Mauricio Delgado over at the Scientific American blog:

Membership in a high social class is thought to contribute to good mental well-being and physical health. Low socioeconomic status, in contrast, increases one’s vulnerability for developing psychiatric or chronic medical conditions, research suggests. Various aspects of socioeconomic status could affect personal health in different ways, but most scientific attention has focused on the role of stress. Surprisingly, the most stressful part of being of lower socieconomic status might not be feelings of deprivation, as might be expected, but rather the subjective perception of our lower social standing.

Although epidemiological associations between low socioeconomic status and stress, and their consequences on mental health have been well documented, there have been fewer attempts to understand the neural pathways through which status and stress may interact in human society. That is the goal of the intriguing study by Peter Gianaros and colleagues entitled “Perigenual anterior cingulate morphology covaries with perceived social standing.” Gianaros and colleagues take advantage of the idea that the subjective perception of low socioeconomic status is a strong predictor of future health. They use a computational structural neuroimaging method to investigate if brain volume of neural substrates linked to stress varies according to perceived social standing.

Wendy McElroy on why (via Crooked Timber):

Act Responsibly: Don’t Vote! That’s not a bumper sticker you’re likely to see in coming weeks. Instead the ballot will be revered like a religious object and voting will be declared a duty. But what if the ballot is just one more government form to fill out? What if the most politically powerful act is to say “no” by tearing the form in half?

This November, most people won’t “do it” in the voting booth despite attempts to shame them. They will spend the time on activities that enrich their lives: buying groceries, playing with children, catching up on work. Even the recent primary, which was supposed to reflect a galvanized and outraged Democratic Party, drew only about 11.4 percent of those eligible to vote. The Republican primary fared worse with a record low turnout of about 6.6 percent.

If war itself can’t motivate people to put a checkmark in a box, it is time to consider non-voting from a radically different perspective. Maybe non-voters are right.

Over at Edge, Nicholas Christakis:

There is a well-known example in evolutionary biology about whether the eye was designed, or is “just so” because it evolved and arose for a reason. How could this incredibly complicated thing come into being? It seems to serve an incredibly complicated purpose, and the eye is often used in debates about evolution precisely because it is so complex and seems to serve such a specialized and critical function.

For me, social networks are like the eye. They are incredibly complex and beautiful, and looking at them begs the question of why they exist, and why they come to pass. Do we need a kind of just-so story to explain them? Do they just happen to be there, for no particular reason? Or do they serve some purpose — some ontological and also pragmatic purpose?

Brian Cook in In These Times:

In a recent story in The Nation, Chris Hayes used 2,200-plus words to argue why progressives should back Sen. Barack Obama. I’ll use only seven: Obama’s favorite TV show is “The Wire.” It’s certainly true, as Hayes noted, that Obama, like every presidential candidate, won’t be saying one word about the prison-industrial complex or the disastrous consequences of the “war on drugs.” But it’s heartening to think that at least he’s tuning in to one of the few public forums that fiercely drags such issues into our consciousness.

Throughout its five seasons on HBO, “The Wire” has created riveting fictional drama out of the residents living, policing and selling dope on the streets of Baltimore. Described by its co-creator David Simon as the ultimate “anti-cop show, a rebellion … against the horseshit police procedurals afflicting American television,” “The Wire” obliterates easy dichotomies of “good cops” and “bad drug dealers.” Instead, it builds morally complex characters on both sides of the law whose individual decisions are largely shaped by political and economic forces outside their control. After detailing the ravages of the drug trade in its first season, the show broadened its scope in each subsequent season, examining the city’s collapsing industrial sector (and unions), political system, public schools and, finally, journalistic institutions.

In The Country and The City, Raymond Williams brought to bear, against the well- entrenched, dominant conception of the English “country house” poetic tradition, a sense of historical context, and an understanding of the complex interplay between text and society, so powerful that it is simply not possible, ever again, to read it in the old way. Characteristically, this was no simple act of literary revaluation. The poems and their cultural settings are not downgraded, but re-claimed and re-ordered by the turning on to them of this penetrating critical- historical gaze. We weigh them differently. They are re-positioned in our imagination and understanding. The mystification of “agrarianism”, which still sustains the “Heritage” impulse in contemporary English cultural life, is slowly dissolved and becomes, in its suffocatingly philistine-civilised forms, untenable as a serious intellectual proposition.

more from The New Statesman here.

