From Science:

Like meadow voles, some men just don’t seem to be built for monogamy, whereas others, like swans, mate for life. New research hints that some of the difference might be due to a single genetic variation. The gene in question, AVPR1a, governs a receptor that regulates the brain’s production of vasopressin, a hormone that contributes to attachment behavior with mates and offspring. A few years ago, scientists found that when they added extra copies of the AVPR1a gene to the brains of promiscuous meadow voles, the animals began acting more like monogamous prairie voles, spending more time with partners and grooming offspring. A similar role for the AVPR1a gene has been observed in chimps and bonobos.

Might such a simple switch be found in humans? A team led by Hasse Walum of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, sequenced the AVPR1a gene in about 500 pairs of adult same-sex Swedish twins, all of them married or cohabiting for at least 5 years, and their partners. One variation of the gene was particularly common; about 40% of males had either one or two copies of a version–or allele–of the gene known as “334.” Although not simply an analog to the polymorphism found in prairie voles, allele 334 seems to have a similar effect on the stability of human relationships, as measured in interviews and questionnaires. The tests included a Partner Bonding Scale containing items that reflect affection and cooperation, such as “How often do you kiss your mate?” and “How often are you and your partner involved in common interests outside the family?” Scores on the test were significantly lower for the men carrying either one or two copies of allele 334 than for those without it.

More here.

Jay Dixit in Psychology Today:

“If the jester’s jokes are based on sound ideas, he becomes the thinker, the philosopher,” George Carlin said, “and if he uses dazzling language, he becomes a poet, too.” More than any comic in memory, Carlin achieved this transmutation—as much cultural essayist as comedian, beloved not just for his jokes but also for the rhythm and poetry of his words. Nine days before his death, he spoke to PT. Sadly, the two-hour interview would be his last. For an extended version, visit [here].

On experience. I’ve been doing this 50 years. By this time it’s all second nature. It’s all a machine—the observation, the immediate evaluation of the observation, the mental filing of it, writing it down. A 20-year-old has a limited amount of data. At 70, the matrix is more textured and has more contours to it. Observations are compared against a much richer data set.

On his gift for language. My grandfather was a New York City policeman. During his adult life, he wrote out Shakespeare’s tragedies longhand just for the joy it gave him. My mother had a great gift for language. My father was an after-dinner speaker, a great raconteur. They both were very funny and gifted verbally. The Irish have a genetic tradition, it seems, an affinity for language and expression. I got that. As the Irish say: “You don’t lick it off the rocks, kid.” It comes in the blood.

Nathan Schneider in Search Magazine:

[W]hat happens to religion when it is biologized? Many would intuitively believe philosopher and “New Atheist” Daniel Dennett, whose best-selling Breaking the Spell framed biologizing religiosity and overcoming it as two sides of the same coin; one leads naturally to the other. Confident in the possibility of this research, Dennett contends that “we” should “gently, firmly educate the people of the world, so that they can make truly informed choices about their lives,” choices that he believes will involve dispelling religion.

Less optimistically, but along similar lines, cognitive anthropologist Scott Atran suspects that “religious belief in the supernatural will be here to stay” despite those who come to understand it scientifically. He and other biologizers prefer to maintain a more agnostic stance than Dennett, purporting to pursue a scientific study of religion apart from biases and agendas. Scientific methods, they suggest, liberate the study of religion from ideological and theological debates.

Yet the lines between religion and the scientific study of it are not so clear. Biologizers depend on traditional ways of conceptualizing religiosity that have particular ideological connotations. In turn, believers of various stripes are eager to respond creatively to scientific research, and in some cases they head to the laboratory themselves to shed new light on their own beliefs and practices.

“I am a ‘left conservative.’” That was Norman Mailer’s jaunty but slightly defensive self-description when first I met him, at the beginning of the 1980s. At the time, I was inclined to attribute this glibness (as I thought of it) to the triumph of middle age and to the compromises perhaps necessary to negotiate the then-new ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. But, looking back over his extraordinary journal of a plague year, written 40 years ago, I suddenly appreciate that Mailer in 1968 had already been rehearsing for some kind of ideological synthesis, and discovering it in the most improbable of places.

Party conventions have been such dull spectacles of stage management for so long that this year it was considered nothing less than shocking that delegates might arrive in Denver with anything more than ceremonial or coronational duties ahead of them. The coverage of such events, now almost wholly annexed by the cameras and those who serve them, has undergone a similar declension into insipidity.

more from The Atlantic here.

