By looking at what we know about how society and commerce would slow down, and how people respond, it’s possible to envision what we might face. Unlike the 1930s, when food and clothing were far more expensive, today we spend much of our money on healthcare, child care, and education, and we’d see uncomfortable changes in those parts of our lives. The lines wouldn’t be outside soup kitchens but at emergency rooms, and rather than itinerant farmers we could see waves of laid-off office workers leaving homes to foreclosure and heading for areas of the country where there’s more work – or just a relative with a free room over the garage. Already hollowed-out manufacturing cities could be all but deserted, and suburban neighborhoods left checkerboarded, with abandoned houses next to overcrowded ones.

And above all, a depression circa 2009 might be a less visible and more isolating experience. With the diminishing price of televisions and the proliferation of channels, it’s getting easier and easier to kill time alone, and free time is one thing a 21st-century depression would create in abundance. Instead of dusty farm families, the icon of a modern-day depression might be something as subtle as the flickering glow of millions of televisions glimpsed through living room windows, as the nation’s unemployed sit at home filling their days with the cheapest form of distraction available.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

///
…between our arrivals and our
Departures, it is a strangely
guiltless territory
……………….— Marne L. Kilates

In Transit
Alvin Pang

With my wife in her usual high-altitude slump,
seat-belt fastened, the cabin lights dimmed
and bad comedy on the movie channel, I slip
into what one poet has termed the blameless country
of air travel. I’ve ploughed through several novels
this way, unperturbed, felt the heart-surge
when a particularly rousing phrase of Beethoven’s
coincides with the exact moment of take-off. Sometimes
the peace is so rare I wave off free champagne,
and in Economy the meals are never worth missing
the view for: sunset over the Grand Canyon, or the Pacific
flowing like silk brocade. Now we enter the sphere
of maps, a world abstracted and solid all at once.
As settlements snuggle up to rivers, and paddyfields
play endless checkers on terraced hillsides, there’s
space enough for long thoughts, wispy musings.
Do clouds, for instance, discharge their burdens in relief,
or do they, in their secret hearts, dream of the fallen?
And which is the life we regret, what was left behind
or the one to which we hurl at 800 km/h? Only
at such giddy velocities might we savour the wonder
of stasis, how the earth’s rotation keeps us easily
in place. Just as, if we knew the true evanescence
of a second, it would stop us in our tracks —
with indecision, if not physics. Yes, even in seat 34A,
risking thrombosis, with barely enough room to clap,
there’s time to ponder unseen forces, the invisible
lift beneath all our wings, only the first
human century with this luxury of boredom.
If the flight were any longer we’d resort to art.
Plot new routes to godhood. No surprise the Pyramids
(just visible beneath the cloud-cover on your left)
had tombs built like departure lounges, since
many of us too would opt to go to ground
this way — with such conducted ease, to the sound
of our preferred music in the company of strangers.
How good to set off so eager, yet unhurried, to arrive
watched for, and welcomed at the gates.

///

From Science:

Doctors may soon be able to use blood tests rather than invasive biopsies to figure out what type of brain tumors their patients have. The findings, which come thanks to new insights about how tumor cells communicate with their environment, may also bring physicians closer to the goal of more personalized medicine. Cells are chatty, constantly exchanging proteins or electrical signals with their neighbors. For example, tumor cells can signal nearby blood vessels to grow in their direction, thereby facilitating tumor growth. Previous research has shown that many cells, including cancer cells, communicate directly with one another by emitting tiny bubbles of cellular material called microvesicles. Their importance for communication between breast cancer cells prompted Johan Skog, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues to examine microvesicles secreted by glioblastoma, or brain tumor, cells.

Previous research had analyzed the protein and lipid content of glioblastoma microvesicles. But upon closer examination, the researchers also detected pieces of RNA. That made Skog and neurologist Xandra Breakefield, also of Harvard Medical School, wonder whether they could develop some sort of test for this genetic material. “We kind of had this wild idea that because these tumor cells are just pouring [out microvesicles], maybe we can actually see it in the blood,” Breakefield says. To test their hunch, the researchers isolated microvesicles from 30 frozen tumor samples and looked for mRNA from a particular growth receptor unique to glioblastomas. The mRNA was present in nearly half of the tumor samples and in 28% of blood samples that had been drawn from patients at the same time, the researchers report online this week in Nature Cell Biology.

More here.

Peter Dizikes in the Boston Globe:

It is a puzzle of evolution: If natural selection dictates that the fittest survive, why do we see altruism in nature? Why do worker bees or ants, for instance, refrain from competing with those around them, but instead search for food or build nests on behalf of their companions? Why do they sacrifice their own reproductive success for the good of the group?

In the 1960s, British biologist William Hamilton offered an explanation in a theory now called kin selection. When animals, often insects, help siblings or other relatives survive, they are enhancing the odds that their shared family genes will be passed on. In other words, the genes, not the individual or social group, are what counts in evolution.

