From The New York Times:

The puzzles look easy, and mostly they are. Given three words — “trip,” “house” and “goal,” for example — find a fourth that will complete a compound word with each. A minute or so of mental trolling (housekeeper, goalkeeper, trip?) is all it usually takes. But who wants to troll? Let lightning strike. Let the clues suddenly coalesce in the brain — “field!” — as they do so often for young children solving a riddle. As they must have done, for that matter, in the minds of those early humans who outfoxed nature well before the advent of deduction, abstraction or SAT prep courses. Puzzle-solving is such an ancient, universal practice, scholars say, precisely because it depends on creative insight, on the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires. And now, modern neuroscientists are beginning to tap its source.

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine. “What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study with Karuna Subramaniam, a graduate student, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections” to solve puzzles. This and other recent research suggest that the appeal of puzzles goes far deeper than the dopamine-reward rush of finding a solution. The very idea of doing a crossword or a Sudoku puzzle typically shifts the brain into an open, playful state that is itself a pleasing escape, captivating to people as different as Bill Clinton, a puzzle addict, and the famous amnesiac Henry Molaison, or H.M., whose damaged brain craved crosswords.

More here.

From Scientific American:

If you find relationships challenging to cultivate and maintain, then you are in good company. In his new book, evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar argues that our ability to manage such complex social connections—love lives, work colleagues, childhood buddies and friendly acquaintances—is what drove humans to develop such large brains in the first place. Dunbar finds support for this theory, dubbed the social intelligence hypothesis, by observing birds. He recently conducted studies in several species of birds and found a clear link between brain size and relationship type. Birds that mate for life have much larger brains relative to body size, whereas birds that live in promiscuous flocks have much smaller brains. Dunbar speculates that birds with smaller brains have many short-lived partners because they lack the mental prowess to form and maintain more complex emotional bonds. Dunbar finds that apes and monkeys form lasting bonds and have a particularly big neocortex—a region of the brain that regulates emotions, awareness of others and language abilities. Humans form some of the most intricate and complex relationships of all. And our brains are high maintenance, consuming a whopping 20 percent of our energy.

Judging from human brain size and complexity, Dunbar calculates that a person’s social group should incorporate about 150 people—this is the maximum number of relationships our brain can keep track of at one time. This figure, now graced with the name “Dunbar’s number” takes different types of relationships into account. On one end of the spectrum, we have a core group of about five people we talk to once a week. On the other end, we have a group of around 100 acquaintances to whom we speak about once a year.

More here.

Madonna

I hailed me a woman from the street,
Shameless, but, oh, so fair!
I bade her sit in the model’s seat
And I painted her sitting there.

I hid all trace of her heart unclean;
I painted a babe at her breast;
I painted her as she might have been
If the Worst had been the Best.

She laughed at my picture and went away.
Then came, with a knowing nod,
A connoisseur, and I heard him say;
“’Tis Mary, the Mother of God.”

So I painted a halo round her hair,
And I sold her and took my fee,
And she hangs in the church of Saint Hillaire,
Where you and all may see.

by Robert Service

Pamela S. Karlan in Boston Review:

A stalled economic recovery. The airwaves filled with demagoguery about important constitutional issues. A president who chides the Supreme Court for striking down a major piece of federal reform legislation. And, in response to charges of a pro-corporate tilt on a Court with a narrow conservative majority, Justice Roberts defends the Court’s intervention with the bland claim that judges do nothing more than “lay the article of the Constitution which is invoked beside the statute which is challenged” in order “to decide whether the latter squares with the former.”

2010? 1936. That mechanistic image of the judicial process was the handiwork of Justice Owen Roberts, responding to critics who complained that the Court was overriding New Deal economic legislation on the basis of its own political preferences. Current Chief Justice John Roberts would deflect such charges of “judicial activism” —the idea that judges improperly strike down democratically enacted laws according to their own moral and political convictions—by appealing to the metaphor of an umpire calling balls and strikes.

