Daniel Dennett in the Guardian:

As I explain in the chapter by that title in Breaking the Spell, “belief in belief” is a common phenomenon not restricted to religions. Economists realise that a sound currency depends on people believing that the currency is sound, and scientists recognise that the actual objectivity of scientific studies on global warming is politically impotent unless people believe in that objectivity, so economists and scientists (among others) take steps to foster and protect such beliefs that they think are benign. That’s acting on belief in belief.

Sometimes the maintenance of a belief is deemed so important that impressive systems of propaganda are erected and vigorously defended by people who do not in fact share the belief that they think is so important for society to endorse. For instance, imbecile monarchs have been kept on their thrones by widespread conspiracies of oblivion and deception when it has been deemed too socially disruptive to confirm to the populace what everybody suspects: the king is an idiot.

Religion offers an extreme case of this. Today one of the most insistent forces arrayed in opposition to us vocal atheists is the “I’m an atheist but” crowd, who publicly deplore our “hostility”, our “rudeness” (which is actually just candour), while privately admitting that we’re right. They don’t themselves believe in God, but they certainly do believe in belief in God.

In Words Without Borders, a translation of Pedro Rosa Mendes’ German Dolls:

“German Dolls” takes Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) to Berlin. It is a text about memories–false and inaccurate, as memories always are–and how they interfere with the places we inhabit, the places we best know by getting lost in them (in the sense of choosing to vanish into them). Pessoa grew up in Durban and wrote his first poems in English. Apart from two trips from Portugal to South Africa, he rarely traveled, and so far as I know was never in Berlin. But his invention of identities, like different layers of one’s self–the heteronymus–has everything to do with a city, Berlin, that hides its true identity, and its memories, behind names that are recognizable only from the inside. To a stranger, they lead nowhere. I wanted to work on a metamorphosis of the Poet into a dog. Pessoa used more than seventy heteronyms, some of them discovered only recently by scholars studying his handwritten papers. It made sense to me to imagine Pessoa as a Stasi agent, playing a game with a city, and a society, where everyone could spy on everyone, living a double life and reporting to a “master”–a Poet, let’s say, or a demiurge–who had the key to everyone’s true identity.–Pedro Rosa Mendes

Berlin is lost,

(he said, licking the back of his hand)

lost on the map. It’s a tropical city in exile. Or in hibernation. The only tropical city in the north of Europe.

(licking slowly, very slowly)

It gets cold here. By chance, it gets extremely cold in this land. Once a year-in the winter. Isn’t that incredible? That’s not normal in the tropics. Snow. Every year, this chill. Have you ever been frostbitten? Implacable.

(there is a thermometer outside the window. it shows seventeen below zero)

The chill is a dog that doesn’t bark. It installs itself. You have a sense that the cold is eating away your bones. You try to melt the pain, but you feel your extremities turning to stone. The mercury finally bites into the nape of your neck. You lose the ability to move.

Jan Swafford examined “Why haven’t we figured out his Ninth Symphony yet?” in Slate 6 years ago. Now James C. Taylor wonders the same about Mahler’s 8th symphony in More Intelligent Life and comes up with a tentative answer:

Performances of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (the “Symphony of a Thousand”) never quite add up. Perhaps the work is too technically unwieldy, or maybe its meaning is too obtuse. (After he finished the symphony, Mahler wrote his wife in 1909 that “it is all an allegory to convey something that, no matter what form it is given, can never be adequately expressed.”) Whatever the reason, it is a work that demands attention. Mahler’s largest creation–and one of few that were well received in his lifetime–premiered in 1910. Nearly 90 years later, New York City played host to not one but two performances of this massive and rarely mounted symphony.

The first took place in May at Carnegie Hall. Pierre Boulez, a French modern-music maestro and arguably the leading interpreter of Mahler’s 6th Symphony, conducted the Staatskapelle Berlin, the orchestra for the Berlin State Opera. The Staatskapelle is a solid pit band, but hardly a world-class symphonic orchestra, and not the first group of players you’d pick for Mahler. The singers, however, were first rate and the orchestra played with assurance, if little sparkle. The performance was most notable for its restraint.