Hamilton’s idea was eventually accepted by most biologists, and found an enthusiastic backer, at the time, in Edward O. Wilson, the renowned Harvard evolutionist.

That was then. Now, Wilson has changed his mind, startling colleagues by arguing that kin selection does not lead to altruism.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Last year, a team of researchers at Harvard made headlines with an experiment testing unconscious bias at hospitals. Doctors were shown the picture of a 50-year-old man — sometimes black, sometimes white — and asked how they would treat him if he arrived at the emergency room with chest pains indicating a possible heart attack. Then the doctors took a computer test intended to reveal unconscious racial bias. The doctors who scored higher on the bias test were less likely than the other doctors to give clot-busting drugs to the black patients, according to the researchers, who suggested addressing the problem by encouraging doctors to test themselves for unconscious bias. The results were hailed by other psychologists as some of the strongest evidence that unconscious bias leads to harmful discrimination.

But then two other researchers, Neal Dawson and Hal Arkes, pointed out a curious pattern in the data. Even though most of the doctors registered some antiblack bias, as defined by the researchers, on the whole doctors ended up prescribing the clot-busting drugs to blacks just as often as to whites. The doctors scoring low on bias had a pronounced preference for giving the drugs to blacks, while high-scoring doctors had a relatively small preference for giving the drugs to whites — meaning that the more “biased” doctors actually treated blacks and whites more equally.

More here.

David Berreby in Slate:

Last week, the New York Times told us Europe would not soon—indeed might never—see a political triumph like Obama’s. It described British politics as though Disraeli had never existed and painted a similar picture of mono-ethnic France.

Desolé, cher collegues, but one year after the far-off, sunny isle of Corsica was acquired by France in 1768, there was born there one Napoleon Bonaparte, whose heavy Italian accent made him seem even more exotic to la France profonde than his strange name. At least our president-elect, born on the far-off, sunny isle of Oahu two years after it became a U.S. state, pronounces English without the marked accent of, oh, the governor of California. And speaking of German accents, the Times thumb-sucker also foresaw that there would be no German Obama any time soon. Bad timing for them: Three days later, Germany’s Greens elected Cem Ozdemir, an ethnic Turk, as their new leader.

More here.

Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times:

One of the most cynical clichés in architecture is that poverty is good for preservation. The poor don’t bulldoze historic neighborhoods to make way for fancy new high-rises.

That assumption came to mind when I stepped off a plane here recently. Buffalo is home to some of the greatest American architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with major architects like Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright building marvels here. Together they shaped one of the grandest early visions of the democratic American city.

Yet Buffalo is more commonly identified with the crumbling infrastructure, abandoned homes and dwindling jobs that have defined the Rust Belt for the past 50 years. And for decades its architecture has seemed strangely frozen in time.

More here.

Killian Fox in the Times of London:

When you mention Assam, most people think of tea. Those on more familiar terms with the state – on the “Seven Sisters” peninsula that juts out from the northeast corner of India – will think of its beautiful national parks, abundant wildlife and the vast Brahmaputra river.

Assam is a charming place, as serene as it is lush and green, but it also harbours something so fearsome, so fiendishly powerful, that even the elephants flee from it in terror.

There is nothing at all serene about the bhut jolokia, the hottest chilli on earth. It registers an incredible 1,041,427 on the Scoville Heat Unit scale, more than double the score of the previous world record-holder (the red savina habanero).

It is 200 times hotter than Tabasco sauce. And yet, when you bite into a bhut jolokia, there is no pain at first, only a smoky flavour with an intense, apple-like sweetness. Then, after about 20 seconds, all hell breaks loose. I know this because I was foolish enough to try one.

More here.

Lauren Shaw. St.John River, Maine.

More here.

Posted with the artist’s permission.

Wendy Cadge offers some sound advice in the context of the retrenchment of rights in California, in The Immanent Frame:

There is also tremendous diversity around homosexuality and gay marriage among local religious leaders today…Personal exposure to gay and lesbian people in family networks, seminary contexts, and local congregations was the single most important factor shaping clergy’s supportive opinions. Diversity of opinion about homosexuality and gay marriage was evident not just across groups but within every religious group we studied.

Rather than pointing fingers at African-Americans or people of faith for passing Proposition 8, we who support gay marriage across the country need to recognize two things. First, the vote—52% voted yes and 48% voted no—in California was closer than you would expect based on national public opinion surveys about gay marriage. And second, this diversity of opinion exists within families, communities, churches, and racial and ethnic groups. This will not make those of us who lost the right to marry feel better. This is a loss. But as we make our signs and plan our protests, we must do so in groups that include everyone who supports gay marriage—African Americans, people of faith, and others—rather than pointing fingers. Marriage is not a finite resource. Unfortunately, neither is blame.

