Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic:

“The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

At the excellent website, Polish Writing, a look at and full text of the story:

The provincial actors of Poland are sometimes colloquially called “comedians,” as distinguished from their more pretentious brethren of the metropolitan stage in Warsaw. The word, however, does not characterize a player of comedy parts. Indeed, the provincials, usually performing in open air theatres, play every conceivable rôle, and as in the case of Janina, the heroine of this story, the life of the Comedienne often embraces far more tragedy than comedy.

Wladyslaw Reymont is the most widely known of living Polish writers. The Academy of Science of Cracow nominated him for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the author of numerous novels dealing with various phases of everyday life in Poland, many of them translated into French, German, and Swedish. The Comedienne is the first of his works to appear in English.

Reymont himself was a peasant, rising from the bottom until to-day the light of his recognized genius shines in the very forefront of the Slavic intellectuals.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow interviews Iranian dissident journalist Akbar Ganji in The Boston Review:

As a supporter of the 1979 revolution, what did you expect from it? Did it turn out differently than you thought it would?

The discourse of the 1979 Revolution was about justice, independence, and anti-imperialism. As a consequence of the Cold War and the Third World ideological thinking of this period, the United States was viewed as the source of all the social and political problems facing our society. In those days, social justice meant either the just rule of Ali, the first Shia Imam in the 7th century, or Soviet-style socialism.

The 1979 revolution did not bring about liberty, democracy, or human rights; it did not even fulfill its promise of social justice. The class gap is about the same today, if not worse. The political repression is greater than it was before the revolution. This is because the Pahlavi regime only repressed political opposition, but the Islamic Republic continues to repress the entire spectrum of cultural, social, and political activity.

In my view, the most important achievement of the revolution is that it turned the masses into agents of historical change and highly politicized them. The 1979 revolution demanded political independence and the end of external interference in Iran’s domestic affairs. In this sense Iran has become independent, but globalization processes have made possible many new forms of foreign interference that affect Iran.

Hamish Johnston over at the Physics World blog comes across this paper by Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga, Victor M. Castano in arXiv.

Tequila is a wide-known alcoholic beverage, granted origin denomination since 1982, eight year are necessary to grow and cultivated this agave.  When the agave plant from which tequila is produced is ready to be processed, it is cooked with vapor and under pressure and the juice is extracted, fermented and distilled twice to obtain a solution with 55 % of alcohol content. Then, the alcoholic solution is diluted with distilled water to obtain a final product (38 to 43 % alcohol content) and finally, aged in different containers, depending on the tequila kind desired.  As we shall see in what follows, tequila, or at least some types of it, present naturally the adequate atomic composition to achieve a proper diamond nucleation.

Elliott Sober reviews Samir Okasha’s  A Philosopher Looks at the Units of Selection Evolution and the Levels of Selection in RedOrbit:

Samir Okasha’s wonderful new book, Evolution and the Levels of Selection, is a philosophical examination of the conceptual framework that MLS [multilevel selection] theory deploys. Lewontin’s early formalism may give the impression that the idea of selection occurring at different levels of organization is straightforward and that the difference between group and individual selection is transparent The complexities that have become visible since the 1970s show otherwise. One complication arises in connection with the Price equation. Consider this simple example: There are two groups of zebras, one composed entirely of fast zebras, the other entirely of slow ones. Suppose the fast group is less likely to go extinct. According to the Price equation, in this situation there is group selection and no individual selection, because all the variance in fitness is between groups. But surely it is possible that the groups differ in fitness just because there is individual selection for running fast. Selection at the individual level can create a fortuitous benefit for the group (as George Williams put it). The Price equation is unable to recognize this. Biologists have coped with this problem in different ways-for example, by invoking the statistical techniques of contextual analysis and by employing a methodology called neighborhood analysis. Okasha skillfully analyzes the Price equation’s strengths and limitations and these more recent attempts to do better.

Another complication that arose as MLS theory developed was that there really are two types of MLS. In discussions of the evolution of altruism, a group’s fitness is usually defined as the number of offspring organisms the group produces. But one can also conceive of group fitness in terms of the number of daughter groups (regardless of size) the group produces. This second type of MLS has been important in discussions of species selection and of major evolutionary transitions. Both concepts raise questions about what heritability at the group level means, and here again Okasha does much to clarify what is at stake.

