Over at the Freakanomics blog, Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for A Day, looks at some gang member responses to HBO’s The Wire.

For the first episode, we gathered in the Harlem apartment of Shine, a 43-year-old half Dominican, half African-American man who managed a gang for fifteen years before heading to prison for a ten-year drug trafficking sentence. I invited older guys like Shine, most of whom had retired from the drug trade, because they would have greater experience with rogue cops, political toughs, and everyone else that makes The Wire so appealing. They affectionately named our gathering “Thugs and ‘Cuz.” (I was told that the “‘cuz” — short for “cousin” — was for me.)… Here’s a quick-and-dirty summary of the evening’s highlights:

1. The Bunk is on the take. Much to my chagrin (since he is my favorite character), the consensus in the room was that the Bunk was guilty. In the words of Shine, “He’s too good not to be profiting. I got nothing against him! But he’s definitely in bed with these street [thugs].” Many had known of Bunk’s prowess as a detective from past episodes. The opening scene, in which he craftily obtains a confession, reinforced their view that the Bunk is too good not to be hiding something.

2. Prediction No. 1: McNulty and the Bunk will split. The observation regarding Bunk’s detective work led to a second agreement, namely that McNulty or Bunk will be taken down — shot, arrested, or killed. This was closely tied to the view that McNulty and Bunk will come into conflict. The rationale? Everyone felt that Marlo, Proposition Joe, or another high-ranking gang leader must have close (hitherto unexplained) ties with one of these two detectives.

First at the Independent (UK) (via richarddawkins.net):

An internationally renowned biologist has shocked colleagues by abandoning the established explanation for why insects appear to display altruistic behaviour.

For the last 40 years researchers have more or less agreed that most ants, bees and wasps forego reproduction to help raise another’s offspring in order to help spread the genes they share.

The theory, known as “kin selection”, was first proposed in 1955 by biologist J. B. S. Haldane, and more famously expressed in Richard Dawkin’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Now however Prof Edward O. Wilson, of Harvard University, the renowned father of the field of socio-biology and a world expert on social insects, has amazed colleagues by renouncing it.

Wilson suggests something else at play, (Brandon Keim in Wired):

Only by conceiving of evolution as acting upon entire populations rather than individual organisms can we understand eusociality — the mysterious, seemingly “altruistic” behaviors exhibited by insects who forego reproduction in order to care for a colony’s young.

So says Edward O. Wilson, the legendary sociobiologist, environmentalist and entomologist, in an article published in the January issue of Bioscience. Wilson doesn’t extrapolate from bugs to people, but his conclusions raise fascinating questions about the evolutionary aspects of non-reproducing humans.

Dawkins responds:

EDWARD WILSON has given us a characteristically fascinating account of the evolution of social insects (see page 6 and BioScience, vol 58, p 17). But his “group selection” terminology is misleading, and his distinction between “kin selection” and “individual direct selection” is empty. What matters is gene selection.

All we need ask of a purportedly adaptive trait is, “What makes a gene for that trait increase in frequency?” Wilson wrongly implies that explanations should resort to kin selection only when “direct” selection fails. Here he falls for the first of my “12 misunderstandings of kin selection (pdf)“, that is, he thinks it is a special, complex kind of natural selection, which it is not (Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, vol 51, p 184).

Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen over at The Immanent Frame:

Why is it that sex is such a central part of American political life anyway? Why, when The New York Times reported on the influence of “values” voters on the 2004 Presidential election, did the Times name only two “values,” both of them reflecting a conservative sexual ethic: opposition to abortion and opposition to “recognition of lesbian and gay couples”?

This conflation of values and sexuality is particularly important because the polls on which the claim was based did not name any values, but just asked people to rate values in relation to other issues like the economy. In addition, the number of voters choosing values in this poll had actually fallen from a high point in 1996, when Bill Clinton was re-elected. But, the Times was willing not only to accept and promote the idea that values voters had swung the election, but also to promote the idea that the values these voters cared about were sexual in nature and conservative in force. Although there was subsequent criticism of the Times’s conclusion that voters in 2004 were more concerned with “values” than were voters in previous elections, there was little to no criticism of the presumption that “values” equals “sexuality,” and conservative sexuality at that.

