Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic:

Salman Rushdie is so much identified with seriousness—his choice of subjects, from Kashmir to Andalusia; his position as a literary negotiator of East and West; his decade and more of internal exile in hiding from the edict of a fanatical theocrat—that it can be easy to forget how humorous he is. In much the same way, his extraordinary knowledge of classical literature sometimes causes people to overlook his command of the vernacular. Here are two examples of wit and idiom from his latest fiction, The Enchantress of Florence. In the first, an enigmatic wanderer, appareled in a coat of many colors, enters a splendid city:

Not far from the caravanserai, a tower studded with elephant tusks marked the way to the palace gate. All elephants belonged to the emperor, and by spiking a tower with their teeth he was demonstrating his power. Beware! the tower said. You are entering the realm of the Elephant King, a sovereign so rich in pachyderms that he can waste the gnashers of a thousand of the beasts just to decorate me.

This is the offbeat manner in which one might start a tale for children, as Rushdie did in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. By contrast, here is Ago Vespucci in Florence, trying by strenuous exercise in a whorehouse to cure his revulsion at the entry of the king of France to the city.

On the threshold of manhood Ago had agreed with his friend Niccolò “il Machia” on one thing: whatever hardships the times might bring, a good, energetic night with the ladies would put everything right. “There are few woes in the world, dear Ago,” il Machia had advised him when they were still only thirteen, “that a woman’s fanny will not cure.”

More here.

Ed Lake reviews Kluge by Gary Marcus and The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, in The Telegraph:

Why is our language so vague and ambiguous? Why are we so bad at sticking to plans, or keeping track of how we know what we know, or generally doing any of the things you’d hope to be able to do with a superlatively well-engineered brain?

Because it was a kluge. Evolution doesn’t, in fact, tend to perfection: it goes with what works and tinkers with it later. That’s why the retinas of vertebrates seem to be installed backwards, giving us all blind spots in the middle of our visual fields. Eyes like that do the job well enough, and there’s no way of flipping the retina while preserving decent vision across intermediate generations. So we’re stuck with them.

Likewise the mind: our meagre reasoning capacity is an afterthought, spatchcocked on to the ancestral systems that have the reins where practical decision-making is concerned. If only our higher mental functions could dominate; alas, the lizard- brain parts have seniority.

More here.

Thomas Schweich in the New York Times Magazine:

On March 1, 2006, I met Hamid Karzai for the first time. It was a clear, crisp day in Kabul. The Afghan president joined President and Mrs. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ronald Neumann to dedicate the new United States Embassy. He thanked the American people for all they had done for Afghanistan. I was a senior counternarcotics official recently arrived in a country that supplied 90 percent of the world’s heroin. I took to heart Karzai’s strong statements against the Afghan drug trade. That was my first mistake.

Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade — by shielding it from American-designed policies. While it is true that Karzai’s Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters. At the same time, some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as has our own Defense Department, which tends to see counternarcotics as other people’s business to be settled once the war-fighting is over. The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs — and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.

More here.

Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff in the New York Review of Books:

Jean-Pierre Changeux is France’s most famous neuroscientist. Though less well known in the United States, he has directed a famous laboratory at the Pasteur Institute for more than thirty years, taught as a professor at the Collège de France, and written a number of works exploring “the neurobiology of meaning.” Aside from his own books, Changeux has published two wide-ranging dialogues about mind and matter, one with the mathematician Alain Connes and the other with the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

Changeux came of age at a fortunate time. Born in 1936, he began his studies when the advent both of the DNA age and of high-resolution images of the brain heralded a series of impressive breakthroughs. Changeux took part in one such advance in 1965 when, together with Jacques Monod and Jeffries Wyman, he established an important model of protein interactions in bacteria, which, when applied to the brain, became crucial for understanding the behavior of neurons. Since that time, Changeux has written a number of books exploring the functions of the brain.

More here.

New Zealand artist Julian Oliver’s latest work, levelHead, allows viewers of the piece to interact with a 3D world by simply moving wooden blocks around in front of a web cam. How his work differs from most motion capture controlled art installations, is that the physical item that one uses to control the experience is replaced with a tiny digital world. Through moving and rotating coded blocks, the “player” attempts to move a tiny trapped man through an elaborate, interlocking labyrinth stretching one’s spatial memory and logical reasoning skills.

Kurt Vonnegut at the San Diego State University website:

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

More here.

Zachary F. Meisel and Jesse M. Pines in Slate:

A major cause for E.R. crowding is the hospital practice of boarding inpatients in emergency departments. This happens when patients who come to the E.R. need to be admitted overnight. If there are no inpatient beds in the hospital (or no extra inpatient nurses on duty that day) then the patient stays in the E.R. long past the completion of the initial emergency work. This is what happened to Green, and it has become widespread and common. The problem is that boarding shifts E.R. resources away from the new patients in the waiting room. While E.R. patients wait for inpatient beds, new patients wait longer to see a doctor. As more new patients come, the waits grow. And an E.R. filled with boarding patients and a full waiting room is an unhappy E.R.: The atmosphere is at once static and chaotic. If you or a loved one has waited for hours in an E.R., you know what we mean. The environment can be unsafe and even deadly. A recent study found that critically ill patients who board for more than six hours in the E.R. are 4 percent more likely to die.

