Amy Sillman and Tom McGrath are very different kinds of New York artists—Amy a modern-day action painter, Tom a new breed of realist—who share an ontological approach to the problem of pictorial staging: What is this thing I am making, they ask, and how can it be said to “represent” anything other than itself? Tom uses creamy, wet paint applied with directness and brio to depict more or less real places; Amy’s paintings, though populated with figures and figurative gestures, use the canvas as a workshop in which eccentrically shaped blocks of color are cobbled together in a kind of improvisational architecture, like memories of houses that you never actually lived in. Amy comes to us by way of abstraction, and over the past decade has been completely refurbishing the formal elements of painting: color, line, shape, and texture. Tom, a younger, cerebral artist, has established himself as an innovator by painting something that had not previously been considered a subject for art—the world viewed through the windshield of a car.

more from David Salle at Paris Review here.

From Salon:

We've all heard about the bright white light at the end of the tunnel, but what's really going on in a “near-death experience”? That's what neurologist and medical doctor Kevin Nelson tries to uncover in his first book, “The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience.” Dr. Nelson is one of the world's leading researchers in the biology of near-death and other mystical experiences, and his fascinating book takes the reader from investigations of MRI studies of the brain to historical anecdotes and philosophical inquiry. Three decades of research led Dr. Nelson to a unique and unexpected conclusion about near-death experiences — rather than arising from parts of the brain that are unique to higher cognitive functions, they actually involve the oldest, most primitive parts of our brain, and might also relate to having dreams while still awake.

What happens near death, and what does it have to do with God?

More here.

Tao’s a bottomless well
ever used, never drawn down
Call it eternal no thing ness;
an infinite no thing filled with all;
a void of countless possibilities.
Tao is in our face
under our nose.
What made Tao is older than God.
What made it, who knows?
-Lao-Tzu in The Tao Te Ching

There is Nothing False in Thee

There is nothing false in thee.
In thy heart the youngest body
Has warmth and light.
In thee the quills of the sun
Find adornment.

What does not die
Is with thee.

Thou art clothed in robes of music.
Thy voice awakens wings.

And still more with thee
Are the flowers of earth made bright.

Upon the deeps the fiery sails
of heaven glide.

Thou art the radiance and the joy.
Thou heart shall only fail
When all else has fallen.

What does not perish
lives in thee.

by Kenneth Patchen
from Kenneth Patchen Selected Poems
Modern Library, 1937-1957

From Scientific American:

Scientists have come a step closer to gaining complete control over a mind, even if that mind belongs to a creature the size of a grain of sand. A team at Harvard University has built a computerized system to manipulate worms—making them start and stop, giving them the sensation of being touched, and even prompting them to lay eggs, as seen in the video above—by stimulating their neurons individually with laser light, all while the worms swim freely in a petri dish. The technology may help neuroscientists for the first time gain a complete understanding of the workings of an animal's nervous system.

More here.

Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books:

In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? In the film, the district attorney, Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante who is corrupted and himself commits murders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his friend police commissioner Gordon realise that the city’s morale would suffer if Dent’s murders were made public, so plot to preserve his image by holding Batman responsible for the killings. The film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder the only figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain. He makes it clear that his attacks on Gotham City will stop when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and protect Batman, Dent tells the press that he is Batman – another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon fakes his own death – yet another lie.

The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask, convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? A terrorist? The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of those classic westerns Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show that, in order to civilise the Wild West, the lie has to be elevated into truth: civilisation, in other words, must be grounded on a lie. The film has been extraordinarily popular. The question is why, at this precise moment, is there this renewed need for a lie to maintain the social system?

More here.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

I want to create a new Supreme Court of Assholedom. Structured much like the actual U.S. Supreme Court, it will employ nine justices, whose job it will be to regularly preside over important cases of national social consequence — to wit, to decide a) whether or not a certain person is an asshole, and b) if he or she is, how much of an asshole.

The court will consider cases of all types. They will have titles ranging from things like United States v. Sarah Palin after the Tucson Shooting, to Taibbi v. Fat Guy in the Next Seat Who Monopolized the Whole Armrest on a Flight to Denver, to Humanity v. Anyone Who Has Ever Generated and/or Sent a Spam Message.

