From Edge:

BANAJI: What is remarkable about this test, which is called the Implicit Association Test—the IAT—is that it allows you to be a subject in your own experiment. Most scientists do not have the remarkable experience of being the object of study in their own research.

GREENWALD: The IAT provides a useful window into some otherwise difficult-to-detect contents of our minds. In some cases, we find things we did not know were there. It may be “an inconvenient truth” that what’s there is not what we thought was there or want to be there. But I think it is generally something we can come to grips with.

[Click here to take the “PRESIDENTIAL CANDITATES IAT]

Much more here.  [Tell us the results of your IAT in the comments section.]

My friend Fred was recently in Gaza doing his human rights do-goodery work.  He reported (to us, not the human rights organization) that the pickup scene in cafes is digital.  Youth on the prowl use cell phone bluetooths with handles like “toosexyforyou” to flirt and hook up.  (The woman in question apparently proved too sexy for Fred.) Der Spiegel reports that a Berlin-based artist has made this mating dance even easier (via Sci Tech Daily).

A burqa may not be the flirtiest garment ever invented for women. The highly modest head-to-toe robe even shrouds the eyes, so for centuries it’s been difficult for women wearing them to send suggestive signals to men.

But now a German designer has debuted a digitally-enabled burqa that can broadcast a photo of the wearer to nearby mobile phones. Markus Kison calls it the “CharmingBurka,” and says it isn’t forbidden by Islamic law.

A model demonstrated a prototype of Kison’s garment at the Seamless 2008 design and fashion show in Boston, a high-tech fashion event run with support from the Masschusetts Institute of Technology.

Kison says the burqa has a “digital layer” that incorporates a Bluetooth antenna, which lets women “decide for themselves where they want to position themselves virtually.” Nearby mobile phones that also use Bluetooth will light up with any small file a woman chooses to broadcast as her identity — a photo, a cartoon, a text file or even a sound clip.

..
My Aunts
Adam Zagajewski

Always caught up in what they called
the practical side of life
(theory was for Plato),
up to their elbows in furniture, in bedding,
in cupboards and kitchen gardens,
they never neglected the lavender sachets
that turned a linen closet to a meadow

The practical side of life,
like the Moon’s unlighted face,
didn’t lack for mysteries;
when Christmastime drew near,
life became pure praxis
and resided temporarily in hallways,
took refuge in suitcases and satchels.

And when somebody died–it happened
even in our family, alas–
my aunts, preoccupied
with death’s practical side,
forgot at last about the lavender,
whose frantic scent bloomed selflessly
beneath a heavy snow of sheets.
Don’t just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,   
………………the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without sound.

Translated by Clare Cavanaugh

..

I drove a car across the country once. It took three weeks and was financed by a rock magazine. Two years after the trip, a handful of people from California with exceptionally comfortable office chairs considered making a movie out of my experience. It was a very confusing process. Enthusiastic strangers with German eyeglasses kept asking me how I imagined this film would look, which I found difficult to elucidate; I assumed it would look like the video for Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway,” partially because of the lyrical content but mostly because I (sort of) looked Canadian before I grew a beard. That was not the answer they were anticipating. I was given a strong impression they were hoping I would say it would be a lot like Trainspotting, although maybe they were just trying to figure out if I could put them in contact with local drug dealers. They also wanted me to sign a 780-page contract that would give time control over my “life rights,” which meant they would have been able to make me an ancillary character in You, Me and Dupree.

I assume the hypothetical Road Movie I was not involved with would have been built on the most elementary of Road Movie clichés: where you’re going doesn’t matter as much as how you get there. But that philosophy raises at least three questions, some of which are equally cliché but all of which are hard to answer: What is a Road Movie, really? Why do so many directors (from so many different eras) long to make them? And what makes movement any more inherently interesting than—or even all that different from—staying in one place?

more from The Believer here.

We have a special prejudice about materials. The Japanese have Zen words to describe the beautiful way in which stone, wood and other natural materials age and patinate, acquiring charm and character as they deteriorate. We lack that. No one has yet coined a term, at least not a favourable one, to describe the way man-made materials grow old. There are no haikus about plastic. There is not much Zen in an old Ford Mondeo. There is even less Zen in an old housing estate.

