From Scientific American:

Nothing focuses the mind’s eye like an erotic picture, according to the results of a new study. Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape. Such nudity-driven focusing worked almost as well for women, as long as the image accorded with their sexual preference.

Cognitive neuroscientist Sheng He of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues gathered groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexual women numbering 10 each. Each viewed special images pointed directly at each individual eye. The researchers could cancel out vision of one eye’s image by presenting a specific high contrast image to the other eye. Such an image, called a Gabor patch, consists of a series of contrasting lines that form an abstract–and visually arresting–shape. “Normally, the two eyes look at the same image. They don’t have any conflict,” he explains. “We create a situation where the two eyes are presented with two images, and then they will have binocular competition. One image is high contrast [and dynamic], the other is static. You basically just see the dynamic image.”

More here.

From Nature:

Fat could send the wrong signals to sick cells.

In studies with mice, shedding a bit of weight acted as a preventative against cancers. And they didn’t even have to exercise to get the benefit: the mouse equivalent of liposuction did the trick. Allan Conney and his colleagues at Rutgers University in New Jersey chopped the excess fat from some mice and exposed them to UV light, damaging some of their skin cells and inducing sunburn. The fat reduction boosted the rate of helpful cell suicide, called apoptosis, in skin tumour cells: cancerous cells died twice as fast in the slimmed-down mice as in the fat ones, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mice kept slim by regular exercise also felt a benefit. The team saw no effect on non-cancerous cells in any of the mice.

“Fat tissue may be preventing the death of damaged cells,” says Conney. He and his team suggest that fat cells might be secreting proteins called cytokines, which usually act as cellular messengers and could send signals to tumour cells telling them to interrupt apoptosis. They also implicate another molecule called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), known to have a similar anti-suicide effect on cells. But these are speculations that the group has yet to test.

More here.

Lynn Geesaman. Parc de Bagatelle, Paris, France. 1995.

Gelatin silver print.

More of Ms.Geesaman’s work here and here.

Peter Hainsworth reviews Dante: the poet, the political thinker, the man by Barbara Reynolds, in the Times Literary Supplement:

The shape is familiar – a chronological survey of Dante’s life and career, with ample exposition of all the important works, and with an emphasis on their autobiographical implications. But the novelties come thick and fast, beginning (so far as I was concerned) with the suggestion on page 10 that Dante and other poets he associated with in Florence as a young man might have given their visionary and dreamlike imaginings a boost with the stimulus of love-potions. These herbal stimulants, cannabis perhaps, may, it turns out later, be what Dante is referring to in the comparison, near the start of Paradiso, between his own “trans-human” experience and what Glaucus felt “on tasting of the herb” (nel gustar dell’erba) which made him into a sea-god. As Reynolds explains at greater length when she comes to the final vision of the Godhead, mystics did often use drugs of one kind or another in conjunction with fasting and meditation in their pursuit of visionary illumination. There is no reason, she argues, why Dante should not have done so too.

Dante as a substance abuser? It is not a key argument and Reynolds may be being provocative, even mischievous. She herself gives much more importance to her decoding of the two prophecies that have always been a problem for Dante commentators. Virgil says, in the first canto of the Comedy, that a hound (Veltro) will be coming to chase away the ever-hungry she-wolf that is afflicting Italy. Reynolds goes along with the standard view that Dante is talking of a new, righteous Emperor, but argues that the real interest lies in the puzzling phrase “tra feltro e feltro” (between felt and felt), which she sees as an allusion to the use of felt in contemporary paper-manufacture; Dante, she argues, is referring to the new power of written texts, and specifically to the imminent imposition of the rule of canon and civil law.

More here.

David Brooks reviews Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul.

Sullivan’s antidote to fundamentalism is the conservatism of doubt. “The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know,” Sullivan writes. “As humans we can merely sense the existence of a higher truth, a greater coherence than ourselves, but we cannot see it face to face,” he argues. So politics should be about acknowledging what we don’t know, and being cautious in what we think we can achieve.

His first great guide is Montaigne, who wrote, Sullivan notes, that God is incomprehensible and that everything we think we know about him is a projection of ourselves. We need to acknowledge that he and his truth are beyond our categories.

Sullivan’s next guide is Michael Oakeshott, the great British philosopher, who brilliantly exposed the limits of rationalism. As Sullivan says, “There is no way, Oakeshott argues, to generate a personal moral life from a book, a text, a theory. We live the way we have grown accustomed to live. Our morality is like a language we have learned and deploy in every new instant.”

Politics is not an effort to find solutions and realize ideals, in this view. It is merely an effort to find practical ways to preserve one’s balance in a complicated world. An Oakeshottian conservative will reject great crusades. He will not try to impose morality or base policy decisions on so-called eternal truths.

