In the US, today is Law Day. So the President reminds us to “celebrate the Constitution and the laws that protect our rights and liberties.” For the rest of the world it’s May Day, which actually followed, not preceded, the September Labor Day. But it remains the international day of labor, or labour. The irony is that its origins are thoroughly American. It was chosen as the day to celebrate labor by the anti-socialist US labor leader Samuel Gompers and has come to mark the Haymarket massacre of 1886 in Chicago. It still inspires occassions for pushing workers’ rights, especially in the world’s South. In Daily News and Analysis:

KOLKATA: Thousands of sex workers from different parts of West Bengal on Tuesday took out a May Day torch rally from the Sonagachi red light area, demanding social rights and the status of a regular worker.

Over 3,000 sex workers participated in the rally that started from Sonagachi at midnight and ended at College Square in north Kolkata on Tuesday.

Sonagachi is the largest red light district in West Bengal and one of the biggest in Asia with more than 10,000 sex workers living in the same area.

“We organised the torch rally involving all the sex workers of Sonagachi and many other districts with the hope to bring them under one roof of equality. Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), the apex body of sex workers in Bengal, has been fighting for the rights of sex workers since the inception of the organisation in 1995,” Mahasweta Mukherjee, a spokesperson of DMSC said.

Happy May Day!

What does this imply for B. L. Whorf? In [email protected]:

The language you speak may influence how you perceive colours, according to new research. Russian speakers, who have separate words for light and dark blue, are better at discriminating between the two, suggesting that they do indeed perceive them as different colours.

Russian speakers divide what the English language regard as ‘blue’ into two separate colours, called ‘goluboy’ (light blue) and ‘siniy’ (dark blue). And a test now shows that this seems to help them view light and dark blue as distinct.

Researchers led by Jonathan Winawer of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge presented Russian and English speakers with sets of three blue squares, two of which were identical shades with a third ‘odd one out’. They asked the volunteers to pick out the identical squares.

Russian speakers performed the task more quickly when the two shades straddled their boundary between goluboy and siniy than when all shades fell into one camp. English speakers showed no such distinction.

What’s more, when the researchers interfered with volunteers’ verbal abilities by asking them to recite a string of numbers in their head while performing the task, the Russian effect vanished. This shows that linguistic effects genuinely do influence colour perception.

Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.

“Because we subscribed to this false ideal of rational, logical thought, we diminished the importance of everything else,” said Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT and pioneer of artificial intelligence. “Seeing our emotions as distinct from thinking was really quite disastrous.”

This new scientific appreciation of emotion is profoundly altering the field. The top journals are now filled with research on the connections between emotion and cognition. New academic stars have emerged, such as Antonio Damasio of USC, Joseph LeDoux of NYU, and Joshua Greene, a rising scholar at Harvard. At the same time, the influx of neuroscientists into the field, armed with powerful brain-scanning technology, has underscored the thinking-feeling connection.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

SO WHY OP NOW? Some forty years after the Museum of Modern Art, New York, introduced Op art to the American public with its landmark 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye,” two museums have mounted historical shows looking back: “Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s” at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio (through June 17); and “Op Art” at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (through May 20). Both are ambitious curatorial efforts, distinct in certain relative emphases, and for that very reason providing in tandem an unusually rich perspective on a movement consigned by pretty much everyone to the dustbin of art history. Yet such impressive attentiveness only serves to raise the stakes with respect to the question, Why should we be looking at this midcentury anachronism again? What are we supposed to learn? The cynic no doubt wonders whether all those museum curators, academics, and artists who have been mining the ’60s for good material finally found the well dried up—meaning, Op is all that’s left to “rediscover.”

more from artforum here.

What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring?

Well, let’s go back a bit first. Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely human view of life (we sicken, we die). But comedy was the gods’ view, from on high: our endless and repetitive cycle of suffering, our horror of it, our inability to escape it. The big, drunk, flawed, horny Greek gods watched us for entertainment, like a dirty, funny, violent, repetitive cartoon. And the best of the old Greek comedy tried to give us that relaxed, amused perspective on our flawed selves. We became as gods, laughing at our own follies.

