It may seem strange to say we have just lost our national philosopher. Is a philosopher, after all, like a bird or an anthem? It’s the wrong question, Richard Rorty would have answered. Rorty, who died June 8 in Palo Alto, Calif., was for some 30 years the chief conductor of such national philosophical conversation as we have about the nature, meaning, and traps of our collective life.

In the classical sense he was of course a philosopher — a lover of wisdom — and only another philosopher could have denied it.

Rorty was also, in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “an anti-philosopher’s philosopher.” He was more widely read and influential among humanists and activists of a left-liberal stripe than in departments of philosophy, two of which (Wellesley and Princeton) he eventually left behind for appointments in the humanities (University of Virginia) and comparative literature (Stanford).

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Fro Scientific American:

It’s a common fantasy to imagine that you’re the last person left alive on earth. But what if all human beings were suddenly whisked off the planet? That premise is the starting point for The World without Us, a new book by science writer Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona. In this extended thought experiment, Weisman does not specify exactly what finishes off Homo sapiens; instead he simply assumes the abrupt disappearance of our species and projects the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries afterward.

According to Weisman, large parts of our physical infrastructure would begin to crumble almost immediately. Without street cleaners and road crews, our grand boulevards and superhighways would start to crack and buckle in a matter of months. Over the following decades many houses and office buildings would collapse, but some ordinary items would resist decay for an extraordinarily long time. Stainless-steel pots, for example, could last for millennia, especially if they were buried in the weed-covered mounds that used to be our kitchens. And certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them.

More here.

From Science:

Ever flinch at the sight of an actor being punched in the face? The reason is that neurons in the brain light up when we watch others suffering. Now a team of psychologists has added evidence to the theory that such mirror systems in our brains are what lie behind our ability to empathize with others. The conclusions are based on a rare group of individuals who feel a touch upon their own bodies when they see someone else being touched. Only one such case of mirror-touch synesthesia had been reported previously in the literature; University College London’s Michael Banissy and Jamie Ward investigated the phenomenon in 10 other individuals.

In the new study, the researchers first established that the subjects had mirror-touch synesthesia. They had the individuals and members of a control group report where they felt a touch on their bodies while observing another person being touched. During the task, an actual touch was applied to their bodies as well–either at the same location as the person being observed or at a different location. The researchers found that mirror-touch synesthetes were quicker at detecting actual touch when it was applied to the same location as that of the person they were watching. They were also more likely than control subjects to report a synesthetic touch as a real touch.

More here.

Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. Joe Whitman, 24, Los Angeles, California. 1990-92.

Photograph.

More here, and here. Current show at the ICA, Boston here.

Richard Posner, Brian Eno, Mark Edmundson, Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Virginia Heffernan, Michael Berube and Stanley Fish remember Richard Rorty. This is Daniel Dennett writing, in Slate (via Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex):

I first met Dick Rorty in 1970 when he invited me (all the way from UC Irvine) to give a talk at Princeton—the first talk I ever gave to an audience of philosophers—and then hosted an unforgettable party at his house afterward. His two 1972 papers “Dennett on Awareness” in Phil. Studies and “Functionalism, Machines, and Incorrigibility” in J.Phil. put my work in the limelight, and he continued through the years to write with insight and appreciation about my work, so I owe a great debt to him over and above all I learned from him in his writing and in our conversations and debates. Dick was always trying to enlist me, an avowed Quinian, to his more radical brand of pragmatism, and I always resisted his inducements, feeling like a stick in the mud. But this didn’t always stop Dick from re-creating me—or others he more-or-less agreed with—in his own radical image. In one of these discussions, which took place in St. Louis in 1981 or thereabouts, I decided to tease him by inventing the “Rorty Factor”: Take anything Dick Rorty says and multiply it by .742 to get the truth! (See his “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” and my “Comments on Rorty” in Synthese in 1982.)

We continued in this vein for years. At one three-hour lunch in a fine restaurant in Buenos Aires, we traded notes on what we thought philosophy ought to be, could be, shouldn’t be, and he revealed something that I might have guessed but had never thought of. I had said that it mattered greatly to me to have the respect of scientists—that it was important to me to explain philosophical issues to scientists in terms they could understand and appreciate. He replied that he didn’t give a damn what scientists thought of his work; he coveted the attention and respect of poets!

