Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Antwerpenaars (people from Antwerp) aren't always so enthusiastic about Rubens. But what city doesn’t have mixed emotions about its most famous sons and daughters, about the clichés, about the touristical kitsch that surrounds and suffocates the great ones? More than twice I've enthusiastically related my interest in Rubens to an Antwerpenaar, only to be met with a rolling of the eyes, followed by an audible sigh. The message is clear: Only an asshole would come to Antwerp to expend time and energy on the most obvious of subjects, the most boring of all possible figures, Rubens.

Bravely, I persist. I trudge dutifully through the rain and the mist to the house that Rubens built near the center of Antwerp in the early 17th century. Some fragment of him must still inhabit the place, no? There must be a clue in that house, though, to be honest, I'm not even sure what of the riddle to which I am seeking clues. Maybe it is simply the answer to the question of why we care at all.

On my most recent trip to the house, I fell into a conversation with one of the museum guards, who likes to be called Toulouse and advised me never to speak Flemish. I took this as disgust with his own language combined with outrage with what I'd done to it. Anyway, he wanted to speak English and, like most people from Flanders, speaks it better than I do. When I told him of my interest in Rubens he became physically agitated. He pulled at his long goatee and squinched his eyes. It seemed that something distressing was happening in his bowels. This house isn't even real, he blurted out. Just before World War II, he told me, the city of Antwerp purchased the wreck of a property and then began “restoring” it through hasty guesswork and a few sketches dashed off by some clown who had visited the house a hundred years after Rubens died.

More here. [Photo taken outside Rubens' house.]

The right loves genetic explanations for poverty or mental illness. But science fingers society.

Oliver James in The Guardian:

When the map of the human genome was presented to the world in 2001, psychiatrists had high hopes for it. Itemising all our genes would surely provide molecular evidence that the main cause of mental illness was genetic – something psychiatrists had long believed. Drug companies were wetting their lips at the prospect of massive profits from unique potions for every idiosyncrasy.

But a decade later, unnoticed by the media, the human genome project has not delivered what the psychiatrists hoped: we now know that genes play little part in why one sibling, social class or ethnic group is more likely to suffer mental health problems than another.

This result had been predicted by Craig Venter, one of the key researchers on the project. When the map was published, he said that because we only have about 25,000 genes psychological differences could not be much determined by them. “Our environments are critical,” he concluded. And, after only a few years of extensive genome searching, even the most convinced geneticists began to publicly admit that there are no individual genes for the vast majority of mental health problems. In 2009 Professor Robert Plomin, a leading behavioural geneticist, wrote that the evidence had proved that “genetic effects are much smaller than previously considered: the largest effects account for only 1% of quantitative traits”. However, he believed that all was not lost. Complex combinations of genes might hold the key. So far, this has not been shown, nor is it likely to be.

More here.

Howard Schweber in The South Asian Idea:

My first impression of Pakistani students was that they are … well, just college students. How utterly, disappointingly unexotic. Grade-conscious careerists, canny manipulators of the system, highly competitive … future engineers and finance majors.

But there are some differences, after all. That word “elite” comes into play, here. In the U.S., no college student would describe him or herself as “elite” – that word is primarily reserved for use as a political insult. Americans, notoriously, valorize the idea of belonging to “the middle class,” sometimes to a ludicrous degree. Pakistani students have no such compunctions, and are quite pleased to describe themselves and their family backgrounds by saying “we are the elites” and other words to that effect. Partly this tendency reflects an inherited colonialist culture, partly it reflects the reality of a deep economic divisions reflected in the ubiquitous servant culture that every American I spoke with privately described as jarring. American college students at top schools tend to have a sense of entitlement … but nothing that compares with the “elite” classes of Pakistani society.

More here.

From Scientific American:

If there are any men left who still believe that women are the weaker sex, it is long past time for them to think again. With respect to that most essential proof of robustness—the power to stay alive—women are tougher than men from birth through to extreme old age. The average man may run a 100-meter race faster than the average woman and lift heavier weights. But nowadays women outlive men by about five to six years. By age 85 there are roughly six women to every four men. At age 100 the ratio is more than two to one. And by age 122—the current world record for human longevity—the score stands at one-nil in favor of women.

