David Samuels in Tablet:

You grew up in a home that was heavily influenced by Ahad Ha’am, the father of cultural Zionism.

My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha’am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha’am’s essays. He was the founding figure of what came to be called cultural Zionism, meaning that there should be a Zionist revival in Israel, in Palestine, and it should be a cultural center for the Jewish people. He wrote in Hebrew, which was novel, because Hebrew was then the language of prayer and the Bible. He saw Jews as primarily a Diaspora community that needed a cultural center that had a physical presence, but he was very sympathetic to the Palestinians. In fact he wrote some very sharp essays, after a visit to Palestine, criticizing the way the new settlers were treating the indigenous population. He said, “You can’t treat people like that.” Also, on practical grounds, he didn’t want to create enemies. A Jewish cultural center in Palestine was his ideal.

Now I won’t swear to the precise accuracy of this, because these are childhood memories, but I remember reading together with my father an essay that Ahad Ha’am wrote about Moses. The basic idea was there are two Moseses—the first is the historical Moses, if there was such a person, and the other is the image of Moses that was constructed and came down through the ages and occupies an important place in the national mythology.

Ahad Ha’am was an early advocate of the idea that later became famous with [the Marxist political scientist] Ben Anderson, when he wrote his books about how nations are imagined communities. He said there’s an imagined—I don’t think he used the term—but there’s an imagined Jewish community, in which Moses plays a central role, and it really doesn’t matter if there was a historical Moses or not. That’s part of the national myth, which is a sophisticated version of what [author] Shlomo Sand was trying to get at. Sand debunks the historical Moses, but from Ha’am’s point of view, it makes no difference.

Two kinds of imagination: the strong, the promiscuous. One can exist without the other. Homer’s and Dante’s were strong, Ovid’s and Ariosto’s promiscuous. An important distinction when praising poets, or anyone, for their imagination. A strong imagination fast makes a man unhappy because his feeling runs so deep, but a promiscuous imagination cheers him because of its variety, because it nimbly visits then leaves all its objects and does so with a heady heedlessness. The two have very different characters. The first weighty, impassioned, usually (nowadays) melancholic, with deep emotion and passion, all fraught with life hugely suffered. The other playful, light, fleet, inconstant in love, high spirited, incapable of really strong, enduring passions and mental pain, quick to console itself even during the hardest times, etc. These two characters also yield clear portraits of Dante and Ovid: you see how the difference in their poetry corresponds exactly to the difference in their lives. Even more, you see how differently Dante and Ovid experienced exile. The same faculty of the human spirit is thus mother to contrary effects, qualities so different as to make the imagination seem virtually two different faculties. I don’t think that the deep imagination inspires courage, because it makes danger, pain, etc., so much more real and immediate than reflection does. What deliberation tells, deep imagination shows. And I believe that an imagination that does foster courage—such poets certainly don’t lack imagination, because enthusiasm always goes hand in hand with imagination and derives from it—belongs more to the deliberative, promiscuous type.

more from Giacomo Leopardi’s 19th century daybook at Poetry here.

The west is still the “best”—if by that we mean richest, strongest, and most inventive. True, China now has the second biggest economy in the world and Japan the third; but Europe and north America still generate two thirds of the world’s wealth, own two thirds of its weapons, and spend more than two thirds of its R&D dollars—all despite having less than one-seventh of its population. The west still rules the roost. But will this last? No. This much we know, because history tells us so. As Winston Churchill (no mean historian himself) put it: “The farther backwards you can look, the farther forwards you are likely to see.” If we look back far enough (to the last ice age), on a scale big enough (the whole planet), we can indeed identify the forces that drive history—and where they are taking us. The west dominates the world not because its people are biologically superior, its culture better, or its leaders wiser, but simply because of geography. When the world warmed up at the end of the last ice age, making farming possible, it was towards the western end of Eurasia that plants and animals were first domesticated. Proto-westerners were no smarter or harder working than anyone else; they just lived in the region where geography had put the densest concentrations of potentially domesticable plants and animals. Another 2,000 years would pass before domestication began in other parts of the world, where resources were less abundant. Holding onto their early lead, westerners went on to be the first to build cities, create states, and conquer empires. Non-westerners followed suit everywhere from Persia to Peru, but only after further time lags.

more from Ian Morris at Prospect Magazine here.

