Snapshot
Charles Tomlinson

……..for Yoshikazu Uehata

Your camera
has caught it all, the lit
angle where ceiling and wall
create their corner, the flame
in the grate, the light
down the window frame
and along the hair
of the girl seated there, her face
not quite in focus —that
is as it should be too,
for, once seen, Eden
is in flight from you, and yet
you have it down complete
with the asymmetries
of journal, cushion, cup
all we might have missed
in the gone moment when
we were living it.

..

From Scientific American:

A type of gene mutation long known to extend the lives of worms, flies and mice also turns up in long-lived humans. Researchers found that among Ashkenazi Jews, those who survived past age 95 were much more likely than their peers to possess one of two similar mutations in the gene for insulinlike growth factor 1 receptor (IGF1R). The mutations seem to make cells less responsive than normal to insulinlike growth factor 1 (IGF 1), a key growth hormone secreted by the liver. In past studies, IGF1 disruption increased the life span of mice by 30 to 40 percent and delayed the onset of age-related diseases in the animals.

The finding suggests that the IGF1R mutations confer added “susceptibility” to longevity, perhaps in concert with other genetic variants, the research team reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. “This is the tip of an iceberg of potential genetic alterations or mutations that are associated with longevity,” says study co-author Pinchas Cohen, a professor and chief of endocrinology at Mattel Children’s Hospital at U.C.L.A. (University of California, Los Angeles).

More here.

Jim Holt in The New Yorker:

Dehaene has spent most of his career plotting the contours of our number sense and puzzling over which aspects of our mathematical ability are innate and which are learned, and how the two systems overlap and affect each other. He has approached the problem from every imaginable angle. Working with colleagues both in France and in the United States, he has carried out experiments that probe the way numbers are coded in our minds. He has studied the numerical abilities of animals, of Amazon tribespeople, of top French mathematics students. He has used brain-scanning technology to investigate precisely where in the folds and crevices of the cerebral cortex our numerical faculties are nestled. And he has weighed the extent to which some languages make numbers more difficult than others. His work raises crucial issues about the way mathematics is taught. In Dehaene’s view, we are all born with an evolutionarily ancient mathematical instinct. To become numerate, children must capitalize on this instinct, but they must also unlearn certain tendencies that were helpful to our primate ancestors but that clash with skills needed today. And some societies are evidently better than others at getting kids to do this. In both France and the United States, mathematics education is often felt to be in a state of crisis. The math skills of American children fare poorly in comparison with those of their peers in countries like Singapore, South Korea, and Japan. Fixing this state of affairs means grappling with the question that has taken up much of Dehaene’s career: What is it about the brain that makes numbers sometimes so easy and sometimes so hard?

More here.

Ron Rosenbaum in Slate:

The latest chapter in the intrigue surrounding The Original of Laura, the elusive, unfinished, unpublished final work of Vladimir Nabokov—a chapter that has unfolded since I last wrote about Laura in Slate—turns out to be a kind of ghost story.   

It involves what might be called the spectral appearance of Nabokov himself to his son, Dmitri, the 73-year-old sole heir who holds Laura’s fate in his hands. This otherworldly manifestation came on the heels of an intense period of worldwide debate among readers and literary figures—debate stirred up by my disclosure that Dmitri was once again inclined to follow his father’s deathbed wish and burn the manuscript, now awaiting its fate in a Swiss bank vault.

“Burn it,” cried playwright Tom Stoppard in the London Times. “Save it,” countered novelist John Banville. Slate readers were passionately divided.

More here.

Juliet Lapidos in Slate:

Italy’s highest appeals court ruled that a 42-year-old workman broke the law by “ostentatiously touching his genitals through his clothing” and must pay a 200 euro fine, the Telegraph reported Friday. The U.K. paper also noted that crotch-grabbing is a common habit among superstitious Italian males, who believe the gesture wards off bad luck. What does the crotch have to do with luck?

It’s the seat of fertility. The crotch grab goes back at least to the pre-Christian Roman era and is closely associated with another superstition called the “evil eye“—the belief that a covetous person can harm you, your children, or your possessions by gazing at you. Cultural anthropologists conjecture that men would try to block such pernicious beams by shielding their genitals, thus protecting their most valued asset: the future fruit of their loins. Over the centuries, the practice shifted. Men covered their generative organs not only to defend against direct malevolence but also in the presence of anything ominous, like a funeral procession.

