Ezra Klein interviews Krugman in The American Prospect:

EK: And why do you think there’s slight better than even odds that we can get it? Why will this time succeed when so many others failed?

PK: First, there’s a progressive movement where there wasn’t one before. Clinton came in when the Democratic Party was basically an uncoordinated coalition of people with their own special interests. There is a real progressive movement now. They’ve learned something from the debate. And health care itself, a lot of the sense of crisis over health care in ’92 was because the economy was in recession, and things got better on the health care front and the economy recovered even as Clinton was trying to get plan through. This time around private health insurance has been declining even in the midst of economic recovery, so the crisis is that much deeper. And because of the progressive movement, the Democrats have more or less coalesced on a plan. LBJ passed Medicare in July of ’65 because he hit the ground running and knew what he wanted. Clinton didn’t give his first speech on health care until September ’93. This time around, we hope, if it’s a Democrat in the White House, that he or she will be much closer to the position that Johnson was in when he passed Medicare.

Anthony Gottlieb in the NYT Book Review:

[Sacks’] new collection starts quite literally with a bolt from the blue, when a 42-year-old surgeon, Tony Cicoria, was struck by lightning in 1994. Cicoria’s heart apparently stopped, but he was resuscitated, and a few weeks later he was back at work. Everything seemed normal until this fan of rock music was suddenly seized by a craving for classical piano music. He bought recordings, acquired a piano and began to teach himself to play. Then his head began to be flooded with music that seemed to come, unstoppably, from nowhere. Within three months of his electrocution, Cicoria had little time for anything other than playing and composing.

A dozen years later, Cicoria is still an extreme musicophiliac but has no desire to investigate his own condition with the finer-tuned forms of brain scanning that are now available. He has come to see his condition as a “lucky strike.” The music in his head is, he says, “a blessing … not to be questioned.” (He was certainly lucky not to be killed. Standing in thunderstorms cannot yet be recommended as a new answer to the old question of how to get to Carnegie Hall.)

Thanks to the willingness of others to be scanned, though, we now know that musicians’ brains are different.

Over at TED, “Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind.”

Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber:

Republican Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini points to this fascinating resource for figuring out the raw numbers of liberal, moderate and conservative Facebook users interested in a specific issue. Don’t try to create a flyer or whatever – just go to the “targetting” section, type the topic that you are interested in into the keywords section, and see how the numbers change whether you click Liberal, Moderate and Conservative (there’s further microtargeting of cities etc available too). For example, about 2,520 self-declared liberal Facebook users declare blogging as one of their interests, as opposed to 1,320 moderates and 1,100 conservatives. 5,180 liberals show the good taste to declare My Bloody Valentine as one of their favourite bands, as opposed to 1,120 moderates, and only 340 conservatives. Less obviously, the number of liberals (7,300) and conservatives (7,580) who like bluegrass music is about the same1. Obviously, treat these numbers with extreme caution; there is no way that Facebook users are a random sample of the population 2, but still, this promises much idle entertainment.

From The Washington Post:

Though Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma helped teach Tolstoy how to describe battle, most of War and Peace might be likened to a compact version of Balzac’s multi-volume Com¿die humaine. In these pages an old man’s heirs connive over his fortune. Parents strive to marry off their worthless children for money and status. Couples form and break up, young girls attend balls, their admirers quarrel and duel, fortunes are lost at cards, babies are born, families face social or financial ruin, and the most cherished dreams are dashed. The book never flinches from showing us deliberate cruelty, repeated heartbreak and survivor guilt.

While his villains never change, only worsen, Tolstoy’s heroes evolve, deepen, see more clearly into the nature of things. Society, the novelist believes, corrupts us because it is built on falsity and pretense, on role-playing and the acceptance of the unreal. It’s all opera. Only the very young and the very holy can ignore the pervasive artificiality. “As with all people, the moment she looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression.” However, those chastened by suffering or allowed ecstatic moments of insight may sometimes escape the world’s meretricious allure.

As its title suggests, the novel examines two opposing realms, alternative paths through life. Tolstoy repeatedly contrasts war and peace, the artificial and the natural, erotic torment and family happiness, the city and the country, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Germanic military tactics and Slavic submission to the force of history, intellectual complexities and Christian simplicities, this world and the next.