Here, then, is another echo of the concern Taylor raises. The Reformation makes sexuality a matter of intense ethical concern, standing in for—and sometimes even blocking out—other concerns about the ideal moral life, such as whether it should be lived through a commitment to poverty.

Via TPM Cafe, Marjorie Valbrun in the Washington Post?

Last month, William Shaheen, a political surrogate for Clinton, was quoted publicly peddling concerns about Obama’s admitted past drug use and intimating that Republicans — not, heaven forbid, candidate Clinton herself — would raise questions about it if Obama was nominated.

Shaheen, who was co-chairman of the New Hampshire campaign but has since resigned, told The Post: “It’ll be: ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’ There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”

What’s harder to overcome is the idea that these patently insincere sentiments about Obama — coming from an experienced political adviser working for a tightly controlled and heavily scripted campaign — weren’t part of a deliberate attempt to paint the Illinois senator as a stereotypical black drug dealer.

Clinton herself has made racially tinged comments that could be taken as either insensitive or patronizing. The most widely noticed was in her efforts to dismiss Obama’s talk of “hope” and “change” as empty idealism. In doing so, she offhandedly diminished the important role played by Martin Luther King Jr. in pushing America to meet its promise of equality for millions of black Americans. “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Clinton said. “It took a president to get it done.”

In other words, “I have a dream” is a nice sentiment, but King couldn’t make it reality. It took a more practical and, of course, white president, Lyndon Johnson, to get blacks to the mountaintop. Of course no black man could have hoped to be president 44 years ago. And, for that matter, neither could any woman.

Via Sean Carroll, does MIMS’s “This is Why I’m Hot” affirm the consequent? 

Matthew Yglesias:

In particular, he [Nyhan] thinks “I’m hot ’cause I’m fly / You ain’t [hot] ’cause you’re not [fly]” is an example of the fallacy. I disagree. Nyhan’s reading depends on construing MIMS as trying to make a logical inference with “’cause” as a material conditional but there’s no need to do that. Interpretive charity suggest that we should understand MIMS to be making two logically independent causal claims: (1) he’s hot because he’s fly and (2) you’re not hot because you’re not fly. Perhaps MIMS believes that x is hot if and only if x is fly, or perhaps he doesn’t. I don’t, however, see a fallacy here.

Rob Harvilla provides a breakdown in The Village Voice:

If you find completely overlapping Venn diagrams visually unhelpful, consider this tautology:

If that’s a bit pretentious, then maybe a blunt flowchart works best:

It does not contradict the earlier remark about Kertész’s not wishing to be categorised as a “Holocaust” writer that not one of his works, including those that are much more concerned with communist totalitarian regimes, lacks at least one specific reference to Hitler’s reign of terror. The framing novel of The Failure, for instance, refers to a book Köves has published about his camp experiences (the title is not given but obviously Fatelessness is meant), and he directly quotes from several other books, including a passage about Ilsa Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald”, taken from Jorge Semprun’s The Long Voyage. By way of contrast, the allusion in The Union Jack is almost unnoticeable: Ernö Szép is immortalised as “a tiny old chap […] swept along the icy streets like a speck of dust by the wind of disaster, drifting from one coffee-house to the next […] his hat […] a so-called ‘Eden’ hat, of a shade that had evidently once been what was called ‘dove grey'”, who introduces himself with the devastating phrase, “I was Ernö Szép.” Most non-Hungarian readers will not be aware that Szép (1884-1953) was a genuinely popular Hungarian poet, writer and journalist of Jewish origin, among whose novels was Adam’s Apple (1935), mentioned by the nameless narrator of The Union Jack. More significantly, however, he wrote a remarkably sardonic memoir of his travails in a forced-labour battalion, published in 1945 and translated by John Bátki under the title The Smell of Humans.[4]

more from Eurozine here.

Today, in virtually any Waterstone’s, Smiths or Borders, the piles of Nigellas, McEwans, Clarksons and Russell Brands seem to demonstrate one simple equation: books equal celebrity. Actually, as John Mullan shows in this provocative little volume, writers used to go to extraordinary lengths to remain anonymous.

