Upcoming Pakistani comedian, Kumail Nanjiani:

Bruno Maddox in Discover:

SCOTLAND. It’s a long way from anywhere to this particular spot on the steep flank of the Hill of Bohuntine, gazing east across the great green heathery abyss of Glen Roy to where it admits the mouth of the more gently scooped-out Glen Glaster. Certainly if you’re coming from the States—from Petersburg, Kentucky, say, or Dayton, Tennessee, or any other of the thousand places where you would be safer lighting a Marlboro off a burning American flag than being caught with a copy of On the Origin of Species—you’re going to find it quite a hike.

But you’ll be glad you came, I promise, and a grateful Lord will one day wash your tired feet in Paradise. For it is from here, looking east, that you get to see the truth—long known in the scientific community, and as a consequence long kept quiet—that Mr. So-Called Charles Darwin, with his dumb beard and his dumb theories, born 200 years ago this very year, was wrong. Not just a little bit wrong. A lot wrong. Wronger than a bluetick hound on moonshine. Wronger than a Dixie Chick wearing a blindfold. And he could, additionally, be a real pain in the you-know-where about it.

Happy birthday, smart guy.

The year was 1836. A 27-year-old Charles Darwin, not yet bearded, fresh from chundering his way around the planet in the poop cabin of the HMS Beagle, disembarked in Falmouth, England, on a mission to cement his growing reputation as a Grand Fromage of Science. His first destination, however, after a two-year pit stop to shower and change his top hat, was not, as you might imagine, the London Zoo, nor the Natural History Museum (which had not yet even been built), but rather the modest town of Spean Bridge, high and deep in the rainy and remote Scottish Highlands.

More here.

From Nature:

A group of scientists is hoping to replicate a controversial Italian experiment that claims to have detected dark matter. But they might have to do so without the help, or the equipment, of the original group. Dark matter is thought to make up around 85% of the matter in the Universe, but it rarely interacts with regular matter except through the force of gravity. Researchers working on the DAMA experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy, claim they have spotted direct signs of it.

The detector used by the DAMA team consists of 250 kilograms of ultrapure sodium iodide crystals placed 1,400 metres beneath Gran Sasso mountain. Over the past decade, the researchers have collected data showing that nuclei in the crystals periodically release flashes of light, which could be caused by interactions with dark matter. Crucially, the number of flashes varies with the seasons, which would be consistent with Earth's motion through a galactic dark-matter stream (R. Bernabei et al. Eur. Phys. J. C 56, 333–355; 2008). But other detectors have so far failed to see an effect, leading some to conclude that DAMA's signal is the result of radioactive contamination inside the sodium iodide crystals. “There are very good reasons to disbelieve the signal,” says Adam Falkowski, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Still, Frank Calaprice at Princeton University in New Jersey says that the signal is significant enough to be followed up. “It could be right — they're careful people,” he says of the DAMA team. “I think it deserves to be checked.”

More here.

Marshall Sahlins over at the American Anthropological Association:

For ninety-nine percent of human history, Levi-Strauss once observed, a divided humanity did not know the other modes of life, the other beliefs and the other institutions that Anthropology since the end of the nineteenth century has been called upon to understand. More than any other science or discipline, Anthropology became the self-consciousness of the human species in all its varieties and all its similarities. There developed a line of global thinkers of human cultures—E.B. Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, Franz Boas, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, Bronislaw Malinowski—of whom, alas, it seems that Levi-Strauss is the last. Levi-Strauss is apparently the last with a pan-human vision, the last to embrace the study of all the cultural expressions of humanity as the only way of knowing what mankind is. More than once he has quoted Rousseau on that score: “When one proposes to study men, one only needs to look at those nearby; but in order to study man, one has to look afar; for it is necessary to observe the differences in order to discover the properties.” Hence the title of an influential collection of Levi-Strauss’s essays, The View from Afar (1988). Levi-Strauss’s grand ambition has been to discover the universal laws of human thought underlying the great diversity of cultures known to Anthropology. In the pursuit of that ambition, he developed an ethnographic knowledge of the planet unparalleled by any scholar before and unlikely to be duplicated by anyone again. A master of Native American cultures North and South, he also supported his famous structuralist theories with detailed descriptions of indigenous customs from every other continent, as well as from remote islands of the South Seas and the nearby practices and histories of European societies.

The main inspiration of Levi-Strauss’s structuralism was the linguistic theory of that name developed by his friend—and fellow World War II refugee in New York—Roman Jakobson. When adapted to social and cultural facts, however, the strictly linguistic notions were reformulated in the terms of a few general principles.

