From Nature:

Brain division could help explain stereotyping, religious conflict and racism.

How do we know what another person is thinking? New research suggests we use the same brain region that we do when thinking about ourselves — but only as long as we judge the person to be similar to us. When second-guessing the opinions and feelings of those unlike ourselves, this brain region does not get involved, the new research shows. This may mean we are more likely to fall back on stereotyping — potentially helping to explain the causes of social tensions such as racism or religious disputes.

Neuroscientists led by Adrianna Jenkins of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, made the discovery when trying to deduce how the brain weighs up the thoughts of others. As Jenkins explains, judging how others are feeling is a valuable social skill, because we have no way of seeing inside another person’s head. “How do we go about bridging the gap between our minds and others’ minds?” Jenkins asks.

The answer seems to be that it depends on whether we feel we identify with that person or not, Jenkins says. In other words, how our brain handles the question of someone’s attitude to anything, from traffic jams to impressionist art, depends entirely on how we feel we relate to them as a person.

More here.

—
—How long will it last?  A hundred years maybe.
Aaah, a hundred years ain’t nuthin, here’s what I’m feeling: we can do that with a Guantanamo detainee’s hands tied behind his back (and trussed to a ceiling). —Frank Yardro.

(3/17/2003)
Del Ray Cross

Here’s my war poem: fuck the
almighty war! I climb the
steps up to Whaleship Plaza,
walking while writing again.
“No Smoking!” But look at this
war and sunshine in the streets!
And little plastic airplanes in
the sky. Coit Tower rising like a
missile toward the sun. Pretty
day, sunshine, a little wind, and
chainsaws. White roses and
tiger lilies. I can’t take it anymore!
So I sit down in the sunshine
with my fucking war poem.

==

In the NYT:

Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.

Rohan de Silva, an aide to Mr. Clarke, said the author died after suffering from breathing problems, The Associated Press reported.

From his detailed forecast of telecommunications satellites in 1945, more than a decade before the first orbital rocket flight, to his co-creation, with the director Stanley Kubrick, of the classic science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Mr. Clarke was both prophet and promoter of the idea that humanity’s destiny lay beyond the confines of Earth.

Other early advocates of a space program argued that it would pay for itself by jump-starting new technology. Mr. Clarke set his sights higher. Paraphrasing William James, he suggested that exploring the solar system could serve as the “moral equivalent” of war, giving an outlet to energies that might otherwise lead to nuclear holocaust.

In case you haven’t seen it, Obama on race in America:

You can whack them with a shovel. You can shoot them, poison, stab or throttle them. You can threaten their families and you can hound them in the press; you can put them down any way you like, but some artists refuse to stay down. What does this tell us? That artists are the undead? Or, worse, that criticism is in crisis? At almost every international art fair over the past few years, there has been a panel discussion about the crisis in art criticism. I have found myself talking about the topic in London, Madrid, Berlin and Miami. Wherever critics are paid to gather (you wouldn’t catch us in the same room otherwise), they go on about the crisis. These debates have become an occupational hazard – but they also pay well. If I had known there was money in it, I would have invented a crisis myself.

more from The Guardian here.

To mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Slate has asked a number of writers who originally supported the war to answer the question, “Why did we get it wrong?” We have invited contributions from the best-known “liberal hawks,” many of whom participated in two previous Slate debates about the war, the first before it began in fall of 2002, the second in early 2004. We will be publishing their responses through the week.

more from Slate here.

From Nature:

Researchers have used a new technique to identify networks of genes linked to obesity in both mice and humans. The procedure is more comprehensive than the traditional method of hunting for genes associated with disease, and is already being used to identify new drug targets. Over the past year, a flurry of studies have revealed genetic variations associated with disease. These ‘genome-wide association studies’ have been used to find variants associated with everything from heart disease to diabetes.

Traditionally, single genes are linked with particular diseases by locating genetic variants present in people who have the disease and identifying the part of a chromosome associated with that disease. Then researchers have to track down the gene on the chromosome, without knowing what it does or why it would be involved. The new approach looks at changes in expression of already-known genes, and finds networks of genes associated with disease, rather than single switches. “Instead of the simple ‘turn the light on or off’ analogy, we would view this as a network of these switches,” says Schadt.

More here.

Continuing Mark Blyth’s “Amazon customer reviews as social criticism” theme (earlier instance posted by Robin here), we have this:

This costume has caused our family all sorts of confusion. We dressed up our son in this pimp suit and took him trick-or-treating downtown. It was pretty crowded on the streets and we lost him for a bit, but when we found him and got him home he took off the costume and he had turned into a 40 year old black man with a strut and a disturbing tendency to want to slap around my wife and teenage daughter. I guess it’s nice that he doesn’t wet the bed anymore, and he says he can find work for our daughter, which is something he has never shown an interest in before, but we don’t understand why he keeps wanting to call her Suga Smoov. Was there some sort of chemical in the fabric that we were supposed to wash out? We think perhaps we should have washed the costume before we put it on little Stevie (who insists we now refer to him as “The Hand”).

