From Scientific American:

When you've spent the weekend splurging on greasy fast foods, your bathroom scale isn't alone in reeling from the impact. Your brain does, too. New research shows just how saturated fat tricks us into eating more and elucidates the evolutionary basis for the propensity for poundage in developed nations. Our brain physiology, it seems, is glaringly out-of-date in the modern world.

Researchers have long known that the hormones leptin and insulin play key roles in appetite and food intake. In healthy people leptin, which is secreted by fat tissue, acts as a molecular measuring tape for our waistlines, quashing feelings of hunger. Insulin spikes when the pancreas gets a whiff of the blood sugar increase after a meal; once the brain detects the spike, it knows to tamp down the desire for food.

More here.

Sean Carroll in The New York Times:

I have long suspected that fish are smarter than we give them credit for.

As a child, I had an aquarium with several pet goldfish. They certainly knew it was feeding time when my hand appeared over their tank, and they excitedly awaited their delicious fish flakes. They also exhibited a darker, disturbing behavior. Evidently, a safe life with abundant food was not fulfilling. From time to time, either sheer ennui or the long gray Toledo winter got to one of the fish and it ended its torment with a leap to my bedroom floor. Maybe my anthropomorphizing is a bit over the top. But, really, just how smart are fish? Can they learn?

A 10-gallon tank with a plastic sunken pirate ship is certainly not the most stimulating habitat. But in the colorful, diverse and dangerous world of coral reefs, fish must be able to recognize not only food, but also to discriminate friends from foes, and mates from rivals, and to take the best action. In such a complex and dynamic environment, it would pay to be flexible and able to learn. A series of studies has recently revealed that reef fish are surprisingly adaptable. Freshly caught wild fish quickly learn new tasks and can learn to discriminate among colors, patterns and shapes, including those they have never encountered. These studies suggest that learning and interpreting new stimuli play important roles in the lives of reef fish.

More here.

This is from February of this year:

And this is from last week:

Tim Lambert in Deltoid:

I reviewed Freakonomics when it first came out and really liked it. So I was looking forward to the sequel Superfreakonomics. Unfortunately, Levitt and Dubner decided to write about global warming and have made a dreadful hash of it. The result is so wrong that it has even Joe Romm and William Connolley in agreement.

So what went wrong? One possibility is that Freakonomics was superficially plausible but also rubbish, and it was only when they wrote about an area where I was knowledgeable that I noticed. But I don't think this is the correct explanation. I've read the journal papers on sumo cheating, Lojack and abortion and crime that they cite in Freakonomics and they are fairly represented. Superfreakonomics, on the other hand, misrepresents the scientific literature on global warming. The difference here is that the papers cited by Freakonomics were Levitt's own work and he understood them, while Levitt and Dubner do not understand the climate science literature. This by itself would not be fatal, but what has taken them off the cliff is the Freakonomics formula: “What you thought you knew about X is wrong!”. If you want to apply this formula to global warming you can easily find many superficially plausible arguments on why the mainstream science is wrong. Bang those into your chapter on global warming without bothering to check their accuracy and the only work that remains is the tour to promote your book.

But enough on why they got everything wrong. Let's look at what they got wrong.

More here. [Thanks to Sean Carroll.]

And speaking of global warming, check out this “cool” project for kids. [Thanks to Jane Langley.]

Tyeb Mehta. Women sitting on Rickshaw. 1993.

Acrylic on canvas.

More here and here.

A Taliban victory would have devastating consequences for U.S. interests. But to avoid disaster, America must beware the Soviet Union’s mistakes — and learn from its own three decades of failure in South Asia.

Steve Coll in Foreign Policy:

To protect the security of the American people and the interests of the United States and its allies, we should persist with the difficult effort to stabilize Afghanistan and reverse the Taliban's momentum. This will probably require additional troops for a period of several years, until Afghan forces can play the leading role.

