From Harvard Magazine:

As the second world war drew to a close, two women thought about applying to Harvard Law School.

The first was an African-American native of North Carolina, the granddaughter of a slave and the great-granddaughter of a slave-owner, who had moved North for college, survived the lean years of the Depression, befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, and sought unsuccessfully to do graduate work in sociology at the all-white University of North Carolina. When instead she finished Howard Law School at the top of her class, she sought the fellowship traditionally awarded to Howard’s best student: a year at Harvard to complete a master’s of law degree. But, wrote the admissions committee, “Your picture and the salutation on your college transcript indicate that you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School.”

The second woman who thought about applying to law school was a Midwesterner of Scottish descent, educated in Catholic schools paid for by her mother’s hard-earned wages. After politely defying her teachers by declining a full scholarship to a local Catholic college, this woman spent the war acing a full course load in political science at her state’s best university by day, and working eight-hour shifts testing firearms in a munitions factory by night. Upon her graduation, Columbia, Radcliffe, and Wellesley all offered her financial aid for graduate study; she chose correctly, and so impressed her Radcliffe professors that one offered to sponsor her application to law school. The steep cost of a legal education led her to decline, and she was off to Washington to seek a job in the federal government.

The first woman was Pauli Murray, whose remarkable contributions to American legal and women’s history are beginning to be recognized, thanks in large part to the voluminous personal papers she left to the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library. The second woman is, quite decidedly and proudly, not a feminist icon. She is Phyllis Schlafly, A.M. ’45, who some say is more responsible than anyone for the rise of grassroots religious conservatism and the transformation of the Republican Party, and who all agree can take the lion’s share of credit or blame for the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the rise of antifeminism as a force in American politics.

More here.

From The New York Times:

All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone. While some scientists are enthusiastic, others are skeptical. The mice may be less fat after standing on the platform, these researchers say, but they are not convinced of the explanation — that fat precursor cells are turning into bone.

“Bone is notorious for ‘use it or lose it,’” Dr. Rubin said. “Astronauts lose 2 percent of their bone a month. People lose 2 percent a decade after age 35. Then you look at the other side of the equation. Professional tennis players have 35 percent more bone in their playing arm. What is it about mechanical signals that makes Roger Federer’s arm so big?”

At first, he assumed that the exercise effect came from a forceful impact — the pounding on the leg bones as a runner’s feet hit the ground or the blow to the bones in a tennis player’s arm with every strike of the ball. But Dr. Rubin was trained as a biomechanical engineer, and that led him to consider other possibilities. Large signals can actually be counterproductive, he said, adding: “If I scream at you over the phone, you don’t hear me better. If I shine a bright light in your eyes, you don’t see better.”

Over the years, he and his colleagues discovered that high-magnitude signals, like the ones created by the impact as foot hits pavement, were not the predominant signals affecting bone. Instead, bone responded to signals that were high in frequency but low in magnitude, more like a buzzing than a pounding.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Landing at Logan. 2006.

Digital photograph.

Ed Emery in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Lebanon’s Ghada Shbeir won the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards this June and, with them, the West discovered Muwashshah, an Arab versified musical form that was previously known just to a handful of scholars. The Palestinian singer Reem Kilani has also helped Britain discover this music, which exists alongside a related form known as Zajal. Like Muwashshah, it is a strophic poetic form much loved and prized by Arabs the world over.

Although it is sung and has music, Zajal is not often performed in the West, for simple reasons: it is an art of poetic duelling in which two poets challenge each other with improvised verses, and each has to respond in kind. It is performance art, emulative poeteering between men. It is not a free-for-all, but takes place within established conventions. Think hip-hop, rap, Jamaican dancehall and toasting.

Since its performance depends on text, it needs an audience who can understand its meanings, cross-references, puns and interplays. And feedback from the audience – appreciative noises, rhythmic clapping and repeating of sung refrains – is necessary for its poets to perform their art, so Zajal could not easily transfer to the alienated spaces of the World Music stage.

