Colson Whitehead in the New York Times:

I never thought I’d see the day. What were the chances that someone who looked like me would come to lead the most powerful nation on earth? Slim.

Skinny Black Guys of my parents’ generation pinned their hopes on Sammy Davis Jr. His was a big-tent candidacy, rallying Skinny Black Guys, the Rat Pack and the Jewish vote in one crooning, light-footed package. He won South Carolina, but he never gathered momentum. In the end, the Candy Man couldn’t.

No one stepped up for a long time. Michael Jackson was black and skinny, but also pretty weird, and after a while he wasn’t even black any more, although he did retain his beanpole silhouette. We thought we had a winner in Chris Rock, but then he started in with his infamous “There are Russians, and then there are … Georgians” routine and we decided he was too raw for the national stage. So we waited. Some lost faith. Others gorged themselves on protein shakes, believing that America might accept a black mesomorph. And some of us kept hoping. We were hungry for change, if not brunch.

More here.

Also over at Philosophy Bites:

Raymond Geuss wants political philosophers to focus on real politics. In this interview  for Philosophy Bites  he explains why he believes philosophers such as Robert Nozick and John Rawls were fundamentally misguided in the way they approached political philosophy. Geuss is in conversation with Nigel Warburton. The introduction is by David Edmonds.

Listen to Raymond Geuss on Real Politics

Well worth listening to, over at Philosophy Bites.

What is the state and how should it be organised? Quentin Skinner sheds light on Thomas Hobbes‘ answers to these fundamental questions in political philosophy in this latest episode of Philosophy Bites.

Listen to Quentin Skinner on Hobbes

Read transcript of Quentin Skinner on Hobbes

The Wittgensteins, ensconced in their grand Winter Palace in fin-de-siècle Vienna, were hardly a model family. The father, Karl , was a brutal autocrat as well as a high-class crook. He was an engineer by vocation, and his son Ludwig would later do some original work in aeronautics at Manchester University. A fabulously wealthy steel magnate, Karl rigged prices, bleeding his workers dry and doing much the same to his timorous wife Leopoldine. She once lay awake all night, agonised by an ugly wound in her foot but terrified of moving an inch in case she disturbed her irascible husband. She was an emotionally frigid mother and a neurotically dutiful wife, from whom all traces of individual personality had been violently erased.

The family was a seething cauldron of psychosomatic disorders. Leopoldine was afflicted by terrible leg pains and eventually went blind. Her children had their problems too. Helene was plagued by stomach cramps; Gretl was beset by heart palpitations and sought advice from Sigmund Freud about her sexual frigidity; Hermine and Jerome both had dodgy fingers; Paul suffered from bouts of madness; and little Ludwig was scarcely the most well balanced of souls. Almost all the males of the family were seized from time to time by bouts of uncontrollable fury that bordered on insanity.

more from The Guardian here.

There is an unwittingly funny passage in the Spanish edition of Ignacio Echevarría’s introduction to “El Secreto del Mal,” a still-untranslated collection of Roberto Bolaño’s stories, a passage that could easily have been cribbed from one of Jorge Luis Borges’ metafictions or, more to the point, from one of Bolaño’s. Echevarría observes that Bolaño’s work is “governed by a poetics of incompleteness.” Bolaño tends to interrupt his stories with other stories, and those with other tales in turn. He spends page after page building tension, then mischievously buries the climax or neglects it altogether. This makes it difficult to determine, Echevarría laments, which “among the pieces that he did not end up publishing can be considered finished.”

A good trick. Less funny, though, than it could be, because we know that “2666,” Bolaño’s last and greatest novel, was not completed to the author’s satisfaction when he died at 50 in 2003 while awaiting a liver transplant. “There are more than a thousand pages that I have to correct,” he told a Chilean newspaper a month before his death. “It’s a job for a 19th century miner.” Despite the book’s unfinished state, Bolaño left instructions that the five subsections that comprise “2666” be released separately, hoping this arrangement would better provide for his children. Fortunately, his heirs disobeyed him and published “2666” as a single giant work, strange and marvelous and impossibly funny, bursting with melancholy and horror.

more from the LA Times here.

Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) is a painter for those who expect disappointment from life and wouldn’t be happy if things turned out any other way. He did not invent neurotic melancholia or bittersweet irony, but many of the delicate young men and women sashaying through his paintings, whether in pastoral or urban settings, seem precociously aware of acting in a world whose uncertain meaning they don’t dare to fathom.

A Frenchman who serves to define European Rococo, Watteau also has the ability to be continually modern. As with Giorgione and Vermeer, the paucity of biographical facts attracted Romantic mythomancers. (It helped that Watteau died young, at 37, of tuberculosis.) In 1873-74 the Goncourt brothers published an influential essay about him in their history of 18th-century art. The aesthetic movement elevated him higher still. His paintings inspired numerous literary works, including a story by Walter Pater and a poem by Proust.

Jed Perl is another smitten writer.

more from the NY Times here.

///
Want
Joan Larkin

She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts
of last century’s lesbians; I want a spotless
apartment, a fast computer. She wants a woodstove,
three cords of ash, an axe; I want
a clean gas flame. She wants a row of jars:
oats, coriander, thick green oil;
I want nothing to store. She wants pomianders,
linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks. She wants Wellesley
reunions. I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s
reflection.  She wants shrimp and sweat and salt;
she wants chocolate. I want a raku bowl,
steam rising from rice. She wants goats,
chickens, children. Feeding and weeping. I want
wind from the river freshening cleared rooms.
She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies.
I want words like lasers. She wants a mother’s
tenderness. Touch ancient as the river.
I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.
She’s in her city, meeting
her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late
with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells thinking
of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.
We’ve kissed all weekend; we want
to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

From Cold River (Painted Leaf Press, 1997)
///

From The Root:

Dear Brother Obama,

You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be struck down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear. And yet, this observation is not intended to burden you, for you are of a different time, and, indeed, because of all the relay runners before you, North America is a different place. It is really only to say: Well done. We knew, through all the generations, that you were with us, in us, the best of the spirit of Africa and of the Americas. Knowing this, that you would actually appear, someday, was part of our strength. Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about.

I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. And so on. One gathers that your family is large. We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.

I would further advise you not to take on other people’s enemies.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

During the past few decades, a mounting body of evidence has shown that animals possess a number of cognitive traits once thought to be uniquely human. Bees “talk” through complex dances and sounds; birds act as “social tutors,” teaching song repertoires to their young; monkeys use tools and can sort abstract symbols into categories. Yet the more scientists learn about the similarities between human and animal thought, the greater the need to explain the dramatic divide. Are the human faculties associated with language simply an advanced version of capacities that are found in animals, or do they represent something that is qualitatively new?

This puzzle has drawn the attention of professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology, and biological anthropology Marc Hauser, who has written widely on human and animal cognition. Drawing on a range of recent studies that link the fields of linguistics, biology, and psychology, Hauser has attempted to isolate the aspects of human thought that account for what he terms “humaniqueness.” He maintains that even though human brains have inherited many of the raw abilities observed in nonhuman animal species, a divergence arises from the ways in which multiple capacities interact in humans, allowing them to convert information into myriad forms to serve infinitely diverse ends.

More here.

Vijay Prashad in CounterPunch:

In 2004, I ran into Shah at the South Asian Awareness Network conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At an earlier panel I questioned her links to the Hindu Right, and so asked people to be wary about her organization, Indicorps. She was furious, and we had a bitter exchange in the Green Room. But at no point did she deny her active connections to the Hindu Right. Her brother, Anand, wrote to me not long after, concerned that Indicorps, which he runs full-time from India, would be tainted by our tussle. “I was curious about Sonal’s own personal relationship with the VHPA,” I wrote back, “That sparked some concern for me. Of course we are free to have our multiple associations, and there is no expectation that all our affiliations necessarily influence each other. That necessity is granted, although it is my understanding that the VHPA is a very disciplined organization that demands a lot from its members – notably congruence in all the work that they do. Which is why I raised the question.”