However, that depends on the answer to Gen. Colin Powell's reported question, “What will more troops do?” As Gen. Stanley McChrystal wrote in his recent assessment, “Focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely.” Instead — after years of neglect of U.S. policy and resources in Afghanistan and after a succession of failed strategies both in Afghanistan and Pakistan — the United States, as McChrystal put it, has an “urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.” While I cannot endorse or oppose McChyrstal's specific prescriptions for the next phase of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan because I do not know what they are, I do endorse the starting point of his analysis, as well as his general emphases on partnering with Afghan forces and focusing on the needs of the Afghan population. I believe those emphases are necessary but insufficient.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

David Runciman reviews Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better in the LRB:

The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is. In graph after graph measuring various welfare functions, the authors show that the best predictor of how countries will rank is not the differences in wealth between them (which would result in the US coming top, with the Scandinavian countries and the UK not too far behind, and poorer European nations like Greece and Portugal bringing up the rear) but the differences in wealth within them (so the US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan). Just as significantly, this pattern holds inside the US as well, where states with high levels of income inequality also tend to have the greatest social problems. It is true that some of the most unequal American states are also among the poorest (Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia), so you might expect things to go worse there. But some unequal states are also rich (California), whereas some fairly equal ones are also quite poor (Utah). Only a few (New Hampshire, Wyoming) score well on both counts. What the graphs show are the unequal states tending to cluster together regardless of income, so that California usually finds itself alongside Mississippi scoring badly, while New Hampshire and Utah both do consistently well. Income inequality, not income per se, appears to be the key. As a result, the authors are able to draw a clear conclusion: ‘The evidence shows that even small decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich market democracies, make a very important difference to the quality of life.’ Achieving these decreases should be the central goal of our politics, precisely because we can be confident that it works. This is absolutely not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Friedrich Nietzsche is famous for many things, including the idea of the Übermensch, The Will to Power and his sceptical beliefs about truth that make him a precursor of much postmodern thinking. But according to Nietzsche expert Brian Leiter (the man behind the Leiter Reports Weblog) close reading of his work tells a different story.

Listen to Brian Leiter on Nietzsche Myths

Brian Leiter's Nietzsche Weblog

Timothy Garton Ash in the New York Review of Books:

Unsurprisingly, the twentieth anniversary of 1989 has added to an already groaning shelf of books on the year that ended the short twentieth century. If we extend “1989” to include the unification of Germany and disunification of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991, we should more accurately say the three years that ended the century. The anniversary books include retrospective journalistic chronicles, with some vivid personal glimpses and striking details (Victor Sebestyen, György Dalos, Michael Meyer, and Michel Meyer), spirited essays in historical interpretation (Stephen Kotkin and Constantine Pleshakov), and original scholarly work drawing on archival sources as well as oral history (Mary Elise Sarotte and the volume edited by Jeffrey Engel). I cannot review them individually. Most add something to our knowledge; some add quite a lot. It is no criticism of any of these authors to say that I come away dreaming of another book: the global, synthetic history of 1989 that remains to be written.

Over these twenty years, the most interesting new findings have come from Soviet, American, and German archives, and, to a lesser extent, from East European, British, and French ones. They throw light mainly on the high politics of 1989–1991. Thus, for example, we find that the Soviet Politburo did not even discuss Germany on November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall would come down, but instead heard a panicky report from Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov about preparations for secession in the Baltic states and their possible effects in Ukraine and Russia. “I smell an overall collapse,” said Ryzhkov.

From The Washington Post:

Jonathan Lethem's brilliant, bloated new novel about the hollowness of modern life should delight his devoted fans — and put them on the defensive. They will point, justifiably, to the exquisite wit and dazzling intricacy of every single paragraph. In the pages of “Chronic City,” all 467 of them, this super-hip, genre-blurring, MacArthur-winning, best-selling novelist proves he's one of the most elegant stylists in the country, and he's capable of spinning surreal scenes that are equal parts noir and comedy. But ultimately, these perfectly choreographed sentences compose a tedious reading experience in which redundancy substitutes for development and effect for profundity.

This is a strange study of the shimmering unreality of New York City, full of knowing references to its culture, politics, celebrities, aristocrats and authors. The story takes place as a series of long monologues and conversations, both cerebral and silly. The narrator, Chase Insteadman, is a handsome bon vivant, “a Manhattan gadabout,” who skates on “frictionless ball bearings of charm” and lives off residuals from his days as a child TV star.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Arthur Miller’s foreword to his first collection of short stories from 1967 won’t delight the more bullish champions of the form – and not just because, as reprinted here, it keeps misspelling “Hemingway”. The idea, he writes, that short stories are “more or less casual things at the lower end of the scale of magnitude” is one he is quite happy to accept. In fact, this is precisely why he enjoys writing them. For a playwright, they’re a chance to escape “the terrible heat at the centre of the stage” for something less grand and more self-effacing.

