Teatro UNAM is a mobile theater company based in Mexico D.F.  Hauling a specially engineered trailer that transforms into a stage complete with prop and wardrobe storage, the company travels through Mexico.  Upon each stop, the company themselves set up the stage and perform, often in rural areas where stage drama is unheard of, before driving on.  The video shows one such transformation, in a high school in Mexico City, for a performance of Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World,” under the direction of Alonso Ruizpalacios.

While a great wind of change was blowing in the social realm, political speeches breathed dogmatism and preached (often unwittingly) the imposition of dictatorship. For those who, like me, came from a land of “real socialism,” all this was a chimera.

At first glance, this heritage has almost entirely disappeared (with the exception of the peculiar popularity of French Trotskyite leaders in presidential elections). But, a few years later, the project of a violent social transformation reappeared in the doctrines dubbed neoconservative. The neoconservatives entered the corridors of power in the US and they now have influence in France, too. The permanent revolution that the 68ers used to preach has changed in its objectives but not in its nature: the eradication of the enemy is still what is called for. And often by the same people as in 1968! This is a heritage that truly does deserve to be abandoned.

more from Prospect Magazine here.

Greg Miller in ScienceNOW:

Say you have a load of donated food to deliver to an orphanage in Uganda. But due to circumstances beyond your control, you’re forced to make a hard choice: give some of the children enough meals to stave off hunger for several days and let the rest go hungry, or evenly distribute a smaller amount of food so that each child feels full for just a few hours. A study published online today in Science is one of the first to investigate how the brain wrestles with such morally charged tradeoffs.

Ming Hsu, a behavioral economist now at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and colleagues Cédric Anen and Steven Quartz at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity in 26 volunteers as they grappled with a version of the orphanage conundrum.

NEW YORK—Director Michel Gondry has spent nearly a week developing his latest flight of artistic fancy by playing make-believe in a large corrugated cardboard box, sources close to the daring filmmaker announced Tuesday.

The 45-year-old Gondry, who directed the critically acclaimed films Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind, reportedly dragged the washing-machine box into the foyer of his $2.1 million Upper West Side apartment after it was discarded by a neighbor Saturday morning. Using only a crayon and his imagination, Gondry was able to effortlessly transform the box into a submarine, a spaceship, and a castle.

He also reportedly turned the box into a super-secret fort.

more from The Onion here.

Karen Wright in Psychology Today:

It starts innocently enough, perhaps the first time you recognize your own reflection.

You’re not yet 2 years old, brushing your teeth, standing on your steppy stool by the bathroom sink, when suddenly it dawns on you: That foam-flecked face beaming back from the mirror is you.

You. Yourself. Your very own self.

It’s a revelation—and an affliction. Human infants have no capacity for self-awareness. Then, between 18 and 24 months of age, they become conscious of their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations—thereby embarking on a quest that will consume much of their lives. For many modern selves, the first shock of self-recognition marks the beginning of a lifelong search for the one “true” self and for a feeling of behaving in accordance with that self that can be called authenticity.

A hunger for authenticity guides us in every age and aspect of life. It drives our explorations of work, relationships, play, and prayer. Teens and twentysomethings try out friends, fashions, hobbies, jobs, lovers, locations, and living arrangements to see what fits and what’s “just not me.” Midlifers deepen commitments to career, community, faith, and family that match their self-images, or feel trapped in existences that seem not their own. Elders regard life choices with regret or satisfaction based largely on whether they were “true” to themselves.

Questions of authenticity determine our regard for others, as well. They dominated the presidential primaries: Was Hillary authentic when she shed a tear in New Hampshire? Was Obama earnest when his speechwriters cribbed lines from a friend’s oration?

‘If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him,’ Voltaire stated. This premise, as expressed in what is possibly one of the most famous lines in the history of philosophy, perfectly summarizes the paradoxical relationship Western societies have had to the idea of faith or belief in the existence of a divine being since the days of the Enlightenment. While most of us seem to believe that there is no such thing as God, and have by and large accepted the rather bleak fact that there is ultimately no meaning to our existence, many of us are (secretly) still searching for a higher power to provide an explanation for the mystery, marvel and misery of the world around us. This desire to conceive of a force capable of providing some guidance and direction for the life we live remains firmly engrained no matter how little belief in God persists.

