Aida Edemariam on Michael Frayn, his new play and theatrical performance, in The Guardian:

Michael Frayn’s new play, Afterlife, like Democracy and Copenhagen, takes a real historical incident as its starting point. Like Copenhagen it cycles deftly through the years, each cycle getting at something new, some different layer of meaning, like simultaneously spinning plates. As in Noises Off, there is a play within a play; like many of his plays, it is acutely aware of its theatricality.

“It seems to me that the theatre’s just a very clear example of what we all do all the time in life – we’re both performing and being the audience,” says Frayn, long limbs folding into the corner of a sofa in the home he shares with his wife, biographer Claire Tomalin, in Petersham, south-west London. He has a monumental head, and a deep quiet rumble of a voice, often directed inward. “Even as we sit here I am being the audience when you ask a question. When I reply, I take over the performance, and you’re the audience. The theatre’s only an extension of that.”

Most dramatists, he writes in Stage Directions, a new collection of his writing on the theatre, “start young, when they are full of passion and certainty; and often, by the age of 36, which I was when my first play was produced, have already got it out of their system, and sunk exhausted into obscurity, celebrity, or drink.”

Michael Saler reviews David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague and Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends in the TLS:

Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague is a thoroughly researched, engagingly written account of a modern witch-hunt: the public hysteria over horror and crime comics in the United States during the early 1950s. Many of these were excessive in their gratuitous depictions of violence, as Hajdu admits, but the reaction to them was even more extreme. Schools and churches organized public burnings of comics, when Nazi book-burnings were still a recent memory; laws were passed to prohibit sales; publishers were forced out of business and artists lost their livelihood. The industry responded to the outcry by creating a self-censoring body whose code was so restrictive that comics lost their vitality and much of their audience.

At first glance, this sad episode of censorship and paranoia seems to coincide with the chilling climate fostered by McCarthyism. There were clear overlaps: the panic was promoted by Dr Fredric Wertham who, like Joseph McCarthy, found a cause that would bring him the national attention he craved. Wertham’s scientific credentials in psychiatry seemed to legitimate his specious claim that comic books caused juvenile delinquency, and made oracular his pronouncement that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry”. His Seduction of the Innocent (1954) led parents to believe that Superman promoted Fascism, Batman and Robin homosexuality, and Wonder Woman sadomasochism. (Wertham wasn’t entirely wrong about the last: Wonder Woman enjoyed using her “golden lasso” and “bracelets of submission” on villains; her creator, William Moulton Marston, claimed she “satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them”.) Politicians, such as Senator Estes Kefauver, joined Wertham in order to advance their careers.

Hajdu notes these similarities, but argues that while McCarthyism represented anti-elitism, the crusade against comics was “anti-anti-elitism, a campaign by protectors of rarefied ideals of literacy, sophistication, and virtue to rein in the practitioners of a wild, homegrown form of vernacular American expression”.

Like something out of Cronenberg’s Crash, in Newsweek:

“Josh” says he was fully prepared when he amputated his left hand with a power tool. He says he had tried to cut it off before—once putting it underneath a truck and trying to crush it (the jack didn’t collapse right); once attempting to saw it off with a table saw (he lost his nerve). He even spent countless miles driving around with his hand dangling out the window, hoping to get side-swiped. But this time he was determined to succeed. Josh, who insisted on anonymity because his family thinks he lost his hand in an accident, says he practiced on animal legs he got from a butcher, and he was equipped with bandages to stop the bleeding and a charged cell phone in case he got dizzy. Now, years later, Josh says he feels wonderful without his hand, that his amputation finally ended a “torment” that had plagued him since middle school. “It is a tremendous relief,” he told NEWSWEEK. “I feel like my body is right.”