This is specially so if it is made of concrete, the fashionable hate material of today. The only words that concrete attracts are ‘grimy’, ‘stained’ and the ones they tag with aerosol paint. Right now culture minister Margaret Hodge has taken very badly against concrete. The particular object of her vengeful, twin-set loathing is Robin Hood Gardens, a failing social housing megastructure near the north end of London’s Blackwall Tunnel that was completed in 1972. Mrs Hodge does not have council household taste. She wants it demolished. It does rather remind us that nothing dates quite so quickly as visions of the future.

more from The Observer Review here.

Peter Doig painted Echo Lake in 1998. A man stands on the far side of a stretch of dark water. He is quite a way off, but you can see that he wears a white shirt and a dark tie. His hands are raised to his face. Is it to keep the light out of his eyes as he looks at you? Or is it to project his voice as he shouts? A police car, lights on, is parked behind him. Beyond the car the black-green of a band of trees is broken by a few bright spots; they could be streetlights or house lights half-obscured by foliage. It must be night time. Are they crime-scene floodlights that shine across the lake, on the man, grass, rocks and car?

Although the scenes shown in this painting and others by Peter Doig (the retrospective of his work runs until 27 April) seem to imply that curious things have gone before, and that others will follow, there is no reason to think you will ever know what the pictures signify. Like ghost stories, they draw on the potency of matters unresolved; it hangs about them like an unearthed static charge.

more from the LRB here.

Noam Chomsky in AlterNet:

On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. “The world is a better place without this man in it,” State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: “one way or the other he was brought to justice.” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been “responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden.”

Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as “one of the U.S. and Israel’s most wanted men” was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, “A militant wanted the world over,” an accompanying story reported that he was “superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden” after 9/11 and so ranked only second among “the most wanted militants in the world.”

The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines “the world” as the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that “the world” fully supported George Bush when he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan. That may be true of “the world,” but hardly of the world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing was announced. Global support was slight.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Sughra Raza and Nargis Raza).

From The New York Times:

For the past two decades, Kay E. Holekamp has been chronicling the lives of spotted hyenas on the savannas of southern Kenya. She has watched cubs emerge from their dens and take their place in the hyena hierarchy; she has seen alliances form and collapse. She has observed clan wars, in which dozens of hyenas have joined together to defend their hunting grounds against invaders. Throughout her career, Dr. Holekamp has remained vigilant against anthropocentrism. She does not think of the hyenas as long-eared people running around on all fours. But the lives of spotted hyenas, she has concluded, share some profound similarities with our own. In both species, a complex social world has driven the evolution of a big, complex brain.

Scientists have long puzzled over the enormous size of the human brain. It is seven times larger than one would predict for an average mammal of our size. Many of our extra neurons are in a region called the frontal cortex, where much of the most sophisticated thought takes place. To understand how we ended up with such a strange organ, many scientists have turned to our fellow primates. They also have large brains, although not as large as our own. It turns out that primates with a big frontal cortex tend to live in large groups.

More here.

[Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Scott Bryan Wilson in The Quarterly Conversation:

Riding Toward Everywhere, this year’s new book from the prolific William T. Vollmann, is a nonfiction account of his adventures hopping freight trains and trying out the hobo lifestyle as a person lurking “literally and figuratively in the shadows.” His traveling companion is a late middle-aged man named Steve who seems to have been riding the trains for “sport” (Vollmann’s term) since college. Steve is the “traincar-finder and [Vollmann] the people-pleaser.”

If you’re at all familiar with Vollmann’s work you know that he can talk to anyone about anything, and Steve usually opts to run to the liquor store while Vollmann stays behind and hangs out drinking with bums, of whom they only meet a few, treating them with his usual compassion and non-judgmental attitude. We get little information about Steve himself, though. Whether this was at Steve’s request is unclear, but what is clear is that he’s married, has kids, is an expert at the sport (or as close to an expert as one can be; Vollmann insists that no one is ever an expert at riding the rails), and often flies out of cities he’s found himself stuck in, and that he’s respectful of the boxcars and the trains, never urinating in them or leaving trash behind.

More here.  [Photo shows Vollman.]