The text can be found here and the audio can be heard here.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

[H/t: Beau Willimon]

Via Rodrik, Bob Geldof in the FT:

Just as the crisis has been international because of globalisation, any new reforms will also need to be international. As Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has remarked, a modernised multilateralism must put global development on a par with international finance. The next round of globalisation must be one where economic opportunities and responsibilities are more widely shared.

This moment of flux offers the chance to revive ideas that have been around for some time but have been heavily resisted. First is the Tobin tax. In 1978 James Tobin, the Nobel economist, proposed a tiny tax of 0.5 per cent or less on all foreign currency ex­change transactions to deter speculation and pay for development. Some calculate this tax could yield $375bn (€289bn, £253bn) annually. Even at half that amount, it is on a par with the amount that should already have been directed to development globally. This levy, even if it is cut to 0.005 per cent would limit volatility in small economies whilst generating enormous sums for the poor. It would also cost taxpayers nothing.

Second, we need to institutionalise the means by which profits from carbon trading can be channelled to development. As Germany has already shown, this is a vast market. It involves creating incentives for polluters to pollute less while generating resources for development. It is a smart, painless way to create revenues and jobs while bringing the poor into the global economy. A Europe-wide scheme is planned, but in Washington it should be seized upon as an effective mechanism for growth and development. It, like the Tobin tax, is tax neutral to the consumer while curbing overproduction of carbon dioxide and helping the world’s poorest.

Third, this new round of globalisation must not be accompanied by a return to protectionism. Make Poverty History called for progress on debt, aid and trade. Trade is the area in which the least has been delivered.

Ivan Klima in Eurozine:

In 1967, I worked, together with a number of fellow writers, on the literary weekly Literární noviny, which had become by then a kind of opposition mouthpiece. Above all else, it was our experience with censorship that led us, at the June 1967 Writers’ Congress, to devote so much space to issues of power and methods of suppressing freedom of speech. The speeches made on that occasion came to be viewed as the prelude to the Prague Spring of 1968.

Although Literární noviny acted rebelliously, it could not escape the constraints of the socialist system: it had its due quota of newsprint, and it was distributed by PNS (Postovní novinová sluzba, the postal news service),the only body set up for the purpose. In its advertising, PNS prided itself on importing some 5,000 titles from the Soviet Union and other “friendly” countries. Since Literární noviny was a licensed periodical, the editor received daily reports from CTK (the Czechoslovak Press Agency), including those to which only a privileged minority of functionaries and journalists had access. These reports, duplicated on red paper, usually carried commentaries broadcast by Radio Free Europe, which was otherwise subject to constant jamming, or translations of articles that had appeared in leading west European or American newspapers and magazines and concerned countries of the Soviet bloc. We were granted access to this kind of information so that we could better counteract “enemy propaganda”. We were not minded to counteract it; for us, these “red reports” were a major source of information and knowledge.

Our most important and obvious source was, however, the very reality in which we lived.

Dragan Klaic in signandsight:

Always when in Moscow I think of Walter Benjamin and his “Moscow Diary”, a record of love, pain and misery in a shabby city. In the past weeks I had been reading his “Memories of a Berlin Childhood” and the evening before I had eaten in a cafe Dona Clara in Maloya Bronya, decorated with his 1920 Berlin photos. So I imagined how I would explain present-day Moscow to the ghost of Walter Benjamin, were he to come down and sit with me here in the back seat of the Mitsubishi 4×4.

What would Benjamin want to know and how would he analyse the latest twists of the post-communist transition? When Benjamin came to Russia in December 1926, pursing his erotic fascination for the Latvian poetess Asja Lacis, Russia had abandoned its New Economic Policy, a brief flirt with small-scale capitalism, and was sliding into the long, cruel night of cultural destruction and terror. Benjamin’s peregrinations through Moscow’s streets and courtyards mark the traces of an old city, soon to be erased to make place for the huge edifices of Stalinist architecture. The Berlin writer saw that the communist project was hopelessly stuck, just like the Mitsubishi in traffic.

Now, 82 years later, Russia is about to take leave of the Putin-era prosperity, shored up by high energy prices, and to slide, with the rest of the world, into the turmoil of protracted economic recession. Stability, prosperity and the 7% annual rise of the GNP has brought little progress to this distant Moscow periphery other than a few Western cars, some small-scale consumerism, patched up kiosks, countless construction sites and street repairs that only exacerbate traffic congestion.

Over at his weblog:

I was not expecting any substantial agreement on international regulatory coordination or any semblance of a new Bretton Woods, so I am not disappointed on that score.  What I was looking for were three things: (i) coordination on fiscal stimulus; (ii) a commitment to provide more liquidity support, as needed, to prevent a further spread of the crisis to emerging nations; and (iii) a clear commitment not to engage in trade protection, with a monitoring mechanism to ensure the pledge is being observed.

