Dianne Cardwell in the New York Times:

Frank Gehry, the architect known for buildings adorned with undulating banners of titanium, is set to make his first foray into the world of monkey bars and swings with a new playground at Battery Park, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday.

The playground’s design, which will transform an aging, underused expanse of gray-pebbled concrete, is to be unveiled this year, city officials said, and will include an environmentally friendly restroom building with a planted roof and walls.

“Everything Frank Gehry touches is unique, and I’m sure it will be a great park,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference yesterday.

The playground is part of a larger redevelopment of the Battery, which includes a bikeway connecting the East and West sides of Manhattan, gardens and the restoration of Castle Clinton, a fort that later became an opera house and an immigration station. The city has set aside $4 million to build the playground, with the Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit group, planning to raise whatever additional funds are needed.

More here.

3QD friend and former contributor Mark Blyth in an email message:

Last weekend I went to Bobigny — a Paris burb — where friend … Mark Gore puts on concerts. There I saw La Secte Phonetik – a three piece French Rap group that blew me away.

All their music is vocal loops that they build up on stage and then perform over — it’s amazing to watch as well as listen to.

Bienvenue dans la Secte (live au Canal 93)
Uploaded by HippocampeAncien

More videos and info here.

John Allen Paulos looks at I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, in his highly recommended Who’s Counting column, at ABC News:

I just read of a panel discussion held in Colorado, for example, whose subject was the number of levels of reality present if Stephen Colbert, anchor of the faux news “Colbert Report,” were to interview Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of the characters Borat and Ali G.

Colbert is, one senses, a very nice guy, but he is also a comedian who pretends to be a self-centered, overbearing blowhard of a television pundit. Cohen is intelligent and thoughtful, but he is also a comedian pretending to be an ignorant, anti-Semitic homophobe. We sit at home watching the interview and forming little ancillary “I” symbols in our minds for each of these men as well as for their ancillary sub “I” ‘s.

This self-referential tangle, being indefinitely extensible and recursive, leads to strange psychological effects, one being that the characters played by Colbert and Cohen can be more truthful in disguise than they can if they present themselves straight.

That we can understand these various levels and personas, their interaction, and analogies to other situations is testament to how natural are some of the seemingly abstract ideas in “I Am a Strange Loop.” Humor, in particular, calls on our ability to model others’ personalities, understand their points of view, and stand outside ourselves.

More here.

In the NYRB, a call to name and shame Iran for its assault on free inquiry, human rights and civil society, and for the arrest of Haleh Esfandiari.

The arbitrary detention and confinement of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, a prominent Iranian-American scholar and the director of the Middle East program at the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., is the latest distressing episode in an ongoing crackdown by the Islamic Republic against those who, directly or indirectly, strive to bolster the foundations of civil society and promote human rights in Iran. Over the past year and a half, this onslaught has targeted prominent women’s rights activists, leaders of nongovernmental organizations, student and teacher associations, and labor unions.

In recent weeks, scores of women’s rights activists have been harassed, physically attacked, and detained for no greater a crime than demonstrating peacefully and circulating petitions calling for the elimination of discriminatory laws and practices. University students across the country have faced expulsion, arrest, and imprisonment for peacefully protesting the erosion of the administrative and academic independence of their universities.

Via Language Log, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson, & Jeremy R. Gray, “The seductive allure of neuroscience explanation“, in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Seamus McGraw in Radar:

“There’s no doubt about it—the Gangster Disciples are the biggest [gang] in the Army,” says Chicago Police Lieutenant Robert Stasch, who has spent 30 years tracking the group’s rise from a handful of street-corner hoodlums to what he calls “the most sophisticated criminal enterprise in the United States.”

Founded three decades ago by Larry Hoover, the Gangster Disciples have worked to burnish their image, says Stasch. They have courted politicians and sought to enhance their legitimacy. At one point Hoover changed the group’s name to “Growth and Development” and tried to portray himself as the leader of a community organization. According to Stasch, “They even set up a political action committee … that would actually go to various cities and states, and even to the federal level, in an attempt to get gang-friendly legislation enacted.”

