From The Powell Books:

No matter what side of the political spectrum you reside, there is a lot of material out there to re-affirm your belief structure. Unfortunately, very little of it seeks discourse between the two sides. There are, of course, Thomas Frank’s excellent What’s The Matter with Kansas, and Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics, but these were written in the aftermath of the 2004 election, and were more of a quest to see what it was that liberals didn’t understand about conservatives and how that cost them the election.

John Moe’s Conservatize Me: How I Tried to Become a Righty with the Help of Richard Nixon, Sean Hannity, Toby Keith and Beef Jerky enters this discourse with an admittedly lighter and more flippant approach. In Conservatize Me, Moe decides to turn himself into a human political guinea pig by immersing himself into the world of conservative culture. Cutting himself off from NPR (whose Seattle affiliate employs him), the New York Times, and other bastions of the allegedly liberal media, Moe imbibes Rush Limbaugh, country music, and copious amounts of beef jerky. The results aren’t as hilarious as the author probably thought they would turn out, but they still yield amusingly trenchant insights into the cultural division in America.

More here.

The final silent image in this movie, so filled as it is with striking and suggestive images, tells you more about Coppola, and perhaps our own historical moment, than it could possibly tell you about Marie Antoinette. It’s a mournful shot of the Queen’s state bedchamber at Versailles, ransacked by the revolutionary mob the night before the Queen and her family were forced to leave, its glittering chandeliers askew, its exquisite boiseries cracked and mangled. You’d never guess from this that men’s lives—those of the Queen’s guards—were also destroyed in that violence; their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris. But Coppola forlornly catalogs only the ruined bric-a-brac. As with the teenaged girls for whom she has such sympathy, her worst imagination of disaster, it would seem, is a messy bedroom.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

Despite this profusion of rules, all far too complex to have impressed the Beau, there is one stipulation of Le Blanc’s that he has inherited directly from Brummell. Once tied, the necktie should never be altered in the hope of improving its appearance; if it is ill-tied, one must start again with a fresh cravat. What the wearer is after is a “curious mean” (as Virginia Woolf wrote of Brummell’s jokes) between skill and pure chance. The tying of a cravat involves the rigorous removal of human agency from the final appearance of the fabric: the knot is intentional, but the folds are entirely fortuitous. As Giorgio Agamben has put it, Brummell, “whom some of the greatest poets of modernity have not disdained to consider their teacher, can, from this point of view, claim as his own discovery the introduction of chance into the artwork so widely practiced in contemporary art.”7 Beau Brummell is a direct precursor of the dandy Marcel Duchamp. The dandy’s intention is in fact to make the garment-like the artwork-evanesce into pure gesture, to institute something like the “threadbare look” described by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly in his essay on Brummell and dandyism. In a brief craze, says d’Aurevilly, dandies took to rubbing their clothes with broken glass, till they took on the appearance of lace, became “a mist of cloth,” scarcely existed as clothes.8 Similarly, at its logical extreme, a well-tied cravat is a palpable immateriality, like a distant nebula or a puff of ectoplasm.

more from Cabinet here.

From Science:

Students who break into a cold sweat at the thought of a pop quiz might feel better once they learn about a side effect of test-taking: The practice appears to enhance memory, possibly even more than studying. What’s more, according to a new study, testing also helps students remember material that wasn’t on the exam in the first place.

Over the past several years, cognitive scientists have documented a phenomenon called the “testing effect,” in which taking a test, rather than studying, boosts an individual’s ability to remember the material later on. The research led psychology doctoral student Jason Chan and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, to wonder whether testing also affects memory for untested materials.

To test the theory, the team had 84 undergraduate students read a passage about toucans, a topic the researchers believed would be unfamiliar to psychology undergraduates. After reading the passage, one-third of the students were dismissed, one-third were asked to read an additional set of study materials that covered the same information as the original passage, and one-third were asked to take a brief short-answer test on the original material. The next day, all participants returned to take a final short-answer test, which included questions from the previous day’s brief test as well as new questions.   Students who took the test the day before scored, on average, 8% higher on the second-day test than did the two groups of students who did not take the initial test.

More here.

