Over at bloggingheads.tv:

During the tour of America that he chronicled in “The American Scene,” Henry James made a stop in Concord, Mass. By 1904, when James visited, the town’s glory days were half a century in the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne were almost as distant as the minutemen who fired the shot heard round the world. James, who had spent decades living in the capitals of Europe, wrote about Concord with a certain embarrassment, as though describing a country cousin. The river reminded him of “some large obese benevolent person,” the town itself of “some grave, refined New England matron of the ‘old school,’ the widow of a high celebrity, living on and in possession of all his relics and properties.” He imagined Concord pleading with him not to demand too much, not to expect America’s intellectual shrine to rival Paris or London: “Compare me with places of my size, you know.”

In James’s embarrassed affection for Concord, we recognize our own mixed feelings about the men and women who made it famous: the loose conspiracy of philosophers, preachers, idealists, and cranks known as the Transcendentalists.

more from The NY Sun here.

American poetry of the nineteen-sixties was a contest of brilliant, unforgettable boasts: “I myself am hell,” Robert Lowell insists; “I eat men like air,” Sylvia Plath crows; “Versing, I shroud among the dynasties,” John Berryman struts. For a moment—the so-called “confessional” moment—the recipe for poetic power was misery mixed with braggadocio. Mark Strand and Robert Hass, two of our finest contemporary poets and both former United States Poet Laureates, started writing at that moment. And yet they occcupy a temperate middle region often thought to be inhospitable to the imagination, which thrives (as Lowell’s, Plath’s, and Berryman’s did) at the poles: burning and freezing, loving and hating, torn between Shakespeare’s “comfort and despair.” (“When Shakespeare wrote, ‘Two loves I have,’ reader, he was not kidding,” Berryman writes.) An entire zone of “ordinary” emotion—where most of us spend most of our time—had not been represented in American poetry. Strand and Hass, more comfortable than despairing, write in that zone.

more from The New Yorker here.

CALL THE Department of Social Services van: I showed “The Jazz Singer” to my children. The groundbreaking 1927 talkie has recently been released in a three-DVD 80th anniversary set, and it remains weirdly entertaining. My two daughters, old hands at old movies, were enthralled. About two-thirds of the way in, though, the film suddenly turns the corner into unforgivable pop travesty: Al Jolson sits at a backstage makeup table and applies burnt cork to his face. Pulls on a nappy wig. Becomes a cartoon black man, singing “Mother of Mine, I Still Have You.”

The kids were appalled. How could someone do that? Didn’t the filmmakers understand it was racist?

Welcome, my children, to your culture’s dirty secret.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Daniel N. Rockmore reviews Mathematics and Common Sense: A Case of Creative Tension by Philip J. Davis, in American Scientist:

These essays offer, among other things, a bird’s-eye view of the world of professional mathematics. The more interesting material derives from the fertile, if somewhat uneasy or even confusing, relationship mathematics has with the real world and real people. In essence, Davis makes the point that mathematics and common sense spring from the same source—a human, if not primal, inclination to organize and communicate experience—but that mystery, confusion and even magic can arise out of these humble human origins.

For example, the property of “fiveness,” which could be common to a small flock of sheep, the members of the shepherd’s family and the fingers on the shepherd’s hand, is more generally a concept of number that comes out of the penchant for and necessity of identifying one-to-one correspondences. Geometry can be seen as the natural outcome of the search for a means of communicating size and shape. The irony is that from such “common sense” and concrete inclinations, mysteries are born. Considerations of number lead naturally to the primes, still a source of simple-to-state but difficult-to-solve problems. Contemplating distance, we come quickly to irrational numbers (note the name!) and, over time, to the mind-bending pursuits and puzzles of modern geometry and topology.

More here.

Richard Rorty in Poetry:

Shortly after finishing “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Some months after I learned the bad news, I was sitting around having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I had found my thoughts turning toward religious topics, and I said no. “Well, what about philosophy?” my son asked. “No,” I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

“Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” my son persisted. “Yes,” I found myself blurting out, “poetry.” “Which poems?” he asked. I quoted two old chestnuts that I had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by…

More here.  [Thanks to Thomas Zipp.]

Nathaniel Fick at the Poetry Foundation:

The bag at my feet is filled with military manuals, but I prefer the poems, thinking they may be my last chance to reflect for a while. War’s intensity is a great catalyst for reflection, but few combatants can afford the luxury. Most real thought must wait until the shooting stops. I wish I could say I took strength in combat from poetry or prayer or love, but I didn’t. I was concerned with more prosaic things: studying maps, planning missions, and cleaning weapons. When I had a few minutes free, I slept.

I do, though, remember two encounters with poetry during my first trip to Afghanistan. Late one evening, while camped in the desert near Kandahar, one of my marines called me over to listen as he read aloud from a book of Kipling’s verse:

      When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
      And the women come out to cut up what remains,
      Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
      An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

He laughed, and so did I, mainly because it didn’t seem very funny at the time.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The doughnut-shaped machine swallows the nun, who is outfitted in a plain T-shirt and loose hospital pants rather than her usual brown habit and long veil. She wears earplugs and rests her head on foam cushions to dampen the device’s roar, as loud as a jet engine. Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity.