Indeed, the phrase “judicial activist” (or “activist judge”) is so frequently used that it has come to exemplify what George Orwell described in the 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” as a term with “no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” Consider how it has been employed in recent judicial-confirmation hearings. Conservative senators who worried that nominee Sonia Sotomayor would be a judicial activist pointed to her appeals court decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, in which she had refused to override employment policies adopted by the democratically elected government of New Haven. A year later the National Rifle Association announced that it would oppose Elena Kagan’s nomination because she might not be activist enough—her record suggested to them that she would uphold laws restricting gun possession. Meanwhile, liberal senators spent the hearings excoriating the activism of the conservatives on the Court, who had voted in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to strike down certain federal restrictions on corporate involvement in the election process.

Alexander Nazaryan in the New York Daily News:

“Patty went even more overboard with Total Jockworld than most, because she could! Because she’d finally escaped from Westchester!”

The above was written by America’s finest author, in his most acclaimed novel, which has been called “the book of the century.”

And they wonder why Americans aren’t reading.

That author is Jonathan Franzen, and he appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” on Monday, nine years after she picked “The Corrections” for her Book Club. Back then, Franzen responded peevishly, claiming the mantle of “the high-art literary tradition” and complaining, “I see this as my book, my creation, and I didn’t want that logo of corporate ownership on it.”

Because redemption is a favorite theme of Oprah’s, it made perfect sense for her to give Franzen a second chance. And needing book sales, he took it.

He sat awkwardly with his hands on his knees, pretending to smile while Oprah leaned back, her legs casually crossed. She hugged him, too, though I think this was less a show of genuine goodwill than a reminder that while many thousands may read Franzen, many millions watch Oprah.

In a nod to Oprah, Franzen said he had “more respect for television” since the “Corrections” fiasco and claimed – with a straight face – that he was a “Midwestern egalitarian.” She called him “one of the best writers in the world” – a hyperbolic statement, absent of value, the kind of thing Americans have become too good at.

It’s a shame that Oprah let Franzen off so easy, without touching upon the fatal flaws in his work. Four years ago, she demolished James Frey because she discovered, after anointing his “A Million Little Pieces” to her club, that it was not a memoir, but a work of fiction passed off as truth.

Hello,

Sorry for the delay in the opening of the voting round. I have been indisposed. Thanks to Robin for putting together the list of nominees and setting up the polling software this time.

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

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

Good luck to all! The voting round closes on Monday, December 13, 2010, 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 December 14, 2010. Winners of the contest, as decided by Lewis Lapham, will be announced on December 21, 2010.

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!

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 Quarks Daily, The Trappers and the Trapped
2. 3 Quarks Daily, Who Will Be A Champion Of The Left We Can Believe In? As Bush-lite, Obama Ain’t It
3. 3 Quarks Daily, The Revolution Will Not Be PowerPointed
4. 3 Quarks Daily, War and the American Republic
5. 3 Quarks Daily, A Jury of One
6. A Collection of Selves, Specialness
7. Accidental Blogger, What was malt liquor?
8. Alter Politics, Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine Undermines Its ‘Collateral Damage’ Claims In Gaza
9. Black Agenda Reporter, The Unraveling of the Empire of Finance Capital
10. BTC News, We are shocked—shocked!—about Obama and Afghanistan, plus: Ghandi!
11. Democracy in America, The rise (and fall?) of religious partisanship
12. Ellen Tordesillas, Never forgetting is weapon against tyranny
13. Farming Pathogens, The Alan Greenspan Strain
14. Get Buckets, A Defense of Cecil Newton
15. Huffington Post, The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush’s Memoir
16. Huffington Post, Haiti’s Political and Economic Earthquake “Made in the USA”
17. Ideas in Motion, Covering Mirrors
18. Inebriated Discourse, What Newt Gingrich Really Meant By “Kenyan, Anti-Colonial Behavior”
19. Kamil Pasha, Jerusalem Redux
20. Like a Rolling Stone, On Aquino’s insistence of maintaining paramilitary groups
21. Muhammad Cohen, Twenty reasons Barack Obama stinks
22. Naked Capitalism, End This Fed
23. Not Rocket Science, Fake CVs reveal discrimination against Muslims in French job market
24. NPR Check, Asymmetric Accomplices to Murder
25. Once Upon a Time…, On Wikileaks (VII): Take Up the Wikileaks Challenge with Pride and Honor
26. Once Upon a Time…, On Wikileaks (V): Losing Control
27. Paul Street’s Blog, A Comeback for Chattel Slavery? Remarkable Revelations from a Top Obama Aide
28. PH2.1, Getting to Agreement
29. Politeia, The Poor Rich
30. Sexy Beast, Spitzer, Stop Hiding From Your Call Girl Past
31. Stephen Walt, Five big questions
32. Stephen Walt, Why America is going to regret the Cordoba House controversy
33. Stoner, Politics and National Security
34. The Heart of the Matter, It’s Just a Leak
35. The Philosopher’s Beard, Politics: Can’t Someone Else Do It?
36. The South Asian Idea Weblog, 9/11: Socrates, Machiavelli, Christ and Gandhi
37. Thought Streaming, South of the Border
38. Triple Canopy, She Goes Covered
39. True/Slant, Some Iran Questions Without Answers
40. Unqualified Reservations, Democracy, cis and trans; Maine’s law
41. Westminister Goss, Andrew Maybee Gets Elected
42. Wisdom of the West, Politics
43. WSJ Health Blog, Health Blog Q&A: ‘White Coat, Black Hat’ Author Carl Elliott
44. Zunguzungu, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”