Of course neither would this kind of conservative write the Declaration of Independence.

Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times Magazine:

One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20’s fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition of Georges Seurat’s “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” — middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys flying a kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight pattern of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction. He had just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque.

He was now looking forward to taking a logic course at a madrasa, or religious school, near Peshawar during his holiday. Pakistan’s religious parties, he told me through an interpreter, would lodge him, as they did other Afghan Taliban fighters, and keep him safe. With us was Abdul Baqi’s mentor, Mullah Sadiq, a diabetic Helmandi who was shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan auditing Taliban finances and arranging logistics. He had just dispatched nine fighters to Afghanistan and had taken wounded men to a hospital in Islamabad. “I just tell the border guards that they were wounded in a tribal dispute and need treatment,” he told me.

More here.

Olivia Wu in the San Francisco Chronicle:

When Fan Wu was feverishly tapping out her first novel in San Jose four years ago, she did not imagine she would star in the launch of a major publishing house. At the 13th Annual Beijing Book Fair, Macmillan Press announced the formation of Picador Asia, its newest imprint dedicated to the Asia Pacific region — the only Asian list created by a mainstream English language publisher — and brought out its first book, “February Flowers,” by Chinese-born Wu. Wu (no relation to this reporter) wrote the novel in English partly to challenge herself in her second language.

Publishers from around the world arrived at the book fair, one of the major publishing events in China, earlier this month to search for, develop and publish Chinese writers. Major houses, such as Penguin and HarperCollins, continued to press forward with translations of English classics into Chinese and emphasis on children’s books. More than 4,000 local and international publishers turned up.

Many consider the greatest loophole in Chinese-English publishing efforts to be contemporary Chinese voices in English.

More here.

Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles reviews The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen, in American Scientist:

Since the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, interest in Darwin’s life has waned and eventually waxed, especially after the publication in the last 20 years of his private notebooks and correspondence. Several excellent biographers have used these materials to inform us about the great scientist’s thought processes and to examine details of his everyday life.

Yet even with this new information, Darwin’s behavior is still puzzling. He ached for recognition from his scientific peers, but, as David Quammen suggests with his title—The Reluctant Mr. Darwin—Darwin postponed publishing the very theory he wanted recognition for discovering.

A prize-winning science journalist, Quammen credits the recent biographers, acknowledging that his concise book is not based on original research. He has written a kind of extended essay for those not familiar with Darwin’s life after his famous journey on HMS Beagle or with the truly radical implications of natural selection—the mechanism of evolution Darwin wanted, but also feared, to reveal. To explain this reluctance to publish, Quammen concentrates on Darwin’s intellectual and emotional life beginning in 1837, soon after he returned from five years at sea, setting Darwin in the context of the political, economic and scientific forces then shaping England.

More here.

First off, I don’t talk to them. OK?

That’s, like, the first thing. Let’s start there.

It’s not like I’m all, Hey, Peter Pufferfish, what’s up? and he’s all, Yo, nothing much, brah.

It doesn’t work like that, all right? I mean, most of them don’t even have brains, for one thing. They have maybe a bump at one end of their spinal cord, a pimply little swelling of ganglia, if they’re lucky.

Language is not a looming issue, is what I’m saying.

No, how it works is: I command them. Period, the end. Command, as in bend them to, you know, my will and whatnot. Fuckin’ A.

more from McSweeney’s here.

IN THE EARLY 1990s, Kim Jong Il became the world’s leading purchaser of Hennessy Paradis, a cognac legendary for its complexity and finesse. Paradis usually retails for a few hundred dollars a bottle, though in Kim’s case bulk discounts may have applied: The North Korean leader–who, according to a former personal chef, has “an exceptionally discriminating palate”–was said to be spending $700,000 to $800,000 a year on it. Such a liquor tab fits the sort of pathological decadence described by defectors and national leaders who have spent time with Kim. The same former chef reports being sent on shopping trips to Denmark for pork, Czechoslovakia for beer, and Uzbekistan for caviar. A former Russian presidential envoy has described a 2001 state visit in which Kim traveled across the country in a private train stocked with crates of Bordeaux, flat-screen televisions, and a retinue of female performers. Live lobsters were flown in to await the train’s chefs at points along the route.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Red Location gets its name from the colour of the corrugated-iron shacks that once lined its streets. Built in 1903 to house black African workers who had been forcibly removed from the city, they quickly rusted to a sombre maroon. Today this dusty, windy quarter of New Brighton township, Port Elizabeth, on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coastline, is crowded with matchbox houses where children play and laundry hangs out to dry in the sun.