The persona Koons had chosen to come packaged in was, like the work that has made him one of America’s most influential living artists, fugitive and particularly difficult to read. The neat business suit, the clubman’s tie and the salt-and-pepper brush-cut hair suggested both the head buyer in the men’s apparel department at Bloomingdale’s and a retired astronaut still out of joint with life on Earth.

“I believe in advertisement and media completely,” Koons has said. “My art and personal life are based on it.” In an interview many years ago he described his idea of pleasure: dining with a group of friends, he recalled, he was moved to propose a toast. How lucky he was, he announced, to be in a beautiful place, surrounded by people he liked … As he stood there, he remembered, in a state of bliss, it was like being in an advertisement.

more from The Guardian here.

Yet the buzz accompanying this month’s arrival of the new translation by Robert Fagles, the emeritus Princeton professor whose translations of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” became bestsellers in the 1990s, suggests that Virgil’s problematic epic somehow still has its hooks in us for reasons that go beyond its stature as imperishable literature.

From John Dryden’s 1697 version in galloping heroic couplets — which did much to mold the sense and sensibility of an age that came to be dubbed “Augustan” — to Robert Fitzgerald’s magisterial blank-verse revamp in 1983, just about every major Anglo-American epoch has wanted to see itself implicated in Virgil’s master narrative, or feels impelled to remodel his mythic edifice in its own complicit fashion. And yet, it’s hard to escape the feeling that there’s something about our current age of clashing civilizations that imparts a brave new vibe to this latest Englishing of “The Aeneid.” Be it symptomatic of a passing phase or a full-blown complex, we all of a sudden seem to have Rome on the brain.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

It was a close contest with much back and forth between me and a few dogged problem solvers in the CPCP challenge, but we now have a clear winner: Ian McMeans was the first to give all the right answers. Ian, I hope that you will agree to write something for us this coming Monday. I shall look forward to it.

Craig L. also got all the answers right, but was just a tiny bit too late.

Two people each got 13 of the 14 problems right: my old friend from the philosophy department at Columbia, David Maier, and George Dickeson.

Subodh C. Agrawal of Chandigarh, India, takes honorable mention with 12/14 correct.

I will post the answers next week, giving the rest of you a chance to work out the problems that you couldn’t get immediately, and I will also post a particularly tough problem at that time. Thanks to the many other people who sent me lists of painstakingly expressed answers to the problem set.

Thanks for participating!

UPDATE: You can see Ian McMeans’ Monday column for 3QD here.

Brice Marden. Grove Group 3, 1972.

Graphite & beeswax on paper.

Current Marden retrospective at MoMA. More on him here.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

Throughout the midterm campaign season, at least one major issue was conspicuously absent from debate. Except in California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reinvigorated his bid for reëlection by vowing to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, climate change was barely mentioned. This can’t be wholly blamed on the politicians: according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, Americans still rank global warming as a low policy priority—far behind Iraq, the economy, and health care—with less than half of respondents designating it a “very important” issue.

Given the news out of Baghdad, it’s only natural that people would choose to focus on catastrophes unfolding in real time, but the longer that global warming is ignored the more intractable it becomes—a point made forcefully last week in a report issued by the British government. Unless the nations of the world come together to control emissions, the report said, we face the risk of “major disruptions to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.”

More here.

Amanda Gefter in New Scientist:

…these students are part of a large, well-organised movement that is empowering parents to teach their children creationist biology and other unorthodox versions of science at home, all centred on the idea that God created Earth in six days about 6000 years ago. Patrick Henry, near the town of Purcellville, about 60 kilometres north-west of Washington DC, is gearing up to groom home-schooled students for political office and typifies a movement that seems set to expand, opening up a new front in the battle between creationists and Darwinian evolutionists. New Scientist investigated how home-schooling, with its considerable legal support, is quietly transforming the landscape of science education in the US, subverting and possibly threatening the public school system that has fought hard against imposing a Christian viewpoint on science teaching.

Ironically, home-schooling began in the 1960s as a counter-culture movement among political liberals. The idea was taken up in the 1970s by evangelical Christians…

More here.

Adam Kuper in Prospect Magazine:

Clifford Geertz, who died last month at the age of 80 of complications following heart surgery, was perhaps the most celebrated anthropologist of a distinguished generation that included Ernest Gellner and Mary Douglas. However, Gellner and Douglas always regarded themselves as social scientists. Geertz switched sides and became the prophet of a radical new humanism.