Jeroen Diepenmaat. pour des dents d'un blanc éclatant et saines (2005)

More here and here.

This post is especially dedicated to Abbas.

Niamh Hardiman on the Irish financial crisis, over at Crooked Timber:

Ireland’s recent €85bn bail-out package negotiated with the IMF and the EU is discussed in terms that verge on the apocalyptic. The rescue was supposed to serve as a break against the wildfire of market bondholder panic. And yet the upward trend in Portuguese bond rates has scarcely been slowed. Beyond Portugal is the much larger Spanish economy. Portugal, like Greece and Ireland, could probably just about be rescued within the terms of the current emergency scheme. It is becoming increasingly possible that the bond markets may make it too difficult for the Spanish government to refinance its loans and to raise new money on government bonds. If this were to happen, the European Financial Stability Fund would come under extreme pressure. And worse, if it is not possible to restore confidence in the stability of the Euro, there seems little reason why other countries may not also be in trouble. Spain is now where the line in the sand must be drawn. But we have heard this before. If Spain is vulnerable, why not Italy; and if Italy, why not Belgium, perhaps even France. Little wonder that the imagery of contagion, of financial plague, is brought into play.

The suddenness of the Irish deal has taken public opinion by surprise, causing shock that we have been plunged into this regime of austerity, and a smouldering anger about the terms on which the deal has been done. The terms of the bail-out will transfer all the hardships onto the taxpayers and citizens: reactions include the views that we have been held to ransom, we cannot afford this rescue package, it is a bad deal for Ireland.

Ireland’s fiscal crisis is largely caused by the collapse of the house price bubble and over-reliance on revenues from construction-related activities. This is bad enough, but by itself it would be difficult but manageable. The millstone around the neck of the Irish people is the vast scale of the crisis in the banking sector. Ireland’s banking crisis is not primarily about complicated and risky financial products: it is a common-or-garden result of reckless lending for property development and an inadequate regulatory regime.

Our friend Darcy James Argue and his band Secret Society–they played the second 3 Quarks Daily ball–have been nominated for a Grammy. Congratulations to Darcy and the rest of the band. Over at Darcy's blog are recordings from a recent show.

David Cesarani on Lanzmann's Shoah 25 years later, in The New Statesman:

There had never been anything like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah when it was released in 1985. There were earlier documentaries about the Holocaust: Alain Resnais's Night and Fog (1955); the “Genocide” episode of the World at War series, which was broadcast on ITV without any commercial breaks in 1974; Kitty: Return to Auschwitz and Auschwitz and the Allies, transmitted in 1979 on ITV and in 1982 on the BBC, respectively. But they hardly prepared you for Lanzmann's nine-hour epic.