Young Gershom, awkward, arrogant, melancholic, and constantly seeking refuge in a rapidly moving kaleidoscope of ideas, was his parents’ fourth, most rebellious son. (The third, Werner, briefly a follower of Rosa Luxembourg, was murdered by the Nazis in 1940 in Buchenwald.) Arthur Scholem, a tough, successful printer, was a member of neither the German Jewish elite nor the German establishment but, like many German Jews of his generation, deluded himself into believing that there was no difference between himself and German Gentiles — that there was no anti-Semitism in Germany.

Gershom shrewdly observed that despite his father’s pretensions, the Germans with whom he did business did not mix socially with the Scholems, and Gershom fought bitterly with his father over the elder Scholem’s indifference to Jewish tradition and misguided attempt to be an unquestioning German patriot. Gershom flirted with anarchism, then perused his own very individual brand of Zionism, and emigrated in 1923 to Jerusalem, where he became the first Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a huge force at making that subject — and the study of the Kabbalah — a serious scholarly enterprise.

more from The NY Sun here.

SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists were in fact presenting the same wines at different prices.

The subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better, even when they were actually identical to cheaper wines.

The experiment was even more unusual because it was conducted inside a scanner – the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes – that allowed the scientists to see how the subjects’ brains responded to each wine. When subjects were told they were getting a more expensive wine, they observed more activity in a part of the brain known to be involved in our experience of pleasure.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

..

Brahma
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

1856 [1857]

..

From findagrave.com:

Jazz Legend. Jazz composer, bandleader and pianist, often reffered to as America’s most prolific composer of the twentieth century. His written contributions are almost innumerable: thousands of songs and dozens of works in symphonic form, as well as complete scores for ballet, theater and film. His artistic development and sustained achievement are among the most spectacular in the history of music. Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in April of 1899 into a black middle-class family in Washington, D.C. he was nicknamed “Duke” because of the flashy way he liked to dress. Ellington studied piano as a child but showed no particular ability until he was enrolled into the Armstrong Manual Training School. He learned to read music, worked on his technique, and began playing at clubs and cafes.

In 1917, Ellington formed his first group, the Duke’s Serenaders and in 1923, they moved to New York, renamed themselves the Washingtonians working off and on four years at the Kentucky Club before moving on to become the house band of Harlem’s renowned Cotton Club (1927-1932). From 1924, when he put his name on the band-Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians produced a great quanity of music for exactly fifty years. And through that bands ranks passed some of the greatest instrumentalists who ever played jazz. Ellington spent much of his professional career in motion-traveling with his band from one performance to the next, composing aboard trains, planes, automobiles and living out of suitcases in an endless series of hotel rooms as he took his music to audiences across the globe. Ellington composed many works specifically to feature the distinctive sounds of such soloists as clarinetist Barney Bigard, Saxophonists Harry Carney and Johnny Hodges and trumpeter Cottie Williams. Ellington’s popular favorites included “Mood Indigo,” “Solitude,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “In A Sentimental Mood,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Satin Doll,” “Black, Brown and Beige,” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” and “Come Sunday”. The end of the big-band era in the 1940’s took its toll on the Ellington orchestra, and as worked dried up Ellington was forced to turn to royalties from his popular songs to keep the band afloat, a situation which was later reversed. Ellington also appeared in numerous films and was the first African-American composer to write a film score (for Anatomy of a Murder).

When he reached his sixties, an age at which many contemplate retirement, Ellington kept up the relentless schedule of composing, performing, recording and traveling he had followed for over thirty years. During this time Ellington was deservedly showered with awards, prizes, sixteen honary degrees and celebrated both at home and abroad for his musical achievements. These awards included the presentation of the keys to the city of Los Angeles in 1936, the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1959, The President’s Gold Medal by President Lyndon B. Johnson (1966), the Pied Piper Award (1968), the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon (1969), the Legion of Honor by the country of France (the countries highest award), a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (6535 Hollywood Blvd.) and thirteen Grammy’s. Duke Ellington and his band remained popular until his death in New York on May 24, 1974 at the age of 75.

From The New York Times:

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships. He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational. Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the MIT, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything). The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go.. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

More here.

James Brown. Untitled.

Thanks to Kuniko and Cliff Weber for introducing me to this artist, who is so obscure I cannot find anything worth linking to about him on the internet.

PD Smith at Kafka’s Mouse:

Do the houses once lived in by famous writers tell us anything about their work? After the Great War, Virginia Woolf and her husband paid £700 for Monk’s House in the Sussex village of Rodmell. It’s a simple, weather-boarded cottage beside a country lane.

