The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies. P.J. O’Rourke on why Americans fell out of love with the automobile.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The phrase “bankrupt General Motors,” which we expect to hear uttered on Monday, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as “Mom’s nude photos.” And, indeed, if we want to understand what doomed the American automobile, we should give up on economics and turn to melodrama.

Politicians, journalists, financial analysts and other purveyors of banality have been looking at cars as if a convertible were a business. Fire the MBAs and hire a poet. The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of financial crisis, foreign competition, corporate greed, union intransigence, energy costs or measuring the shoe size of the footprints in the carbon. It’s a tragic romance—unleashed passions, titanic clashes, lost love and wild horses.

Foremost are the horses. Cars can’t be comprehended without them. A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.

More here.

Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times:

Some evolutionary psychologists believe that disgust emerged as a protective mechanism against health risks, like feces, spoiled food or corpses. Later, many societies came to apply the same emotion to social “threats.” Humans appear to be the only species that registers disgust, which is why a dog will wag its tail in puzzlement when its horrified owner yanks it back from eating excrement.

Psychologists have developed a “disgust scale” based on how queasy people would be in 27 situations, such as stepping barefoot on an earthworm or smelling urine in a tunnel. Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals. (To see how you weigh factors in moral decisions, take the tests at www.yourmorals.org.)

It appears that we start with moral intuitions that our brains then find evidence to support. For example, one experiment involved hypnotizing subjects to expect a flash of disgust at the word “take.” They were then told about Dan, a student council president who “tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students.”

The research subjects felt disgust but couldn’t find any good reason for it. So, in some cases, they concocted their own reasons, such as: “Dan is a popularity-seeking snob.”

More here. [Take the tests, they are interesting.]

Lives of Great Men (Selected)
Inuo Taguchi

Lenin

Lenin is relieved
that the bronze statue of himself was taken down.
In fact for half-a-century
he has wanted to lie down in Red Square
and listen to the Beach Boys,
on some fine Sunday afternoon, for instance,
with his family and close friends, of course.
But he could not confess this sort of thing to anyone,
so he has kept standing as a bronze statue.
Imagine yourself a bronze statue.
Just standing watching history
would wear on him.

Newton

Under an apple tree
Newton encountered the Law of Universal Gravitation
and instantly fell in love with her.

Ah, she was indeed his eternal lover –
the universal love and the universality which was love.
That night he applied all his skill
to the writing of a love letter
entitled,
'On the Law of Universal Gravitation and Her Passionate Function.'

The Law of Universal Gravitation, however,
didn't give a damn about Newton,
because she was crazy about the quadrille
which was popular at that time.

Superman

Superman is strolling the garden
in his wheelchair.
Life is cruelty itself,
though sunlight falling down at this moment
is grace itself.

When I was flying the sky
I was still very young.
I was flying, surely,
but I still didn't yet know
what it meant
to be flying the sky.

But now it's different.
To fly the sky is,
as it were,
to move your little finger,
and even at that no more than half-an-inch.

Life is like a sublime joke.
But it's funny,
isn't it? You have to get a wheelchair
and then you can become superman.

From The Boston Globe:

Without quite grasping the extent of our debt, we rely on writers to help explain the world to us. It's they who give us a feel for what it's like to fall in love, who give us words for describing the landscape around us, and who help us interpret the dynamics of our families. Such is their power that we can name whole slices of experience with adjectives built of their names. We speak of encountering, sometimes in the most unlikely settings, dynamics most succinctly described as “Proustian,” “Austenesque,” and “Kafkan.” Writers are our map-makers.

However, many contemporary writers are notably silent about a key area of our lives: our work. If a proverbial alien landed on earth and tried to figure out what human beings did with their time simply on the evidence of the literature sections of a typical bookstore, he or she would come away thinking that we devote ourselves almost exclusively to leading complex relationships, squabbling with our parents, and occasionally murdering people. What is too often missing is what we really get up to outside of catching up on sleep, which is going to work at the office, store, or factory.

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

If you own a dog, especially a dog that has anointed your favorite rug, you know that an animal is capable of apologizing. He can whimper and slouch and tuck his tail and look positively mortified — “I don’t know what possessed me.” But is he really feeling sorry? Could any animal feel true pangs of regret? Scientists once scorned this notion as silly anthropomorphism, and I used to side with the skeptics who dismissed these displays of contrition as variations of crocodile tears. Animals seemed too in-the-moment, too busy chasing the next meal, to indulge in much self-recrimination. If old animals had a song, it would be “My Way.”