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being elicited considerable interest after its publication (in French in 1984, in Czech in 1985) and ultimately became Milan Kundera’s best-known novel. A major discussion took place in the exile journal Testimony, in which Milan Jungmann reproached Kundera for pandering to his readers, for dealing too loosely with the details of real life under the normalization regime,[1] and for his “method of beautiful fabulation.” After the critical Jungmann, some voices spoke out defending Kundera (including Kvetoslav Chvatik, Petr Kral, Ivo Bock, and Josef Skvorecky), pointing out that irrational anti-Kundera positions were determined by something “essential to the whole Czech character” (Kral). In 1988, Jaroslav Cejka added salt to the wounds with another criticism of Kundera, calling the novel “third-generation kitsch”. In essence, Cejka repeated Jungmann’s reproaches to the effect that Kundera merely wanted to gratify his readers, as well as (and here he was also in accordance with Jungmann) rebuking him for his erotic scenes and meditations on defecation. How strange: Jungmann, a dissident writing unofficial samizdat, and Cejka, an official critic from the very top of the Communist establishment who wrote for the principal cultural-political weekly, both managed – where Kundera was concerned – to agree.

How does The Unbearable Lightness of Being look more than twenty years after its original publication? Answering this question means hunting through our memory to track down just what Kundera’s novel did to us in the mid-1980s.

more from Eurozine here.

Richard Phillips makes jpeg art — that is, imagery that looks absolutely fantastic when transferred digitally from gallery to collector, curator, critic or magazine art director. The paintings themselves are enormous, and there is no denying the fact that images of bare-breasted babes and Nazi insignia still pack a wallop in a media-glutted world. In fact, this is partly what the work is about, the backbreaking effort to make “paintings as such” while burdened with a head full of Yale-induced Postmodern critical theory.

“Is it a vital medium or a redundant object of nostalgia connoisseurship?” intones the Gagosian Gallery press release. If the answer to that question is based on Phillips’ paintings, the answers would have to be no and yes. The act of laying paint on canvas is not Phillips’ gift. His paintings have none of the fluidity of Tom Wesselmann or the eroticism of David Salle.

more from artnet here.

The curiosity shop that artist Nancy Shaver runs in Hudson, N.Y., is named Henry. It is an antique store filled with non-art objects in display cases that customers pay cash for and carry away. In one sense Shaver makes straightforward modernist/minimalist sculptures: brightly colored or patterned little boxes that are lined up or stacked on object pedestals such as wheeled dollies or handmade shelving units or placed on the walls in object frames such as musical instrument cases and in handmade wooden boxes. In another sense, Shaver transforms, through an intuitive predominantly visual decision making process, real objects she does not modify in any way into expensive art objects. Shaver’s exhibition at Feature Inc. includes non-art objects from Henry, sculptures that are completely handmade by the artist and sculptures that combine the handmade and the found object. This work is all about the nexus of the utilitarian object that has hidden poetic qualities and the self-consciously constructed art object. Shaver’s art is also about accumulation, juxtaposition, and the visual habits we form with objects that we live with day to day.

more from artcritical here.

ME: For some reason, I can’t get this report orb to beam.

HOTSHOT: Well, go ahead and materialize the topaz orb first. That should launch your facefield preferences.

ME: OK, here goes … Wait, remind me, how do I get to the topaz orb? Sorry, I knew how to do this just a second ago—I imagine a shape, right?

HOTSHOT: Kind of. Defocus your eyes and visualize a beam of light illuminating a rhombus. That will materialize the topaz orb.

ME: Hmm … It’s still not working.

HOTSHOT: OK, let’s back up a step. Which wormhole did you do your push-up in?

ME: I’m pretty sure it was Wormhole Gamma. But I did a sit-up. Does a sit-up not work?

HOTSHOT: Oh, you did a sit-up? (Smirk.) Yeah. That’s probably why it’s not working. Try it again.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Prachi Patel-Predd in Technology Review:

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have made a polymer material that can heal itself repeatedly when it cracks. It’s a significant advance toward self-healing medical implants and self-repairing materials for use in airplanes and spacecraft. It could also be used for cooling microprocessors and electronic circuits, and it could pave the way toward plastic coatings that regenerate themselves.

The first self-healing material was reported by the UIUC researchers six years ago, and other research groups have created different versions of such materials since then, including polymers that mend themselves repeatedly when subject to heat or pressure. But this is the first time anyone has made a material that can repair itself multiple times without any external intervention, says Nancy Sottos, materials-science and engineering professor at UIUC and one of the researchers who led the work.

More here.