In the sphere of visual art, Belgian artist Kris Martin provides one of the most striking explorations of this dilemma of faith. Martin is a believer, it would seem, and his work clearly challenges the generally accepted assessment of our life as stripped of meaning, without any enduring substance. Most of his practice circles (in one way or another) around the subjects of life and death, and the ephemerality and fragility of our existence. While it seems that a large number of contemporary artists tackle issues of such significance, it is in fact rather unusual to come across one whose work and artistic motifs are so clearly related to considering these fundamental questions, and whose own position is firmly rooted in a belief in Christian values and the existence of God.

more from Frieze here.

Over at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson reviews Philip Glass’s Satyagraha:

Satyagraha tells, in non-linear and largely non-verbal fashion, the story of Gandhi’s struggles on behalf of South Africa’s Indian population. During the course of this twenty-year fight for civil rights, he developed the philosophy and political tactics he would eventually use to liberate India from British colonialism. These tactics went on to inspire Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and other liberators around the world. But in this period, they were still a work in progress, paid for in risk and blood.

Satyagraha juxtaposes symbolic stagings of key episodes in Gandhi’s struggle with Sanskrit quotations from the Bhagavad Gita, among the most sacred texts of Hinduism. While to some this may seem an obvious choice, it is actually a curious one, as much of the Gita is about why its hero, Arjuna, must go to battle. It’s hardly a nonviolent text.

Yet it is a text, perhaps above all, about knowing and fulfilling one’s holy mission, of virtue in the face of adversity, of duty and moral responsibility. This is why Satyagraha appealed to me as “Jewish”: not because of its composer’s ethnicity, but because it captures the power of sacred text to inspire sacred action.

If you haven’t seen Der Untergang (The Downfall), rent it. It’s really good. Meanwhile here is a pretty funny parody (sorry Hillary supporters, but it IS funny, no?). Warning: Strong Language.

[Thanks to Tony Cobitz.]

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee interviews Neil Gross, author of Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher:

Q: A common account of Rorty’s career has him starting out as an analytic philosopher who then undertakes a kind of “turn to pragmatism” in the 1970s, thereby reviving interest in a whole current of American philosophy that had become a preserve of specialists. Your telling is different. What is the biggest misconception embedded in that more familiar thumbnail version?

A: Rorty didn’t start out as an analytic philosopher. His masters thesis at Chicago was on Whitehead’s metaphysics, and while his dissertation at Yale on potentiality was appreciative in part of analytic contributions, one of its major aims was to show how much value there might be in dialogue between analytic and non-analytic approaches. As Bruce Kuklick has shown, dialogue between various philosophical traditions, and pluralism, were watchwords of the Yale department, and Rorty was quite taken with these metaphilosophical ideals.

Rorty only became seriously committed to the analytic enterprise after graduate school while teaching at Wellesley, his first job. This conversion was directly related to his interest in moving up in the academic hierarchy to an assistant professorship in a top ranked graduate program. At nearly all such programs at the time, analytic philosophy had come to rule the roost. This was very much the case at Princeton, which hired him away from Wellesley, and his commitment to analytic philosophy solidified even more during the years when he sought tenure there.

But the conventional account is flawed in another way as well.

Over at Princeton University Press, Chapter 1 of Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human:

The online fieldsite of Coming of Age in Second Life might seem utterly different than Indonesia, but like my earlier work this book touches on broad issues concerning selfhood and society, and like my earlier work this book is a methodological experiment. Building upon a significant body of prior research on virtual worlds, I argue that ethnography holds great promise for illuminating culture online, but not because it is traditional or old-fashioned. Ethnography has a special role to play in studying virtual worlds because it has anticipated them. Virtual before the Internet existed, ethnography has always produced a kind of virtual knowledge. Borrowing a phrase from Malinowski, Clifford Geertz argued that the goal of ethnographic understanding is to achieve the “native’s point of view” (Geertz 1983). The quotation from Malinowski that started this book asked you to “imagine yourself ” in a new place (Malinowski 1922:4), to be virtually there. Representations of persons in virtual worlds are known as “avatars”; Malinowski’s injunction to “imagine yourself ” in an unfamiliar place underscores how anthropology has always been about avatarizing the self, standing virtually in the shoes (or on the shores) of another culture.

Pauline Melville in the FT:

The Wapisiana are savannah Indians. Their territory stretches from the south of Guyana over and into the north of Brazil. Wapisiana is one of two Arawak languages in Guyana. Like many of South America’s indigenous languages, it is under threat from the languages of the old imperial powers – in this case English and Portuguese – and from an invading way of life that has been imposed uneasily on the culture. School lessons are taught in English and, until recently, pupils speaking Wapisiana were punished.