It is not clear whether this restraint was due to Boulez’s minimalism, the relatively modest size of the forces assembled (the Carnegie concert involved barely 300 musicians; at the symphony’s premiere in 1910 there were over a thousand) or simple fatigue (the Staatskapelle was performing all ten of Mahler’s symphonies in under two weeks). Regardless, the result was an 8th that beguiled more than it overwhelmed.

William Easterly in VoxEU:

The “tipping point” is a popular concept covering a whole range of phenomena (and a best-selling book by Malcolm Gladwell) where individual behaviour depends on the behaviour of the herd.

Its original application was to racial segregation. Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling developed a beautifully simple model for this. Suppose that whites have different degrees of racism – some would “tolerate” higher shares of non-whites in their local neighbourhood than others. Schelling showed that even the less racist whites would still wind up exiting during tipping because of a chain reaction.

Here’s how it happens – at first only the most extreme racist whites exit. But their departure causes the white share to go down, making the second most extreme racist whites uncomfortable, so they also exit. The white share goes down some more, and so now even less racist whites will be uncomfortable being a white minority, and they will wind up exiting too. So the remarkable prediction of the tipping point model is that just a little bit of integration that directly bothered only the most racist whites wound up causing all of the whites to exit. So even if the typical white were perfectly happy with an integrated neighbourhood, these neighbourhoods would be so unstable that the final outcome would be extreme racial segregation. The segregated non-white neighbourhood will remain permanently non-white. Segregated white neighbourhoods (with a white share above the tipping point) will also be stable, because virtually all whites will tolerate a very small non-white share. So segregation happens through a chain reaction, even though the average white person did not want such extreme segregation.

How to search for aliens

At midnight we’d light candles
in the tabernacle and begin
our yearly vigil for the dead.
Mostly I remember the kneeling,
how the vaulted ceiling pressed
the congregation silent until grief
weighted the air. Sometimes I slept
as the incense censer chimed smoke
into strange eddies; often I dreamed
of falling into a vast darkness only to wake
in the pew with tears stepping down my face
as though death had come and gone in the space
of an hour. Even then I knew the spirit shunned
this drama, the artificial quiet shrouding the voice
of god in ritual while outside the planet spun
unperturbed. Four point five billion years
since genesis and the sky still hovers
like a veil between us and space,
wanting to be lifted before the unintelligible
babble dismantles the tower we have
half-built. At Arecibo, signals fall
from the dark like angels dropping messages;
there are miracles in the data waiting for discovery,
contact unrealized despite centuries of squinting
into the heavens. When our vigil ended we would walk
home in the cold, my mother mourning the past
while I tracked the stars that winked between
the street lights, listening for serendipity
in between footsteps. She held my hand so tightly,
perhaps she knew that prayer was too simple:
not enough prime numbers hidden in the signal,
no small man standing on our solar system,
peering out into the universe.

by Christine Klocek-Lim, recipient of the 2009
Ellen La Forge Poetry Prize (previously the Grolier Prize)
—forthcoming in the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial
Poetry Foundation Annual.

Stephen Faris in Foreign Policy:

Until now, the two sides had been able to relegate the water issue to the back burner. In 1960, India and Pakistan agreed to divide the six tributaries that form the Indus River. India claimed the three eastern branches, which flow through Punjab. The water in the other three, which pass through Jammu and Kashmir, became Pakistan's. The countries set a cap on how much land Kashmir could irrigate and agreed to strict regulations on how and where water could be stored. The resulting Indus Waters Treaty has survived three wars and nearly 50 years. It's often cited as an example of how resource scarcity can lead to cooperation rather than conflict.