More here.

William Deresiewicz in The Nation:

There’s no better way to take the profession’s temperature, it seems to me, than by scanning the Modern Language Association Job Information List, the quarterly catalog of faculty openings in American English departments. If you want to know where an institution is at, take a look at what it wants. The most striking fact about this year’s list is that the lion’s share of positions is in rhetoric and composition. That is, not in a field of literature at all but in the teaching of expository writing, the “service” component of an English department’s role within the university. Add communications and professional and technical writing, and you’ve got more than a third of the list. Another large fraction of openings, perhaps 15 percent, is in creative writing. Apparently, kids may not want to read anymore, but they all want to write. And watch. Forward-thinking English departments long ago decided to grab film studies before it got away, and the list continues to reflect that bit of subterfuge.

That’s more than half the list, and we still haven’t gotten to any, well, literature. When we do, we find that the largest share of what’s left, nearly a third, is in American literature. Even more significant is the number of positions, again about a third, that call for particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group. “Subfields might include transnational, hemispheric, ethnic and queer literatures.” “Postcolonial emphasis” is “required.” “Additional expertise in African-American and/or ethnic American literature highly desirable.”

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

If he hadn’t been a poet, Cavafy said, he would have been a historian. ‘In part to examine an era/and in part to while away the time,/last night I picked up to read/ a collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions,’ is how he begins one poem. The historical periods that interested him were the Hellenic Age (fourth to first century BC), the Roman (first century BC to fourth century AD) and the late Byzantine (11th to 14th century), with their cosmopolitan way of life, their high civilisation and the political and religious turmoil that eventually did them in. Small episodes or debacles in the history of old Alexandrians, Antiochians, Seleucians or the Hellenes of Egypt, Syria and Medea provide his subjects. Cavafy’s historical poems are both nostalgic and realistic. He may grow dreamy – as he often does – thinking of some beautiful young man’s heroic life and early death, but he doesn’t forget the cynical power struggles of the day. He’s ‘more coroner than commentator, equally disinclined to offer blame or grant the benefit of the doubt’, is how Seamus Heaney puts it in his foreword to Haviaras’s translations. Tyrants with one mad idea in their head fascinated Cavafy. He has six poems, for example, about Julian the Apostate, a vicious fourth-century Roman emperor who tried to abolish Christianity and return to an intolerant version of paganism.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

You can accuse the disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of many things in his decision to flout the law by soliciting the services of a pricey prostitute: hypocrisy, egomania, sophomoric impulsiveness and self-indulgence, delusional ineptitude and boneheadedness. But one trait decidedly not on display in Mr. Spitzer’s splashy act of whole-life catabolism was originality. It’s all been done before, every snickering bit of it, and not just by powerful “risk-taking” alpha men who may or may not be enriched for the hormone testosterone. It’s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy.

Even the “oldest profession” that figured so prominently in Mr. Spitzer’s demise is old news. Nonhuman beings have been shown to pay for sex, too. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University and the University of South Bohemia described transactions among great grey shrikes, elegant raptorlike birds with silver capes, white bellies and black tails that, like 90 percent of bird species, form pair bonds to breed. A male shrike provisions his mate with so-called nuptial gifts: rodents, lizards, small birds or large insects that he impales on sticks. But when the male shrike hankers after extracurricular sex, he will offer a would-be mistress an even bigger kebab than the ones he gives to his wife — for the richer the offering, the researchers found, the greater the chance that the female will agree to a fly-by-night fling.

More here.

William Dalrymple in the New York Review of Books:

What happened in Khairpur was a small revolution—a middle-class victory over the forces of reactionary feudal landlordism. More astonishingly, it was a revolution that was reproduced across the country. To widespread surprise, the elections in Pakistan were free and fair; and Pakistanis voted heavily in favor of liberal centrist parties opposed to both the mullahs and the army. Here, in a country normally held up in the more Islamophobic right-wing press of Western countries as the epitome of “what went wrong” in the Islamic world, a popular election resulted in an unequivocal vote for moderate, secular democracy.

More here.

Our own  Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I can’t stop thinking that Eliot Spitzer’s downfall is extraordinary in its Oedipal dimensions. I don’t mean this in the Freudian sense, but in the classical. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex a man, Oedipus, attempts to engineer his own fate in the face of a terrible prophecy. In the end, Oedipus comes to realize that his own actions, meant to liberate him from this course of fate, have been the agents of its realization. He declares:

No human hand but mine has done this deed.
   What need for me to see,
When nothing’s left that’s sweet to look upon?