With good reason. Books were a matter of life and death. For the first three centuries after the introduction of the printing press, writers who challenged religious or political orthodoxy (and what is the use of a book that does not risk a contrary opinion?) were in mortal danger. Translations of the Bible, especially, offered a short route to immortality. Tyndale was burned at the stake. Lower down the slopes of Parnassus, even so fine a poet as Shakespeare published anonymously, after first circulating his work in private. Anon remains the star contributor to most dictionaries of quotations.

more from The Guardian here.

I am challenged at the Iowa caucuses to endorse gay marriage as a sacred institution. Of course I believe it, but how can they make me say so when they know the political cost it will exact? Hot tears of rage stream down my scarlet face.

In New Hampshire, I endure the grandiose posturing of Chris Matthews so I can get an interview on MSNBC. What a blowhard the man is! Who, man or woman, would not find his pompous questions exasperating? I curl my fists into tiny balls beneath the interview table.

There comes a time, dear reader, when a woman of high conscience must make her feelings plain. Today, in Ohio, I came out strongly for government support of stem-cell research.

more from McSweeney’s here.

WHY should not old men be mad?

WHY should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.
 

–  from On The Boiler by William Butler Yeats

From The Washington Post:

  DEFYING DIXIE: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore.

The real and infinitely more complicated history of the modern civil rights struggle “begins at the radical edges of a human rights movement after World War I, with communists who promoted and practiced racial equality and considered the South crucial to their success in elevating labor and overthrowing the capitalist system. They were joined in the late 1930s by a radical left to form a southern Popular Front that sought to overturn Jim Crow, elevate the working class, and promote civil rights and civil liberties. During and after World War II a growing number of grassroots activists protested directly against white supremacy and imagined it poised to fall of its own weight. They gave it a shove.”

In telling this story, Gilmore broadens the scope of Southern and civil rights history to include individuals and organizations operating well beyond the Mason-Dixon line. Nationalizing and internationalizing the saga, she reminds us that “the South could remain the South only by chasing out some of its brightest minds and most bountiful spirits, generation after generation. Many of those who left did so, directly or indirectly, because they opposed white supremacy. Counting them back into southern history reveals an insurgent South and shows some Southerners to be a revolutionary lot that fought longer and harder than anyone else to defeat Dixie.”

No brief review can do justice to the full range of historical characters and events that dominate the pages of Defying Dixie. But one example may give some sense of the exotic radicalism that prevailed prior to the classic civil rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s. Gilmore begins the book with the story of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the first African American to join the Communist Party.

More here.

A Philoctetes Center roundtable discussion with Jorge L. Ahumada, Akeel Bilgrami, Arnold M. Cooper, Garrett Deckel, Peter D. Kramer, and Bernard Reginster:

Richard Skinner in Ekklesia:

Recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, a noted theologian and philosopher in his own right, gave a lecture at Swansea University entitled ‘How to Misunderstand Religion’. He was responding in particular to the writings of Richard Dawkins, arguing that in applying evolutionary thinking to religion Dawkins is making two mistakes: first, in doing so he is reducing religion to the status of a “survival strategy”, and second, in opposing a scientific theory to religion he is reducing religion to a pre-scientific explanatory system now superseded by real science.

I have no quarrel with Dr Williams’ second point, but I wish to take issue with his view that the application of evolutionary theory reduces religion to a form of “survival strategy”, since I find the understanding of evolutionary thinking implicit in this argument too simplistic. It is important to clarify the matter, because many people, myself included, have criticised Richard Dawkins for having a misguided, indeed crass, understanding of what religion is about. We have claimed that he sets up a ‘straw god’ in order to knock it down, that he misquotes and misunderstands religious texts and arguments, that philosophically he is stuck in the nineteenth century, that he fails to bring to his scrutiny of religion the same scrupulous scholarship that he brings to his scientific work, and so forth. Given that Professor Dawkins’ critics launch into him thus, it is only fair, as well as being crucial in the interests of reasoned debate, that in criticising the application (or the attempted application) of Darwinian theory to religion we do not fall into the same trap by misrepresenting the former. But I think that in his use of the term “survival strategy” Rowan Williams does just that.