John Cornwell in Prospect:

MacIntyre begins his Cambridge talk by asserting that the 2008 economic crisis was not due to a failure of business ethics. The opener is not a red herring. Ever since he published his key text After Virtue in 1981, he has argued that moral behaviour begins with the good practice of a profession, trade, or art: playing the violin, cutting hair, brick-laying, teaching philosophy. Through these everyday social practices, he maintains, people develop the appropriate virtues. In other words, the virtues necessary for human flourishing are not a result of the top-down application of abstract ethical principles, but the development of good character in everyday life. After Virtue, which is in essence an attack on the failings of the Enlightenment, has in its sights a catalogue of modern assumptions of beneficence: liberalism, humanism, individualism, capitalism. MacIntyre yearns for a single, shared view of the good life as opposed to modern pluralism’s assumption that there can be many competing views of how to live well.

In philosophy he attacks consequentialism, the view that what matters about an action is its consequences, which is usually coupled with utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness” principle. He also rejects Kantianism—the identification of universal ethical maxims based on reason and applied to circumstances top down. MacIntyre’s critique routinely cites the contradictory moral principles adopted by the allies in the second world war. Britain invoked a Kantian reason for declaring war on Germany: that Hitler could not be allowed to invade his neighbours. But the bombing of Dresden (which for a Kantian involved the treatment of people as a means to an end, something that should never be countenanced) was justified under consequentialist or utilitarian arguments: to bring the war to a swift end.

Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum at NPR:

The periodic table lists 118 different chemical elements. And yet, for thousands of years, humans have really, really liked one of them in particular: gold. Gold has been used as money for millennia, and its price has been going through the roof.

Why gold? Why not osmium, lithium, or ruthenium?

We went to an expert to find out: Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University. We asked him to take the periodic table, and start eliminating anything that wouldn't work as money.

The periodic table looks kind of like a bingo card. Each square has a different element in it — one for carbon, another for gold, and so on.

Sanat starts with the far-right column of the table. The elements there have a really appealing characteristic: They're not going to change. They're chemically stable.

But there's also a big drawback: They're gases. You could put all your gaseous money in a jar, but if you opened the jar, you'd be broke. So Sanat crosses out the right-hand column.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Beast and Man was written as a corrective to two opposing views of human nature. The one dominant in the social sciences believes man is shaped completely by society or economic circumstances; the other side, argued for by zoologists such as Desmond Morris, sees man as an evolved animal with natural urges and tendencies – usually aggressive – that cannot be abolished. Midgley sought to balance these two approaches. She agreed with the zoologists that man was among the animals rather than separate from them, and that our nature cannot be wholly created by society or by ourselves because of the limits of our biological make-up. Observing chimpanzees in the manner of Jane Goodall could yield fascinating insights into human behaviour.

Yet she was also deeply wary of the fatalism she saw in some (usually male) zoologists who continually emphasised competition, selfishness and virility among animals and took a morbid delight in nature, red in tooth and claw. The Solitary Self takes up the arguments of Dawkins, the most recent exponent of biological fatalism. Our genes, Dawkins suggests, are like Chicago gangsters, forever competing with one another; we are, therefore, “born selfish”. However, as Midgley picks up, Dawkins does not notice that his words leap from speaking about selfish genes to selfish persons. People are whole entities subject to many influences – their physical environment, other people, their culture, not to mention their own minds.

More here.

The Kings Are Out

1
In Patrick Street
In Grattan Street
In Ireland Rising Liberty Street
The Kings are out.

Along the Mall
The Union Quay
In every street along the Lee
The Kings are out.

With knives of ice
And dressed to kill
The wine flows down from Summer Hill
Christ! Be on your guard tonight
The Kings are out.

The snow is dark
And where they meet
The blood in rivers at their feet
Christ! be on your guard tonight
The Kings are out.

Armies marching through the snow
Banners burning row on row
Hate upon them as they go
The stars are red.

Parnell Bridge is falling down
South Gate Bridge is falling down
The City Hall is falling down
The stars are red.

Christ! Be on your guard tonight
The Kings are out.

