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:

More here.

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.

From Edge:

As I look through the structure of the words and the structure of the sentences, it just becomes clear that they don’t have recursion. If recursion is what Chomsky and Mark Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch have called ‘the essential property of language’, the essential building block–in fact they’ve gone so far as to claim that that might be all there really is to human language that makes it different from other kinds of systems–then, the fact that recursion is absent in a language–Piraha–means that this language is fundamentally different from their predictions…

My original concern was to think about Language with a capital ‘L’. Human Language, what it’s like in the brain, what the brain has to be like to sustain the capacity for Language. The most influential ideas for me in my early research were the ideas of Noam Chomsky, principally the proposal that there is an innate capacity for grammar in our genes, and that the acquisition of any given language is simply learning what the different parameter-settings are. What is a parameter?

More here.

From The New Republic:

Browsing the websites of different colleges, a prospective biology student finds an unusual statement on the page of the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University.

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of “intelligent design.” While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.

To my knowledge, such a statement is unique. Biology departments do not customarily assert publicly that they support a theory known for more than a century to be true. This is equivalent to a chemistry faculty announcing that “we are unequivocal in our support of atoms.” Yet this disclaimer is perfectly understandable. For in this department resides Michael Behe — that rara avis, a genuine biologist who is also an advocate of “intelligent design.” And Lehigh University does not wish to lose prospective students who bridle at the thought of studying miracles in their science courses.

More here. (For Asad Raza who made me read Darwin’s Black Box)

From The New York Times:

After all the twisted racial history of the United States Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas was confirmed by the Senate with the smallest margin of victory in more than 100 years, with little professional scrutiny and with a level of manipulative political rancor that diminished everyone directly involved. The effect on Thomas, we learn from this impeccably researched and probing biography, was to reinforce the chronic contradictions with which he has long lived.

Thus, although he seriously believes that his extremely conservative legal opinions are in the best interests of African-Americans, and yearns to be respected by them, he is arguably one of the most viscerally despised people in black America. It is incontestable that he has benefited from affirmative action at critical moments in his life, yet he denounces the policy and has persuaded himself that it played little part in his success. He berates disadvantaged people who view themselves as victims of racism and preaches an austere individualism, yet harbors self-pitying feelings of resentment and anger at his own experiences of racism. His ardent defense of states’ rights would have required him to uphold Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, not to mention segregated education, yet he lives with a white wife in Virginia. He is said to dislike light-skinned blacks, yet he is the legal guardian of a biracial child, the son of one of his numerous poor relatives. He frequently preaches the virtues of honesty and truthfulness, yet there is now little doubt that he lied repeatedly during his confirmation hearings — not only about his pornophilia and bawdy humor but, more important, about his legal views and familiarity with cases like Roe v. Wade.

More here.

Daniel Soar in the London Review of Books:

During the row over weaponry that thundered on during the G8 summit at Heiligendamm – drowning out the distant shouts of protesters and the platitudinous murmuring of soon-to-be-ex-world leaders about the need (again) to tackle climate change – Russia’s president took a leaf out of his own book. The book is called Judo: History, Theory, Practice, and Vladimir Putin wrote it with a couple of buddies during the euphoric period that followed his re-election in 2004 with 71 per cent of the vote. It has since been published in English by North Atlantic Books – no relation to the treaty organisation – and is frustratingly hard to get hold of. This may be deliberate. Not only does it lay bare the deep strategic thinking behind Putin’s remarkable art of martial diplomacy – teaching a lesson from which his sparring partners Bush and Blair could learn a thing or two – but it is also a brilliant judo manual.

More here.

Gopal Sharma at MSNBC:

Two climbers who aimed to recreate British mountaineer George Mallory’s pioneering attempt to climb Everest using only 1920s gear ended up wearing modern clothes due to the cold, a spokeswoman said on Thursday.

American climber Conrad Anker, who in 1999 discovered Mallory’s frozen body about 2,030 feet below the summit, wanted to see if it was possible, as some believe, for Mallory to have reached Mount Everest’s summit in 1924.

Anker, 44, along with his 27-year-old British climbing mate Leo Houlding, set off to retrace Mallory’s route up the Chinese face this week.

More here.