Wolfgang Schevilbusch in Cabinet:

Émile Zola was one of countless literati who formulated this hopeful vision. In his utopian novel Work (1900), the factory environment is entirely electrified:

The machines did nearly everything. Driven by electricity, they formed an army of obedient, enduring, and indefatigable workers. If one of their steel arms broke, it could simply be replaced without any pain. The machines had now become the worker’s friend and no longer his competitors as before. They were liberating machines, universal tools that toiled for man while he rested. The only thing that remained for him to do was to monitor and control the machines by pushing levers and buttons. The workday lasted no more than four hours, and no worker was occupied with the same task for more than two of those. When a colleague replaced him, he occupied himself with something else-in public life or in culture-altogether. After electrification had freed factory-halls from their earlier deafening noise, these were filled with the workers’ merry singing. These songs, combined with the quietly and powerfully working machines, produced a hymn to the justice, glory, and redemption of work.²

^…The literary imagination went even further, it represented the equation “life = electricity” as reversible. Dead matter without a soul could be animated by introducing electrical current. In “Some Words with a Mummy,” Edgar Allan Poe resuscitates an ancient Egyptian corpse in this fashion. Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein brings his monster, constructed from dead body parts, to life with a force like electricity but without referring to it by name (it was the twentieth-century film version that first did that). In his novel l’Ève future, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam creates the ideal woman as an electrically animated automaton. A latecomer to this tradition is the demonically destructive female robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, likewise given life by electricity.

More here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

Under a big tent set for lunch in breezy Radcliffe Yard on Friday (June 8), Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison offered a gathering of 950 graduates, fellows, and friends a brief meditation on the oblique efficacy of the humanities. She said these “creative, imaginative arts” counsel, goad, and interrogate American culture from its own borders. The humanities still function “best, and most brilliantly, from the edge,” said Morrison. The meditation was delivered in her trademark style. Measured and slow, each word was spoken as if it were wrestled into precision at that moment. Morrison was awarded the Radcliffe Medal and delivered the keynote address at the luncheon on Radcliffe Day. “Book by book, Toni Morrison has confronted the national memory,” said Faust. “And word by word, she has cleansed it.” The cleansing came from the power of Morrison’s beautifully written stories, said Faust, “filled with loss, haunting, beauty, cruelty, and catastrophe.”

Morrison, who twice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, took the praise with good humor, and a dose of salt. “I really adore my life as recorded and delivered by Drew,” she said, since it leaves out all the “doubts and regrets and mistakes” there were along the way. “It just flows along in an organized fashion.” If there was an organizing principle to Morrison’s life, she said, it was learning to read at age 3, and falling under the spell of the written word. Reading marked her path from high school graduation in Lorain, Ohio (1949), when opportunities were not plentiful for “an African-American female without money, who was simply fairly well-read,” Morrison said. “So I just followed the books.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Researchers believe they may have unlocked the mystery behind a set of blood disorders called myeloproliferative syndromes—precursors to conditions such as leukemia that are triggered by an excess of stem cells. If so, the finding could set the stage for ways to prevent and treat such conditions—some of which can lead to heart disease, abnormal bleeding and even death.

Scientists long believed that these diseases were caused by disruptions in the normal cycle of blood stem cells that prompted them morph into progenitor cells, an intermediate phase when stem cells have been programmed to become a certain type of tissue cell, but have not fully matured into that form. But two new studies published this week in the journal Cell indicate that outside factors rather than flawed cells may be to blame. Specifically, scientists found that blood stem cells may go haywire because of defects in the bone marrow, where they are manufactured.

More here.

George Packer in The New Yorker:

The crucial moment of Peter Morgan’s new play on Broadway, “Frost/Nixon,” about the four ninety-minute interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977, comes not during the famous final session, on Watergate, but the night before. Nixon, who has been drinking, places an imaginary but not unimaginable phone call to Frost, who has been agonizing over his abject failure to direct the conversation in the first three interviews. The ex-President, played by Frank Langella, points out that both men rose up from nowhere and, at that moment, as the decade meanders to a close, both seem bound for oblivion. “If we reflect privately just for a moment,” Nixon muses, “if we allow ourselves a glimpse into that shadowy place we call our soul, isn’t that why we’re here now? The two of us? Looking for a way back? Into the sun? Into the limelight? Back onto the winner’s podium? Because we could feel it slipping away? We were headed, both of us, for the dirt.” Frost, played by Michael Sheen, accepts the truth of this but adds, “Only one of us can win.” And Nixon warns him, “I shall be your fiercest adversary. I shall come at you with everything I’ve got. Because the limelight can only shine on one of us. And for the other, it’ll be the wilderness.”

“Frost/Nixon” is about the struggle to control historical memory, with television the medium, self-explanation the means, and redemption the prize.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Nine years ago I had the opportunity to visit southern Sudan. With a few other reporters, I flew from Nairobi to Lokichokio in northern Kenya, where we prepared to cross the border. A man took our passports and told us he’d hold onto them till we got back. We climbed into another plane loaded with medical supplies and took off again, into a land that had been at war for 15 years.