Read more »

From The New York Times:

We’d better address one textual issue up front, and without italics. This book opts for the iconic form: OK. This newspaper’s style calls for the punctilious (and closest to the original) form: O.K. My own strong preference is the form that looks most simply like a word, whose pronunciation is clear, and which doesn’t call for an apostrophe in extensions like “okayed” and “okays”: Okay. (Capitalized only when it begins a sentence or a sentence fragment like this or the preceding one.)

OK/O.K./okay so far?

Oh, my. Maybe we should follow the precedent handed down in 1967 when the writers of a song entitled “Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus” filed a suit claiming that their copyright had been infringed by the song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Wrote the judge: “All variants of this tongue twister will hereinafter be referred to collectively as ‘the word.’ ”Not that the word considered here is a tongue twister — anything but. Allan Metcalf, professor of English and executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, has made a strong case for his subtitle. He certainly establishes that “the word” . . . No, that’s not going to work. How about OK, a k a O.K. . . .

More here.

Laura Marsh reviews Nicholas Ostler's book of that title in The New Republic:

While English is the most widely-spoken lingua franca in history, so-called common or working languages can be much less pervasive. Elamite, for example, was the submerged administrative language of the Persian Empire in the sixth century B.C.E. All official documents were written down in Elamite, but they were both composed and read out in Persian, the language of the illiterate ruling class. Then there is Pali, the language of Theravada Buddhism. No longer used in everyday conversation, Pali is written in different scripts in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Burma, and sounds different when read aloud by Thai and Burmese speakers. The identity of the language is almost obscured by its profusion of forms.

Pali is a tantalizing case for Nicholas Ostler, because it suggests to him the possibility of a “virtual” language. A “virtual language” would not be read or spoken itself. It would allow the user to understand what is being written or said without learning the original language—in much the same way that “virtual reality” allows the user to have an experience of something without actually doing it. Pali is not “one language” in the concrete sense that it has one set of words, but those who know any of its forms can access exactly the same information. Yet on closer inspection this is not because it is a “virtual language.” It is because the differences between its forms are largely superficial. However the words are pronounced or written down, they mean the same thing. It is one language after all.

Despite this setback, Ostler has faith in a virtual system, which he claims will revolutionize global communications, and make foreign language learning a thing of the past.

More here.

From Physorg.com:

The result is being heralded as a dramatic breakthrough in our basic understanding of quantum mechanics and provides new clues to researchers seeking to understand the foundations of quantum theory. The result addresses the question of why quantum behaviour is as weird as it is—but no weirder.

The strange behaviour of quantum particles, such as atoms, electrons and the photons that make up light, has perplexed scientists for nearly a century. Albert Einstein was among those who thought the quantum world was so strange that quantum theory must be wrong, but experiments have borne out the theory's predictions.

One of the weird aspects of quantum theory is that it is impossible to know certain things, such as a particle's momentum and position, simultaneously. Knowledge of one of these properties affects the accuracy with which you can learn the other. This is known as the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle”.

Another weird aspect is the quantum phenomenon of non-locality, which arises from the better-known phenomenon of entanglement. When two quantum particles are entangled, they can perform actions that look as if they are coordinated with each other in ways that defy classical intuition about physically separated particles.

Previously, researchers have treated non-locality and uncertainty as two separate phenomena. Now Wehner and Oppenheim have shown that they are intricately linked. What's more, they show that this link is quantitative and have found an equation which shows that the “amount” of non-locality is determined by the uncertainty principle.

More here. [Paging Dr. Sean Carroll, we need you to understand this!]

James Verini in the New York Times Magazine:

One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash. Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another, and another. The guy wasn’t stealing cars, but the detective figured he was stealing something.

Indeed, the young man was in the act of “cashing out,” as he would later admit. He had programmed a stack of blank debit cards with stolen card numbers and was withdrawing as much cash as he could from each account. He was doing this just before 12 a.m., because that’s when daily withdrawal limits end, and a “casher” can double his take with another withdrawal a few minutes later. To throw off anyone who might later look at surveillance footage, the young man was wearing a woman’s wig and a costume-jewelry nose ring. The detective asked his name, and though the man went by many aliases on the Internet — sometimes he was cumbajohny, sometimes segvec, but his favorite was soupnazi — he politely told the truth. “Albert Gonzalez,” he said.

More here. [Thanks to Ejaz Haider.]

Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books:

If you go to the website of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines. But what sort of human should it be given to?

Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English. The book itself is more than 150 years old. What would/ should/do you want? The impossible, of course. But what sort of impossible? For a start, you would probably want it not to read like ‘a translation’. You want it to read as if it had originally been written in English – even if, necessarily, by an author deeply knowledgable about France. You would want it not to clank and whirr as it dutifully renders every single nuance, turning the text into the exposition of a novel rather than a novel itself. You would want it to provoke in you most of the same reactions as it would provoke in a French reader (though you would also want some sense of distance, and the pleasure of exploring a different world). But what sort of French reader? One from the late 1850s, or the early 2010s? Would you want the novel to have its original effect, or an effect coloured by the later history of French fiction, including the consequences of this very novel’s existence? Ideally, you would want to understand every period reference – for instance, to Trafalgar pudding, Ignorantine friars or Mathieu Laensberg – without needing to flick downwards or onwards to footnotes. Finally, if you want the book in ‘English’, what sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the colouration, are irrevocable.

More here. [Thanks to Vladimir Chechik.]

Though his book is unusually good, Larry Stempel is not the first to sum up the history of the Broadway musical theater. The literature, as they say, is vast. They say that about subjects where literature is not the first thing you want. You want it only later on, after you have already fallen for the subject because of its inherent enjoyability, and not because of what can be brought to it by way of explanation. In that respect, Broadway itself was vast almost from the start, when a musicalized version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first staged in 1853, included Stephen Foster’s catchy lament “Old Folks at Home,” of which even the lyrics were in blackface. “All de world am sad and dreary …” The way the word world sat on the note clinched the deal. Anybody’s grandmother could have a crack at singing it, even though she herself was as Old Folks as you could get. Something similar was true for any other show that clicked. People would come to it so that they could go home singing. People who didn’t go to the opera loved going to the musicals. Eventually people who did go to the opera went to the musicals as well. More eventually still, the musicals turned into operas—Carousel and its many successors are essentially operas, but with easier arias, and plots that add up—as America’s most energetic indigenous art form went on conquering the world. Most eventually of all, the British musicals conquered Broadway, but they got the idea from the place they conquered. The same would be true if a show starring Kim Jong Il—also responsible for music, book, and lyrics—started its New York run next week.

more from Clive James at The Atlantic here.

Anthropology won a large and appreciative audience in the West in the first half of the twentieth century by combining adventure stories like those of the great Victorian explorers with a new sensitivity to the rich human lessons that could be learned from the ‘natives’. Figures such as Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead ventured into remote corners of the world still unfamiliar to Westerners: the Arctic, far-flung Pacific islands, and the interior of New Guinea. They brought back not human captives or golden treasure but the fruits of the new techniques of ‘participant-observation’: reports on the stories people told themselves in myths and religious observance; how they coped with the challenges of adolescence, relations between men and women, gift giving and commercial exchange; and how they struck a balance between the demands of the individual and the needs of the community. Such reports proved compelling: especially after the First World War, when ‘Western civilisation’ was inclined to doubt itself, the ‘natives’ provided fresh resources for thinking about how best, and how variously, to be human. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, though born after these pioneering anthropologists and before the First World War, made his impact in the second half of the twentieth century and had something quite different to offer: theory. How to explain the appeal of this new and rather forbidding commodity, and to build it into a biography, is Patrick Wilcken’s challenge.

more from Peter Mandler at Literary Review here.

From PhysOrg:

By imitating human joint movement in its shoulders, arms, hands and head, Cosmobot motivates children to develop new skills more quickly than is typical with traditional therapy. Supported in part by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research Program, scientists developed the assistive social robot primarily to work with children ages 5-12, including those with autism and cerebral palsy. But why does this work? Why do children respond so favorably to educational programs taught by technology? And when the technology is a robot made from inanimate materials, how do children learn to distinguish between the robot and a living thing? The answer, it turns out, may have far-reaching implications for interaction with “social” robots for both children and adults.

