Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I remember hearing Gang Starr for the first time. I was in my friend's garage, the one at his mom's house in South Central L.A. that he'd converted into a hangout spot, which was the fashion at the time. The neighborhood dogs were barking pointlessly in all the yards and the LAPD helicopters chop-chop-chopped the sky, ever present. It was a warm day, as I recall, and the sound coming out of the garage was damn smooth. I liked the raspy voice of the MC. He was rapping about the streets, which was also the fashion. He wasn't just bragging, rhyming about how hard he and his crew were. But he wasn't wagging a finger in condemnation, either. There was a balance to the song, something real from the standpoint of someone who knows. Like something Johnny Cash would have understood.

The song was “Just to Get a Rep” and the MC went by the name of Guru. Guru dropped into a coma two weeks ago after a heart attack related to his fight with cancer. On April 19, he died.

“Just to Get a Rep” might not be the best Gang Starr song, but it is the one I'll always listen to with a special fondness. One of the difficult things about doing hip-hop in the late ’80s/early ’90s was navigating the whole gangster rap thing. Did you try to out-gangsta the other guys? Did you go off in a completely different direction like the post-hippie sound of De La Soul? The gangsta rap persona was a bit overwhelming for any young MC trying to create a sound and an identity. Guru understood all that. “Just to Get a Rep” had a streety edge to it; Guru was down. Still, it was clear that he saw the tragedy and ugliness of the gangster life. Plus he wore that Black Muslim cap and he'd throw out fancy words, complicated diction. Guru once rhymed “mic” with “teletype.” I heard someone refer to him once as the “wise uncle.” I like to think of Guru that way. Just like your wise uncle, Guru was dangerously close to being full of shit, getting a little too self-righteous. But he always reined it back in the nick of time. “Jazz Thing,” the song made famous by Mo' Better Blues, is preachy and didactic but redeemed, nevertheless, by the delightful phrase, “Theolonious Monk, a melodious thunk.”

More here.

The Waters

Poet, oracle and wit
like unsuccessful anglers by
the ponds of apperception sit,
Baiting with the wrong request
The vectors of their interest;
At nightfall tell the anglers lie.

With time in tempest everywhere,
To rafts of frail assumption cling
the saintly and the insincere;
Enraged phenomena bear down
In overwhelming waves to drown
Both sufferer and suffering.

The waters long to hear our question put
Which would release their longed-for answer, but.

by W.H. Auden
from Selected Poems,
Vintage Books, 1972

From The Washington Post:

Fear not, for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy: Philip Pullman's novel about Jesus is not quite as shrill as his public statements on religion would suggest. Choosing a vocal atheist and best-selling British fantasy writer to retell the story of the Gospels was clearly an answer to some publicist's prayer, but for all its satanic fanfare and heretical rejiggering, “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” is — God forbid — kind of inspiring. It even manages to convey a message that's always been central to Christian thought.

…

So what does Pullman do with the greatest story ever told? Essentially, he condenses the four Gospels, following the basic outline they provide of Jesus's life. Indeed, some of the text here — such as his simple, beautifully rendered Sermon on the Mount — will strike Christians as very familiar. Again and again, he displays a marvelous sense of the elemental power of Jesus's instructions and parables. Even when he transforms the canonical stories to match his atheist perspective, he emphasizes the basic Christian theme of universal love.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Why do some men and women cheat on their partners while others resist the temptation? To find the answer, a growing body of research is focusing on the science of commitment. Scientists are studying everything from the biological factors that seem to influence marital stability to a person’s psychological response after flirting with a stranger. Their findings suggest that while some people may be naturally more resistant to temptation, men and women can also train themselves to protect their relationships and raise their feelings of commitment. Recent studies have raised questions about whether genetic factors may influence commitment and marital stability. Hasse Walum, a biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, studied 552 sets of twins to learn more about a gene related to the body’s regulation of the brain chemical vasopressin, a bonding hormone.

Over all, men who carried a variation in the gene were less likely to be married, and those who had wed were more likely to have had serious marital problems and unhappy wives. Among men who carried two copies of the gene variant, about a third had experienced a serious relationship crisis in the past year, double the number seen in the men who did not carry the variant. Although the trait is often called the “fidelity gene,” Mr. Walum called that a misnomer: his research focused on marital stability, not faithfulness. “It’s difficult to use this information to predict any future behavior in men,” he told me. Now he and his colleagues are working to replicate the findings and conducting similar research in women.

