Pixar’s post-apocalyptic love story Wall-E finished No. 2 at the box office over the Fourth of July weekend after hauling in $65 million the weekend before. The film depicts a future Earth abandoned by humans, blanketed in garbage, and nearly devoid of life. At the outset, Wall-E, a robot, has but one companion: a friendly cockroach. How did we come to believe that cockroaches will outlive everything else on Earth?

The cockroach survival myth seems to have originated with the development of the atom bomb. In The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore, journalist Richard Schweid notes that roaches were reported to have survived the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading some to believe that they would inherit the Earth after a nuclear war. This idea spread during the 1960s, in part due to its dissemination by anti-nuclear activists. For example, a famous advertisement sponsored by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and referenced in a 1968 New York Times article read, in part, “A nuclear war, if it comes, will not be won by the Americans … the Russians … the Chinese. The winner of World War III will be the cockroach.”

more from Slate here.

The Boston Review has a special issue on incarceration and what happens afterwards, with pieces by Bruce Western, Mary F. Katzenstein and Mary L. Shanley, and Robert Perkinson.  Western:

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, “With the world’s largest prison population,” he said, “our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity.” Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison’s significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb’s hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control.

First, Ewen Callaway in New Scientist:

To determine whether these differences carry over to unspoken communication, Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues asked 40 native speakers of Chinese, Turkish, English and Spanish to mime scenarios shown on a computer screen using only their hands and body.

These included a boy drinking a bottle of soda and a ship’s captain swinging a pail of water.

Regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, most of the volunteers communicated with a subject-object-verb construction.

“We actually thought we were going to get gestures that just matched your speech,” Goldin-Meadow says.

In a separate experiment, she asked volunteers to reconstruct a scenario using transparencies depicting different elements. Again, people of all cultures tended to arrange the transparencies in subject-object-verb order.

Next, David Beaver’s reaction over at Language Log:

We have a hypothesis, that SOV [subject object verb] is an innate linguistic trait, and we have a suggestion from Goldin-Meadow about how to test it: look at non-linguistic representations, and if the same order is found in non-linguistic representations, then there’s no reason to think that SOV is a specifically linguistic trait.

Fast-forward to the present. Goldin-Meadow has now finished doing the work. And she’s found that the same order is indeed used in non-linguistic representations. Ergo we’ve no evidence at all that the SOV preference is “an innate linguistic trait.” No evidence of syntax etched into the brain. If only the new New Scientist reporter had started his working day by reading what the old New Scientist reporter had written.

The discussion in the Goldin-Meadow PNAS article is completely in tune with her comments in the earlier New Scientist article (and, incidentally, with my own immediate reactions, as reported earlier), and out of tune with the way she is reported in the new New Scientist article. The PNAS article suggests that a basic order of Actor-Patient-Action (thus ArPA order, where “Patient” is one way linguists describe things that are acted upon) is cognitively natural, independently of language. That is, to the extent that anything is “etched into our brains” it’s not sentence syntax, but a way of thinking about events.

Benzene over at Benzene 4 (via Andrew Gelman):

Months ago, I read a serious analysis of the dynamics and economics of the news business. (Alas, I don’t remember where.) Among the observations was that a TV journalist’s career success is strongly correlated to how well-known he is to the audience, which in turn is strongly correlated to how much face time he gets. When you watch an interview on TV, if most of what you see are is person being interviewed, you won’t remember the journalist so much. If more of your time is devoted to watching and hearing the interviewer talk, he’ll be more recognizable next time. The latter probably does not make for a better interview, but it does make for a better chance of the journalist getting more gigs.

Quite likely, some ambitious journalists are well aware of this and they make a concerted effort to maximize their face time in furtherance of their careers. But even if they don’t do it on purpose, the result is the same. If some journalists tend to hog the screen just by natural inclination, those hogs are going to become better-known; that will get them more gigs, which will make them even more well-known, driving out the meeker journalists who prefer to let the interviewee do most of the talking.

This is why we have a news media full of obnoxious TV journalists who hound their guests with stupid and unanswerable “gotcha” questions. This is why, on the rare occasion that a guest actually tries to explain something with more than one sentence, the interviewer loudly interrupts, “Stop dodging the question, Senator. Give me an answer, yes or no!” This interruption is essential to the interviewer’s viability as a journalist. Without it, the camera might stay off him for more than ten precious seconds.

With that in mind, I want to make a deal with the journalists: Let’s agree that from now on the TV cameras will always be pointed at the guy who isn’t talking. I realize that’s stupid. Obviously, I’d rather see the facial expression of the person who is saying something. But if that’s the price we have to pay to get journalists to shut the hell up and let the guest talk, it would be worth it.

