Koons, meanwhile, has always seemed the sort of clever, wildly successful artist-cum-businessman one could afford to hate, or at least to distrust with bilious envy. But if the audience were expecting someone who wore his intellectual flair on his body, along with, say, funny hair and multicolored tennis shoes, they were disappointed. (There were some funny-haired people in the audience, and they were sitting together – does LACMA provide a special row?) Either he is a very good actor, or Koons is in reality a soft-spoken, thoughtful and articulate man who believes that the artist’s “journey” begins with the “acceptance of self.”

At one point a questioner in the audience addressed the result of Koons’ own self-acceptance, suggesting that his work is “cynical.” Koons seemed to take a slightly deeper breath; he’s heard this before. “I’m not cynical,” he said with deliberation. “My definition of cynicality is when you have more information than you reveal. I try to reveal everything I know. Every day I try to be as generous as I can be.”

more from the LA Weekly here.

The very talented economist and game theorist Ariel Rubinstein on Steven Levitt’s Freakanomics (via Tom Slee over at Whimsley):

Freakonomics lashes out at the entire world from the Olympus of economics. My response is an outline of “my new book”—Freak- Freakonomics. In my (“brilliant . . . ”) book, I will borrow from the structure and text of Freakonomics. I will show that if one also looks upon economists, including Levitt, as economic agents, one can use the insights of Freakonomics to lash out against . . . economics and economists.

Like Levitt, I have no central theme. My book will be a series of observations—some about economics, some about Freakonomics—that I hope the reader will find intriguing.

Chapter 1: is imperialism still alive?

Economists believe that they have a lot to contribute to any field—sociology, zoology or criminology. The academic imperialism of economics has something in common with political imperialism. Therefore, I will begin my chapter with a fascinating historical review where we will learn that imperialism stemmed from the perceived superiority of the conquering people over the conquered peoples, and that the role of the conqueror is to disseminate its lofty culture.

From here, I will move to describe Freakonomics as a typical work of academic imperialism. The complex interplay of feelings of superiority and deficiency has driven every empire, and economics is no different. Levitt: “Economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers, but a serious shortage of interesting questions”(xi). Freakonomics makes statistical reasoning, which is used in all the sciences, look like a subdued colony of economics. Furthermore, Freakonomics expresses the aspiration to expand economics to encompass any question that requires the use of common sense.

In Slate, Clive James, author of Cultural Amnesia, takes a look at the great lyrical Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

Born in Odessa, educated in Kiev, and launched into poetic immortality as the beautiful incarnation of pre-revolutionary Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was the most famous Russian poet of her time, but the time was out of joint. Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, called Akhmatova, already wore the Russian literary world’s most glittering French verbal decorations: Here work was avant-garde, and in person she was a femme fatale. Love for her broken-nosed beauty was a common condition among the male poets, one of whom, Nikolay Gumilev, she married. After the Revolution, Gumilev was one of the new regime’s first victims among the literati: The persecution of artists, still thought of today as a Stalinist speciality, began under Lenin. Later on, under Stalin, Akhmatova included a reference to Gumilev’s fate in the most often quoted section of her poem “Requiem”: “Husband dead, son in gaol/ Pray for me.”

In the last gasp of the czarist era, she had known no persecution worse than routine incomprehension for her impressionistic poetry and condemnation by women for her effect on their men. But the Russia of Lenin and Stalin made her first a tragic, then a heroic, figure. After 1922 she was condemned as a bourgeois element and severely restricted in what she could publish. Following World War II, in 1946, she was personally condemned by Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin’s plug-­ugly in charge of culture. She was not allowed to publish anything new, and everything she had ever written in verse form was dismissed as “remote from socialist reconstruction.”

From “Requiem” (translation by Sasha Soldatov, but you should look for the Stanley Kunitz-Max Haward translation, or the D.M. Thomas translation.):

Not under foreign skies/Nor under foreign wings protected -/I shared all this with my own people/There, where misfortune had abandoned us.

[1961]

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.