Geertz began his professional career as a graduate student in an interdisciplinary social science programme that Talcott Parsons had set up at Harvard. Parsons elected anthropology to be the handmaiden of sociology. It should treat the collective ideas and values that Parsons called culture. After all, people often behaved irrationally, to the despair of economists and policymakers. The job of anthropologists was to decode their symbolic statements, find out what they believed and so explain why they made irrational choices. This was particularly relevant to the study of the new states that emerged after the second world war, where culture seemed to be the main roadblock to rational political modernisation and economic “take-off” (a rocket-ship metaphor much in vogue at the time).

More here.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times Book Review on Dave Eggers’ new book:

After two mannered books (“You Shall Know Our Velocity” and “How We Are Hungry”) in which cleverness and literary gimmickry seemed to get the upper hand, Mr. Eggers has produced “What Is the What,” a startling act of literary ventriloquism that recounts the harrowing story of a Sudanese refugee named Valentino Achak Deng, while reminding us just how eloquently the author can write about loss and mortality and sorrow.

A devastating and humane account of one man’s survival against terrible odds, the book is flawed by an odd decision on Mr. Eggers’s part to fictionalize Mr. Deng’s story — a curious choice, especially in the wake of the uproar over James Frey’s fictionalized memoir earlier this year. But while we start out wondering what is real and what is not, it is a testament to the power of Mr. Deng’s experiences and Mr. Eggers’s ability to convey their essence in visceral terms that we gradually forget these schematics of composition.

More here.

From Washington Monthly:

There’s a bait and switch going on at the beginning of The Way to Win, the recent collaboration between ABC political director Mark Halperin and the Washington Post‘s John Harris. The authors say they plan to share the lessons of the two sharpest political minds of this generation: Karl Rove and Bill Clinton. Only Rove and Clinton, they argue, have mastered presidential campaigning in the age of the Freak Show, by which they mean the era of hyper-personal, hyper-partisan, scandal-obsessed politics ushered in by New Media.

And, to be fair, The Way to Win dispenses no shortage of lessons — if anything, the book offers too many of them. But don’t be fooled. Much as Halperin and Harris want you to believe it, this is not an innocent how-to kit for Freak-Show-era presidential aspirants. It’s an argument for why Hillary Clinton should be the Democrats’ nominee in 2008.

Better yet, it’s a remarkably fresh argument for why Hillary should be the party’s nominee. To date, the most damning knock against Hillary has to do with electability: Democratic partisans love her (naysaying bloggers notwithstanding), but they fret that she carries too much baggage to win a general election. Halperin and Harris disagree. They suggest Hillary would be the Democrats’ most formidable candidate precisely because she’s the most electable.

It all depends on your definition of “electable,” of course. The traditional notion of electability holds that there’s something about a candidate’s biography or worldview that makes her more or less capable of winning over the swing voters who decide elections. John Kerry qualified as electable under this standard because of his war-hero résumé and his relatively moderate Senate record. Hillary fails the test because of her starring role in the Clinton-era scandals, not to mention the biggest policy fiasco of the 1990s.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in the excellent Radical Society:

The skeptic is generally portrayed as standing, on purpose, outside the normal flow of life. The skeptic refuses to assent to things that most people take for granted, perceiving the world through a protective lens of doubt and incredulity. The skeptic is the one who pauses just as everyone else jumps in.

The funny thing about this picture is that it characterizes an attitude almost exactly opposite to what some of the earliest skeptics actually proposed. For them, the most important thing to be skeptical about was the very tendency for human beings to worry about knowledge. Once you start worrying about whether you really know things or not, it sets off a whole chain of intellectual moves that, to the skeptic, get you nowhere. Skepticism is not about nay-saying and arch looks; it is about getting us back into the normal flow of life, with, perhaps, a renewed and deeper sense of how flowing that flow really is.

Sextus Empiricus was just that kind of skeptic. Phyrronian Inquiries, his most influential work, was probably written sometime in the second century AC and lost soon thereafter before being rediscovered during the Renaissance. Its influence since then has been, at best, subtle. Problem is, Sextus wasn’t always the clearest writer. Frankly, he wasn’t always the clearest thinker either. Phyrronian Inquiries is a pretty tiresome book after the first fifteen pages or so. Against the Mathematicians (the other major work we have from Sextus, a rambling polemic against all strains of academic thought in the late Hellenistic world) is downright unreadable garbage. Sextus’ brand of skepticism is exhilaratingly contemporary at times, as we shall see; but Against the Mathematicians reminds us that the obsessions of past ages can be impenetrable indeed.

