Ismene Brown in The Telegraph:

Fat, middle-aged, highly sexed women aren't supposed to dance. Or bare their breasts, or take lovers half their age. Nor were they when Isadora Duncan was leading her free-range, tragic, melodramatic life 90 years ago.

Could this woman really have been a dance genius? In 1921, when Duncan was 44, fat and notorious, a 17-year-old English boy bought a ticket for her performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. “I didn't think I'd like it but I was absolutely captivated,” he later recalled. “I suppose she was rather blowsy, and the first impact of her gave me a shock, but that soon passed. I find that people now stress this appalling life that she led, and the sexual side, but I didn't get that impression at all.

“She had the most extraordinary quality of repose. She would stand for what seemed quite a long time doing nothing, and then make a very small gesture that seemed full of meaning.”

That boy, Frederick Ashton, would grow up to become Britain's foremost ballet choreographer, and he was not the only creative figure to be enchanted by the alternative dancing Duncan proposed. Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, said she was his greatest inspiration; Konstantin Stanislavsky, Moscow's radical theatre director, was fascinated; George Bernard Shaw was impressed, despite himself; and the pivotal figures of 20th-century Russian ballet, Sergei Diaghilev, Anna Pavlova and Michel Fokine unreservedly admired her.

But while half the world marvelled at Duncan's magical ability to pluck dance from the air without apparent preparation or technique, the other half was dismissing her as a sensationalist.

Benoit d’Aboville in Project Syndicate:

What will be the consequences of France’s return to NATO’s integrated military structure?

The Allies are quietly satisfied, but nobody expects major changes in France military contribution: in the last ten years, it has been on par with the other major European allies. The reason is simple: since France’s return to the Military Committee in 1994, its position within NATO has allowed for full participation in the Alliance’s military and political activities. 

In Paris, the move has not in itself raised major political opposition for two main reasons.
First, nobody disputes the obvious: since Charles de Gaulle’s decision to withdraw from the military organization, more than 40 years ago, the Alliance and the world have changed profoundly. Today’s global threats demand greater European as well as NATO solidarity, and the Alliance’s successive enlargements mean that most EU members are now NATO members as well.

Second, the whole notion of “integration” is completely different since de Gaulle’s day.
When the Warsaw Pact existed, NATO troops were positioned in such a way that any attack would collectively involve most of the allies. The whole Central Front was tightly coordinated, and even France was involved in NATO planning through a set of special agreements. The Cold War’s end, and the subsequent transformation of NATO into an “expeditionary alliance,” has made “integration” largely irrelevant: each member’s contribution to NATO operations is decided by individual NATO members ad hoc and on the basis of consensus.

“Hey Mr. Tambourine man play a song for me,
in the jingle jangle mornin’ I’ll come following you.”
-Bob Dylan

American Myth
Jim Bell

i flew out of bradley snow
sick & so tired of lawyers rocked

back over erie’s shivering green
gunk saw the fat fingered river that cuts

down american belly coasts of nebraska
chalk dust plains & jagged white slung

rocky & sierra nevada mountains
this land that rolls
west in one giant gulp that slides

into frisco at the end of a thumb I pissed
in kerouac alley opened my door

painted nothing black my limits were
new to me I watched the dead drug

eyes on telegraph & let berkeley become
my jingle jangle morning dropping

back in the musty church basement in dolores
barrio where a skinny girl with green hair &

pierced eyebrows named dragon asked
me to read the promises

From Science:

Feeling a little blue? Why not kick back and put Bobby McFerrin's “Don't Worry, Be Happy” or Queen's “We Are the Champions” on the stereo? Chances are you'll feel more cheerful in no time. But what about people who have never been exposed to Western music? A new study concludes that even they can tell the difference between a happy and a sad tune. Researchers have proposed numerous hypotheses about why humans make music, ranging from emotional communication to group solidarity. Other scientists, such as Harvard University linguist Steven Pinker, have countered that music is just “auditory cheesecake” with no real evolutionary significance.