More here.  [For Tariq Jehangir Khan.]

From Scientific American:

We Scientific Americans are emphatic empiricists. And although astronomy and astrology have common historical roots, the modern practice of astrology is total hooey. (And we say that only because we choose not to use stronger words than hooey in a family magazine.)

Nevertheless, some staffers were recently musing about what a horoscope would look like in our august pages. (Or September, even.) So here’s a proof-of-concept. It’s not based on science, because it’s impossible to have a horoscope based on science. But it’s science heavy. Specific predictions accompany individual zodiacal signs as per the form of the typical newspaper or magazine horoscope page (and shame on all you allegedly legitimate news outlets for running such garbage). Some of the predictions may seem intimately related to the sign in question. Even so, consider them all totally interchangeable, as the truly important aspect of the coordinates of your birth is the GDP at that time and place. And away we go.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Whatever the health police think of them, pies are a great leveller. In the late 1690s, a pastry cook called Christopher (Kit) Cat hung up his sign, a cat playing a small fiddle (or ‘kit’), in Gray’s Inn Lane. His signature dish was a mutton pie, dubbed a kit-cat in his honour, though he also sold cheesecakes, rosewater codling tarts (made with a kind of cooking apple, not fish) and many another inexpensive treat. It was a place where hungry authors could afford to chitchat while eating Kit Cat’s kit-cats at the Cat and Kit. The coterie who met there became an institution, under the inevitable name of the Kit-Cat Club, and were a formidable force for social change, not least because theirs was a meritocratic club within a rigidly stratified society: ‘A Kit-Cat,’ observed poor playwright William Burnaby, ‘is a supper for a Lord.’

The members of the Kit-Cat Club were writers of various kinds, politicians and aristocrats. Their names include a litany of famous authors – William Congreve, John Vanbrugh, Matthew Prior, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele – but they also included Jacob Tonson, the most important publisher in London, Robert Walpole and a shoal of peers. The unifying factor was Whiggery. In 1700, Whigs, as opposed to Tories, stood for constitutional government against royal absolutism; they were pro-parliament, progressive and hungry for cultural change. But beyond that, the Kit-Cats were friends. The group at the club’s core had known each other since their schooldays. Field’s highly intelligent book is about politics and culture, but it is also about male bonding and networking and how it works.

More here.

When Julius Caesar marched his legions into Gaul in 58BC, he found a surprisingly coherent federation of barbarian tribes. They had a common religion – Druidism – and the sort of traditions and institutions that allowed vast armies to be marshalled at short notice. Two millenniums before the TGV (train à grande vitesse), the Gauls’ high-speed chariots and expressways were the envy of the civilised world. Fine wines and luxury goods were transported safely over vast distances, and a Latin-speaking merchant with a basic grasp of Gaulish could made himself understood from the Mediterranean to the North Sea.

Reading Robert Gildea’s sober, concise and masterly history of France from 1799 to the first world war, one is tempted to ask: where did it all go wrong? Or, to put it less frivolously, why, after 2,000 years, did so many educated Frenchmen look back wistfully on the good old days of Vercingetorix, when a patriotic army of handsome, hairy Gauls could inflict a crushing defeat on Caesar’s legions?

more from The Sunday Times here.

Doris Lessing has never been one to shy from bold moves. She married early to escape her overbearing mother, then left her husband and two children, wedding a German Communist classed as an enemy alien during World War II. Her most famous novel, “The Golden Notebook” (1962), was considered boldly feminist and structurally daring. In the 1980s, Lessing upset many of her readers by turning to science fiction. During the same period, she made headlines by submitting a novel to her longtime British publisher, Jonathan Cape, under a pseudonym — demonstrating, with its rejection, how hard it is for unknown writers to break into print. Last year, when told she’d won the Nobel Prize for literature, she seemed more exasperated than exhilarated by the attention. “Oh, Christ! . . . It’s a royal flush,” she said.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, nearing the end of her ninth decade, in what she declares is her last book, Lessing has pushed the boundaries of the memoir form. She does this by splitting “Alfred & Emily” between fiction and personal reminiscence, in order to attack from multiple angles material she’s still struggling to understand.

more from the LA Times here.

In 1970, two discrete events helped define what would become known as “land art.” Michael Heizer, who had fled the East Coast for the ascetic rigor of the Nevada desert, had a New York gallery show featuring images of “Double Negative,” a pair of 50-foot-deep, dynamited and bulldozed trenches on a remote mesa near Las Vegas. Later that year, Artforum featured another monumental work, Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” an “immobile cyclone” of boulders jutting out from a desolate coast of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

As Suzaan Boettger writes in her definitive history, “Earthworks,” the art presented a curious dynamic. Built far from the white boxes of the New York art world, it could only be easily experienced (and validated as art) through the galleries themselves and the mediated form of photography. This could be powerful in itself: Gianfranco Gorgoni’s famous photographs of the “Spiral Jetty” in Artforum essentially were the “Spiral Jetty” for most people.