Surprising as it may seem, Josh is not alone. He has what some scientists are calling Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), an exceedingly rare condition characterized by an overwhelming desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs or become paraplegic. The desire to be disabled seems so bizarre and contrary to basic human instincts that those who suffer from BIID have largely kept their compulsion a secret. But online communities of those with BIID have formed over the last decade, galvanizing a small movement to bring the disorder into the open.

[H/t: Ruchira Paul]

In the LRB, Donald MacKenzie on the building economic crisis:

Indices and other tranches quickly became a huge-volume, liquid market. They facilitated the creation not just of standard CDOs but of bespoke products such as CDO-like structures that consist only of mezzanine tranches…All this activity explains the attractiveness of the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the buying and selling of protection on the safest, super-senior tranches of the investment-grade indices. No one buys protection on these tranches because they are looking for a big pay-out if capitalism crumbles: if nothing else, they have no reason to expect that the institution that sold them protection would survive the carnage and be able to make the pay-out. Instead, they are looking to hedge their exposure to movements in the credit market, especially in correlation. Traders need to demonstrate they’ve done this before they’re allowed to book the profits on their deals, so from their viewpoint it’s worth buying protection, for example from ‘monolines’ (bond insurers), even if the latter would almost certainly be insolvent well before any pay-out on the protection was due.

With problems such as the non-observability of correlation apparently adequately solved by the development of indices, the credit-derivatives market, which emerged little more than a decade ago, had grown by June 2007 to an aggregate total of outstanding contracts of $51 trillion, the equivalent of $7,700 for every person on the planet. It is perhaps the most sophisticated sector of the global financial markets, and a fertile source of employment for mathematicians, whose skills are needed to develop models better than the single-factor Gaussian copula.

From The Washington Post:

WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception by Scott McClellan.

McClellan says the “defining moment in my time working for the president, and one of the most painful experiences of my life,” occurred in July 2005, when he discovered that what he had told the press two years earlier — that Karl Rove and Lewis Libby were not involved in “the leaking of classified information” about Valerie Plame, Wilson’s wife — was untrue. “I had unknowingly passed along false information,” he writes. “And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, Vice President Cheney, the president’s chief of staff Andrew Card, and the president himself.” Upon learning this, he felt “constrained by my duties and loyalty to the president and unable to comment. But I promised reporters and the public that I would someday tell the whole story of what I knew.”

What Happened is the result. “I’ve written it not to settle scores or enhance my own role,” McClellan says, “but simply to record what I know and what I learned,” and on the whole this seems to be the case. As a deputy in the White House press office and then as press secretary, McClellan did not participate in high-level decision-making, especially with regard to foreign policy, but attempted to explain presidential decisions to the public — as those decisions had been explained to him — through the various conduits provided by the press. It is the fate of the presidential press secretary to be among an administration’s most visible public faces yet to be comparatively impotent within the circles of real power. McClellan struggled with this as did all press secretaries before him, but it was his misfortune to be the spokesman for an administration in which deceit and prevarication were commonplace.

If McClellan feels betrayed, he doesn’t say so. Instead, in the self-effacing manner that characterizes his book (and renders it somewhat limp), he merely says, “I blame myself. I allowed myself to be deceived,” and then blandly adds, “But the behavior of the president and his key advisers was even more disappointing.” Well, yes.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Ever wondered why some people seem able to gobble down anything and still stay slim?

New research shows that the answer may lie in serotonin, a neurotransmitter, or chemical messenger produced by nerve cells. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, (U.C.S.F.) report in the journal Cell Metabolism that the nerve messenger, a known appetite suppressant, not only controls whether and how much you eat but, independent of that, also plays a role in what the body does with the calories once they’re consumed. “This may mean you could develop therapeutic strategies to manipulate fat metabolism (the rate at which food is turned into energy) independently of what you eat,” says study co-author Kaveh Ashrafi, a U.C.S.F. physiologist.