In the Economist:

ONE of life’s little mysteries is why particular people fancy each other—or, rather, why they do not when on paper they ought to. One answer is that human consciousness, and thus human thought, is dominated by vision. Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the other senses. However, as the multi-billion-dollar perfume industry attests, beauty is in the nose of the beholder, too.

ScientificMatch.com, a Boston-based internet-dating site launched in December, was created to turn this insight into money. Its founder, an engineer (and self-confessed serial dater) called Eric Holzle is drawing on an observation made over a decade ago by Claus Wedekind, a researcher at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.

In his original study Dr Wedekind recruited female volunteers to sniff men’s three-day-old T-shirts and rate them for attractiveness. He then analysed the men’s and women’s DNA, looking in particular at the genes that build a part of the immune system known as the major histocompatability complex (MHC). Dr Wedekind knew, from studies on mice, that besides fending off infection, the MHC has a role in sexual attractiveness. It changes odours in ways the mice can detect (with mice, the odours are in the urine), and that detection is translated into preferences for particular mates. What is true for mice is often true for men, so he had a punt on the idea that the MHC might affect the smell of human sweat, as well.

A debate over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free looks at the issue. Soumaya Ghannoushi:

Representations of the Muslim woman serve a dual legitimising function, at once confirming and justifying the west’s narrative of itself, and of the Muslim other. The victimised Muslim woman is the lens through which Islam and Muslim society are seen. In medieval times she was cast as an intimidating powerful queen or termagant (like Bramimonde in the Chanson de Roland, or Belacane in Parzival) reflecting an intimidating powerful Muslim civilisation. And when the power balance began to shift in Europe’s favour in the 17th and 18th centuries, she was made to mirror her society’s fallen fortunes. She turned into a harem slave, leading little more than a dumb animal existence, subjugated, inert, abject, powerless, and invisible. She is the quintessential embodiment of a despotic, deformed, and backward Islam.

Brian Whitaker responds:

In their articles, both Mahadin and Ghannoushi set out a broadly non-interventionist argument – that we should heed “the cries of the downtrodden” but not appoint ourselves as their guardians or benefactors (Ghannoushi’s latest article) or, as Mahadin puts it, “that the politics of resistance can only be formulated by those ‘who wish to be otherwise than they are'”.

These are not merely the views of a couple of Cif writers: they reflect a broad swathe of opinion in postcolonial countries and particularly in the Middle East – not only among Islamists but also among the more secular nationalists and, of course, the authoritarian regimes that tend to rule there.

In the NY Sun, Tyler Cowen reviews Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets:

I opened this book expecting to learn about why crime is high, how the drug trade works, or why so many people seem to make dysfunctional lifestyle choices. That’s not what I got. Most of all this is a story of male friendship and bonding — that’s right, I mean the bonding between the researcher and the criminal.

J.T., the gang leader at the center of the story, and of Mr. Venkatesh’s research, becomes wrapped up in the idea of having his own biographer. Eventually it became his obsession that Mr. Venkatesh record the details of his life, including the shakedowns. In part, this was J.T.’s narcissism, and in part he needed the motivation of an observer. Most of all, J.T. seemed to enjoy having an audience: “I realized that he had come to rely on my presence; he liked the attention, and the validation,” Mr. Venkatesh reports. None of J.T.’s underlings were qualified for the role of courtier, but the highly intelligent and nonjudgmental Mr. Venkatesh was perfect.

Others are not quite so generous toward Mr. Venkatesh. Ms. Bailey, one neighborhood figure, told him: “You want to act like a saint, then you go ahead … But you are also hustling. And we’re all hustlers … You’re a hustler, I can see it. You’ll do anything to get what you want. Just don’t be ashamed of it.” Mr. Venkatesh himself does not shy away from telling us about the more lurid appeal his project had for him: “By now I had spent about six years hanging out with J.T., and at some level I was pleased that he was winning recognition for his achievements. Such thoughts were usually accompanied by an equally powerful disquietude that I took so much pleasure in the rise of a drug-dealing gangster.”

