From The London Times:

STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS by Daniel Gilbert, THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
by Darrin McMahon and THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS by Jonathan Haidt.
We should all be working about two days a week, earning just enough to get by, and spending the rest of the time with friends, family, or even “wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub”. We would be genuinely happier for it. Our gross overoptimism is also a kind of meme: 90% of us believe we are better-than-average drivers, for instance, when, of course almost all of us are, by definition, average drivers. We are “hopelessly Panglossian”. It’s nice to know that happier people are also kinder. One psychologist handed out biscuits to certain passers-by, and then had an accomplice drop a stack of papers in the street. Those still merrily scoffing their free biscuits were far more likely to stop and help than others.

One of the most honest and fascinating sections is on Buddhism. Gautama Siddartha, you may recall, decided the world was a place of unmitigated suffering and unhappiness, to be escaped at all costs, after he first encountered old, sick and poverty-stricken people. Only recently did a sharp American psychologist, Robert Biswas-Diener, say, “But hang on — did he ever get down from his gilded chariot and ask those people if they were unhappy?” So he went to India himself. He even questioned sex workers in the back streets of Calcutta, surely the most wretched of the earth. “No,” they said, “we’re mostly quite happy, thanks.” How can this be? Well, compare it with the experience of paraplegia. Calcutta’s prostitutes are dirt poor, but then money doesn’t make you happy. Having intense friendships, close-knit families and neighbourhoods certainly does: and that’s just what they have. Bye-bye Buddhism. (Picture: The Jolly Fisherman).

More here.

From Science:

Scientists have identified a widespread sexually transmitted canine tumor that can be spread from dog to dog. Canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) is likely the oldest known cancer and retains much the same genetic structure it had when it began in a single wolf or dog more than 200 years ago. More broadly, the finding casts doubt on a long-held theory about genetic instability in cancer cells and raises new questions about tumor evolution. CTVT is a common, usually nonlethal, cancer that affects dogs of all breeds around the world. Scientists once thought it was caused by a transmissible virus, much like cervical cancer in humans, but recent studies suggested the tumor cells themselves are spread from dog to dog, perhaps during sex or through oral contact with tumors.

Probing that theory, virologists led by University College London scientist Robin Weiss took tumor and blood samples from 16 dogs from three countries. DNA analysis revealed strong genetic similarities between the tumors, evidence that the tumor cells came from a common ancestral cell. Furthermore, there was no genetic match between the tumors and the dogs, which would be expected if the tumors arose by mutation of a dog’s own cells. After examining the genetic structures of tumors taken from 24 other dogs from five more countries, the team determined that the cancer must have originated in one animal, most likely a gray wolf or an old-breed dog between 200 and 2500 years ago.

More here.

“Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been jailed, banned and attacked in Kenya. Now in exile in America, the novelist tells John Freeman his epic story of struggle and survival.”

From The Independent:

Forces within Kenya have tried to silence Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s voice twice. In 1977, the future president Daniel arap Moi threw him into a maximum-security prison without trial for co-authoring a play critical of the government. Ngugi was released one year later, only to discover that his teaching job had disappeared. He eventually left the country because of fear for his own safety in 1982.

For a while, it looked like he would never return. “Moi used to say, ‘I can forgive anybody but Ngugi’,” says the 68-year-old novelist today at his home in Irvine, where he is a professor of English at the University of California. At just over five feet tall, with a ready giggle, he is hardly the portrait of a steely revolutionary. When Moi agreed to abide by term limits, and his hand-picked successor lost in the presidential elections, Wa Thiong’o realised that he had a chance to come home. It was good timing. Wa Thiong’o had just completed a six-volume satirical novel called Murogi wa Kagogo, a ribald satire of a fictional African dictator. It was also the longest novel ever written in his native Gikuyu language.

More here.

Celeste Biever in New Scientist:

We all know that pictures of models and celebrities are given a little digital “enhancement” before they appear on magazine covers.

Well now you too could enjoy such treatment: an algorithm has been developed that morphs photographs of human faces into subtly more attractive versions of themselves. By making tiny adjustments to the distances between hundreds of different facial features, the “digital beautification” algorithm is designed to make a face more attractive in just a few minutes without significantly altering the person’s appearance.

The system, created by Tommer Leyvand of Tel Aviv University in Israel, could not only give magazine editors and advertisers a new photographic tool, it could also help amateur photographers touch up their digital images at home.

In 2005 a team led by Leyvand’s colleague Yael Eisenthal asked people to rate the attractiveness of faces in almost 200 photographs. Software then analysed the images, measuring distances between facial features and ratios such as that between facial width at eye and mouth level, and the thickness of the eyebrows.

More here.

