Dan Vergano in USA Today:

“Scientists, educators and policymakers have long been concerned about American adults’ resistance to certain scientific ideas,” note Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg in the review published in the current Science magazine. In 2005 for example, the Pew Trust found that 42% of poll respondents think people and animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a view that is tough to reconcile with evidence from fossils. Many people believe in ghosts, fairies and astrology. “This resistance to science has important social implications because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning,” the psychologists say.

In the last three decades, studies of children show that they quickly pick up an intuitive understanding of how the world works, say the researchers. For example, babies know that objects fall and are real and solid (even though physics experiments show they are mostly made of atoms containing empty space.) “These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. However, they also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn,” the review says.

More here.

From Videos with Bibi:

Many more such videos here.

From CNN:

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize Sunday with “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a harrowing portrait of an illegal abortion in communist-era Romania.

The low-budget, naturalistic film about a student who goes through horrors to ensure that her friend can have a secret abortion beat out 21 other movies in competition for the Riviera festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or — including films by well-known directors like Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers and Wong Kar-wai.

Mungiu, who was awarded the prize by actress Jane Fonda, said he did not have the idea for the film a year ago, and did not even have money to shoot it just six months ago. He hoped the win would be “good news for the small filmmakers from small countries.”

More here.

After my piece about the arrival of Whole Foods on the Lower East Side, a friend asked me, “Why is food so important?”  Having thought about the question, I realized that wasn’t quite the right question: that piece wasn’t really about food.  Instead, the arrival of a giant organic supermarket is about the dilution of the pleasures of urban life.  Such retailers represent a descent into a cosseted, unvarying lifestyle of convenience.  They are also a form of false diversity: just as the rows upon rows of gas-station fridges filled with hundreds of varieties of soft drinks, all made by Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Co, are a false diversity.  The potential loss is very real: they offered to buy out a friend’s nearby wine shop to eliminate their competition.  So it’s not food, exactly, but the suburbanization of New York City that was the issue: Whole Foods is just a big symptom of that.  But I want to make a different argument here: that the reason we gravitate towards “corporate parents,” as Jayasree said so nicely in the comments, is that we live in a state of induced hysteria about food. 

I once had the opportunity to have coffee with Andros Epanimondas, who had been the assistant to one of my greatest heroes, Stanley Kubrick.  Reminiscing, he mentioned that, over dinner, he once saw Kubrick hurriedly alternating bites of his main course and bites of a chocolate cake.  He asked why.  Kubrick, busy preparing for his greatest project to date, the unrealized Napolean, simply responded, “Andros, it’s only food!”  It may sound funny, but I think that’s a healthy attitude, especially in today’s heated food culture, where Ed Levine can talk up the pizzeria DiFara’s and suddenly people are waiting in line for an hour (on Avenue J!) for a slice of pizza.  Or where New York Times food critic Frank Bruni has become an Old Testament deity, capricious and capable of unleashing plagues on your Jeffrey Chodorow’s and your Keith McNally’s in retribution for the mortal sin of hubris.  (For the record, I too agree with the opinion of David Chang, the current darling of New York chefs, on Chodorow: he’s the anti-Christ.)  Food has become an at times unhealthy obsession.

The last decade’s avalanche of information about food, where to get it, what’s in it, and how it’s made has been mostly a very good thing: the industrialized food system that wallows in corn syrup, hydrogenated soybean oil, and boneless, skinless chicken breasts is finally being recognized as unhealthy for both individuals and society, as well as the very soil.  American culture is in the gradual process of rediscovering the pre-industrial food system, and recovering some of the benefits that many other countries have yet to lose: seasonality of fruits and vegetables, the higher quality of meats produced by smaller-scale production, etc.

This gradual rediscovery of pre-industrial food production shows especially in a current trends that I want to discuss.  This is the anxiety about ever “safer” foods – a trend that is obviously mostly positive in that it means people are thinking about what they eat.  On the other hand, labels are often a shortcut for thinking: the mania for organic food, whether trucked from a farm ten miles away or flown from ten thousand, is an example.  Another is the degree to which the problems of contamination of anti-resistant bacteria associated with giant feedlots and factory farms have led advertisers to provoke and exploit the public’s fear of illness, to the point where people don’t trust things to be safe unless labeled.

