The premise of Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Road, is simple: In a ruined, postapocalyptic future, a nameless father and his young son—”each the other’s world entire”—trudge down a road toward the ocean, with the hope of finding a warmer, more hospitable locale. Along the way, they scrounge for cans of food in cities and countryside already thoroughly pillaged by other refugees. Death from starvation and exposure hovers, but a more immediate terror is the constant threat of dismemberment by roving bands of cannibals, for this is what most survivors have been reduced to. There is an urgency to each page, and a raw emotional pull in the way McCarthy, the poet laureate of violence, known for brutal and biblical novels like Child of God (1973) and Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985), renders the father’s attempts to keep alive the hopes of the young boy as well as his own, making it easily one of the most harrowing books you’ll ever encounter. Nearly unreadable in its heartbreaking detail, it is also, once opened, nearly impossible to put down; it is as if you must keep reading in order for the characters to stay alive.

Hardcore fans would have forgiven the seventy-three-year-old legend (the galley cover announces “His New Novel,” as if God himself had written the book) had he produced another in his recent string of accessible novels. Some might see it as a return to form, but The Road diverges from his earlier work as McCarthy switches the focus from the hunters to the hunted. And some might see this free-floating futuristic nightmare as a radical departure, yet for true believers who’d followed the signs in his previous work, this is where they hoped he would arrive.

more from Bookforum here.

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly,
but nothing can be taken back,
not the leaves by the trees, the rain
by the clouds. You want to take back
the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel
remains in the wound, some mud.
Night after night Tybalt’s stabbed
so the lovers are ground in mechanical
aftermath. Think of the gunk that never
comes off the roasting pan, the goofs
of a diamond cutter. But wasn’t it
electricity’s blunder into inert clay
that started this whole mess, the I-
echo in the head, a marriage begun
with a fender bender, a sneeze,
a mutation, a raid, an irrevocable
fuckup.

more of Dean Young’s poem at Paris Review here.

From The Herald Tribune:

Maybe it was just a Freudian slip. Or a case of hiding in plain sight. Either way, Sigmund Freud, scribbling in the pages of a Swiss hotel register, appears to have left the answer to a question that has titillated scholars for much of the last century: Did he have an affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays?

Rumors of a romantic liaison between Freud and his sister-in-law, who lived with the Freuds, have long persisted, despite staunch denials by Freud loyalists. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud’s disciple and later his archrival, claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed to an affair to him. (The claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung’s part.) And some researchers have even theorized that she may have become pregnant by Freud and have had an abortion.

What was lacking was any proof. But a German sociologist now says he has found evidence that on Aug. 13, 1898, during a two-week vacation in the Swiss Alps, Freud, then 42, and Miss Bernays, then 33, put up at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja, and registered as a married couple, a finding that may cause historians to re-evaluate their understanding of Freud’s own psychology.

A yellowing page of the leather-bound ledger shows that they occupied Room 11. Freud signed the book, in his distinctive Germanic scrawl, “Dr Sigm Freud u frau,” abbreviated German for “Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife.”

More here.

From Orion:

Some biblical scholars argue that Eve pulled down the suggestive pomegranate, not an apple, in the Garden of Eden. In the Koran, as in Persian iconography and poetry, images of pomegranates symbolized fertility, and in China, a bride and groom went to bed with seeds scattered on their covers to assure conception. In the early sixteenth century, the Spanish carried crateloads of them across the sea because the vitamin C-rich fruit guarded sailors against scurvy. The friars on board, meanwhile, brought roots to plant in the New World, where the fruit flourishes four hundred years later in California’s Mediterranean climate.

Folk healers have long used every part of the fruit to staunch wounds and treat illnesses like dyspepsia and leprosy. And these days, scientists in Israel have been actively researching the fruit’s pharmaceutical properties (the country harvests three thousand tons annually) to battle everything from viruses to breast cancer and aging skin.