Samuel Bowles offers some interesting remarks (in the October 19th issue of Science):

Clark’s thesis is that the industrial revolution occurred when and where it did (England, late 18th century) because from 1250 on wealthy Englishmen passed their distinctive values of diligence, patience, and prudence on to their children who were more numerous and became wealthier than the children of other families (who lacked these values), the result being a gradual spread of these values in the population, eventually accounting for England’s take off. The following data and reasoning amplify points made in the review and suggest some empirical shortcomings of the thesis…

5. If parent-child personality similarity is due entirely to parent child transmission – whether genetic or cultural – it will dissipate rapidly, accounting for a very modest correlation of traits over 4 or more generations. Clark’s argument concerns fathers and sons. We assume that mating assortment can be ignored, given the evidence Clark offers for “great social mobility and fluidity… in medieval England” (p. 161). Let the intergenerational correlation of a trait be r. Then if genes are not involved and the only direct influence of vertical cultural transmission on sons is by fathers (not grandfathers, etc.), the correlation across n generations is r^(n -1).

Ezra Klein interviews Krugman in The American Prospect:

EK: And why do you think there’s slight better than even odds that we can get it? Why will this time succeed when so many others failed?

PK: First, there’s a progressive movement where there wasn’t one before. Clinton came in when the Democratic Party was basically an uncoordinated coalition of people with their own special interests. There is a real progressive movement now. They’ve learned something from the debate. And health care itself, a lot of the sense of crisis over health care in ’92 was because the economy was in recession, and things got better on the health care front and the economy recovered even as Clinton was trying to get plan through. This time around private health insurance has been declining even in the midst of economic recovery, so the crisis is that much deeper. And because of the progressive movement, the Democrats have more or less coalesced on a plan. LBJ passed Medicare in July of ’65 because he hit the ground running and knew what he wanted. Clinton didn’t give his first speech on health care until September ’93. This time around, we hope, if it’s a Democrat in the White House, that he or she will be much closer to the position that Johnson was in when he passed Medicare.

Anthony Gottlieb in the NYT Book Review:

[Sacks’] new collection starts quite literally with a bolt from the blue, when a 42-year-old surgeon, Tony Cicoria, was struck by lightning in 1994. Cicoria’s heart apparently stopped, but he was resuscitated, and a few weeks later he was back at work. Everything seemed normal until this fan of rock music was suddenly seized by a craving for classical piano music. He bought recordings, acquired a piano and began to teach himself to play. Then his head began to be flooded with music that seemed to come, unstoppably, from nowhere. Within three months of his electrocution, Cicoria had little time for anything other than playing and composing.

A dozen years later, Cicoria is still an extreme musicophiliac but has no desire to investigate his own condition with the finer-tuned forms of brain scanning that are now available. He has come to see his condition as a “lucky strike.” The music in his head is, he says, “a blessing … not to be questioned.” (He was certainly lucky not to be killed. Standing in thunderstorms cannot yet be recommended as a new answer to the old question of how to get to Carnegie Hall.)

Thanks to the willingness of others to be scanned, though, we now know that musicians’ brains are different.

Over at TED, “Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind.”

Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber:

Republican Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini points to this fascinating resource for figuring out the raw numbers of liberal, moderate and conservative Facebook users interested in a specific issue. Don’t try to create a flyer or whatever – just go to the “targetting” section, type the topic that you are interested in into the keywords section, and see how the numbers change whether you click Liberal, Moderate and Conservative (there’s further microtargeting of cities etc available too). For example, about 2,520 self-declared liberal Facebook users declare blogging as one of their interests, as opposed to 1,320 moderates and 1,100 conservatives. 5,180 liberals show the good taste to declare My Bloody Valentine as one of their favourite bands, as opposed to 1,120 moderates, and only 340 conservatives. Less obviously, the number of liberals (7,300) and conservatives (7,580) who like bluegrass music is about the same1. Obviously, treat these numbers with extreme caution; there is no way that Facebook users are a random sample of the population 2, but still, this promises much idle entertainment.

From The Washington Post:

Though Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma helped teach Tolstoy how to describe battle, most of War and Peace might be likened to a compact version of Balzac’s multi-volume Com¿die humaine. In these pages an old man’s heirs connive over his fortune. Parents strive to marry off their worthless children for money and status. Couples form and break up, young girls attend balls, their admirers quarrel and duel, fortunes are lost at cards, babies are born, families face social or financial ruin, and the most cherished dreams are dashed. The book never flinches from showing us deliberate cruelty, repeated heartbreak and survivor guilt.

