by Ashley Mears

Coco Rocha in Bill Blass by Peter Som February 2008, Photographed by Ed Kavishe for Fashion Wire Press.jpg

(Photo: Coco Rocha in Bill Blass by Peter Som February 2008, Photographed by Ed Kavishe for Fashion Wire Press, and is licensed under creative commons.)

In 2002, a tall and skinny 14-year old girl competed in a dance contest in Vancouver, Canada. There she encountered a modeling agent, who asked her to consider going out for modeling jobs. Today, the 22-year-old Coco Rocha is celebrated as a “supermodel” (however little of its glamazon power the term retains these days), appearing on covers of Vogue and i-D magazines, on catwalks from Marc Jacobs to Prada, and as the star face for Dior, H&M, and Chanel. You might not recognize her name, but the chances are you’ve seen Coco Rocha in the past few years.

Coco is what economists would call a winner in a “winner-take all market,” prevalent in culture industries like art and music, where a handful of people reap very lucrative and visible rewards while the bulk of contestants barely scrape by meager livings before they fade into more stable and far less glamorous careers. The presence of such spectacular winners like Coco Rocha raises a great sociological question: how, among the thousands of wannabe models worldwide, is any one 14 year-old able to rise from the pack? What makes Coco Rocha more valuable than the thousands of similar contestants? How, in other words, do winners happen?

The secrets to Coco’s success, and the dozens of girls that have come before and will surely come after her, have much less to do with Coco the person (or the body) than with the social context of an unstable market. There is very little intrinsic value in Coco’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly-built teens—when dealing with symbolic goods like “beauty” and “fashionability,” we would be hard pressed to identify objective measures of worth inherent in the good itself. Rather, social processes are at work in the fashion modeling market to bequeath cultural value onto Coco. The social world of fashion markets reveals how market actors think collectively to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. And this social side of markets, it turns out, is key to understanding how investors could trade securities backed with “toxic” subprime mortgage assets leading us into the 2009 financial crisis.

Read more »

Bunny Harvey. Damsel's View. 2009

Oil on panel.

More here and here.

Editor's Note: In the spirit of The New Yorker's popular caption contest, we will be presenting original cartoons done for 3QD by the very talented Robert Pichler. Unlike The New Yorker, we are not running a real contest, but just for fun, we encourage you to suggest captions in the comments area.

Charles Simic over at the NYRB blog:

The first instance of capital punishment on record in America was the shooting in colonial Virginia of George Kendall, accused of plotting to betray the British to the Spanish. If he had any parting quips, they were not written down. We have to wait for the execution of two Quakers, Marmaduke Stevenson and William Robinson, fifty years later, on October 27, 1659, for an account of the last words of the condemned. As one would expect, the two men, who were convicted and hung for disobeying banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, reaffirmed their faith in God and reminded the spectators to mind the light that shone within them. Since then, as Last Words of the Executed, an enthralling book by Robert K. Elder, amply documents, there have been over sixteen thousand executions in this country and a vast record of final pronouncements taken from prison records, eyewitness statements, newspaper accounts, period diaries and written statements. Some of these are credibly attributable to the executed while others are of questionable origin or indisputably redacted.

Why this enormous interest in the final thoughts of men and women who were often guilty of committing horrific crimes? It must be the same morbid curiosity that brought huge crowds of Americans to public executions in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many considered these grim occasions so much fun they brought their families along. The spectators didn’t mind if the hanging they were watching was botched and the condemned struggled choking for a long while at the end of the rope, or if his body dropped headless to the ground, and greeted such horrors with “rude jests” and “rabid laughter.” They expected, as part of the program, to hear a public admission of guilt, expression of remorse, appeal for forgiveness from God and the assembled, and a warning about the evils of booze and company of loose women. They were rarely disappointed.

Frans de Waal reviews Oren Harman's The Price of Altruism, in The New York Times:

Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting anyone else, we are urged at the beginning of every flight. Altruism often requires that we take care of ourselves first, which is exactly what the subject of Oren Harman’s enthralling book “The Price of Altruism” tragically failed to do. The scientist George Price was an obscure and enigmatic figure, unknown outside his field of study. Born near New York City in 1922 and originally trained as a chemist, Price worked on the Manhattan Project, at Bell Labs and at I.B.M. before moving to London in 1967, after botched surgery for thyroid cancer. There he became a population geneticist and tried to solve the mystery of altruism with brilliant mathematical formulas. He had trouble solving his own problems, though. Having shown little sensitivity to others in his previous life (he abandoned his wife and daughters and was a lousy son to his aging mother), Price swung to the other extreme. Long a staunch skeptic and atheist, he became a devout Christian, gave up all his possessions and dedicated himself to caring for the city’s vagabonds. By the age of 50, he was as gaunt as an old man, with rotting teeth and a raspy voice. He killed himself in 1975.