///
Song of the Mirror Maker
Juan Manuel Roca

I make mirrors:
To horror I add more horror.
To beauty more beauty.
I take the moon of quicksilver by the street:
The sky reflects in the mirror
And the roofs dance
Like a painting from Chagall.
Whenever the mirror enters into another house
It will efface the known faces,
Since the mirrors don’t talk about their past,
They don’t delate old residents.
Some people construct jails,
Bars for cages
I make mirrors:
To horror I add more horror,
To beauty more beauty.

Painting: Girl Before a Mirror, Pablo Picasso

From The Telegraph:

Poor Mr Gorbachev. Every time he met Ronald Reagan at a summit, he was subjected by the American President to a stream of Russian jokes. Or rather, to be precise, Soviet jokes – the point of which was always to satirise some aspect of life under communism. What made it worse was that some of them really were very funny. like the one, for example, about the man who goes to buy a car in Moscow, pays for it, and is told by the salesman that he can collect it on a particular date in 10 years’ time. The buyer thinks for a moment and then asks: ‘Morning or afternoon?’ The salesman, astonished by the question, asks: ‘What difference does it make?’ And the buyer answers: ‘Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.’

As Gorbachev was well aware, these jokes had not been manufactured by some sinister department of the CIA; they were real ones, as told by real Russians. He was probably also aware that although people in the West told jokes about the frustrations of ordinary life, there was no such thing as a whole category of jokes about the capitalist system as such. If there had been, we can be sure that his aides would have been feeding them to him, contributing to an ever-escalating jokes race between the superpowers. For some commentators in the 1980s, the existence of this type of humour in the communist world took on a profound significance. It demonstrated the indomitable nature of the human spirit under oppression; the fact that communism produced such a huge quantity of jokes showed how hugely oppressive it was; and the stubborn persistence of this humour played a major role in undermining Soviet rule. In the end, they said, communism was laughed out of existence.

More here.

Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times:

“I love being a doctor but I hate practicing medicine,” a friend, Saeed Siddiqui, told me recently. We were sitting in his office amid his many framed medical certificates and a poster of an illuminated lighthouse that read: “Success doesn’t come to you. You go to it.” A doctor in his late 30s, he has been in practice for six years, mostly as a solo practitioner. But he told me he recently had decided to go into partnership with another cardiologist; his days, he said, will be “totally busy.”

“Your days aren’t busy enough already?” I asked. The waiting room was packed. He had a full schedule of appointments, and after he was done with his office patients, he was going to round at two hospitals. He smiled wanly. “Just look at my eyes.” They were bloodshot.

“This whole week I haven’t slept more than about six hours a night.”

I asked when his work usually got done.

“It is never done,” he replied, shaking his head. “See this pile?” He pointed to five large manila packages on a shelf above his desk. “These are reports I still have to finish.”

As a physician, I could empathize. I too often feel overwhelmed with paperwork. But my friend’s discontent seemed to run much deeper than that. Unfortunately, he is not alone. I have been hearing physician colleagues voice a level of dissatisfaction with medical practice that is alarming.

More here.

Kehinde Wiley. Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy-Carignano. 2006

Oil on canvas.

More here, here, and here.

Yassin Musharbash in Der Speigel:

Islamist forums are abuzz with a new theory: The designers of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, they say, were inspired by killing methods developed by al-Qaida. But did the idea for the car bombs and suicide attacks in the game really come from Osama bin Laden?

For user “Abd al-Wahhab,” it is obvious. It isn’t just military men all over the world who are studying the murderous methods employed by the terror group al-Qaida. Rather, designers, developers and graphic artists in the video game world, he argues, have realized that “al-Qaida is a killing school.”

His theory: The wildly successful video game Grand Theft Auto IV (more…) was inspired by the tactics used by Osama bin Laden’s terror group. It is an idea “Abd al-Wahhab” first posted on a large discussion forum used by cyber-jihadists and al-Qaida sympathizers not long ago. He is convinced of his theory, arguing that the video game “shows the power and effectiveness of these tactics.”

Slavoj Žižek responds to his critics in the LRB

When I was a young student in socialist Yugoslavia, criticism of the regime was dismissed by those in power as ‘Western propaganda’. It was always enough to say threateningly: ‘We know whom such reasoning serves.’ To my surprise, the critics of my letter on Tibet and China rely on the same manoeuvre: my statements are dismissed with the claim that they repeat Chinese propaganda (Letters, 5 June). But I base my claim that Tibet before 1949 was an oppressive and corrupted feudal society on by far the best and most extensive study of the Tibetan legal system, Rebecca Redwood French’s The Golden Yoke: The Legal Cosmology of Buddhist Tibet (1995), which has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese propaganda.