I found the place eerie in its quiet. We were far from the front lines, and so you could forget that there was a war going on, except for the occasional word of government planes in the air, potentially carrying bombs. The war made itself known where we were in subtler, but no less devastating ways. Sleeping sickness, which had been brought under control in the years before the war, was on the rise again, and only a few doctors were braving the war to try to stop it. For more on that particular story, see this piece I wrote in 1998 for Discover, which I adapted for my book, Parasite Rex. Also, the doctors later published a paper describing the outbreak you can read for free here. Everyone who came on that trip was struck by the beauty of the place, the strange fields of termite mounds, the wooded slopes. But we could never imagine how many people could ever come to see it.

Things have changed. The civil war in southern Sudan is over. Sleeping sickness has been reined in, although not wiped out. And, as I report in today’s New York Times, wildlife biologists have conducted the first aerial survey of southern Sudan.

More here.

Via Redorbit.com:

Many techniques promise to mitigate global warming — planting forests, nuclear power, bioethanol, and cars with better gas mileage, to name a few. The problem is so enormous and the potential adverse effects so disturbing that we may have to simultaneously implement all available solutions to make the slightest dent in rising carbon dioxide levels.

Unfortunately, we are often slaves to preconceived notions such as “complex problems require complex solutions.” Take the surprising trade-offs between even the most technologically advanced solar panel and plain white paint. Which product would make you a better environmental citizen?

To arrive at an answer, consider the following:

Our sun illuminates the earth with a steady 1,350 watts per square meter. Some of this energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, some is reflected back into space, and some makes it to the earth’s surface, where it might be absorbed or reflected as well. A black earth, like a black leather car interior, would be very hot indeed. Fortunately, white clouds, polar ice caps, and even deserts keep the earth’s average reflectivity [“albedo” to planetary scientists] at around 30% — giving our planet more of a beige leather interior, so to speak.

More here.

Julian Dibbell in the New York Times Magazine:

It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly wooded mountain terrain, studded with castle ruins and grazing deer, in which warrior monks milled about. Li, or rather his staff-wielding wizard character, had been slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m., mouse-clicking on one corpse after another, each time gathering a few dozen virtual coins — and maybe a magic weapon or two — into an increasingly laden backpack.

Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does — for a living. On this summer night in 2006, the game on his screen was, as always, World of Warcraft, an online fantasy title in which players, in the guise of self-created avatars — night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters — battle their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning points for every monster slain and rising, over many months, from the game’s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the highest (70). More than eight million people around the world play World of Warcraft — approximately one in every thousand on the planet — and whenever Li is logged on, thousands of other players are, too.

More here.

Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post:

One measure of an artwork’s success might be the time you give to it, especially when there are lots of other things you could do. Surrounded by another thousand or so works of current art, and with the older glories of Venice just a bit farther off, the Dutch pavilion of the Venice Biennale kept me captive for hours over several visits. Aernout Mik, who’s filling it this year, makes art that is too complex to take in all at once and too compelling to pass by.

Mik works at the border between politics and play, reality and drama. His Venice project, called “Citizens and Subjects,” includes a series of video projections of disasters and crises that raises the stakes for what theater means.

One pair of screens shows footage from the news, of such things as illegal immigrants being rescued from the ocean or a wrecked train being hoisted by a crane. Those same screens also present images of emergency personnel pretending to deal with such events, in rehearsal for the real thing. The crux of the work is that it’s not easy to tell when you’re seeing truth and when you’re watching fiction — or rather, real documentation of a staged event.

More here.

From PassiveAggressiveNotes.com:

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Amelia Hill at The Observer:

After hearing jokes across Britain, Lenny Henry’s verdict offers little cheer:

From The Office to Little Britain and Peep Show, British comedy is as robust as it has ever been. But are Cockneys really funnier than Scousers? What about the Welsh? The British take their humour seriously, but do the one-liners people tell really reveal something about society, about who people are and how people have changed? What, in short, is in a joke? To get under the skin of the British sense of humour, the Open University has carried out a unique survey of the jokes people tell.

‘The defining trait of Britishness is our sense of humour, but although we all tell funny stories and jokes, not all of us get a laugh from them,’ said Dr Marie Gillespie, professor of sociology and anthropology at the Open University. ‘Jokes are not just a bit of fun. Yes, they play with the taboo and the forbidden, with the rules of language and logic, but jokes are also a barometer of the social and political climate. They reveal a great deal about social conventions and expose established pieties.’

More here.