This leads to increasingly circular solutions, such as the irradiation of ground beef as a response to the potential dangers of gargantuan meatpacking plant that have consolidated most of the country’s meats.  What’s worse, it discourages people from seeing foodstuffs as natural products and encourages a kind of magical thinking about the world as a harbor of dangerous bacteria that can only be banished by the application of chemicals.  It is anti-holistic and tends towards seeing complex, industrial things like a Big Mac as more real, more understandable, and safer than a raw piece of cow’s flesh.  It takes time and effort to undo the digust that has been incited in us by commercial propaganda, effort that usually only leisured people have the opportunity to make.  That’s why sophistication about food is another way to announce your social position. 

Germ-phobia cleverly incited by Proctor and Gamble lies underneath lots of this: we live in a culture that is pathologically afraid of pathogens.  Why is it that raw-milk, unpasteurized cheese is not permitted in this country, which basically means that great cheese is outlawed?  Fear of germs.  The great irony of this squeamishness is that fast food is the single most dangerous source of anti-resistant strains of bacteria that have evolved in our feedlots.  Even though, most people would pick a spicy chicken sandwich over a raw oyster picked up off the beach, which serves ConAgra very well, thank you.  And it’s only the very lucky among us who are ever in a situation to stroll a beach with wild oysters on it anyway – it happened to me once and I still marvel at it over the chicken cutlet sandwich from my deli.

A word about the spiciness of the chicken: when the quality of a foodstuff is low, the easiest single way to disguise it is to hide it’s flavor.  I think you can correlate the rise of a taste for hot sauces over the last thirty years to the increasingly dismal flavor of chicken breasts.  Not that I dislike spicy food – I love it – but the food at Taco Bell simply uses capsacin to anaesthetize some pretty awful ground beef.  The overloading of ingredients is a similar tendency: when the quality of something simple is really good, it’s usually delicious with a squeeze of lemon and buttered bread.

A show like Alton Brown’s “Good Eats,” as informative as it is, is possibly the apotheosis of magical thinking about food.  Brown is so meticulous about preparation, so sterilized is his every surface, that you forget that most of the food he makes and supposedly improves (cakes, macaroni and cheese, tomato sauce) were developed by humble kitchen staffs and home cooks, and should not be hard to make.  He has a mania for visiting the local big-box retailer to find the perfect culinary appliance.  Only Brown with his intensely overeager, overthought approach can make you feel like cooking is best approached by amateur chemists.  (I wonder what Harold McGee thinks of him.)  Brown makes eating seem like a pretext for a hobbyist to invent pulley systems for lowering turkeys into hot oil.  Food is dangerous, food can easily come out badly, you must be extremely anal to make food safely and well.  But for all his geekery, who would you rather eat a meal cooked by, Brown or the comparatively simple Jacques Pepin?

I feel a little strange, as someone who loves eating as much as I do, saying this, but shouldn’t we be more interested in who we’re eating with than what we’re eating?  Isn’t it a measure of how abstracted our eating habits have become that we pay such hysterical attention to them?  Is it a compensatory overreaction to the lack of a grounded, seasonal national cuisine of the kind many other nations have?  Finally, isn’t it sad that we are so rarely in a position to eat food whose history is knowable – you caught this fish, you picked these nettles – that gleaning food has become a kind of luxury hobby only available to the rich?  The most characteristic desire in urban foodie culture now is to raise your own chickens and dine on the eggs.  What does that say about how much we value our individual taste experiences and how little we trust others in our society to provide for us?

My other Dispatches.

Hedda Sterne. Untitled 1985-90.

More on this gifted and prolific American artist here and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Raza Kolb.

From the New York Times:

Bill Clinton talked to The Times’s Andrew C. Revkin after announcing his new plan to fight global climate change at the Large Cities Climate Summit in New York.

Video interview here.

Partial zoom:

More zoom:

More such pictures here.  [via Ruchira Paul.]

Steven Pinker reviews The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier, in the New York Times:

In “The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science,” Natalie Angier aims to do her part for scientific literacy. Though Angier is a regular contributor to the Science Times section of this newspaper, “The Canon” departs from the usual treatment of science by journalists, who typically cover the “news,” the finding that upsets the apple cart, rather than the consensus. Though one can understand why journalists tend to report the latest word from the front — editors’ demand for news rather than pedagogy, and the desire to show that science is a fractious human activity rather than priestly revelation — this approach doesn’t always serve a widespread understanding of science. The results of isolated experiments are more ephemeral than conclusions from literature reviews (which usually don’t fit into a press release), and the discovery-du-jour approach can whipsaw readers between contradictory claims and leave them thinking, “Whatever.”

Angier’s goals are summed up in two words in her subtitle: beautiful basics. “The Canon” presents the fundamentals of science: numbers and probability, matter and energy, the origins and structure of living things, and the natural history of our planet, solar system, galaxy and universe. These are, she judges, the basics that every educated person should master, and a prerequisite to a genuine understanding of the material in any newspaper’s science coverage.