So why do women live longer than men? One idea is that men drive themselves to an early grave with all the hardship and stress of their working lives. If this were so, however, then in these days of greater gender equality, you might expect the mortality gap would vanish or at least diminish. Yet there is little evidence that this is happening. Women today still outlive men by about as much as their stay-at-home mothers outlived their office-going fathers a generation ago. Furthermore, who truly believes that men’s work lives back then were so much more damaging to their health than women’s home lives? Just think about the stresses and strains that have always existed in the traditional roles of women: a woman’s life in a typical household can be just as hard as a man’s. Indeed, statistically speaking, men get a much better deal out of marriage than their wives—married men tend to live many years longer than single men, whereas married women live only a little bit longer than single women. So who actually has the easier life?

More here.

From The New York Times:

It’s a sign of how poorly liberals market themselves and their ideas that the word “liberal” is still in disrepute despite the election of the most genuinely liberal president that the political culture of this country will probably allow. “Progressive” is now the self-description of choice for liberals, though it’s musty and evasive. The basic equation remains: virtually all Republican politicians call themselves conservative; few Democratic politicians call themselves liberal. Even retired Classic Coke liberals like Walter F. Mondale are skittish about their creed. “I never signed up for any ideology,” he writes in his memoirs.

That would be fine (people are sick of labels) if clarity weren’t such an obvious political advantage. Simple ideology routinely trounces nuanced pragmatism, just as emotion so often beats reason and the varsity fullback will most likely deck the captain of the debate team in a fistfight. For four decades, conservatives have used the word “liberal” as an epithet, while liberals have used “conservative” defensively (“I’m a little conservative on . . .”). And Fox fans range out of factual bounds (“death panels”) more than their NPR-­listening counterparts in the liberal “­reality-based community” (a term attributed to a Bush White House aide by the author Ron Suskind).

More here.

Small Trek

snowbound
homebound

….hidebound
….hamstrung

………hogtied

………….in a corner
………….up a tree
………….down the river

nosedive

…headway
…deadmarch

………footloose

…………..pointblank
…………..playground

by Eleanor Ross Taylor
from Poetry, 2010

Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn't to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.

Robert A. Pape in Foreign Policy:

Although no one wants to talk about it, 9/11 is still hurting America. That terrible day inflicted a wound of public fear that easily reopens with the smallest provocation, and it continues to bleed the United States of money, lives, and goodwill around the world. Indeed, America's response to its fear has, in turn, made Americans less safe and has inspired more threats and attacks.

In the decade since 9/11, the United States has conquered and occupied two large Muslim countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), compelled a huge Muslim army to root out a terrorist sanctuary (Pakistan), deployed thousands of Special Forces troops to numerous Muslim countries (Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, etc.), imprisoned hundreds of Muslims without recourse, and waged a massive war of ideas involving Muslim clerics to denounce violence and new institutions to bring Western norms to Muslim countries. Yet Americans still seem strangely mystified as to why some Muslims might be angry about this situation.

In a narrow sense, America is safer today than on 9/11. There has not been another attack on the same scale. U.S. defenses regarding immigration controls, airport security, and the disruption of potentially devastating domestic plots have all improved.

But in a broader sense, America has become perilously unsafe.

More here.

Daniel Lende in Neuroanthropology:

Daniel Lende: So, Mark, tell me about your forthcoming book Harnessed.

Mark Changizi: Language and the arts are the centerpieces of what we humans are proud of. They are what we gloat to the other apes about. But how did we come to have language and art, and thereby stand so markedly apart from the rest of the animal world?

Answers traditionally come from one of two opposing poles.

The first view is that language and/or the arts are results of natural selection, and so we now have instincts for them: language instincts, music instincts, art instincts.

The opposing view is that, instead, we evolved to be highly plastic general-purpose learners who can train ourselves on loads of cultural artifacts evolution never intended for our brain, language and the arts among them.

There is a third option, however. It agrees with the ‘instinct’ view in positing that humans aren’t especially plastic. And it agrees with the ‘general-learner’ view in positing that culture matters. It is that language and the arts culturally evolved to be shaped “just right” to fit into our minds. Cultural — not natural — selection is the “brains” behind our human gloating rights. This kind of ‘cultural-selection’ view also is an old one.

What is new here is my view of how culture goes about making language and the arts good for our brain: Culture’s trick is to make language and the arts “mimic nature,” just the thing our brain *is* designed to absorb.

I refer to it as “Nature Harnessing.”

More here.

From NPR:

His latest book, the Keys to Good Cooking, is a how-to guide for home chefs in which McGee, a food science expert, explains techniques for kicking recipes up a few notches. McGee details why people perceive flavors differently, offers his thoughts on seasonings and explains why searing meat doesn't seal in the juices.