It seems an incongruous setting for a museum – but then, that is part of the philosophy behind the Red Location Museum of the People’s Struggle, which recently won the inaugural Lubetkin Prize, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects for an outstanding building outside the EU. By the time a visitor arrives at the museum, he or she has got a feel for what township life is like. And for the local residents it is a functional space: outside, there is a covered plaza that provides shade and shelter to people chatting as they wait to catch a bus. “Our challenge was to reconstruct a past which had been destroyed, to give voice to people who had been stifled,” says Jo Noero of the Noero Wolff architectural partnership, which designed the museum. “Our aim was to help a community to reclaim its history.”

more from The New Statesman here.

Primo Levi’s haunting memoir of life as a Jew in Mussolini’s Italy told through the unlikely metaphor of chemistry has been named the best science book ever written.

The Periodic Table, published in 1975, fought off competition from Richard Dawkins, DNA legend James Watson, Tom Stoppard, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Darwin to win the vote at an event organised by the Royal Institution in London.

“This book pinions my awareness to the solidity of the world around me,” said former Guardian science editor Tim Radford, who was the book’s advocate at the event. “The science book is the ultimate in non-fiction,” he told the Guardian’s weekly science podcast. “You’ve got the entire universe and the entire sub-atomic world to choose from and everything that has happened in it.”

more from The Guardian here.

From Prospect:

The modern western world is inseparable from the idea of secularisation. From Socrates’s refusal to acknowledge the Greek gods to Copernicus’s heretical idea that the earth revolved around the sun to the French revolution’s overthrow of religious authority, the path of modernity seemed to lead away from the claims of religion. In our own time, the decline in church attendance in Europe is seen as evidence that secular modernity has entered the lives of ordinary people. Some optimistic secularists even see signs that the US, noted as a religious exception among western nations, is finally showing evidence of declining church attendance. But amid the apparent dusk of faith in Europe, one can already spot the religious owl of Minerva taking flight. This religious revival may be as profound as that which changed the course of the Roman empire in the 4th century.

In his remarkable book The Rise of Christianity, the American sociologist of religion Rodney Stark explains how an obscure sect with just 40 converts in the year 30AD became the official religion of the Roman empire by 300. The standard answer to this question is that the emperor Constantine had a vision which led to his conversion and an embrace of Christianity. Stark demonstrates the flaws in this “great man” portrait of history. Christianity, he says, expanded at the dramatic rate of 40 per cent a decade for over two centuries, and this upsurge was only partly the result of its appeal to the wider population of Hellenistic pagans. Christian demography was just as important. Unlike the pagans, Christians cared for their sick during plagues rather than abandoning them, which sharply lowered mortality. In contrast to the “macho” ethos of pagans, Christians emphasised male fidelity and marriage, which attracted a higher percentage of female converts, who in turn raised more Christian children. Moreover, adds Stark, Christians had a higher fertility rate than pagans, yielding even greater demographic advantage.

More here.

From Powell Books:

About halfway through Margaret Atwood’s latest book, I wondered whether that slight, afterthought of a subtitle, and Other Stories, might be a pun of some kind. What one expects from a short story collection, and what one encounters in Moral Disorder are distinctly different. One might read the stories in a collection at random, beginning at the end, or in the middle of the book and sampling stories here and there throughout. Indeed, Atwood’s other story collections can be read satisfactorily in this way. Moral Disorder and Other Stories reads like a novel, however, following the protagonist, Nell, from childhood, through adolescence, middle age, and finally, old age. The reason “and other stories” might give one pause is because Nell’s stories are about other stories — the ones she’s read in novels, the ones from history or regional lore, the ones she’s been told, or discovers in family photo albums. Nell’s story is about the way in which narratives — our own, and those of others — help us to read, and thus to understand, the world around us.

Of the persistent themes of Moral Disorder, the idea of “the reader” is perhaps the most important. Nell, from childhood, is a reader — of books, of characters, of situations. Her absorption of familiar narratives (housekeeping manifestos and Victorian and noir novels, in particular) often influences her relationship with the world around her. In “The Headless Horseman” Nell describes how her childhood as a reader set her apart from others:

[I]f I studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn’t yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine:

Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. “I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat — sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism — to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.

More here.

“The game is both very British and, to Americans, very confusing. But it was once our national pastime, and its gaining fans on these shores.”

Simon Worrall in Smithsonian Magazine:

Cricket—now played by millions of people in 92 countries ranging from the Caribbean to Europe to Africa to South Asia—was once the national game of, yes, these United States. And one of the first outdoor sports to be played on these shores. An 1844 cricket match between teams from the United States and Canada was the first international sporting event in the modern world, predating the revival of the Olympic Games by more than 50 years.

