Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

People find a great deal of satisfaction worrying about attention span, at least for a little while, and especially in the realm of popular culture. Twitter is the latest culprit. It's recent importance in organizing Iranian street protests notwithstanding, the 140 character posting limit on Twitter makes a certain kind of person nervous. Such persons (such as Baroness Susan Greenfield, a scientist at Oxford University) wonder whether tweeting and other such activities “encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centered.” She goes on to say, “My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and live for the moment.”

Unfair to the inherent joys of buzzing noises and bright lights, the statement is particularly galling to those of us who are rather fond of the moment, and living therein. One wonders during which time period the Baroness would prefer we live. I will leave wholly without comment the fact that Baroness Greenfield is also a Patron of Dignity in Dying.

More here.

A Politically Incorrect Ode to Whitman

Whitman isn’t in
He will not be in
This year or the next

He’s gone out
Far out where the two
Americas meet like kissing whales

Beyond the net
Of the universities
Whitman celebrates his absence

Old grampus
Without a postmodern
Stitch on him he reads himself

Sitting naked
On leaves of grass
Sounding his barbaric yawp

Read more »

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

When young, we are all aesthetes, eager to enjoy a wondrous world full of beauty, promise and reward. The experience of life itself seems enough to keep us busy and happy. So we fall in love and go to work and find success or not, and the decades roll by. In later years, however, we become unwilling philosophers. A parent unexpectedly dies. The now-grown children go off on their own. Work suddenly loses its savor. Before long, we are taking long walks and wondering about the old perplexities: What makes for a meaningful life? How should we pass our too few days upon this Earth? What really matters?

Keith Thomas's “The Ends of Life” examines the ways that people answered those questions from the early 16th century to the late 18th. To do so, this cultural historian — author of the classic “Religion and the Decline of Magic” (1971) — investigates six areas that have traditionally supplied aims for purpose-driven lives: Military prowess, work and vocation, wealth and possessions, honor and reputation, friendship and sociability, and fame and the afterlife. In each case, he presents his evidence largely through quotations from contemporary letters, memoirs, court testimonies and other documents. As Thomas's own connecting prose is graceful and sometimes crisply epigrammatic, “The Ends of Life” is a pleasure to read.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

For all the indignities that the elderly suffer, they aren’t typically accused of being a menace to society. Until, that is, they get behind the wheel of a car. Here in Massachusetts, a spate of high-profile accidents involving older drivers – a 92-year-old man who killed his wife by backing over her in a parking lot, an 88-year-old woman who allegedly hit and killed a 4-year-old girl in a crosswalk in Stoughton last month, a 93-year-old man who mistook the gas pedal for the brake and drove through the entrance of a Danvers Wal-Mart – have triggered calls on Beacon Hill for measures that would take older drivers off the roads as their abilities decline. Within families, it has heightened anxieties about whether it may finally be time to take the car keys away from elderly parents or grandparents.

The risk is real. While there is a wide variation, people for the most part grow measurably worse at driving as they age. They experience a steady erosion of physical capabilities like strength, eyesight, and hearing. And perhaps more importantly, they also lose the specific cognitive skills that driving requires. Even a healthy aging brain suffers a declining ability to respond quickly, to take in one’s surroundings and identify potential dangers, and to balance and coordinate all of the different tasks that merely backing out of a driveway can involve.

And yet it also emerges that, as a group, elderly drivers are in far fewer accidents per capita than those in any other age group. Older people, it turns out, have a second set of skills that helps them make up for the ones that have diminished. For many people, old age brings a growing awareness of their own limits, and they compensate by driving less and avoiding situations that overtax their abilities. They don’t drive fast, or at night, or on the freeway, or during rush hour. They certainly don’t text and drive. Consciously or not, older drivers become savvy at working with what they have.

More here.

Time Magazine conducted an online poll, asking “Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America’s most trusted newscaster?” Jon Stewart received 44% of the vote, 15 percentage points more than the second most trusted newscaster, Brian Williams. Stewart came in first or second in every state, except Vermont.  And he won more than 50% of the vote in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, but also surprisingly in Idaho, Utah, Arkansas (where he won 63% of the vote). Jason Linkins in the Huffington Post:

Well, in a result that he will probably accept as downright apocalyptic for America, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has been selected, in an online poll conducted by Time Magazine, as America’s Most Trusted Newscaster, post-Cronkite. Matched up against Brian Williams, Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson, Stewart prevailed with 44 percent of the vote. Now, if we’re being honest, he probably managed to prevail as the winner precisely because he was the odd man out in a field of network news anchors. Nevertheless, I think Jim Cramer should feel free to SNACK ON THAT.