Lanzmann eschewed the use of archive foot­age. He refused to include photographs. There is not a single image of a corpse in the entire film. Instead, there are interminable landscape shots of woods, forest clearings and empty fields. And trains: trains crossing the screen, filling the frame, close up, at middle distance or silhouetted again the horizon. The constant motion of camera or of locomotive drives the film along.

Then there was the director himself: a burly figure, often wrapped in a coat against the Polish winter, interviewing his witnesses. Lanzmann was insistent, ironic and sometimes faintly contemptuous. He showed himself lying to Franz Suchomel, a former SS guard at Treblinka, who was being captured by a hidden camera, brazenly flouting the ethics of documentary film-making.

Although Shoah has been hugely influential, it was so unconventional that it remains almost sui generis. Lanzmann declined to incorporate stock footage because it was created either by the Nazis or after the camps were liberated. To him, the monochrome newsreels short-circuited our engagement with the past by offering reassuringly familiar imagery. Shoah offers no such comforts.

Deborah Solomon interviews Das Racists, in the NYT Magazine:

Your indie-rap group, Das Racist, is known for songs that wittily riff on Taco Bell, Googleand the general limitations of American consumerism. Rap is a black art form that originated in the Bronx, so why, as two Wesleyan graduates who met in college, would you think you could rap?

Himanshu Suri (top): Would you prefer your rappers to be uneducated? Victor Vazquez: And would we even be on the page of this publication if we had not gone to Wesleyan?

You jokingly describe yourself as “Puerto Rican cousins” in a song title, when in fact you are neither Puerto Rican nor cousins. What are you actually?

Suri: It’s weird. I’m an Indian-American who is participating in a historically black art form, while acknowledging that the experience of South Asians in America has been a relatively easier one than that of black Americans. Vazquez: My dad is black and my mom is white, and I don’t know if I am neither or both. And we don’t have the time to get into the identity-politics discussion that this would lead to. Suri: Then what are we doing here? Vazquez: We’re bigging up our brand so that we can make more money. Suri: To buy things. I want to start dressing more like a British colonialist in a red coat and maybe lighten my skin with that money.

Mike LaBossiere in The Philosopher's Magazine:

While there are various legal concerns regarding these documents, my main concern is with the ethics of this leaking. I will consider various arguments in the course of the discussion.

One argument in favor of the leak is the classic Gadfly Argument (named in honor of Socrates because of his claim to the role of the gadfly to the city of Athens). The gist of the argument is that the people in government need to be watched and criticized so as to decrease the likelihood that they will conduct and conceal misdeeds in shadows and silence.

Given that governments have an extensive track record of misdeeds, it certainly makes sense to be concerned about what the folks running the show might really be doing under the cloak of secrecy and national security. If it is assumed that being part of the government does not exempt these people from moral accountability, then it would seem to follow that leaking their misdeeds is, in general, a morally acceptable action. After all, it would seem to be rather absurd to argue that people have a moral right to keep their misdeeds a secret.

The obvious reply to the Gadfly Argument is that even if it is granted, it does not cover all of the leaked material. After all, not all of the material deals with moral questionable activities that should be thus exposed to the light of day. As such, more would be needed to justify such a leak.

A second obvious argument is based on the assumption that in a democracy the citizens have a moral right to know what the folks in the government are doing in their name. This right can be based on the idea that the citizens are collectively responsible for the actions of their government and hence have a right (and need) to know what is actually going on. This right could also be based on the notion that the citizens need to be properly informed so as to make decisions. Since power comes from the people, one might argue that the people have a right to know about how that power is exercised and the information to (in theory) exercise it wisely.