But “The Price of Altruism” is about far more than Price himself. It covers the entire 150-year history of scientists’ researching, debating and bickering about a theoretical problem that lies at the core of behavioral biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: Why is it that organisms sacrifice themselves for the benefit of others? As a scientist, Price, following longstanding tradition, loved to pit altruism against selfishness. The sharper the contrast, the deeper the mystery of how altruism might have evolved. Why would animals worry about the survival of others, sometimes even nonrelatives? Is this not against the law of nature?

Extremely well researched and written with great love of the subject, “The Price of Altruism” reveals all sorts of personal details of momentous events in the history of science.

Steven Shapin in Seed:

Scientists, perhaps to a greater degree than any other sector of society, get to define what the world is like. They may not always be the most highly rewarded people in our communities, but they are among the most influential: When reality speaks, it speaks through them, and what we know about the world, we know because we have found grounds to recognize their competence and to trust them or the institutions they represent.

Our understanding of who these men and women are is central to the authority of modern science, and if, as seems to be the case, there are emerging problems with that authority, then a clarification of the scientist’s identity is in order. It’s not so easy, however, to know exactly who the scientist is. Public perception of the scientist probably owes much to the idea of mastering something known as the “scientific method” (even though there is no consensus on what exactly this consists of), but we also define scientists through some notion of integrity — an independent voice speaking truth to power. So any perceived problems concerning scientists’ moral makeup are of great consequence: Scientists without credibility are culturally impotent, and science without credibility is a meaningless enterprise.

In recent times, and especially over the past quarter century, scientific integrity has become a live issue in public culture — think of the drumbeat of reports on commercially and politically induced bias and violations of research independence. Medical-journal editors despair of finding reviewers without financial ties to Big Pharma. The New York Times and the Associated Press now routinely inform readers not just about what scientists claim but also about their sources of commercial research funding and whether or not they act as consultants to, or accept speaking fees from, industry. It’s become a truism — a point of pride for some, of anxiety for others — that academia and industry as scientific work environments have converged in all sorts of ways. At the same time, these ties and convergences have elicited diverse reactions from within the scientific community: Just as there are scientists wholly comfortable doing their work in industry or with industrial support, there are others who take the responsibility of defending scientific integrity and who seek to foreground commercial bias or government interference as public issues. Some scientists speak for reality from within the big oil companies; others claim that to do such a thing with integrity is impossible and speak up for the environment from an advertised position of institutional independence.

James Verini in the Washington Monthly (via Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber):

The Chamber has lost major policy battles during the Obama presidency, and its resistance to reform has also been costly. When, last fall, the Chamber made news with what was effectively a rejection of climate science, several major companies, including Apple Inc., dropped their membership in the organization—an exodus that provided a welcome public relations boost for the White House. But under the curious rules of Washington lobbying, losses can be as good as wins. “The worst thing to happen to Tom is to have an issue resolved, even to his own favor, because then he can’t raise any more funds on it,” says John Schulz, a former editor at the trade journal Traffic World, who’s covered Donohue for twenty-five years. “There’s nothing he can’t make a dollar on.”

Many of the Chamber’s efforts are undoubtedly good for certain businesses. Wall Street would prefer to avoid further financial regulation. Oil companies would prefer to avoid further environmental regulation. Whether the Chamber—which counts as members everyone from Goldman Sachs to British Petroleum, Microsoft to Wal-Mart, PepsiCo to General Motors, and hundreds of thousands of more obscure businesses in between—is good for business as a whole is another matter. With unemployment, statistical and personal, on the mind of every officeholder up for reelection this year, Republicans and Democrats claim to agree on one thing: small business will be the engine of job growth after the Great Recession. But while the Chamber has as legitimate a claim to representing this sector as any organization around—96 percent of its members have fewer than 100 employees—it is also beholden to a cadre of multinationals whose interests are often inimical to those of small business. In 2008, a third of its revenues came from just nineteen companies.