More here.

From Edge:

BANAJI: What is remarkable about this test, which is called the Implicit Association Test—the IAT—is that it allows you to be a subject in your own experiment. Most scientists do not have the remarkable experience of being the object of study in their own research.

GREENWALD: The IAT provides a useful window into some otherwise difficult-to-detect contents of our minds. In some cases, we find things we did not know were there. It may be “an inconvenient truth” that what’s there is not what we thought was there or want to be there. But I think it is generally something we can come to grips with.

[Click here to take the “PRESIDENTIAL CANDITATES IAT]

Much more here.  [Tell us the results of your IAT in the comments section.]

My friend Fred was recently in Gaza doing his human rights do-goodery work.  He reported (to us, not the human rights organization) that the pickup scene in cafes is digital.  Youth on the prowl use cell phone bluetooths with handles like “toosexyforyou” to flirt and hook up.  (The woman in question apparently proved too sexy for Fred.) Der Spiegel reports that a Berlin-based artist has made this mating dance even easier (via Sci Tech Daily).

A burqa may not be the flirtiest garment ever invented for women. The highly modest head-to-toe robe even shrouds the eyes, so for centuries it’s been difficult for women wearing them to send suggestive signals to men.

But now a German designer has debuted a digitally-enabled burqa that can broadcast a photo of the wearer to nearby mobile phones. Markus Kison calls it the “CharmingBurka,” and says it isn’t forbidden by Islamic law.

A model demonstrated a prototype of Kison’s garment at the Seamless 2008 design and fashion show in Boston, a high-tech fashion event run with support from the Masschusetts Institute of Technology.

Kison says the burqa has a “digital layer” that incorporates a Bluetooth antenna, which lets women “decide for themselves where they want to position themselves virtually.” Nearby mobile phones that also use Bluetooth will light up with any small file a woman chooses to broadcast as her identity — a photo, a cartoon, a text file or even a sound clip.

..
My Aunts
Adam Zagajewski

Always caught up in what they called
the practical side of life
(theory was for Plato),
up to their elbows in furniture, in bedding,
in cupboards and kitchen gardens,
they never neglected the lavender sachets
that turned a linen closet to a meadow

The practical side of life,
like the Moon’s unlighted face,
didn’t lack for mysteries;
when Christmastime drew near,
life became pure praxis
and resided temporarily in hallways,
took refuge in suitcases and satchels.

And when somebody died–it happened
even in our family, alas–
my aunts, preoccupied
with death’s practical side,
forgot at last about the lavender,
whose frantic scent bloomed selflessly
beneath a heavy snow of sheets.
Don’t just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,   
………………the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without sound.

Translated by Clare Cavanaugh

..

I drove a car across the country once. It took three weeks and was financed by a rock magazine. Two years after the trip, a handful of people from California with exceptionally comfortable office chairs considered making a movie out of my experience. It was a very confusing process. Enthusiastic strangers with German eyeglasses kept asking me how I imagined this film would look, which I found difficult to elucidate; I assumed it would look like the video for Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway,” partially because of the lyrical content but mostly because I (sort of) looked Canadian before I grew a beard. That was not the answer they were anticipating. I was given a strong impression they were hoping I would say it would be a lot like Trainspotting, although maybe they were just trying to figure out if I could put them in contact with local drug dealers. They also wanted me to sign a 780-page contract that would give time control over my “life rights,” which meant they would have been able to make me an ancillary character in You, Me and Dupree.

I assume the hypothetical Road Movie I was not involved with would have been built on the most elementary of Road Movie clichés: where you’re going doesn’t matter as much as how you get there. But that philosophy raises at least three questions, some of which are equally cliché but all of which are hard to answer: What is a Road Movie, really? Why do so many directors (from so many different eras) long to make them? And what makes movement any more inherently interesting than—or even all that different from—staying in one place?

more from The Believer here.

We have a special prejudice about materials. The Japanese have Zen words to describe the beautiful way in which stone, wood and other natural materials age and patinate, acquiring charm and character as they deteriorate. We lack that. No one has yet coined a term, at least not a favourable one, to describe the way man-made materials grow old. There are no haikus about plastic. There is not much Zen in an old Ford Mondeo. There is even less Zen in an old housing estate.

