In American Scientist, Margaret Jacob’s reviews Peter Dear’s The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World:

Why are science’s instrumental techniques effective? The usual answer is: by virtue of science’s (true) natural philosophy. How is science’s natural philosophy shown to be true, or at least likely? The answer: by virtue of science’s (effective) instrumental capabilities. Such is the belief, amounting to an ideology, by which science is understood in modern culture. It is circular, but invisibly so.

Readers are apparently expected to conclude that, although other disciplines that accumulate knowledge display many factors that explain their relative effectiveness or success, science alone is solely about theories and methods of inquiry. Truth or lesser falsity cannot explain science’s success, nor can the replication of experimental methods and results. And the historical circumstances, or context, that may have shaped the science are also irrelevant.

Let’s see how this approach works for the history of 17th-century science. Once, when Aristotle held sway, natural philosophy was seen as distantly related to instrumentality and superior to it. Gradually, thanks to Bacon, Descartes and especially Newton, “doing things and understanding things . . . became increasingly folded into one another.” The resulting ideas we have today about nature “are all shaped by our acceptance of the images of reality that we owe to science in its guise as natural philosophy.” If we assign intelligibility to the world, it is because science has “powerful social authority . . ., which serves to render most people unable to refuse a knowledge-claim presented as a ‘scientific fact.'”

In the BBC’s Doha Debates, Norman Finkelstein and Andrew Cockburn vs. Martin Indyk and David Aaronovitch on the “Israel lobby” and criticism of Israel.

At the latest Doha Debate held at the prestigious Oxford Union in the United Kingdom on May 1st, two-thirds of the student audience approved a motion claiming that Israel’s supporters are stifling Western debate about Israel’s actions.

The event at the world famous debating society of Oxford University marked the first time the Doha Debates have been held outside Qatar.

The Debate took place amid mounting controversy over the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and accusations that it has suppressed criticism of Israel – a charge that the lobby vigorously denies.

In Dissent:

[Jon Wiener of Dissent]: The biggest obstacle in any peace settlement, according to the Israelis, is the Palestinian claim of a right of return. In 1948 your mother’s family was expelled from land that had been theirs for generations. What do you tell your Palestinian comrades about the right of return?

[Sari Nusseibeh]: This is the most painful part of a compromise that has to be made between Israelis and Palestinians. We have to think not only of the past but also of the future. I’ve been accused of arguing that we don’t have a right of return. That is false. I think we have a right of return. But we have other rights as well. We have a right to freedom. We have a right to independence. We have a right to create a new future. And very often in life the implementation of one right conflicts with the ability to implement another. You have to make a choice. In this case, I’ve been arguing with my peers, my colleagues, my people, that we must choose, and that, morally speaking, the best choice is to opt for the right to freedom, the right to independence, and the right to a new future.

From The Harvard Gazette:

Researchers at Harvard and Princeton universities have taken a crucial step toward building biological computers, tiny implantable devices that can monitor the activities and characteristics of human cells. The information provided by these “molecular doctors,” constructed entirely of DNA, RNA, and proteins, could eventually revolutionize medicine by directing therapies only to diseased cells or tissues.

Evaluating Boolean logic equations inside cells, these molecular automata will detect anything from the presence of a mutated gene to the activity of genes within the cell. The biocomputers’ “input” is RNA, proteins and chemicals found in the cytoplasm; “output” molecules indicating the presence of the telltale signals are easily discernable with basic laboratory equipment. Benenson and his colleagues demonstrate in their Nature Biotechnology paper that biocomputers can work in human kidney cells in a culture.

More here.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

FATHERS AND SONS: The Autobiography of a Family By Alexander Waugh

For more than three generations the Waughs have been extremely prominent literary figures in Great Britain. Arthur Waugh oversaw Chapman and Hall (publishers of Dickens, among others); both his sons, Alec and Evelyn, became well-known writers, the latter arguably the leading English novelist of the century; and one of Evelyn’s many offspring, Auberon, was long reviled and revered for his no-holds-barred, fiercely scathing and very funny political and social journalism. The author of this memoir, Alexander Waugh, is Auberon’s son, and he has already thrown in with the family business by bringing out works bearing such ambitious (and perhaps slightly ludicrous) titles as Time and God. He tells us, in passing, that nine of Arthur Waugh’s descendants have already produced 180 books.

More here.

We were lucky enough to have Forro in the Dark play at our 1st Annual 3QD party a couple of years ago. The band was formed by our old friend (and brilliant percussionist) Mauro Refosco during an impromptu jam session on his birthday some years ago. Those of you who have seen them perform live know how truly amazing they are. The rest of you should really try to catch them somewhere in the US or Europe during their tour this summer. Get more information about dates in different cities here. They often have amazing guest musicians, for example, here David Byrne plays with them (although this video fails to give a good sense of how transporting their music is):

And you can see a video of them playing live in NYC here.