When Emanuel Haldeman-Julius drowned in his backyard swimming pool, on July 31, 1951, he was popularly regarded as a has-been, even in his adopted hometown of Girard, Kansas.

It was an odd ending for a man who, in just over thirty years, had become one of the most prolific publishers in U.S. history, putting an estimated 300 million copies of inexpensive “Little Blue Books” into the hands of working-class and middle-class Americans. Selling for as little as five cents and small enough to fit in a trouser pocket, these books were meant to bring culture and self-education to working people, and covered topics ranging from classic literature to home-finance to sexually pleasuring one’s spouse. Distributed discreetly by mail order, Little Blue Books disseminated birth-control information not available in small-town libraries, advocated racial justice at a time when the Ku Klux Klan influenced politics, and introduced Euripides, Shakespeare, and Emerson to people without the means for higher education.

more from The Believer here.

In a culture obsessed with efficiency, daydreaming is derided as a lazy habit or a lack of discipline, the kind of thinking we rely on when we don’t really want to think. It’s a sign of procrastination, not productivity, something to be put away with your flip-flops and hammock as summer draws to a close.

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to see the act of daydreaming very differently. They’ve demonstrated that daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind – so fundamental, in fact, that it’s often referred to as our “default” mode of thought. Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections. Instead of focusing on our immediate surroundings – such as the message of a church sermon – the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

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To An Iraqi Infant
Sinan Antoon

do you know
that your mother’s nipples
are dry bones?
that her breasts
are bursting
with depleted uranium?

do you know
that the womb’s window
overlooks
a confiscated land?

do you know
that your tomorrow
has no tomorrow?
that your blood
is the ink
of new maps?

do you know
that your mother is weaving
the slowness of her moments
into an elegy?
And she is already
mourning you?

don’t be shy!
your funeral is over
the tears are dry
everyone’s gone

come forward!
it’s only a short way
don’t be late
your grave is looking
at its watch!

don’t be afraid!
We’ll arrange your bones
which ever way you want
and leave your skull
like a flower
on top

come forward!
your many friends await
there are more every day
. . .
your ghosts
will play together

come on!

New York, December 2002
Translated by the poet

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From The Washington Post:

If you’re clever enough, or hire the right accountants and financial wizards, you can actually dodge paying taxes. The big boys do it all the time. But death — that’s quite another matter. Pace cryonics, there’s no way of putting off forever what the philosopher Fontenelle — who lived to be 99 — called that “last unpleasant quarter hour.” Sooner or later, all of us are going to close up shop. As Philip Larkin said in his mortality-haunted poem “Aubade,” “Most things may never happen: this one will.”

Now in his early 60s, the novelist Julian Barnes tells us that he thinks about death every day, and periodically finds himself bolting upright from sleep screaming, “No, no, no.” (Ah, yes: Been there, done that.) As its brilliant title punningly hints, Nothing to Be Frightened Of offers an extended meditation on human mortality, but one that is neither clinical nor falsely consoling. Instead, the witty and melancholy author of Flaubert’s Parrot and Arthur & George simply converses with us about our most universal fear:

“For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever — including the jug — there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?”

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Dr. Near and Dr. Prum have spent a few evenings testing out Spore, one of the most eagerly anticipated video games in the history of the industry. After years of rumors, the game goes on sale Friday. Spore’s designer, Will Wright, is best known for creating a game called the Sims in 2000. That game, which let players run the lives of a virtual family, has sold 100 million copies. It is the best-selling video game franchise of all time — an impressive achievement in an $18-billion-a-year industry that is now bigger than Hollywood. Spore, produced by Electronic Arts, promises much more than the day-to-day adventures of simulated people. It starts with single-cell microbes and follows them through their evolution into intelligent multicellular creatures that can build civilizations, colonize the galaxy and populate new planets.

Unlike the typical shoot-them-till-they’re-all-dead video game, Spore was strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology. Mr. Wright will appear in a documentary next Tuesday on the National Geographic Channel, sharing his new game with leading evolutionary biologists and talking with them about the evolution of complex life. Evolutionary biologists like Dr. Near and Dr. Prum, who have had a chance to try the game, like it a great deal. But they also have some serious reservations. The step-by-step process by which Spore’s creatures change does not have much to do with real evolution. “The mechanism is severely messed up,” Dr. Prum said.