More here.

John Updike in the New York Review of Books:

Twenty-four chromogenic prints each measuring three by five feet: the exhibition begins with six of them in the Metropolitan’s Tisch Galleries, the long upstairs corridor customarily devoted to etchings, drawings, and photographs, and continues, after two left turns, in the modest spaces of the Howard Gilman Gallery. The show concerns the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s ruinous pass over New Orleans on August 29, 2005, as recorded by the distinguished architectural photographer Robert Polidori in four visits between September 2005 and April 2006; it is being attended, to judge from the day this viewer was present, by more youthful African-Americans than usually make their way into the Met.

Katrina, as the disaster is called for short, was a black disaster, exposing the black poverty that, dwelling in the low-lying areas of the metropolis, stayed out of the view of the tourists who flocked to Bourbon Street for a taste of Cajun cuisine and old-fashioned jazz, or who admired the fluted columns and iron lace of the gently moldering Garden District, or who were unthriftily prepared to laisser le bon temps rouler at Mardi Gras or the Super Bowl. Good times were what the city had to sell, trading on its racy past as a Francophone southern port.

More here.

Lynn Margulis and Emily Case in Orion Magazine:

Babies rely on milk, food, and finger-sucking to populate their intestines with bacteria essential for healthy digestion. And microbial communities thrive in the external orifices (mouth, ears, anus, vagina) of mammals, in ways that enhance metabolism, block opportunistic infection, ensure stable digestive patterns, maintain healthy immune systems, and accelerate healing after injury. When these communities are depleted, as might occur from the use of antibacterial soap, mouthwash, or douching, certain potentially pathogenic fungi—like Candida or vaginal yeast disorders—can begin to grow profusely on our dead and dying cells. Self-centered antiseptic paranoia, not the bacteria, is our enemy here.

But in our ignorance, we also miss a larger lesson. Bacteria offer us evidence that health depends on community, and independence is an ecological impossibility. Whenever we treat isolated medical symptoms or live socially or physically isolated lives, we ignore warnings from our more successful planetmates.

More here.

Hubert Burda at Edge.org:

More than two thousand years after a ruler, Augustus, used for the very first time the minting technique to bring his face to the people, the possibilities for getting one’s picture shown in public have increased many fold. Print media, TV and the Internet have teamed up and have made the motto of the hippie generation of late 60s San Francisco — “Expose yourself!” — a reality.

More here.

Liz Hoggard in The Independent:

What makes a film truly erotic? Unrequited longing, transgression, voyeurism? Can men and women ever agree? And why are film polls on the subject always so disappointing? Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Sexy Moments was a prime example. The Top 10 ended up a mix of soft-core classics (Basic Instinct, Emmanuelle, Nine 1/2 Weeks) and films that treat sex as slapstick (American Pie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). There was very little grown-up discussion of the co-ordinates of desire.

Which is why director Sophie Fiennes’ latest project, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which is showing at selected screenings around the country, is so refreshing. In her trilogy, the cult philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek takes us on a brilliant and unhinged road-trip through some of the greatest movies ever – from Hitchcock’s romantic epic Vertigo, to the films of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, delving into the hidden language of cinema, and uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves. Key to The Pervert’s Guide is an exploration of the relationship between desire and fantasy in film.

More here.

Joel Waldfogel in Slate:

One of the deep questions in economics is why some countries are rich and others are poor. It is widely believed that institutions such as clear and enforceable property rights are important to economic growth. Still, debates rage: Do culture, history, government, education, temperature, natural resources, cosmic rays make the difference? The reason it’s hard to resolve this question is that we have no controlled experiments comparing otherwise similar places with different sets of legal and economic institutions. In new research, James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote, both of Dartmouth College, consider the effect of a particular aspect of history—the length of European colonization—on the current standard of living of a group of 80 tiny, isolated islands that have not previously been used in cross-country comparisons. Their question: Are the islands that experienced European colonization for a longer period of time richer today?

More here.