Brian Williams drew the second largest percentage of votes, with 29 percent. Gibson and Couric finished third and fourth, respectively, with 19 and 7 percent of the vote.

[H/t: Mark Blyth]

Adam Hochschild in the New York Review of Books:

As if eastern Congo had not already suffered enough, seven years ago Nature dealt it a stunning blow. The volcano whose blue-green bulk looms above the dusty, lakeside city of Goma, Mount Nyiragongo, erupted, sending a smoking river of lava several hundred yards wide through the center of town and sizzling into the waters of Lake Kivu. More than 10,000 homes were engulfed. Parts of the city, which is packed with displaced people, are still covered by a layer of purplish rock up to twelve feet thick.

Far greater destruction has come from more than a decade of a bewilderingly complex civil war in which millions have died. First, neighboring Uganda and Rwanda supported a rebel force under Laurent Kabila that overthrew longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997. Soon after, Kabila fell out with his backers, and later Uganda and Rwanda fell out with each other. Before long, they and five other nearby nations had troops on Congo's soil, in alliance either with the shaky national government in Kinshasa or with a mushrooming number of rival ethnic warlords, particularly here in the mineral-rich east. Those foreign soldiers are almost all gone now, but some fighting between the government and remaining rebel groups continues. For two weeks in June, I had the chance to observe the war's effects, with the best of possible traveling companions: Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, whose reports have been an authoritative source of information on the country for years.

More here.

As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force. Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that’s the scariest part.

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

If we were transported forward in time, to an Earth ravaged by catastrophic climate change, we might see long, delicate strands of fire hose stretching into the sky, like spaghetti, attached to zeppelins hovering 65,000 feet in the air. Factories on the ground would pump 10 kilos of sulfur dioxide up through those hoses every second. And at the top, the hoses would cough a sulfurous pall into the sky. At sunset on some parts of the planet, these puffs of aerosolized pollutant would glow a dramatic red, like the skies in Blade Runner. During the day, they would shield the planet from the sun’s full force, keeping temperatures cool—as long as the puffing never ceased.

Technology that could redden the skies and chill the planet is available right now. Within a few years we could cool the Earth to temperatures not regularly seen since James Watt’s steam engine belched its first smoky plume in the late 18th century. And we could do it cheaply: $100 billion could reverse anthropogenic climate change entirely, and some experts suspect that a hundredth of that sum could suffice. To stop global warming the old-fashioned way, by cutting carbon emissions, would cost on the order of $1 trillion yearly. If this idea sounds unlikely, consider that President Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, said in April that he thought the administration would consider it, “if we get desperate enough.” And if it sounds dystopian or futuristic, consider that Blade Runner was set in 2019, not long after Obama would complete a second term.

More here.

And thanks to “waa” in the comments, Jason Garfield’s Chris Bliss Diss:

Tywater

Death of Sir Nihil, book of nth,
Upon the charred and clotted sward,
Lacking the lily of our Lord,
Alases of the hyacinth.

Could flicker from behind his ear
A whistling silver throwing knife
And with a holler punch the life
Out of a swallow in the air.

Behind the lariat’s butterfly
Shuttled his white and gritted grin,
And cuts of sky would roll within
The noose-hole, when he spun it high.

The violent, neat and practiced skill
Was all he loved and all he learned;
When he was hit, his body turned
To clumsy dirt before it fell.

And what to say of him, God knows.
Such violence. And such repose.

by Richard Wilbur

From The Guardian:

No one who has ever had a baby chimp climb trustingly into her arms (I have) can doubt that Pan troglodytes is the nearest living relative to Homo sapiens. But how close does that make us? Should we, as some influential scientists and philosophers have argued, see chimpanzees as fellow humans and accord them the same rights? Or does science support the assumption of human uniqueness that has prevailed through most of civilisation?

As his title suggests, Jeremy Taylor is firmly in the second camp. A TV science producer, he was driven to distraction by a stream of documentaries showing cute chimps displaying apparently human traits such as empathy, tool-making and language. Egged on by a tendency to anthropomorphism, some primatologists have argued that the difference between chimpanzee and human cognition is simply a matter of degree. Taylor is having none of it: “To call the difference quantitative between alarm calls, food-specific grunts, whoops and Shakespeare; between night nests and twig tools, and the A380 passenger jet; and between retribution and food sharing and Aristotle and Mill is, to my mind, stretching a point, and a bit of an insult to human ingenuity and culture.”