This sort of conflict doesn’t appear to bother [Thomas] Donohue [president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce]. One lobbyist at a trade association that shares many members with the Chamber describes Donohue’s tack as “imperial.” “If you don’t like it, you can leave. That’s their approach to members,” he says. Not all members, though. If there’s a consistent pattern to how the Chamber operates, it’s that it follows the money.

History Filled In
……………………
I never knew snow, this cold that burns.
Cold with a thickness of braided hair
or a man’s hand. I am leaving my mother’s town

now that her bones have been sent back to Heng-Ha
to anchor her ghost. In her town, men stand
like they have no place to stand, and women
cannot look at their foreign children.

I carry out the last of the house: eight red
door tassels and a tin of greasy silver dollars.
New telephone wires dip to grins under ropes of ice.

I have inherited, too, my mother’s hatred of the cold.
On the path to the car, my footprints are filled
as soon as I leave them, as if the snow,
like winter’s sod, sprouts to swallow them.

Soon there is no trace of where I began
to leave, where I turned back,
where I began again without starting over.
…………………………
………………………….
by Melody S. Gee
from Blackbird, Spring 2010

From The Boston Globe:

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

The idea for Bad Translations came to me a number of years ago in Ecuador. My wife and I, the mysterious Shuffy©, were staying in a little pension outside of the old town in Quito and there was a ramshackle bookstore nearby we would duck into during violent confrontations between groups of young protesters and the police. People were pissed off about the dollarization of the currency. Gustavo Noboa had recently been elected president. But this is ancient history. I found an old volume of poetry by Jorge Carrera Andrade. The pages hadn’t even been split and it smelled of dirt. Andrade is more or less a big deal in Latin American literature though you don’t hear his name very often up north. Such is the way of things. The poems were in Spanish, since Andrade wrote them that way. My Spanish is terrible. But I decided to start translating them anyway. Some years ago, before even the trip to Ecuador, the man who taught me to read Golden Age Latin, the hairy and intense Alan Fishbone, made a comment to me over a game of pool. “You know,” he said (I’m paraphrasing here), “It’s all syntax, …. And syntax is magic.” I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant at the time, though it sounded cool. He was a cool guy, likely he still is, though his Juvenalian Foundation for a New Humanism located on Elizabeth Street in New York City only lasted about a year. Money did not pour in.

more from me at The Owls here.

Dutch football as we have known it was born in Amsterdam in the late 1960s as the city was being transformed by social and cultural revolution. Playful Provos and anarchists were subverting the old, grey, sober Netherlands and turning the city into a centre of world hippiedom. Meanwhile, iconoclastic Ajax coach Rinus Michels and teenage genius Cruyff were laying down the blueprint for a revolution in football. Within a few years, Amsterdam went from backwater to world significance. In the early 1970s Ajax won the European Cup three years in a row with their dazzling cerebral style, and the official foreign policy of the radical government of Joop den Uyl was Nederland gidsland, literally Netherlands Guiding Country. In both cases, the idea was that the ever-moral Dutch would show the rest of the world how things were done. But Nederland gidsland bit the dust in the wake of the economic crisis that overwhelmed Holland following the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil boycott. The football was never quite the same after the 1974 World Cup final against the West Germans in Munich, when Holland took the lead in the second minute, yet lost. The day is remembered in Holland with the sort of shudder still evoked in America by recollection of the assassination of President Kennedy. The Dutch convinced themselves they were moral winners because they played the more beautiful football. Now this view is being fundamentally challenged.

more from David Winner at The Guardian here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Can it be ethical to give girl fetuses a drug to prevent ambiguous genitalia when the drug may also influence their sexual preferences in later life? The US researchers involved reject the idea of using the drug to “treat” homosexuality.

New Scientist explores what's behind the story.

What is the treatment, and what is it used for at present?

The treatment is for a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which affects about 1 in 15,000 babies. Fetuses affected by CAH have gene defects which mean that they either can't make or don't make enough of a key adrenal hormone called 21-hydroxylase.

That means that their adrenal glands carry on producing male hormones long after they should have stopped. Boys' sexual organs are not affected by this, but about one in eight fetuses that are at risk of CAH will be female and develop genitalia with masculine characteristics, such as a large clitoris. Girls may also have their urethra positioned inside the vagina, for example.

At birth doctors and parents may have difficulty deciding the gender of girls affected this way, and many go on to have surgery to correct the physical abnormalities. But a group of researchers led by Maria New of the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York have been testing a treatment that prevents the anatomical abnormalities in the womb. It means giving a pregnant woman at risk of having a child with CAH a drug called dexamethasone (dex) starting as early as five weeks after conception. The drug keeps male hormones at a normal level, reducing the possibility of the anatomical defects, though it has no effect on their CAH – people with the disorder will continue to take medication throughout their life.