McGee joins Fresh Air's Terry Gross to offer advice for harried home cooks wondering whether it's safe to eat that shrimp in the back of the freezer (maybe) or whether it's worth it to buy that fancy new appliance (also maybe). Among the nuggets of wisdom he shares:

On the efficiency of gas vs. electric stovetops: “Many of us interested in cooking put a premium on big burners — powerful burners that are going to pump out a hot of heat so we can get woks really, really hot. It turns out that gas burners, as we all know from working with them and looking at them, actually send a lot of their heat into the kitchen instead of the food, just by the fact that it's an open flame. So most of the energy generated in a gas flame actually goes elsewhere than the food. In the case of a very ordinary electric stove, they're much more efficient. Even though their power rating may be lower than a fancy gas burner, they'll bring a pot to boil much faster.”

More here.

Nick Antosca in The Paris Review:

For much of middle school, I’d been enamored of a smart and introverted girl in my grade. I’ll call her Anna. Red-haired, freckled, and painfully pale, Anna was hardly a dead ringer for Dolores Haze, but I was observant enough to recognize the “ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb”—that marked her as a nymphet.

My imagination required a corresponding nympholept, and the Humbert Humbert of Brunswick Middle School could only be our affable fourth-period teacher, a tall, handsome, offhandedly suave man who was soon slipping in Anna’s bedroom window to ravish her—and be ravished by her—on a nightly basis, as a perturbed cocker spaniel looked on. (I’d once overheard her mention her dog at school.) I loathed and admired him. How could I ever hope to compete?

What Nabokov prettified with a murderer’s fancy prose style, I saw with bracing clarity. This was 1995, and hardcore Internet porn was not yet easily accessible to twelve-year-olds, but my imagination was ambitious. No permutation of heterosexual sex escaped it.

More here.

John H. Evans in Immanent Frame:

The use of religious reasons by ordinary citizens talking over the fencepost may be different than their use by activists. I recently published an empirical analysis of whether there is a shared moral language among diverse religious people in the U.S. used in debates over reproductive genetic technologies. In one chapter, I evaluate whether people would want to refer to religious reasons in discussing reproductive genetics with their neighbors. I asked in-depth interview respondents whether one should explain one’s position on reproductive genetic technologies to a Hindu neighbor “using religious terms or secular terms.”

In my interviews, a majority of the people thought one should use religious discourse with the Hindu neighbor, with conservative Protestants being the most likely to say so. Interestingly, a majority of the secular respondents also thought that one should use religious discourse, which I will address below. The most prevalent reason given for advocating the use of religious reasons is that using only secular reasons is not possible if you are religious. For example, a Pentecostal woman said that she would use religious reasons because “that’s who I am . . . so that’s probably how it would come across.” A traditional evangelical woman said, “I can’t separate that because my spiritual beliefs influence everything I do and say. If I really feel that that’s the core of who I am, then to say, ‘it only influences me some of the time,’ is a mistake.”

This seems to be empirical support for the claim made by Calhoun and many others, such as Wolterstorff and Habermas, that people who are religious cannot separate out their religious reasons and their secular reasons—or, more subtly, that they cannot translate between the two. They have no choice but to use religious reasons.

Not quite.

George Soros in The NYRB:

The imbalances that were at the root of the crash of 2008 remain to be corrected and the private sector is unable to do it on its own. The US still consumes more than it produces, running a chronic trade deficit. Consumption is too high at nearly 70 percent of GDP, compared to an unsustainably low 35.6 percent for China. Households are overindebted and need to increase their savings rates. The US economy badly needs investments that enhance productivity but the private sector is unwilling or unable to provide them. US corporations operate very profitably but instead of investing their profits they are building up their liquidity—accumulating money, not investing it. In these circumstances there is a strong case for government intervention. Admittedly, consumption cannot be sustained indefinitely by running up the national debt. But to cut back on government spending at a time of large-scale unemployment would ignore all the lessons learned from the Great Depression.

The obvious solution is to draw a distinction in the budget between investments and current consumption and to provide additional stimulus for investments but not for consumption. Such a stimulus program coupled with a gradual appreciation of the renminbi would go a long way toward correcting the prevailing imbalances. Consumers would spend less on imported goods because they would cost more and corporations would find it more profitable to invest at home, creating more jobs. The trade deficit would shrink. Prices would move toward the inflation target of 2 percent, removing the threat of a deflationary spiral. The economy could start growing its way out of the prevailing imbalances.

