spirits.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

As an essayist she had cut her teeth on the outermost crusts of literary minority, reviewing the long-forgotten work of the pointlessly pseudonymous. In 1907 she was sent five dramas in verse to review: “my mind feels as though a torrent of weak tea has been poured over it”, she complained in a letter. Here we see her learning the ropes: forging an argument out of unprepossessing materials (“these stories were meant to be read swiftly on a train, and to preserve them in a book is to imprison them unkindly”); experimenting with the avuncular and the urbane and the knowingly fogeyish (Rose Macaulay’s characters “say a great many very clever things”); and mastering the delicate art of praise never quite so faint as to descend to a sneer: “It would seem inexcusably bad taste to pull such innocent work to pieces; it seems to confide in you”. The apprenticeship gave her a respect for “ingenuity and good workmanship”, however mistakenly applied. (In later life she wrote of her friend Roger Fry that, because he was a painter himself, his criticism was “full of respect and admiration for the artist who has used his gift honourably and honestly even though it is a small one”.) It also gave her a lifelong appreciation of the variegatedness of the experience of reading, and of the fact that sometimes, as she said of Frederick Marryat, “our critical faculties enjoy whetting themselves upon a book which is not among the classics”.

more from Trev Broughton at the TLS here.

Colin Dayan in the Boston Review:

A sound of gulls, a sunlit port, human voices, barking dogs. In a city market, dogs are sitting, lying down, walking past. Dogs gather in the center of the screen. Night falls. A dog gives birth; she nurses her babies. A constable in sharp silhouette comes and looks on as, growling, she huddles over her young.

So begins Serge Avedikian’s fifteen-minute animated film Barking Island (originally Chienne d’histoire in French), which, in 2010, won the Palme d’Or as the best short film at Cannes. The images are paintings by Thomas Azuélos, made deep and weighty, contoured yet dissolving at the edges, almost palpable.

Once the music changes, the scene shifts to humans at a long table discussing how to eliminate the dogs. Newspapers announce that there are more than 60,000 dogs on the streets of Constantinople. The Turkish authorities appeal for an end to them. After exploring various options—gassing, incineration, turning corpses into meat for human consumption—offered by the Pasteur Institute in Paris and other European experts, the Turks decide to round the dogs up and abandon them on a deserted island in the Bosporus.

More here.

From The Browser:

I wanted to start by saying how pleased I am you call yourself a liberal, because there are a lot of people – politicians – who are reluctant to be associated with the word.

As I see it, there has been a lot of effective propaganda. As a result, a lot of people adopted the term “progressive” as a somehow less charged way of saying the same thing, which I don’t think works. I consider myself both – liberal and progressive. It’s not too different from what would be called a social democrat in Europe – you believe in a decent-sized welfare state, you believe that we are our brothers’ keepers. Of course I’m not a politician so I can afford to label myself in a way that might lose some votes…

The first book you’ve chosen isn’t about economics at all; it’s a work of science-fiction, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. But was it part of what inspired you to become an economist?

Yes. This is a very unusual set of novels from Isaac Asimov, but a classic. It’s not about gadgets. Although it’s supposed to be about a galactic civilisation, the technology is virtually invisible and it’s not about space battles or anything like that. The story is about these people, psychohistorians, who are mathematical social scientists and have a theory about how society works. The theory tells them that the galactic empire is failing, and they then use that knowledge to save civilisation. It’s a great image. I was probably 16 when I read it and I thought, “I want to be one of those guys!” Unfortunately we don’t have anything like that and economics is the closest I could get.

More here.

Sharon Begley in Newsweek:

Since Christine “I’m Not a Witch” O’Donnell is campaigning for the U.S. Senate and not the directorship of the Kinsey Institute, maybe we should give her a pass when it comes to her views on sex and, specifically, masturbation. But that would be a mistake: the stakes are simply too high, going all the way up the very survival of our species. For while O’Donnell crusaded against masturbation in the mid-1990s, denouncing it as “toying” with the organs of procreation and generally undermining baby making, the facts are to the contrary. Evidence from elephants to rodents to humans shows that masturbating is—counterintuitively—an excellent way to make healthy babies, and lots of them. No one who believes in the “family” part of family values can let her claims stand.