If it were the custom to dedicate letters, I would dedicate mine to the Tibetan exile settlements in Mundgod and Bylakuppe in southern India. All the media attention is on upper-class Dharamsala: nobody – the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere included – talks about the destitute thousands in these two larger camps.

Phillip Ball in Nature News:

What was avant-garde yesterday is often blandly mainstream today. But this normalization doesn’t seem to have happened to experiments in atonalism in Western music. A century has passed since composer Arnold Schoenberg and his supporters rejected tonal organization, yet Schoenberg’s music is still considered by many to be ‘difficult’ at best, and a cacophony at worst.

Could this be because the dissonances characteristic of Schoenberg’s atonal compositions conflict with some fundamental human preference for consonance, embedded in the very way we perceive musical sound? That’s what his detractors have sometimes implied, and it might be inferred also from a new proposal for the origins of consonance and dissonance advanced in a paper by biomathematicians Inbal Shapira Lots and Lewi Stone of Tel Aviv University in Israel, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface ¹.

Shapira Lots and Stone suggest that a preference for consonance may be hard-wired into the way we hear music.

Over at The Guardian’s Comment is Free:

The world needs to rethink the sources of growth. If the foundations of economic growth lie in advances in science and technology, not in speculation in real estate or financial markets, then tax systems must be realigned. Why should those who make their income by gambling in Wall Street’s casinos be taxed at a lower rate than those who earn their money in other ways? Capital gains should be taxed at least at as high a rate as ordinary income. (Such returns will, in any case, get a substantial benefit because the tax is not imposed until the gain is realised.) In addition, there should be a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies.

Given the huge increase in inequality in most countries, higher taxes for those who have done well – to help those who have lost ground from globalisation and technological change – are in order, and could also ameliorate the strains imposed by soaring food and energy prices. Countries, like the US, with food stamp programmes, clearly need to increase the value of these subsidies in order to ensure that nutrition standards do not deteriorate. Those countries without such programmes might think about instituting them.

Two factors set off today’s crisis: the Iraq war contributed to the run-up in oil prices, including through increased instability in the Middle East, the low-cost provider of oil, while biofuels have meant that food and energy markets are increasingly integrated. Although the focus on renewable energy sources is welcome, policies that distort food supply are not. America’s subsidies for corn-based ethanol contribute more to the coffers of ethanol producers than they do to curtailing global warming.

From The London Telegraph:

The rise of the birth-attending, nappy-changing, self-sacrificial new man is not an archetype that playwrights tend to celebrate much. Indeed, in the theatre it’s almost never a happy father’s day. Drama often being about conflict, and conflict often being between paternal authority and rebellious youth, there are relatively few plays and musicals around that say, “Thanks, Dad, I love you loads”. And even fewer operas. So this Father’s Day say it with a tie, a bottle or a pair of socks but don’t say it with theatre tickets. Unless, of course, you calculate that a trip to the West End might encourage your father to see the error of his ways.

“At least two fathers have already been reduced to a state of sobbing,” says David Calder, currently playing King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe and receiving stricken dads backstage afterwards. The lesson they’re taking from Lear is simple: that even if they’re kings, fathers cannot boss their children around with impunity. “Lear makes the mistake all human beings make: he believes that because he thinks it, others will think it,” says Calder. “He wants everybody at his feet, writing gooey poems about how wonderful a father he is. He is self-obsessed. It’s a one-way street. ‘I give out the goodies and you fall on the floor and thank me.'”

More here.

James McConkey in The American Scholar:

In this exploration of my past for whatever understanding it can give me of my present self—probably my final attempt, though I’ve believed that before—I’ve touched upon questions beyond my competence to answer. But the issues of chance, genetic inheritance, the relation between fathers and sons, and the debate between determinism and free will, important to human meaning as they are, fade into insignificance before the most encompassing paradox that I know: death, that great opponent of life and ultimate victor over it, is also responsible for all the values of life that we struggle to rescue from it. Without mortality—that is, if we lived forever, uncaring of the ticking of clocks—would we have need of religion, of families with children for a new generation, of dreams for a better future? Wouldn’t scientists lose their urgency to discover, artists to create? Without my ever-keener awareness of Jean’s and my mortality, I certainly wouldn’t be writing this account in my 87th year. And what about love? As lyrical expressions, sonnets typically represent the poet’s personal emotions. One sonnet in particular, by Shakespeare, moves both Jean and me; I liked it as a graduate student, but not in the way I do today. The first-person narrator acknowledges that life, like a fire, is consumed by the source nourishing it, and tells his beloved in the concluding couplet, “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

That’s the best summation I’m capable of making.