Many weight-loss drugs now on the market are designed to increase serotonin levels, but they were believed to work by stemming appetite; the new research shows they may also work by speeding metabolism. That means, Ashrafi says, that treatments could be developed that target obesity, which has been linked to a slew of ills from diabetes to cancer, without necessarily suppressing appetite. Ashrafi says he launched the study to determine why some people on diet drugs regained their weight after they stopped popping them, even if they did not increase their caloric intake. “The assumption that body weight is simply a consequence of behavior is not exactly correct,” he says. “It is the combination of behavior and the organism’s propensity for what to do with nutrients it takes in,” whether to store or use them.

More here.

Josh Cohen reviews Paul Reitter’s biography of the favorite of my ethical spectres, Karl Kraus, in The Forward:

Kraus was born in 1874 in Austro-Hungarian Gitschin, now Jicˇín in the Czech Republic. It should be ironic that his father was a successful manufacturer of paper. Vienna 1899 was the decisive dateline: In that year, Kraus renounced Judaism and began Die Fackel, The Torch, which published whenever he pleased, even daily. After 1911, and up until the end of his life in 1936 amid fascism’s rise, he wrote most of this publication himself. Before Nazism became news, newly broadcast over the radio and on newsreels, Die Fackel’s intertextuality would preview that of the Internet; formed on the informal, referential feuilleton style of Heinrich Heine, Kraus’s literary editorializing could be considered — but isn’t, in any cyber history I’ve read — the first blog.

With the regrettable exception of Hitler’s mature years, there was no German-language phenomenon that did not occasion Kraus’s print comment: He inveighed against the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s petit-bourgeois paper of record; the ideal of pan-Germany; the Habsburg Monarchy, and, especially, the new Jewish science that was psychoanalysis: Kraus found exceptional hilarity in Freud’s account of Vienna’s fantasies of violence and sex, which frolicked after the populace was safely in bed, and the Realism of the newspaper’s day sound asleep.

Die Fackel’s eminent early contributors included Peter Altenberg, Richard Dehmel, Oskar Kokoschka, Else Lasker-Schüler, Adolf Loos, Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, August Strindberg, George Trakl, Franz Wedekind, Franz Werfel and Oscar Wilde; Prague’s Franz Kafka was a loyal reader, as was Berlin’s Walter Benjamin, who regarded Kraus’s project as the literary fulfillment of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution — the making of “an eternally new newspaper.” Benjamin often discussed Die Fackel with his friend Gershom (then Gerhard) Scholem, who would torch the noun Fackel into a verb: fackelt, “to fackel on” — signifying a prophetic though aggressively egotistical rhetoric, not necessarily flattering, but proof that Kraus could not be ignored.

Kerri Smith in news@nature:

Researchers have come up with a new use for the ubiquitous mobile phone: tracking human movements. By monitoring the signals from 100,000 mobile-phone users sending and receiving calls and text messages, a team from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, has worked out some apparently universal laws of human motion.

The results could help epidemiologists to predict how viruses will spread through populations, and help urban planners and traffic forecasters to allocate resources.

Albert-László Barabási and his colleagues show that most people, perhaps unsurprisingly, are creatures of habit. They make regular trips to the same few destinations such as work and home, and pepper these with occasional longer forays such as vacations.

The distances people covered varied widely between individuals, but follow a similar pattern — most people move on average a short distance on a daily basis, whereas a few hardy souls move long distances in a short time.

[H/t: Aditya Dev Sood & Misha Lepetich]

While sports, life, and style have been around for a while, the “sports lifestyle” as a distinct market is a mere half-century old. Like much else of cultural import in the years since World War II, this niche is the product of the human laboratory we call California, and specifically of its coastline. Surfing is enjoying (or despising, depending on your perspective) one of its periodic peaks in the general consciousness, which makes it appropriate to look back the five decades to the moment when the sport broke free of its cult status and became the urtext of athletic sports retailing. The publication of Gidget in 1957 did not just introduce us to the barely fictionalized account of a girl’s summer in Malibu; it started a chain reaction that introduced surfing to the rest of the country and spread it to the world at large. The novel was licensed for three hit movies, and later made into numerous television shows. Within a few years, the Beach Boys, woodies, hangin’ ten, and board shorts were as popular in Kansas City as Santa Cruz.

The thing to remember is that, since 1957, surfing as something you buy has overshadowed surfing as something you do. I would hazard that no other activity has ever generated as many products among people who neither know how to do it, nor follow those who do.[1] The archetypal surfer might be a sun-bleached, vacant eyed, deracinated beach boy, but there are deeper stories beneath surfing’s glossy surface. Like Los Angeles, surfing often seems to be outside the realm of history, trapped in a permanent present. In this story, though, noir eclipses sunshine; high culture paves the way for low commerce; utopia inspires and disappoints in equal measure; and the surf shops of Huntington Beach owe an unacknowledged debt to the sweet scents of Viennese coffee houses.

more from The Believer here.

LATE IN 1988, a 41-year-old Italian hardware clerk arrived in his doctor’s office with a bizarre complaint. Although he could recognize people, and remember all sorts of information about them, he had no idea what to call them. He’d lost the ability to remember any personal name, even the names of close friends and family members. He was forced to refer to his wife as “wife.”

A few months before, the man, known as LS in the scientific literature, had been in a serious accident. He was thrown from his horse and the left side of his skull took the brunt of the impact. At first, it seemed as if the man had been lucky. A battery of routine tests had failed to detect any abnormalities. But now he appeared stuck with this peculiar form of amnesia, so that the names of people were perpetually on the tip of his tongue. It was agonizing.

In the years since, scientists have come to a much firmer understanding of this phenomenon. It’s estimated that, on average, people have a tip-of-the-tongue moment at least once a week. Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can’t remember, although you know that it begins with the letter “T.” Or perhaps you struggle to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail. Researchers have located the specific brain areas that are activated during such moments, and even captured images of the mind when we are struggling to find these forgotten words.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Helena Cobban in the Boston Review:

In January 2006, in an election that monitors recognized as free and fair, the Islamist movement Hamas won 76 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian parliament. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had pushed hard for the elections, since she was confident her Fateh allies would win. Hamas’s victory came as a complete surprise and embarrassment to both her and the Fateh leaders. Angered by the Hamas victory, Rice and Fateh decided to join with Israel in working to overturn it.

Israel and the United States rapidly defined three tough conditions for dealing with the new Palestinian government and vowed that as long as it refused to meet these conditions they would quarantine and attempt to undermine it. The conditions—that the new government recognize Israel, renounce all use of violence, and commit to observing all agreements signed by previous, Fateh-led Palestinian governments—were considerably more stringent than those defined for opposition forces included in successful peace negotiations in South Africa or Northern Ireland, or indeed, in nearly all negotiations over decolonization in decades past.

The Hamas leaders refused to meet the conditions.

More here.

Our own PD Smith at Kafka’s Mouse:

In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the experience of travelling through the fourth dimension is cinematic: the Time Traveller sits like a film-goer, watching the accelerated passage of time, as the time machine’s dials spin ever faster. The effect is of rapid cutting and slow fade-out: “The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter.” As Keith Williams says, time in the novel becomes a “movie reel, speeded forwards and backwards, or stopped at will”. Remarkably, The Time Machine was written before Wells had seen a film. It was published in 1895, the very year the cinematograph was invented by the Lumière brothers. As film historian Ian Christie has said, their invention “quite literally made time travel a spectator sport”.

More here.