The pomegranate contains a flavonoid that is a powerful cancer-fighting antioxidant. The fruit is also rich in estrogen, and one company is now marketing pomegranate-derived EstraGranate as an alternative to hormone-replacement therapy. In the works is a condom coated with pomegranate juice that will reportedly fend off HIV. In rural Sonoma County, California, where I live, stores now carry pomegranates from fall through winter, but we are offered only one variety, called Wonderful, grown by Paramount Farms, the corporate farm giant. Our nurseries carry only Wonderful seedlings, so when I wanted to plant a pomegranate, it had to be Wonderful. 

More here.

Leonardo da Vinci. The Last Supper. 1495-98. Milan.

More here and here.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Risa Wechsler has a fun and thoughtful post that’s spurred some interesting comments:

From Paul Kedrosky, via Rebecca Blood, an excellent challenge:

Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that “Everything is made of atoms”. What one sentence would you tell the future about your own area, whether it’s entrepreneurship, hedge funds, venture capital, or something else? Examples: An economist might say that “People respond to incentives”. I had an engineering professor years ago who said all of that field could be reduced to “F=MA and you can’t push on a rope”.

There’s lots of good and diverse responses out there…

Via normblog, which is critical of the piece, Tzvetan Todorov on concern for the truth in the context of the war in Iraq.

One of the most interesting conclusions of the Baker-Hamilton report resides in the observations that, since the war in Iraq, the American government has often sought to rule out any information that runs counter to its policies, and that this refusal to take the truth into account has had calamitous effects. The report says so in measured, but firm, terms: “Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.” In other words, the American government has held truth to be a negligible value that could easily be sacrificed to the will to power.

This reflection is not really a surprise for observers outside the United States. The preparation and unleashing of the war were based on a double lie or double illusion – that is, that Al-Qaeda was linked to the Iraqi government and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, biological, or chemical. Since the fall of Baghdad, this casual attitude to the truth has been in constant evidence. At the very moment when the images of torture in Abu Ghraib prison were being revealed to the whole world, the US asserted that democracy was being securely implanted in Iraq. Then, while hundreds of prisoners had already been moldering for five years in the camp at Guantanamo, subjected to degrading treatment, without any trial or any possibility of defending themselves, [the US government] declares that the United States is using its forces in defense of human rights. The very same people who declare that they are the incarnation of freedom have legalized the use of torture. The Baker-Hamilton report chose not to go into the past; it simply notes that the refrain repeated until recently that “everything is going well in Iraq” does not strictly correspond to the truth.

The centenary volume of the American Science Political Review looks at the evolution of the discipline.  Mark Blyth on comparative politics:

Political science’s inability to predict any of the great events of the previous decade had proven a serious embarrassment. Eager to make up for their prewar irrelevance, post-war political scientists sought to provide policymakers with predictions regarding, as Gabriel Almond put it, “exotic and uncouth” parts of the world (Almond and Coleman 1960, 10). As Karl Lowenstein (1944) wrote, to overcome past errors comparative politics would have to become “a conscious instrument of social engineering” (541) because “the discipline ha[d] a mission to fulfill in imparting our experience to other nations integrating scientifically their institutions into a universal pattern of government” (547). Political science therefore had to become positive and predictive, and the discipline rebuilt itself around the latest theories of the day (functionalism, modernization theory, and political culture) to meet these new expectations.

This new version of political science posited that societies were self-equilibrating entities that shared common functionally related subsystems for integration, adaptation, and goal attainment.Actually existing societieswere then arrayed along a developmental continuum with the United States posited as the world’s historical end. Where states actually sat on this telos was determined by some combination of their functional fit (Huntington 1968) and/or political culture (Almond and Verba 1966). Some political cultures were seen as better or worse at adapting to the dictates of modernity, but overall the path to a stable capitalist democracy was pretty much set. At least this is what members of the discipline imagined into the 1960s, a decade that proved to be, just like the 1920s and 1930s, a watershed for political science. As occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, these new and scientifically rigorous theories were about to be punctuated (and thereby invalidated) by the politics of the day.