[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

DEDICATION

Mountains fall before this grief,/A mighty river stops its flow,/But prison doors stay firmly bolted/Shutting off the convict burrows/And an anguish close to death./Fresh winds softly blow for someone,/Gentle sunsets warm them through; we don’t know this,/We are everywhere the same, listening/To the scrape and turn of hateful keys/And the heavy tread of marching soldiers./Waking early, as if for early mass,/Walking through the capital run wild, gone to seed,/We’d meet – the dead, lifeless; the sun,/Lower every day; the Neva, mistier:/But hope still sings forever in the distance./The verdict. Immediately a flood of tears,/Followed by a total isolation,/As if a beating heart is painfully ripped out, or,/Thumped, she lies there brutally laid out,/But she still manages to walk, hesitantly, alone./Where are you, my unwilling friends,/Captives of my two satanic years?/What miracle do you see in a Siberian blizzard?/What shimmering mirage around the circle of the moon?/I send each one of you my salutation, and farewell.

[March 1940]

From The National Geographic:

Three Indian explorers are giving amateurs a good name. The fossil enthusiasts recently set out on an 18-hour hunt near the central city of Indore and ended up with more than a hundred dinosaur eggs (some of which are pictured above, apparently arranged for photographers), the Hindustan Times reported today.

“They are the typical, spherical eggs that researchers interpret as having been laid by sauropod dinosaurs,” paleontologist Hans-Dieter Sues told National Geographic News via email after viewing photos of the find. Sues is an associate director for research and collections at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and a former member of the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration.

Distinguished by their long necks and tails, plant-eating sauropods are among the largest creatures known to have roamed the Earth. These particular sauropod eggs were found in clusters of six to eight, one of the discoverers told the Hindustan Times. The eggs were laid during the Cretaceous period, roughly 146 to 66 million years ago, by dinosaurs between 40 and 90 feet (12 and 27 meters) long, he added.

More here.

From Nature:

The idea of repressed memory — when traumatic events are wiped from a person’s conscious memory but resurface years later — has had a chequered past. Some have cited it as evidence in court, yet others dismiss it as nothing more than psychiatric folklore. A new study adds a literary layer of evidence to the debate. To see how long the idea of repressed memories have been around, a group of psychologists and literature scholars turned to historical writings.

They could not find a single description of repressed memory, also referred to as dissociative amnesia, in fiction or factual writing before 1800. Harrison Pope of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues harnessed the power of the Internet to gather information, advertising on more than 30 websites and discussion boards a US$1,000 prize to the first person who could find an example of repressed memory after a traumatic event in a work published before 1800.

More here.

With this season of Lost set to resume tomorrow, The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley weighs in.

Anyone who thinks it’s a good sign that “Lost” is back has not spent enough time at the Web site of James Randi, a skeptical scholar of the pseudoscientific and the supernatural.

A fan recently posed this question online at randi.org: “Is a fascination and increased belief in the supernatural a sign of social decline?”

The answer came as categorically as the words under the Magic 8-Ball: “Yes. Absolutely.”

By itself, “Lost” may not be a harbinger of the decline of Western civilization. But alongside “Heroes,” as well as “Medium,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “Raines,” a new NBC drama that begins in March and stars Jeff Goldblum as a detective who solves murders by appearing to commune with dead victims, the collapse looks pretty darn nigh.

“Lost,” on ABC tonight, is the most intriguing of all the series that traffic in the supernatural, mostly because it defies its own illogical reasoning. As the third season resumes after a three-month hiatus, nothing about the fate of the plane wreck survivors marooned on a paranormal island (or is it an archipelago?) makes much sense. But the real mystery of “Lost” is not the Dharma Initiative, the Others or why some characters are named after British philosophers (John Locke, Edmund Burke). It’s whether the writers actually have a cohesive story line that ties together all the unexplained subplots.

(I agree with her and have for a while… but am still going to watch it.)