Many of the finest novels—and certainly the novels I love most—are in the Greek comic tradition, rather than the tragic: Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Voltaire, and on through to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and the late Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

Jon Mooallem in the New York Times Magazine:

Peter Acworth is 36 and trim, with a pale, boyish face. He grew up in the English Midlands, the son of a sculptor and a former Jesuit priest, and came to the United States in 1996 to get a Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He had already worked for Baring Brothers in London and was on track to do analytical research on Wall Street. Then, after his first year, he read in a British tabloid about a fireman who sold pornographic pictures on the Internet. “He had made a quarter of a million pounds over a short period doing nothing very clever at all,” Acworth told me not long ago, pointing to the clipping framed in his office in downtown San Francisco. “So I basically just ripped off that idea.”

Acworth has since built what is arguably the country’s most successful fetish porn company, Kink.com — a fast-growing suite of 10 S-and-M and bondage-themed Web sites, each updated weekly with a new half-hour or hour video segment. Kink has 60,000 subscribers; access to each site costs about $30 a month. Acworth founded Kink’s first site, Hogtied, while still at Columbia. He purchased licensed digital photographs for content, many of which were simply old bondage-magazine spreads, torn out and scanned. Almost immediately, Hogtied made several hundred dollars a day — then, with a few ads in place, more than a thousand. In 1998, Acworth dropped out of grad school and moved to San Francisco, which he had always regarded as the world’s “fetish capital,” to run Hogtied full time. His mother worried that the lifestyle of a self-employed Web master might get lonely.

More here.

From The New York Times:

As May dawns and the mothers among us excitedly anticipate the clever e-cards that we soon will be linking to and the overpriced brunches that we will somehow end up paying for, the following job description may ring a familiar note:

Must be exceptionally stable yet ridiculously responsive to the needs of those around you; must be willing to trail after your loved ones, cleaning up their messes and compensating for their deficiencies and selfishness; must work twice as hard as everybody else; must accept blame for a long list of the world’s illnesses; must have a knack for shaping young minds while in no way neglecting the less glamorous tissues below; must have a high tolerance for babble and repetition; and must agree, when asked, to shut up, fade into the background and pretend you don’t exist.

As it happens, the above precis refers not only to the noble profession of motherhood to which we all owe our lives and guilt complexes. It is also a decent character sketch of the chromosome that allows a human or any other mammal to become a mother in the first place: the X chromosome.

More here.

From Science:

You don’t need to be Dr. Doolittle to know what a chimpanzee means when she reaches out with her hand, palm-side up. It’s the begging sign, a gesture that speaks volumes even without any accompanying sound. Indeed, so evocative are the manual gestures of chimpanzees and bonobos that a team of researchers has rekindled an old hypothesis: that human language evolved from gesturing, rather than from vocal calls.

Chimps and bonobos use a variety of calls and gestures in their everyday lives. But many researchers assumed that both forms of communication were little more than reflexes, as when a chimp screams when it sees a snake. Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Yerkes National Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia suspected there was something more to ape gestures. So he and colleague Amy Pollick videotaped the vocal, facial, and manual signals of two captive groups of bonobos and two groups chimpanzees. Of the 375 communicative signals the bonobos produced, nearly 79% were hand gestures, while 14% were facial and/or vocal signals.

The researchers then identified the specific social contexts of the various types of communication.

More here.

Alexander Calder. Circus. 1926-31.

Watch video here. And on YouTube here.

More about the famous Calder Circus, currently on display at the Whitney Museum, New York, here.

I was setting to work on the 6th volume of St Augustine—I had just awoken. It was after three. My mother brought me Mme. de Maupassant’s letter—we left—heat terrible in Rouen—I had the carriage ready very quickly, I got the shaft on while Eugène went for the horses. At the port, across from the Guillaume-Lion gate, a man on horseback in summer pants and black tails passed by and I took him for Alphonse Karr. At the top of the rise we went into a tavern, my mother and I, Au jeune Ermite, where I had a grog with kirsch; Eugène a glass of cider—(We’d been there to see the church, in a hackney-coach with Max, the winter before my Father, Caroline and had a few little glasses.) We said almost nothing the whole trip—the left horse was galloping, I watched its head—

more from Paris Review here.