At a superficial level, science supports the chimps 'R' us hypothesis. In 2005, scientists published a letter-by-letter comparison of the chimpanzee and human genomes, with an overall similarity of 96%. For comparison, studies of the human genome now put the similarity between any two individuals at between 97% and 99%.

More here.

Maria Margaronis in The Nation [picture from the Cavafy archive]:

The poet Constantine Cavafy was a cosmopolitan by both birth and inclination. His parents were Constantinople Greeks of what was then known as “good family”; by the time their youngest son was born in 1863, they were settled in Alexandria, Egypt, prosperous pillars of a thriving community. But after his father’s death in 1870, the family fortunes failed and Cavafy’s mother took her sons to live for a few years near her late husband’s relatives in Liverpool and London. (It’s said that afterward Cavafy’s Greek retained a faint English inflection.) The dimly remembered life of parties and servants was gone; in the early 1880s the British bombardment of Alexandria destroyed the family home. By the time the novelist E.M. Forster met Cavafy in 1918, he was living in a small apartment on the run-down Rue Lepsius. Alexandria, wrote Forster, “founded upon cotton with the concurrence of onions and eggs,” was “scarcely a city of the soul.”

Stanley Fish in The New York Times:

Now, in 2009, it’s a version of the same story. Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black. He isn’t the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama’s initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been the victim of racial profiling himself. Speculation was unnecessary, for they didn’t have to look any further than the story they were reporting in another segment, the story of the “birthers” — the “wing-nuts,” in Chris Matthews’s phrase — who insist that Obama was born in Kenya and cite as “proof” his failure to come up with an authenticated birth certificate. For several nights running, Matthews displayed a copy of the birth certificate and asked, What do you guys want? How can you keep saying these things in the face of all evidence?

He missed the point. No evidence would be sufficient, just as no evidence would have convinced some of my Duke colleagues that Gates was anything but a charlatan and a fraud. It isn’t the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate that’s the problem for the birthers. The problem is again the legitimacy of a black man living in a big house, especially when it’s the White House. Just as some in Durham and Cambridge couldn’t believe that Gates belonged in the neighborhood, so does a vocal minority find it hard to believe that an African-American could possibly be the real president of the United States.

Gates and Obama are not only friends; they are in the same position, suspected of occupying a majestic residence under false pretenses. And Obama is a double offender. Not only is he guilty of being Housed While Black; he is the first in American history guilty of being P.W.B., President While Black.

More here.

Harry Kreisler interviews Craig Calhoun, President of the Social Science Research Council:

Michael Fox over at In These Times:

On a chilly evening in late May, hundreds of Porto Alegre, Brazil, residents packed into the Cecores gymnasium of the working-class neighborhood of Restinga for their yearly regional Participatory Budgeting (PB) assembly. Mayor José Fogaça and his PB team sat before them at long tables. This year marked the 20th anniversary of the process in this southern city. The lively crowd cheered and waved banners. Residents spoke in support of their needs, or denounced the government for not fulfilling promises it had made. “Housing” was on the lips of many. 


“I struggled. I’m proof of this,” said Fabiana dos Santos Nacimento, a mother of six, who won her own home through the PB process a decade ago. “I waited six or seven years to acquire my home. And now my daughters are here and I’m struggling to help them acquire a home next door.”


More than 750 residents voted housing as this year’s third most important priority, behind social assistance and roads. During the last decade and a half, thousands of working families with the National Movement for the Struggle of Housing (MNLM for Movimento Nacional de Luta pela Moradia) have won homes through participatory budgeting in this region alone. 


The assembly was just one of 23 that occur in Porto Alegre every fall. At the assemblies, neighborhood residents participate in the allocation of city funds by prioritizing needs, proposing future government projects and electing neighborhood delegates and councilpersons to carry out their decisions throughout the year. 


Henry Farrell over at the Monkey Cage:

Renowned macroeconomist Paul Romer (perhaps the economist most responsible for getting the literature on endogenous growth up and running) has resigned from Berkeley to help start up a new institute dedicated to changing how we think about sovereignty, so as to make it easier both for countries to borrow rule-sets from each other, and perhaps to allow other countries to actively administer parts of their own territory. Romer notes

…we [should] rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe create new systems of administrative control); rethink citizenship (allowing perhaps for voice without residency as well as residency without voice); and rethink scale (instead of focusing on nations, focus on new cities.) If nations are willing to experiment along these lines, they can create new places, places that can give more people access to the kind of rules that they would like to live and work under, and places that can sustain the historical process of entry and innovation in national systems of rules.