Justin Smith reviews Cătălin Avramescu's An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, in n+1:

In July 2008, while travelling on a Greyhound bus between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Vincent Li beheaded his sleeping seatmate, a man he had never met, with a butcher knife. Li held up the head in crazed triumph as the bus screeched to a halt and the other passengers rushed out. He then began to pace back and forth along the aisle, witnesses report, tearing off the ears, gouging out the eyes, pulling out the tongue, and eating them.

This event, as well as Li's recently concluded trial—not guilty by reason of insanity—might serve as an opportunity to take measure of the present state of cannibalism studies, mostly a minor academic industry, though one not without its star performances and its polarizing debates. For a long time, the field was dominated by a curious variety of négationnisme, most famously spelled out by William Arens in his 1980 book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. According to Arens, cannibalism is nothing more than a projection of fear-induced fantasies upon unknown others, and in the past 500 years this projection has served as part of the ideological soundtrack to the European conquest of the rest of the world. As the incident on the Greyhound reminds us, however, sometimes people really do eat people.

The title of the original Romanian version of Cătălin Avramescu's giddy book, Filozoful crud, translates as both “the cruel philosopher” and “the raw philosopher.” “Crude” in the sense of “uncooked” (think of “crudités”) and “cruel” share the same etymology, and in at least one Romance language—the easternmost and most obscure, yet in some sense also the purest, because the closest to Latin—these two meanings remain packed into one and the same word. In what sense, now, could a philosopher be both “cruel” and “raw”? Does Avramescu want to say that philosophers have somehow been both the perpetrators and the victims of anthropophagy?

This interview aired on Arte is on YouTube in 7 parts; here is the first part. The subtitles have been provided by the YouTube community. Not all the parts have been subtitled; the poster of the videos is asking for assistance in translating the remainder of the videos.

Horacio Castellanos Moya in Guernica:

I had told myself I wasn’t going to say or write anything more about Roberto Bolaño. The subject has been squeezed dry these last two years, above all in the North American press, and I told myself that there was already enough drunkenness. But here I am writing about him again, like a vicious old man, like the alcoholic who promises that this will be the last drink of his life and who, the next morning, swears that he will only have one more to cure his hangover. The blame for my relapse goes to my friend Sarah Pollack, who sent me her insightful academic essay on the construction of the “Bolaño myth” in the United States. Sarah is a professor at The City University New York and her text “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in the United States” was published in the summer issue of the journal Comparative Literature.

Albert Fianelli, an Italian fellow journalist, parodies a quote often attributed to Herman Goering and says that every time someone mentions the word “market,” he reaches for his revolver. I’m not so extreme, but neither do I believe the story that the market is some kind of deity that moves on its own according to mysterious laws. The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S. I say this because the central idea of Pollack’s work is that behind the construction of the Bolaño myth was not only a publisher’s marketing operation but also a redefinition of the image of Latin American culture and literature that the North American cultural establishment is now selling to the public.

Estelle Shirbon in Reuters:

French intellectual Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology, has died at the age of 100, his publishing house Plon said on Tuesday.

Levi-Strauss, who was known to a wider public thanks to his 1955 memoir and masterpiece, “Tristes Tropiques,” died on Saturday. He would have turned 101 on November 28.

“He was France's greatest scientist,” said writer Jean d'Ormesson, fellow member of the Academie Francaise which brings together the elite of the country's intellectual establishment.

A brilliant student who excelled at geology, law and philosophy, Levi-Strauss was posted to Brazil as a professor in 1935. It was there that he found his vocation for anthropology.

He conducted several expeditions into remote areas of the Amazon rainforest and the Mato Grosso to study the customs of local tribes, starting to develop theories and methods that would later have a profound impact on his field.

He returned to France and was drafted into the French army at the start of World War Two. After the defeat of France by the Nazis, he realized that being Jewish had now become dangerous and he moved to the United States until 1944.

Over the following years, he held a number of prestigious scientific posts in Paris and New York and started to churn out his influential scientific volumes.

In particular, he used tribal customs and myths to show that human behavior is based on logical systems which may vary from society to society, but possess a common sub-structure.

These findings, which challenged the notion that Western European culture was somehow unique or superior, resonated with the ideas of opponents of colonialism and Levi-Strauss gained a following beyond the circle of professional anthropologists.