How does the statement do in these regards?  So-so.  There is no coordination in the fiscal arena, the promises made to emerging markets are vague, and even though there is a clear statement on protection and export subsidization, there is no monitoring or enforcement mechanism.

What about the longer-term issues? The fundamental dilemma of financial globalization is that regulation and supervision remains national while financial markets are international.

Disquisitions about public intellectuals usually conclude that they ain’t what they used to be. Subtitles from recent books on the topic include A Study of Decline and An Endangered Species? Indeed, the major point of debate is dating the precise start of the decline and fall. For some critics, Götterdämmerung started in the 1950s; for others, the 1930s. More-curmudgeonly writers place the date earlier, stretching back to the heyday of John Stuart Mill or even the death of Socrates.

The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that “the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it’s all ‘gotcha’ commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible.” David Frum complains that “the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world whose controversies and feuds are … absorbing.” David Brooks laments, “People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.”

But these critics fail to recognize how the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing has partially reversed a trend that many cultural critics have decried — what Russell Jacoby called the “professionalization and academization” of public intellectuals.

more from The Chronicle Review here.

Fifty years before van Gogh began doing his night paintings, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in the opening chapter of Nature: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!”

The brilliance of the MoMA exhibit, which has been organized with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (where it will go after it closes in New York on January 5), is that it captures what Emerson regarded as the miraculous, letting us see how van Gogh’s painting technique evolved over the course of the 1880s.

Van Gogh’s fascination with the night began with his “Twilight, Old Farmhouses in Loosduinen” (1883) and “Lane of Poplars at Sunset,” painted a few months later in 1884. The flat brushwork in these paintings is unremarkable, but the orange sun nearing the horizon in “Lane of Poplars at Sunset” hints at the change about to come in van Gogh’s work. A year later in “The Potato Eaters,” the direction in which van Gogh was headed becomes evident and so, too, does the fact that he was in the process of changing the sentimental approach to rural life that was so central to such French paintings as Jean-Francois Millet’s “The Sower” and Jules Breton’s “The Feast of St. John.”

more from Dissent here.

In 1981, singer, actress Olivia Newton-John is performing in a musical video for her song “Physical.” Olivia Newton-John is in the gym, not sweating, wearing headband and leotard, doing aerobics. Why is she not sweating? To answer this question, we need to reverse it and ask: Why are we not wearing a headband and leotard? And why are we sweating?

Then, I think, the meaning is clear. We are sitting in front of the TV, being couch potato, watching the illusion of nudity—which is the leotard—and the symbolism of discipline: the headband. She is doing all the work for us. She is getting physical.

With that in our minds, today we are going to do an upper-body workout with weights and the machines. OK!

more from McSweeney’s here.

Odette England in lensculture:

The Ishihara Color Test is the most common clinical test for red-green color vision deficiencies in humans. It comprises 38 plates, each containing a circle of dots randomized in color and size, which form a number that is visible to people with normal color vision. However, the number in the dots is invisible, or difficult to see, for those with a red-green color vision defect. But, like mirages and memories, the Ishihara numbers are just optical phenomena. Each shows an image of things elsewhere, where refraction and reflection coexist and, to some extent, can be captured on camera.

My project, Attentional Landscapes, undertakes quasi-scientific experiments by photographically stripping and manipulating intended meaning and function.

More here.

Martha Nussbaum in The Boston Review:

On August 16, 2008, Martha Nussbaum—University of Chicago professor and Boston Review contributing editor—became a bat mitzvah. Part of the ceremony is the d’var Torah: a talk by the bat mitzvah on a section of the Torah portion (parashah) and the haftarah (pl. haftarot, a biblical reading accompanying a thematically related Torah portion). Nussbaum’s talk is reproduced here.

When we are babies, we are very needy and we experience a great deal of pain. We long to be held and comforted. We long for a world in which every pain is nullified, every separation suspended by an embrace. That means that we want to be the center of the universe. Because, after all, the only way we would ever get immediate relief of every pain would be to turn others into our slaves. At first, our only awareness of others is as dimly seen forces that minister to our needs. When they do so, they can be sort of loved. (I say “sort of,” because it is not really love when an infant welcomes the breast or runs to be comforted.) When they do not minister to our needs, when they obstinately go their own separate way and fail to meet some imperative of nurture or holding, we feel rage. We want people to be the way we need them to be. Freud called the infant “His Majesty the Baby” for good reason: babies, like kings, do not understand that other people are real; they just want to rule them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, commenting on the tendency of small children to make slaves of their parents, saw here a major threat to the very idea of a social order based on justice and political equality.

The personal call for comfort, in its infantile form, is sheer narcissism. Unreformed, it will surely defeat any thought of justice, since it does not even involve the understanding that other people are real.

More here.