In the wake of rising inequality, Julian Sanchez offers some clarification on its relationship to moral and political goods over at Notes from the Lounge:

For various reasons, inequality seems to be a hot topic of late, and in particular I seem to be seeing a lot of folk taking up the abstract question of whether it’s inequality per se that we ought to be concerned with, or only whether the absolute level of the badly off is sufficiently high. All of which got me wondering: Does anyone really care about (material) equality in itself as an independent moral good? Lots of people profess to, but I want to suggest that if we get a little nitpicky about it, perhaps they don’t really think what they think they think.

First, for clarity’s sake, let’s distinguish three possible views of economic justice. First, there’s what you might call a Threshold View: What matters is that as few people as possible should be below some absolute level of well-being. On this view, it’s a matter of political concern when people lack adequate food or shelter, basic healthcare, education, opportunities for meaningful work, and certain other of what John Rawls would have dubbed “primary goods.” But our obligations here have a cutoff: Once (almost?) everyone has reached this minimum level, it is at least not a matter of political concern—not a question of justice—how much people have. If some people are only a bit above the minimum, while others have very much more, that is neither here nor there as far as public policy goes.

Next you’ve got the view that I suspect most self-described egalitarians actually hold, which (again borrowing from Rawls) we’ll call the Maximin View. Here again, what actually matters is the absolute level of well-being of the badly off. The only difference is that the obligation here has no upper-boundary; there’s no cutoff point past which we’re relieved of a duty to better the lot of those at the bottom of the distribution. Now, this will sometimes look like a concern with inequality per se, but the concern with inequality here is actually epiphenomenal. In other words, on this view, if some people have enormously more wealth or resources than others, the core problem is not that some have more as such. Rather, the disparity is taken as evidence that we could be doing a great deal more to improve the condition of the worst off (through redistribution), and are failing to do so.

IDEAS: You think that questions about the mind are at the core of philosophy today, don’t you?

SEARLE: Right. And that’s a big change. If you go back to the 17th century, and Descartes, skepticism — the question of how it is possible to have knowledge — was a live issue for philosophy. That put epistemology — the theory of knowledge — at the heart of philosophy. How can we know? Shouldn’t we seek a foundation for knowledge that overcomes skeptical doubts about it? As recently as a hundred years ago, the central question was still about knowledge. But now, the center of philosophical debate is philosophy of mind.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Victor I. Stoichita, Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, is the author of A Short History of the Shadow (Reaktion, 1997). In exploring the writings of Plato, Pliny, Leonardo, and Piaget, Stoichita explains how the shadow has always been integral to theories of art and knowledge, and investigates the complex psychological meanings we project into shadows. Christopher Turner spoke to him by phone.

Your book is the first study of its kind. Why do you think the subject was previously so overlooked?

I actually started my research with that very question. Just before the publication of my book, an exhibition on shadows was organized at the National Gallery in London, accompanied by a short but interesting text by the late Ernst Gombrich. But previously art historians took a long time in paying attention to shadows because shadows are, so to speak, heavy, dark, and ugly. Perhaps this is because for the Greeks, the shadow was one of the metaphors for the psyche, the soul. A dead person’s soul was compared to a shadow, and Hades was the land of shadows, the land of death.

more from Cabinet here.

Hogarth’s art bursts with life, and with characters fictional and real, sometimes side by side. Moll Hackabout, Tom Rakewell and the Earl of Squander rub shoulders with Colonel Francis Charteris, a notorious abuser of women, while Sir Francis Dashwood prays at an altar to lust. Hogarth’s characters are as various as his age, and only rarely do they become caricatures. Early in his career, he made a stab at illustrating Don Quixote, but gave it up – perhaps the characters and situations were already too one-dimensional. For the same reasons, one can envisage him rejecting Dickens but illustrating De Sade. I imagine him appreciating the film director Robert Altman – the weave of stories, the characters, the situations. Hogarth knew his talents were as much those of a storyteller as of a painter or a printmaker; nowadays, he would probably have written and directed movies. The brilliantly orchestrated crowd scenes in Election are crying out for animation.

more from The Guardian here.