The rest of the book triumphantly lives up to these modest claims. The 18 stories – which include the two collections published during his life, and a third, Presence, published posthumously (here making its first British appearance) – lack the crunching power of Miller’s best drama. The compensation, though, is a rich, even touching sense of intimacy. With a few exceptions, these stories are not just good, but good in a way that may well come as a revelation to Miller fans. “I feel I know Chekhov better from his stories than from his plays,” he says in that same foreword – and after reading Presence you have exactly the same feeling about him.

More here.

The Leveret
………….

This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.
The Owennadornaun is so full of rain
You arrived in Paddy Morrison’s tractor,
A bumpy approach in your father’s arms
To the cottage where, all of one year ago,
You were conceived, a fire-seed in the hearth.
Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?
Do you hear the wind tonight, and the rain
And a shore bird calling from the mussel reefs?
Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to the sea,
Little hoplite. Have you been missing it?
I’ll park your chariot by the otters’ rock
And carry you over seaweed to the sea.
There’s a tufted duck on David’s lake
With her sootfall of hatchlings, pompoms
A day old and already learning to dive.
We may meet the stoat near the erratic
Boulder, a shrew in his mouth, or the merlin
Meadow-pipit-hunting. But don’t be afraid.
The leveret breakfasts under the fuchsia
Every morning, and we shall be watching.
I have picked wild flowers for you, scabious
And centaury in a jam-jar of water
That will bend and magnify the daylight.
This is your first night in Carrigskeewaun.

by Michael Longley, 2004

Photo: Carrigskeewaun, County Mayo, Ireland

From the Brihadaranyako Upanisad:

Om Asatoma Sat Gamaya

Om Tamasoma Jyoti Gamaya

Om Mrthyoma Amritam Gamaya

“Lead us from falsehood to truth. From darkness to light. From death to immortality”. Additionally, a message from Obama:

Read more »

Herta Müller has eyes like spotlights that drive out the darkness night after night. She is small, featherweight even, and is the last person you would suspect spent to have spent a childhood herding cows. Of her background, she says: “I was born in 1953 in Nitzkysdorf, the year in which Stalin physically died – mentally, he continued living for years. The village,” she continues, referring to her place of birth, “lies in the Romanian Banat, a two-hour drive from Belgrade and Budapest. A peasant population, white, pink, pale blue gables – and triangular houses in symmetrical streets. My father hated working in the fields and when he returned from the SS in 1945, he became a lorry driver and alcoholic. The combination is possible in the countryside. My mother was and remained a peasant in the corn and sunflower fields. Corn for me is the socialist plant par excellence: it displays its colours, grows in colonies, blocks the view and cuts your hands with its leaves while you’re working.”

more from Verena Auffermann at Sign and Sight here.

“The only way I can regain credit for my early work is to die,” Kurt Vonnegut once said, sounding more amused than worried about it. Ever the realist, ever the stoic, ever the cynic, Vonnegut got how the lit game works. Reputations soar, tumble into the trash and rise mysteriously again. The good news is that quality tells in the end; and so here we are, 2 1/2 years after Vonnegut’s death, celebrating new books and handsome reprints by a man who, by the time he passed on, had been a part of the liberal furniture for so long (“counter-culture icon,” proclaimed the New York Times obituary) it was possible to forget he’d done a life sentence at the typewriter, fighting his suicidal tendency and instead making magic happen. Vonnegut started publishing in the early 1950s and, in 1969, came out with “Slaughterhouse-Five,” recently reissued by Dial Press — along with “Sirens of Titan,” “Mother Night” and “Galapagos,” all $15 — a miracle book that both distilled everything its writer knew and caught the wave of America’s damaged, deranged Vietnam-era mood. The worldwide splash made by “Slaughterhouse-Five” turned Vonnegut into a wealthy celebrity, and thereafter it came to seem that everything he’d written before had been a kind of preparation, while what he wrote after merely drifted in that book’s wake. That judgment is true in a way and yet totally unfair — a very Vonnegutian formulation — although “Slaughterhouse-Five” does remain central.

more from Richard Rayner at the LA Times here.