Colette Melville is a sturdily built, lively Wapisiana woman, as hard-working as you have to be when there is no running water or electricity in the house. Wapisiana is her first language. When I suggested that we put some sort of dictionary together, she was enthusiastic. But neither of us had the skills of a lexicographer, or knew anything about phonetics or how to agree on orthography with a language that was barely written down. Even the name Wapisiana is not standardised: Wapishana, Wapityan, Wapitschana, Matisana, Vapidiana, Uapixana have all appeared in literature. In the end we just started writing down words in notebooks. “The correct pronunciation is ‘Wapichan’,” said Colette. “And we are the Wapichannao – the people who come from the west. We’ll call it the Wapichan dictionary.”

Samuel Johnson has another definition of the dictionary-maker: “A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” We set about the drudgery.

From The Washington Post:

As we consider who will be our next first lady (or first laddie), Cokie Roberts introduces us to the women who pioneered this most ill-defined of jobs. Ladies of Liberty also portrays a bevy of bluestockings, educators, explorers and even a few intrepid nuns, but it is the first ladies — especially the affable and politically astute Dolley Madison — who steal the show. This might be a good Mother’s Day gift for Michelle Obama, Cindy McCain or even Bill Clinton because the role has evolved surprisingly little.

Although one can imagine Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison having her own political career at a later time in our nation’s history, the first ladies chronicled here overwhelmingly saw their jobs solely in terms of what they could do for their husbands.

More here.

Myles Burnyeat: On 24 April 1993 I took part in a popular weekly BBC radio programme, entitled Ad Lib., chaired by Robert Robinson, in which people in odd professions talked about what they did. Once upon a time, when I was a young fellow at University College London, the BBC would regularly broadcast interesting philosophical talks by the likes of Gilbert Ryle, David Pears, and Bernard Williams, and publish them subsequently in a wonderful weekly journal (sadly, now defunct) called The Listener, which would appear on the newsstands alongside the Economist, Spectator, and New Statesman. Then we were mainstream, not an odd profession. But now the BBC had reclassified us as an oddity, worthy of Robert Robinson’s splendidly acerbic attention alongside two varieties of psychotherapist (broadcast in alternate weeks, lest they fall into a quarrel), lighthouse keepers, and other queer folk. We did not complain. For a moment, queer as we might be, we had the attention of the whole country.

more from Eurozine here.

In the Spring 2008  Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute (pdf, p. 18).

Aaron Clause has spent nearly three years modelling the statistics of terrorism, but holds  little hope that a mathematical model can predict whether a given man will walk a bomb into a given cafe on a given afternoon. He does believe that in large enough social systems, the capricious behaviors of individuals seem to fade in the face of collective patterns. “A classic question that many historians have asked over the years is, ‘Where does individual control end and statistical behavior take over?’” Clauset says. A physicist and computer scientist by training, he is pursuing that question.

His work to date has led him to conclude that terrorist attacks conform to patterns, at least on a global scale. In February 2007, Clauset, a Santa fe Institute postdoc, and his partners maxwell young (now a graduate student at the university of Waterloo) and Skrede Gleditsch (a reader at the university of essex) published a study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution that made a novel claim: the frequency of severe terrorist attacks, when taken worldwide, seems to follow a remarkably simple equation. the statistical distribution fits severe events like 9/11 to the same curve as more common but less severe ones that kill a dozen or so people. the pattern suggests that such rare and large events are not outliers, as was previously thought, but are somehow interconnected with the smaller attacks. the authors claim that if an underlying connection exists, then taking  measures to discourage small-scale attacks might also prevent severe ones.

THE GREAT Sicilian mystery writer Leonardo Sciascia once quipped, “A man who dies tragically is, at any moment of his life, a man who will die tragically.” For the historical novelist, this is a potent proposal — essentially, the dramatic key to a story in which the ending is predetermined and plot twists are not an option. In Ron Hansen’s novel “Exiles,” the dramatic inevitable belongs to the five drowned German nuns to whose memory the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins dedicated perhaps his most important work, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” a poem that was neither understood during his lifetime nor terribly well-liked.

Returning to the religious territory of his acclaimed 1991 book, “Mariette in Ecstasy,” Hansen tells the story of the poet-turned-Jesuit seminarian so moved by news of the 1875 shipwreck that he breaks a seven-year abstinence from writing to compose a tribute. Hansen’s novel, like the poem it’s based on, takes up the dramatic scene aboard the Deutschland, a grisly, slow-motion sequence in which 157 people die from exposure, drowning or battering waves after the German steamship ran aground on a sandbar in the North Sea. “They fought with God’s cold — / And they could not and fell to the deck / (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled / With the sea-romp over the wreck.”

more from the LA Times here.