More here.  [Thanks to Robin Varghese.]

Gary J. Bass in the New York Times Magazine:

…Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.

In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what they call “the miracle of aggregation.” It might seem obvious that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal health care. (I certainly don’t.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters’ ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.

The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random.

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth and Ben Rosamond.]

Margaret Busby in The Guardian:

According to Yoruba wisdom, as one approaches elder status, one ceases to indulge in battles. “Some hope!” comments Wole Soyinka, early in his new memoir: “When that piece of wisdom was first voiced, a certain entity called Nigeria had not yet been thought of.” Now past his biblical three-score-and-ten and with a distinctive mass of white hair making him the most recognisable of African writer-elders, Soyinka shows no sign of laying down the cudgels or his pen just yet. Last month’s flawed Nigerian elections to deliver a successor to President Obasanjo had Soyinka calling for a new poll, declaring that: “It is not right to accept the unacceptable.” His love-hate relationship with his homeland testifies to his refusal to back down in the face of injustice and tyranny, possessing as he does “an over-acute, remedial sense of right and wrong, of what is just and unjust”.

You Must Set Forth at Dawn is an extraordinary chronicle (the title derives from a Soyinka poem that goes on to promise the traveller “marvels of the holy hour”), as much an insider’s political biography of Nigeria as an updating of the author’s own restless story since the publication over a quarter of a century ago of his first autobiographical work. Soyinka’s Aké: The Years of Childhood was a modern classic and fortunately, he was persuaded to abandon his vow not to “pursue the task of recollection and reflection beyond the age of innocence, calculated at roughly eleven and a bit”.

More here.

Sarah Crown in The Guardian:

Hay snorkles for top words:

Snorkle, freedom, midwifery and interglobular are just some of the suggestions authors and visitors to the Hay festival have come up with at the launch of a nationwide search for our favourite word.

Education Action, one of the festival’s official charities, is using the ‘Words for the World’ campaign to draw attention to their support for education for children in conflict zones. Festival visitors are being asked to donate £1 to add their favourite word to a pinboard outside the charities’ tent, and Education Action is calling on everyone from authors and journalists to politicians and members of the public to visit the website and add their own favourite words.

The charity chose the festival to launch their campaign, says Education Action’s communications manager Pippa Ranger, because “Hay plays host to some of the most literate people in the world, and we’re working with some of the least literate. Those who value and have benefited from education can show their support for the millions of children around the world who need it.”

More here.

About the Hay festival  here.

In her latest volume, Native Guard, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Natasha Trethewey finds a wormhole to the past through the Negro spiritual. Its sounds can be heard in nearly every poem in this taut, mournful book, elevating grief into song, turning the blues into something as sacred and fleshly as mud:

It rained the whole time we were laying her down;

Rained from church to grave when we put her down.

The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.

The woman being buried is, one presumes, the poet’s mother, but Native Guard doesn’t have the whiff of the personal the way so much contemporary poetry does. Indeed, it hardly grieves in the conventional sense. Instead, it feels more like the ephemera that crowded the fiction of the late German novelist W.G. Sebald.

more from The Philadelphia Inquirer here.

Levi is justly revered for his masterly memoirs, beginning with “Survival in Auschwitz” and continuing through “The Reawakening,” “The Periodic Table” and finally, and most darkly, “The Drowned and the Saved.” “Survival in Auschwitz” was written in a white heat soon after Levi’s liberation and published in 1947, though translation and recognition came much more slowly. It has often been noted, but is worth noting again, that the American title represents an unfortunate decision by the publisher to replace the haunting Italian title, “Se Questo È un Uomo” — “If This Is a Man” — with a more utilitarian one. The decision signals a confusion that exists in Levi’s reputation and that perhaps existed even inside of him: the urge to poeticize and philosophize competing with the need to bear witness, to record in as literal and straightforward a manner as possible the Nazi war against Western civilization in general and Jews in particular. But in all his writing, Levi, who worked as an industrial chemist much of his life, combined scientific detachment with deep, sympathetic imagination, a combination that allowed him to parse with excruciating clarity all the degradations — large and small, physical, psychic and spiritual — of the Nazi genocide.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From BBC News:

Scientists from the University of Bristol observed that, when ants were foraging on rough terrain, some of them used their own bodies to plug potholes. They even chose which of them was the best fit to lie across each hole. The flatter surface provided the rest of the group, which can number 200,000, a faster route between prey and nest. The research, published in the journal of Animal Behaviour, said that the team first noticed the army ants’ (Eciton burchellii) unusual behaviour in the insects’ native rainforest home in Panama.