This is not only not as strange as it sounds, but actually has some considerable empirical precedent, as Alex Cooley and Hendrik Spruyt discuss in their new book, Contracting States (Amazon). State sovereignty is much more frequently abrogated than we think, and many states effectively control bits and pieces of other states’ territories. Sovereignty is not the single unitary phenomenon that it is often taken for, but instead a “a bundle of rights and obligations that are dynamically exchanged and transferred between states.”

The first chapter of Contracting States over at Princeton University Press.

Via the Daily Dish, Jacob Sullum over at Reason’s Hit & Run:

Indiana lawyer Joshua Claybourn notes that the Henry Louis Gates affair (Gatesgate?) highlights the threat to civil liberties posed by laws prohibiting “disorderly conduct,” the offense for which Gates was arrested. In Massachusetts, a person is deemed “disorderly,” and therefore subject to a jail term of up to six months, if he

1) “engages in fighting or threatening, violent or tumultuous behavior,” or

2) “creates a hazard or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose”

3) “with purpose to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm,” or

4) “recklessly creates a risk thereof.”

Claybourn (who, for what it’s worth, is skeptical of Gates’ charges of racism) says:

This sort of definition is…similar to that found in most states, and in almost [every]instance it is fraught with vagaries, giving far too much discretion to police officers. In short, “disorderly conduct” can easily become a euphemism for whatever a particular police officer doesn’t like. That kind of environment runs counter to fundamental ideals of the American system.

The danger of such discretion is clear from the report on Gates’ arrest. Sgt. James Crowley, the Cambridge police officer who arrested Gates at his home after responding to an erroneous burglary report, claims the Harvard professor’s complaints and charges of racism amounted to “tumultuous behavior” that recklessly created a risk of “public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.” How so?

UPDATE: Via billy in the comments, Henry Farrell has posted a defense of the discretionary power of police by Brandon del Pozo, a captain in the NYPD and a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at CUNY, over at Crooked Timber. To me there is some merit in de Pozo’s arguments for discretionary power, which does not mean I’m totally convinced. I’m far from convinced that Sergeant Crowley used that discretionary power wisely, and am inclined to think he used it unwisely.

From my own experience and what I have learned about the incident, I highly doubt that I would have ordered the arrest of Professor Gates for any charge. I do, however, think that based on his actions as alleged by Sergeant Crowley, his arrest was somewhat plausible within the universe of possible outcomes to the incident. That still does not mean that the cops in question weren’t acting “stupidly,” as President Obama suggested. It is possible to do a lawful thing that is stupid, and that is why officers have discretion in many cases. While it can be misused, discretion is there to prevent them from stupidly enforcing the letter of the law. That the arrest was unwise and imprudent has also been made clear by how quickly the charges were dropped and the apologies issued by the government of Cambridge.

On the other hand, I do feel that Professor Gates seems to have acted inappropriately. There was no good reason for him to converse belligerently with the responding officer from his first words, or accuse him of racism, or refuse to answer basic questions directly related to the scope of the officer’s legitimate investigation. Of course, Gates also had the prerogative to say nothing at all, but this is different from saying nothing constructive, and instead issuing verbal abuse.

Danny Postel in New Humanist:

“Daddy, why did Jesus invent butterflies if they die after two weeks?”

I just about hit the panic button when my six-year-old son Theo put this question to me not long ago. His mother, who is a Christian, had taught him that Jesus was God. When Jesus's visage appears in a painting or on television, Theo sometimes exclaims, “That's God!” In his butterfly question he seemed to reason, syllogistically, that if Jesus was God, and God created the world and its life forms (butterflies being one of them), Jesus “invented” the winged creatures. Either that or God and Jesus are simply interchangeable in his mind.

“First, Theo, your question presumes that Jesus was God,” I responded. “Many people, like mommy, believe he was, but many others don't. It also presumes that there is a God – we don't know for sure that there is.” “I think there is,” he retorted. “There may very well be a God, Theo. But not everyone agrees on that – there are many people who doubt there is a God. We might never know for sure if there is or not,” I told him. “When we die we'll know,” he came back. “Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.”

The literalism packed into Theo's question alarmed me, but this was by no means my first encounter with the influence of religion on my progeny. My ten-year-old son Elijah enjoys going to church with his mother – not every Sunday, but not infrequently. I've never discouraged it. One Monday morning a few months ago, though, I saw him reading the Bible, a children's Bible he'd been given at his mother's church. In no way did I discourage him from reading it. But I confess (as it were) that I went to work that day a bit preoccupied.

More here.