But there was another option: See the work.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

In case you haven’t been to the site.

Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book — a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development — to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world’s problems are too big for philanthropy–even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims. Over the next couple of months we’ll be posting much of that material here, in the hopes of eliciting public commentary.

Ester Duflo:

Bill Gates’ speech at Davos calls for a greater involvement of capitalists in the fight against poverty, and is rightly concerned about the need to create a structure that can give would-be creative capitalists the proper incentives to apply their energies to the fight. The main driving force he identifies, and many of the subsequent posts discuss, is public recognition. Consumers, employees, and shareholders may all derive utility from the warm glow of being associated with a company that does good things for the world, and they may therefore be willing to pay for it in the form of slightly higher prices, lower wages, and lower dividends.

And in many cases no sacrifice is required. Firms spend large amounts of money to sponsor things like car races so as to gain brand recognition, presumably because it makes economic sense. One might imagine that being associated with a sufficiently sexy philanthropic cause could be a just as effective way to advertise. I once heard the CEO of TNT, a Dutch transport and logistics company, make this argument very cogently. He explained why he had decided to stop sponsoring Formula One rallies and instead spend the money helping the World Food Program. His argument was that helping the WFP transport food in TNT trucks would do more to build his brand as one capable of rising to the most complex challenges than would a banner on a racing track. This example also underscores another important point, implicit in Gates’s speech and explicit in Abhijit Banerjee’s post: One reason we want to lure the successful entrepreneurs to the development business is that they will bring their business acumen, technical expertise, and creativity to the problem at hand, all of which are badly needed.

For these two reasons, I largely share the optimism evident in Bill Gates’ speech.

Kate Benson in the Sydney Morning Herald:

When Mehdi Jaffari was told his left carotid artery was so severely blocked he faced the risk of an imminent stroke, he turned the clock back to medieval times.

The 52-year-old counsellor, from Chatswood, bought more than 35 leeches from a Victorian farmer and applied them to his body daily. Within five days, a CT angiogram showed the artery had cleared, stunning staff at Royal North Shore Hospital and his family.

Leech therapy, first documented in Greece more than 4000 years ago, is not new in Sydney. More than 50 Richardsonianus australis leeches are kept in a tank at Liverpool Hospital for use on patients who have had skin grafts or severed digits because their saliva contains hirudin, a chemical that acts as a powerful anticoagulant and vasodilator.

More here.  [Thanks to Susan Anthony.]

Cognition studies clash with ‘New Yorker’ rationale.

Brilliant comment on the New Yorker cover controversy by 3QD friend Mahzarin Banaji, in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

On the morning of July 14, the Internet was clogged with discussions of the latest New Yorker cover depicting a Muslim Barack Obama and a terrorist Michelle Obama in fist-bumping celebration before a fireplace in which lies a burning American flag, while above it hangs a portrait of Osama bin Laden.

Asked by the Huffington Post whether, in retrospect, and in response to the public outcry, he regretted having produced the cover, the image’s creator, Barry Blitt, said: “Retrospect? Outcry? The magazine just came out 10 minutes ago, at least give me a few days to decide whether to regret it or not.”

If Blitt were aware of the science of social perception, he wouldn’t need a few days to decide. If he were cognizant of the facts about how the mind works, the simple associations that typify the brain’s ordinary connection-making, he might have thought differently before he sketched the first flame in that fireplace. If he had paid attention to a few of the dozens of experiments available — even in the popular media — that describe how the mind learns and believes, he and his boss wouldn’t have responded as they did to the questions posed to them the day after the cover appeared.

More here.

///

Gone Are The Days
Norman MacCaig

Impossible to call a lamb a lambkin

or say eftsoons or spell you ladye.

My shining armour bleeds when it’s scratched;

I blow the nose that’s part of my visor.
…….

When I go pricking o’er the plain

I say Eightpence please to the sad conductress.

The towering landscape you live in has printed

on its portcullis Bed and breakfast.
…….

I don’t regret it. There are wildernesses

enough in Rose Street or the Grassmarket

where dragons’ breaths are methylated

and social workers trap the unwary.
…….

So don’t expect me, lady with no e,

to look at a lamb and feel lambkin

or give me a down look because I bought

my greaves and cuisses at Marks and Spencers.
…….

Pishtushery’s out. But oh, how my heart swells

to see you perched, perjink, on a bar stool.

And though epics are shrunk to epigrams, let me

buy you a love potion, a gin, a double.

….

Via Hootsbuddy’s Place.

From CNN:

Randy Pausch, the professor whose “last lecture” became a runaway phenomenon on the Internet and was turned into a best-selling book, died Friday of pancreatic cancer, Carnegie Mellon University announced on its Web site.

Pausch, 47, a computer science professor, delivered the lecture, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007, a month after being told he had three to six months to live because his cancer had returned.

More here.  And do take an hour and a quarter to watch this video of the moving lecture: