From Discover:

Tucked away in the cabinets of Oliver Sacks’s Greenwich Village office are hundreds of small black notebooks, each filled with jottings and sketches, newspaper clippings, and photos. These are the accumulated reflections from a lifetime spent observing the extraordinary ways the human brain can misfire and misbehave: a man who believes his own leg does not belong to him, an autistic woman with a gift for understanding animals, and the man who mistook his wife for a hat—the case that inspired one of Sacks’s most famous books.

What people may not know about Sacks, however, is that the 74-year-old neurologist has spent much of his career regularly treating patients in mental-health facilities around New York City. Those patients have more commonplace problems such as dementia, sciatica, gait disorders, and seizures. In his latest book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Sacks focuses on unusual cases having to do with music’s effects on the mind, such as a man who found relief from Tourette’s syndrome by playing the drums, and another who was driven to the edge by an unwelcome and unending tune that cycled uncontrollably through his head.

More here.

Over at ReasonOnline, Kerry Howley interviews Laura María Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins.

Collective anxiety about women who traverse sexual and spatial boundaries is anything but new. As Agustín writes, “Women who cross borders have long been viewed as deviant, so perhaps the present-day panic about the sexuality of women is not surprising.” Immigrants are human beings with the courage to leave the comforts of home. In Sex at the Margins, Agustín asks readers to leave behind easy stereotypes about migrants and welcome the overlooked expats among us.

reason spoke with Agustín in December.

reason: What experiences led you to write Sex at the Margins? 

Laura María Agustín: I was working in NGOs and social projects on the Mexico/US Border, the Caribbean, and in South America. I worked with people who called themselves sex workers and gays having sex with tourists. To us, this was normal, conventional. Everyone talked about it. Obviously many of these people didn’t have many options. Some of them had the guts to travel, and I felt I understood that.

In ’94 I hadn’t heard the word the work trafficking in this context. In the sex context, it’s a creation of the past 10 years. I started running into the term when I came to Europe and saw what people who were trying to help migrants were doing and saying. The whole idea of migrants who sell sex being victims was so different from what I knew. My original research question was, why is there such a big difference between what people in Europe say about people who sell sex, and what those people themselves say about themselves? It took a while for me to answer that question.

Via Crooked Timber, philosophy bites has an interview with the Marxist philosopher Gerald Cohen.

Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times:

A few months ago I wrote a magazine article about scientists who are building robots capable of a rudimentary form of sociability. As part of my research, I spent a few days at the humanoid robotics laboratory at M.I.T. And I admit: I developed a little crush on one of the robots. The object of my affection was Domo, a man-size machine with a buff torso and big blue eyes, a cross between He-Man and the Chrysler Building; when it gripped my hand in its strong rubbery pincers I felt a kind of thrill. So I was primed for the basic premise of David Levy’s provocative new book, “Love and Sex With Robots”: that there will soon come a day when people fall in love with robots and want them for companions, friends, love objects and possibly even partners for sex and marriage.

That day is imminent, Levy writes, especially the sex part. By the middle of this century, he predicts, “love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”

If this seems a bit much, hang on. Levy, an expert on artificial intelligence and the author of “Robots Unlimited,” builds his case gradually. He begins with what scientists know about why humans fall in love with other humans. There are 10 factors, he writes, including mystery, reciprocal liking, and readiness to enter a relationship. Why can’t these factors apply to robots, too?

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Has man’s conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?”[1] The question raised is addressed to the layman, not the scientist, and it is inspired by the humanist’s concern with man, as distinguished from the physicist’s concern with the reality of the physical world. To understand physical reality seems to demand not only the renunciation of an anthropocentric or geocentric world view, but also a radical elimination of all anthropomorphic elements and principles, as they arise either from the world given to the five human senses or from the categories inherent in the human mind. The question assumes that man is the highest being we know of, an assumption which we have inherited from the Romans, whose humanitas was so alien to the Greeks’ frame of mind that they had not even a word for it. (The reason for the absence of the word humanitas from Greek language and thought was that the Greeks, in contrast to the Romans, never thought that man is the highest being there is. Aristotle calls this belief atopos, “absurd.”)[2] This view of man is even more alien to the scientist, to whom man is no more than a special case of organic life and to whom man’s habitat—the earth, together with earthbound laws—is no more than a special borderline case of absolute, universal laws, that is, laws that rule the immensity of the universe. Surely the scientist cannot permit himself to ask: What consequences will the result of my investigations have for the stature (or, for that matter, for the future) of man? It has been the glory of modern science that it has been able to emancipate itself completely from all such anthropocentric, that is, truly humanistic, concerns.

more (along with several response essays) from The New Atlantis here.

Though Henry Hathaway’s 1953 film Niagara put a rather hopeless spin on marriage, the film turned Niagara Falls honeymoon fever—one hundred years old in 1952—into an epidemic. It also vaulted Marilyn Monroe into her now-familiar position as an icon of ruthless American femininity.

Much of the interest in the film’s “Marilyn walk” focused on the question of whether it was real. A minicontroversy—the kind that perpetually swirled around Marilyn—arose over the seemingly trivial question of how her hip-swinging, eye-catching wriggle of a walk came to be. The controversy reflected what biographer Sarah Churchwell calls “the central anxiety in Marilyn’s story: Was she natural or manufactured? Scripted or real?”

In the ’50s, this was becoming a question for the Falls too.

more from The Believer here.

In the first decade of the 21st century modern art became a popular phenomenon. Galleries stopped being the preserve of an elite, and artists communicated directly with a mass public. Who could have guessed, in 1998, that within 10 years an artist as serious as Doris Salcedo would be a well-known name thanks to a crack she’d made in a south London power station?

The groundwork for arts popular triumph was laid in the 1990s, when art made news with one sensation after another. It was outrageous and disreputable. That now seems a remote attitude. Art is accepted these days – even occasionally understood.

This century started with an event whose significance is still growing: Britain’s first modern art museum opened. Unlike New York’s lofty Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern turned out to be a celebration of art now with mass appeal. Tate Modern is in itself the most important phenomenon in art now, anywhere in the world, because it has changed art’s audience, and destroyed the old order. The traditional preserves of the critic, the art historian, “the expert”, have vanished.

more from The Guardian here.

From Booklist:

For those readers anxious to get a head start planning Black History Month activities or ordering relevant titles, we are offering our ninth annual Black History preview. It is intended to provide an overview of some of the books by and about African Americans to be published in 2008. The titles are based on lists submitted to us by both adult and youth publishers. Because we have not seen many of these titles yet, we can’t offer recommendations at this point, but we will be considering them for review as galleys arrive in the office in the coming weeks. Think of this Preview as part 1 of our Black History Month coverage. Part 2, of course, will be our annual Black History issue in February, which will include both reviews and numerous feature articles.

Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War. By James Brewer Stewart.

More here.

From Nature:

Aside from the UN’s four top picks, 2008 is also the Year of the Frog. “Largely our campaign is targeted at the zoo community,” says Kevin Zippel, program director for Amphibian Ark, the international conservation organization behind this year. Because of this target audience, the perceived wider reach of the UN was unnecessary for their campaign. Amphibian Ark has highlighted 500 frog species threatened with extinction. The year of the frog campaign is aiming to raise $50 million to try to save them — a huge job. “We have pretty lofty goals,” says Zippel, adding that the year will be a success even if just one of those 500 species is saved.

Zippel thinks the wider populous isn’t so blinkered that it only sees UN-backed campaigns as credible. Celebrity helps raise profiles, he says, and The Year of the Frog has Sir David Attenborough as its patron. The campaign also has Kermit the Frog’s backing, he says.

More here.

Via NoUtopia:

From On Being Fired Again
Erin Belieu

I’ve known the pleasures of being
fired at least eleven times-
most notably by Larry who found my snood
unsuitable, another time by Jack,
whom I was sleeping with. Poor attitude,
tardiness, a contagious lack
of team spirit; I have been unmotivated
squirting perfume onto little cards,
while stocking salad bars, when stripping
covers from romance novels, their heroines
slaving on the chain gang of obsessive love-
and always the same hard candy
of shame dissolving in my throat;
handing in my apron, returning the cash-
register key. And yet, how fine it feels,
the perversity of freedom which never signs
a rent check or explains anything to one’s family…

*A snood is a hair net

Richard Highfield in The Telegraph:

More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, a milestone work that would inspire generations of scientists to examine the connection between the nebulous, hard-to-define mind and the grey, wrinkled organ that sits between our temples.

Freud called our dreams the “royal road to the unconscious”. His seductive idea was that their content is shaped by experiences early in life, creating the hope that psychoanalysis could use our dreams to reveal our childhood miseries, and thereby cure our inner torment.

Today, however, a study of dreams conducted for The Daily Telegraph by Harvard University has come to the inescapable conclusion that Freud put too much emphasis on our formative years.

Although dreams are bizarre and otherworldly, they are as likely to be moulded by mundane, humdrum and everyday activities as by life-changing events.

More here.

Nicholas Kulish in the New York Times:

Six men whirled faster and faster in the center of the nightclub, arms slung over one another’s shoulders, performing a traditional circle dance popular in Turkey and the Middle East. Nothing unusual given the German capital’s large Muslim population.

But most of the people filling the dance floor on Saturday at the club SO36 in the Kreuzberg neighborhood were gay, lesbian or bisexual, and of Turkish or Arab background. They were there for the monthly club night known as Gayhane, an all-too-rare opportunity to merge their immigrant cultures and their sexual identities.

European Muslims, so often portrayed one-dimensionally as rioters, honor killers or terrorists, live diverse lives, most of them trying to get by and to have a good time. That is more difficult if one is both Muslim and gay.

“When you’re here, it’s as if you’re putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun,” said a 22-year-old Turkish man who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.

More here.

An interview with Marjane Satrapi at CNN:

The subtitle for Marjane Satrapi’s highly personal animated film “Persepolis” might as well be “Iranians: They’re Just Like Us.” They lose their keys, dance to “Eye of the Tiger,” endure rocky relationships.

Satrapi, an Iranian who now lives in France, said her mission was to share with Westerners her stories of how life was lived during the Islamic revolution, and what went on just out of sight of the “guardians,” police enforcers of religious principles.

The film, largely in black and white, is based on Satrapi’s two graphic novels of the same name. Co-written and co-directed by Vincent Parronaud, it features Chiara Matroianni as the voice of Marjane, Catherine Deneuve as her mother, and Danielle Darrieux as her dynamic grandmother.

Satrapi, dressed in flowing black, stabbed her lit cigarette in the air to emphasize points as she talked about the movie in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Q: Tell me about your family.

MARJANE SATRAPI: I come from a middle-class family, with money. Not a huge amount of money, but we were living in a nice flat. My parents had their own car. We could go on holidays abroad. I could go to a bilingual school. We went to the cinema, to the theater, being able to read books.

More here.

That is the Edge Annual Question for 2008. Here’s one reply:

Steven Pinker:

Have Humans Stopped Evolving?

Ten years ago, I wrote:

For ninety-nine percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic bands. Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations. They are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, government, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience.

And:

Are we still evolving? Biologically, probably not much. Evolution has no momentum, so we will not turn into the creepy bloat-heads of science fiction. The modern human condition is not conducive to real evolution either. We infest the whole habitable and not-so-habitable earth, migrate at will, and zigzag from lifestyle to lifestyle. This makes us a nebulous, moving target for natural selection. If the species is evolving at all, it is happening too slowly and unpredictably for us to know the direction. (How the Mind Works)

Though I stand by a lot of those statements, I’ve had to question the overall assumption that human evolution pretty much stopped by the time of the agricultural revolution. When I wrote these passages, completion of the Human Genome Project was several years away, and so was the use of statistical techniques that test for signs of selection in the genome. Some of these searches for “Darwin’s Fingerprint,” as the technique has been called, have confirmed predictions I had made. For example, the modern version gene associated with language and speech has been under selection for several hundred thousand years, and has even been extracted from a Neanderthal bone, consistent with my hypothesis (with Paul Bloom) that language is a product of gradual natural selection. But the assumption of no-recent-human-evolution has not.

Much more here.

In one of the most famous arguments of postwar philosophy of language, Saul Kripke addressed a question that had long preoccupied philosophers: how do names refer to people or things? (The larger question here is: How does language get traction on reality?) In a theory that Bertrand Russell made canonical, a name is basically shorthand for a description that specifies the person or thing in question. Kripke was skeptical. He suggested that the way names come to refer to something is akin to baptism: once upon a time, someone or some group conferred the name on an object, and, through the causal chains of history, we borrow that original designation.

To support his case, Kripke offered a thought experiment: Suppose, he asked us to imagine, that Gödel’s theorem was actually the work of a fellow named Schmidt; it’s just that Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and thereafter was wrongly credited with its authorship. When those of us who know about “Gödel” only as the theorem’s author invoke that name, whom are we referring to? According to Russell’s view of reference, we’re actually referring to Schmidt: “Gödel” is merely shorthand for the fellow who devised the famous theorem, and Schmidt is the creature who answers to that description. “But it seems to me that we are not,” Kripke declared. “We simply are not.”

more from the NYT Magazine here.

In the context of a linguistic diversity that has been restored as if to reverse the old myth of Babel, it is not about sanctioning those who may have broken some taboo decreed for some unknown reason by a deity who has since lost his mind or his nerve – certainly never his problem in the past. On the contrary: the same deity, proud of the audacity of his creation, pays tribute to humanity by endowing it with the gift of linguistic diversity, a happy device for its encounters with others and the cause of misunderstanding. For this ancient deity knows full well that it is misunderstanding that prompts people to draw closer to one another, that arouses their curiosity and fuels their desires to the point of madness, and sparks their creative frustration. Misunderstanding is what makes mankind an inventive and fragile, yet comical and ridiculous species. While contemporary political powers are coming unstuck as they pursue their grandiose visions of human unity, tongues, too, are, quite literally, being loosed and set free by their now powerless censors. In the nooks and crannies of the run-down, neglected sink estates, they are rediscovering their unfettered inventiveness. Here, distanced from the posturings of certain imperial languages chasing recognition within international organisations and in school textbooks, other forms of linguistic expression are surrendering to the delights of interpretative doubt, yielding to the sirens of misunderstanding. In these estates, the multiplicity fostered by a real enjoyment of diversity can be seen at work; it is here that misunderstanding provides a framework for people to approach one another and strangeness becomes the basis for them to get to know one another.

more from Eurozine here.

The Patriots have beaten bad teams, like Miami, and they have beaten good teams, like Dallas. They have beaten six teams that will join them in the NFL playoffs starting next weekend. In Tom Brady, they have the best quarterback who ever played the game. (Come February, when he gets that fourth Super Bowl, the discussion will be limited to him and Joe Montana, and Montana never put up a year like the one Brady has had.) In Bill Belichick, they have one of the five or six best coaches who ever coached the game. They are ludicrously better than 30 of the other teams in the league. We exempt here the Indianapolis Colts, than whom they are only considerably better. And, best of all, they make all the right people angry.

That list starts, as it must, with the surviving members of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins, who decided years ago to break the world record for being publicly grumpy old farts, a mark previously held jointly by the McLaughlin Group and any show Louis Rukeyser hosted alone. Bob Kuechenberg’s opinion has been almost universally unsought for more than three decades, and the last person who truly cared what Mercury Morris said about anything was a judge. Yet, all season, the Patriots found themselves heckled by the NFL equivalents of Statler and Waldorf from the old Muppet Show. Go down to the Metamucil section of South Beach, the lot of you, and shut up.

more from Slate here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

The world is etched with invisible paths, the routes taken each year by uncountable swarms of geese, elk and salmon, of dragonflies, zebras and leatherback turtles. But in his new book “No Way Home,” David Wilcove, a Princeton biologist, warns that “the phenomenon of migration is disappearing around the world.” Despite their huge numbers, migratory species are particularly vulnerable to hunting, the destruction of wild habitat and climate change. Humans have already eradicated some of the world’s greatest migrations, and many others are now dwindling away. While many conservation biologists have observed the decline of individual migrations, Dr. Wilcove’s book combines them into an alarming synthesis. He argues that it is not just individual species that we should be conserving — we also need to protect the migratory way of life.

As a scientist, Dr. Wilcove finds the disappearance of the world’s migrations particularly heartbreaking because there is so much left for him and his colleagues to learn. What are the cues that send animals on their journeys? How do they navigate vast distances to places they have never been? How do some species travel for days without eating a speck of food?

More here.

William Dalrymple in Outlook India:

The West always had a soft spot for Benazir.

However the very reasons that make the West love Benazir are the same that leave many Pakistanis with second thoughts. Her English may be fluent, but you can’t say the same about her Urdu which she speaks like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi is even worse: apart from a few imperatives, she is completely at sea. Equally, the tragedy of Benazir’s end should not blind us to her as astonishingly weak record as a politician. Benazir was no Aung San Suu Kyi, and much of the praise now being heaped upon her is misplaced. In reality, Benazir’s own democratic credentials were far from impeccable. She colluded in massive human rights abuses, and during her tenure, government death squads in Karachi were responsible for the abduction and murder of hundreds of her MQM opponents. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world’s worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.

Within her own party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP, and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her for its leadership. When he was shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside her home, Benazir was implicated. His wife Ghinwa, and her daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir’s own mother, all firmly believed that she gave the order to have him killed.

More here. (Thanks to Dr. Talaha Ali)

Thanks to Judith Weingarten.