The science is straightforward. Whenever a behavior is common in the animal kingdom, biologists suspect it has an adaptive function. That is, the behavior enabled individual animals to survive better and leave more offspring than animals that did not engage in the behavior. As a result, genes for the behavior spread throughout that population until it became essentially ubiquitous. And so it is with autoeroticism, which is common—really common. As the Science in Seconds blog noted this week, what with “spanking the monkey,” “charming the snake,” and “freeing willy,” a remarkable number of the slang terms for pleasuring oneself refer to animals. That reflects reality: the practice has been documented in Japanese macaques, gibbons, baboons, chimps, elephants, dogs, cats, horses, lions, donkeys, “and walruses that manage to flog the bishop with their fins.” (Bonus for clicking on the blog link above: excellent photo of an elephant in flagrante dilecto.)

What, then, might be its adaptive function?

More here.

From The Paris Review:

Margaret Mitchell was on her way to see a movie when she was struck by an off-duty cabbie driving too fast down Peachtree Street one night in Atlanta in 1949. Her death five days later cemented certain facts of her life, most notably that her first novel would also be her last. But she had made the most of her debut: in its nearly 1,500 pages, Gone with the Wind captured the romance and demise of America’s Old South like none other before or since, sold one million copies within six months of its publication, secured a Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1937, and inspired one of the most beloved motion pictures of all time.

Little was said about Mitchell’s death one recent evening in Atlanta, when several dozen of her fans—Windies, as they like to be called—gathered for a tour and graveside toast at the historic Oakland Cemetery, where Mitchell is buried and where her plot is among the most visited. The soiree was one of many held in and around the city this month in honor of Gone with the Wind’s seventy-fifth anniversary. The crowd was almost entirely female; Gone with the Wind handbags abounded, and at least one wristwatch bore the iconic image of Rhett and Scarlett’s smoldering onscreen embrace. Though most wore street clothes, some ladies had arrived in 1860s-ish period dress, their dedication eclipsing both the melting late-afternoon heat and the outfits’ flagrant anachronisms—clip-on chignons, hemlines revealing reputation-shattering amounts of ankle, synthetic fabrics not invented in Mitchell’s lifetime.

More here.

From Nature:

If you are a small animal, it is useful to know whether there is anything around that might want to eat you. Stephen Liberles from Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues have analysed urine samples from a variety of zoo inhabitants, including lions and bears, and discovered how rodents can use smell to do just that. In a research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the team identifies a chemical found in high concentrations in the urine of carnivores that makes mice and rats run for cover¹. Chemicals have already been identified that allow prey to recognize a known predator. But this is the first example of a generic clue that allows an animal to detect any potential predator, irrespective of whether the two species have ever come into contact.

The researchers started by analysing an engimatic group of olfactory receptors discovered in 2001 called trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs)². They are found in most vertebrates, in varying numbers. Mice, for example, have 15, rats 17 and humans have just 6. Very little is known about what chemicals bind to them. Liberles and his colleagues found that one member of the receptor family, TAAR4, is strongly activated by bobcat urine, which is sold online and used by gardeners to keep rodents and rabbits away. They managed to extract the molecule responsible for activating the receptor, called 2-phenylethylamine. They then wondered whether the molecule was specific to the bobcat. But the urine from other animals cannot always be bought as easily. “Also, commercial products may be contaminated, whereas we wanted to be sure we were studying only natural substances,” says David Ferrero, a graduate student in Liberles's lab and first author of the study. So the researchers collected urine samples from a range of sources, including zoos in New England and South Dakota. Their collection covered 38 species from predators such as lions, snow leopards and servals to herbivores including cows, giraffes and zebra. They also tested humans, cats and various rodents. The operation was not trivial. A giraffe had to be trained to urinate in a cup, and Ferrero had a nose-to-nose encounter with an uncooperative jaguar when the animal jumped against the bars as he approached its cage.