Behind it was a garden and an orchard of overgrown pear and apple trees, with views over the flats of the Ouse valley. When they bought it, Monk’s House had no bath, no toilet, no hot water and just brick floors. Its previous owner had gone mad and starved himself to death. Virginia wrote: “We went to Rodmell, and the gale blew at us all day; off arctic fields; so we spent our time attending to the fire.” One morning they had to get up at 4 am to chase mice out of their bed. Today, few would put up with such conditions. But not Virginia; she loved the cottage and her “soft grey walks” in the surrounding countryside.

More here.

Francis Wilkinson in Discover:

As a former chairman of George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass is well acquainted with controversy, and with the treacherous terrain at the nexus of science and politics. The council, tasked with advising the president on such hot-button issues as stem cell research and cloning, has sometimes been dismissed as a vehicle for the right wing of the Republican Party. But although some of his views comport with those of hard-liners, Kass, a physician with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, is hard to pigeonhole. “I do not come from a school of thought, nor do I have an ideology,” he says.

An old-fashioned moralist, he holds some views that are remarkably unfashionable—even premodern. He still employs the term bastard to describe the children of unwed parents, and he has written despairingly about the loss of “female modesty” in our culture. At the same time, he has misgivings about the effects of global capitalism and believes in integration, tolerance, and inclusiveness. In the end, what really rankles many scientists is Kass’s belief that society has a duty to regulate research, and his frequent warnings about the dehumanizing effects of some technologies.

The recommendations of the Council on Bioethics, though substantive and scholarly, have by and large not been put into practice by policymakers, and the group’s prominence has faded as the debate about stem cell research has ground to a standoff. Kass left the council in September and currently is a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, where his office is a few paces from Lynne Cheney’s. He sat down with DISCOVER to reflect on his tenure and discuss his beliefs, his influences, and his concerns for the future.

More here.

Emily Wax in the Washington Post:

Like a lot of young Indian couples, they met on a matrimonial Web site and within a matter of weeks were picking out the wedding invitations, reserving the horse-drawn carriages and having the bride fitted for a pearl- and gold-encrusted sari.

Judging by his online profile, the groom was suitable and eager to be a good spouse: a quiet, stay-at-home kind of guy who never drank and worked as a successful software engineer. Perfect, thought the bride, a shy 27-year-old computer engineer.

Too perfect, according to Bhavna Paliwal, one of India’s wedding detectives, who are being hired here in growing numbers to ferret out the truth about prospective mates.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Mohsin Hamid in Time:

It has been some time since I was as happy as I was on the night after Pakistan’s Feb. 18 general election. Mine was perhaps a reckless joy, temporarily distracting me from the very real troubles that Pakistan faces. But as I spoke to friends and acquaintances, both here in London and in my hometown of Lahore, I realized that the sense of euphoria I was feeling was widespread.

Pakistan is sometimes described by the international media as the most dangerous place on the planet. That has always seemed to me to be an irresponsible exaggeration: there are other countries whose citizens are far more likely to die of violent causes. But certainly Pakistan is a troubled land, suffering from illiteracy, poverty, terrorism and the bite of rapidly increasing prices, especially of food. The Feb. 18 election has not solved those problems. Yet Pakistanis are justified in allowing themselves a sigh of relief. Indeed, the entire world should be breathing a little easier now, for Pakistan suddenly looks a lot less frightening than it did.

More here.

I Know a Man
Robert Creeley

As I sd to my

friend, because I am

always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for

christ’s sake, look

out where yr going.

Leonard Bernstein set Broadway on fire in 1957 with “West Side Story,” a jazzed-up version of “Romeo and Juliet” in which the Capulets and Montagues were turned into Puerto Rican Sharks and American Jets. It was the most significant musical of the postwar era — and the last successful work that Bernstein wrote for the stage. His next show, 1976’s “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” closed after seven performances. For the rest of his life he floundered, unable to compose anything worth hearing.

What happened? Stephen Sondheim, Bernstein’s collaborator on “West Side Story,” told Meryle Secrest, who wrote biographies of both men, that he developed “a bad case of importantitis.” That sums up Bernstein’s later years with devastating finality. Time and again he dove head first into grandiose-sounding projects, then emerged from the depths clutching such pretentious pieces of musical costume jewelry as the “Kaddish” Symphony and “A Quiet Place.” In the end he dried up almost completely, longing to make Great Big Musical Statements — he actually wanted to write a Holocaust opera — but incapable of producing so much as a single memorable song.

more from the Wall Street Journal here.