More here.

Margaret Eby in Salon:

As it turns out, much of what you think about the state of the American marriage is wrong: Half of marriages don’t end in divorce; married people don’t have less sex than their single counterparts and — surprise! — fighting can actually be beneficial to your relationship. That is what Tara Parker-Pope, a health journalist and the woman behind the New York Times' Well blog, discovered while researching her new book, “For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage.” In the book, Parker-Pope argues that the marital bond isn't nearly as mysterious as you might believe, and unlike the vast majority of authors on the subject, she uses credible scientific research to back up her claims about everything from sex to housework.

As “For Better” points out, researchers found that couples in lasting marriages have at least five small positive interactions (touching, smiling, paying a compliment) for every negative one (sneering, eye rolling, withdrawal). When the ratio drops, the risk of divorce increases. Snoring and other sleep problems can contribute enormously to marital unhappiness. How you treat your partner during the first three minutes of a fight determines whether the argument will be good or bad for your marriage — launching a volley of personal criticisms is worse than opening up a discussion with a complaint. It’s these small but recognizable actions, claims Parker-Pope, that distinguish a marriage bound for splitsville from couples who stay together.

More here.

Victor Man. Male White Shirt. 2005.

Oil on wood.

More here and here.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in the New York Times:

We love stories as much as we need them, but a funny thing has happened to departments of literature. The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed up as Theory. The situation seems to call for a story, and one written in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, the grand chronicler of the tragicomic struggle between humans and logic.

Rumors had reached us of a doctrine called Theory emanating from distant corners of the university. We in the Department of Philosophy understood it immediately as a grand hoax. I will not dwell on my particular amusement, in which I was so tragically at odds with my collaborator, Theo Rhee. This is the story not of my particular emotions but rather of Theory. Suffice it to say that the self-parody of the appellation, singular and majuscule as if affixed in Plato’s firmament, appeared to rule out all interpretations competing with that of shenanigan. So, too, did the buffoonery of the language, phraseology bloated past the point of grotesqueness. Above all, what convinced us that we had an advanced absurdist on our hands was the localization of Theory to departments of literature, the very experts steeped in the collective genius of expression, whom we judged to be as likely to embrace violations of the laws of sense and felicity as physicists to make merry with violations of the laws of nature. We looked to these colleagues to explain a poem to us, not to tell us our epistemology.

More here.

From the physics arXiv blog at Technology Review:

In 1938, the physicist Frank Benford made an extraordinary discovery about numbers. He found that in many lists of numbers drawn from real data, the leading digit is far more likely to be a 1 than a 9. In fact, the distribution of first digits follows a logarithmic law. So the first digit is likely to be 1 about 30 per cent of time while the number 9 appears only five per cent of the time.

That's an unsettling and counterintuitive discovery. Why aren't numbers evenly distributed in such lists? One answer is that if numbers have this type of distribution then it must be scale invariant. So switching a data set measured in inches to one measured in centimetres should not change the distribution. If that's the case, then the only form such a distribution can take is logarithmic.

But while this is a powerful argument, it does nothing to explan the existence of the distribution in the first place.

Then there is the fact that Benford Law seems to apply only to certain types of data. Physicists have found that it crops up in an amazing variety of data sets. Here are just a few: the areas of lakes, the lengths of rivers, the physical constants, stock market indices, file sizes in a personal computer and so on.

However, there are many data sets that do not follow Benford's law, such as lottery and telephone numbers.

What's the difference between these data sets that makes Benford's law apply or not? It's hard to escape the feeling that something deeper must be going on.

Today, Lijing Shao and Bo-Qiang Ma at Peking University in China provide a new insight into the nature of Benford's law. They examine how Benford's law applies to three kinds of statistical distributions widely used in physics.

More here.

Cyril Almeida in Dawn:

The intensification of the American air campaign in Pakistan — 32 drone strikes this year alone — has sharpened debate in Pakistan and the US over the incidence of civilian casualties.

Paradoxically, however, near the locus of the attacks, the Waziristan agencies, where 95 per cent of the strikes have occurred, there has been little sign of protest, and anecdotal evidence suggests locals may actually be in favour of the strikes.