It may be several decades since the last splash of red slipped off the map, but for the French there will always be a part of Africa that is for ever theirs. Even if it’s fictional. This year, Babar the Elephant celebrates his 75th anniversary and the French are treating him as the royalty he is. Their post office has printed a commemorative birthday stamp of the green-suited pachyderm, while the ministry of the environment is handing out Babar packs promoting green issues to drivers on the Autoroute de Sud.

Quite what Babar knows about the environment is anyone’s guess, as his only recognisable expertise is in dictatorship. In the 75 years that Jean de Brunhoff’s creation has been on the Celesteville throne, Babar has shown no inclination to relax the iron tusk in his velvet glove. Having returned from Paris to the African jungle in 1931, he promptly built a city modelled on western architecture and forced all his subjects to wear western dress. Any notions of regime change are banished firmly from the page as Babar has never even bothered to go through the charade of a rigged democratic election.

more from Guardian Unlimited here.

If part of Hollywood’s appeal is the lure of the artificial—not the entirety of its appeal, but some—then Jayne Mansfield is irresistible. For everything unbelievable, garish, overdone, over-everything about her, there’s also something beguiling, funny, even touching. Her story isn’t pretty (especially as told in the shallow, sensationalistic style of the A&E Biography—par for that series—included in the new Jayne Mansfield Collection). With an insatiable appetite for fame and a figure that seems to have sprung from the imagination of a dirty-minded cartoonist, Jayne (it would be heartless to call her Mansfield) parlayed pin-up work into a contract as a bit player at Twentieth Century Fox. Bigger roles came her way in the mid-’50s, accompanied by near-hysterical press coverage. But both petered out, and Jayne sank into European exploitation movies, cheapie American-made nudies, regional theater, third-rate nightclub tours—and alcohol and drugs on top of that. Her career was essentially over by the time, in 1967, she was killed in a car crash. She was 34.

more from the NY Observer here.

As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.

more from the LRB here.

David Rothenberg in The Globe and Mail:

Will science ever be able to figure music out? Those chords, tunes and beats that touch us so — can biology explain why we care so much about them? Can neuroscience tell us just what goes on in the brain when we can’t get a song out of our heads?

Daniel Levitin has the ideal résumé to answer this question. Once producer or engineer for famous pop records by Steely Dan, Blue Oyster Cult, Jonathan Richman and Chris Isaak, he is now Bell Professor of the Psychology of Electronic Communication and director of the Levitin Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise, at McGill University. He’s one of few people to have had such illustrious careers in the industry and the academy, so he brings a rare mixture of street and lab cred together in this accessible and fascinating book on the cutting edge of music psychology.

More here.

Daniel Green, editor of The Reading Experience, in Prose Toad:

In his essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchid,” the philosopher Richard Rorty describes the personal and professional discoveries that allowed him, finally, to abandon the attempt to reconcile the twin values implicated in the essay’s title: the search for some kind of justice in the arrangement of human affairs on the one hand, with an appreciation of essentially aesthetic pleasures (represented by Rorty’s youthful interest in New Jersey orchids) on the other. As Rorty himself puts it:

Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me—in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats—“hold reality and justice in a single vision.” By reality I meant, more or less, the Wordsworthian moments in which. . .I had felt touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance. By justice I meant. . .the liberation of the weak from the strong. I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity—a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice.

It is only after rediscovering the American “pragmatic” philosophy of William James, John Dewey, and Sidney Hook that Rorty is led to see not merely the futility of trying to unite “reality and justice” in some kind of seamlessly perceived whole, but the undesirability of doing so. The consequence of such an attempt is to harden political aspirations into rigid ideologies and to distort reality by in effect aestheticizing it.

More here.

Shiri Lev-Ari for Haaretz.com:

“Acclaimed Israeli authors Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman publicly stated their opposition Thursday to the cabinet’s decision to expand ground operations in Lebanon, calling for a diplomatic solution to the crisis based on the proposal put forth by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora…The three men convened a joint news conference with reporters Thursday afternoon, a rarity in the world of Israeli literature, a few meters from the Defense Ministry compound at the Kirya in Tel Aviv. Later Thursday evening, Meretz and Peace Now are to stage a large demonstration in the vicinity.

“The literary people who are sitting here thought that Israel initiated a just war,” said the organizer of the joint briefing, Professor Nissim Calderon. “After yesterday’s cabinet meeting, they feel that the decision to widen the war is mistaken, and that [we] need to go from a military operation to a diplomatic operation.”

Yehoshua said Israel has reached a true crossroads. “No one is happy to go to battle,” he said. “We know that Israel doesn’t have its eyes set on conquerings. We were at the Litani River twice, and we don’t have any need to be there a third time. But now, there is an initiative by the prime minister of Lebanon which offers to deploy the Lebanese army all along the border with Israel.”

“Lebanon is our neighbor forever, it isn’t Vietnam nor is it some Soviet republic,” Yehoshua said. “Thus, there’s a need to be more careful with it, not to destroy it.” Yehoshua said he called upon the government to renew negotiations with the Palestinians.”