This is specially so if it is made of concrete, the fashionable hate material of today. The only words that concrete attracts are ‘grimy’, ‘stained’ and the ones they tag with aerosol paint. Right now culture minister Margaret Hodge has taken very badly against concrete. The particular object of her vengeful, twin-set loathing is Robin Hood Gardens, a failing social housing megastructure near the north end of London’s Blackwall Tunnel that was completed in 1972. Mrs Hodge does not have council household taste. She wants it demolished. It does rather remind us that nothing dates quite so quickly as visions of the future.

more from The Observer Review here.

Peter Doig painted Echo Lake in 1998. A man stands on the far side of a stretch of dark water. He is quite a way off, but you can see that he wears a white shirt and a dark tie. His hands are raised to his face. Is it to keep the light out of his eyes as he looks at you? Or is it to project his voice as he shouts? A police car, lights on, is parked behind him. Beyond the car the black-green of a band of trees is broken by a few bright spots; they could be streetlights or house lights half-obscured by foliage. It must be night time. Are they crime-scene floodlights that shine across the lake, on the man, grass, rocks and car?

Although the scenes shown in this painting and others by Peter Doig (the retrospective of his work runs until 27 April) seem to imply that curious things have gone before, and that others will follow, there is no reason to think you will ever know what the pictures signify. Like ghost stories, they draw on the potency of matters unresolved; it hangs about them like an unearthed static charge.

more from the LRB here.

Noam Chomsky in AlterNet:

On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. “The world is a better place without this man in it,” State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: “one way or the other he was brought to justice.” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been “responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden.”

Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as “one of the U.S. and Israel’s most wanted men” was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, “A militant wanted the world over,” an accompanying story reported that he was “superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden” after 9/11 and so ranked only second among “the most wanted militants in the world.”

The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines “the world” as the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that “the world” fully supported George Bush when he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan. That may be true of “the world,” but hardly of the world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing was announced. Global support was slight.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Sughra Raza and Nargis Raza).

From The New York Times:

For the past two decades, Kay E. Holekamp has been chronicling the lives of spotted hyenas on the savannas of southern Kenya. She has watched cubs emerge from their dens and take their place in the hyena hierarchy; she has seen alliances form and collapse. She has observed clan wars, in which dozens of hyenas have joined together to defend their hunting grounds against invaders. Throughout her career, Dr. Holekamp has remained vigilant against anthropocentrism. She does not think of the hyenas as long-eared people running around on all fours. But the lives of spotted hyenas, she has concluded, share some profound similarities with our own. In both species, a complex social world has driven the evolution of a big, complex brain.

Scientists have long puzzled over the enormous size of the human brain. It is seven times larger than one would predict for an average mammal of our size. Many of our extra neurons are in a region called the frontal cortex, where much of the most sophisticated thought takes place. To understand how we ended up with such a strange organ, many scientists have turned to our fellow primates. They also have large brains, although not as large as our own. It turns out that primates with a big frontal cortex tend to live in large groups.

More here.

[Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Scott Bryan Wilson in The Quarterly Conversation:

Riding Toward Everywhere, this year’s new book from the prolific William T. Vollmann, is a nonfiction account of his adventures hopping freight trains and trying out the hobo lifestyle as a person lurking “literally and figuratively in the shadows.” His traveling companion is a late middle-aged man named Steve who seems to have been riding the trains for “sport” (Vollmann’s term) since college. Steve is the “traincar-finder and [Vollmann] the people-pleaser.”

If you’re at all familiar with Vollmann’s work you know that he can talk to anyone about anything, and Steve usually opts to run to the liquor store while Vollmann stays behind and hangs out drinking with bums, of whom they only meet a few, treating them with his usual compassion and non-judgmental attitude. We get little information about Steve himself, though. Whether this was at Steve’s request is unclear, but what is clear is that he’s married, has kids, is an expert at the sport (or as close to an expert as one can be; Vollmann insists that no one is ever an expert at riding the rails), and often flies out of cities he’s found himself stuck in, and that he’s respectful of the boxcars and the trains, never urinating in them or leaving trash behind.