The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, compared unfavorably in the press with the Islamist philosopher who writes prefaces for the collected fatwas of Sheik al-Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb. Today the menace to society is declared to be Hirsi Ali and people of similar minds, of whom there are quite a few: John Stuart Mill’s Muslim admirers, who are said to be just as fanatical as the fanatics. During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism.

How did this happen? The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women’s rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism; the inability to recall the problems faced by Muslim women in European hospitals; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas; the refusal to discuss with any frankness the role of Ramadan’s family over the years; the accidental endorsement in the Guardian of the great-uncle who finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks–what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.

more from TNR here.

Modern Western Civilization presents us with a Janus-like face: On one side Renaissance Humanism which begins in Italy in the 14th century with Petrarch, on the other side Enlightenment Rationalism which begins in France in the 17th century with Descartes.

After Descartes, there is a dangerous tendency to separate the two cultural phenomena and consider Humanism either anachronistic, or superseded. The inevitable result has been sheer confusion in the area of cultural identity; consequently, at this critical juncture of the new polity called European Union, there is talk of a “democratic deficit,” that democracy that is integral part of Western Civilization.

We are in urgent need of cultural guides to show us how to better harmonize the two above mentioned phenomena. One such guide is Emmanuel Lévinas’ humanistic philosophy. In as much as it challenges the Western rationalistic philosophical tradition, it is extremely important for the emergence of a renewed European cultural identity. It explores in depth the threats to the authentic cultural identity of Europe, how modalities of thinking powerfully affect other ideas and shape a whole cultural milieu, sometimes with less than desirable consequences.

more from Ovi Magazine here.

When you think of a high-society dance in the England of the 1770s, for example, this passage in Tobias Smollett’s 1771 novel, “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker,” probably isn’t what you have in mind: “Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues…besides a thousand frowzy streams, which I could not analyse.” Though the description is lightly fictionalized, Cockayne says, odor-wise it’s dead-on.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Nature:

Breast cancer — which will affect about one in every nine women in Britain and the United States — is known to have a strong genetic influence. But until now, known genes could account for only about a quarter of the genetic component of cancer risk. To search for some of the many other genes thought to make small differences to a woman’s breast-cancer risk, Easton and his colleagues compared the genomes of some 4,400 women with breast cancer with those of about 4,300 who did not have the disease.

They identified 30 differences in single DNA bases that seemed to be linked to the disease. These were then compared in more than 20,000 women with breast cancer and in a similar number of controls. The results are reported in Nature. Three of the newly discovered genes are involved in controlling the growth of cells. The gene with the strongest association was fibroblast growth factor receptor 2, or FGFR2. Women who have two copies of the high-risk version of this gene — about 16% of the population — have a 60% greater chance of developing breast cancer than do those with no copies of the gene, Easton and his colleagues found.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science. By Norman Doidge

An amputee has a bizarre itch in his missing hand: unscratchable, it torments him. A neuroscientist finds that the brain cells that once received input from the hand are now devoted to the man’s face; a good scratch on the cheek relieves the itch. Another amputee has 10 years of excruciating “phantom” pain in his missing elbow. When he puts his good arm into a box lined with mirrors he seems to recognize his missing arm, and he can finally stretch the cramped elbow out. Within a month his brain reorganizes its damaged circuits, and the illusion of the arm and its pain vanish.

Research into the malleability of the normal brain has been no less amazing. Subjects who learn to play a sequence of notes on the piano develop characteristic changes in the brain’s electric activity; when other subjects sit in front of a piano and just think about playing the same notes, the same changes occur. It is the virtual made real, a solid quantification of the power of thought. From this still relatively primitive experimental data, theories can be constructed for the entirety of human experience: creativity and love, addiction and obsession, anger and grief — all, presumably, are the products of distinct electrical associations that may be manipulated by the brain itself, and by the brains of others, for better or worse.

More here.

John Leo in City Journal:

So how should we write and restore the integrity of good English? Candor, clarity and sincerity are important keys. All of us are weary of writers who dance around their subjects, protecting friends, bending facts to push a cause. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” Orwell wrote. “When there is a gap between one’s real and declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms.”

Further, our minds are clogged with the clichés, idioms, and rhythms of other people, and we have to work to avoid them. Paul Johnson says, “Most people when they write, including most professional writers, tend to slip into seeing events through the eyes of others because they inherit stale expressions and combinations of words, threadbare metaphors, clichés and literary conceits. This is particularly true of journalists.”