If music is the result of Darwinian selection, it's likely that all members of the human species, regardless of their culture, will respond to it in similar ways. Yet investigating such cross-cultural musical universals has been very difficult. With increasing globalization, it is nearly impossible to find a Westerner who has not heard Eastern music or an African who hasn't heard the Beatles. “Someone may say that they have never heard Hindustani music or Japanese Shinto music,” says Laura-Lee Balkwill, a music cognition researcher at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, “but chances are that they have been exposed to it, on the radio, as background music in a movie or on a Web site, even as someone else's ringtone.” And that makes it difficult for researchers to distinguish between musical sensibilities that might be hard-wired and those that are culturally determined.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The crime writer Laura Lippman was a reporter for 20 years, including 12 years at the Baltimore Sun. Since 2001, she has been a full-time novelist. Her novels have won almost every prize given for crime fiction in the United States, including the Edgar, Anthony, Nero Wolfe and Agatha awards. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, the writer David Simon, who created the hit TV series The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street. Her most recent novel, Life Sentences, is published by Avon.

I love memoirs, although I have promised my family members that I will never try my hand at one. (“Can I get that in writing?” my sister asked.) However, I'm generally not drawn to the addiction/dysfunction stories that have been popular of late; I wanted no part of A Million Little Pieces even when it was masquerading as nonfiction. As a former reporter, I have a pesky allegiance to fact, although I recognize that the fragile nature of memory makes it difficult for most writers to produce uncontestable versions of their lives. I am drawn to stories about the quotidian – marriage, friendship, childhood, work, life, death.

More here.

more from Big Think here.

Since becoming the successor to Jörg Haider after the governor’s fatal accident in October, Dörfler has won attention beyond Carinthia’s borders for one thing, above all. In the presence of his friend, Afro-Cuban schmalz-pop singer Roberto Blanco, he told a joke about two breast-feeding mothers, one black, one white. The white baby lets go of its mother’s breast and says, “Mummy, I want cocoa, too.” Of course this ruffled feathers, especially in distant Vienna; Roberto Blanco affirmed that he didn’t feel insulted, and Dörfler said he wouldn’t ban humor. With his carnival appearance in a garbage man costume, whose orange is also the colour of his party – the right-wing splinter group BZÖ (Alliance for the Future of Austria) – he once again confirmed who’s setting the standards for taste in Austria’s southernmost state. Last Sunday, this Dörfler, who has neither the looks nor the brains of his charismatic predecessor Haider, was elected to office with an overwhelming 45 percent.

more from Sign and Sight here.

The words Franklin in France are pretty much guaranteed to elicit a smile, a raised eyebrow, a mischievous wink, and at least one of the following words: frisky, randy, lecherous, dissolute. In great part this is the legacy of the portraitists: the French Franklin has made his way into our imagination courtesy of the artists who have relied on him as an excuse to paint a crop of European beauties, and a lot of European cleavage. It helps to remember that those are 19th- and 20th-century portraits, and that Franklin went to France in the l8th century. It also helps to remember that he has never been played on the screen by Nick Nolte; that was Jefferson in Paris. It helps as well to remember that Franklin’s most difficult colleague in France was John Adams, who contributed more to making Franklin a ladies’ man than did Franklin himself. Franklin went to Paris in l776 not on a lark, or to cement his reputation as a rake, but on a crucial mission. When he crossed the ocean that November he did so for the seventh time in his life—and for the first time as a traitor.

more from American Scholar here.

We’re on a historical cusp. No one knows what will come next. But in the art world, an aesthetic sorting out is already beginning. I’m not talking about the purging or comeuppance some critics have gleefully cackled about or howled for. I love art galleries, and worry that a wave of them will close this June when, looking ahead to the traditionally dead months of summer, dealers will be forced to throw in the towel. As for art, I admire much of the work that came to prominence in the last fifteen years. Recently, though, much of this art has been looking either dated or not so relevant. At this year’s Armory Show it was stunning to see almost no work by stars of last season like Murakami, Hirst, Koons, Prince, Reyle, Struth, and Gursky. Partly this is a natural process and doesn’t necessarily mean these artists are bad or not passionate. But the hypermarket that justly extended the careers of many artists also delayed the winnowing process of many others. Now all this winnowing is occurring at once. Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don’t seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste, momentary glitches in an artist’s work, or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times, however, these problems mean there’s something wrong with the art. One sign that this is happening is when the same things that were said about an artist a decade ago are still being said today.

more from NY Magazine here.