Melodye in Child's Play:

As an avid reader of Language Log, my interest was recently piqued by a commenter asking for a linguist’s eye-view on the “Knobe Effect”:

“Speaking of Joshua Knobe, has any linguist looked into the Knobe Effect? The questionnaire findings are always passed off as evidence for some special philosophical character inherent in certain concepts like intentionality or happiness. I’d be interested in a linguist’s take. If I had to guess, I’d say the experimenters have merely found some (elegant and) subtle polysemic distinctions that some words have. As in, ‘intend’ could mean different things depending on whether the questionnaire-taker believes blameworthiness or praiseworthiness to be the salient question. Or ‘happy’ could mean ‘glad’ in one context but ‘wholesome’ in another, etc…”

Asking for an opinion, eh? When do I not have an opinion? (To be fair, it happens more than you might expect).

But of course, I do have an opinion on this, and it’s not quite the same as the one articulated by Edge. This post is a long one, so let me offer a teaser by saying that the questions at stake in this are : What is experimental philosophy and is it new? How does the language we speak both encode and subsequently shape our moral understanding? How can manipulating someone’s linguistic expectations change their reasoning? And what can we learn about all these questions by productively plumbing the archives of everyday speech?

For those who are not familiar, Joshua Knobe is an up-and-coming ‘experimental philosopher’ at Yale, and is well-known for his experimental work looking at how we interpret a person’s actions depending on linguistic context. The idea underpinning his approach is that we can better understand philosophical concepts if we look at how people use and respond to them in practice. Many of these experiments focus on intentionality : i.e., in what contexts do we say that a person acted intentionally, and in what contexts unintentionally? Based on these findings, Josh wants to claim that he has discovered something ‘deep’ about the nature of theory of mind, intentional action, and moral judgment. But has he? I’d argue that he’s discovered something about how we use certain words and what we take them to mean. Is that deep? Perhaps! Read on — and you tell me.

There is one thing I’d say first though, which is that while Josh’s approach is widely taken to be innovative or revolutionary, it’s almost certainly not. Wittgenstein proposed this method of investigation in the 1930′s, and Chomsky roundly denied that linguistic research could tell us anything about these kinds of ‘philosophical’ questions in the 1960′s, in response to an enthusiastic outburst by Zeno Vendler.

From Science:

You probably won't hear too many people admit this, but … I'm from Delaware. From the placid waterways of Sussex County, to the credit card companies of Wilmington, to the rolling hills that are more likely in Pennsylvania, my home state is a hotbed of scientific innovation. Or was. When I was in third grade, my teacher asked us to raise our hands if one or both parents worked for local chemical giant DuPont. Almost every hand went up. My mother worked for nearly 20 years as a scientist at DuPont, which later became DuPont Merck, which then became DuPont Pharmaceuticals, whose campus then became a ghost town when it was bought by Bristol-Myers Squibb. You suck, Bristol-Myers Squibb. Recently, however, I was alarmed to hear that my fellow Delawareans voted to oust Representative Mike Castle, a solid moderate who pushed for embryonic stem cell research and was handily elected as the Republican representative of a largely Democratic state for nine consecutive terms, in favor of Christine O'Donnell, who, as far as I can tell, is a houseplant.

Suddenly, Delaware became the bellwether state for the nation, presaging Tea Party upsets from New York to New Hampshire in the coming midterm elections. Television pundits asked difficult questions, such as “Can the Democrats hold on to their legislative majorities?” and “Which state is Delaware in?” The issues receiving the most attention in this election have been the ones Tea Partiers are proud to stand behind: lowering taxes, reducing government spending, and proving that Hawaii is Kenya. But ask any Tea Partier to define “science” and you'll get an answer whose value is less certain: “Something it's important to stop doing.” I tried reaching several Tea Party candidates and officials to learn their specific views on today's major scientific issues, but no one returned my calls, so I guess I'm on my own. (It probably didn't help that I have the same name — same spelling, too — as the political director of MoveOn.org.) Here, as well as I can determine, are the Tea Party's views on science. In a couple of weeks, when you tap Diebold's proprietary and easily hacked touchscreens — that is, when you attempt to cast your ballot — remember what might happen to your beloved science career if the Tea Partiers triumph:

The space program:

The Tea Party isn't opposed to outer space per se. After all, the Scientologists in its ranks claim that their founder came from there. They just don't like us fiddling around in the heavens without a purpose prescribed by the heavens, or at least one comprehensible to a fifth-grader. For example, one of NASA's current projects is called “Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere.” Boring! Who even knows what these crazy words mean? “Aeronomy”? “Mesosphere”? “Ice”? None of these words appear in the Bible! No, the Tea Party will support the space program only if we tether our efforts to an arbitrary timeframe, a simplistic goal, and a meaningless patriotic gesture: We will put an American on Callisto by 2023, and he will plant a flag made of guns!