But the treaty's success depends on the maintenance of a status quo that will be disrupted as the world warms. Traditionally, Kashmir's waters have been naturally regulated by the glaciers in the Himalayas. Precipitation freezes during the coldest months and then melts during the agricultural season. But if global warming continues at its current rate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates, the glaciers could be mostly gone from the mountains by 2035. Water that once flowed for the planting will flush away in winter floods.

More here.

Salman Hameed and Kevin Anderson in Irtiqa:

July 20th will mark the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing. After a long absence, there is a renewed interest in returning to the Moon – perhaps to establish a permanent outpost. If the Apollo program of the 1960s was driven largely by the desire to win the space race with the Soviet Union, the current push has commercial benefits at the forefront, from mining the lunar surface to the possibility of space tourism.

But as we prepare for a permanent presence on another terrestrial body, we must carefully look at the implications of our explorations – both on the Moon and on its human inhabitants.

“Moon,” a film strategically released a month before the anniversary of the lunar landing, continues in the tradition of using alien environments to raise ethical implications of our actions and to explore the nature of being human. The movie is set in the near future on a remote mining station, Sarang Lunar Outpost, located on the dark side of the Moon.

More here.

John Gravois in The National:

His fortnightly trips to the UAE are a symbol of his devotion to one of the most audacious, ambitious and strange projects in academia today, the creation of New York University, Abu Dhabi. With his Emirati counterparts, [John] Sexton is proposing to build an American-style research and liberal arts institution that will attract the world’s most elite students and scholars from day one. Just as grandly, Sexton envisions the Abu Dhabi campus as a kind of network hub that will operate in tandem with NYU in Manhattan to power a new “global university” comprising study sites on five continents. And as if all that were still too modest, Sexton believes these global moves will slingshot NYU into the ranks of the Ivy League. If the Abu Dhabi and New York campuses aren’t both ranked among the world’s top 10 universities in 20 years, he says, he’ll consider the whole undertaking a failure.

Thirty years ago, NYU was a poorly endowed commuter school on the brink of collapse, whose only salvation was the sale of a university-owned pasta factory. The school’s administrators, realising they could no longer survive in this local niche, set out to reinvent the university as an elite institution. Since then, NYU and its leaders have scrapped and fought to distinguish themselves, furiously raising money and then furiously spending it on reputational capital – chiefly star professors, Manhattan real estate and, more recently, international programmes. Under Sexton, who was named president in 2001, NYU’s strategy of upward mobility has reached a kind of apotheosis. Last year, he concluded the largest academic fundraising campaign in US history. Under his watch, NYU has been called “the success story in contemporary American higher education” – but for Sexton and NYU, the uphill battle for status never ends.

More here.

In Guernica:

I think the problem that Obama has made in Pakistan is an enormous one. Empowering Pakistan’s military and empowering this incredibly criminal and corrupt government with drone access and all the rest of it, and with billions and billions of dollars of aid, he’s just repeating the cycle. We’re seeing on a much larger scale a repeat of the earthquake. Pakistan took in, I think, $6.7 billion to deal with the earthquake. Four years later, we still have people in camps; that money has gone to some very high-up officials’ bank accounts and nowhere else. Except in this case, the Pakistan Army has entered into a guerrilla war and what Obama has proved to people in the region is that American democracy is always going to come down against the people. I mean, American democracy means we’ll drone your village, it means we’ll bomb your schools, and it means you live in refugee camps. The idea then of reaching out to the Muslim world, reaching out to places like Pakistan to explain to them that we share a common battle in fighting extremism, has been entirely lost. If I were going to meet President Obama, I would have so many things to say to him…

Fatima Bhutto: But [laughs] I think I would want to make clear to him that he’s opened a third front in my country. By allying America with this government, he has furthered the cause of the Pakistani Taliban so immensely, so immensely. Because when you’ve got these guys fighting the seventh largest army in the world and the first largest army in the world, and they’re fighting and they’re losing their homes, people forget that they flog women. People forget that they are in favor of an incredibly repressive Sharia system. Because what they see is that [the Taliban] are fighting a corrupt system, a corrupt government, a violent army.