Bob Moser in The Nation:

[I]n the March presidential primaries, a startling show of Democratic enthusiasm was the big story buried under the Clinton/Obama headlines: just 1.3 million Texans voted Republican, while nearly 2.9 million voted Democratic–more than voted here in either of the last two general elections for Gore or Kerry. Political scientists are projecting that Bush Country will morph, by 2020, into the nation’s second-largest Democratic state. “Texas,” Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean enthused during the DNC’s rules committee showdown in May, “is ready to turn blue.”

Yes, Texas.

“Until three years ago, the Texas Democratic Party was just brain-dead and prostrate,” says Southern Methodist University professor Cal Jillson, author of Texas Politics: Governing the Lone Star State. “They were beaten down. During the Bush years, people wouldn’t even admit to being Democrats in Texas. Now they’re up on their hind legs, feeling confident. It’s the Republicans who are sullen and downcast.”

What in the name of Sam Houston is going on down here?

Olivia Judson over at NYT blog, The Wild Side:

It always happens the same way. A glance around the room to make sure no one else is listening. A clearing of the throat. A lowering of the voice to a conspiratorial tone. Then, the confession.

“I’ve never read ‘On the Origin of Species.’  I tried, but I thought it was boring.”

Thus, a number of eminent scientists — biologists all — have spoken.  Or rather, whispered.

As the first major statement on evolution and how it works, Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” not only transformed the way we humans see ourselves. It marks the beginning of modern biology. But reading it is evidently not a prerequisite for a successful career in biology — not even for those studying evolution.

Which is not surprising. The book was written almost 150 years ago, and the subject has (needless to say) evolved since then. Moreover, the central enduring idea in the “Origin” — evolution by natural selection — can be learned from any number of textbooks.

Nonetheless, those confessions made me wonder. Does the “Origin” have anything fresh to say to a modern reader? Or is it simply of historical interest?

From The Atlantic Monthly:

The characters of Meg Wolitzer’s latest novel are so insightful and articulate that it’s a pleasure to listen to them think.

Wolitzer’s engaging novel focuses on women who are breath-takingly educated and fully prepared to fill the most-rigorous roles in the workplace, but who nevertheless spend a good portion of what might have been peak career-building time fully engrossed in child-rearing and homemaking. They have the resources — both external and internal — to be well-satisfied by such a course. At the same time, though, these women are the most inclined to doubt and wonder: having had the opportunity to make any choice at all, did they make the right one? And once they no longer have “the excuse of having a young child at home to use as a human shield against all questions about what [they] ‘did,'” what then? With a light but needle-sharp touch and in a tone at once thoughtful and witty, Wolitzer explores this theme from nearly every possible angle. The cast of this richly peopled story features a group of likable friends in contemporary Manhattan with a wide range of talents and backgrounds, but also reaches back to include their mothers and out to incorporate a friend who has moved to the suburbs. Throughout, Wolitzer draws both fine and significant distinctions as she identifies types that her readers will recognize: the artist who didn’t have the necessary single-minded drive; the promising student who lost her way once she finished her classes; the English major who pragmatically chose the “enclosed pasture” of law school over the “open field&” of literature. Her characters never collapse into stereotype. Among working mothers, for instance, she distinguishes between those in whom the strain was obvious — “they had folders clutched in one hand and a child’s science project involving a potato and a battery in the other” — and the occasional, depressingly enviable one who managed to be feminine and maternal while possessing “power in the hard-shelled, armed male world.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

The would-be president’s taste in fiction runs to full-bodied American classics like Moby Dick and heavyweight contemporary novelists such as Philip Roth, Toni Morrison and EL Doctorow (apparently his second favourite author after Shakespeare). Where George W Bush once peevishly retorted that his favourite philosopher was “Jesus Christ”, Obama devours Friedrich (“God is dead”) Nietzsche and Reinhold Niebuhr, the author of the provocative Moral Man and Immoral Society. For good measure, his enthusiastic endorsement of Malcolm X’s autobiography risks stoking the embers of the Jeremiah Wright scandal all over again.

According to Salon, “If Obama is elected he’ll be one of the most literary presidents in recent memory.” Not that there is much competition. Evidence suggests that the voters prefer their presidents to be men of action; street-smart as opposed to cerebral. Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson were too busy wheeling and dealing to relax with a hardback, while the current incumbent once joked that he wanted to see more “books with bigger print” in the White House. Even JFK, who won a Pulitzer for his Profiles in Courage, reportedly didn’t range far beyond the works of Ian Fleming.

Yet now even John McCain seems to be getting in on the act. The Republican nominee recently named Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls as his favourite novel and claimed its hero (a principled American, prepared to give his life in the fight against fascism) is his role model for life. “There is nobody I’d rather be than Robert Jordan,” he said.