No reporter or official was willing to talk on the record about the strikes; however, the various accounts offered were strikingly similar and were corroborated by Pakistani and American analysts.

Referring to the lack of protests, a reporter claimed: “Imran Khan and the (Jamaat-i-Islami) are always talking about mass civilian casualties. But in Peshawar, Charsadda, Tank, Bannu, nowhere in the areas adjacent to the tribal agencies where attacks have been common have there been protests. They simply don’t exist.”

A senior journalist averred that many politicians protesting the drone strikes were guilty of dissembling: “Privately all the Fata members of parliament support the strikes. They can’t say it publicly because of the politics involved, but off the record they claim the strikes are great.”

More here.

Paul Bloom in The NYT Magazine:

Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings? From Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists have long argued that we begin life as amoral animals. One important task of society, particularly of parents, is to turn babies into civilized beings — social creatures who can experience empathy, guilt and shame; who can override selfish impulses in the name of higher principles; and who will respond with outrage to unfairness and injustice. Many parents and educators would endorse a view of infants and toddlers close to that of a recent Onion headline: “New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths.” If children enter the world already equipped with moral notions, why is it that we have to work so hard to humanize them?

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.

Marcia Angell in the Boston Review with responses from Adriane Fugh-Berman, David Korn, Howard Brody, Dan W. Brock, Emma D’Arcy, Suzanne Gordon, and David Bollier.

In May of 2000, shortly before I stepped down as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, I wrote an editorial entitled, “Is Academic Medicine for Sale?” It was prompted by a clinical trial of an antidepressant called Serzone that was published in the same issue of the Journal.

The authors of that paper had so many financial ties to drug companies, including the maker of Serzone, that a full-disclosure statement would have been about as long as the article itself, so it could appear only on our Web site. The lead author, who was chairman of the department of psychiatry at Brown University (presumably a full-time job), was paid more than half a million dollars in drug-company consulting fees in just one year. Although that particular paper was the immediate reason for the editorial, I wouldn’t have bothered to write it if it weren’t for the fact that the situation, while extreme, was hardly unique.

Among the many letters I received in response, two were especially pointed. One asked rhetorically, “Is academic medicine for sale? These days, everything is for sale.” The second went further: “Is academic medicine for sale? No. The current owner is very happy with it.” The author didn’t feel he had to say who the current owner was.

The boundaries between academic medicine—medical schools, teaching hospitals, and their faculty—and the pharmaceutical industry have been dissolving since the 1980s, and the important differences between their missions are becoming blurred. Medical research, education, and clinical practice have suffered as a result.

Academic medical centers are charged with educating the next generation of doctors, conducting scientifically important research, and taking care of the sickest and neediest patients. That’s what justifies their tax-exempt status. In contrast, drug companies—like other investor-owned businesses—are charged with increasing the value of their shareholders’ stock. That is their fiduciary responsibility, and they would be remiss if they didn’t uphold it. All their other activities are means to that end. The companies are supposed to develop profitable drugs, not necessarily important or innovative ones, and paradoxically enough, the most profitable drugs are the least innovative. Nor do drug companies aim to educate doctors, except as a means to the primary end of selling drugs. Drug companies don’t have education budgets; they have marketing budgets from which their ostensibly educational activities are funded.

This profound difference in missions is often deliberately obscured—by drug companies because it’s good public relations to portray themselves as research and educational institutions, and by academics because it means they don’t have to face up to what’s really going on.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Raymond Geuss discusses the place of utopian thinking in political philosophy and its relation to realism in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. The conversation touches on wishful thinking, ideology and Foucault's notion of genealogy.