Primo Levi, posthumously in this weeks New Yorker:

After the death of the Arab, al-Ludra [“the capricious one”, the name given to the star], although provided with a name, did not attract much interest, because the variable stars are so many, and also because, starting in 1750, it was reduced to a speck, barely visible with the best telescopes of the time. But in 1950 (and the message has only now reached us) the illness that must have been gnawing at it from within reached a crisis, and here, for the second time, our story, too, enters a crisis: now it is no longer the adjectives that fail but the facts themselves. We still don’t know much about the convulsive death-resurrection of stars: we know that, fairly often, something flares up in the atomic mechanism of a star’s nucleus and then the star explodes, on a scale not of millions or billions of years but of hours and minutes.We know that these events are among the most cataclysmic that the sky holds; but we understand only—and approximately—the how, not the why. We’ll be satisfied with the how.

An observer who, to his misfortune, found himself on October 19th of 1950, at ten o’clock our time, on one of the silent planets of al-Ludra would have seen, “before his very eyes,” as they say, his gentle sun swell, not a little but “a lot,” and would not have been present at the spectacle for long. Within a quarter of an hour he would have been forced to seek useless shelter against the intolerable heat—and this we can affirm independently of any hypothesis concerning the size and shape of this observer, provided that he was constructed, like us, of molecules and atoms—and in half an hour his testimony, and that of all his fellow-beings, would end. Therefore, to conclude this account we must base it on other testimony, that of our earthly instruments, for which the event, in its intrinsic horror, happened in a “very” diluted form and, besides, was slowed down by the long journey through the realm of light that brought us the news. After an hour, the seas and ice (if there were any) of the no longer silent planet boiled up; after three, its rocks melted and its mountains crumbled into valleys in the form of lava. After ten hours, the entire planet was reduced to vapor, along with all the delicate and subtle works that the combined labor of chance and necessity, through innumerable trials and errors, had perhaps created there, and along with all the poets and wise men who had perhaps examined that sky, and had wondered what was the value of so many little lights, and had found no answer. That was the answer.

From Lensculture:

Abelardo Morell travels the world and converts full-size rooms (some spare, some ornately rococo) into immense camera obscura devices. He brings the outside in through a tiny pin-hole, and by the alchemy of optics, the outside is projected quite naturally upside down superimposing and hugging the surfaces of everything in the room. Then, he photographs the resulting “installation” with his 8 x 10 view camera and enlarges the prints to mural size.

The effect is dizzying and delightful. And the photographs get better and better as you study them and soak in the exquisite overlapping details.

More here.

From BBC News:

Bacteria that kill off male butterflies can actually lead to increased promiscuity in female butterflies, scientists have found. The Current Biology study looked at the Hypolimnas bolina species, common to the Pacific and SE Asia. The team discovered as the bacteria caused male populations to fall, females mated more frequently to boost their chances of becoming impregnated.

The study has revealed the bacteria’s powerful effect on mating systems. The Wolbachia bacteria are passed from mother to son in some species of tropical butterfly, and kill the embryo before it hatches. The bacteria are so effective, some islands can be left with one male to every 100 females. Theoretically, an excess of females should lead to an increase of mating opportunities for males and a decrease in the average number of matings per female, as males become increasingly rare.

More here.

Walton Ford. The Forsaken. 1999.

Watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper; 60 x 40 inches.

“When I painted the monkey wife, I painted her individually and I named it ‘The Forsaken.’ And my idea is that what Richard Burton did as part of his colonial enterprise was to actually learn languages. When he would go to a new place…he would have a woman set up house for him and become his mistress. And he said he would learn the language that way. So this thing with the monkey wife seemed to be perverse once you know that about him.”
— Walton Ford

More here & here.
The just-ended Brooklyn Museum show here.

Thanks to my friend Vimala Mohammed.