And so I raise the question again.

More here.  [Thanks to Manas Shaikh.]

Paul Bloom in Slate:

Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.

In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one’s reputation. If you think about God, you believe someone is watching. This argument is bolstered by other research that they review showing that people are more generous and less likely to cheat when others are around. More surprisingly, people also behave better when exposed to posters with eyes on them.

Maybe, then, religious people are nicer because they believe that they are never alone. If so, you would expect to find the positive influence of religion outside the laboratory. And, indeed, there is evidence within the United States for a correlation between religion and what might broadly be called “niceness.”

More here.

In Scientific American:

LEHRER: One of those concrete problems that you’ve studied is craving. What can neuroanthropology teach us about craving and its most extreme form, addiction?

LENDE: Let’s begin with the neuroscience. In the scientific literature on addiction, dopamine has often been made out as the “bad boy” behind substance abuse. Although dopamine is often associated with the experience of pleasure—it represents “rewards,” such as chocolate cake or crack cocaine—it also helps make us want stuff. Wanting just needs a little push to get to craving.

There is one small problem: much of the dopamine research is done through lab work with rats and monkeys. As I tell my students, that is not the same as getting a late night pizza craving and picking up the phone to dial Dominos.

But I did see in my work with Colombian adolescents that research on incentive motivation and dopamine could help me understand how some adolescents got so deeply involved with drug use.

So I asked myself: How could I put this genuine advance in neuroscience into practice to actually understand people? As with almost all neuroscience research, the results are exciting, but they suffer from a serious translation problem.

This predicament is where neuroanthropology can be so helpful. In order to draw connections between neuroscience and real world situations, I went out and talked to people to understand craving and addiction from their point of view. This type of real-world data can both challenge and inform ideas based on animal models and neuroimaging studies.

Lawrence Summers has changed his mind somewhat on the shape of a desirable globalization and how to proceed with it, but nonetheless, we should recall this fact about the next potential Treasury Secretary:

[W]hat started out as a vehicle for hedging ended up giving investors a cheap, easy way to wager on almost any event in the credit markets. In effect, credit default swaps became the world’s largest casino. As Christopher Whalen, a managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, observes, “To be generous, you could call it an unregulated, uncapitalized insurance market. But really, you would call it a gaming contract.”

There is at least one key difference between casino gambling and CDS [credit default swap] trading: Gambling has strict government regulation. The federal government has long shied away from any oversight of CDS. The CFTC floated the idea of taking an oversight role in the late ’90s, only to find itself opposed by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others. Then, in 2000, Congress, with the support of Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, passed a bill prohibiting all federal and most state regulation of CDS and other derivatives. In a press release at the time, co-sponsor Senator Phil Gramm – most recently in the news when he stepped down as John McCain’s campaign co-chair this summer after calling people who talk about a recession “whiners” – crowed that the new law “protects financial institutions from over-regulation … and it guarantees that the United States will maintain its global dominance of financial markets.” (The authors of the legislation were so bent on warding off regulation that they had the bill specify that it would “supersede and preempt the application of any state or local law that prohibits gaming …”)

Edward Blum in Religion Dispatches:

After the election was called for Senator Obama (thank goodness it didn’t go into the next day or weeks), it felt like the biblical “day of Jubilee” was upon us. Pro-Obama crowds were euphoric as the revolution was seemingly televised. There was dancing and singing. Tears flowed. Everyone commented on the “historic” moment. Senator McCain sought to wash the historic story as one for African Americans, but he was only partly right. The entire campaign—for both Democrats and Republicans—was an historic event. It was an emblem of how far the United States has changed, and we should all be proud of that. One hundred years ago, an African American man was lynched in the United States every five days. National votes for women were still a dozen years away. One hundred years ago W. E. B. Du Bois had to defend the “souls” of black folks against claims that African Americans were soulless beasts. One hundred years ago, divorce laws made it next-to-impossible for women to divorce their husbands.