Lyra Pappin in PopMatters:

Forro in the Dark is a band that brings not just the heat of Brazil to crowded, pulsing nightclubs—it brings the heart. A group of five Brazilians and one American put their rhythmic spin on forró, a style of music and dance from the northeast of Brazil that is full of passion, joy, heartache, and love. Forro in the Dark have been sneaking up the radar, as their latest album, Bonfires of São Jo&atildeo, has been making waves from coast to coast. Featuring such impressive guest vocalists as David Byrne, Bebel Gilberto, and Miho Hatori, FIT Dark have become an underground sensation with people in the know. The hippest (but least pretentious) Manhattanites know that Nublu is where it’s at, and every Wednesday, FIT Dark can be heard making people sweat, sway, and groove until the sun rises.

Mauro Refosco leads the band, a percussionist with an impressive resume. After growing up in a small town outside São Paolo, Mauro turned his attention to music after he let the dream of being a professional soccer play die (although his passion for the game didn’t. Walking home one day, he spontaneously joined an in-progress soccer game and almost broke his ankle! Don’t tell David Byrne though). Since graduating with a Master’s Degree in percussion from the Manhattan School of Music in 1994, Mauro has worked with some of the most creative and innovative musicians today, including performing with David Byrne for over ten years; collaborating with Brazilian Girls, Bebel Gilberto, and Stewart Copeland; and still finding time to release a solo record, Seven Waves/Sete Ondas. But maybe the most impressive thing about this accomplished musician is his genuine warmth and appreciation for his success, evident in his utter lack of pretension or arrogance. There’s a realness to Mauro that echoes the forró spirit of openness, charm, and fun.

I caught up with Refosco to discuss the rise of his band’s success, how he keeps it all together, and the mystery behind the photo shoot-turned-jam session/cookout at a place known only as “The Boat”.

More here.  More on Forro in the Dark from the Boston Herald here.  And don’t miss their show in New York City at the Highline Ballroom on June 22nd. Other concert dates and info about their current tour here. And check out this video (which doesn’t, unfortunately, give a good sense of the real energy of Forro in the Dark’s live performances):

The most eminent evolutionary scientists have surprising views on how religion relates to evolution.

Gregory W. Graffin and William B. Provone in American Scientist:

During the 20th century, three polls questioned outstanding scientists about their attitudes toward science and religion. James H. Leuba, a sociologist at Bryn Mawr College, conducted the first in 1914. He polled 400 scientists starred as “greater” in the 1910 American Men of Science on the existence of a “personal God” and immortality, or life after death. Leuba defined a personal God as a “God to whom one may pray in the expectation of receiving an answer.” He found that 32 percent of these scientists believed in a personal God, and 37 percent believed in immortality. Leuba repeated basically the same questionnaire in 1933. Belief in a personal God among greater scientists had dropped to 13 percent and belief in immortality to 15 percent. In both polls, beliefs in God and immortality were less common among biologists than among physical scientists. Belief in immortality had dropped to 2 percent among greater psychologists in the 1933 poll. Leuba predicted in 1916 that belief in a personal God and in immortality would continue to drop in greater scientists, a forecast clearly borne out by his second poll in 1933, and he further predicted that the figures would fall even more in the future.

More here.

Robert Sullivan in the New York Times Book Review:

If HBO is looking to develop a series based on environmental politics, then “Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound” is a natural for the option, with the Kennedys sitting in for the Sopranos, Nantucket Sound for the Meadowlands and phrases like “environmental impact statement” replacing “swimming with the fishes.” Cameos will include Elizabeth Taylor as the former wife of the anti-wind-farm Senator John Warner; Warner’s former mother-in-law Bunny Mellon, the nonagenarian Listerine heiress who decorated the Kennedy White House (behind the scenes) and helped establish the Oyster Harbors Club; and Walter Cronkite, who, as the co-authors Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb have it, starts out on the side of darkness only to turn toward the light, or in this case, the wind. The setting is Horseshoe Shoal, about five miles off the coast of Cape Cod, where, in 2001, an energy developer named Jim Gordon proposed what he still hopes will be America’s first offshore wind farm, an array of 130 turbines, 440 feet tall, that would create 468 megawatts of electrical energy, the only dangerous fumes being those emanating from the mad-as-hell multimillion-dollar homeowners on the Cape, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

More here.