Yet as new reports keep appearing — moping coyotes, rueful monkeys, tigers that cover their eyes in remorse, chimpanzees that second-guess their choices — the more I wonder if animals do indulge in a little paw-wringing. Your dog may not share Hamlet’s dithering melancholia, but he might have something in common with Woody Allen. The latest data comes from brain scans of monkeys trying to win a large prize of juice by guessing where it was hidden. When the monkeys picked wrongly and were shown the location of the prize, the neurons in their brain clearly registered what might have been, according to the Duke University neurobiologists who recently reported the experiment in Science.

More here.

Gabriel and Gilberto Colaco. CLP #1. 2006.

Acrylic on canvas.

More here.

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

It is spring in McAllen, Texas. The morning sun is warm. The streets are lined with palm trees and pickup trucks. McAllen is in Hidalgo County, which has the lowest household income in the country, but it’s a border town, and a thriving foreign-trade zone has kept the unemployment rate below ten per cent. McAllen calls itself the Square Dance Capital of the World. “Lonesome Dove” was set around here.

McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.

The explosive trend in American medical costs seems to have occurred here in an especially intense form. Our country’s health care is by far the most expensive in the world. In Washington, the aim of health-care reform is not just to extend medical coverage to everybody but also to bring costs under control. Spending on doctors, hospitals, drugs, and the like now consumes more than one of every six dollars we earn.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Coy friends are serving me fruit at their peril since I read Adam Leith Gollner’s passion-packed book on the subject. Presented with a dish of sliced lemons at a pancake party recently, I caused several female guests to cross their legs by explaining that Casanova used these same fruits (halved and squeezed) as contraceptive diaphragms, believing that the acidic pulp acted as a spermicide. And the other day a waiter almost dropped my sister’s creme brûlée when he heard me tell her that the conquistadors named the vanilla bean after the Latin word for vagina.

…

Today there are an estimated 240,000 to 500,000 fruit-bearing plant species with perhaps 70,000 to 80,000 of these being edible. But most of our food comes from only 20 crops. Puréeing together the science, history, art and politics of fruit, Gollner tells the tale of how humans took small and often relatively bitter morsels from the wild and cultivated increasingly large and succulent varieties. Then of how big agriculture and global markets required farmers to engineer fruits that could be picked before they were ripe, transported thousands of miles to stack uniformly and durably on supermarket shelves in all seasons, resulting in “Stepford Fruits: gorgeous replicants that look perfect, feel like silicon implants and taste like tennis balls, mothballs or mealy, juiceless cotton wads”.

More here.

Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause Of Dorm Fire

Photographer Richard Mosse first appeared on BLDGBLOG last year with his unforgettable visual tour through the air disaster simulations of the international transportation industry. He and I have since kept in touch —so, when Mosse returned from a trip to Iraq this spring, he emailed again with an unexpectedly intense, and hugely impressive, new body of work. These extraordinary images—published here for the first time—show the imperial palaces of Saddam Hussein converted into temporary housing for the U.S military. Vast, self-indulgent halls of columned marble and extravagant chandeliers, surrounded by pools, walls, moats, and, beyond that, empty desert, suddenly look more like college dormitories. Weight sets, flags, partition walls, sofas, basketball hoops, and even posters of bikini’d women have been imported to fill Saddam’s spatial residuum. The effect is oddly decorative, as if someone has simply moved in for a long weekend, unpacking an assortment of mundane possessions.

more from BLDGBLOG here (h/t Alan Koenig).

VIDEO games get a bad press. Many are unquestionably violent and, as has been the way with new media from novels to comic books to television, they have been accused of corrupting the moral fabric of youth. Nor are such accusations without merit. There is a body of research suggesting that violent games can lead to aggressive thoughts, if not to violence itself. But not all games are shoot-’em-ups, and what is less examined is whether those that reward more constructive behaviour also have lingering impacts. That, however, is starting to change. Two studies showing that video games have a bright side as well as a dark one have been carried out recently. One, to be published in June by the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, was conducted by Douglas Gentile, of Iowa State University’s media research laboratory. He and his colleagues tested the effects of playing so-called “pro-social” games on children and young adults in three countries.

more from The Economist here.

Parade
Tony Hoagland

Peter says if you’re going to talk about suffering
you have to mention pleasure too.

Like the way, on the day of the parade, on Forbes Avenue,
one hundred parking tickets flutter
under the windshield wipers of one hundred parked cars.

The accordion band will be along soon,
and the famous Flying Pittsburgettes,
and it’s summer and the sun is shining on the inevitable flags—

Something weird to admire this week on TV:
the handsome face of the white supremacist on trial.
How he looks right back at the lawyers, day after day
—never objecting, never making an apology.

I look at his calm, untroubled face
and think, That motherfucker is going to die white and right,
disappointing everyone like me
who thinks that punishment should be a kind of education.

My attitude is like what God says in the Bible:
Love your brother, or be destroyed.