More here.

From Science:

Who hasn’t agonized over a major decision in life, whether to accept a job offer, move house, or perhaps switch research fields? We are confronted with a multitude of decisions on a daily basis. Many decisions are trivial and can be dealt with in seconds. However, others may have wider ramifications and can be excruciatingly complicated. In the past few years, our understanding of the underlying processes of decision-making has progressed markedly. This neuroscience special issue highlights some of the most exciting developments in this area.

Koechlin and Hyafil review recent experimental studies that provide new insights into the function and connectivity of the anterior prefrontal cortex, which forms the apex of the executive system underlying decision-making. The authors propose an original model of the anterior prefrontal function and provide a theoretical framework for addressing major unresolved issues and guiding future research on decision-making and higher cognition.

More here.

For Hughes, poetry was a matter of archetypes and of dreams transcribed — the account here, years later, of the dream which inspired ‘The Thought-Fox’ is mesmerising. A powerful spirit, he confidently engaged with the ouija-board which has destroyed less committed minds, and took professional advice from his spirit guide, called Pan. (Apparently, Pan gave him the numbers for the pools draw, one number out from top to bottom). He thought, as these letters and Birthday Letters clearly imply, that poetry, once written, creates as much as inspires a situation, and he may have been right. Crow, that terrifying statement of nihilistic madness, was not, as we all thought, driven by the terrible suicide of his lover Assia Wevill and her murder of their daughter, Shura; it was finished on the day before Assia’s final act.

more from The Spectator here.

Lessing, in the course of more than 50 books, has become an “epicist of the female experience,” the Nobel committee said, who “with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.”

Her books have plumbed the deep divide across which men and women talk at each other, the painful racial fractures and stultifying suburbia of colonial Africa, the earnestness and silliness of Communism, the ways in which passion still skulks in an aging woman’s heart. She has been alternately adored by feminists for her acute chronicles of what it means to be intelligent and frustrated and female, and reviled by them for renouncing, not a little imperiously, much of what they hold dear.

more from the LA Times here.

Urban legend has it that when a patron fell ill in Carnegie Hall and the call went out for a doctor in the house, half the audience stood up to help. Perhaps the concert was a medical benefit; more likely, it never happened. But there does seem to be no shortage of doctors who are musical, at least in New York, and one of them is Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and author, who has now combined two of his passions in one book.

In his earlier collections of clinical tales — most famously in “Awakenings” (1973) and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (1985) — Sacks presented with compassion, sensitivity and learning what, in coarser hands, might have been freak shows of the mind. The genre could have been an exploitative sideshow: a parade of misfits whose brains have been weirdly affected by disease, trauma, congenital defect or medical treatment. But Sacks is adept at turning neurological narratives into humanly affecting stories, by showing how precariously our worlds are poised on a little biochemistry. The result is a sort of reverse-engineering of the soul.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Over at ZNet:

An overwhelming majority of Pakistan’s citizens do not want harsh strictures imposed on their personal liberties. They do not want enslavement of their women, their forced confinement in the burqa, or for them to be denied the right to education. Instead, they want a decent life for themselves and their children. They disapprove of Islam being used as a cover for tribal primitivism. But there is little protest.

We must understand this. Why is there no mass movement to confront the extremist Taliban of Miramhah and Waziristan, or the violence-preaching extremist mullah in Mingora, Lahore or Islamabad? This is because ordinary people lack the means and institutions to understand, organise, and express their values and aspirations. We do not yet have the democratic institutions that can give politics meaning for ordinary people. Depoliticising the country over the decades has led to paying this heavy price.

To fight and win the war against the Taliban, Pakistan will need to mobilise both its people and the state. The notion of a power-sharing agreement is a non-starter; the spectacular failures of earlier agreements should be a lesson. Instead, the government should help create public consensus through open forum discussions, proceed faster on infrastructure development in the tribal areas, and make judicious use of military force. This is every Pakistani’s war, not just the army’s, and it will have to be fought even if America packs up and goes away.

It may yet be possible to roll back the Islamist laws and institutions that have corroded our society for over 30 years and to defeat our self-proclaimed holy warriors.