Susan McGrath in Smithsonian Magazine:

The long-billed vulture, Gyps indicus, is one of three vulture species that serve as sanitation engineers in India, Nepal and Pakistan. For thousands of years, they have fed on livestock carcasses. As many as 40 million of the birds once inhabited the region. Obstreperous flocks of vultures thronged carcass dumps, nested on every tall tree and cliff ledge, and circled high overhead, seemingly omnipresent. In Delhi, perching vultures ornamented the tops of every ancient ruin. In Mumbai, vultures circled the Parsi community’s hilltop sanctuary. Parsis, who are members of the Zoroastrian religion, lay their dead atop stone Towers of Silence so that vultures can devour the flesh. This practice, according to Parsi tradition, protects dead bodies from the defiling touch of earth, water or fire.

But across the subcontinent all three species of Gyps vultures are disappearing. Dead livestock lie uneaten and rotting. These carcasses are fueling a population boom in feral dogs and defeating the government’s efforts to combat rabies. Vultures have become so rare that the Parsi in Mumbai have resorted to placing solar reflectors atop the Towers of Silence to hasten the decomposition of bodies. International conservation groups now advocate the capture of long-billed, white-backed and slender-billed vultures for conservation breeding.

More here.

Jenn Shreve reviews  Richter’s Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man by Susan Elizabeth Hough, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The shift of science from an individual to a team pursuit has caused some to opine that the days of the great scientific biography are numbered, too. Yet there are still a few luminaries of science who have not yet gotten their due in print. Among them, until now, was Charles Richter.

That it took so long for a biography to appear is surprising because Richter’s life is about as ripe for the book treatment as it gets. A reluctant seismologist, he made important contributions to the field, including though not limited to the scale that bears his name. But as we learn in Susan Elizabeth Hough’s “Richter’s Scale: Measure of an Earthquake, Measure of a Man,” noteworthy professional accomplishments tell only a fraction of the story.

Richter, it turns out, was also an avid nudist, a frustrated but prolific poet, a Trekkie, a devoted backpacker profiled in the pages of Field and Stream, and a philandering spouse who was quite possibly in love with his sister and whose globe-trotting wife may have been a lesbian. While that may not sound all that unusual to the modern-day San Franciscan, keep in mind that the guy was born in 1900.

More here.

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

There is a silent catastrophe going on all around us. Every day, 100,000 people die of a condition that might be curable. If it were an ordinary disease it would be called a plague, a pandemic, and epic public-health plans would be drawn up. So why aren’t we devoting more of our resources to finding a cure for this one? Because it’s old age.

In his thought-provoking book, Bryan Appleyard has talked to many of the scientists who think something should be done. They are known as the “life-extension” movement, or, more vividly, the promoters of “medical immortality”. There is no reason in principle why our bodies should be allowed to fall apart and stop working. We could be “medically immortal”: still killable by violence or accident, but otherwise going on and on, like a race of those Ariston washing machines from the 1980s. And if such a thing is possible, delay is immoral. Here is Aubrey de Grey, a beer-loving Englishman who takes an engineering approach to pedantic objections: if, for example, clearing out the garbage that builds up in your cells works, we don’t need to know exactly how it works, we should just start doing it right away. Another researcher says: “It would be insane not to hit the ‘save’ key on you and your life.” The dream is a procedure that would take the old you and repair your bodily damage (perhaps using nanobots, rebuilding you from the inside out), thus restoring you to the physical age of 29. Would you take the pill?

More here.

In the Asia Times Online, a review of Nick Robins new book on the British East India Company, The Corporation that Changed the World.

From the 17th to the 19th century, the East India Company shocked its age with executive malpractice, stock-market excesses and human oppression, outdoing the felons of our times such as Enron. Its contemporaries across the political spectrum saw the “Company” as an overbearing and fundamentally problematic institution.

Karl Marx called it the standard bearer of Britain’s “moneyocracy”. Adam Smith, the economist deeply suspicious of mighty corporations, was horrified at the way in which the Company “oppresses and domineers” in India. Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, declared India to be “radically and irretrievably ruined through the Company’s continual drain of wealth”.