Then Moses or somebody says back to God,
If I love you,
will you destroy my enemies?
and God says—this is in translation—, No Problemo.

Here, everyone is talking about the price of freedom,
and about how we as a people are united in our down payment.
about how we will fight to the very bottom of our bank account.

And the sky is so blue it looks like it may last forever
and the skinny tuba player goes oompahpah
and everybody cheers.

In the big store window of the travel agency downtown,
a ten-foot sign says, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.

The letters have been cut with scissors out of blue construction paper
and pasted carefully to the sign by someone’s hand.

What I want to know is, who will issue the ticket
for improper use of the collective pronoun?

What I want to know is, who will find and punish the maker
of these impossible promises?

…………….
from What Narcissism Means to Me; Greywolf Press, 2003

From The Guardian:

Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly. Yet in this fine short book, David Gardner makes the case that the clock really is running down. It is a fiery essay, but accurate and sincere. According to Gardner, a fifth of the world's population is falling into a despair of which the atrocities of Bin Laden and Zarqawi are mere symptoms. The fault lies with the failures of governments in the Middle East, the corpulent kings and republican thugs, corrupt generals and sinister internal security, and the bloody-minded Israelis. Yet the west, most notably the US and the UK, in their unprincipled support for autocracy and readiness to indulge or encourage corruption, have brought extremism and violence to their own frontiers and within them. “Unless,” Gardner writes, “the Arab countries and the broader Middle East can find a way out of this pit of autocracy, their people will be condemned to bleak lives of despair, humiliation and rage for a generation, adding fuel to a roaring fire in what is already the most combustible region in the world.

“It will be primarily up to the citizens of these countries to claw their way out of that pit. But the least they can expect from the west is not to keep stamping on their fingers.” Or, in a region where there are wars to suit every taste and purse, to start its own for no very good reason in Iraq. It is not that the Muslim peoples of the Middle East reject western values of democracy, liberty and fairness. They think, like Gandhi, that they would be a good idea.

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

To get to President Asif Ali Zardari's presidential palace in the heart of Islamabad for dinner is like running an obstacle course. Pakistan's once sleepy capital, full of restaurant-going bureaucrats and diplomats, is now littered with concrete barriers, blast walls, checkpoints, armed police, and soldiers; as a result of recent suicide bombings the city now resembles Baghdad or Kabul. At the first checkpoint, two miles from the palace, they have my name and my car's license number. There are seven more checkpoints to negotiate along the way.

Apart from traveling to the airport by helicopter to take trips abroad, the President stays inside the palace; he fears threats to his life by the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, who in December 2007 killed his wife, the charismatic Benazir Bhutto, then perhaps the country's only genuine national leader. Zardari's isolation has only added to his growing unpopularity, his indecisiveness, and the public feeling that he is out of touch. Even as most Pakistanis have concluded that the Taliban now pose the greatest threat to the Pakistani state since its creation, the president, the prime minister, and the army chief have, until recently, been in a state of denial of reality.

More here.

Jeff Foust in The Space Review:

Last week came word of something of a setback in the quest for understanding the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that is far more abundant in the universe than the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets, and people. An instrument on NASA’s Fermi spacecraft failed to detect a surge of electrons and positrons at high energies that was seen last year by a balloon-borne instrument. That peak had been thought to be the signature of the annihilation of weakly interacting massive particles (better known by their acronym, which is, yes, WIMP), a theoretical particle posited by some astrophysicists as the composition of dark matter. But with Fermi providing more and better data than the earlier experiment, that discovery may have been only a false alarm.

If things like WIMPs and dark matter (or its even more mysterious acquaintance, dark energy) leave your scratching your head, a good place to turn is Evalyn Gates’ new book, Einstein’s Telescope. Gates, the assistant director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, provides an overview of what we know—and what we don’t—about dark energy, dark matter, and related mysteries of the universe that’s accessible to those who can’t tell the difference between a WIMP and a MACHO—in the astronomical sense, at least.

More here.

From Rolling Stone:

There was some concern about compiling our latest Rolling Stone Hot List during an ice-cold era. But it seems that in these uncertain, gray days, we need what our Managing Editor Will Dana called “the sparkly and the sexy, the perfectly shaped diversions America leads the world in creating.”

As he notes, we haven't yet felt the cultural tectonic shift that one might expect from our current financial meltdown. Dark times inspire great art, and Will notes that the economic crunch of the '70s gave rise to punk, hip-hop and “downtown” culture. “So far, all we've gotten from this downturn is Twitter,” he writes in our Hot Issue. If cultural revolution has yet to arrive, hotness, it seems, still abounds, giving us the artists, movements and must-be places that comprise our 2009 Hot List.