Thomas Dixon in the TLS:

In the heyday of natural theology, the human eye was the great example of divine design – a wonderful symbol of vision and insight, as well as a marvel of optical engineering. God’s intelligence is apparently discerned these days in the E. coli bacterium – a wonderful symbol of diseases of the gut, propelled by an ingenious rotating tail. It is this “flagellum”, a bacterial outboard motor, that is used by proponents of so-called Intelligent Design as an example of the sort of “irreducible complexity” that they claim cannot be explained by Darwinism. It was recently reported that teaching materials promoting Intelligent Design had been sent to all heads of science at British secondary schools, but it is unlikely that they will have much impact here. Intelligent Design is a quintessentially American movement responding to a set of constitutional, cultural and religious dilemmas peculiar to the United States.

Opinion polls today consistently find that, when asked to say whether human beings were created by God within the past 10,000 years, or by a process of evolution guided by God, or by an entirely natural process of evolution, about half the population of the US choose the first option, and most of the rest choose the second. In a country where the question of whether Intelligent Design should be taught in schools on equal terms with Darwinism is regularly debated, it is understandable that books about science and religion sell well and that they have a more tangible political impact than they do in Britain. In this American context, Richard Dawkins’s recent atheistic broadside, The God Delusion, also makes a little more sense. It is really a book to keep up the morale of that embattled 10 per cent of Americans who think God has nothing to do with evolution.

Although Dawkins of course has no truck with “irreducible complexity”, one thing that he and his Intelligent Design antagonists agree about is that God’s existence or non-existence is, in Dawkins’s phrase, “a scientific fact about the universe”. Most theologians would want to reject Intelligent Design, along with the theology of The God Delusion, for exactly that reason. For them it is axiomatic that if we are going to talk about God at all, then God is not part of the natural order and should not be expected either to conform to the laws of physics or to feature as another entity in scientific accounts of life or the cosmos.

In openDemocracy.net, what the Iraq Study Group’s suggestions mean for the Kurds:

In a retrograde step, the ISG unapologetically makes five potentially damaging recommendations:

• suspension and/or gross manipulation of the democratically adopted constitution

• inhibition of the constitutionally agreed referendum on the fate of the arabised city of Kirkuk, representing yet another major betrayal of the Kurds

• centralisation of power in Baghdad, in a return to dictatorial central government

• rewarding extremists by their integration into the Iraqi state machinery

• reaching out to appease terrorists and their sponsoring countries.

Thus, the US’s arch-enemies – Iran, Syria, al-Qaida, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army and Saddamists – are among the winners; so, too, are Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. Bush’s policymakers and their main Iraqi allies (Kurds and some Shi’a) are the chief losers.

Virginia Hughes in Seed Magazine:

Smilack has a rare form of synesthesia that involves all of her senses—the sound of one female voice looks like a thin, bending sheet of metal, and the sight of a certain fishing shack gives her a brief taste of Neapolitan ice cream—but her artistic leanings are shared by many other synesthetes. Scientists estimate that synesthesia is about seven times more common in poets, novelists, and artists than in the rest of the population. (Some of the most famous examples include artists David Hockney and Wassily Kandinsky and writer Vladimir Nabokov.)

In the last decade, this connection between synesthesia and art has drawn much attention from neuroscientists. And now several genetic and behavioral studies aim to pin down the biological mechanisms linking art and synesthesia, with hopes of answering even bigger questions about how every brain perceives art.

More here.

From The New York Times:

I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office — one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games — where I’d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I’d held my tongue. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with “Hi, Princess”; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her “princess meal”; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, “I bet I know your favorite color” and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, “Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?” I lost it.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped. “Do you have a princess drill, too?”

She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.

“Come on!” I continued, my voice rising. “It’s 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”

My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. “Why are you so mad, Mama?” she asked. “What’s wrong with princesses?”

More here.

From MSNBC:

A Japanese research team has succeeded in filming a giant squid live — possibly marking a first — and says the elusive creatures may be more plentiful than previously believed, a researcher said Friday.