Kurt Vonnegut has said that a writer’s natural style will almost always be drawn from the speech he heard as a child. Vonnegut grew up in Indiana, where, he said, “common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin.” He wrote: “I myself find I trust my own writing most and other people seem to trust it most, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.”

More here.

From The New Yorker:

In 1943, when I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Danzig, I volunteered for active duty. When? Why? Since I do not know the exact date and cannot recall the by then unstable climate of the war, or list its hot spots from the Arctic to the Caucasus, all I can do for now is string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist. No mitigating epithets allowed. What I did cannot be put down to youthful folly. No pressure from above. Nor did I feel the need to assuage a sense of guilt, at, say, doubting the Führer’s infallibility, with my zeal to volunteer.

It happened while I was serving in the Luftwaffe auxiliary—a force made up of boys too young to be conscripts, who were deployed to defend Germany in its air war. The service was not voluntary but compulsory then for boys of my age, though we experienced it as a liberation from our school routine and accepted its not very taxing drills. Rabidly pubescent, we considered ourselves the mainstays of the home front. The Kaiserhafen battery became our second home. At first there were attempts to keep school going, but, as classes were too often interrupted by field exercises, the mostly frail, elderly teachers refused to travel the wearisome dirt road to our battery.

More here.

Dan Vergano in USA Today:

“Scientists, educators and policymakers have long been concerned about American adults’ resistance to certain scientific ideas,” note Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg in the review published in the current Science magazine. In 2005 for example, the Pew Trust found that 42% of poll respondents think people and animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a view that is tough to reconcile with evidence from fossils. Many people believe in ghosts, fairies and astrology. “This resistance to science has important social implications because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning,” the psychologists say.

In the last three decades, studies of children show that they quickly pick up an intuitive understanding of how the world works, say the researchers. For example, babies know that objects fall and are real and solid (even though physics experiments show they are mostly made of atoms containing empty space.) “These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. However, they also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn,” the review says.

More here.

From Videos with Bibi:

Many more such videos here.

From CNN:

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize Sunday with “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a harrowing portrait of an illegal abortion in communist-era Romania.

The low-budget, naturalistic film about a student who goes through horrors to ensure that her friend can have a secret abortion beat out 21 other movies in competition for the Riviera festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or — including films by well-known directors like Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers and Wong Kar-wai.

Mungiu, who was awarded the prize by actress Jane Fonda, said he did not have the idea for the film a year ago, and did not even have money to shoot it just six months ago. He hoped the win would be “good news for the small filmmakers from small countries.”

More here.

After my piece about the arrival of Whole Foods on the Lower East Side, a friend asked me, “Why is food so important?”  Having thought about the question, I realized that wasn’t quite the right question: that piece wasn’t really about food.  Instead, the arrival of a giant organic supermarket is about the dilution of the pleasures of urban life.  Such retailers represent a descent into a cosseted, unvarying lifestyle of convenience.  They are also a form of false diversity: just as the rows upon rows of gas-station fridges filled with hundreds of varieties of soft drinks, all made by Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Co, are a false diversity.  The potential loss is very real: they offered to buy out a friend’s nearby wine shop to eliminate their competition.  So it’s not food, exactly, but the suburbanization of New York City that was the issue: Whole Foods is just a big symptom of that.  But I want to make a different argument here: that the reason we gravitate towards “corporate parents,” as Jayasree said so nicely in the comments, is that we live in a state of induced hysteria about food. 

I once had the opportunity to have coffee with Andros Epanimondas, who had been the assistant to one of my greatest heroes, Stanley Kubrick.  Reminiscing, he mentioned that, over dinner, he once saw Kubrick hurriedly alternating bites of his main course and bites of a chocolate cake.  He asked why.  Kubrick, busy preparing for his greatest project to date, the unrealized Napolean, simply responded, “Andros, it’s only food!”  It may sound funny, but I think that’s a healthy attitude, especially in today’s heated food culture, where Ed Levine can talk up the pizzeria DiFara’s and suddenly people are waiting in line for an hour (on Avenue J!) for a slice of pizza.  Or where New York Times food critic Frank Bruni has become an Old Testament deity, capricious and capable of unleashing plagues on your Jeffrey Chodorow’s and your Keith McNally’s in retribution for the mortal sin of hubris.  (For the record, I too agree with the opinion of David Chang, the current darling of New York chefs, on Chodorow: he’s the anti-Christ.)  Food has become an at times unhealthy obsession.

The last decade’s avalanche of information about food, where to get it, what’s in it, and how it’s made has been mostly a very good thing: the industrialized food system that wallows in corn syrup, hydrogenated soybean oil, and boneless, skinless chicken breasts is finally being recognized as unhealthy for both individuals and society, as well as the very soil.  American culture is in the gradual process of rediscovering the pre-industrial food system, and recovering some of the benefits that many other countries have yet to lose: seasonality of fruits and vegetables, the higher quality of meats produced by smaller-scale production, etc.