Now, with the unintended help of the U.S. Army, the gang is extending its reach worldwide. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article last year, Gangster Disciple graffiti has been spotted all over Iraq. The gang’s initials and main symbol, the six-pointed star, have been tagged on concrete blast barriers, armored vehicles, and even remote firebase guard shacks. In an astonishing study of just three Army bases over the past four years, a Department of Defense detective identified more than 300 active gang members.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Ed Folsom and Jerome Loving in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

The publication of significant previously unpublished work by one of America’s best-known authors is always a major literary event, but when it is an unpublished piece by Mark Twain about another of America’s legendary writers, Walt Whitman, it is cause for a double celebration. This is especially the case with these two writers whose lives overlapped (Samuel Clemens was born in 1835, nineteen years after Whitman’s birth, and he died in 1910, eighteen years after Whitman), but had so little to say about each other. This seems odd to us since we now think of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Mark Twain’s many novels as sharing in the very creation of an idiomatic, realistic, gritty new national literature, and so we imagine them as literary compatriots. But it was only during his last years that Whitman even occasionally referred to the novelist, after Samuel Clemens donated money to several fund-raising projects to help out the aged and infirm poet.

Asked in 1889 about Mark Twain as a writer, Whitman said, “I think he mainly misses fire: I think his life misses fire: he might have been something: he comes near to being something: but he never arrives.” While he said that he admired certain aspects of Twain’s work, Whitman probably discounted him as a mere humorist, one of those “writers of the left hand,” who hid not only behind their pseudonyms but also the literary frame that separated them from their vernacular storytellers.

Over at Crooked Timber Kieran Healy takes notice of some poll results:

I read the other day that a recent Gallup poll found that about 83 percent of Americans felt interracial dating was OK, and I believe this was a new high-water mark for this view. There was a degree of understandable concern about the remaining 17 percent, but (some people said) it’s only been forty years since Loving vs Virginia. And, as it turns out, it could be worse. The idea that the Earth orbits the Sun has had rather longer to catch on…

Sean Carroll provides the numbers:

more than 83% of Americans now think that interracial dating is acceptable. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Hey, that means that there’s still 17% of Americans that think interracial dating is not okay.” Well, yes. But everything is relative. Apparently the folks at the General Social Survey, just for kicks, decided to ask Americans to come clean about their feelings toward heliocentrism. As it turns out, about 18% of Americans are in the “Sun moves around the Earth” camp. A full 8% prudently declined to have an opinion, leaving only 74% to go along with Copernicus.

Of course the answer to whether the universe is heliocentric is not so straightforward. Sean again:

[In the wake of General Relativity] the concept of a global reference frame and the more restrictive concept of an inertial frame simply do not exist. You cannot take your locally-defined axes and stretch them uniquely throughout space, there’s just no way to do it. (In particular, if you tried, you would find that the coordinates defined by traveling along two different paths gave you two different values for the same point in space.) Instead, all we have are coordinate systems of various types. Even in Newtonian absolute space (or for that matter in special relativity, which in this matter is just the same as Newtonian mechanics) we always have the freedom to choose elaborate coordinate systems, but in GR that’s all we have. And if we can choose all sorts of different coordinates, there is nothing to stop us from choosing one with the Earth at the center and the Sun moving around in circles (or ellipses) around it.

I would note that views on interracial dating probably affect the lives of more people, the way we treat others, family dynamics and the like far more than disagreements about whether the solar system is heliocentric or geocentric.

From BBC News:

The landmark Wellcome Trust study analysed DNA from the blood of 17,000 people to find genetic differences. They found new genetic variants for depression, Crohn’s disease, coronary heart disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 and 2 diabetes. The remarkable findings, published in Nature, have been hailed as a new chapter in medical science. It is hoped they will pave the way for research into new treatments and genetic tests.