Nevertheless, Dr. Prum admires the way Spore touches on some of the big questions that evolutionary biologists ask. What is the origin of complexity? How contingent is evolution on flukes and quirks? “If it compels people to ask these questions, that would be great,” he said.

More here.

From his blog Think Again at the New York Times:

Last week the New York Post’s Page Six picked up on a story that had been widely circulated on the blogosphere. The magazine Wine Spectator was the victim of a hoax when it came out that its “award of excellence” had been given to a restaurant that did not exist. Robin Goldstein, a wine critic who said that he wanted to expose the lack of any foundation for many food and wine awards, had submitted an application that included the menu and wine list of a fictitious restaurant he named Osteria L’Intrepido. Goldstein revealed the hoax within a week or so of the announced award and declared that what he had done proved that “the level of scrutiny” that accompanies such awards is “insufficient.”

Stung by the adverse publicity his magazine was receiving, Executive Editor Thomas Matthews fought back with an account of what he termed “the actual facts of the matter” on the Wine Spectator web site. He said that “we do not claim to visit every restaurant in our Awards program” or “review the restaurant as a whole.” Rather, “[we evaluate] the content, accuracy and presentation of wine lists.”

Thomas then detailed the efforts of the magazine to verify the facts. The restaurant was called (it was never reached); a Google search revealed an “actual address” on a street in Milan, a site featuring the restaurant’s menu, and reviews by what are now known to be fictitious customers. Goldstein claimed that the wine list he had confected contained vintages that Wine Spectator itself had criticized in previous issues. Thomas retorted that of the 256 wines listed only 15 scored below the mark the magazine considered a standard.

More here.

From CNN:

Who says science doesn’t turn people on? Kate McAlpine is a rising star on YouTube for her rap performance — about high-energy particle physics.

Her performance has drawn a half-million views on YouTube.

The 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and science writer raps about the Large Hadron Collider, the groundbreaking particle accelerator that has been built in a 17-mile circular tunnel at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

McAlpine raps that when the collider goes into operation September 10, “the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.”

The $3.8 billion machine will collide two beams of protons moving at close to the speed of light so scientists can see what particles appear in the resulting debris.

More here. Oh, and here’s the video:

                                                 May 19, 1991 — August 30, 2008

Brian Bress. Third Wave. 2006

Collage on digital print.

More on the artist here and here.

When we consider the current uproar over Muslim immigration, particularly in Europe, we can see that the allegedly enlightened societies of the West still have a lot of learning to do. Instead of seeing ourselves as fighting on the side of the angels in a great “clash of civilizations,” we should see each nation, Western and non-Western, as fighting its own internal “clash” between people who are prepared to live with others on terms of mutual respect and people who seek the protection of religious (and cultural) homogeneity. At a deeper level, each of us is always engaged, within ourselves, in an internal “clash of civilizations,” as narcissistic fear contends with our capacities for concern and respect.

In this struggle, it helps to have philosophical friends. Locke, ubiquitously invoked in this connection, is a good enough friend, but somewhat lacking in psychological insight. The history of the North American colonies, however, shows us another friend, an even better one–a hero, really–whose writings, now virtually unknown, can help us greatly as we grapple with problems that are not unlike those he confronted in the seventeenth century. He is Roger Williams. Williams wrote many books, including two lengthy philosophical treatises that are among the major works on religious toleration in the history of Western thought. Prolix, diffuse, and ill-organized, their thousand pages are hardly ever consulted, while Locke’s succinct A Letter Concerning Toleration is taught in countless college classrooms. Even Williams’s American contemporaries did not have much knowledge of his books, which were published in England.

more from TNR here.

Tickets for this Leonard Cohen concert were very expensive. I paid $180 for this ticket. Because I’m a music critic, it’s tax deductible. Also, I thought I’d sell a review to someone, but in the end no one wanted a review. Sitting in the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, I think about what I would write if I were reviewing this for Rolling Stone or Pitchfork. “He seems at once smaller and larger than his songs. And, while I never need to hear ‘Democracy’ or ‘Boogie Street’ again, because they were terrible, I also never again need to hear ‘Who by Fire’ or ‘Sisters of Mercy,’ because they were beautiful.”