Without downplaying these historical changes, we should be wary. In many ways, Senator Obama has been transformed into a symbol. He has become a totem, representing hope, change, and even salvation. During my interview with NPR, one caller exulted as he referred to Obama as a “sublime mystery.” The caller was right. Mysteries can be wonderful. They can be exciting. They can be comforting. “The body and the blood” of Christ have led billions to feel connected to God and to other Christians; Our Lady of Guadalupe inspired (and continues to inspire) Christian faith for so many. The narrative of the deathless state of Guatama Buddha has led countless to seek enlightenment. I do not believe President-Elect Obama is a mystery, but I am certainly frightened by those who do and those who want a mystery to have control over the United States army and have access to nuclear weapons.

Mysteries can be dangerous and days of Jubilee do not always end with eras of sublimity.

“I want to assassinate painting,” Joan Miró is reported to have said, in 1927. Four years later, the Catalan modern master elaborated, in an interview: “I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.” (He is quoted, along similar lines, as having put the Cubists on notice: “I will break their guitar.”) Brave words, for a painter. Miró, who first came to Paris in 1920, when he was twenty-six, plainly enjoyed indulging in the slash-and-burn attitudinizing of the avant-garde, despite being essentially a plain man, of equable temperament. He had reason to think that he meant it, and not just because he was of the generation that, in the wake of the high-minded slaughter of the First World War, was disgusted with European civilization. Fustian brought out the best in him. An eventful show now at the Museum of Modern Art, “Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937,” explores dizzyingly rapid-fire, experimental developments in the artist’s work, influenced by Dadaism, Surrealism, and the savage materialism of the writer Georges Bataille. (In no other period was the ingenuously intuitive Miró so receptive to intellectual impetus.) With cultivated “automatist” spontaneity, he worked on raw canvas, copper, and the recently invented Masonite; employed gross materials, including sand and tar; made thoroughly abstract pictures; and hatched funky varieties of collage and assemblage, whose influence would extend to Robert Rauschenberg. It’s not his fault—or is it?—that the show leaves an impression of being distant and dated, and strangely tame.

more from The New Yorker here.

In popular culture the best-known example is probably Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment in which a cat in a fiendishly designed box is suspended in a mixed dead/alive state; the cat’s fate is only resolved by the process of observation. Other examples include the idea of wave-particle duality, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and ‘spooky action at a distance’. World Cup-winning rugby player Jonny Wilkinson is only the latest author to claim a link between quantum mechanics and one form or another of Eastern mysticism.

Quantum weirdness is not rooted in popular misconceptions of the ideas of scientists – or not entirely so. The intriguing issue is that it is rooted in a highly influential interpretation of quantum mechanics, known as the Copenhagen Interpretation on account of the fact that the Danish Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr was central to its development. If you weren’t shocked by quantum theory, argued Bohr, you didn’t really understand it. And the most shocking thing for Albert Einstein and some other physicists was that Bohr believed quantum mechanics demanded the abandonment of the idea of an underlying quantum reality existing independently of the observer.

more from Spiked here.

Is it considered bad manners to question the choice of a Nobel laureate from one’s own country? If so, the French writer Frédéric-Yves Jeannet could be accused of a flagrant display of rudeness. In a diatribe in Le Monde’s “Débats” section recently, under the heading “Jean-Marie Le Clézio ou le Nobel immérité”, Jeannet, who is also a professor of literature at the University of Wellington in New Zealand, states that “it is not politically correct . . . to criticize Le Clézio, who is such an upholder, in these times of great confusion, of fine sentiments and noble causes” (see NB, October 17, for the announcement of the prize). He goes on to say that fine sentiments and noble causes don’t necessarily make for good literature. As if to bolster his position, Jeannet points out that, in 1985, someone he holds in high regard, but doesn’t name, wrote a piece stating that the award of the Nobel Prize that year to Claude Simon was a mark of shame for French literature (until Le Clézio, Simon had been the most recent French recipient of the award – if one excludes the Chinese writer in exile Gao Xingjian, who has French nationality and was Nobelled in 2000; Le Clézio, incidentally, has hailed Simon as “a marvellous writer”). Jeannet goes so far as to suggest that Hélène Cixous, or even Amélie Nothomb, might have been a more worthy French laureate. One could add Michel Tournier’s name to the mix, although his output, unlike Le Clézio’s, has slowed up considerably in recent years. Jeannet contends that only Le Clézio’s early fiction (which he admires) fits the Nobel committee’s assessment of his work as representing “rupture”. But the committee, in its curiously worded citation, also commended him as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, an explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation” – allusions to the writer’s passionate interest in non-European cultures and to novels chronicling lives of the downtrodden and dispossessed.

more from the TLS here.