It has been noted again and again in the Spitzer story that ironies abound, multiplying quicker than they can be sorted out. This is a man who seemingly went out of his way to commit a crime that A) he would eventually get caught doing and, B) that he would have no defense against when caught. As a prosecutor Spitzer made enemies — lifelong abiding enemies in the banking world, the Republican political establishment, and organized crime. He then frequented a call girl service (which he had to know was likely tied to organized crime), used bank transfers to pay for it, and crossed state lines in the process. He was tempting fate, surely. More like sticking his finger in its eye. (Speaking of eyes, it must be noted here that Oedipus ends up blinding himself. Spitzer, meanwhile, hands his governorship over to the blind David Paterson.) If this is not hubris, the tragic flaw of arrogance, what is? Let us not forget, further, that Spitzer is a man who chose to define himself, and his political career, in opposition to corruption and to hypocrisy.

But it gets more intriguing.

More here.

A R Chughtai. The Shepherd Girl.

Water color on paper.

More on this illustrious Pakistani painter (1899-1975) here and here.

Arthur Ituassu’s internal Amartya Sen guides him through Goa, in openDemocracy:

For a Brazilian, this is a very interesting place to be. It is so clear that both former colonies of Portugal (Brazil 1500-1882, Goa 1510-1961) are products of a shared history – Portugal’s pioneering globalisation – that enables people from widely distant territories to feel at home in the other. When, for example, a mass in Portuguese is celebrated on Sunday morning at the church of Imaculada Conceição, both the oceans and the centuries between Brazil and Goa seem to fall away.

But a common history, as Amartya Sen argues, is no excuse from reasoning. A Brazilian in Goa can equally see that everything here is also “similar, but different”. The space for human creation and intervention – for making it new – must never be suppressed. It is such intervention that has also made Brazilia and Goan cultures – their shared histories notwithstanding – different.

Goa is India, and the Portuguese influence could not change this fact. This is a place where Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Arabs and the non-religious have been talking to each other for centuries – even though some people are (often violently) trying to sell the idea of a “pure” Hindu India. In that particular sense, a Brazilian’s journey through Goa is one that triggers reflection on one’s own self amid Goan/Indian complexity in order to come to a better understanding of one’s place in the world.

Harry Kreisler discusses the US’s response to terrorism with Stephen Holmes:

John Mullan reviews Rónán McDonald’s The Death of the Critic in the TLS:

Nowadays, there are more critical responses than ever, but critical authority has been devolved from the experts. McDonald surveys the rise of blogs and readers’ reviews, of television and newspaper polls and reading groups, under the heading “We Are All Critics Now”. He argues that the demise of critical expertise brings not a liberating democracy of taste, but conservatism and repetition. “The death of the critic” leads not to the sometimes vaunted “empowerment” of the reader, but to “a dearth of choice”. It is hardly a surprise to find him taking issue with John Carey’s anti-elitist What Good Are the Arts? (2005), with its argument that one person’s aesthetic judgement cannot be better or worse than another’s, making taste an entirely individual matter. McDonald proposes that cultural value judgements, while not objective, are shared, communal, consensual and therefore open to agreement as well as dispute. But the critics who could help us to reach shared evaluations have opted out. The distance between Ivory Tower and Grub Street has never been greater. While other academic disciplines have seen the rise of the professional popularizer of art, music and film, literary expertise has sealed itself off in the academy. McDonald believes that the main reason for the gulf between academic and non-academic criticism is “the turn from evaluative and aesthetic concerns in the university humanities’ departments”. He does not bemoan the influence of the Richard and Judy Book Club or the internet; he blames his fellow academics.

If you ever wanted to know a little more about Cosma Shalizi, Norman Geras has a profile:

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you’ve ever changed your mind? > Whether or not we have free will; reading Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room convinced me that (in every meaningful sense) we do.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > The old Enlightenment/liberal thesis that it is neither necessary nor desirable to have a single vision of the good enforced on society. (I wish I could answer ‘individual rationality and morality are delicate social products’ or something like that, but, sadly, no.)

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > That there are any such things as discrete, distinct civilizations, cultures, races, etc., with enduring essences, destinies or interests. There are only ‘real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live’.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies permanently shaped how I think about the goals and means of politics and progressive social change; I like to think of myself as a sort of Left Popperian.

In my reply to a comment a few days ago I referred to a man I’d done some carpentry work for, maybe 25 years ago. He’d just retired, so was in his late sixties at the time.

Jos lives across the road from my daughter and when I go there I often turn around in his driveway. About a year ago when I pulled in, there he was on his riding mower —by then he was in his early nineties. He got off, came over to my truck and we chatted. Jos has always been an upbeat man with a gentle demeanor and practical outlook.  In the conversation his physical condition came up, which was excellent for a man his age; but as we talked further he suggested this thing called life might be getting a little old.

I asked, “You’re not telling me you’re ready to check out, are you Jos?”

He just grinned from ear to ear and said, “Anytime, Jim. Any time.”

Then I came across this poem by Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

Autumn Song

Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
Knowest thou not? and how the chief
Of joys seems–not to suffer pain?

Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
Bound up at length for harvesting,
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf

..

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the “writing process,” as I believe it’s called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.

But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

more from The Village Voice here.