The Carmelite nun and 14 of her Catholic sisters have left their cloistered lives temporarily for this claustrophobic blue tube that bears little resemblance to the wooden prayer stall or sparse room where such mystical experiences usually occur. Each of these nuns answered a call for volunteers “who have had an experience of intense union with God” and agreed to participate in an experiment devised by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Beauregard seeks to pinpoint the brain areas that are active while the nuns recall the most powerful religious epiphany of their lives, a time they experienced a profound connection with the divine.

The question: Is there a God spot in the brain?

More here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Seven years ago, Time magazine featured the Swiss biologist Ingo Potrykus on its cover. As the principal creator of genetically modified rice—or “golden rice”—he was hailed as potentially one of mankind’s great benefactors. Golden rice was to be the start of a new green revolution to improve the lives of millions of the poorest people in the world. It would help remedy vitamin A deficiency, the cause of 1-2m deaths a year, and could save up to 500,000 children a year from going blind. It was the flagship of plant biotechnology. No other scientific development in agriculture in recent times held out greater promise.

Seven years later, the most optimistic forecast is that it will take another five or six years before golden rice is grown commercially. The realisation of Potrykus’s dream keeps receding. The promised benefits from other GM crops that should reduce hunger and disease have been equally elusive. GM crops should now be growing in areas where no crops can grow: drought-resistant crops in arid soil and salt-resistant crops in soil of high salinity. Plant-based oral vaccines should now be saving millions of deaths from diarrhoea and hepatitis B; they can be ingested in orange juice, bananas or tomatoes, avoiding the need for injection and for trained staff to administer them and refrigeration to store them.

More here.

The first issue of Lapham’s Quarterly is out. Lewis Lapham on the magazine and the first issue:

To bring at least some of the voices of the past up to the microphone of the present, Lapham’s Quarterly chooses a topic prominent in the news and, within the perimeter of that topic, assembles a set of relevant texts—literary narrative and philosophical commentary, diaries, speeches, letters, and proclamations, as well as essays and reviews by contemporary historians. The method assumes that all writing, whether scientific treatise, tabloid headline, or minimalist novel, is an attempt to tell a true story. Some stories are more complicated or more beautiful than others. Some stories are immortal, others incoherent. Homer told a story, and so did Albert Einstein; so do Jay Leno and Donald Duck. The stories that bear a second reading are true in the sense that the voice of the author emerges from the struggle to get at the truth of what he or she thinks, has seen, remembers, can find language to express. I know of no task more difficult, but it is the joint venture entered into by writer and reader—the writer’s labor turned to the wheel of the reader’s imagination—that produces the freedoms of mind from which a society gathers its common stores of energy and hope.

My sense of such an enterprise I gathered from a prolonged correspondence with the readers of Harper’s Magazine—people whom I never met and wouldn’t recognize if I came across them in an elevator or a police lineup.

Crooked Timber is hosting a seminar on the book:

Dani Rodrik’s new book, One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions and Economic Growth ( Powells, Amazon ) is a major contribution to debates on globalization, economic development and free trade. It brings together much of his existing work bringing together an important critique of the Washington Consensus with positive suggestions about how best to encourage economic growth, and how to build a global system of rules that can accommodate diverse national choices. We’re pleased and happy that both Dani and several other guests have agreed to participate in a new Crooked Timber seminar.

Daniel Davies, Dan Drezner, Henry Farrell, Jack Knight, Adam Przeworski, John Quiggin, Mark Thoma, David Warsh and Dani Rodrik offer their insights.

From Ms. Magazine:

NHI, or no humans involved, is police jargon for the morgue remains of women prostitutes and African Americans. It’s no accident that the phrase, which neatly expresses our society’s flippancy toward suffering borne by the socalled underclass, sports a hip acronym. Language can reveal the carelessness and cruelty of a culture that strips people of human rights, particularly when they are caught up in the criminal justice system.

Investigative reporter Silja Talvi focuses on the dehumanization of women behind bars in her new book, though she also tells of our nation’s dramatic expansion of its prison system, and the political opportunism, profiteering, rampant stereotypes and misguided policies that support that expansion. But given the stories of struggle and dignity culled from Talvi’s interviews with about 100 imprisoned girls and women, it’s hard to dismiss their humanity. Not uncommonly, these women receive brutal treatment along with their sentences: rape and prostitution rings administered by guards, life-threatening “health care,” overmedication (what some women refer to as “chemical handcuffs”) and confinement in “control” units — small, soundproof cubicles without natural air, sunlight, reading material or human contact — that leads to mental breakdowns. In the war on drugs, addicted pregnant women are incarcerated despite the lack of funding for rehabilitation programs, while inside some prisons mental-health counseling is turned over to untrained Christian fundamentalists. Talvi describes how our nation’s punitive political and social mandates, as well as our racial and class biases, have created a “penal democracy.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants. Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock. Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.