How might such a treatment stop girls being gay?

The majority of girls with CAH are heterosexual. One of the hallmarks of girls who have CAH is that they are more likely to be tomboyish, to avoid having children in adulthood, and are slightly more likely than the average girl to be gay or bisexual.

The IMF's Olivier Blanchard and Carlo Cottarelli, in Vox EU:

Advanced economies are facing the difficult challenge of implementing fiscal adjustment strategies without undermining a still-fragile economic recovery. Fiscal adjustment is key to high private investment and long-term growth. It may also be key, at least in some countries, to avoiding disorderly financial market conditions, which would have a more immediate impact on growth through effects on confidence and lending. But too much adjustment could also hamper growth, and this is not a trivial risk. How should fiscal strategies be designed to make them consistent with both short-term and long-term growth requirements?

We offer ten commandments to make this possible. Put simply, what advanced countries need is clarity of intent, an appropriate calibration of fiscal targets, and adequate structural reforms – with a little help from monetary policy and their (emerging market) friends.

Commandment I: You shall have a credible medium-term fiscal plan with a visible anchor (in terms of either an average pace of adjustment, or of a fiscal target to be achieved within 4–5 years).

There is no simple one-size-fits-all rule. Our current macroeconomic projections imply that an average improvement in the cyclically-adjusted primary balance of some 1 percentage point per year during the next four to five years would be consistent with gradually closing the output gap, given current expectations on private sector demand, and would stabilise the average debt ratio by the middle of this decade. Countries with higher deficits/debt should do more; others should do less. Such a pace of adjustment must be backed up by fairly specific spending and revenue projections and supported by structural reforms (see below).

Raghuram Rajan in Project Syndicate:

Before the recent financial crisis, politicians on both sides of the aisle in the United States egged on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-backed mortgage agencies, to support low-income lending in their constituencies. There was a deeper concern behind this newly discovered passion for housing for the poor: growing income inequality.

Since the 1970’s, wages for workers at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution in the US –such as office managers – have grown much faster than wages for the median worker (at the 50th percentile), such as factory workers and office assistants. A number of factors are responsible for the growth in the 90/50 differential.

Perhaps the most important is that technological progress in the US requires the labor force to have ever greater skills. A high school diploma was sufficient for office workers 40 years ago, whereas an undergraduate degree is barely sufficient today. But the education system has been unable to provide enough of the labor force with the necessary education. The reasons range from indifferent nutrition, socialization, and early-childhood learning to dysfunctional primary and secondary schools that leave too many Americans unprepared for college.

The everyday consequence for the middle class is a stagnant paycheck and growing job insecurity. Politicians feel their constituents’ pain, but it is hard to improve the quality of education, for improvement requires real and effective policy change in an area where too many vested interests favor the status quo.

Moreover, any change will require years to take effect, and therefore will not address the electorate’s current anxiety. Thus, politicians have looked for other, quicker ways to mollify their constituents. We have long understood that it is not income that matters, but consumption. A smart or cynical politician would see that if somehow middle-class households’ consumption kept up, if they could afford a new car every few years and the occasional exotic holiday, perhaps they would pay less attention to their stagnant paychecks.

Therefore, the political response to rising inequality – whether carefully planned or the path of least resistance – was to expand lending to households, especially low-income households.

Jordan Ellenberg on the Poincaré conjecture, in Slate:

Poincaré conjectured that three-dimensional shapes that share certain easy-to-check properties with spheres actually are spheres. What are these properties? My fellow geometer Christina Sormani describes the setup as follows:

The Poincaré Conjecture says, Hey, you've got this alien blob that can ooze its way out of the hold of any lasso you tie around it? Then that blob is just an out-of-shape ball. [Grigory] Perelman and [Columbia University's Richard] Hamilton proved this fact by heating the blob up, making it sing, stretching it like hot mozzarella, and chopping it into a million pieces. In short, the alien ain't no bagel you can swing around with a string through his hole.

That's zingier than anything the Times will run, but may still leave you without a clear picture of Perelman's theorem. Indeed, it's pretty hard to give an elementary account of the statement that Poincaré conjectured and that Perelman seems to have confirmed. (If that's what you're after, Sormani's home page links to a variety of expositions, including one in the form of a short story.) Instead, I'll try to explain why Perelman's theorem matters without explaining what it is.