‘Why write on vampires at this stage in history?’ Toufic asked. ‘Were humanity to conquer death . . . it will suddenly dawn on it that the attributes of death, or pastiches or parodies of them, have become salient facts of life.’ Toufic is captivated by thresholds, misunderstood warnings, lapses in consciousness, ‘quantum effects, such as tunnelling’, ‘unreflective glass’: tropes traditional to the vampire movie, but versions of which structure all films, all narrative. How can a story ever be told without jumps through wormholes, dissolving doors and windows, dream-states and drowsiness and forgetfulness and the vagueness that comes with sitting in the darkness in front of an enormous screen of light? In the old days, the Gothic was said to focus readers’ deepest fears about their future: blood-sucking aristos; mills, engines, new technology, with its way of shifting boundaries between the human and the not-human; infant mortality, post-mortem flatus, doubts about the afterlife and, of course and always and mainly, the problem of death. In our day we don’t have to visit a cinema to hallucinate life into images of immortal perfection; they flicker everywhere around us, emptied of the animal and plumped up instead with plastics. And so, the question is not so much about entering the ‘labyrinthine realm of undeath’ as whether anyone can ever really be said to leave it.

more from the LRB here.

To see it all – the world of Palladio – you have to imagine it all. But there are aids to the imagination both in the vivid documents quoted by scholars, and in the photographs that survive from the nineteenth century, from the days just before the agricultural revolution destroyed the old order. Not that the old photographs are themselves without their anachronisms: wisteria or Virginia creeper growing up a Renaissance villa is a botanical anachronism, and a foolish piece of planting (the rats climb up the creepers to get at the corn in the attic). The arum lilies (Zantedeschia) you see everywhere clogging the ditches of the Veneto come from Southern Africa, and are named after the North Italian botanist Giovanni Zantedeschi (1773–1846). The nineteenth century also saw the planting of exotic trees in English-style parks, replacing the strictly economic fruit trees the sixteenth century would have known. But still, what grips us about the old photographs when we can see them (there are none at Burlington House) is the glimpse we have of the functioning rural economy in which these crucial structures played their part, caught in the years when it was coming to an end, when the threshing machines were making their first appearance.

more from the TLS here.

Ditty of First Desire
Frederico Garcia Lorca

In the green morning
I wanted to be a heart.
A heart.

And in the ripe evening
I wanted to be a nightingale.
A nightingale.

(Soul
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.)

In the vivid morning
I wanted to be myself.
A heart.

And at the evening’s end
I wanted to be my voice.
A nightingale.

Soul,
turn orange-colored.
Soul,
turn the color of love.

From NewsDaily:

Canadian researchers said on Monday they have discovered North America's smallest known dinosaur, a pint-sized predator half the size of a house cat and cousin to the ferocious Velociraptor, which roamed in what is now Alberta 75 million years ago.

Hesperonychus, whose name means “western claw”, prowled southeastern Alberta in Western Canada during the late cretaceous period, running on two legs, eating insects, small mammals, or whatever else it could find. Researchers said the dinosaur resembled its cousin Velociraptor, a hunter with a fierce reputation and a killer claw similar to that of Hesperonychus. “It was only about half the size of a Velociraptor,” said Nick Longrich, a researcher at the University of Calgary, and co-author of a paper on Hesperonychus with University of Alberta paleontologist Philip Currie. “Presumably Velociraptors could take down large animals but in this one the blade-like claw on the foot is not that big. My guess is that it was a small-game hunter, taking down mammals and birds and baby dinosaurs.”

Hesperonychus fossils have been collected since 1982 but paleontologists had assumed that because of their small size, they must have come from juvenile animals.

More here.

Sukumar Muralidharan in Himal Southasian:

If any lesson is to come out of the current financial crisis, it is that the pipedream of corporate social responsibility needs to be shelved.

By all accounts, the mood at the customary annual gathering of corporate movers and shakers at the Swiss ski resort of Davos in late January and early February was sombre, even funereal. Public sentiment outside was turning restive, as tough questions were being posed about the turmoil in the world economy. And the conclave, which has had little difficulty all these years recycling the same nostrums as the solution to all problems, for once had no answers. It could warn against the dangers inherent in abandoning the free-enterprise model and pour subtle disdain at the undeniable drift towards economic nationalism. But it could not quite come up with a credible antidote for the economic woes that were an obvious outcome of the hard-edged pursuit of the free-enterprise model.

India had the stellar representation at Davos 2009 that it has in recent years become used to, consistent with its status as a country with a fast-growing tribe of billionaires. India also had the confidence that the shockwaves emanating from the US – which has rapidly transformed itself from global economic leader to the capital of chaos – had not yet dealt their full impact on its shores. But it just narrowly managed to avert a major public-relations disaster. B Ramalinga Raju, the former chairman of the once globally toasted enterprise, Satyam Computer Services – now the first in India to be caught using the creative accounting that was once thought to be the exclusive province of US corporations – had been scheduled to address a Davos session on the education of new entrepreneurs. What he might have taught them must, unfortunately, remain in the realm of speculation, since Raju had to make a detour into one of Hyderabad’s most prominent jails, where he has since been detained to answer the charges of fraud to which he has already admitted.