“Malgré les prix gonflés,” Leonard says, wryly, “j’espère que vous n’êtes pas déçus.” Despite the inflated prices, I hope you are not disappointed. While Leonard is playing “I’m Your Man,” I do some math. If the concert is three hours long, that’s just $60 an hour. Or $15 for 15 minutes. Which is about the same price as a taxi. Or laser tag. This concert is far, far, far better than riding a taxi or playing laser tag. Leonard, I am not disappointed.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979 and immediately ascended to the heaven inhabited by dead poets—George Herbert, John Keats, and Emily Dickinson—whom everyone venerates. In a review of Alice Quinn’s edition of Bishop’s unfinished poems, William Logan put the following question apropos of Bishop’s ascendancy: “Why has our age become so enamored of a poet who almost to the end of her life required a special taste?” Logan doesn’t quite answer that question, though he does suggest what is probably undemonstrable—that readers “adore themselves for adoring her.” Nor can I demonstrate that the poets listed above are indisputably ones whom everyone venerates; but they share a winning vulnerability to the assaults of life, a vulnerability that many sorts of readers find deeply appealing, indeed irresistible. By contrast, two poets who ascended to another part of heaven, John Donne and Robert Lowell, for all their dramatizing of vulnerability (“Batter my heart three-personed God”; “I hear my ill spirit sob in each blood cell”) beat—in Lowell’s words from a letter to Bishop—the “big drum” so forcefully that they seem scarcely in need of our sympathetic concern. At any rate, it’s undeniable that Bishop’s reputation has been untouched by anything like adverse criticism, and it is no surprise that she is the first twentieth-century woman poet to be included in The Library of America.

more from Hudson Review here.

Robert Hughes in the Guardian:

In 1988, Lucian Freud had an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It was a great success, of course: the German art audience knew about Freud already, and were able to see his work against the background memory of the German realist art movement of the 1920s known as Neue Sachlichkeit, “the new objectivity”.

In fact, the pictures were so well liked that one of them was stolen. It was a tiny portrait, done in 1952 on a sheet of copper no bigger than a leaf of typing paper, of his friend and fellow painter Francis Bacon. It belonged to the Tate, but someone just took it from the wall in Berlin and walked off with it.

Freud rang to tell me. It was shocking news. I had never known a friend’s painting to be stolen, particularly not a picture that I thought of as an unequivocal masterpiece: that smooth, pallid pear of a face like a hand-grenade on the point of detonation, those evasive-looking eyes under their blade-like lids, had long struck me as one of the key images of modernity, though a dozen years ago practically no one in America, where the big reputations were meant to be made, had even heard of Lucian Freud.

“Well,” I said to Freud, “at least there’s someone out there who’s really fanatical about your work.” “Oh, d’you think so ?” he replied. “You know, I’m not sure I agree. I don’t think whoever it was took it because he liked me. Not a bit of it. He must have been crazy about Francis. That would justify the risk.”

And as I chewed this over later, I came to think that Freud was quite possibly right.

Richard Gray in the Telegraph:

Critics of the Large Hadron Collider – a £4.4 billion machine due to be switched on in ten days time – have lodged a lawsuit at the European Court for Human Rights against the 20 countries, including the UK, that fund the project.

The device is designed to replicate conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and its creators hope it will unlock the secrets of how the universe began.

However, opponents fear the machine, which will smash pieces of atoms together at high speed and generate temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade, may create a mini-black hole that could tear the earth apart.

Scientists involved in the project have dismissed the fears as “absurd” and insist that extensive safety assessments on the 17 mile long particle accelerator have demonstrated that it is safe.

The legal battle comes as the European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN), in Geneva, prepares to send the first beam of particles around the machine at the official switch on, on September 10, although it will be several weeks before the first particles are collided together.

Opponents of the project had hoped to obtain an injunction from the European Court of Human Rights that would block the collider from being turned on at all, but the court rejected the application on Friday morning. However, the court will rule on allegations that the experiment violates the right to life under the European Convention of Human Rights.

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The Dacca Gauzes
Agha Shahid Ali

…for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes. -Oscar Wilde/The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca Gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:

a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. “No one
now knows,” my grandmother says,

“what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.” She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,
and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only

in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one feel that same texture again.

One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.

From Half Inch Himilayas (Wesleyan U.P., 1987)

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