Susan Stewart reviews The Sonnets and Poems of the Night, both by Jorge Luis Borges, in The Nation:

In the introduction to his Obra Poética 1923–1985, brought out by Emecé Editores in Buenos Aires in 1989, Borges recalls a passage from a letter of his beloved literary ancestor Robert Louis Stevenson: “I do not set up to be a poet. Only an all-round literary man: a man who talks, not one who sings…. Excuse this apology; but I don't like to come before people who have a note of song, and let it be supposed I do not know the difference.” This borrowed strategy of first apologizing, then dazzling, was an intrinsic aspect of Borges's public persona; we find it, too, in the doubled being of his well-known little essay “Borges and I.” There he writes: “news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor…. I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification.”

Obscure provincial of the New World, destined to live out his life as a near invalid in a tiny apartment with his mother once he loses his “reading and writing” sight in his mid-50s; prim celibate; lover, Platonic or otherwise, of dozens of women and husband of two in his late age; firebrand of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, who brought the news of Geneva, Madrid, Seville and Majorca to Buenos Aires; publisher, in the 1920s, of the “Ultraist” Symbolist journal Prisma and of Proa, the journal of democratic reform and liberal, syncretic, poetics; high school dropout; devotee of Federico García Lorca, denigrator of García Lorca; the most learned reader of the twentieth century; in a bizarre historical irony, the third person to hold the position of director of the National Library of Argentina “whom God granted both books and blindness”; professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and scholar of Anglo-Saxon; recipient of honorary degrees from Oxford, Columbia, Cambridge and elsewhere, of the Jerusalem Prize, the Alfonso Reyes Prize and the Cervantes Prize; longstanding supporter of the Radical Party; fearless opponent of the dictatorship of Juan Domingo Perón; willfully naïve apologist for the brutal late-1970s military regimes of Argentina and Chile. There is no end to the string of paradoxes that arise from the biographies of Borges and “Borges.”

Such contradictions were indeed part of Borges's legacy—from his family, his nation, his literary tradition.

From Wired:

Several evenings a week, after a day’s work at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, Sergey Brin drives up the road to a local pool. There, he changes into swim trunks, steps out on a 3-meter springboard, looks at the water below, and dives. Brin is competent at all four types of springboard diving—forward, back, reverse, and inward. Recently, he’s been working on his twists, which have been something of a struggle. But overall, he’s not bad; in 2006 he competed in the master’s division world championships. (He’s quick to point out he placed sixth out of six in his event.) The diving is the sort of challenge that Brin, who has also dabbled in yoga, gymnastics, and acrobatics, is drawn to: equal parts physical and mental exertion. “The dive itself is brief but intense,” he says. “You push off really hard and then have to twist right away. It does get your heart rate going.”

There’s another benefit as well: With every dive, Brin gains a little bit of leverage—leverage against a risk, looming somewhere out there, that someday he may develop the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson’s disease. Buried deep within each cell in Brin’s body—in a gene called LRRK2, which sits on the 12th chromosome—is a genetic mutation that has been associated with higher rates of Parkinson’s. Not everyone with Parkinson’s has an LRRK2 mutation; nor will everyone with the mutation get the disease. But it does increase the chance that Parkinson’s will emerge sometime in the carrier’s life to between 30 and 75 percent. (By comparison, the risk for an average American is about 1 percent.) Brin himself splits the difference and figures his DNA gives him about 50-50 odds.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Since 1998, the New York Public Library has housed a manuscript so blistering that researchers are probably required to don oven mitts before handling it. Consisting of a long-overlooked autobiographical fragment by Claire Clairmont, who was Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Lord Byron’s lover and the inspiration for Henry James’s “Aspern Papers,” it has the declared intention of showing what “evil passion” sprang from the pursuit of free love by Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. “Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love,” Clairmont states, “I saw the two first poets of England . . . become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery — under the influence of free love Lord B became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women.” Her indictment, which Daisy Hay says is now being published for the first time, comes only at the end of “Young Romantics” yet sends a blast of scorching fury back across the entire book. For Clairmont’s charges, however hyperbolic, have about them a degree of truth. Not just for her but for Mary Shelley and other women, participating in the communal, proto-1960s life of “English poetry’s greatest generation,” as Hay’s subtitle puts it, was ultimately less thrilling than damaging. This, at least, is the dominant impression I took away from “Young Romantics,” even if it isn’t Hay’s thesis or even drift.

More here.