Guardian America launched last Tuesday. Over at Comment is Free, Michael Tomasky discusses this American cousin of the British paper:

So what is Guardian America, what makes a British newspaper think that Americans will want to imbibe its view of America and the world, and why, having decided to undertake such an improbable project, would the paper place it in my hands? Fine questions. Let’s explore.

The journalistic shorthand version is that Guardian America is the US-based website of the Guardian newspaper of London and Manchester, which will combine content produced in the UK and around the world with content that we originate here to create a Guardian especially tailored to American readers. I am sometimes asked what, or who, this means we will try to be “like”; the questioner wants an American reference point the better to slot this project into a known category. The only answer is that we will try to be like … the Guardian.

Which means what?

Dennis Romero in City Beat:

Sasha Frere-Jones’s recent New Yorker essay, “A Paler Shade of White,” argues that “rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties” and became, essentially, free from black influence. Rock, as I argue in “Pop’s Living Dead” [CityBeat, October 9, 2003], stopped evolving around 1979, a victim of self-segregation (rock fans burned disco records in Comiskey Park that year) at a time when African-Americans moved on to create rap, disco, and soon, house and techno – new genres far from rock. But with that came a hyperawareness of blackness and masculinity in hip-hop – an almost anti-rock sentiment. As the genre stepped further away from its multicultural roots, it turned its back on its brother, the often-effeminate dance music genre. In the late ’90s, a defiant saying in hip-hop clubs – where men would line the dance floor, arms crossed, and bob their heads as women gyrated – was “n—— don’t dance.”

Today, hip-hop is recapturing the groove.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

In the FT:

Academic economists are no more self-serving than other professions. You should blame those in the real world who give them the means to be taken seriously: those awarding that “Nobel” prize.

In 1990 William Sharpe and Harry Markowitz won the prize three years after the stock market crash of 1987, an event that, if anything, completely demolished the laureates’ ideas on portfolio construction. Further, the crash of 1987 was no exception: the great mathematical scientist Benoît Mandelbrot showed in the 1960s that these wild variations play a cumulative role in markets – they are “unexpected” only by the fools of economic theories.

Then, in 1997, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for their option pricing formula. I (and many traders) find the prize offensive: many, such as the mathematician and trader Ed Thorp, used a more realistic approach to the formula years before. What Mr Merton and Mr Scholes did was to make it compatible with financial economic theory, by “re-deriving” it assuming “dynamic hedging”, a method of continuous adjustment of portfolios by buying and selling securities in response to price variations.

Dynamic hedging assumes no jumps – it fails miserably in all markets and did so catastrophically in 1987 (failures textbooks do not like to mention).

Later, Robert Engle received the prize for “Arch”, a complicated method of prediction of volatility that does not predict better than simple rules – it was “successful” academically, even though it underperformed simple volatility forecasts that my colleagues and I used to make a living.

[H/t: Saifedean Ammous]

Ziba Kashef in Color Lines:

Instead of focusing on the 99.9 percent overlap in all human genes, the Pharmacogenetics Research Network, a government funded follow-up to the Genome Project, honed in on the 0.01 percent difference as a source of the new discoveries and therapies. And several scientists and researchers sought further funding for investigations into possible genetic causes for racial disparities in disease and drug responses.

Their faulty reasoning, however, is illustrated by the controversial race drug BiDil. Developed to address the greater mortality from heart failure among African Americans, the drug has been met with both celebration and skepticism. While it is true that Blacks ages 45 to 64 are more than twice as likely to die from heart failure than whites, Duster points out that the disparity narrows after age 65. The disparity may have less to do with biology and race than other documented factors in heart disease, such as diet, stress and lifestyle. Evidence outside of the U.S. also undermines the rationale for a race-based approach to the condition. Citing the data of epidemiologist Richard S. Cooper, who compared hypertension rates worldwide, Duster explains, “Germany has the highest rate of hypertension, and Nigeria has the lowest rate. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in epidemiology to figure out what might be the issue there. It can’t be race and genetics.”