Since we launched the Hot List in 1986, we've had our share of hits and misses (check our cover gallery to revisit all out past Hot Issues, from Angelina to Giselle to Britney). In 1988, we profiled “Hot Character Actor” Kevin Spacey, and we're particularly proud that in 1990, we introduced readers to a 23-year-old screenwriter named Jeffrey Abrams (you might know him now as Lost and Star Trek visionary J.J. Abrams). Of course, we've also missed the mark — in 1990, we thought Renny Harlin's hot streak would last, and the same issue that featured Abrams also declared Tevin Campbell “Hot Prodigy.”

More here.

June 21, 2009, NOTE: The winners have been announced. See here.

June 11, 2009, NOTE: See list of seven finalists by clicking here.

Dear Readers (and Writers!),

I have some exciting news to give you: in the interest of encouraging and rewarding good writing in the blogosphere, we have decided to start awarding four prizes every year in the respective areas of Science, Arts & Literature, Politics, and Philosophy for the best blog post in those fields. Here's how it's going to work:

Starting next month, the prizes will be awarded every year on the two solstices and the two equinoxes. So, we will announce the winner of the science prize on June 21, the arts and literature prize on September 22, the politics prize on December 21, and the philosophy prize on March 20, 2010.

About a month before the prize is to be announced we will solicit nominations of blog entries from our readers. The nominating period will last approximately one to two weeks. At the end of this time, we will open up the process to voting by our readers. After this period, we will take the top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add a wildcard entry of their choosing. And finally, a well-known intellectual from the field will pick the winner, runner up, and third place finisher from these, and will write some short comments on the winning entries.

Just for fun, the first place award will be called the “Top Quark,” and will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with two hundred dollars.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)

*

The 3QD Prize in Science, 2009, Judged by Steven Pinker

As I said, the winners of this prize will be announced on June 21, 2009, so we don't have as much time as we'd like for the nominating and voting processes. Here's the somewhat tight schedule:

Today:

• The nominating process is hereby declared open. Please nominate your favorite blog entry in the field of the natural and social sciences by placing the URL for the blogpost (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old from today. In other words, it must have been written after May 24, 2008.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog.
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, and this post, of course!

June 1, 2009

• The nominating process will end at midnight (NYC time) of this date, so this time around there is only a week to submit nominations.
• At some point on this day, the public voting will be opened.

June 8, 2009

• Public voting ends at midnight (NYC time).

June 21, 2009

• The winners are announced.

This year, the winners of the 3QD Prize in Science will be selected from the six finalists by Steven Pinker, who will also provide some comments about each of the three winning entries. We are honored to have him as our final judge, and would like to thank him warmly for his service.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Ingfei Chen in Smithsonian Magazine:

There was little chance of missing the elephant in the room. About a dozen years after Simba died at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, a half-inch slab of her yellowish, wrinkled, basketball-size brain was laid out before John Allman, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Preserved in formaldehyde, it looked like half a pancake, frozen solid on a misting bed of dry ice. Allman carefully sliced it using the laboratory equivalent of a deli meat cutter. Taking well over an hour, he carved off 136 paper-thin sections.

Allman was searching for a peculiar kind of brain cell that he suspects is a key to how the African elephant—like a human being—manages to stay attuned to the ever-shifting nuances of social interplay. These spindle-shaped brain cells, called von Economo neurons—named for the man who first described them—are found only in human beings, great apes and a handful of other notably gregarious creatures. Allman, 66, compares the brains of people and other animals to gain insight into the evolution of human behavior.

More here.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

Negating the truth about the Nakbah — the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from what became Israel in 1948 — has been a staple of Jewish-nationalist propaganda as long as I can remember: As a youngster in Habonim, I was told bubbemeis tales about foolish Arabs marching off into the wilderness like zombies after being hypnotized by radio broadcasts urging them to leave; a “miracle” on a par with the parting of the Red Sea that ostensibly gave the Zionist movement the “land without a people” about which it had fantasized. It should have been painfully obvious that this was a preposterous self-serving myth (which even then didn’t account for the fact that the ethnic cleansing was sealed by Israel in one of its founding laws that denied the right of any Arab absent from their property on the day of Israel’s creation to return to that property). But to suggest anything less than a miraculous conception and bloodless birth for the state of Israel was to deny its “legitimacy”, we were told. As international pressure grows for an historic reckoning between Israelis and Palestinians, the frenzy of denial and negation has intensified. Suddenly, Netanyahu is demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”, even though to do so requires that Palestinian refugees simply sign away their birthright, erase their history and identity. Even more bizarre, perhaps, is the effort by members of Israel’s parliament to outlaw commemoration of the Nakba.

More here. [Thanks to Usha Alexander.]