It’s essential to Styron that these larger-than-life figures be shown, even at the pinnacle of their public glory, as creatures of uncertainty and appetite, just as it’s essential that we see Styron himself not merely on the podia of lecture halls or in his book-lined Martha’s Vineyard study but suffering the depredations of chronic prostatitis. (By the way, Styron’s essay on the prostate, originally published in France, is one of the funniest and wisest in the book; I doubt any male reader will walk away from it unaffected.) Urogenital horrors also inform “A Case of the Great Pox,” an eloquent account of Styron’s skirmish with a diagnosis of syphilis during World War II that incorporates a lucid meditation on the disease’s rich and terrible history. Here, as in his novels, Styron demonstrates his genius for revealing the inextricability of the personal from the global.

“Havanas in Camelot” includes three essays in which Styron recounts his friendships with other writers: Truman Capote, James Baldwin and Terry Southern. Of the three, Southern comes across with particular vigor, a Texas libertine whose passionate admiration for, of all people, Henry Green leads him to write a novel called “Flash and Filigree.” “I trust then, Bill,” he remarks, after giving Styron the manuscript, “that you think this will put me in the quality lit game?”

more from the NY Times here.

Patrick Barry in Science News:

It doesn’t take brains to have some smarts. New research shows that even bacteria can evolve to predict upcoming events based on clues, like a dog salivating at the sound of the dinner bell.

“It’s really the first evidence that single-celled organisms — bacteria — also have this ability for associative learning,” says Saeed Tavazoie, a molecular biologist at Princeton University who led the research on E. coli bacteria.

The discovery reveals a kind of predictive intelligence in how microbes interpret sensory cues from their environments. Understanding how this predictive ability affects bacteria’s behavior could help scientists control microbes better, benefitting industry and the treatment of infectious diseases.

When E. coli enters a person’s body, its environment immediately becomes warmer. Later, as the microbe moves into the person’s gut, oxygen becomes scarce. Tavazoie and his colleagues found that warm temperatures alone triggered the microbes to switch to a less efficient, low-oxygen mode. The bacteria anticipated the coming lack of oxygen and were preparing for it, the researchers reported online May 8 in Science.

In Granta an interview with the author of Germany’s most provocative of recent debut novels:

Thirty-year-old Charlotte Roche, born in High Wycombe but raised in Germany, has been a recognizable face in her adopted home country since she started working as a presenter on Viva, the German equivalent of MTV, in the mid-1990s. She went on to write and present programmes and late-night talk shows for Arte and ZDF, and won the highly respected Grimme Prize for television in 2004. But only now that she has written her first book are people ready to take her seriously.

Feuchtgebiete, which translates roughly as ‘wetlands’ or ‘moist patches’, was published by Cologne’s Dumont Verlag earlier this year. It is narrated by eighteen-year-old Helen Memel, an outspoken teenager whose childlike stubbornness is paired with a premature sense of sexual confidence. After a failed attempt to shave her intimate parts, Helen ends up in the Department of Internal Medicine at the Maria Hilf Hospital. She doesn’t leave the ward for the rest of the novel. Surrounded by surgical instruments and humming X-ray machines, she reflects in ever more uncomfortable detail on the eccentric wonders of the female body. It’s an explicit novel, often shockingly so, but also a surprisingly accomplished literary work, which evokes the voice of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the perversion of J.G. Ballard’s Crash and the feminist agenda of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

Feuchtgebiete hasn’t been out of Germany’s newspapers since publication, selling half a million copies.

 In The New Statesman:

One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a “crisis of democracy” from too much participation of the masses. In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard. When they did, it was called an “excess of democracy” and people feared it put too much pressure on the system. The only group that never expressed its opinions too much was the corporate group, because that was the group whose involvement in politics was acceptable.

The commission called for more moderation in democracy and a return to passivity. It said the “institutions of indoctrination” – schools, churches – were not doing their job, and these had to be harsher.

The more reactionary standard was much harsher in its reaction to the events of 1968, in that it tried to repress democracy, which has succeeded to an extent – but not really, because these social and activist movements have now grown. For example, it was unimaginable in 1968 that there would be an international Solidarity group in 1980.

But democracy is even stronger now than it was in 1968.