More here.

///
republic
D.A. Powell

soon, industry and agriculture converged

                            and the combustion engine

sowed the dirtclod truck farms green

                                          with onion tops and chicory

mowed the hay, fed the swine and mutton

                            through belts and chutes

cleared the blue oak and the chaparral

                                          chipping the wood for mulch

back-filled the marshes

                            replacing buckbean with dent corn

removed the unsavory foliage of quag

                                          made the land into a production

made it produce, pistoned and oiled

                            and forged against its own nature

and—with enterprise—built silos

                                          stockyards, warehouses, processing plants

abattoirs, walk-in refrigerators, canneries, mills

                                                      & centers of distribution

it meant something—in spite of machinery—

                            to say the country, to say apple season

though what it meant was a kind of nose-thumbing

                                                      and a kind of sweetness

                            as when one says how quaint

knowing that a refined listener understands the doubleness

Read more »

According to Jim Steinmeyer’s perceptive and entertaining new biography, “Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural” (Tarcher/Penguin: 332 pp., $24.95), some of the 25,000 metaphors found their way into his tenement-based pulp fiction and “The Outcast Manufacturers” (1909), his only novel. A sailor’s forehead has “[e]xactly five wrinkles in it, as if it had been pressing upon banjo strings.” One woman possesses a “nose like a tiny model of a subway entrance; nostrils almost perpendicular and shaped like the soles of tiny feet.” Steinmeyer writes that Fort would often tinker with the metaphor as it was unfolding, as if “continually whispering into the reader’s ear”: “[S]he flushed a little — flushes like goldfish in an aquarium, fluttering in her globe-like, colorless face — goldfish in a globe of milk, perhaps — or goldfish struggling in a globe of whitewash, have it.”

Of these metaphors, Dreiser wrote: “It was amazing, the force or beauty of these sentences.” But Fort would soon burn this priceless hoard, as he turned from fiction to a new sort of writing, requiring the assembly of a different kind of hoard.

more from The LA Times here.

Simon Louvish’s elegantly exhaustive study of Cecil Blount DeMille (1881-1959) carries the respectful if not necessarily reverent title “Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art.” It examines that life largely though not entirely through his 70 movies, completed during a 42-year career, from “The Squaw Man” in 1914 to “The Ten Commandments” in 1956, itself a remake of his own 1923 “Ten Commandments.” “The Squaw Man” was also remade as an early talkie in 1931, during a period in which all of Hollywood, and DeMille especially, was struggling, often pathetically and disastrously, to make sense and cinema out of the newfangled dimension of talk.

As it happens, I grew up listening to DeMille’s mellifluous voice on the weekly “Lux Radio Theater” as he introduced the stories of recent Hollywood movies, most often with the original stars reading their lines from scripts. Unlike Louvish, however, I was never an admirer of DeMille’s biblical epics, which, as Louvish himself acknowledges, are DeMille’s chief claims to fame, though his only film to win an Oscar for best picture was his 1952 circus extravaganza, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” And yet for all his remarkable ability to outlast and in some instances outlive much greater contemporaries — including D. W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, King Vidor, John Ford, Howard Hawks and the ill-starred Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg — he remains something of a joke among sophisticated cinéastes, largely because of his tin ear for dialogue. (One famous howler is from “The Ten Commandments,” in which Yul Brynner’s Egyptian pharaoh says of Charlton Heston’s Hebraic Moses, “His God IS God!”)

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Witold Rybczynski in Slate:

Much to the critics’ chagrin, Saarinen’s work did not follow a straight-line trajectory. Unlike his contemporaries—Philip Johnson, Paul Rudolph, Minoru Yamasaki, and Edward Durell Stone—he did not stick to one style but went off in different, seemingly unrelated directions. At the same time as he was building Morse and Stiles, for example, he was also designing the most fanciful building of the 1950s, the TWA Terminal in New York’s Idlewild (now JFK) Airport. Responding to his client’s demand to convey “the spirit of flight,” Saarinen, who had earlier designed a thin concrete vault at MIT, combined concrete shell construction with his sculptural training. He said that he always wanted his architecture to make people feel things, and nowhere is this truer than at TWA, which was a throwback to the German Expressionist architecture of Erich Mendelsohn. Another heresy, since modern architects were supposed to look forward, not backward. We now can see that TWA also anticipated the late-20th-century Expressionism of architects such as Greg Lynn and Zaha Hadid.