Matt Mendelsohn in the New York Times:

I’d spent most of election night in front of the TV in Arlington, Va. But around 11 p.m. I couldn’t sit idle any longer, which is why I sped to the memorial. When I arrived, I found a TV crew sitting on the plaza above the Reflecting Pool, waiting, I assumed, for a mob to arrive. I approached with cameras in hand. One of them looked up and said with a slight roll of his eyes, “Nothing to see here.”

And so I climbed the memorial steps and came upon that small group listening to the radio. (What is it about people gathered around a transistor radio?) Surely there was someone else around — a videographer, a print reporter. But there wasn’t. I felt for the TV guy. The crowd standing in the shadow of Lincoln had the scoop, a profound event to themselves, of the people and by the people.

More here.

Arjun Appadurai at The Immanent Frame:

I regret that we are forced to catch the special aura of this election without a deep and serious space for the idea of magic, magic as it used to be. It would help us fill this rhetorical void. It would let us name the un-nameable and it would let us enjoy our means even without certainty about our ends. It would let us enjoy this week without dragging it immediately into boring predictions about what Nancy Pelosi will do, about how many huge headaches Obama will face, about how heavy the coming storm will be, and how fragile our collective sources. We have hardly crowned Obama and we have promptly begun to mourn for him, as if he is has already been vanquished by his foes. In the name of hard talk and pragmatism, realistic expectations and balanced judgments, rolling up our sleeves and keen to fix the leaks in the roof and the flood in the basement, we are refusing ourselves the joy of inhabiting what David Gregory called the transcendent, for it is too close to the language of official religion to be acceptable or satisfying for too long.

Magic, anthropologists have always known, is about what people throughout the world do when faced with uncertainty, catastrophic damage, injustice, illness, suffering or harm, while ritual (also magical in its logic) is performed to forestall or prevent these very things. Magic is not about deficient logic, childish mental mistakes, clever priestly illusions or other mistaken technologies. It is the universal feeling that what we see and feel exceeds our knowledge, our understanding and our control.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

The poisonous dart frogs use conspicuous color to tell predators that they are not good to eat. Similarly, a venomous coral snake sports rings of bright color to advertise that it isn’t to be messed with—by a bird considering it for lunch, for instance—while a milk snake, which isn’t poisonous and could be taken quite safely, looks much like a coral snake and trades on the latter’s reputation. Bauer fellow Marcus Kronforst studies a bad-tasting species of butterfly that is orange, black, and yellow, and other species of unsavory butterflies that mimic its color and pattern to form a uniformed corps of the unappetizing. Colors can conceal as well as warn, as in, “You can’t eat me because you can’t see me—I’m a cuttlefish and can change my color to match my background in a millisecond.” Or, conversely, “I’m so well camouflaged with stripes [or spots] that you can’t see me creeping up…and I’m going to eat you.” Hopi Hoekstra, Loeb associate professor of the natural sciences, studies the genetic mechanisms at work in a species of mouse that adapts to its environment by being sand-colored if it lives at the beach and dark if it lives inland.

Perhaps some of the richest language of color has to do with sex. Janis Sacco, director of exhibitions, offers such examples as a male bird of paradise from New Guinea that not only sports much bolder colors than any female of the species, but also a ludicrously long tail. “Pick me as a mate,” he says, “because I have this splendid thing you females may select mates on the basis of, and I must be fit because I have managed to survive despite having to carry it around with me while wearing these obvious colors.”

More here.