While his villains never change, only worsen, Tolstoy’s heroes evolve, deepen, see more clearly into the nature of things. Society, the novelist believes, corrupts us because it is built on falsity and pretense, on role-playing and the acceptance of the unreal. It’s all opera. Only the very young and the very holy can ignore the pervasive artificiality. “As with all people, the moment she looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression.” However, those chastened by suffering or allowed ecstatic moments of insight may sometimes escape the world’s meretricious allure.

As its title suggests, the novel examines two opposing realms, alternative paths through life. Tolstoy repeatedly contrasts war and peace, the artificial and the natural, erotic torment and family happiness, the city and the country, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Germanic military tactics and Slavic submission to the force of history, intellectual complexities and Christian simplicities, this world and the next.

More here.

From Science:

Who hasn’t agonized over a major decision in life, whether to accept a job offer, move house, or perhaps switch research fields? We are confronted with a multitude of decisions on a daily basis. Many decisions are trivial and can be dealt with in seconds. However, others may have wider ramifications and can be excruciatingly complicated. In the past few years, our understanding of the underlying processes of decision-making has progressed markedly. This neuroscience special issue highlights some of the most exciting developments in this area.

Koechlin and Hyafil review recent experimental studies that provide new insights into the function and connectivity of the anterior prefrontal cortex, which forms the apex of the executive system underlying decision-making. The authors propose an original model of the anterior prefrontal function and provide a theoretical framework for addressing major unresolved issues and guiding future research on decision-making and higher cognition.

More here.

For Hughes, poetry was a matter of archetypes and of dreams transcribed — the account here, years later, of the dream which inspired ‘The Thought-Fox’ is mesmerising. A powerful spirit, he confidently engaged with the ouija-board which has destroyed less committed minds, and took professional advice from his spirit guide, called Pan. (Apparently, Pan gave him the numbers for the pools draw, one number out from top to bottom). He thought, as these letters and Birthday Letters clearly imply, that poetry, once written, creates as much as inspires a situation, and he may have been right. Crow, that terrifying statement of nihilistic madness, was not, as we all thought, driven by the terrible suicide of his lover Assia Wevill and her murder of their daughter, Shura; it was finished on the day before Assia’s final act.

more from The Spectator here.

Lessing, in the course of more than 50 books, has become an “epicist of the female experience,” the Nobel committee said, who “with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

Her books have plumbed the deep divide across which men and women talk at each other, the painful racial fractures and stultifying suburbia of colonial Africa, the earnestness and silliness of Communism, the ways in which passion still skulks in an aging woman’s heart. She has been alternately adored by feminists for her acute chronicles of what it means to be intelligent and frustrated and female, and reviled by them for renouncing, not a little imperiously, much of what they hold dear.

more from the LA Times here.

Urban legend has it that when a patron fell ill in Carnegie Hall and the call went out for a doctor in the house, half the audience stood up to help. Perhaps the concert was a medical benefit; more likely, it never happened. But there does seem to be no shortage of doctors who are musical, at least in New York, and one of them is Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and author, who has now combined two of his passions in one book.

In his earlier collections of clinical tales — most famously in “Awakenings” (1973) and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (1985) — Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. The genre could have been an exploitative sideshow: a parade of misfits whose brains have been weirdly affected by disease, trauma, congenital defect or medical treatment. But Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry. The result is a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Over at ZNet:

An overwhelming majority of Pakistan’s citizens do not want harsh strictures imposed on their personal liberties. They do not want enslavement of their women, their forced confinement in the burqa, or for them to be denied the right to education. Instead, they want a decent life for themselves and their children. They disapprove of Islam being used as a cover for tribal primitivism. But there is little protest.

We must understand this. Why is there no mass movement to confront the extremist Taliban of Miramhah and Waziristan, or the violence-preaching extremist mullah in Mingora, Lahore or Islamabad? This is because ordinary people lack the means and institutions to understand, organise, and express their values and aspirations. We do not yet have the democratic institutions that can give politics meaning for ordinary people. Depoliticising the country over the decades has led to paying this heavy price.

To fight and win the war against the Taliban, Pakistan will need to mobilise both its people and the state. The notion of a power-sharing agreement is a non-starter; the spectacular failures of earlier agreements should be a lesson. Instead, the government should help create public consensus through open forum discussions, proceed faster on infrastructure development in the tribal areas, and make judicious use of military force. This is every Pakistani’s war, not just the army’s, and it will have to be fought even if America packs up and goes away.