More here.

///
Balance
Aviva Englander Cristy

Last week the origin was piled
with dust in the corner
when I swept. I wonder now
how we manage to hold
these widening circles so tight.

In the window the birds
are held by tiny feet
and breathless balance
on a thin metal thread.

We learn to stand
by balancing the origin.

Which stillness will hold
itself in your view
one moment longer?

In one still life the bones
in the foot of a bird
curve perfectly around
the electrical wire, leaving
no room for error or fall.

//

From The Hindu:

Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, one of the leading Islamic organisations, along with several other Muslim outfits owing allegiance to different sects and ideologies, issued a “fatwa” against terrorism at the Anti-Terrorism Global Peace Conference at Ramlila Grounds here on Saturday.

The “fatwa,” sought by Member of Parliament and Jamiat leader Mahmood Asad Madani and issued on the letterhead of Darul Uloom Deoband, read: “Islam is a religion of peace and security. In its eyes, on any part over the surface of the earth spreading mischief, rioting, breach of peace, bloodshed, killing of innocent persons and plundering are the most inhuman crimes.”

Welcoming the fatwa, Mr. Madani said: “Terrorism has emerged as the most serious challenge faced by our nation in recent times. It threatens to strike at the very root of secular structure of our society besides causing irreparable loss in terms of human lives and property. The conference today has provided the opportunity for the entire Islamic community to come on a single platform and raise its voice against terrorism.”

The conference, organised as part of a series of such public meetings across the country, adopted a seven-point declaration condemning the propaganda that “regards terrorism as synonymous with jehad.”

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

[Thanks to Jeff Burns.]

The British painter, critic, and novelist Wyndham Lewis was a monster of intolerance – yet Walter Sickert once called him “the greatest portraitist of this, or any other time”. What is more, an exhibition of Lewis’s portraits at the National Portrait Gallery reveals that Sickert was very nearly right.

I dislike everything about Lewis, and, if you want to know why, all you have to do is glance at his famous self-portrait Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro (1920-21). In it the artist looks out at us with an expression somewhere between a sneer and a snarl.

Curling his upper lip to bare his teeth, he swivels his hard and suspicious eyes round to fix us with an angry glare. The face is made up of flat planes and sharp angles. The points of the chin, cheek and nose look like knives.

more from The Telegraph here.

Steve Fuller in Project Syndicate:

We need the humanities only if we are committed to the idea of humanity. If the humanities have become obsolete, then it may be that humanity is losing its salience.

I do not mean that we are becoming “less human” in the sense of “inhumane.” If anything, we live in a time when traditionally human-centered concerns like “rights” have been extended to animals, if not nature as a whole. Rather, the problem is whether there is anything distinctive about being human that makes special demands of higher education. I believe that the answer continues to be yes.

Today, it sounds old-fashioned to describe the university’s purpose as being to “cultivate” people, as if it were a glorified finishing school. However, once we set aside its elitist history, there remains a strong element of truth to this idea, especially when applied to the humanities. Although we now think of academic disciplines, including the humanities, as being “research-led,” this understates the university’s historic role in converting the primate Homo sapiens into a creature whose interests, aspirations, and achievements extend beyond successful sexual reproduction.

What was originally called the “liberal arts” provided the skills necessary for this transformation.

Over at NYPL Live:

Colum McCann meets with Michael Ondaatje at a very public fireplace.

Come hear these two best-selling authors—both of whom are often spoken of as “international mongrels” in the sense that their backgrounds and their range of literary influences are cast extraordinarily wide. “We get our voice from the voices of others,” says McCann, “and Ondaatje has long been a hero of mine.” This is a fireside chat that promises to be offbeat, informal, unrehearsed and thrillingly passionate.

The video can be seen here.

Paul Ehrlich in Seed:

We do not understand how cultures evolve nearly so well. The majority of human evolution does not involve changes in our DNA, but rather alterations in the gigantic library of nongenetic information, the culture, that our species possesses. This library is orders of magnitude larger than that of our genetic information, and the elements on its diverse shelves usually have meaning only in connection with other elements. Indeed, there has been a long, bitter debate about whether it is sensible even to use the term evolution to describe changes in culture. After all, culture is composed of overlapping phenomena from languages, religions, institutions, and socially transmitted power relationships to the information embodied in artifacts ranging from potsherds to jumbo jets. The study of cultural change encompasses not only the disciplines of biology and the social sciences, but areas of the humanities as well.

Despite the great difficulties of building a comprehensive theory of cultural change deserving of the label of “evolution,” progress in that direction has begun. We are finally starting to understand the patterns of culture change and the role of natural selection in shaping them. And since everything from weapons of mass destruction to global heating are the results of changes in human culture over time, acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself.