The court will focus particularly on establishing case law in those areas where existing laws don't apply. For instance, it's not against the law to be the highly-compensated attorney representing the Gigantic International Megabank that recently foreclosed on an old lady in suburban New Jersey because she entered one number incorrectly on one check for one monthly mortgage payment (there actually is such a case). That's not illegal, but if that's how you make your living — if you paid for your S-Class Mercedes helping Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein throw old ladies out of their houses — I'm pretty sure you're an asshole.

But how much of an asshole? That's an interesting question, and another one of the court's mandates. My idea is to create a points scale of 1 to 10,000, with one point meaning less of, to not at all of, an asshole and ten thousand points of course being a total asshole. Here we have a graph showing points A (100 points), B (5,000 points), and C (10,000 points) that will serve as the basic guideline for the court's deliberations…

More here.

A speech delivered by Roberto Bolaño in 2000 in Vienna. From The Nation:

I've been invited to talk about exile. The invitation I received was in English, and I don't speak English. There was a time when I did or thought I did, or at least there was a time, in my adolescence, when I thought I could read English almost as well, or as poorly, as Spanish. Sadly, that time has passed. I can't read English. By what I could gather from the letter, I think I was supposed to talk about exile. Literature and exile. But it's very possible that I'm completely mistaken, which, thinking about it, would actually be an advantage, since I don't believe in exile, especially not when the word sits next to the word “literature.”

It's a pleasure for me, I should say right away, to be with you here in the celebrated city of Vienna. For me Vienna is strongly associated with literature and with the lives of some people very near to me who understood exile in the way I sometimes understand it myself, which is to say, as life or as an attitude toward life. In 1978, or maybe 1979, the Mexican poet Mario Santiago spent a few days here on his way back to Israel. As he told it, one day the police arrested him and then he was expelled. In the deportation order, he was instructed not to return to Austria before 1984, a date that struck Mario as significant and funny and that today strikes me the same way.

More here.

Samuel Abrahám: Multiculturalism was originally an affirmative term indicating the diversity of the “melting pot”. Today, however, it has come to be associated with ethnic ghettoes. Rather than celebrating difference and creating respect for pluralism, multiculturalism has brought new conflicts. Kenan Malik, what went wrong?

Kenan Malik: It seems to me that part of the problem is confusion over what we mean by multiculturalism. It can mean one of two things. First: diversity as lived experience. Second: multiculturalism as a political process. To talk of diversity as lived experience is to talk of the experience of living in a society that, through mass immigration, has become more open, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan. In that sense, the mass immigration of the past 50 years has been of great benefit, it seems to me. But multiculturalism as a political process has come to mean something very different, namely the process of managing that diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes. It's a process through which cultural differences are institutionalized, publicly affirmed, recognized and institutionalized; through which political policy is predicated on the ethnic box to which one belongs. That seems to me deeply problematic.

more from Kenan Malik and Fero Sebej at Eurozine here.

Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs — from marijuana to heroin — but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation’s criminal justice system and improving the people’s overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime. As the sweeping reforms went into effect nine years ago, some in Portugal prepared themselves for the worst. They worried that the country would become a junkie nirvana, that many neighborhoods would soon resemble Casal Ventoso, and that tourists would come to Portugal for one reason only: to get high. “We promise sun, beaches, and any drug you like,” complained one fearful politician at the time. But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved.

more from Keith O’Brien at the Boston Globe here.

From Nature:

Groups of friends show patterns of genetic similarity, according to a study published today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹. The findings are based on patterns of variation in two out of six genes sampled among friends and strangers. But the claim is a hard sell for some geneticists, who say that the researchers have not analysed enough genes to rule out alternative explanations. The team, led by James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California, San Diego, looked at the available data on six genes from roughly 5,000 individuals enrolled in unrelated studies, and recorded the variation at one specific point, or single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), in each gene, and compared this between friends and non-friends.