It may yet be possible to roll back the Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded our society for over 30 years and to defeat our self-proclaimed holy warriors.

Guardian America launched last Tuesday. Over at Comment is Free, Michael Tomasky discusses this American cousin of the British paper:

So what is Guardian America, what makes a British newspaper think that Americans will want to imbibe its view of America and the world, and why, having decided to undertake such an improbable project, would the paper place it in my hands? Fine questions. Let’s explore.

The journalistic shorthand version is that Guardian America is the US-based website of the Guardian newspaper of London and Manchester, which will combine content produced in the UK and around the world with content that we originate here to create a Guardian especially tailored to American readers. I am sometimes asked what, or who, this means we will try to be “like”; the questioner wants an American reference point the better to slot this project into a known category. The only answer is that we will try to be like … the Guardian.

Which means what?

Dennis Romero in City Beat:

Sasha Frere-Jones’s recent New Yorker essay, “A Paler Shade of White,” argues that “rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties” and became, essentially, free from black influence. Rock, as I argue in “Pop’s Living Dead” [CityBeat, October 9, 2003], stopped evolving around 1979, a victim of self-segregation (rock fans burned disco records in Comiskey Park that year) at a time when African-Americans moved on to create rap, disco, and soon, house and techno – new genres far from rock. But with that came a hyperawareness of blackness and masculinity in hip-hop – an almost anti-rock sentiment. As the genre stepped further away from its multicultural roots, it turned its back on its brother, the often-effeminate dance music genre. In the late ’90s, a defiant saying in hip-hop clubs – where men would line the dance floor, arms crossed, and bob their heads as women gyrated – was “n—— don’t dance.”

Today, hip-hop is recapturing the groove.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

In the FT:

Academic economists are no more self-serving than other professions. You should blame those in the real world who give them the means to be taken seriously: those awarding that “Nobel” prize.

In 1990 William Sharpe and Harry Markowitz won the prize three years after the stock market crash of 1987, an event that, if anything, completely demolished the laureates’ ideas on portfolio construction. Further, the crash of 1987 was no exception: the great mathematical scientist Benoît Mandelbrot showed in the 1960s that these wild variations play a cumulative role in markets – they are “unexpected” only by the fools of economic theories.

Then, in 1997, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for their option pricing formula. I (and many traders) find the prize offensive: many, such as the mathematician and trader Ed Thorp, used a more realistic approach to the formula years before. What Mr Merton and Mr Scholes did was to make it compatible with financial economic theory, by “re-deriving” it assuming “dynamic hedging”, a method of continuous adjustment of portfolios by buying and selling securities in response to price variations.

Dynamic hedging assumes no jumps – it fails miserably in all markets and did so catastrophically in 1987 (failures textbooks do not like to mention).

Later, Robert Engle received the prize for “Arch”, a complicated method of prediction of volatility that does not predict better than simple rules – it was “successful” academically, even though it underperformed simple volatility forecasts that my colleagues and I used to make a living.

[H/t: Saifedean Ammous]

Ziba Kashef in Color Lines:

Instead of focusing on the 99.9 percent overlap in all human genes, the Pharmacogenetics Research Network, a government funded follow-up to the Genome Project, honed in on the 0.01 percent difference as a source of the new discoveries and therapies. And several scientists and researchers sought further funding for investigations into possible genetic causes for racial disparities in disease and drug responses.

Their faulty reasoning, however, is illustrated by the controversial race drug BiDil. Developed to address the greater mortality from heart failure among African Americans, the drug has been met with both celebration and skepticism. While it is true that Blacks ages 45 to 64 are more than twice as likely to die from heart failure than whites, Duster points out that the disparity narrows after age 65. The disparity may have less to do with biology and race than other documented factors in heart disease, such as diet, stress and lifestyle. Evidence outside of the U.S. also undermines the rationale for a race-based approach to the condition. Citing the data of epidemiologist Richard S. Cooper, who compared hypertension rates worldwide, Duster explains, “Germany has the highest rate of hypertension, and Nigeria has the lowest rate. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in epidemiology to figure out what might be the issue there. It can’t be race and genetics.”

Scientists do, of course, acknowledge the influence of environment and lifestyle on disease and disparities. The laser-like focus on, and blind faith in, genes as the source of understanding and treating disease has been tempered by technical challenges and other trends in medicine. But the damage to our society’s understanding of race may be done.