One of the most exciting finds was a previously unknown gene common to type 1 diabetes and Crohn’s disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disorder, suggesting that they share similar biological pathways. The team also unexpectedly found a process known as autophagy – a process of clearing bacteria from within cells – is important in the development of Crohn’s disease.

More here.

From Nature:

Research reported this week by three different groups shows that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice. In theory, embryonic stem cells can propagate themselves indefinitely and are able to become any type of cell in the body. But so far, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells involves destroying an embryo, and to get a genetic match for a patient would mean, in effect, cloning that person — all of which raise difficult ethical questions. As well as having potential ethical difficulties, the ‘cloning’ procedure is technically difficult. It involves obtaining unfertilized eggs, replacing their genetic material with that from an adult cell and then forcing the cell to divide to create an early-stage embryo, from which the stem cells can be harvested. Those barriers may have now been broken down.

Last year, Yamanaka introduced a system that uses mouse fibroblasts, a common cell type that can easily be harvested from skin, instead of eggs. Four genes, which code for four specific proteins known as transcription factors, are transferred into the cells using retroviruses. The proteins trigger the expression of other genes that lead the cells to become pluripotent, meaning that they could potentially become any of the body’s cells. Yamanaka calls them induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). “It’s easy. There’s no trick, no magic,” says Yamanaka.

More here.

From the Knackered Hack:

So what should journalism look like? Taleb gives us a clue in The Black Swan’s utopian vision of “Epistemocracy”, a world where everyone is more like his hero, Menodotus of Nicomedia. Where everyone questions their knowledge, and where introspection and a readiness to admit uncertainty of opinion is accorded more respect.

I asked Taleb how he thought the media should work in our complex society, where we seem ever more driven to seek out experts and snake-oil salesmen to tell us what to think. His answer:-

The internet could do an epistemocracy by doing a “reverse-New York Times“. … By making fun of them, if you do it right. Sort of what I did here [with The Black Swan]. I played their narrative fallacy to the hilt. I made it as readable as you can. You need to be as honest as you can and as readable as you can. A lot of people are not honest, and yet very readable. That is very dangerous. But if you are honest, and not readable — it’s statistics. It’s not gonna work.”

Very obviously, TV and video, with their need for images, are well known for disregarding an accurate narrative in favour of what the available pictures will tell. So, Taleb has bad news for TV executives and YouTube users:-

If you are using visuals, you are probably messing up the world. Because you focus on the lurid, and sensational, and an image automatically hits people in their limbic. As we know, we are more reactive to the visual.”

Interview in three parts: here, here, and here.

Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker:

When I think of Richard Serra’s work as art, or of art as what Richard Serra does, a bracing bleakness descends, like that of a stern northern region, where people live gladly, while under no illusion that it’s the isle of Capri. Serra’s mostly magnificent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art proves that he is not only our greatest sculptor but an artist whose subject is greatness befitting our time. He works at the physical scale of architecture and at the intellectual scale of art history as a whole. The degree of his undoubted success is immeasurable, because nothing really relates to it. The enveloping austerities of Carl Andre and Dan Flavin—Serra’s minimalist forebears in the nineteen-sixties, when five years was a generation—come closest, but compared with his work theirs is parlor décor. His art affords no handle as easy, or as ingratiating, as “style.” Consciousness of Serra’s furious ambition—an arbitrary force, like weather—addles both analysis and aesthetic response. My comprehension of his tons of shaped steel always feels inadequate to their conceptual subtlety, engineering sophistication, and, oh my, size. Taking a childlike view may be the best way to relax with and, to the extent possible, enjoy Serra’s art. Don’t try to understand. Play.

More here.  [Thanks to Timothy Don.]