More here.

Read more »

Abbas Milani in The National Interest:

Ahmadinejad and his oligarch cronies have been having a rough couple of months. The ayatollah is out for blood, and those in “elected” office are under attack. In fact, the dominant narrative taking over the Islamic Republic has lately sounded a great deal more like the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez than the realpolitik of Hans Morgenthau. It has been two months of bizarre allegations of voodoo and venal sins taking place in the offices and homes of the president’s closest aides and confidants—not to mention the far more run-of-the-mill charges of their financial corruption and sweetheart deals in places like Belarus. It has been a time of repeated open threats of the president’s impeachment, the same president who was not too long ago the darling of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, close as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to the supreme leader’s own ideas and ideals. It has been a time when more than a hundred members of Iran’s parliament, the Majlis, have requested an investigation into the last presidential election and the allegation that 9 million votes were purchased through cash payments from government coffers. Amazing how the tables can turn. Indeed, just like the police chief in Casablanca, these conservative (ayatollah-backing) members of the Majlis are “shocked, shocked” that electoral cheating is going on in Iran. Lest we forget, Mir Hussein Moussavi (the “losing candidate” in that same presidential election), his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, Mehdi Karroubi (the other “losing” candidate) and his wife, Fatemeh, have been under house arrest for months—for making the same accusations of fraud. Thousands of Iranians have been imprisoned, and about a hundred of the regime’s past ministers, deputy ministers and directors were put on Stalinist-era-like show trials to confess to the crime of alleging a bought-and-paid-for vote. Hundreds of young women and men were tortured, dozens raped and thousands forced into exile for questioning the June 2009 presidential-election results. It was of course all, according to Khamenei, a sinister U.S. plot to create a “velvet revolution” using Gene Sharp’s model and George Soros’s money.

More here.

From The Talks, a new online magazine of interviews:

Mr. Jagger, what kept you from completely going off the deep end?

I mean we all did excessive things and I had a lot of unstable moments as I’m sure everyone does in their life. Maybe it helped me that I had a very centered upbringing.

So your parents basically.

Yeah, I think so. When you are young and you have a sort of close family life and stuff, it helps you to be centered for later. If you don’t have a centered upbringing, I think it is much more difficult.

You still had a very destructive lifestyle back then.

Excess was the order of the day. But that was just a period. You know you get excessive people nowadays as well. Today people are excessive consuming things, like consumer goods.

But you were even chased by the police for your drug abuse. How do you remember those days?

At the time it wasn’t very funny. It wasn’t very good because it completely took over our lives creatively and we couldn’t do this and couldn’t do that. You had to spend all your time trying to deal with all the police and you didn’t have time to do anything else.

More here.

James Yeh in The Faster Times:

Is it possible, in this age of earbuds and smart phones, to spread “good vibes” among strangers on the street through something as simple as conversation? The poet Jon Cotner thinks so. That’s why Cotner—who, along with Andy Fitch, co-authored Ten Walks/Two Talks—created Spontaneous Society, a walking tour designed to create “gentle interventions” aimed at “replacing urban anonymity with something bordering on affection—even if it’s fleeting.”

The premise is simple: to each participant, Cotner gives two very simple, very basic lines to recite to passersby. The lines (which Cotner lovingly describes as “oceanic”) are, generally and in essence, positive observations about something that passerby is currently doing as a means of initiating a brief, but positive, social exchange. For example, “That looks like a good spot for a picnic,” said when passing someone eating on a bench, a blanket, or doorstep; or “It’s a good day to have the feet out,” said when someone approaches with a carriage in which at least one inhabitant is shoeless.

More here.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Patricia S. Churchland, the philosopher and neuroscientist, is sitting at a cafe on the Upper West Side, explaining the vacuousness, as she sees it, of a vast swath of contemporary moral philosophy. “I have long been interested in the origins of values,” she says, the day after lecturing on that topic at the nearby American Museum of Natural History. “But I would read contemporary ethicists and just feel very unsatisfied. It was like I couldn't see how to tether any of it to the hard and fast. I couldn't see how it had anything to do with evolutionary biology, which it has to do, and I couldn't see how to attach it to the brain.” For people familiar with Churchland's work over the past four decades, her desire to bring the brain into the discussion will come as no surprise: She has long made the case that philosophers must take account of neuroscience in their investigations.