After controlling for genetic likeness due to sex, age, race or common ancestry, friends still tended to have the same SNP at one position in a gene encoding the dopamine D2 receptor, DRD2. Friends also showed more variation at one position in a cytochrome gene, CYP2A6, than non-friends. An 'opposites attract' phenomenon may account for the variation in CYP2A6 among friends, say the authors. This result indicates that genetic patterns aren't always the result of friends who connect through similar activities, such as running marathons or playing musical instruments.

More here.

Mark Stevenson in the New Statesman:

Nobody would blame you for being pessimistic about the future. After all, if you listen to the media (and, it seems, anybody over 25) we're all going to hell in the proverbial handcart, as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – economic meltdown, climate change, terrorism and, who else, Simon Cowell – bear down on us.

But I have news. Some people are rather fed up of this narrative and are quietly getting on with solving the grand challenges our planet faces, using both new technologies and forgotten wisdom. Their mantra? “Cheer up, it might just happen.” I've spent the past 18 months researching a book about these people.

One of them is Tony Lovell, an accountant from Australia, where farming has become synonymous with drought. A decade of low rainfall, heatwaves and wildfires has scorched much of the land. Australians call it “the Big Dry” and it means that when the rains come – as they are doing now on the eastern seaboard – water runs over the parched surface, resulting in devastating floods. Many farms survive on “drought assistance” handed out by the government. Rural suicide is depressingly common.

Lovell thinks he has the answer. At a climate-change conference in Manchester, I find him talking about a new method of farming. “This is a typical ranch in Mexico,” he explains, showing an image of a terracotta dust bowl with bare, compacted soil. Then he puts up a second image of lush green vegetation. “This is the ranch next door. Same soil, same rainfall. These pictures were taken on the same day.”

More here.

Scott Adams in his blog:

Being married is a lot like being deaf. If you hear the same person talking day-after-day, you literally lose the ability to hear what that person is saying. I will give you two examples from my own life. Both are true. This one happened last week:

Shelly: Do you want some carrot cake?

Me: Hurricane? What hurricane?

In that particular case, we eventually got to the bottom of it, but only because Shelly needed an answer. I estimate that half of the time she says lamp, I hear doorknob, and it doesn't really matter so we go on with our lives. I might spend a few seconds confused about the larger point, but I shake it off.

Within a day of the carrot cake incident, I made an offhand comment to Shelly to the effect that she might enjoy a certain sport. That conversation went like this:

Me: That's your new game, honey.

Shelly: What did you call me?

Me: (slower and louder) I SAID, “THAT'S YOUR NEW GAME, HONEY.”

Shelly: Oh. I thought you called me Jimmy Bean

Me: Why would I call you Jimmy Dean

Shelly: Not Dean, Bean. Jimmy Bean.

Me: Why would I call you Jimmy Bean?

Shelly: That's what I wondered too.

Me: No, I said, “That's your new game, honey.”

Shelly: What's my new game?

Me: I forget.

As I'm sure you've learned, it's impossible to speak to a spouse if he or she is near running water, or using power equipment, or concentrating on something else, or eating something crunchy, or wondering if the squeak in the distance is the cat dying, or there is a child within a hundred yards. Amazingly, that covers 90% of every conversation you might attempt at home.

Recently I discovered that spouses, like computers, must be booted up before they can hear what you say.

More here.

An endangered Greek dialect which is spoken in north-eastern Turkey has been identified by researchers as a “linguistic goldmine” because of its startling closeness to the ancient language, as Cambridge researcher Dr Ioanna Sitaridou explains.

Brian Greene in the New York Times:

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand. The light from more distant objects, captured by powerful telescopes, has been traveling toward us far longer than that, sometimes for billions of years. When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing — literally — ancient times.

During the past decade, as observations of such ancient starlight have provided deep insight into the universe’s past, they have also, surprisingly, provided deep insight into the nature of the future. And the future that the data suggest is particularly disquieting — because of something called dark energy.

This story of discovery begins a century ago with Albert Einstein, who realized that space is not an immutable stage on which events play out, as Isaac Newton had envisioned. Instead, through his general theory of relativity, Einstein found that space, and time too, can bend, twist and warp, responding much as a trampoline does to a jumping child. In fact, so malleable is space that, according to the math, the size of the universe necessarily changes over time: the fabric of space must expand or contract — it can’t stay put.