Established in 1600 by royal charter, the Company’s operations stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan. Colonial rule in India was the eventual outcome of the Company’s forays, but its ultimate purpose was profit-making with an eye to shareholders and the annual dividend in London.

Personal and private profits were the abiding motives of this Company, which “reversed the centuries-old flow of wealth from West to East and engineered a great switch in global development” (p 7). Robins challenges romantic reinterpretations of the Company’s past, now under way in Britain, for ignoring the abuse, misery, devastation and plunder that marked its presence in India. His point is that the Company should be assessed on the basis of its extortion, corruption and impunity rather than peripheral contributions to “discovering” Oriental culture.

Via Crooked Timber, Anatol Rappaport, best known for the the most successful strategy in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, “Tit-for-Tat” (a very important finding in political science, economics, and biology), is dead.

For Anatol Rapoport, rationality wasn’t all that rational. It was slippery and deceptive and tended to default to the selfish interests of the individual, only to hurt collective interests. Examples abounded: If every farmer kept as many cows as possible, soon there would be no grass to graze on, and all cows would die. If everyone ran for the exit of a burning building at once, no one would get out. If every fisherman took the maximum catch, the fishery would soon be depleted.

He believed war was no different: Belligerent factions actually work toward the same goal — to kill — in what appears (to them) as rational behaviour. The result is that all humanity is needlessly threatened by war and conflict.

Among the most versatile minds of the 20th century, Dr. Rapoport applied his protean talents in mathematics, psychology and game theory to peace and conflict resolution. The first professor of peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto, he is known as one of the world’s leading lights in the application of mathematical models to the social sciences.

“This is a great loss for the program, the centre, Canada, and, indeed, all of humanity,” said Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the program’s successor, the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at U of T. “He was a man of staggering intellectual scope.”

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Ian Buruma profiles Tariq Ramadan.

Tariq Ramadan, Muslim, scholar, activist, Swiss citizen, resident of Britain, active on several continents, is a hard man to pin down. People call him “slippery,” “double-faced,” “dangerous,” but also “brilliant,” a “bridge-builder,” a “Muslim Martin Luther.” He wants Muslims to become active citizens of the West but four years ago was himself refused permission to enter the U.S. He could not take up the teaching position he’d been offered at the University of Notre Dame. Oxford University took him on as a visiting fellow instead.

To his admirers, he is a courageous reformer who works hard to fill the chasm between Muslim orthodoxy and secular democracy. Young European Muslims flock to his talks, which are widely distributed on audiocassettes. A brilliant speaker, he inspires his audiences, rather like Black Power leaders did in the 1960s, by instilling a sense of pride. A friend of mine saw him last year in Rotterdam, talking to a hall packed with around 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. To them he had the aura of an Islamic superstar. Even my friend, an Iranian-born Dutchman with entirely secular views, was impressed by the eloquence of this Muslim thinker, who wishes to press his faith into the mainstream of European life. His critics see things differently: they accuse him of anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, promoting the oppression of women and waging a covert holy war on the liberal West.

I first met Ramadan last year in Paris. The French news magazine Le Point had organized a debate between the two of us on Muslims in Europe (or “Eurabia,” as some fearful people are now calling my native continent). I was instructed to “really push him.” But if the hope of Le Point was for sparks to fly, they were disappointed. Ramadan is much too smooth for sparks. Slim, handsome and dressed in a very elegant suit, he spoke softly in fluent English, with a slight French accent. His first languages were French and Arabic, but he heard English at home in Geneva, spoken mostly by visiting Pakistanis.

Perhaps I didn’t push hard enough. We agreed on most issues, and even when we didn’t (he was more friendly toward the pope than I was), our “debate” refused to catch fire. So when I set off for London a few months later to talk to him again, I felt that I had seen the polished Ramadan, the international performer who, in the words of Reuel Marc Gerecht, an expert on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute, sounds “like a British diplomat at the U.N.,” the kind who leaves you with “a strong impression that prevarication is in the DNA.”