This gradual rediscovery of pre-industrial food production shows especially in a current trends that I want to discuss.  This is the anxiety about ever “safer” foods – a trend that is obviously mostly positive in that it means people are thinking about what they eat.  On the other hand, labels are often a shortcut for thinking: the mania for organic food, whether trucked from a farm ten miles away or flown from ten thousand, is an example.  Another is the degree to which the problems of contamination of anti-resistant bacteria associated with giant feedlots and factory farms have led advertisers to provoke and exploit the public’s fear of illness, to the point where people don’t trust things to be safe unless labeled.

This leads to increasingly circular solutions, such as the irradiation of ground beef as a response to the potential dangers of gargantuan meatpacking plant that have consolidated most of the country’s meats.  What’s worse, it discourages people from seeing foodstuffs as natural products and encourages a kind of magical thinking about the world as a harbor of dangerous bacteria that can only be banished by the application of chemicals.  It is anti-holistic and tends towards seeing complex, industrial things like a Big Mac as more real, more understandable, and safer than a raw piece of cow’s flesh.  It takes time and effort to undo the digust that has been incited in us by commercial propaganda, effort that usually only leisured people have the opportunity to make.  That’s why sophistication about food is another way to announce your social position. 

Germ-phobia cleverly incited by Proctor and Gamble lies underneath lots of this: we live in a culture that is pathologically afraid of pathogens.  Why is it that raw-milk, unpasteurized cheese is not permitted in this country, which basically means that great cheese is outlawed?  Fear of germs.  The great irony of this squeamishness is that fast food is the single most dangerous source of anti-resistant strains of bacteria that have evolved in our feedlots.  Even though, most people would pick a spicy chicken sandwich over a raw oyster picked up off the beach, which serves ConAgra very well, thank you.  And it’s only the very lucky among us who are ever in a situation to stroll a beach with wild oysters on it anyway – it happened to me once and I still marvel at it over the chicken cutlet sandwich from my deli.

A word about the spiciness of the chicken: when the quality of a foodstuff is low, the easiest single way to disguise it is to hide it’s flavor.  I think you can correlate the rise of a taste for hot sauces over the last thirty years to the increasingly dismal flavor of chicken breasts.  Not that I dislike spicy food – I love it – but the food at Taco Bell simply uses capsacin to anaesthetize some pretty awful ground beef.  The overloading of ingredients is a similar tendency: when the quality of something simple is really good, it’s usually delicious with a squeeze of lemon and buttered bread.

A show like Alton Brown’s “Good Eats,” as informative as it is, is possibly the apotheosis of magical thinking about food.  Brown is so meticulous about preparation, so sterilized is his every surface, that you forget that most of the food he makes and supposedly improves (cakes, macaroni and cheese, tomato sauce) were developed by humble kitchen staffs and home cooks, and should not be hard to make.  He has a mania for visiting the local big-box retailer to find the perfect culinary appliance.  Only Brown with his intensely overeager, overthought approach can make you feel like cooking is best approached by amateur chemists.  (I wonder what Harold McGee thinks of him.)  Brown makes eating seem like a pretext for a hobbyist to invent pulley systems for lowering turkeys into hot oil.  Food is dangerous, food can easily come out badly, you must be extremely anal to make food safely and well.  But for all his geekery, who would you rather eat a meal cooked by, Brown or the comparatively simple Jacques Pepin?

I feel a little strange, as someone who loves eating as much as I do, saying this, but shouldn’t we be more interested in who we’re eating with than what we’re eating?  Isn’t it a measure of how abstracted our eating habits have become that we pay such hysterical attention to them?  Is it a compensatory overreaction to the lack of a grounded, seasonal national cuisine of the kind many other nations have?  Finally, isn’t it sad that we are so rarely in a position to eat food whose history is knowable – you caught this fish, you picked these nettles – that gleaning food has become a kind of luxury hobby only available to the rich?  The most characteristic desire in urban foodie culture now is to raise your own chickens and dine on the eggs.  What does that say about how much we value our individual taste experiences and how little we trust others in our society to provide for us?

My other Dispatches.

Hedda Sterne. Untitled 1985-90.

More on this gifted and prolific American artist here and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Raza Kolb.

From the New York Times:

Bill Clinton talked to The Times’s Andrew C. Revkin after announcing his new plan to fight global climate change at the Large Cities Climate Summit in New York.

Video interview here.

Partial zoom:

More zoom:

More such pictures here.  [via Ruchira Paul.]