Actual Czechs are eminently practical, nothing magical or mystical about them, as befits the people who drink the most beer in the world. Their most curious feature, which they keep to themselves and of  which the tourists know nothing, is a collective sense of  humor. Consider Jára Cimrman, by popular opinion the greatest Czech who ever lived. A few years ago a Czech TV channel asked its audience to name the most beloved native son. Jára Cimrman came first, ahead of Václav Havel, founding president Masaryk, and the Emperor Charles IV. Even the fact that Cimrman was explicitly disqualified in advance did not hurt his chances. This year, when a popular Internet site angled for an alternative to the current President Václav Klaus, Cimrman, disqualified again, came second. An obvious handicap was the fact that he was allegedly last seen alive in 1914.

Jára Cimrman is, of course, a fictitious character, the brainchild of a small group of writers and actors. In the Czech version of Wikipedia he is introduced as “one of the greatest Czech playwrights, poets, musicians, teachers, adventurers, philosophers, inventors” and many other things. Some of his achievements include inventing the Paraguayan puppet show, almost becoming the first man to reach the North Pole (he apparently missed it by seven meters), and conducting a voluminous correspondence with George Bernard Shaw, who never deigned to respond.

Well, that’s funny enough, but the most striking thing about Cimrman is the favor he has found with his people.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

The Academy Award nominees are a worthy but scattered bunch this year, and anyone who confidently tells you they know what’s going to happen is not to be trusted. I, by contrast, make a bid for your confidence by openly acknowledging that my guesses are entirely uneducated, and you could probably fare well by betting against them in your office Oscar pool.

The good news is that, with a few exceptions, the Academy seems to have screwed up less than usual. 2007 was a very strong year for film, and the Oscar nominees do a solid job of reflecting this. If there’s a major complaint to be made this year, it’s with the abstruse rules that govern eligibility in certain categories–in particular, best score and best foreign-language film. In the former category, Jonny Greenwood’s stunning, vital, utterly original score for There Will Be Blood was deemed ineligible for containing too many bits of music not written for the film, ensuring the ludicrous outcome that by far the best score of the year is not even nominated. The foreign film category is an even sorrier sight, with the year’s most celebrated offerings (Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days; Persepolis; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Lust, Caution; La Vie En Rose; The Orphanage; etc.) not making it, for one reason or another, to the “short list” of nine films from which the five finalists were chosen. (The foreign film rules, which are particularly convoluted, are explained here.) I’d especially like to put in a plug for Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which I saw too late to include in my end of the year list, but would have belonged near the top. It is a marvel of cinematic intimacy, grim and unsparing yet not without hope. If The Lives of Others, the 2006 spellbinder about life behind the Iron Curtain, captured the institutional oppressions of totalitarian rule, Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days captures the ways in which it turns people into their own oppressors.

more from TNR here.

In the summer of 2003, as part of that year’s Lincoln Center Festival, members of the public were offered a guided walk around selected New York sites, beginning on Roosevelt Island and ending in the Chrysler Building. As they proceeded from site to site, they were invited to keep an eye out for angels. And at certain sites they did indeed get to see angel-actors, some with wings, some without, some gazing into the distance, some sleeping. At other sites there were merely traces of past angelic visits: feathers, for example.

The event was the brainchild of the British theater director Deborah Warner. In its first version, dating back to 1995 and as yet sans angels, it was set in a huge abandoned nineteenth-century London hotel; its goal was to evoke ghostly presences from the building’s past. In 1999 Warner presented a revised version with angels added. For the angels, said Warner, she was indebted to Rilke. “There’s a wonderful quote from Rilke which says that angels are uncertain if they are walking amongst the living or the dead.” In 2000 the revised version was exported to Perth, capital of Western Australia.

Responses of participants in the Angel Project varied widely. According to some, the presence of otherworldly beings changed the nature of their gaze, aestheticizing their view of the city. Others dismissed the project as mere Disneyfication, exploitation of a millenary craze for angels. Yet others were deeply moved. “They cried a lot,” said Warner, looking back on the 1999 London performance. “We put angels up at the top of the empty floors of the Euston Tower watching over London. And again, people’s response, terribly, terribly emotional. I think it’s about loss of innocence.”

Among visitors to the 2000 Angel Project was the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, in Perth to take part in the city’s arts festival. Nooteboom’s novel Lost Paradise, published in the Netherlands in 2004, draws heavily on recollections of that visit, as we shall see.

more from the NYRB here.