More here.

In New Scientist, another take on fiction

WHY does storytelling endure across time and cultures? Perhaps the answer lies in our evolutionary roots. A study of the way that people respond to Victorian literature hints that novels act as a social glue, reinforcing the types of behaviour that benefit society.

Literature “could continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way”, says Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania.
Gottschall and co-author Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri, St Louis, study how Darwin's theories of evolution apply to literature. Along with John Johnson, an evolutionary psychologist at Pennsylvania State University in DuBois, the researchers asked 500 people to fill in a questionnaire about 200 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, and then to describe their personality and motives, such as whether they were conscientious or power-hungry.

The team found that the characters fell into groups that mirrored the egalitarian dynamics of hunter-gather society, in which individual dominance is suppressed for the greater good (Evolutionary Psychology, vol 4, p 716). Protagonists, such as Elizabeth Bennett in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, for example, scored highly on conscientiousness and nurturing, while antagonists like Bram Stoker's Count Dracula scored highly on status-seeking and social dominance.

The party line from the Economist:

Via the Valve, a discussion:

Looking Around Believing
Gary Soto

How strange that we can begin at any time.

With two feet we get down the street.

With a hand we undo the rose.

With an eye we lift up the peach tree

And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms

At our feet. Like today. I started

In the yard with my daughter,

With my wife poking at a potted geranium,

And now I am walking down the street,

Amazed that the sun is only so high,

Just over the roof, and a child

Is singing through a rolled newspaper

And a terrier is leaping like a flea

And at the bakery I pass, a palm,

Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed

To the window. We're keeping busy —

This way, that way, we're making shadows

Where sunlight was, making words

Where there was only noise in the trees.

The Introduction from George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller's Animal Spirits:

TO UNDERSTAND HOW economies work and how we can manage them and prosper, we must pay attention to the thought patterns that animate people’s ideas and feelings, their animal spirits. We will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature.

It is unfortunate that most economists and business writers apparently do not seem to appreciate this and thus often fall back on the most tortured and artificial interpretations of economic events. They assume that variations in individual feelings, impressions, and passions do not matter in the aggregate and that economic events are driven by inscrutable technical factors or erratic government action. In fact, as we shall discover in this book, the origins of these events are quite familiar and are found in our own everyday thinking. We started work on this book in the spring of 2003. In the intervening years the world economy has moved in directions that can be understood only in terms of animal spirits. It has taken a rollercoaster ride. First there was the ascent. And then, about a year ago, the fall began. But oddly, unlike a trip at a normal amusement park, it was not until the economy began to fall that the passengers realized that they had embarked on a wild ride. And, abetted by this obliviousness, the management of this amusement park paid no heed to setting limits on how high the passengers should go. Nor did it provide for safety equipment to limit the speed, or the extent, of the subsequent fall.

What had people been thinking? Why did they not notice until real events—the collapse of banks, the loss of jobs, mortgage foreclosures— were already upon us? There is a simple answer. The public, the government, and most economists had been reassured by an economic theory that said that we were safe. It was all OK. Nothing dangerous could happen. But that theory was deficient. It had ignored the importance of ideas in the conduct of the economy. It had ignored the role of animal spirits. And it had also ignored the fact that people could be unaware of having boarded a rollercoaster.

Alison Abbott in naturenews:

The society alleges that the editorial grievously misrepresents it and harms the reputation of one of its scientists. It wants the journal to publish a letter from the society addressing these concerns without delay.

Peter Fox, an editor-in-chief at Human Brain Mapping, says that the MPS letter went through normal refereeing processes “in a timely manner”, but says he does not know when it will be published. MPS vice-president Herbert Jäckle, a developmental biologist who was deputized to speak for the society, claims that the journal has unfairly delayed the society's right to reply.

The dispute has been raging for nearly a year. Fox, a neurologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, accepted the letter on 11 March, two days after the deadline the society set before taking legal action. Fox says that he will publish the letter together with a reply that “rebuts Dr Jäckle's various accusations”.

“I don't have a problem with the journal printing a reply,” says Jäckle. “But I fear that without expedited publication, the letter would appear on the web only after months of delay and in print only in a year.”