The research team, led by Tsunemi Kubodera, videotaped the giant squid at the surface as they captured it off the Ogasawara Islands south of Tokyo earlier this month. The squid, which measured about 24 feet long (7 meters), died while it was being caught.

“We believe this is the first time anyone has successfully filmed a giant squid that was alive,” said Kubodera, a researcher with Japan’s National Science Museum. “Now that we know where to find them, we think we can be more successful at studying them in the future.”

More here.  (For Sheherzad)

Here’s the 3rd annual Christmas Eve booklist from some of the editors and writers of 3 Quarks Daily (last year’s list can be seen here):

1.  The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century, by Sheri Berman

Political history in the industrial world may have ended, argues this pioneering study, but the winner has been social democracy – an ideology and political movement that has been as influential as it has been misunderstood. Berman looks at the history of social democracy from its origins in the late nineteenth century to today and shows how it beat out competitors such as classical liberalism, orthodox Marxism, and its cousins, Fascism and National Socialism by solving the central challenge of modern politics – reconciling the competing needs of capitalism and democracy. Bursting on to the scene in the interwar years, the social democratic model spread across Europe after the Second World War and formed the basis of the postwar settlement. This is a study of European social democracy that rewrites the intellectual and political history of the modern era while putting contemporary debates about globalization in their proper intellectual and historical context. –Mark Blyth

2. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

I picked it up at about 11pm one night and I did not put it down—literally—until I had finished it. That might not be saying much, because it’s a short, tight book of flawless prose that only takes about five hours to read, but all the same—I couldn’t put it down. It’s rare that you find a book like that, no? The Road is gripping and beautiful and tragic, completely unsentimental but aching with loss and regret, longing and love. Here are the first three lines of the book: “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” Incredible. “Dark beyond darkness”:McCarthy takes all the risks with language that we’re not supposed to take, and he succeeds.

Someone Important told me recently that the real measure of a book is whether it changes your life. I don’t know. That seems a bit heavy-handed and sophomoric to me, and I’m not fifteen anymore. I think I may have wept at the end of this book. I do know that in that darkest hour before dawn, having just finished The Road, ego-smashed and raw, with many of the notes at the darker end of my emotional spectrum still echoing around me, I sat for a while and watched the heave of my wife’s back as she slept. Whether or not it changed my life, this book made me want to thank whatever artist it was who shaped the exquisite details of everyday life and–even more–saw fit to place me here, among them. –Timothy Don

3.  The Social Sources of Financial Power, by Leonard Seabrooke

A state’s financial power is built on the effect its credit, property, and tax policies have on ordinary people: this is the key message of Leonard Seabrooke’s comparative historical investigation, which turns the spotlight away from elite financial actors and toward institutions that matter for Lower Income Groups. Seabrooke argues that legitimacy contests between social groups and the state over how the economy should work determine the legitimacy of a state’s financial and fiscal system. Ideally, he believes, such contests compel a state to intervene on behalf of people below the median income level, leading the state to broaden and deepen its domestic pool of capital while increasing its influence on international finance. But to do so, Seabrooke asserts, a state must first challenge powerful interests that benefit from the concentration of financial wealth. A great book that really makes you think again about what you think you know. –Mark Blyth

4.  Creme de la Phlegm: Unforgettable Australian Reviews, by Angela Bennie

This book is memorable for all the wrong reasons. As Angela Bennie says in the Preface, the book “focuses on how negative criticism is written and received and what that might tell us about the wider culture.” Every Australian artist should read it and have a hard think about what these kinds of reviews signify. –Peter Nicholson

5.  Stravinsky: The Second Exile: France and America 1934-1971, by Stephen Walsh

This is a book I have enjoyed reading this year, wherein Igor, Vera and Bobsky take
on the world, and the first Mrs Stravinsky leaves it. What once seemed an impossibly glamorous lifestyle, with the dramatis personae regularly bumping into the great and the not-so-good, is here shown in its true creative colours. The starkly contrasting sunlight and shadow are comprehensively set forth, leaving readers to ponder the fate of a centrifugal artistic life in the modern period. –Peter Nicholson