More Here

One evening a few weeks ago my friend (and fellow 3 Quarker) Jed Palmer and I were sitting around in my living room, when we noticed an ad on TV for some sort of thriller starring Samuel L. Jackson. They didn’t announce the name of the movie until the very end of the 30-second spot, but when they did, Jed and I were left speechless by the audacious brilliance of it: Snakes on a Plane. One could write a book about that title (and maybe Jed will, or at least Asad could do a Dispatch about it!), but suffice it to say that Jed and I immediately made a date to see the movie on August 18th, the day it opens, and we were by no means alone in our appreciative anticipation of this exquisitely-named film. (How often is one driven to the theater by the title of a movie alone?) Before the movie has even been released, there are countless parodies which have been produced, like Frogs on a Helicopter, Gorillas on an Elevator, Kangaroos on a Taxi, etc., etc. Some are quite good. Sort of.

Check out the Snakes on a Plane parody film challenge at the Blanks on a Blank site here.

From Lens Culture:

Since the mid-1980s, Joan Fontcuberta has used photography — and all of its contextual trappings — to sow strong doubt and distrust about the authority and veracity of photography itself and the multitude of media that rely on it.

What makes Fontcuberta (a life-long iconoclast) so effective and so engaging, is his sharp wit, biting humor, stinging intelligence, and seamless technique, with which he infuses all of his elaborate provocations. He is the author/creator of more than 20 books, most of which are, unfortunately, out-of-print. My personal favorites include The Artist and the Photograph, which “proves” that Picasso, Dali, Miro and other famous painters actually used photographs as the original source material for some of their greatest masterpieces. That work created a real shock and backlash from the art world, because so many people believed it was true.

More here.

From Nature:

It might not seem inevitable that overweight mothers will have fatter babies. But this is exactly what’s happening in the United States, say researchers who have documented how the ‘obesity epidemic’ is being passed on to the next generation. The team, based at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, has found that the proportion of overweight babies has risen by almost two-thirds over the past two decades, so that 10% of babies now fall into this category. And the proportion of babies at the upper end of the weight scale — termed ‘at risk of becoming overweight’ — has risen by a third to 14%.

The group, led by Matt Gillman, followed more than 120,000 children between birth and 6 years of age, monitoring their weight and height. Infants from birth to 6 months old showed a particularly large increase in obesity from the 1980s to the 2000s, they add. A mother who gains a lot of weight during pregnancy can predispose her child to being overweight for life, says Gillman, who reports the work in the journal Obesity. In extreme cases, putting on excessive weight when pregnant can lead to a condition called gestational diabetes in the mother.

More here.

Lying in bed one morning, on the blurry border of sleep, I realized that the three books I was currently reading all conjured up the fantastic realism of a dream. In each, incidents were depicted with hyper-lifelike clarity, but the story lines flagrantly, even preposterously, violated the rules by which we live, the very assumptions which govern our next step. Sequentiality itself was overthrown, or at least undermined. The narratives advanced, as if towards a crisis or climax, yet they seemed suspended in an aspic of frozen time. Or such was my dreamy epiphany. To a wide-awake mind, the books appeared at first to have almost nothing in common.

Little Nemo, a New York Herald Sunday comic strip of the early twentieth century, starred its eponymous little-boy hero each week in a dreamworld adventure (a selection was recently reissued in a full-sized facsimile edition edited by Peter Maresca). I Will Bear Witness is the abridged diary (even so, it fills up two fat volumes) of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish humanities professor who survived in Dresden under the Third Reich. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a landmark of postmodern literature, imagines Marco Polo regaling Kublai Khan with descriptions of the cities that he has seen in his travels.

more from Threepenny Review here.

‘Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive subject; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.’ So wrote the psychologist Stuart Sutherland in his Dictionary of Psychology in 1989.

Two decades on, Sutherland’s sardonic view remains widely held by psychologists and philosophers. Consciousness has an ineffable quality that appears to be beyond the reach of the rational method of science. As the philosopher Nakita Newton has put it: ‘Nothing else is like it in any way at all.’

If this is true, Nicholas Humphrey observes, ‘we might as well give up at once’ trying to understand the nature of conscious experience.

more from Telegraph here (via TPM online).

Lauren Gunderson in The Scientist (via Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance):

My career as a science playwright started when I asked my undergraduate physics professor to let me write a play instead of a term paper. Luckily he agreed, and the result was a time-twisting play called Background, based on cosmologist Ralph Alpher. Unexpectedly, the play not only satisfied my physics professor, it went on to receive awards and inspire productions across the country.