Working with a group of 18-month-old toddlers and a metallic robot, a team of scientists from the University of Washington (UW) recently determined that it is not only what something looks like, but how it moves and interacts with others that give even inanimate objects social significance. In fact, they say these characteristics give lifeless objects meaning to all humans regardless of age.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The invitations come in the mail, covered in large print: “Investment Workshop—Free Gourmet Lunch!” “Avoid the Biggest Financial Mistakes Seniors Make!” “Protect Your Financial Security!” At the lunch, the salmon is accompanied by an investment pitch, with reminders that “there's a high rate of return,” and “only a few opportunities are left.” Many of these free lunch seminars are scams aimed at retirees. Nearly six million seniors have attended such seminars in the past three years, the senior advocacy group AARP estimates—although conventional wisdom says that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Despite their years of experience, however, older people are more likely to err in their financial decisions by overemphasizing potential benefits and downplaying potential risks. Now insights from psychology, economics and neuroscience may help us understand why and how those errors occur. Older adults aren't as upset by possible financial losses as young people are, psychological research has shown, and Stanford University researchers found in a recent brain-imaging study that seniors' brains don't anticipate a loss as much as younger ones do. That might be leading them to make less rational—and therefore less profitable—choices. But the news isn't all bad; a better understanding of why these mistakes happen may make it easier to prevent them.

More here.

Romance Sonambulo

Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With the shade around her waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.

Green, how I want you green.
Big hoarfrost stars
come with the fish of shadow
that opens the road of dawn.
The fig tree rubs its wind
with the sandpaper of its branches,
and the forest, cunning cat,
bristles its brittle fibers.
But who will come? And from where?
She is still on her balcony
green flesh, her hair green,
dreaming in the bitter sea.

–My friend, I want to trade
my horse for her house,
my saddle for her mirror,
my knife for her blanket.
My friend, I come bleeding
from the gates of Cabra.
–If it were possible, my boy,
I'd help you fix that trade.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
–My friend, I want to die
decently in my bed.
Of iron, if that's possible,
with blankets of fine chambray.
Don't you see the wound I have
from my chest up to my throat?
–Your white shirt has grown
thirsy dark brown roses.
Your blood oozes and flees a
round the corners of your sash.
But now I am not I,
nor is my house now my house.
–Let me climb up, at least,
up to the high balconies;
Let me climb up! Let me,
up to the green balconies.
Railings of the moon
through which the water rumbles.

Now the two friends climb up,
up to the high balconies.
Leaving a trail of blood.
Leaving a trail of teardrops.
Tin bell vines
were trembling on the roofs.
A thousand crystal tambourines
struck at the dawn light.

Green, how I want you green,
green wind, green branches.
The two friends climbed up.
The stiff wind left
in their mouths, a strange taste
of bile, of mint, and of basil
My friend, where is she–tell me–
where is your bitter girl?
How many times she waited for you!
How many times would she wait for you,
cool face, black hair,
on this green balcony!
Over the mouth of the cistern
the gypsy girl was swinging,
green flesh, her hair green,
with eyes of cold silver.
An icicle of moon
holds her up above the water.
The night became intimate
like a little plaza.
Drunken “Guardias Civiles”
were pounding on the door.
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea.
And the horse on the mountain.

Federico García Lorca
Translated by William Logan

Read more »

Tony Perrottet in The Smart Set:

You might think a 2,300-year-old sex scandal would eventually lose some of its bite. But when it comes to paragons of masculinity such as world conqueror Alexander the Great, it doesn’t. With his 2004 film Alexander, writer-director Oliver Stone outraged stiff-necked military types with his depiction of the macho Macedonian king, history’s most brilliant warrior, flirting with his boyfriends up and down the Khyber Pass. In between gore-splattered battles, Alexander (played by Colin Farrell) flounces about in makeup at drunken Babylonian banquets, shoots suggestive glances to his male entourage, and indulges in a passionate kiss with one of his officers — all the sort of behavior that would be frowned upon in the U.S. military today, for example. But according to Paul Cartledge, professor of Classics at Cambridge University, the film is actually very coy about Alexander’s busy homoerotic life: There is no real doubt that he took a young Persian eunuch named Bagoas as his lover in Babylon, and that at the height of his power he was still carrying on a torrid affair with his studly childhood sweetheart, Hephestaion. On the other hand, we also know that Alexander sired at least one son — with his wife, the lovely Afghani princess Roxanne — and that he maintained a bevy of voluptuous mistresses as he stormed his way across the Middle East.

So was Alexander bisexual? In fact, the Greeks themselves would not have understood the question. They were shocked by Alexander’s love life for other reasons.

More here.