To investigate this further, the researchers inserted wooden planks, drilled with a variety of different sized holes, into the army ants’ trails. They found that the ants did indeed plug the holes, but the team also discovered that individuals would size-match themselves to a hole for the best fit.

More here.

Reviewed by Frank Rich in The New York Times:

FALLING MAN

By Don DeLillo.

No matter where you stood in the city, the air was thick after the towers fell: literally thick with the soot and stench of incinerated flesh that turned terror into a condition as inescapable as the weather. All bets were off. New Yorkers who always know where they’re going didn’t know where to go. Cab drivers named Muhammad were now feared as the enemy within; strangers on the street were improbably embraced like family under a canopy of fliers for the missing. Such, for a while anyway, was the “new normal,” though the old normal began to reassert itself almost as soon as that facile catchphrase was coined. Today 9/11 carries so many burdens — of interpretation, of sentimentality, of politics, of war — that sometimes it’s hard to find the rubble of the actual event beneath the layers of edifice we’ve built on top of it. (Or built on top of all of it except ground zero.)

More here.

[Thanks to Mark Blyth and Matthias Matthijs.]

Nicolai Ouroussoff in the NYT:

The headquarters of the federal environment agency in Dessau, Germany, occupies a low-slung building on the edge of an abandoned gasworks. Dessau, a center for munitions production during the war, was virtually obliterated by Allied bombs. Over the next 50 years, East German factories saturated the soil with chemical and industrial waste. Yet both the agency building and its location might be said to embody a new, ecologically sensitive Europe.

Designed by a young Berlin-based firm, Sauerbruch Hutton, the building is touted as one of the most efficient in the world, but it doesn’t wear its sustainability on its sleeve. Four stories high, it wraps around a vast interior courtyard that is cooled and heated by a system of underground pipes. Vents in the glass roof allow hot air to escape, and an occasional breeze passes through the courtyard’s gardens. The sinuous wood structure is clad in horizontal bands of candy-colored, enameled glass panels, in shades of green, red and blue. The pattern, it turns out, is carefully tuned to the surrounding environment: the green reflects a nearby park; the red, the brick facades of an industrial shed; and the blue, the sky.

More here.

Hopper has long been associated with compelling images of urban buildings and the dwellings within them.  The artist lived in Washington Square, in New York’s Greenwich Village, for more than fifty years, and New York City was his favorite backdrop.  Rather than focusing on the skyscrapers that symbolized the ambition of the Jazz Age, Hopper lovingly depicted the city’s crumbling brownstones, dusty storefronts, and undistinguished bridges.  Paintings like Drug Store (1927, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), From Williamsburg Bridge (1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and Early Sunday Morning are Hopper’s tribute to quieter, less dramatic, but nonetheless eloquent parts of the city.  Other New York scenes provide fascinating glimpses—often through windows and from passing trains—into the lives of strangers.  Such well-known paintings as Chop Suey (1929, Barney A. Ebsworth Collection), Room in New York (1932, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Office at Night (1940, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) intrigue because they suggest stories but leave unresolved the motivations of the figures within them.  A section of the exhibition will be dedicated to Hopper’s paintings of women in interiors.  These pictures—from Eleven A.M. (1926, Hirshborn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.) to New York Movie (1939, Museum of Modern Art, New York)—are tender evocations of the poignancy of solitude in the midst of the city’s noise and energy.

More here, and here.

Robert Wilonsky in The Village Voice:

Once, written and directed by John Carney, is a deceptively simple movie—a narrative strung together by pop songs, but without the sheen (or arrogance) of most cinematic musicals. By day, a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) sings Van Morrison on a street corner for spare change, which, on occasion, is swiped by old friends in far more desperate straits than he. At night, the singer switches to his own compositions, most written for the girlfriend who abandoned the guy (who has no name in the film or credits other than The Guy). A Czech girl (Markéta Irglová, billed only as The Girl) approaches The Guy and asks him about his songs. He brushes her off; she’s pretty but too young (Irglová was 17 when the movie was shot two years ago). She’s also persistent.

In time, it turns out this Girl selling flowers to strangers for loose coins is also a musician—a pianist and singer, every bit The Guy’s equal. And so theirs becomes a friendship and partnership—though not quite a relationship, because of The Guy’s ex and The Girl’s estranged husband. He teaches her his songs: He gives them heart, but she gives them soul.

More here.