While Churchland's intellectual opponents over the years have suggested that you can understand the “software” of thinking, independently of the “hardware”—the brain structure and neuronal firings—that produced it, she has responded that this metaphor doesn't work with the brain: Hardware and software are intertwined to such an extent that all philosophy must be “neurophilosophy.” There's no other way. Churchland, professor emerita of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego, has been best known for her work on the nature of consciousness. But now, with a new book, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton University Press), she is taking her perspective into fresh terrain: ethics. And the story she tells about morality is, as you'd expect, heavily biological, emphasizing the role of the peptide oxytocin, as well as related neurochemicals.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set:

As a boy, D.J. was a promising student. He had received a scholarship to study English at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth where he graduated with first-class honors. Like many promising students of English, D.J. had dreams of being a poet. Instead, he became a grammar school teacher. He watched in anger and shame as colleagues of clearly inferior worth gained appointments to higher university positions while he remained where he was. D.J. was often ill, and wondered why he had no visitors. He cultivated a devastating schoolmaster’s sarcasm that shielded his fragile pride. Students of Schoolmaster Thomas remember an unforgiving tyrant who cursed stupid boys and dirty boys. But he made Shakespeare come alive and became known for getting his boys into Oxford and Cambridge. D.J.’s great passion for English literature was available for any boy willing to receive it. To his son Dylan, however, the clever, disappointed father gave his entire dream of a poet’s life.

From childhood, Dylan Thomas accepted the poet’s life as his fate and set out to prove that his father’s rage, along with his love of language, would live on. He cultivated a big sonorous voice and a big sonorous presence in which rage and poetry thrived. Dylan was doughy, curly-headed, soft, and at the same time asthmatic, wild, and prone to nightmares and depression. Dylan would lie awake at night thinking of “God and Death and Triangles,” and would develop an alcoholism as famous as his poetry. Just as D.J.’s eccentric mannerisms and dramatic storytelling made people uncomfortable, the same mannerisms, performed by the son, became a trademark. D.J.’s hypochondria became Dylan’s sensitivity. Just as D.J. used rage to hide from regret, Dylan used it to further his poet’s identity. The father and son would feed off each other, each raging himself into a state that was alternately more wronged and more poetic than the other. It was the rage that allowed them to be larger than life, larger than themselves. The rules of this father/son project were catalogued in Dylan’s most famous poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The poem was written during D.J.’s declining years, after the father had allowed himself to become quiet and frail and resigned.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

The scientific tale of the rough-skinned newt begins five decades ago, with a story about three dead hunters in Oregon. Reportedly, the bodies of the hunters were discovered around a camp fire. They showed no signs of injury, and nothing had been stolen. The only strange thing about the scene was the coffee pot. Curled up inside was a newt.

In the 1960s, a biologist named Butch Brodie got curious about the story. The newt in the coffee pot–known as the rough-skinned newt–has a dull brown back, but when it is disturbed, it bends its head backward like a contortionist to reveal an orange belly as bright as candy corn. Bright colors are common among poisonous animals. It’s a signal that says, in effect, “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave me alone.” Brodie wondered if the newts were toxic, too.

Toxic, it turns out, doesn’t do the newts justice. They are little death machines. The newts produce a chemical in their skin called tetrodotoxin, or TTX for short, that’s made by other poisonous animals like pufferfish. Locking onto sodium channels on the surface of neurons, TTX blocks signals in the nervous system, leading to a quick death. In fact, TTX is 10,000 times deadlier than cyanide. While we may never know for sure what killed those three Oregon hunters, we do know that a single rough-skinned newt could have easily produced enough TTX to kill them, and have plenty of poison left over to kill dozens more.

More here.