More here.

Now That I have Cable

now that i have cable i feel
i am able to mainline culture
where before i barely
got a sniff. oh, i was able

to quote yeats or baudelaire or
know the details of the natural
world the way others
knew britney spears and tony

soprano, but the pictures
paled after a while, and i went
to the channels i hadn’t paid to get,
that were scrambled

but not enough so i didn’t
know what i was missing. and
that is why i now get the cubist
cocksuckers’ channel

and why i don’t feel
as if i am on the periphery any more
but i can step right up with my
hungry eyes on britney

and quote french poetry
to her blonde good looks.
if her head is empty, why,
mine is quickly emptying

too, and i say things like
what’s up with that? and everything
seems better, more satisfying
and infinitely more true.

by Robert Allen
from Jacket Magazine
October 2007

Steven L. Isenberg in The American Scholar:

The British writers W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson paid respectful attention to each other: Larkin wrote “English Auden was a superb and magnetic wide-angled poet, but the poetry was in the blaming and the warning.” Empson thought Auden a “wonderful poet” and put Larkin among the “very good poets.” Auden wrote a sonnet for Forster, and Empson wrote a poem called “Just a Smack at Auden.” Forster’s novels were touchstones for Auden, who cabled “Morgan” Forster on his 80th birthday these good wishes: “May you long continue what you already are stop old famous loved yet not yet a sacred cow.” Empson thought Forster’s Aspects of the Novel—lectures he had heard as a student at Cambridge—“a model.”

For me the four have another thing in common, the unlikely and unexpected occasions of my having met each of them for lunch. Those visits are always with me, and while I kept no diary and so remember fewer of their words than I wish, the memories I do have are testimony to their humanity and kindness.

More here. [Photo shows Auden.]

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Certain groups of animals show a remarkable capacity for quickly evolving into new species to seize control of unexploited niches in the environment. And among these ecological opportunists, there are few better examples than the cichlids, a group of freshwater fishes that are one of the most varied group of back-boned animals on the planet.

In the words of Edward O. Wilson, the entire lineage seems “poised to expand.” The Great Lakes of Africa – Tanganyika, Malawi and Victoria – swarm with a multitude of different species; Lake Malawi alone houses over 500 that live nowhere else in the world. All of these forms arose from a common ancestor in a remarkably short span of time. Now, a new study suggests that this explosive burst of diversity has been partly fuelled by rivalry between hostile males.

Michael Pauers of the Medical College of Wisconsin found that male cichlids have no time for other males that look like them. They will bite, butt and threaten those who bear the same colour scheme. In doing so, they encourage diversity in the lake since mutant males with different tints are less likely to be set upon by territorial defenders.

This process is just part of the cichlids’ tale. Their rise to dominance in the African lakes probably happened in several stages and were driven by different evolutionary forces.

More here.

Two of science’s luminaries converse on the beauty of science. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and host of NOVA and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins will explore the wonders of the Cosmos and of Life, its origins, its inspirations, and why science is not just an option, it is the only reality we possess. One hour and 17 minutes.

Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

Avi Steinberg’s memoir, “Running the Books,” about his job as a prison librarian at “the Bay” — the Suffolk County House of Correction in South Bay near Boston — gets off to an obnoxious start.

Mr. Steinberg is a self-described “asthmatic Jewish kid,” a young Harvard graduate and a stalled novelist. He applied for the prison library job when he saw it posted on Craigslist. He needed the health insurance. Probably he needed a book idea too.

The early bits of “Running the Books” are as hopped-up as a spaniel with a new rubber ball. The tone is, more or less, “Augusten Burroughs Goes to the Clink.” Here’s a not atypical passage: “It was official. I was now on the side of angels. The Po-Po. The Fuzz. The Heat. The Big Blue Machine.”

But a funny thing happens to “Running the Books” as it inches forward. Mr. Steinberg’s sentences start to pop out at you, at first because they’re funny and then because they’re acidly funny. The book slows down. It blossoms. Mr. Steinberg proves to be a keen observer, and a morally serious one. His memoir is wriggling and alive — as involving, and as layered, as a good coming-of-age novel.

More here.