Robert Paxton in bookforum:

Artistic and intellectual life in France under the German occupation (1940–44) presents a paradox. On the one hand, there were stultifying pressures: censorship, aggressive cultural agendas, and the exclusion of Jews, Freemasons, and leftists. On the other hand, the authorities—both Vichy and Nazi—encouraged the arts, each for their own reasons, and even some Resistance artists felt a duty to keep French cultural expression alive. The result was a surprisingly active artistic and cultural scene, though distorted in ways that are fascinating to explore.

In The Shameful Peace, a zesty book that has seduced many reviewers, Frederic Spotts, a retired diplomat who has published other historical works, including studies of the Wagner shrine at Bayreuth and Hitler’s aesthetic sensibility, presents a diverting (if depressing) rogues’ gallery of art-world self-seekers, compromisers, and outright Nazi sympathizers who survived and even thrived in occupied France. The book consists largely of corrosive portraits, based on diaries, letters, biographies, and memoirs. There are ideological pro-Nazis like journalist Alain Laubreaux (dubbed by Spotts a “supreme rat”); novelists and essayists Lucien Rebatet, Robert Brasillach, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle; social butterflies like Jean Cocteau, director Sacha Guitry, and actress Arletty; crafty entrepreneurs like novelist Georges Simenon; power-seekers like pianist Alfred Cortot; and those, like the great French Wagnerian soprano Germaine Lubin, who craved German applause.

Spotts, however, underrates dissenting and resisting artists and intellectuals. No one would want him to revive the pious image, demolished long ago, of an almost universally resisting France. But he takes his reasoning too far in the opposite direction, declaring that resisters were “exceptions.” For all its profusion of lively detail, The Shameful Peace simply omits whole realms of French artistic and intellectual endeavor.

Charlie Bertsch in Jewcy:

Publicity cuts both ways. With the help of a smart press pack and a persistent publicist, a musician who defies categorization can inspire the creation of a new category. But success of that sort can be heavy load to bear. Once your media profile is well established, it’s hard to modify. And that problem, faced by anyone who sustains a meaningful career, is greatly magnified when you have helped to construct the box into which critics eagerly put you.

Such is the fate of Matisyahu, born Matthew Miller, whose deft combination of different musical genres has made him one of the world’s most successful Jewish musicians. Although it has been half a decade since he first started to attract the attention of the mainstream press, he continues to be defined by the perception that it is strange for someone to practice his religion on tour.

A recent piece in The Idaho Statesman provides a good example. After labeling Matisyahu a “devout Jewish rapper,” the author Jordan Levin goes on to describe him making “the kind of journey he makes all the time between his music and his religion.” It sounds like a major undertaking. But the trip in question, later further embellished into a “dual spiritual and musical odyssey,” only turns out to take Matisyahu across Manhattan, from a voice lesson to the preparations for Shabbat, which the author finds it necessary to identify as “the Jewish holy day of rest.”

From Science:

In elephant society, nothing is more important than family. From traveling packs of mothers and calves to larger groups that contain aunts and cousins, all segments of the creature's complex social structure are typically composed of relatives. But what happens when these populations are decimated by humans? New research reveals that elephants sometimes bring in non-kin to keep their social groups viable. The finding is based on a survey of about 400 elephants living in Kenya's Samburu National Reserve. The elephants are part of a larger population that lost three-quarters of its members to ivory poachers in the 1970s. Today, the group remains vulnerable to illegal killing by nomadic tribes, farmers, and others. Curious about how such devastation has affected the social structure of the Samburu elephants, conservation biologist George Wittemyer of Colorado State University in Fort Collins and colleagues studied the creatures for 5 years. They pinpointed the elephants' genetic relationships to each other by sequencing DNA from fresh dung samples. The researchers found that when they looked at the largest groupings of elephants in this society–so-called “clan” and “bond” groups–many of the elephants had opened up to include nonrelatives.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Taking turns isn't just a nice idea. It may be as much a part of the theory of evolution as survival of the fittest – at least that's the conclusion that British researchers reached after running a genetic simulation through thousands of generations of evolutionary change. Turn-taking behavior seem to come naturally to humans, whether it's standing in line or deciding who's going to do the dishes tonight. But such behavior has been observed in a wide variety of other species as well: Chimps take turns grooming each other, for example, and penguins take turns minding their eggs.