Listen to Raymond Geuss on Realism and Utopianism in Political Philosophy

Listen to an earlier Philosophy Bites interview of Raymond Geuss on Real Politics

[H/t: Andrew Sullivan]

From The Boston Globe:

You’re not likely to hear about this from your doctor, but fake medical treatment can work amazingly well. For a range of ailments, from pain and nausea to depression and Parkinson’s disease, placebos–whether sugar pills, saline injections, or sham surgery–have often produced results that rival those of standard therapies. In a health care industry fueled by ever newer and more dazzling cures, this phenomenon is usually seen as background noise, or even as something of an annoyance. For drug companies, the placebo effect can pose an obstacle to profits–if their medications fail to outperform placebos in clinical trials, they won’t get approved by the FDA. Patients who benefit from placebos might understandably wonder if the healing isn’t somehow false, too. But as evidence of the effect’s power mounts, members of the medical community are increasingly asking an intriguing question: if the placebo effect can help patients, shouldn’t we start putting it to work? In certain ways, placebos are ideal drugs: they typically have no side effects and are essentially free. And in recent years, research has confirmed that they can bring about genuine improvements in a number of conditions. An active conversation is now under way in leading medical journals, as bioethicists and researchers explore how to give people the real benefits of pretend treatment.

In February, an important paper was published in the British medical journal the Lancet, reviewing the discoveries about the placebo effect and cautiously probing its potential for use by doctors. In December, the Michael J. Fox Foundation announced plans for two projects to study the promise of placebo in treating Parkinson’s. Even the federal government has taken an interest, funding relevant research in recent years.

But any attempt to harness the placebo effect immediately runs into thorny ethical and practical dilemmas.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The India of Hobson-Jobson has also found a new global audience. A film such as Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding is typical of the world's new English culture. The Indian bridegroom has a job in Houston. The wedding guests jet in from Melbourne and Dubai and speak in a mishmash of English and Hindi. Writing in the Sunday Times, Dominic Rushe noted that Bollywood English is “hard to reproduce in print, but feels something like this: “Yudhamanyus ca vikranta uttanaujas ca viryanavan: he lives life in the fast lane.” Every English-speaking visitor to India watches with fascination the facility with which contemporary Indians switch from Hindi or Gujarati into English, and then back into a mother tongue. In 2009, the film Slumdog Millionaire took this a stage further. Simon Beaufoy's script, a potpourri of languages, adapted from an Indian novel, was shot in Mumbai, with a British and Indian cast, by Scottish director Danny Boyle, but launched worldwide with an eye on Hollywood's Oscars, where it eventually cleaned up.

India illustrates the interplay of British colonialism and a booming multinational economy. Take, for instance, the 2006 Man Booker prize. First, the result was broadcast on the BBC World Service from Delhi to Vancouver. The winner was The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, an Indian-born writer who had attended writing classes in New York. So far removed from any English experience, though steeped in its literary tradition, was The Inheritance of Loss that, finally, the British critic John Sutherland was moved to describe Desai's work as “a globalised novel for a globalised world”. The writer herself is emblematic of the world's new culture: educated in Britain and America, she wrote her novel in her mother Anita Desai's house in the foothills of the Himalayas, and boasts on her website of feeling “no alienation or dislocation” in her transmigration between three continents.

More here.

Robert Fisk in The Independent:

How many Independent readers can name a single man imprisoned in the Arab gulags? How many tourists to Egypt know that in the Tora prison complex, prison guards have forced inmates to rape each other? How many men have been “renditioned” to Egypt and Syria and Morocco by the Americans or by our Muslim “allies”? So this week, let’s be specific. Take the cases of Bahaa Mustafa Joughel, Syrian identity card number 01020288992, and Mohamed Aiman Abo Attot, Syrian ID no 01020265346. Haven’t heard of them, have you?

Here, according to their families, are their stories. Bahaa Joughel, born in Damascus in 1976, is married, has two children and used to live in Pakistan with his family, his sister and her daughters. A partial cripple, Joughel worked on computers and ran a small IT company from his home. Again, according to his family, he engaged in no political activities. On Jan 30, 2002, Pakistani security police raided their home in Islamabad, apparently under the orders of a US officer. Joughel disappeared for five months, his family told only that he was being “investigated” by the Americans. But the Joughel family was later shocked to learn that he had been “renditioned” to Syria scarcely three months after his arrest – on May 4, 2002, to be precise – and jailed at the “Palestine” branch of Syrian military intelligence. This institution makes the adjective “notorious” irrelevant. He spent 20 months in underground solitary confinement – tortured in his grave-like concrete cabin, his sight damaged by his confinement, just as Canadian Maher Arar was after the Americans sent him to Syria around the same time – before being transferred to Sednaya prison. He was released on 12 February 2005, but was forbidden to leave Syria and then re-arrested on Christmas Eve the same year. No charges have ever been made against him.

More here.