///
Emergency Kit
Tanure Ojaide

When I find myself among a laughing tribe,
I know they hide something from me;
I conjure up a laughter box whose button I press
to outlaugh them all. As long as they hear their music,
they leave me free; I don’t want to surrender all I have.
I am a moving stump in the forest of men
and if I stray into a towering company, those
more than a kilometre from the undergrowth,
I release stilts from my soles; I don’t want to be
looked down upon by the very top ones.
I collapse the long legs when I step into where
giants are the required offerings of the gods of the race.
I have a lifesaver installed in my body
just in case I am knocked into some deep river;
unless I come out alive, I will be declared evil—
who ever wants his adversary to have the last word on him?
So when a hunter stalks me to fill his bag,
I call on my snake from nowhere to bite him.
Folks, let’s drink ourselves to death in the party
as long as we wear sponges in the tongue;
let’s stay awake in our unending dream so that nobody
will take us for gone and cheat us out of our lives.

Thanks to Elatia

–

From Scientific American:

There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”—preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them. Your morning pages, Julia, are a perfect example of a capturing technique. There are many ways to capture new ideas. Otto Loewi won a Nobel Prize for work based on an idea about cell biology that he almost failed to capture. He had the idea in his sleep, woke up and scribbled the idea on a pad but found the next morning that he couldn’t read his notes or remember the idea. When the idea turned up in his dreams the following night, he used a better capturing technique: he put on his pants and went straight to his lab!

The second competency is called “challenging”—giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.

More here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Modern video games mean big business, and big controversy. Yet most of the charges levelled against games—that they stunt minds and spark addiction—are based on an outdated understanding of what gamers do when they sit down to play.

Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft. Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70. It’s not that he has lost interest—just that he’s no longer working his way up the greasy pole. He’s got to the top. He heads his own guild, has 20,000 gold pieces in the bank and wields the Twin Blades of Azzinoth; weapons so powerful and difficult to acquire that other players often (virtually) follow Mogwai around just to look at them. In his own words, he’s “e-famous.” He was recently offered $8,000 for his Warcraft account, a sum he only briefly considered accepting. Given that he has clocked up over 4,500 hours of play, the prospective buyers were hardly making it worth his while. Plus, more sentimentally, he feels his character is not his alone to sell: “The strange thing about this character is that he doesn’t just belong to me. Every item he has he got through the hard work of 20 or more other people. Selling him would be a slap in their faces.” As in many modern online games, co-operation is the only way to progress, with the most challenging encounters manageable only with the collaboration of other experienced players. Hence the need for leaders, guilds—in-game collectives, sometimes containing hundreds of players—and online friendships measured in years. “When I started, I didn’t care about the other people. Now they are the only reason I continue.”

When Mogwai isn’t online, he’s called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line “The best sign that someone’s qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status.” Is there anything to this? “Absolutely,” he says, “but if you tried to argue that within the traditional business market you would get laughed out of the interview.” How, then, does he explain his willingness to invest so much in something that has little value for his career? He disputes this claim. “In Warcraft I’ve developed confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I’ve enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more subtle things: judging people’s intentions from conversations, learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group of people, leading them to succeed in a task.”

More here.

Robert Nadeau in Scientific American:

The 19th-century creators of neoclassical economics—the theory that now serves as the basis for coordinating activities in the global market system—are credited with transforming their field into a scientific discipline. But what is not widely known is that these now legendary economists—William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Maria Edgeworth and Vilfredo Pareto—developed their theories by adapting equations from 19th-century physics that eventually became obsolete. Unfortunately, it is clear that neoclassical economics has also become outdated. The theory is based on unscientific assumptions that are hindering the implementation of viable economic solutions for global warming and other menacing environmental problems.

The physical theory that the creators of neoclassical economics used as a template was conceived in response to the inability of Newtonian physics to account for the phenomena of heat, light and electricity. In 1847 German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz formulated the conservation of energy principle and postulated the existence of a field of conserved energy that fills all space and unifies these phenomena. Later in the century James Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and other physicists devised better explanations for electromagnetism and thermodynamics, but in the meantime, the economists had borrowed and altered Helmholtz’s equations.