Scientists do, of course, acknowledge the influence of environment and lifestyle on disease and disparities. The laser-like focus on, and blind faith in, genes as the source of understanding and treating disease has been tempered by technical challenges and other trends in medicine. But the damage to our society’s understanding of race may be done.

From Harvard Magazine:

“Our planet has been shaped by an invisible world,” says Roberto Kolter, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS). “Microbes mediate all the important element cycles on Earth, and have played a defining role in the development of the planet,” says Kolter. They form clouds, break down rocks, deposit minerals, fertilize plants, condition soils, and clean up toxic waste. Among their ranks, explains Cavanaugh, are the photosynthetic “primary producers” that use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to form the broad base of the food chain, and together with plants make up the earth’s largest source of biomass. The earliest life on our planet was entirely microbial, and if life exists on other planets, it is surely microbial there as well.

In the realm of human health, microbes help us digest food and produce vitamins, protect us against infection, and are the main source of antibiotic medicines. The human cells in your body number 10 trillion, but that pales by comparison to the estimated 100 trillion microbial cells that live in and on you. “Without them, you would be in trouble,” Kolter says: animals experience abnormal growth and become sick if deprived of their microflora during development. Although a few microbes are known to cause disease, the precise role played by the vast majority is essentially unknown.

The same could be said for microbes around the planet. There are a billion of them in a gram of soil, and a billion per liter of seawater, but we know neither what they are nor what they do.

More here.

From The New York Times:

So what on earth does Jonathan Gould think he’s doing by adding to the flood with “Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America” — aside from guaranteeing himself a floor audience of completists and getting to write off bootlegs on his tax returns? Is there anything left to say, any detritus left unpicked through? Well, I for one didn’t know that Linda McCartney’s sobriquet in her high school yearbook was “Yen for Men.” Intrigued yet? Here is his take on “Something,” George Harrison’s second-finest moment as a Beatle (I’m an “If I Needed Someone” fan):

“Though it gives the impression of being highly melodic, the tune in the verse is actually very narrow, moving in a range of five notes, which allows George to sing it with great relaxation and force. What gives the song its melodic flavor is the pining electric guitar riff that introduces the verse and the bridge. … This memorable hook not only adds ‘top’ to the tune; it also provides a tangible expression of the ‘something’ that the lyric wisely leaves unsaid (much as McCartney’s extraordinarily active and expressive bass line suggests an undercurrent of powerful emotion beneath the self-possessed surface of the song).”

(Contrast that with the totality of Pattie Boyd’s assessment in “Wonderful Tonight”: “I thought it was beautiful.” And George wrote the song for her!)

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Because life is so utterly elusive all the way down to the end, you have two basic choices if you want to say anything about it. You can say a lot, too much even, and be satisfied that at least you’ve dumped as much clutter on the matter as you could. Or you can withhold, take little tiny pecks at the thing, and be satisfied that the gaping silences are doing the job.

Raymond Carver came out with Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in 1976 and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 1981. The stories are a revelation in pecks and silences. Stripped down, punchy sentences did just that: They punched your guts out. The human landscape of his stories was so rich for being so bare. It seems impossible that literature can be this honest, this true. But there it is. If your hands don’t tremble a little when you read Raymond Carver then you’re lacking something essential in your make-up: You’re flat, you’re a goner, you won’t do.

The trouble (if such things trouble you) is that the stories in both those volumes are what they are not just because of Carver, but also because of the rough hands of a certain Gordon Lish, Editor. Mr. Lish, working at Knopf, took the stories that Carver sent him and he hacked away at them, mercilessly. He liked the stories as they were, no doubt, but he saw something else in them as well, something harder and more pure. He saw the power in Carver’s natural restraint and he wanted to push it to the very limit. He saw a compact emotional explosion in each story, and he pared away at the language until each one was a mean package of terrible beauty. It worked. The stories are brilliant, devastating. There is nothing like them.

But Carver never felt very good about what had happened.