In recent years, scientists have developed a novel theory of what falters in the depressed brain. Instead of seeing the disease as the result of a chemical imbalance, these researchers argue that the brain’s cells are shrinking and dying. This theory has gained momentum in the past few months, with the publication of several high profile scientific papers. The effectiveness of Prozac, these scientists say, has little to do with the amount of serotonin in the brain. Rather, the drug works because it helps heal our neurons, allowing them to grow and thrive again.

In this sense, Prozac is simply a bottled version of other activities that have a similar effect, such as physical exercise. They aren’t happy pills, but healing pills.

These discoveries are causing scientists to fundamentally reimagine depression. While the mental illness is often defined in terms of its emotional symptoms – this led a generation of researchers to search for the chemicals, like serotonin, that might trigger such distorted moods – researchers are now focusing on more systematic changes in the depressed brain.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Pity the penguin. Darling of the animal world in the wake of March of the Penguins’ success in 2005, penguin fever quickly begat penguin fatigue. First, the film’s makers went and accepted their Oscar for best documentary carrying penguin stuffed animals. Then Hollywood inundated the market with penguin-centric films including Happy Feet, Surf’s Up, and Farce of the Penguins. The story of adorable birds with strong familial bonds on the desolate Antarctic landscape was universally appealing. But, as with most things adorable, enough finally became enough.

This is probably why Werner Herzog opens his new documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, with a caveat: If the U.S. National Science Foundation — which sent Herzog to Antarctica — had been expecting a penguin film, it would be sorely disappointed.

more from The Smart Set here.

Charles McGrath in the NYT:

In many ways “Dancing” is an almost perfect piece of Internet art: it’s short, pleasingly weird and so minimal in its content that it’s open to a multitude of interpretations. It could be a little commercial for one-world feel-goodism. It could be an allegory of American foreign policy: a bumptious foreigner turning up all over the world and answering just to his own inner music. Or it could be about nothing at all — just a guy dancing.

However you interpret it, you can’t watch “Dancing” for very long without feeling a little happier. The music (by Gary Schyman, a friend of Mr. Harding’s, and set to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, sung in Bengali by Palbasha Siddique, a 17-year-old native of Bangladesh now living in Minneapolis) is both catchy and haunting. The backgrounds are often quite beautiful. And there is something sweetly touching and uplifting about the spectacle of all these different nationalities, people of almost every age and color, dancing along with an uninhibited doofus.

Children, not surprisingly, turn out to be the best at picking up on Mr. Harding’s infectious vibe. There’s frequently a grown-up, on the other hand — especially one in the front row of a crowd — who tends to ham it up and make a fool of himself.

The other remarkable thing about the “Dancing” phenomenon is that it is, to a very considerable extent, a creation of the Internet. It doesn’t just live, so to speak, on the Web; it was the Web that, more or less accidentally, brought it into being.

From Scientific American:

How did space and time come about? How did they form the smooth four-dimensional emptiness that serves as a backdrop for our physical world? What do they look like at the very tiniest distances? Questions such as these lie at the outer boundary of modern science and are driving the search for a theory of quantum gravity—the long-sought unification of Einstein’s general theory of relativity with quantum theory. Relativity theory describes how spacetime on large scales can take on countless different shapes, producing what we perceive as the force of gravity. In contrast, quantum theory describes the laws of physics at atomic and subatomic scales, ignoring gravitational effects altogether. A theory of quantum gravity aims to describe the nature of spacetime on the very smallest scales—the voids in between the smallest known elementary particles—by quantum laws and possibly explain it in terms of some fundamental constituents.

Superstring theory is often described as the leading candidate to fill this role, but it has not yet provided an answer to any of these pressing questions. Instead, following its own inner logic, it has uncovered ever more complex layers of new, exotic ingredients and relations among them, leading to a bewildering variety of possible outcomes. Over the past few years our collaboration has developed a promising alternative to this much traveled superhighway of theoretical physics. It follows a recipe that is almost embarrassingly simple: take a few very basic ingredients, assemble them according to well-known quantum principles (nothing exotic), stir well, let settle—and you have created quantum spacetime. The process is straightforward enough to simulate on a laptop.

To put it differently, if we think of empty spacetime as some immaterial substance, consisting of a very large number of minute, structureless pieces, and if we then let these microscopic building blocks interact with one another according to simple rules dictated by gravity and quantum theory, they will spontaneously arrange themselves into a whole that in many ways looks like the observed universe. It is similar to the way that molecules assemble themselves into crystalline or amorphous solids.

More here.

Masum Chisty. Untitled.

Installation.

More on the artist here and art in Bangladesh here, and here.