“It is far from obvious how turn-taking evolved without language or insight in animals shaped by natural selection to pursue their individual self-interests,” University of Leicester psychologist Andrew Colman said last week in a news release about the research. Colman and a university colleague of his, Lindsay Browning, looked into the evolution of politeness for a paper published in the September issue of the journal Evolutionary Ecology Research – not by studying actual monkeys, penguins or line-standers, but by setting up a series of genetic simulations where they could dictate the rules of the evolutionary game. The experiment was as much an exercise in game theory as in evolutionary biology. Colman and Browning programmed a computer to play a variety of games in which the payoff varied depending on whether the simulated players made the same or different choices.

More here.

Having read close to 30 Scandinavian crime novels over the last several months, I can come to only one conclusion: Scandinavia is a bleak, ungodly, extraordinarily violent place to live. The capitals are seething hot pots of murder. In Oslo, a serial killer slips red diamond pentagrams under the eyelids of his victims (Jo Nesbø’s The Devil’s Star), while in Stockholm a stalker terrorizes young girls in public parks (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Man on the Balcony). The situation is even worse at the local level. Take, for instance, Ystad, population 17,000, a quaint fishing village on Sweden’s southern shore best known for its high-speed ferry terminal. It has suffered, in the novels of Henning Mankell, the following horrors: the torture and execution of an elderly farmer and his wife (Faceless Killers); the torture and execution of two men who are found floating off the coast in a life boat (The Dogs of Riga); the impalement of a retired bird-watcher on sharpened bamboo poles (The Fifth Woman); and the self-immolation of a teenage girl (Sidetracked). Each of these crimes—and many, many more—is committed by a different killer and all within just three years. In terms of per capita incidence of violent crime, Mankell’s Ystad would rank behind Mosul but well ahead of Johannesburg and Mogadishu. Fortunately, more people are murdered every year in the pages of Scandinavian crime novels than are murdered in Scandinavia itself. The homicide rates in Scandinavian countries are among the lowest on the planet. This year, the Global Peace Index ranked Denmark and Norway the second and third most peaceful countries. Sweden came in 13th. The Nordic countries also consistently rank as the happiest countries in the world.

more from Nathaniel Rich at Slate here.

It was slightly disconcerting when, towards the end of Berlin’s life, as his friend and former colleague Henry Hardy began to gather up his Remains, he published a series of essays under the title of The Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990). Here was the Maistre essay again, rechauffé under a new title but saying more or less what was contained in the volume of forty years before. It gave one the sense that perhaps Berlin – charming, witty, urbane, brilliantly talkative as he was – had not exactly done much with the intervening years. This sense is quickened by the publication of his voluminous letters. Before turning to these remarkable documents, I should like to stay for a moment with Berlin’s intellectual interests and with his heroes. Chief of these was undoubtedly Alexander Herzen. In his delightful essay on Herzen – in the volume entitled Russian Thinkers (1978) – Berlin painted another little self-portrait when he wrote, “Herzen is detached from party, detached from doctrine”. Young Revolutionaries (of 1860) attacked Herzen for “being a gentleman, for being rich, for living in comfort, for sitting in London and observing the Russian revolutionary struggle from afar, for being a member of a generation which had merely talked in the salons, and speculated and philosophised, when all round them was squalor and misery, bitterness and injustice”. Yet Herzen, sybaritic and lazy as he appears, had been clever enough not to be bewitched by doctrine when many others had been; and therefore he was able to see clearly. “Why is liberty valuable? Because it is an end in itself, because it is what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to perform an act of human sacrifice.”

more from A.N. Wilson at the TLS here.