6.  Everyman, by Philip Roth

Most of the very good books I have read that were published this year have been fiction. If you have Philip Roth’s Everyman, do not leave it unread. It is very good. You can read it in two days. But it will be around for a while, and it will wait for you. It is the bell that tolls. –Timothy Don

7.  Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World, by Paul Cartledge

In 480 BC, a huge Persian army, led by the inimitable King Xerxes, entered the mountain pass of Thermopylae as it marched on Greece, intending to conquer the land with little difficulty. But the Greeks—led by King Leonidas and a small army of Spartans—took the battle to the Persians at Thermopylae, and halted their advance—almost. It is one of history’s most acclaimed battles, one of civilization’s greatest last stands. And in Thermopylae, renowned classical historian Paul Cartledge looks anew this history-altering moment and, most impressively, shows how its repercussions have bearing on us even today. The invasion of Europe by Xerxes and his army redefined culture, kingdom, and class. The valiant efforts of a few thousand Greek warriors, facing a huge onrushing Persian army at the narrow pass at Thermopylae, changed the way generations to come would think about combat, courage, and death. The battle of Thermopylae was at its broadest a clash of civilizations; one that momentously helped shape the identity of classical Greece and hence the nature of our own cultural heritage. –Timothy Don [book description from Amazon.com]

8.  Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, by Frances Fox Piven

Challenging Authority argues that ordinary people exercise real power in American politics mainly at those extraordinary moments when they rise up in anger and hope, defy the rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives, and by doing so, disrupt the workings of the institutions in which they are enmeshed. These are the conditions that produce the democratic moments in American political development. –Michael Blim [book description from Amazon.com]

9.  Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, by Lisa Randall

Randall, a professor of physics at Harvard, offers a tour of current questions in particle physics, string theory, and cosmology, paying particular attention to the thesis that more physical dimensions exist than are usually acknowledged. Writing for a general audience, Randall is patient and kind: she encourages readers to skip around in the text, corrals mathematical equations in an appendix at the back, and starts off each chapter with an allegorical story, in a manner recalling the work of George Gamow. Although the subject itself is intractably difficult to follow, the exuberance of Randall’s narration is appealing. She’s honest about the limits of the known, and almost revels in the uncertainties that underlie her work—including the possibility that some day it may all be proved wrong. –Abbas Raza [book description from The New Yorker]

10. Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, by Marc Hauser

Marc Hauser’s eminently readable and comprehensive book Moral Minds is revolutionary. He argues that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Experience tunes up our moral actions, guiding what we do as opposed to how we deliver our moral verdicts. For hundreds of years, scholars have argued that moral judgments arise from rational and voluntary deliberations about what ought to be. The common belief today is that we reach moral decisions by consciously reasoning from principled explanations of what society determines is right or wrong. This perspective has generated the further belief that our moral psychology is founded entirely on experience and education, developing slowly and subject to considerable variation across cultures. In his groundbreaking book, Hauser shows that this dominant view is illusory. Combining his own cutting-edge research with findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, he examines the implications of his theory for issues of bioethics, religion, law, and our everyday lives. –Abbas Raza [book description from Amazon.com]

H. Allen Orr in the New York Review of Books:

Scientists’ interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design.

During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists—all biologists—have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.

More here.

Victor Limjoco in Discover Magazine:

Holiday shoppers beware. That pleasantly surprising sale price can actually bust your budget. A new study by a behavioral scientist shows why we often spend more when we’re convinced that we’re saving. Economists call it the “spillover effect” when a sale on one item can spur extra spending on unrelated items throughout a store.

Behavioral economist Robert Meyer, a researcher at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says that retailers take advantage of this when they use discounts to hopefully create a ripple effect throughout the store. “That little local surprise not only affects how many units that you buy of that one product, but also it affects your whole attitude towards what you do elsewhere in the store,” Meyer says.