Of course, the moral teachings of Vince Lombardi refer primarily to the City of Man, the fallen realm in which we strive, day after day, to liken ourselves to the angles. But from the perspective of the City of God, we are simply fallen, wretched sinners. Between us and the angels stretches an infinite chasm, a vast abyss in which lurk the demons of our besmirchéd nature. It is to that wretchedness that we now turn. Why cannot the New York Jets score any points in the first half of a football game? You suspect that there must be some hidden answer to this perplexing question but I submit to you that there is not. The weapons wielded by this offense are no less formidable than many another team. And yet, offenses around the league score away during the initial half of play while the Jets cough and sputter, tilling a field so fallow as to be barren. The 37 year-old Offensive Coordinator Brian Schottenheimer is considered, by those in a position to know, one of the best young minds in the game. He comes from a noble lineage. His father, Marty Schottenheimer, is an old warhorse of American football. Marty played linebacker for the Bills, Colts and Steelers during the 1960s and 70s, when America still made good cars. He was a head coach in the NFL for more than twenty years after that.

more from me at The Owls here.

Communion

Like a prism of oil in a puddle under a car after a storm,
Love reminds us of the impossible passing beauty
Of this world, like the nights in autumn when a streetlight dapples
A city sidewalk through a tree. It’s the same reason my heart
Breaks when I notice how tiny my niece’s hands are, breaks
A little each time I hear her laugh. Her hands will grow,
And she will not stay laughing. Leaves fall in November,
Streetlights are dark by sunrise, oil slips down a drainpipe.

Not a single one of us can promise forever, but in these bodies
We bury our love inside each other; we try to keep it safe from death.
We forage within each other, blind and starving, never
Giving or getting as much as we search for, never understanding
That none of us will ever have enough love to hold onto this world.

But what if we could learn to love within our means here,
As garlic and onions simmer on a stove,
As bodies are warmed and fed with rice and beans?
What if we left forever for death to deal with, and knuckled down
To reaping this modest, evanescent harvest?
Could we be candles and firewood and salt pork for one another?
Could we become the prism and the streetlight and the child?
Could we teach each other to let our hearts break open,
To let in the garlic, the laughter, the oil, the music, the light,
Until eternity takes us and all these seasons change?

by Rebecca T. Klein
from The Q Review

From The New Yorker:

Jay-Z grew up absorbing many of the rhymes that Bradley and DuBois celebrate. He was born in 1969, and raised in the Marcy Houses, in an area of Brooklyn from which Times Square seemed to be “a plane ride away.” (Nowadays, some real-estate agents doubtless consider it part of greater Williamsburg.) “It was the seventies,” he writes, “and heroin was still heavy in the hood, so we would dare one another to push a leaning nodder off a bench the way kids on farms tip sleeping cows.” He was a skinny, watchful boy with a knack for rhyming but no great interest in the music industry, despite some early brushes with fame—he briefly served as Big Daddy Kane’s hype man. Besides, Jay-Z had a day job that was both more dangerous and more reliable: he says he spent much of the late eighties and early nineties selling crack in Brooklyn and New Jersey and down the Eastern Seaboard. He was no kingpin, but he says he was a fairly accomplished mid-level dealer, and though he hated standing outside all day, he found that he didn’t hate the routine. “It was an adventure,” he says. “I got to hang out on the block with my crew, talking, cracking jokes. You know how people in office jobs talk at the watercooler? This job was almost all watercooler.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “But when you weren’t having fun, it was hell.”

Early recordings of Jay-Z reveal a nimble but mild-mannered virtuoso, delivering rat-a-tat syllables (he liked to rap in double-time triplets, delivering six syllables per beat) that often amounted to études rather than songs. But by 1996, when he released his début album, “Reasonable Doubt,” on a local independent label, he had slowed down and settled into a style—and, more important, settled into character. The album won him underground acclaim and a record deal with the very above-ground hip-hop label Def Jam, which helped him become one of the genre’s most dependable hitmakers. He was a cool-blooded hustler, describing a risky life in conversational verses that hid their poetic devices, disparaging the art of rapping even while perfecting it:

Who wanna bet us that we don’t touch lettuce, stack
cheddars forever, live treacherous, all the et ceteras.
To the death of us, me and my confidants, we
shine. You feel the ambiance—y’all niggas just rhyme.

More here.