More here.

Richard Freidman in The New York Times:

It is practically an article of faith among many therapists that self-understanding is a prerequisite for a happy life. Insight, the thinking goes, will free you from your psychological hang-ups and promote well-being. Perhaps, but recent experience makes me wonder whether insight is all it’s cracked up to be. Not long ago, I saw a young man in his early 30s who was sad and anxious after being dumped by his girlfriend for the second time in three years. It was clear that his symptoms were a reaction to the loss of a relationship and that he was not clinically depressed.

“I’ve been over this many times in therapy,” he said. He had trouble tolerating any separation from his girlfriends. Whether they were gone for a weekend or he was traveling for work, the result was always the same: a painful state of dysphoria and anxiety. He could even trace this feeling back to a separation from his mother, who had been hospitalized for several months for cancer treatment when he was 4. In short, he had gained plenty of insight in therapy into the nature and origin of his anxiety, but he felt no better. What therapy had given this young man was a coherent narrative of his life; it had demystified his feelings, but had done little to change them.

Was this because his self-knowledge was flawed or incomplete? Or is insight itself, no matter how deep, of limited value?

More here.

Vivian Maier. Steps.

Recently discovered NYC and Chicago street photographer of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

More here, here and interview with the accidental discoverer here.

Thanks to Anjuli Raza Kolb for the pointer.

Pankaj Mishra in the New York Times Book Review:

I don’t think of myself as a literary critic. I write about novels and short stories. But I am reluctant to describe what I do as “literary criticism,” as I like to move quickly beyond the literariness of a text — whether narrative techniques or quality of prose — and its aesthetic pleasures, to engage with the author’s worldview, implied or otherwise, and his or her location in history (of nation-states and empires, as well as of literary forms).

This kind of reading came naturally to me in the new, very poor and relatively inchoate Asian society in which I grew up. When I first began to read literary fiction I could assume neither a clear backdrop of political and social stability, nor a confident knowledge of the world and assumptions of national power. Everything had to be figured out, and literature was the primary means of clarifying a bewilderingly large universe of meanings and contexts.

Much of my self-education was assisted by American writers like Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, F. W. Dupee and Irving Howe. Some of these were literary critics, but they were, above all, public intellectuals (a species whose irrelevance and powerlessness Alfred Kazin seems to be mourning — rather more than the demise of a critical genre — when he writes, “We are rushing into our future so fast that no one can say who is making it, or what is being made; all we know is that we are not making it, and there is no one, no matter what his age is, who does not in his heart feel that events have been taken out of his hands”).

Coming of age during and after the progressive era, when intellectual argument and political activism promised to reshape America’s future, these critics took it for granted that literature was among the main signs of the times, and subject to the inquiring gaze of history and politics.

In this presumption, they were supported not so much by the Marxian ideologues of the 1930s as by the great realist novelists, from Stendhal to Tolstoy and Mann, who could not have written their most mature works without grappling with the political and moral challenges of their day.

More here.

Jesse Bering in Slate:

Thornhill and Palmer, Malamuth, and the many other investigators studying rape through an evolutionary lens, take great pains to point out that “adaptive” does not mean “justifiable,” but rather only mechanistically viable. Yet dilettante followers may still be inclined to detect a misogyny in these investigations that simply is not there. As University of Michigan psychologist William McKibbin and his colleagues write in a 2008 piece for the Review of General Psychology, “No sensible person would argue that a scientist researching the causes of cancer is thereby justifying or promoting cancer. Yet some people argue that investigating rape from an evolutionary perspective justifies or legitimizes rape.”

The unfortunate demonization of this brand of inquiry is rooted in the fallacy of biological determinism (according to which men are programmed by their genes to rape and have no free will to do otherwise) and the naturalistic fallacy (that because rape is natural it must be acceptable). These are resoundingly false assumptions that reveal a profound ignorance of evolutionary biology. Yet the purpose of the remaining article is not to belabor that tired ideological dispute, but to look at things from the female genetic point of view. We've heard the argument that men may have evolved to sexually assault women. Have women evolved to protect themselves from men?

More here.