Travis Jackson reviews Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound in The Nation:

here are few areas of music where repetition in its myriad forms assumes a greater significance–and holds greater promises of joy–than jazz. Despite the changes presented and challenges posed by many jazz recordings released in and after 1959 (Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come and John Coltrane’s Giant Steps were all released that year), the essential core of jazz coalesces around group interplay over successive sonic cycles from twelve or thirty-two bars in length. The repetition and moment-to-moment alteration of harmonic progressions and melodic fragments, even when they recur in tunes with different names, provide a ground for further exploration. When alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley begins his fourth solo chorus on “Straight, No Chaser” (from the Davis album Milestones) with a blustery one-bar figure that Charlie Parker frequently used on blues-based tunes, we hear both possible results of repetition at work. Adderley doesn’t merely reproduce Bird’s tones and phrasing: he worries the line, twisting and transforming it almost as though he has caught himself falling back into old habits and is trying to break their hold.

The other saxophonist featured on that track, John Coltrane, had his own struggles with repetition. Indeed, one way of understanding Coltrane’s music and life is to see them as meditations on how to embrace and escape repetition. The tenor player’s lengthy practice routines, for example, are the stuff of legend. His previous biographers–including Bill Cole, Cuthbert Simpkins and J.C. Thomas–have detailed how Coltrane worked methodically through étude books like Sigurd Rascher’s Top-Tones for the Saxophone (1941) and Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1947). Noting that musicians, too, are fascinated by these stories, Lewis Porter writes in Coltrane: His Life and Music (1998) that they “are told with apparent love, respect, and admiration. But there is often a suggestion that Coltrane’s practice was obsessive, that it was not a simple matter of working to improve, that there was an emotional desperation and drive in it that was somehow beyond the norm.” When Coltrane kept returning to the woodshed, he seems to have been reaching for something harder to achieve than instrumental mastery. It’s little wonder, then, that, like Porter, Coltrane’s other biographers and fans describe him as an ascetic treading difficult musical pathways in search of some greater truth.

Alan G. Sanfey in Science:

Our lives consist of a constant stream of decisions and choices, from the everyday (will I respond to this e-mail?) to the highly consequential (will I have a child?). Essentially, the study of decision-making attempts to understand our fundamental ability to process multiple alternatives and to choose an optimal course of action, an ability that has been studied by various disciplines with different theoretical assumptions and measurement techniques, although with relatively little integration of findings.

The emergence of an interdisciplinary field, popularly known as neuroeconomics (1, 2), has begun to redress this lack of integration and offers a promising avenue to examine decision-making at different levels of analysis. Its proponents seek to better understand decision-making by taking into account cognitive and neural constraints, as investigated by psychology and neuroscience, while using the mathematical decision models and tasks that have emerged from economics.

Most experimental studies of decision-making to date have examined choices with clearly defined probabilities and outcomes, such as choosing between monetary gambles. Given that we live in highly complex social environments, however, many of our most important decisions are made in the context of social interactions, which are additionally dependent on the concomitant choices of others—for example, when we are deciding whether to ask someone on a date or entering a business negotiation. Although relatively understudied, these social situations offer a useful window into more complex forms of decisions, which may better approximate many of our real-life choices.

As part of the neuroeconomic approach, researchers have begun to investigate the psychological and neural correlates of social decisions using tasks derived from a branch of experimental economics known as Game Theory.

Holland Cotter in the NYT:

Beginning in the late 1980s hellish sectarian violence between the Indian army and Kashmiri separatists, Hindus and Muslims, swept through the valley, scorching its beauties and sealing it off from the rest of the world. Few travelers came; some who did lost their lives. This story was not new. These storms regathered many times over the centuries.

“The Arts of Kashmir” at Asia Society adds to these two perspectives a third: a land in creative tumult. Set amid Afghanistan, China and India, the region underwent constant cultural fermentation, taking influences in, sending them out. Sacred to Hinduism, home to early Buddhism and a favored retreat of Muslim rulers, it was forever either struggling to sustain social balance or heading into conflict. And this perpetual play of opposites produced, through molding or friction, some of the most beautiful art in the world.

Despite that beauty, art from Kashmir remains relatively unfamiliar here, and the Asia Society show, assembled by the art historian Pratapaditya Pal, is the first full-scale New York survey. Why the wait? Mistaken identity has been one reason. Kashmiri metal sculptures and paintings often arrived in the West with salvaged monastic holdings from Tibet, and were assumed to be Tibetan.