The strategy the economists used was as simple as it was absurd—they substituted economic variables for physical ones. Utility (a measure of economic well-being) took the place of energy; the sum of utility and expenditure replaced potential and kinetic energy.

[H/t: Pablo Policzer and Mark Blyth]

Over at openDemocracy, an expanded version of Ram’s piece here in 3QD:

[T]he general’s focus in the dialogue was to stop extremists from using violence to secure their goals. While he disagreed with their goals, his point to them was that they should use democratic political means. In effect he was saying: here are extremist, even intolerant people, who use violence to get their way; my job as a general is to get them to stop using violence, then hope that the (democratic) political system can find a way to accommodate them and politically blunt their extremism.

But this leaves open an important additional point about specific practices in communities that violate what might be considered as basic democratic and liberal values, including a commitment to equal rights. These practices can range from murder and paedophilia to discrimination on the basis of gender or caste. What happens when political actors (even if unarmed) seek to use the political system to advance these kinds of aims? What are the limits to tolerating extremists?

There is no single or simple answer, but there are elements that compose a pattern:

* there is such a limit, especially when the extremists’ aims include intolerance and an explicit rejection of others’ civic equality – whether based on race, gender, caste or class

* extremists, especially those who are intolerant of others, have no general right to be tolerated based on reciprocity, since they themselves do not tolerate others

* if tolerating extremists leads to the weakening of a democratic constitutional order, then extra care must be taken before the step is taken – though the default judgment should be to have confidence that a stable democratic structure (where it exists) will not be so weakened

Shego Jinpa and others in the LRB on Žižek’s claims:

Not only does Žižek rely on Chinese propaganda for his understanding of Tibet’s past, he also interprets the current tragedy through TV images selected and transmitted by the Chinese government. These images repeatedly show footage of riots, but not the peaceful protests whose brutal suppression triggered the uprising. The Chinese authorities haven’t produced any evidence to show that there was a programme of organised violence by Tibetans: the wave of human rights protests and demonstrations in support of the Dalai Lama was vociferous but predominantly peaceful. In the incredible pictures of nomadic protesters on horseback in Amdo Bora (Gannan in Chinese) captured by a Canadian TV crew, for example, not a single weapon is being brandished. These nomads have guns so that they can protect their cattle, and it is their custom to carry swords and knives. But because they support the Dalai Lama’s message of peace, on this occasion they left their weapons behind. Žižek tellingly remains silent about the gunning down of unarmed Tibetan protesters (more than two hundred were killed), the mass arrests, the flooding of the Tibetan plateau with Chinese paramilitaries, the lockdown of monasteries and schools and the barring of independent foreign journalists from the region.

Žižek implies what the Chinese authorities have explicitly stated, that Tibet should be grateful for Chinese investment in its economy and its education and health systems. The presumption that Tibet would have remained unchanged had it not been for the Chinese invasion and colonial tutelage is preposterous, but there is also a failure to acknowledge what China gains from Tibet.

Ezra Klein on this historic moment, in case you missed it:

Obama’s speech tonight was powerful, but then, most all of his speeches are. This address stood out less than I expected. It took me an hour to realize how extraordinary that was. I had just watched an African-American capture the Democratic nomination for the Presidency of the United States of America, and it felt…normal. Almost predictable. 50 years ago, African Americans often couldn’t vote, and dozens died in the fight to ensure them the franchise. African-Americans couldn’t use the same water fountains or rest rooms as white Americans. Black children often couldn’t attend the same schools as white children. Employers could discriminate based on race. 50 years ago, African Americans occupied, in effect, a second, and lesser, country. Today, an African-American man may well become the president of the whole country, and it feels almost normal.

It was, to be sure, not entirely unpredicted. On March 31st, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. preached his final Sunday sermon. “We shall overcome,” he said, “because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Four days later, he was murdered. But 40 years later, his dream is more alive than he could have ever imagined. Not only might a black man be president, but at times, many forget to even be surprised by it.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Joe Crimmings.