When the economy sours, news anchors talk of housing and manufacturing, of hedge funds and barrels of oil. They generally don’t discuss the lives of artists, and how their careers are crushed into a dull oblivion. If artists survive the fiscal and emotional shakedown, they steady themselves as adjuncts in the Midwest, they design for architectural firms. They take corporate commissions and they sit on city planning boards. They might show again, but this time in coffee shops or farmers’ markets. Artists fade, but they don’t disappear. Not the way Ford Beckman disappeared, at least. Beckman enjoyed heights few artists attain, and then no one in the art world could find him. When Beckman’s name surfaced at showings, it was met with shoulder shrugs. Dealers scanned floors, looking for Beckman’s trademark velvet slippers, which he wore to exhibitions. They’d heard about financial issues, but they knew him as a man of resources. Where, they wondered, was Ford Beckman? Beckman, now fifty-six, has been hiding in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, until recently, he has been serving donuts for seven dollars an hour. A look into his eyes will tell you what you already know: there isn’t a more punishing zero than the sugary naught of a Krispy Kreme Hot Original Glazed. And yet Beckman is emerging, and doing so in one of the worst economic climates of our times. It’s a move that he feels particularly prepared to undertake.

more from Michael Paul Mason at The Believer here.

Dubner and Levitt are at it again, marshalling the forces of data to trouble the conventional wisdom and dethrone the experts. In their new book, “SuperFreakonomics,” they argue that walking drunk is more dangerous than driving drunk, that a doctor’s skill doesn’t matter very much, and that prostitution makes poor women better off. But the book’s biggest provocation comes in its last chapter, on climate change. And it has ensured that, unlike the last time around, the new book is being greeted with as much outrage as curiosity. The “SuperFreakonomics” treatment of climate change, critics charge, is a hodgepodge of unfounded and occasionally contradictory claims. Time and again, the critics say, Dubner and Levitt raise provocative, if unoriginal, arguments only to move on to the next provocation without bothering to mention substantial, even overwhelming, evidence to the contrary. Among other things, readers are told that solar power contributes to global warming, that the climate models that predict warming have all been doctored to achieve matching results, and that carbon dioxide does not “necessarily” warm the earth and may have had little to do with recent warming trends – all arguments that the majority of climate scientists reject as wrong.

more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.

The monsters have no historical antecedents. They’re clearly not animals, and they’re not the caricaturization of a person. They sit, instead, as the third point of a triangulation — not between humans and animals, but equidistant from the two. They’re clearly meant to invoke something of our environment: the Philadelphia Phillie’s Web site lists the Phanatic’s birthplace as the Galapagos Islands — a place whose name evokes rich ideas of life and biology and evolution — and not some place as fanciful as the Phanatic itself. It’s interesting to see the role the Phanatic plays. He has an animal-like innocence that gives him a pass for stealing cotton candy or ribbing Jack Nicholson or dressing in drag and seducing an umpire. Yet he’s also an asshole. He mines guy-on-guy attraction for laughs. He steals. He famously mocked Los Angeles Dodgers coach Tommy Lasorda so incessantly that the latter finally erupted at a 1988 game and “body slammed” the Phanatic.

more from Jesse Smith at The Smart Set here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Kierkegaard was a dissembler and a clown. He had a Christ complex and a club foot. He looked great in an overcoat with a turned-up collar. Much of his adult life was spent mentally obsessing over a woman. Catullus had his Lesbia. Dante had his Beatrice. Petrarch had his Laura. Kierkegaard had his Regine. She appears in some form or another in all of his writing. The reader can be forgiven for not recognizing Regine as Isaac in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, but that's the way Kierkegaard saw her.

By all accounts, Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen were genuinely in love. The two were affianced in 1840. But by 1841, Kierkegaard had decided to call it off. Thus begins the great mystery of his life. Why did Kierkegaard choose pain and despair over happiness? The answer, I'm sorry to tell you, is the complete works of Søren Kierkegaard.

Still, we'll try to tease out a few key talking points. Central to the story is faith. Some think of faith as a simple matter — you have it or you don't. For these people, further inquiry is unnecessary. Faith is not accessible to reason. Kierkegaard agrees, a little bit. He never thought that faith could be understood through logic or rational thought. Faith, for him, had to have an element of the absurd or it wouldn't be something special, something outside the normal rules. But he did not think of faith as simple. He saw it as the hardest thing, the greatest challenge, the center of the grand torture we call life. He once said, “If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.”

More here.

After Love

Afterwards, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept

by Maxine Kumin

from No More Masks!; Anchor Books, 1973

From The Washington Post:

Like Native Americans, European Jews and Rwandan Tutsis, Turkish Armenians seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Children of Armenia,” Michael Bobelian's first book, describes the Ottoman Empire's 1915 mass extermination of this Christian minority without getting bogged down in “G-word” histrionics. “The purpose of this book is neither to prove the existence nor affirm the veracity of the Genocide,” Bobelian writes: The Armenian holocaust is a historical fact.