Henri IV, France’s most popular king (1553-1610), was a model centrist in his day, which means that he often seemed a model of indecision. During the course of his life, he converted between Protestantism and Catholicism no fewer than five times. But, over the years, he learned how to deploy this apparent indecision for maximum political effect, tacking deftly between camps and finally uniting the country behind him.

It is fitting, then, that Henri IV is the great hero of today’s model French centrist–and surprisingly effective political gadfly–François Bayrou (who comes from the king’s native province of Béarn and has written a popular biography of him). Although Bayrou came in third in the initial round of France’s presidential election last Sunday, he seems paradoxically to have gained more stature and prominence in defeat than Nicolas Sarkozy or Ségolène Royal have done in victory. Bayrou has cannily exploited his own apparent indecision–his refusal to endorse either candidate in the second round election on May 6–to become not king himself, but the closest France has had to a kingmaker in a long time.

more from TNR here.

First Chapter from Lee Iacocca’s latest book:

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

More here.  (Thanks to my friend Ilyas Haider in Tehran)

From MSNBC:

Parasites are by definition bad for you. Some, such as malaria, can kill. Others, like microbes known as Wolbachia that are found in more than one-fifth of all insects, often make female hosts less fertile. Now scientists discover parasites can evolve surprisingly rapidly to become helpful instead of harmful. The typically nasty Wolbachia can make females more fertile instead of less, a study reveals. They’re not doing it out of the goodness of their non-existent hearts — they boost host fertility to better spread themselves in nature. For instance, Wolbachia parasitizes a worm that in turn parasitizes humans, and this worm already depends on Wolbachia in order to produce young.

Wolbachia are bacteria that insects get only from their mothers. They can display a bewildering diversity of additional effects, such as turning males to females, causing infected females to reproduce without males and triggering vicious cycles of increasing female promiscuity and male sexual exhaustion. The presence of these parasites also often carries a toll on their victims — for instance, cutting down the number of eggs that females produce.

More here.

Christopher Hart on Christine Garwood’s book, in the Sunday Times:

Up until 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, everyone believed the earth was flat. Since then, everyone has known better. In fact, as Christine Garwood demonstrates in this quirky and highly entertaining slice of intellectual history, both these statements are false. The Ancient Greeks knew very well that they lived on a globe, while the Flat Earth News ceased publication only in 1988.

Not the least attractive thing about Garwood’s study is her criticism of modern scientists whose arrogant assumption that the present always trumps the past only flatters their self-esteem. She dismisses “supposed Christian closed-mindedness” as a post-Enlightenment myth. The Church was at the forefront of intellectual and scientific discovery for centuries. Indeed, it’s really quite stupid and credulous of us now to believe that most medieval people thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the world. They could see as well as you or I that a ship disappears over the horizon after a few miles, or that during a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the earth on the moon is round. Duh. There was “no mutiny of flat-earth sailors on the Santa Maria”.

Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, St Augustine and Bede were all firm “globularists”, in Garwood’s pleasing neologism, while Newton refined things still further by showing that we really lived on an “oblate spheroid” (the earth bulges in the middle, to you and me). As with scientology, belief in alien abduction, or wildly overpriced face creams containing such bogus substances as “micro-oils”, for real stupidity you need a dash of dodgy modern science.

More here.

Katy June-Friesen in Smithsonian Magazine:

In June, Chicago will host its 24th annual blues festival—six stages, free admission—in Grant Park. Today Chicago is known as the “blues capital,” but the story behind this distinction began some 90 years ago. In the early 1900s, Southern blacks began moving to Northern cities in what would become a decades-long massive migration. Chicago was a place of promise, intimately linked to recurrent themes in blues songs—hope for a better life, for opportunity, for a fair shake.

This year’s festival honors piano player Sunnyland Slim, who died in 1995 and would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Giant in stature and voice, Sunnyland was a formidable personality on Chicago’s blues scene, and his journey to the city somewhat parallels the history of the blues. Beginning around 1916, millions of African Americans migrated from the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the rural South to cities like Detroit and Chicago, where burgeoning industry and loss of workers to World War I promised jobs. For many, including musicians, Memphis was an important stop on this journey, and Sunnyland spent more than a decade there before moving to Chicago in the early 1940s.