C. Christine Fair in the Huffington Post:

While the Pakistani press is rife with caricatures of U.S. policy, distorted versions of history, and outright falsehoods, American journalists are capable of equal chicanery. Mr. Christopher Hitchens' latest offering in Vanity Fair, “From Abbottabad to Worse,” is an appalling example of American commentary that undermines the efforts of saner voices in this critical debate.

His piece commences with a dramatic reference to rape — not as a crime but as a punishment — and honor killing. The former refers to the rare, horrific instances where women and girls are subject to sexual assault by, in the words of the author, “tribal and religious kangaroo courts.” The latter refers to killing women (and sometimes men) in the name of honor. In this paragraph a complex polity of 180 million — most of whom condemn both practices — are essentialized as a barbarous people who embrace the notion that “moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.” This literary amuse bouche foretells the absurdities, fallacies and dubious assertions in the rest of his troubling account of Pakistan's malaise.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

Family meal planning stereotypically falls on the shoulders of women; however an increasing number of men are working in the kitchen. In 1965, dad helmed the stove only about 5 percent of the time. By 2005, at least according to statistics presented in the book Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, that figure had grown substantially: the paternal unit was responsible for a third of a family’s time spent cooking. (Some sources point to the increasing number of women in the out-of-home workforce, others see that having cooking know-how is a means of making a man more attractive to a potential romantic interest.) And with websites such as Man Tested Recipes and television programming like “Top Chef” that put a highly competitive spin on cooking, our 21st century culture is encouraging men to dispense with old gender roles and crack out the pots and pans. If the father figure in your life is already master of the kitchen—or if you’re trying to encourage one to expand his cooking abilities beyond the occasional bit of grilling—here are a few Father’s Day book ideas that we hope will get his creative gears turning.

Man With a Pan: New Yorker editor John Donahoe offers this collection of essays—and yes, a few recipes—in which notable personalities from author Stephen King to chef Mario Batali open up about their foibles and triumphs in the kitchen. If nothing else, it reinforces the idea that learning how to make meals for loved ones is a wonderful way to provide for one’s family. Donahoe caught the cooking bug after he and his wife had their first child and he realized that, if he was going to have satisfying dining experiences, he was better off making meals at home than dining out. “Night after night,” Donohue says in his introduction, “when I whipped up something delicious that pleased Sarah and fed Aurora and Isis, I felt like I was doing something so right that I couldn’t possibly go wrong.” For those of you looking to go beyond the book, Donahoe tracks his culinary escapades by way of his blog.

More here.

Robin McKie in The Observer:

At the start of each school term, Tim Radford – as so many other pupils have done over the decades – would scribble his name in his exercise book, add his address, and then for good measure put in his hometown, his country, his planet, the solar system, galaxy and finally the universe. It was “an obsessive little ritual”, says Radford, but it was an important one. “It might have been my first independent search for answers to questions posed consciously and unconsciously by everyone in every culture. Where did I come from and where am I going?”

Radford, one of the Guardian's most experienced writers, has now returned to the concept of the extended address to establish where he stands in the universe today and, through his story, help us understand our own positions in the cosmos. As he notes: “Place is a powerful part of identity.”

Hence we are taken on an autobiographical trail of Radford's life: the houses he lived in, the towns and cities he settled in, and the countries that were his homelands – New Zealand and Britain. We are given a geological history of Hastings, where Radford eventually settled, and provided with an outline of the creation of the British Isles – “a 500-million-year accident of geophysics, the story of how Scotland crossed an ancient, vanished ocean and attached itself to what would become England”.

Each chapter peels back a different layer of the complexities of Homo sapiens, creatures with close-knit private histories, but who also live in a frighteningly large universe, on a world created out of the rubble of the explosive big bang birth of the cosmos 13.7 billion years ago. The trick for Radford is to explain not just the immediate and personal but outline the cosmic and the significant in this grand picture. And to a considerable degree, he is successful. Radford is an adroit writer and, as a former literary editor as well as ex-science editor, he comes very well-prepared for the task.

More here.