More here.  [Photo shows Vollman.]

Lovely video by Namit Arora:

Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun:

When Democratic primary voters go to the polls tomorrow in Ohio and Texas, it’s a safe bet that few will be casting their votes based on senators Clinton‘s and Obama‘s merits as writers. To judge a candidate based on his or her literary ability would be as irrelevant, most people agree, as voting for the better ballroom dancer. It may be a nice talent to have, but it has nothing to do with being president. It even seems a little naïve to judge a politician as the author of a book bearing his or her name. Today, just about every candidate with national ambitions feels the need to publish a book — a memoir, a polemic, a 10-point program — but such books are not really written; they are issued, such as press releases or position papers. A senator is no more the author of his books than of his bills. In both cases, he just accepts responsibility for a document drafted by a team of experts.

Against this cynicism, however, stands the fact that the greatest statesmen — the ones who occupy the most cherished places in our historical memory — are the ones who were great writers. President Lincoln and Prime Minister Churchill, to take the most familiar examples, occupy a higher plane than the average president or prime minister, partly because of the events they participated in, but also because of the way they interpreted those events in their speeches and writings. Politics and language, they proved, do not have to be sullen strangers — or sworn enemies, as they are in the realm of propaganda that George Orwell wrote about. On the contrary, reading Lincoln’s second inaugural or Churchill’s 1940 speeches, it becomes clear that the political and the literary converge at the highest levels. In both fields, the ability to imagine and to communicate what you imagine is essential; and both of those tasks depend entirely on language. As long as politics is an expression of human creativity, not just a matter of administering populations, there will be a profound connection between language and leadership.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

If only we’d listened to John Locke. In his Second Treatise of Government, he declared that human beings were entitled only to “life, liberty and” — get ready — “estate.” As in property. Leave it to Mr. Jefferson of Virginia to change that last item in the trinity to “pursuit of happiness.” What he neglected to tell us was that, 230 years later, we would still be pursuing it.

Make even a passing scan of today’s bestseller lists, and you’ll find a veritable happiness racket: titles urging us to start “Living Well” and “Become a Better You” and master “The Secret” and (my personal favorite) be “Happy for No Reason.” Between all the Tony Robbinses and Rick Warrens and Deepak Chopras of the world, happiness is perhaps our last growth industry, and it even has a volunteer sales force. “Smile!” a stranger recently exhorted me on the street. “It can’t be that bad.” To which my only response was: “How do you know?”

Maybe it’s all paying off, though. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, nearly 85 percent of us believe ourselves to be happy or very happy. All power, then, to Eric G. Wilson for writing a book with the refreshing title Against Happiness. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University, is seriously bummed by the cultural landscape. “Everywhere I see advertisements offering even more happiness, happiness on land or by sea, in a car or under the stars. . . . It seems truly, perhaps more than ever before, an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.” This “overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness,” he writes, produces only blandness, conformity, “a dystopia of flaccid grins” fueled by Lexapro and Paxil.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

“Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That is the common fallacy that all adults make—and no child ever does,” says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, England de Valpine professor of applied mathematics. Mahadevan enjoys explaining mathematically the phenomena of everyday life: practicing the old-fashioned method of scientific inquiry called natural philosophy, where one wonders about everything.

Mahadevan, who grew up in India, tells a traditional story about Krishna where mud becomes metaphor. “In Hindu mythology, Krishna is divine,” he begins. “However, because there was a prophecy that he would overthrow an evil king, his origins when he was a baby were hidden from almost everybody. So when Krishna was born, his mother surreptitiously sent him away to be brought up by a foster mother who didn’t know who he was. As in all mythologies, there were premonitions [of greatness], but growing up with his foster mother, he would go out like all children and play in the mud. One day he started to eat the mud, putting it in his mouth. And his [foster] mother, from afar, said, ‘Don’t do it.’” Krishna kept eating the mud. “Again [she] said, ‘Don’t do it,’ and yet he continued. So she came up to him, and when she opened his mouth to take out the mud, she looked—and she saw the universe.

“Without ever claiming all the grandeur that the story actually suggests,” says Mahadevan, “you just have to look and you will find interesting things everywhere.”

More here.