Rorty’s blasé liberalism has had a greater influence than any other aspect of his thought, and this influence has been, on the whole, good for liberal thinking. Just over a half-century ago, Lionel Trilling could convincingly argue that American liberalism’s distinctive defect was its self-satisfaction–its “sense of general rightness.” Strengthening liberalism therefore required, somewhat paradoxically, that its assumptions be placed “under some degree of [critical] pressure.” To the extent that Rorty’s bracingly critical approach to political reflection has contributed to making liberalism more philosophically and morally humble than it once was, his writings deserve to be recognized for making a welcome contribution to intellectual debate in the United States.

Still, liberals have ample reason to resist Rorty’s lead in making the abandonment of truth a precondition of liberal politics. One of liberalism’s greatest strengths, after all, is its flexibility–its compatibility with many (though not all) cultures. This flexibility flows from liberalism’s minimalism. It is a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of life. A liberal society will permit and even encourage the proliferation of competing comprehensive views of what constitutes a good human life. Some of these views will be consistently pragmatic; like Rorty’s, they will deny the possibility of appeals to extra-human truths. But many other views will be based on more traditional (foundationalist) assumptions–assumptions about God, about scientific truth, about the ability of reason to answer ultimate human question.

more from TNR here.

In fact, despite what the bloggers themselves believe, the future of literary culture does not lie with blogs — or at least, it shouldn’t. The blog form, that miscellany of observations, opinions, and links, is not well-suited to writing about literature, and it is no coincidence that there is no literary blogger with the audience and influence of the top political bloggers. For one thing, literature is not news the way politics is news — it doesn’t offer multiple events every day for the blogger to comment on. For another, bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve. The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.

Still, it is important to distinguish between the blog as a genre and the Internet as a medium. It is not just possible but likely that, one day, serious criticism will find its primary home on the Web. The advantages — ease of access, low cost, potential audience — are too great to ignore, even if our habits and technology still make it hard to read long essays on the computer screen. Already there are some web publications — like Contemporary Poetry Review (cprw.com), to which I occasionally contribute — that match anything in print for seriousness of purpose. But there’s no chance that literary culture will thrive on the Internet until we recognize that the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end.

more from The NY Sun here.

Purcell’s ways of making sense—and eventually pictures—of her collections vary almost as much as the things themselves, systems of classification resembling those in Borges’s imagined Chinese encyclopedia. Some of her items take on meaning by juxtaposition. A mummified cat and a pitted one of concrete go together with pitted volcanic stones, because such stones falling from the sky were once called “lynx stones,” and their sulfuric odor was like cat piss. Or do the stones and the concrete cat go together with the piece of wormholed bread from France as “Things that have holes”?

An overarching category (if Purcell’s extreme nominalism can permit such a thing) is the category of the sublimely diminished, things that, as she says, are bereft of their original potential yet still familiar. “I have chipped these things from the matrix of the almighty thingness of our all-American world, and, as I did not stop to mourn their demise, why not revel now in their inevitable disintegration?”

more from Boston Review here.

From MSNBC:

Scientists  investigating a mysterious ailment that killed many of the nation’s honeybees are concentrating on pesticides and a new pathogen as possible culprits, and some beekeepers are already trying to keep their colonies away from pesticide-exposed fields. After months of study, researchers are finding it difficult to tie the die-off to any single factor, said Maryann Frazier, a senior extension associate in Penn State University’s entomology department. “Two things right now … that are really keeping us focused are the pathogen and the role of pesticides,” Frazier said.

Hackenberg, 58, trucks his bees around the country for pollination — from oranges in Florida to blueberries in Maine. He was the first beekeeper to report the disorder to Penn State researchers last fall, having lost nearly 75 percent of his 3,200 colonies. He said he is convinced pesticides, and in particular a kind of pesticide called neonicotinoids, were harming his bees.

More here.

From Science:

Giving feels good.
The brain’s reward center lights up on an MRI image when subjects give money to charity. You don’t need to donate to charity to feel all warm inside. Researchers have found that even when money is taken from some people involuntarily, they feel good about the transaction, as long as the funds go to a good cause. The findings may force economists to rethink just what guides our response to taxes and other financial decisions.