The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives, styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic. In this respect they resemble essays, which, as it happens, came into existence at more or less the same time (Montaigne launched the form in 1580, with Bacon following in 1597). Essays tend to be classier, more learned and more demanding—there is no essayistic equivalent of the “popular novel”—and even when written in a perfectly casual style, they are likely to be strewn with half-concealed quotations or allusions to flatter or perhaps annoy the smarter class of reader. As exercises in hesitation, exploration and experimental self-multiplication, they are like novels, only more so. You might even say that the novel aspires to the condition of the essay, and there is certainly no shortage of novelists who have aspired to be essayists too. Think of Eliot or Henry James, Woolf, Forster or Orwell, or Mann, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and Mary McCarthy. And as the four recently published books now lying open on my kitchen table demonstrate, the essay-writing novelist is still a literary force to be reckoned with.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

Is it possible to oppose the death penalty and still be in favor of killing tyrants? That is, I think, my own position, but the botched execution of Saddam Hussein, which looked more like savage revenge than impartial justice, made it much harder to hold on to both those views. Still, they seem to me contradictory but not incompatible. I don’t believe that the state should kill people convicted of crimes against other people, even of terrible crimes. Except when it is resisting military attack or helping others who are under attack, the state should not be in the killing business; its first commitment is to the preservation of life. But a tyrant has committed crimes not simply against individuals but against the solidarity of the citizens, against the commonwealth, against the very idea of a political community. And that seems to raise the stakes; a tyrant is not an ordinary criminal.

more from Dissent here.

You just can’t argue with this work of art. You can’t fault it. I’ve examined it with the critical equivalent of a jeweller’s eyepiece. I compared it to Holbein’s anamorphic skull in The Ambassadors, as well as the turquoise Aztec skull in the British Museum. It is comparable to those masterpieces, not derivative.

It’s something no artist could ever do before – that is, as a modern work of art. The objects it resembles – from Tutankhamun’s gold death mask to a silver monument to Alexander Nevsky in the Hermitage – were commissioned from nameless craftsmen by all-powerful rulers. No modern ruler has the authority to do such a thing, and up until now, no artist was in a position to emulate them. So Hirst truly has created an exceptional object. It is not merely an expensive work of art, but a great one. It has a primitivism that renews art for our time just as Picasso’s discovery of African and Oceanic masks renewed art a century ago: it promises that art in this century might yet become as new and as ancient as the best art of all ages. I can’t think of a period that wouldn’t be amazed and delighted by it: Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare and the Aztecs would all be flocking to White Cube. You should go, too.

more from The Guardian here.

Horace Elisha Scudder in The Atlantic Monthly: [Ed. Note. This review first ran in the Atlantic Monthly, June 1886.]

It might be supposed, at first glance, that Mr. James in The Bostonians was not going to let us off, but intended to drag us with him into the labyrinth of the woman question. Nothing could be more unjust. Mr. James, with the quick instinct of an artist, saw his opportunity in the strange contrasts presented by a phase of Boston life which is usually taken too seriously for purposes of fiction. We do not remember any more striking illustration of Mr. James’s general self-expatriation. He comes back, as it were, to scenes once familiar to him, bringing with him habits of thought and observation which make him seize upon just those features of life which would arrest the attention of an Englishman or a Frenchman. The subtle distinctions between the Laphams and Correys are nothing to him, but he is caught by the queer variety of humanitarianism which with many people outside Boston is the peculiar attribute of that much suffering city. He remembers, we will suppose, the older form, the abolition sentiment which prevailed in his youth, and now is curious about the later development, which he takes to be a medley of women’s rights, spiritualism, inspirationism, and the mind cure. He notices a disposition on the part of what a clever wit called Boston Proper to break away from its orbit and get entangled in this nebulous mass, and so he takes for his main figure a woman who is young and old by turns, according to the need of the novelist, a Bostonian of the straighter sect, who has yet, by the very force of her inherited rigidity of conscience, martyred herself, and cast in her lot with a set of reformers who are much the worse for wear.

More here.

From The New York Times:

When Albert Einstein was starting out on his cosmological quest 100 years ago, the universe was apparently a pretty simple and static place. Common wisdom had it that all creation consisted of an island of stars and nebulae known as the Milky Way surrounded by infinite darkness. We like to think we’re smarter than that now. We know space is sprinkled from now to forever with galaxies rushing away from one another under the impetus of the Big Bang. Bask in your knowledge while you can. Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.