“Children of Armenia” focuses on the Turkish nationalism, world war weariness, survivor psychology and Cold War squabbling that let the world forget the unforgettable. Some will flinch at Bobelian's lionization of Gourgen Yanikian, an Armenian who shot two Turks in a revenge plot hatched in the 1970s, but the author stumbles only when he strays into Armenian exceptionalism, the idea that “no other people have suffered such a warped fate — a trivialization of their suffering and a prolonged assault on the authenticity of their experience.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Could adults gossiping in the office be more devious than the teenagers in “Gossip Girl”? If you have a hard time believing this, then you must have skipped the latest issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Perhaps you saw “ethnography” and assumed it would just be quaint reports from the Amazon and the South Seas. But this time enthnographers have returned from the field with footage of a truly savage native ritual: teachers at an elementary school in the Midwest dishing about their principal behind her back. These are rare records of “gossip episodes,” which have been the subject of a long-running theoretical debate among anthropologists and sociologists. One side, the functionalist school, sees gossip as a useful tool for enforcing social rules and maintaining group solidarity. The other school sees gossip more as a hostile endeavor by individuals selfishly trying to advance their own interests.

But both schools have spent more time theorizing than observing gossipers in their natural habitats. Until now, their flow charts of gossips’ conversations (where would social science be without flow charts?) have been largely based on studies in informal settings, like the casual conversations recorded in a German housing project and in the cafeteria of an American middle school.

More here.

Edward Burtynsky. Alberta Oil Sands # 6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007.

Digital chromogenic print.

More here and here.

Pow'r

By L. S. McKee

The first time I attended my father’s church, I was mortified, standing among my siblings, to realize we would be singing hymns without accompaniment: the sole piano player had defected to another church before my father’s arrival. With barely over a dozen members in the congregation, you couldn’t get away with mouthing the words. And trying to sing loudly enough to prove you have neither a heathen’s irreverence – though you are your very own, grown-up kind of heathen, singing out of respect for your parents’ belief – nor a tin ear while trying to keep your neighbors from hearing the cracks in your voice is akin be being strangled. Or slowly drowning. The necessary ratios of open throat to closed throat, of sound release to sound blockage, are tricky. Sure, it sounds pornographic, but anyone who has reluctantly joined in on the joys of communal singing knows it’s the truth. Your heart rate accelerates equally from oxygen deprivation as congregational stage fright. All this to say, trying to maintain privacy while singing in church is difficult enough without a conspicuously absent piano and twelve good country people singing acapella.

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Hans Kundnani in the TLS:

It has long been known that tensions existed between Thatcher and the Foreign Office, including her Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd. To coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the FCO has published a set of documents from its and the Cabinet Office’s archives that would normally have been released under the thirty-year rule. They illustrate the full extent of those tensions for the first time.

Although Britain had a long-standing commitment to German unity through self-determination, which Thatcher had herself reiterated in 1985, some mandarins appear to have had views on Germany that were not so different from the Prime Minister’s. The collection opens with a note from Sir Christopher Mallaby, the British ambassador in Bonn, which is almost Thatcherite in its analysis of German pathology (the Germans, he says, are “always yearning for something”). But during the course of 1989, the FCO became increasingly concerned about the possible effect of Thatcher’s reaction to events in East Germany on relations with Britain’s other allies. Sir Patrick Wright, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State in the FCO, worries at one point that “the Prime Minister’s views, if they became known, would raise eyebrows (at least) both in Germany and in the United States”. On November 10, Wright cautions Stephen Wall, Hurd’s Private Secretary, that Thatcher might be feeling “under siege” from her advisers.

The documents illustrate how quickly events in East Germany began to move after November 9. On November 27, Mallaby describes how the theme of reunification, “though still shunned by Kohl and [Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich] Genscher, is becoming more prominent in political debate”, and says a growing number of Germans believe that it will take place within ten years. The following morning, his counterpart in East Berlin, Nigel Broomfield, reports to Hurd that a growing number of East Germans are now demanding immediate reunification. Later that day, Kohl announced his Ten-Point Plan in the Bundestag without consulting the British beforehand. Mallaby sends Hurd another telegram at the end of the day after finally being briefed by Kohl’s adviser Horst Teltschik, who has told Mallaby that even Kohl’s plan “could be overtaken by other views before long”. So it proved.