Lovely video by Namit Arora:

Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun:

When Democratic primary voters go to the polls tomorrow in Ohio and Texas, it’s a safe bet that few will be casting their votes based on senators Clinton‘s and Obama‘s merits as writers. To judge a candidate based on his or her literary ability would be as irrelevant, most people agree, as voting for the better ballroom dancer. It may be a nice talent to have, but it has nothing to do with being president. It even seems a little naïve to judge a politician as the author of a book bearing his or her name. Today, just about every candidate with national ambitions feels the need to publish a book — a memoir, a polemic, a 10-point program — but such books are not really written; they are issued, such as press releases or position papers. A senator is no more the author of his books than of his bills. In both cases, he just accepts responsibility for a document drafted by a team of experts.

Against this cynicism, however, stands the fact that the greatest statesmen — the ones who occupy the most cherished places in our historical memory — are the ones who were great writers. President Lincoln and Prime Minister Churchill, to take the most familiar examples, occupy a higher plane than the average president or prime minister, partly because of the events they participated in, but also because of the way they interpreted those events in their speeches and writings. Politics and language, they proved, do not have to be sullen strangers — or sworn enemies, as they are in the realm of propaganda that George Orwell wrote about. On the contrary, reading Lincoln’s second inaugural or Churchill’s 1940 speeches, it becomes clear that the political and the literary converge at the highest levels. In both fields, the ability to imagine and to communicate what you imagine is essential; and both of those tasks depend entirely on language. As long as politics is an expression of human creativity, not just a matter of administering populations, there will be a profound connection between language and leadership.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

If only we’d listened to John Locke. In his Second Treatise of Government, he declared that human beings were entitled only to “life, liberty and” — get ready — “estate.” As in property. Leave it to Mr. Jefferson of Virginia to change that last item in the trinity to “pursuit of happiness.” What he neglected to tell us was that, 230 years later, we would still be pursuing it.

Make even a passing scan of today’s bestseller lists, and you’ll find a veritable happiness racket: titles urging us to start “Living Well” and “Become a Better You” and master “The Secret” and (my personal favorite) be “Happy for No Reason.” Between all the Tony Robbinses and Rick Warrens and Deepak Chopras of the world, happiness is perhaps our last growth industry, and it even has a volunteer sales force. “Smile!” a stranger recently exhorted me on the street. “It can’t be that bad.” To which my only response was: “How do you know?”

Maybe it’s all paying off, though. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, nearly 85 percent of us believe ourselves to be happy or very happy. All power, then, to Eric G. Wilson for writing a book with the refreshing title Against Happiness. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, is seriously bummed by the cultural landscape. “Everywhere I see advertisements offering even more happiness, happiness on land or by sea, in a car or under the stars. . . . It seems truly, perhaps more than ever before, an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.” This “overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness,” he writes, produces only blandness, conformity, “a dystopia of flaccid grins” fueled by Lexapro and Paxil.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

“Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That is the common fallacy that all adults make—and no child ever does,” says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, England de Valpine professor of applied mathematics. Mahadevan enjoys explaining mathematically the phenomena of everyday life: practicing the old-fashioned method of scientific inquiry called natural philosophy, where one wonders about everything.

Mahadevan, who grew up in India, tells a traditional story about Krishna where mud becomes metaphor. “In Hindu mythology, Krishna is divine,” he begins. “However, because there was a prophecy that he would overthrow an evil king, his origins when he was a baby were hidden from almost everybody. So when Krishna was born, his mother surreptitiously sent him away to be brought up by a foster mother who didn’t know who he was. As in all mythologies, there were premonitions [of greatness], but growing up with his foster mother, he would go out like all children and play in the mud. One day he started to eat the mud, putting it in his mouth. And his [foster] mother, from afar, said, ‘Don’t do it.’” Krishna kept eating the mud. “Again [she] said, ‘Don’t do it,’ and yet he continued. So she came up to him, and when she opened his mouth to take out the mud, she looked—and she saw the universe.

“Without ever claiming all the grandeur that the story actually suggests,” says Mahadevan, “you just have to look and you will find interesting things everywhere.”

More here.