If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.

More here.

Thomas Laqueur looks at Five Germanys I have Known by Fritz Stern, in the London Review of Books:

Stern’s ancestors stood at the pinnacle of the Bildungsbürgertum, the cultivated middle class, who regarded culture generally and Wissenschaft – science in the broadest, purest sense – as the core of an ethical and useful life, both private and public. All four of his great-grandfathers, both grandfathers and his father were successful, well-regarded doctors. The physician’s white coat, as Stern writes, ‘was the one uniform of dignity to which Jews could aspire and in which they could feel a measure of authority and grateful acceptance’. Although medicine was in the 19th century, as it is today, far from a pure science, it held out the promise of a dispassionate, unideological, rational approach to the ills of the body, both social and individual. It was, in Max Weber’s sense, ‘a calling’, a secular equivalent to being chosen by God for his purposes. Germany’s Jews embraced this calling: at the beginning of the 19th century, perhaps 2 per cent of German doctors were Jews; by the early 20th century, at a time when Jews constituted something like 1 per cent of the population, they provided 16 per cent of all doctors. The proportion was far higher in big cities. Excluded from the higher ranks of the civil service and the military, medicine offered them entry into the life of the nation.

For Stern’s people, the ‘German question’ had been settled in 1871; Bismarck was their hero; they were, if anything, more German than the Germans.

More here.

This is from “Best of Craig’s List,” on Craig’s List:

I think “Will and Grace” has instructed an entire generation of women that gay men are dying – DYING! – to be your friend and indulge your every co-dependent and neurotic whim. We’ll be there in a clinch with a “you go girl!” or “you look fierce!” Because we all love to say that stuff and many other quippy zingers.

Last Monday night, a woman at a bar came up to me and asked me if I was single. Not to disparage her, but let’s just say I was happy to shut her down right away with an abrupt “I’m gay.” And you know what? THAT DID NOT DETER HER.

She LIT up and said, “We can go shopping together and you can watch me play with myself with my Rabbit.”

Ugggggghhhh… Do you ever not even know where to begin?

I wanted to say, “Yes, please, I am in the habit of befriending bar skanks in the first ten seconds of talking to them. And despite my lack of sexual attraction to women, I would simply LOVE to watch you get yourself off. JACKPOT!”

As far as the shopping thing goes: I love saying “I’m not really into shopping” and I just stand back and wait for their heads to explode. Their precious “Will and Grace” never prepared them for that possibility!

More here.  And other “Best of” entries here.

Salil Tripathi in the New Statesman:

A year ago, a group of Hindu activists attacked two paintings by Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s best-known painter. The artist, now aged 91, had offended their sensibilities by drawing Hindu goddesses in the nude. Judging the zeitgeist – the attack happened during the time of the dispute about the Danish Muhammad cartoons – the organisers hastily closed the exhibition. It was not the first attack on Husain’s work; for nearly a decade, he has borne the brunt of Hindu nationalists’ anger. Today he lives in self-imposed exile, dividing his time between Dubai and London. What was unusual about this particular act of mob censorship and vandalism, however, was that it occurred in the heart of central London, at Asia House.

A sale at Bonhams and Asia House this month will include 85 works by major Indian artists, including Husain. The profits from “Art for Freedom” will go towards another champion of freedom of expression, the Indian weekly newspaper Tehelka, which is backed by such luminaries as V S Naipaul and Arundhati Roy, and for which I also write. Since its launch in 2000, the publi cation has used investigative guile, outright subterfuge and spycam techniques to break several stories in India – betting scandals in international cricket, corruption in defence deals and, most recently, unlawful killings of Muslims in Gujarat. The paper was closed down by the government after breaking a story on corruption, only to relaunch in 2004. Appropriately, the word tehelka means sensation.

The defence of free speech seems particularly important this year, as India marks the 60th anniversary of her independence.

More here.