The behavior under the microscope is altruism, which refers to concern for the well-being of others. Sometimes this manifests as a “warm glow” associated with the act of giving. In that case, economists speculate, the act is not entirely selfless because the giver makes the donation in order to feel good. But economists have also proposed that not all warm glows are self-interested. Some people may have positive emotions wash over them just from witnessing good deeds. This is called “pure altruism,” and it may be motivating society’s biggest givers.

More here.

Mikita Brottman in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

As an undergraduate, I liked to annoy the dons at St. Hilda’s College by turning up at my tutorials in a leather biker jacket, a miniskirt, ripped fishnet stockings, and Doc Marten boots. My hair (which has never recovered) was crimped and sprayed into black and pink spikes. “Épater le bourgeois” was the idea, I suppose. I never identified myself as a goth, nor do my own students today who dress in a similar way, but they’d probably accept the term as a fair description of their style and sensibility, as, in retrospect, would I.

Now, of course, I realize the dons at St. Hilda’s had seen it all before. Goth style has been around since the 1970sif not in full bloom, then in hints and gestures, from dyed black hair and pale makeup to Doc Martens, crushed velvet, black nail polish, and fingerless gloves. When I was at college, we added Crazy Color hair streaks and motorbike leathers; my own students add body piercing and tattoos. Goth obviously emerged from punk, but punk didn’t last. The same is true of most subcultures: Hippies are old hat; skinheads have come and gone; grunge is yesterday’s news. Why does goth alone remain undead?

That question is one of many considered in two new books on the subject: Contemporary Gothic, by Catherine Spooner (Reaktion Books), and Goth: Undead Subculture, edited by Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby (Duke University Press). Both books situate the goth movement as a post-punk phenomenon, emerging from the socioeconomic decline of late 1970s Britain.

More here.

Conrad McCallum in The Toronto Star:

Since hunter-gatherer times, men have relied not on DNA swabs but on a little-understood calculus of physical resemblance to decide whether to invest in little Emma or Ethan. In the infant’s upper face and eyes, the skeptical pater familias looks for clues.

Comedian Chris Rock probably went through a similar mental process after a Georgia woman claimed he fathered of a child she had 13 years ago. Ditto Larry Birkhead and Howard K. Stern when they first saw Anna Nicole Smith’s baby daughter, Dannielynn, born last September. Birkhead, after DNA testing, was determined the biological dad and won custody of his little look-alike following Smith’s death last February.

The latest study, done early this year by Brock University psychology professor Anthony Volk, show cues of genetic relatedness are more important to men than women. He showed photos of infants’ faces to male and female subjects, and asked them to make hypothetical adoption choices. In the journal Evolutionary Psychology, Volk reported that men reacted more positively to children with facial traits resembling them, while women’s decisions were influenced more by healthy looks.

More here.

In the files of the Atlas Group, an “imaginary foundation” co-created and administered by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad “whose purpose is to collect, produce, and archive documents of the Lebanese civil wars,” there are nearly one hundred black-and-white photographs chronicling the wreckage of a fraction of the 3,641 car bombs set off in Lebanon between 1975 and 1991. “The only part that remains intact after a car bomb explodes is the engine,” Raad writes in the introduction to My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair (2005). “Landing on balconies, roofs or adjacent streets, the engine is projected tens and sometimes hundreds of meters away from the original site of the bomb.” The photographs depict not the grisly crime scenes, splayed bodies, and bloodied streets but rather the helpless aftermaths of these punctual murders; men stand around the hulks of destroyed vehicles, some of them still aflame. The inert shells of twisted metal, harmless, only hint at the carnage the photographers have failed to capture.

more from Bookforum here.

It is still not even a week since Rorty’s death last Friday. Here’s a brilliant short piece by him, from Eurozine:

I shall be developing this theme of the irrelevance of philosophy to democracy in my remarks. Most of what I shall say will be about the situation in my own country, but I think that most of it applies equally well to the European democracies. In those countries, as in the US, the word “democracy” has gradually come to have two distinct meanings. In its narrower, minimalist meaning it refers to a system of government in which power is in the hands of freely elected officials. I shall call democracy in this sense “constitutionalism”. In its wider sense, it refers to a social ideal, that of equality of opportunity. In this second sense, a democracy is a society in which all children have the same chances in life, and in which nobody suffers from being born poor, or being the descendant of slaves, or being female, or being homosexual. I shall call democracy in this sense “egalitarianism”.

More here.  [Thanks to Helmut at Phronesisiacal.)