Memory, a Small Bird
Susie Patlove

Memory is a small bird
……..flying with bones so light
its tiny feathered form blurs
……..and I have only a scene
dimly lit, of a woman’s legs
……..dark-stockinged, wordless
and while everything there
……..is shaped by angular light
her legs are soft, cylindrical
……..sinking into her black shoes
and who am I to believe
……..that such a thing occured
or whatever I saw in 1948
……..had much to do
with what my mother said to
……..the woman in stockings
or if I, the baby, crawling
……..on our kitchen floor, knew
for the first time that words
……..could order the bright emptiness
that what was uttered
……..by one woman to another
described their minds
……..and I could then translate
all shapes and every color
……..into sounds flying, birdlike
between the one who was everything
……..and a stranger, whose legs
would come down through decades
……..an odd vision asserting itself
until it arrives here on this page
……..mysterious, flapping its wings

…

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan in the New York Times Book Review:

When the Banana Company arrives in Macondo, the jungle town in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” it brings with it first modernity and then doom. “Endowed with means that had been reserved for Divine Providence in former times,” García Márquez writes, the company “changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests and moved the river from where it had always been.” It imported “dictatorial foreigners” and “hired assassins with machetes” to run the town; it unleashed a “wave of bullets” on striking workers in the plaza. When the Banana Company leaves, Macondo is “in ruins.”

If Macondo is meant to represent Latin America, it is fitting that “the Banana Company” plays so central a role in its development and decline. For much of the 20th century, the American banana company United Fruit dominated portions of almost a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere. It was, Peter Chapman writes in “Bananas,” his breezy but insightful history of the company, “more powerful than many nation states … a law unto itself and accustomed to regarding the republics as its private fiefdom.” United Fruit essentially invented not only “the concept and reality of the banana republic,” but also, as Chapman shows, the concept and reality of the modern banana. “If it weren’t for United Fruit,” he observes, “the banana would never have emerged from the dark, then arrived in such quantities as to bring prices that made it available to all.”

Today, “the banana is the world’s fourth major food, after rice, wheat and milk.” But when a Brooklyn-born twentysomething named Minor Keith planted a few banana cuttings next to a railroad track in Costa Rica in the early 1870s, it was virtually unknown outside its native environs…

More here.

Christopher Hitchens, Shashi Tharoor, Dan Savage, and some other guy, on Bill Maher:

Russell Greenberg reviews No Way Home: The Decline of the World’s Great Animal Migrations by David S. Wilcove, in American Scientist:

Conservation biology focuses largely on developing solutions to the human-caused extinction crisis gripping the world’s biota. Somewhat diminished amid the valiant efforts to save threatened species and populations is the complementary goal of maintaining the grandeur of certain natural phenomena, including ones that capture the imagination by virtue of the sheer abundance of organisms involved. A prime example, which David S. Wilcove describes eloquently in No Way Home, is animal migration—the back-and-forth journeys of flocks, herds, pods and schools of animals across plains and seas, and sometimes even hemispheres. These grand migrations have evolved over millions of years to allow animals to take advantage of seasonal flushes of food. Yet the patterns of movement are indeed dynamic and can change noticeably over a fairly short period of time.

No Way Home explores the current precarious state of migration, raising a fundamental question for conservationists: How satisfying will it be to save all of the migratory species from extinction if the flow of migration nevertheless slows to a trickle? Migration is indeed declining. In some cases the changes have been abrupt and obvious, but more often they have taken place so slowly as to be barely perceptible until eventually it becomes obvious that a particular migration is an unrecognizable ghost of the phenomenon it once was.

More here.

Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka, via Amitava Kumar:

Far away from the glittering salons of Bombay and Delhi, away from its obsessions with booming malls and plummeting stocks, a good man waits in jail. He’s been in for nine months. But it is unlikely that the story of Dr Binayak Sen would have caught your attention. He’s been written about in bits. Some channels have covered him. But even though he is a mesmeric character — intense, articulate, idealistic, a man of privilege who seeks nothing for himself — and his imprisonment is a scandal that should shame any civilised society, for the most part, news of him here has been overwhelmed by hotter media preoccupations. Lead India competitions. And polls on who should be awarded Indian of the Year. Shah Rukh, Manmohan, or Vijay Mallya? Men like Dr Binayak can wait their turn in jail.

The story of Binayak Sen is the story of the dangerously thin ice India’s democratic rights skim on. The story of every dangerous schism in India today: State versus people. Urban versus rural. Unbridled development versus human need. Blind law versus natural justice. It is the story of an India unraveling at the seams. The story of unjust things that happen — unreported — to thousands of innocent people, the story of unjust things waiting to happen to you and me, if we ever step off the rails of shining India to investigate what’s happening in the rest of the country. Most of all, it is the story of what can be done to ordinary individuals when the State dons the garb of being under siege.

But, first the facts of the story…

More here.  [Thanks to Tony Cobitz.]