“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.” The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said. By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in his blog at The Atlantic Monthly:

Several smart correspondents have made the point that one of the other oddities of western press coverage of Benazir Bhutto is that you tend not to hear about how she’s a huge crook. Corruption in a middle-income country, of course, is nothing new and Pakistan in general is not a paragon of good governance. Still, the best of my knowledge Bhutto and her husband stand out as unusually corrupt by Pakistani standards, which is precisely how she wound up ejected from power.

The Bhuttos, naturally, claim that all of this is politically motivated, but if you look at John Burns’ account from early 1998 when the investigations were going down you can see that it’s grounded in some pretty solid evidence and involves lots of European banks and corporation that are hardly going to be under the control of her political rivals in Pakistan. And we’re not talking small change here, either, this one scam seems to have netted tens of millions of dollars. Back in the late 1990s, she even had Swiss authorities looking to get her indicted which, again, seems like a beyond-the-ordinary level of corruption rather than domestic political gambits.

More here.

From the Oxford University Press USA blog:

It’s that time of the year again. It is finally starting to get cold (if you are worried about the global warming maybe you should become carbon-neutral) and the New Oxford American Dictionary is preparing for the holidays by making its biggest announcement of the year. The 2007 Word of the Year is (drum-roll please) locavore.

“Locavore” was coined two years ago by a group of four women in San Francisco who proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius. Other regional movements have emerged since then, though some groups refer to themselves as “localvores” rather than “locavores.” However it’s spelled, it’s a word to watch.

Runners-up for the 2007 Word of the Year include:

aging in place: the process of growing older while living in one’s own residence, instead of having to move to a new home or community

bacn: email notifications, such as news alerts and social networking updates, that are considered more desirable than unwanted “spam” (coined at PodCamp Pittsburgh in Aug. 2007 and popularized in the blogging community)

cloudware: online applications, such as webmail, powered by massive data storage facilities, also called “cloud servers”

More here.

From Slate:

“Have you read The Naked And The Dead?” wrote George Orwell to David Astor in 1949, a few months before his death. “It’s awfully good, the best war book of the last war yet.” For those of us who have to accept, bored as we must be with the idea, membership in the postwar “boomer” generation, it is impressive to reflect on quite how many subsequent milestones bore a Mailer imprint. The Kennedy years (with a detour for Marilyn Monroe and a long excursus for the assassination), the Cuban revolution, the agony of Vietnam, the Apollo mission, and the dark shadow of Richard Nixon: All of these were chronicled or encapsulated by Mailer episodes from The Deer Park, The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon, and many fine but lesser texts written either for glossy magazines or for the “alternative” papers (Dissent, the Village Voice) that he helped to found and energize.

More here.

Richard Tomkins reviews What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect by James R. Flynn, in the Financial Times:

A more precise, if less exciting, title for this book might have been What is Intelligence Testing? since that is what it is mainly about. But don’t let that put you off. This is a mystery story – and an intriguing one.

In the early 1980s, the author, a US-born psychologist now living in New Zealand, made the startling discovery that, over the course of the 20th century and across the developed world, IQ test scores had shown big gains from one generation to the next. This phenomenon, which became known as “the Flynn effect”, had previously gone unnoticed because test scores were continually normalised to keep the mean at 100.

Picking up the story in this book, James Flynn notes that the phenomenon throws up several paradoxes. If people really are becoming more intelligent, why are we not struck by the extraordinary cleverness of our children or the stupidity of our parents? If, by present-day norms, the average IQ score in 1900 was between 50 and 70, are we to accept that most of our ancestors were, literally, mentally retarded?

And if, as has been shown over and again, genes dominate individual differences in IQ, how do we reconcile that with sudden leaps in IQ from parent to child? Why, as IQ scores rise, are people getting no better at arithmetic, vocabulary or general knowledge?

More here.

Richard King reviews three books in his eponymous blog:

In Point of Departure (1967), the British journalist James Cameron evokes in darkly humorous detail the formative event of his life and career: his attendance at Operation Crossroads in Bikini Atoll in 1946. In his account of the preparations for the test – ‘a monstrous scientific joust’ designed to analyse the effectiveness of atomic weaponry on a battle fleet – Cameron recalls the ‘extravagant multitude of strange personalities’ and their stacks of equipment. In particular, he remembers

the underwater specialist whose contribution to the sum of human knowledge was the fact that the shrimps at the bottom of Bikini Lagoon could talk. They made a sound, he said, resembling: ‘Awk, awk.’

Cameron continues:

Questioned after the explosion as to the behaviour of the atomised shrimps he replied: ‘They are still saying “Awk, awk”, only shriller.’

It is one effect of nuclear weaponry to have made us all a little shriller.

More here.

Go check out the brilliant “vintage pop” band Lords of Whimsy. From their MySpace page:

Lords of Whimsy have been hard at work in the studio over the last few months, recording, mixing and mastering songs for the upcoming debut album.

We now offer a taste of things to come… two freshly finished album tracks. Check out our blog for more about the songs.

We also welcome two new band members to our lineup. Sydney Conservatorium of Music graduate and drummer for Grots Vegas and Blackwell Hammer, Mik Adam joins us on the skins. And Vanilla Chainsaw founding member Mark Alexander contributes lead guitar.

Two songs here.  [Photo shows founding bandmember and singer Najib Khan.]