Several years later, it now seems that stages across the world have fallen in love with science. It’s an age-old flirtation, for sure. From the Greeks to Marlowe to now, scientists (and alchemists) have held a fascination for playwrights and audiences. More recently, in our tech-savvy, genetically altered, atomic-powered climate, plays containing science of any description can head straight for the spotlight, and hits like Tom Stoppard’s time-bending chaos theory play Arcadia and Michael Frayn’s Heisenberg-Bohr intellectual smash Copenhagen have delighted audiences for the past two decades.

More here.  And Lauren’s blog Deepen the Mystery is here.

R. Taggart Murphy in New Left Review:

The Bretton Woods system conceived by Keynes and Harry Dexter White in 1944 was more than a simple recognition of the reality that the United States would emerge from the Second World War in a position of overwhelming economic strength and that any workable global financial regime had to start from that premise. It mandated specific institutional action and imf approval to reset the exchange value of any currency in the system vis-à-vis the dollar. Most importantly, it required that the us maintain both the will and the ability to sell gold at $35 an ounce to foreign central banks on request, which meant that Washington had to take action whenever trade deficits threatened a precipitous loss of gold. When in 1971 the Nixon administration suspended the gold sales, did not use economic tightening to reverse the structural trade deficits, and could neither persuade nor browbeat its trading partners—notably Japan—to undertake compensating adjustments, the system collapsed. But despite a decade that saw the exchange value of the dollar plummet, the financial world continued to revolve around the dollar and does so to this day.

There is every reason for the us to be happy with Bretton Woods ii since Americans reap vast benefits from the arrangement, most importantly in the ability to finance trade deficits with impunity—what French economist Jacques Rueff famously labelled ‘deficits without tears’. Among other things, that allows Washington to project military power around the world at little real financial cost, since the necessary money is first created by the Federal Reserve, then exchanged for goods and services from foreigners, and borrowed back by the us Treasury.us Treasury securities by the central banks of Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. As long as those central banks do not sell these securities (or fail to roll them over when they mature), Washington bears no additional financial burden in mounting a vast military operation, beyond the (relatively) modest interest payments. Taxes need not increase; Americans need not work harder to produce more goods for export or reduce their consumption in order to pay foreigners back the money they have borrowed from them.’, FGCOLOR, ‘#E3E3E3’, BGCOLOR, ‘#000000’)” onmouseout=”nd();” href=”#_edn4″ name=”_ednref4″> [4] (Technically, it does not matter in what form foreigners hold dollars, whether us government debt, corporate debt, equities or anything else with a $ sign. As long as the securities are denominated in dollars they remain within the American banking system, where they serve to create credit in the us.)

More here.

In the eighth chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, on “inadvertent actions”, Freud recalls two occasions on which, visiting a certain building, he climbed a floor too high; the verb he uses is versteigen: “to become lost while mountaineering”. On both occasions, he deduces, a professional daydream was to blame: the first time, a feeling that he was travelling ever onwards and upwards; the second, a fear that he would be accused of “going too far”. The anecdote functions as an allegory of psychoanalysis itself: like Homer, Augustine and Dante before him, Freud knows that we get lost in order to discover ourselves, but also that sometimes we go looking in order to lose our way. Both Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Diski ask what it might mean to get lost in a world where those insights have hardened into cultural cliché. Can we still get lost without being forced to find ourselves too soon? Or stay at home and still stray far enough to remain interesting?

more from the TLS here.

Traditionally the preserve of superheroes and anti-heroes, the comic book provides Jim Shaw with a structural framework that, either visibly or invisibly, is central to the works shown at Emily Tsingou Gallery. Comic Book Drawing (1–7) (all works 2006) is a seven-part project, the narrative form of which adds further to Shaw’s pseudo-religion ‘Oism’. The comic tells the Biblical-like story of a scribe and dreamer named Julo. Set in the queendom of O, where figurative representation is prohibited, the Kafkaesque authorities of Oism take offence when Julo proposes to draw a picture of an invented musical instrument. Although the work follows the stylized conventions of the comic medium, its text has been collaged onto the surface of the paper. This piecing-together wryly undermines the work, proposing as it does that the content either has been, or could have been, tampered with or censored – also affirming that Shaw’s interest in the comic book is structural and extends beyond appropriation and reproduction.

more from Frieze here.

Rarely can a change of two words in a political agreement have had such an effect. In the European Union’s Treaty of Amsterdam, which came into force in 1999, animals were designated “sentient beings” instead of mere agricultural products. Member states are now required to pay “full regard to the welfare requirements of animals”. No big shakes, you might think. But given the history of western thought, that idea is nothing short of astonishing. Animals have long been regarded as little more than lumps of meat. Aristotle said that animals, like slaves, existed for our use. Aquinas regarded them as mere instruments to whom moral considerations did not apply. Descartes thought they were automata. “There is no prejudice to which we are more accustomed,” he declared, “than the belief that dumb animals think.”

more from The New Statesman here.