PHILOSOPHY
…………………..
I love intellectual discourse, so don’t hold back.
Unleash your Wittgenstein. I Adorno.
Taste the Hegel on the lips, let Decartes
be an acrobat on the tongue. Let us be,
light-headedly, Spinoza, Saussure.
May Foucault suggest the unspeakably dirty.
Let us Schopenhauer until we are flushed.
Lacan will lead the way
to where we can lay together.
I’ll caress your Voltaire, run my fingers
along your Derrida, play with the curls
of your Kristeva. Drink in the perfume
of Deleuze and let James surprise us
with his firmness until we Kafka in fits.
Let the strap of your Nietzsche fall
from your shoulder.
We’ll Freud like Wilde animals,
drench ourselves in Brecht, and collapse
into Kierkegaard, our Jaspers wilted,
gasping for Camus.

by Brian R. Young
from Barn Owl Review, #1, 2009

Hannah Devlin in The Times:

Hundreds of wallets were planted on the streets of Edinburgh by psychologists last year. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly half of the 240 wallets were posted back. But there was a twist.

Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, and his team inserted one of four photographs behind a clear plastic window inside, showing either a smiling baby, a cute puppy, a happy family or a contented elderly couple. Some wallets had no image and some had charity papers inside.

When faced with the photograph of the baby people were far more likely to send the wallet back, the study found. In fact, only one in ten were hard-hearted enough not to do so. With no picture to tug at the emotions, just one in seven were sent back.

According to Dr Wiseman the result reflects a compassionate instinct towards vulnerable infants that people have evolved to ensure the survival of future generations. “The baby kicked off a caring feeling in people, which is not surprising from an evolutionary perspective,” he said.

More here.

John Markoff in the New York Times:

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates believes that if he had been able to watch physicist Richard Feynman lecture on physics in 1964 his life might have played out differently.

Mr. Gates, of course, is legendary as a Harvard University dropout who went on to create the world’s most successful software firm. He has told associates that if had watched the lectures earlier in his life he might have become a physicist instead of a software entrepreneur.

However, Mr. Gates, who is also well known for his sharp and varied intellectual interests and his philanthropic commitment to education, said this week that he had purchased the rights to videos of seven lectures that Dr. Feynman gave at Cornell University called “The Character of Physical Law,” in an effort to make them broadly available via the Internet.

Microsoft Research announced on Wednesday that Mr. Gates, who purchased the rights to the videos privately from the Feynman estate, BBC and from Cornell University, in cooperation with Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher, has created a Web site that is intended to enhance the videos by annotating them with related digital content.

More here. [Go to the website and watch the brilliant lectures!]

Mark McDonald and 3QD friend Wolf Böwig on the Rohingya (photo by Wolf Böwig with more amazing images in the piece):

The Rohingya number about 750.000 in Burma. But the military junta does not recognize them as one of the 135 “national races” in the mostly Buddhist nation. And so, in the face of forced labor, arbitrary arrest, stolen land and even starvation, they flee to the makeshift camp (an adjoining settlement of 20.000 residents has water, electricity and other basic services. Run by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, it is known as the official Kutupalong camp. Some Rohingya have lived there for more than a decade.)

Every day more Rohingya arrive at the Bangladeshi camps, stateless, sun-blasted refugees carrying their meager bundles. The newcomers, largely from Rakhine State in Burma, are often so traumatized that they’re unable to tell aid workers what they have fled.

Another one million Rohingya are scattered about the world – there has been a major diaspora from South Asia in recent decades – and they have flung themselves from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to Thailand to Indonesia. The men lay asphalt and pour cement in Riyadh. They haul fishing nets in the Andaman Sea. They pull rickshaws in Jakarta. The children, with their small hands, peel shrimp and weave carpets in Karachi.