More here.

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine:

In his 2005 Inaugural Address, President Bush traced out the logic of a new, post-9/11 American foreign policy. “For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny,” he declared, violence “will gather . . . and cross the most defended borders” — i.e., our own. Therefore, he announced, “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Thus was born the Freedom Agenda; and Egypt occupied the bull’s-eye on this new target. Egypt was an authoritarian state that had supplied much of the leadership of Al Qaeda. It is also the largest nation in the Arab world and, historically, the center of the region’s political and cultural life. Progress in Egypt’s sclerotic political system would resonate all over the Islamic world. The nearly $2 billion a year in military and economic aid that the U.S. had been providing since the Camp David accords in 1979 offered real leverage. And Egypt’s early experience of democratic government (from 1922 to 1952), mostly under British occupation, and its lively community of democratic and human rights activists gave political reform a firmer foundation than it had elsewhere in the Arab world.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his always excellent blog, The Loom:

Here’s a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn’t: a new study indicates that plants don’t release lots of methane gas.

You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas–perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere.

The result was big news for several reasons. It was a surprise just in terms of basic biology–scientists have been studying the gases released by plants for a long time, and so it was surprising that they could have missed such a giant belch. Making the matter of pressing interest was methane’s ability to trap heat in the atmosphere. Suddenly plants became a much bigger player in the global warming game…

More here.

Lania Knight in The Missouri Review:

Interviewer: I’ve heard you say that you’re not the funny person in your family. Amy’s funny. Your brother’s funny. When did you figure out that you were funny?

Sedaris: Oh, I’m not really. I can do things with paper sometimes, if you give me some time. But no, I’m observant. I know how to tell a story. You meet some people who don’t know how, and they’ll say, “It was me and Philip and Elizabeth, and we were at dinner. No, wait, wait, ’cause Mark was there. Was Mark there? Or did Mark come later? I think Mark came later, with Tony . . .” And the audience is already gone. Hugh and I argue about storytelling. He’ll say, “Now, that’s not true. You left out half the room. . .” He’s talking about people who didn’t contribute to the story. I would get rid of a lot, so we can move there quicker.

Interviewer: Is writing plays with your sister Amy similar to writing your own essays and stories?

Sedaris: No. When you’re writing a story, it’s completely private. You’re struggling with it on your own. The way my sister and I work on a play is like this: three weeks before opening, we get together with a cast; we have a script, we read the script out loud and then throw the script away. And then say, “Fuck. We’re opening in three weeks.”

More here.

Musicians have been badgering Apple to sell their music without copy protection for years, so why, wonders Wendy M Grossman, is it changing its tune now?

From The Guardian:

It’s a mystery that Apple won’t talk about. Independent artists have been complaining for years that Apple was deaf to their requests to include their music at the iTunes Music Store without applying digital rights management (DRM) software. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in his February 6 essay Thoughts on Music that the company had no choice but to use DRM to protect songs sold via iTunes because the record companies insisted on it. Complain, he said, to Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI, who control 70% of the world’s music. No answer, still, to the artists who wanted their music released DRM-free.

A few weeks ago, EMI blinked and agreed to release its catalogue in near-CD quality (256kbps AAC format), DRM-free, via iTunes for a premium price (99p per track). The DRM-free offerings will be available next month. Just like that.

Was that difficult to implement? Apple declined to discuss the decision, the technical complexity involved, or anything beyond Jobs’s essay.

Scott Cohen, founder of the digital distribution service The Orchard, says the change is “not technically complicated”. What is complicated, he says, is the many different versions required to service digital stores, from iTunes to mobile phone downloads. There are only three basic file formats in use – AAC, MP3 and WMA – but, he says, details like bit rates and the metadata identifiers are different for each store. There are 63 variants for mobile devices alone, and overall there are hundreds. Cohen notes, though, that the really hard work is marketing the music.

The reversal makes it even less understandable why independent artists who want to release their music via iTunes but without DRM have been unable to do so.

More here.

Via Majikthise:

[Thanks to Margit Oberrauch and Asad Raza.]