But no one knows exactly why it happens. To figure out the mechanisms behind this phenomenon, Meyer teamed up with the University of Arizona’s Narayan Janakiraman and Arizona State University’s Andrea Morales. They had volunteers shop in a virtual grocery store and instructed them to supply their household cupboards over a simulated 35 weeks. A $50 prize was given to the four volunteers with the lowest shopping costs.

Meyer found that, on average, if the price of the needed item was cheap, volunteers felt an obligation to stay in the store and shop.

More here.

Rachel Donadio in the New York Times:

Few relationships are as complex as that between a living author and his biographer. In a startling recent example, Nadine Gordimer — the South African writer who helped bring the world’s attention to the evils of apartheid and won the 1991 Nobel Prize for her efforts — had a bitter falling out with Ronald Suresh Roberts, the young biographer to whom she had granted extraordinary access during his five years of research. Since it appeared last year, Roberts’s biography, “No Cold Kitchen,” has been the talk of literary South Africa. This year it made the non fiction shortlist for the country’s highest literary accolade, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize, eventually losing to two AIDS memoirs.

How this author-biographer relationship ran aground is a drama as rich as any to come out of post-apartheid South Africa.

More here.

Christopher Beam in Slate:

A recent article on Hillary Clinton’s political engine-revving mentioned that her husband, Bill, has received “counseling for a sex addiction.” How do you cure a nymphomaniac?

The same way you’d cure any kind of addict: with counseling, group therapy, and, in some cases, medication. You won’t find an entry for “sexual addiction” in DSM-IV, the standard manual of mental disorders. In fact, there’s some controversy as to whether “addiction” is the best terminology for what might just be a naturally heightened sex drive. But many doctors discuss it in the same terms as a chemical dependency: Like drug addicts, sex junkies exhibit escalating behavior, withdrawal symptoms, and an inability to stop despite adverse consequences. Self-deceptive thinking and denial (e.g., “I did not have sexual relations with that woman“) may play a role, often accompanied by feelings of shame. Having lots of sex isn’t the only symptom. Looking at lots of porn also counts, as does acting out with anonymous partners, or excessive masturbation. (Sound familiar? Find out if you’re a sex addict here.)

More here.

Andrew Brown in Prospect Magazine:

It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works.

In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous, and in their popular forms profoundly irrational. The agnostics must be right and the atheists very well may be. There is no purpose to the universe. Nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics has been reliably reported. To demand a designer to explain the complexity of the world begs the question, “Who designed the designer?” It has been clear since Darwin that we have no need to hypothesise a designer to explain the complexity of living things. The results of intercessory prayer are indistinguishable from those of chance.

Dawkins gets miffed when this is called “19th-century” atheism, since, as he says, the period of their first discovery does not affect the truth of these propositions. But to call it “19th-century” is to draw attention to the important truth added in the 20th century: that religious belief persists in the face of these facts and arguments.

This persistence is what any scientific attack on religion must explain—and this one doesn’t. Dawkins mentions lots of modern atheist scientists who have tried to explain the puzzle: Robert Hinde, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, DS Wilson, Daniel Dennett, all of them worth reading. But he cannot accept the obvious conclusion to draw from their works, which is that thoroughgoing atheism is unnatural and will never be popular.

More here.

C. K. Williams’s poems are broad in scale and narrow in scope. He has been misunderstood as an entirely “social” poet, but his real subject is the mind that attempts, never entirely successfully, to ward off the social world that bombards it from every side. His lines, longer than those written by any other significant English-language poet, suggest a big, Whitman-like appetite for worldly variety. This is not simply the case. Williams is a poet of imaginative composure amid real-world disarray. His fastidious, refined heart camps in the middle of the worldly misery that minimizes its claims.

To read Williams’s “Collected Poems” (over 680 pages, spanning more than 35 years) is therefore to behold a contest between “poetry” and its system of values and an opposing system, call it “anti-poetry.” Anti-poetry usually gets the first word, as a scan of Williams’s openings reveals:

One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look
freshly generated from fresh excrement

The only time, I swear, I ever fell more than abstractly in
love with someone else’s wife

Willa Selenfriend likes Paul Peterzell better than she likes me
and I am dying of it.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.