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

Few cities have withstood the kind of violence and carnage that Beirut has. Though destroyed by a civil war lasting 15 long years, it seemed to be on the verge of an economic and cultural renaissance in 2006 when it was bombed again during the Israeli invasion. Beirut is a city that has learned to start over, to rebuild itself on top of its ruins, but it is also a place where memories are long and myths are persistent. In his new novel, “Yalo,” Elias Khoury grapples with the idea of truth and memory, what we choose to remember and what we prefer to forget. In fact, “Yalo” is composed of confessions — whether forced or voluntary, true or laced with self-aggrandizement, redemptive for the confessor or entirely useless.

more from the LA Times here.

Over the ages, philosophy has offered valuable guidance on profound questions of truth, beauty and existence, yet still unresolved is the conundrum of how to respond to a bad book review.

This neglect no doubt has helped contribute to a feud between the prominent philosophers Colin McGinn and Ted Honderich. That, and perhaps a slight to an ex-girlfriend 25 years ago, terror in the Middle East and, oh yes, a fundamental disagreement on the nature of consciousness.

The spat started in the summer, when Mr. McGinn, a British-born philosophy professor at the University of Miami, wrote a scathing review of Mr. Honderich’s book “On Consciousness” in the July 2007 issue of The Philosophical Review, a quarterly journal edited by the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From Discovery:

The mosques of the medieval Islamic world are artistic wonders and perhaps mathematical wonders as well. A study of patterns in 12th- to 17th-century mosaics suggests that Muslim scholars made a geometric breakthrough 500 years before mathematicians in the West. Peter J. Lu, a physics graduate student at Harvard University, noticed a striking similarity between certain medieval mosque mosaics and a geometric pattern known as a quasi crystal—an infinite tiling pattern that doesn’t regularly repeat itself and has symmetries not found in normal crystals (see video below). Lu teamed up with physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University to test the similarity: If the patterns repeated when extended infinitely, they couldn’t be true quasi crystals.

Most of the patterns examined failed the test, but one passed: a pattern found in the Darb-i Imam shrine (seen in the first video above), built in 1453 in Isfahan, Iran. Not only does it never repeat when infinitely extended, its pattern maps onto Penrose tiles—components for making quasi crystals discovered by Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1970s—in a way that is consistent with the quasi crystal pattern. Among the 3,700 tiles Lu and Steinhardt mapped, there are only 11 tiny flaws, tiles placed in the wrong orientation. Lu argues that these are accidents possibly introduced during centuries of repair. “Art historians always suspected there must be something more to these patterns,” says Tom Lentz, director of Harvard University Art Museums, but they were never examined with “this kind of scientific rigor.”

More here. (The video images are a MUST see).

Jeffery Rosen in The New York Times:

FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE: A Biography of the First Amendment. By Anthony Lewis.

Throughout his long career as an author and a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, Anthony Lewis has been one of the most inspiring advocates of a heroic view of the American judiciary. Each year I read aloud to my criminal procedure students the final paragraphs of “Gideon’s Trumpet,” Lewis’s definitive account of the 1963 Supreme Court case that recognized a constitutional right to court-appointed counsel. They never fail to bring a lump to the throat — at least to mine. In his new book, “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate,” Lewis offers a similarly heroic account of how courageous judges in the 20th century created the modern First Amendment by prohibiting the government from banning offensive speech, except to prevent a threat of serious and imminent harm. “Many of the great advances in the quality — the decency — of American society were initiated by judges,” he writes. “The truth is that bold judicial decisions have made the country what it is.”

In the 21st century, the heroic First Amendment tradition may seem like a noble vision from a distant era, in which heroes and villains were easier to identify. But that doesn’t diminish the inspiring achievements of First Amendment heroism. Conservative as well as liberal judges now agree that even speech we hate must be protected, and that is one of the glories of the American constitutional tradition. Anthony Lewis is right to celebrate it.

More here.