In a diary he kept between 1709 and 1712, William Byrd, owner of the Virginia plantation Westover, noted, “I rose at 6 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew. About 10 o’clock Dr. Blair, and Major and Captain Harrison came to see us. After I had given them a glass of sack we played cricket. I ate boiled beef for my dinner. Then we played at shooting with arrows…and went to cricket again till dark.”

The first public report of a cricket match in North America was in 1751, when the New York Gazette and the Weekly Post Boy carried an account of a match between a London “eleven” (as cricket teams, or “sides,” are called) and one from New York City. The latter side won, though it is almost certain that both teams comprised residents of New York.

More here.

From the 700 Hoboes website:

In the beginning, there were hoboes. Then, a notable non-historian wrote some lies about them in his wonderful and wholly inaccurate almanac. That man was John Hodgman. The book was The Areas of My Expertise. Amongst the lies was a comprehensive list of notable historical hobo names, numbering 700. After Hodgman read the list into a music flattening device, one Mr. Mark Frauenfelder of the Boing Boing teletyped a suggestion that 700 cartoonists volunteer to draw one hobo each as a public service or for no particular reason. And so it was, more or less, and here they are.

In March of 2006, 65 years after the end of the Hobo Wars, several members of the 700 Hoboes project decided to build a new, majestic home for these noble hoboes. Len Peralta quickly came up with a wonderful design for the site. He passed the design on to Dan Coulter who built a back end system using phpFlickr, his open source wrapper for Flickr’s API. Also, Adam Koford, Mike Peterson, Ben Rollman, and Eric Vespoor all contributed greatly to the making of this website. Special thanks to John Hodgman for giving us his blessing on this interpretation of his brilliant creation.

More here.

Excellent post by Helmut at Phronesisaical:

Remember right after 9-11 when Americans asked that question, “why do they hate us so?” That question was so full of promise. It had seemed that the attacks of 9-11, and their horror, had prompted real self-examination and reflection. I wrote in an academic journal in Spring 2002 that, to the side of the option that would be chosen, one of the (admittedly unlikely) options open to us was,

…a sea-change in policy – of that policy of incommensurability between saying America represents one thing, a set of liberal principles and humane values, while acting in ways that often violate those principles for which we supposedly stand (previously in the countless corners of the Cold War world, and now, perhaps, in the countless secret corners of the global war on terrorism). This would be a change from what others perceive as arrogance and what Americans tend to perceive as God-given rights and the moral certainty of a “chosen” country. Part of this change would consist in a renewed attempt to perceive the actions and beliefs of others through their own cultural lenses. Rather than attempting to export our own self-certainty, we would view the world in its contingency with a hearty sense of our own fallibility. Perhaps it would be a change which would take fully into account our tradition of democracy, fallibilism, and commitment to pluralism…

…the two cultural attitudes – self-admiration and moral absolutism – are especially odd for a pluralistic nation that produced the eloquent philosophies of fallibilism found in Jefferson, Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Peirce, James, and Dewey…

More here.  [For explanation of photo, meant as a tribute to Helmut, go to the site.]

From the website of the excellent journal, Radical Society:

Tuesday, October 24th
7:30 pm
Hungarian Cultural Center
447 Broadway, 5th floor
New York, NY

Our panelists will use the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution (and their memories of it) to examine the relationship between revolution and ideology in today¹s world. To what extent have past revolutions been ideologically driven, and to what extent are they similarly driven today? To what extent is ideology counter-revolutionary, and to what extent is revolution ultimately directed against ideology? Has the connection between political revolution and political ideology become passé or even antithetical? How do Islamic fundamentalism, religious ideology and neoconservative philosophy affect the way we perceive revolution? And to what extent does every revolution represent a resurgence of memory, a reaching back to prior revolutions and mythical politics?

Reception to follow the discussion.

More on the distinguished panelists here.

Jonathan Brent in The New Criterion:

Moscow is now the most expensive city in the world, at least according to a recent, widely publicized report. Teenagers walk down Tverskaya Boulevard with stylish new cell phones pressed to their ears; they stop before shop windows that could line Madison Avenue; they treat themselves to ice cream and coffee at a wide spectrum of new foreign and domestic establishments. Restaurants of every sort serve every kind of food from pizza and hamburgers to sushi and the finest pre-Revolutionary lamb. “Moo-Moo,” with its enormous polyethylene black and white Holstein out front, “Shesh-Besh,” “Shashlyk-Mashlyk,” “Yolki-Palki” with their colorful ethnic trappings in full display announce themselves where but ten years ago nondescript storefronts presented signs that read simply: “Shoes,” “Furniture,” or “Women’s Clothing.” Ordinary shops are packed with expensive foreign goods. Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, and mammoth SUVs converge on all the boulevards, and, in traditional Moskvich style, do not recognize the rights of pedestrians to enter their privileged world of speed and power.

More here.