From Science:

Humans are highly social, but we don’t get pally with just anybody. Before forming relationships with other people, we normally size them up to see how trustworthy they are. A new study suggests that this behavior stems from an evolutionary reorganization in a part of the brain responsible for detecting other people’s emotions. The amygdala, a small, almond-shaped area deep within our brains, appears to be essential in helping us read the emotions of others. Last year, for example, scientists noted that the amygdalas of patients with autism, which is characterized by decreased social interaction and an inability to understanding the feelings of others, have fewer nerve cells, especially in a subdivision called the lateral nucleus. To see how the amygdala varies in different primate species, a team led by anthropologist Katerina Semendeferi of the University of California, San Diego, measured brain area in autopsy material from 12 ape and human specimens. The researchers found that although the human amygdala was much larger than those of the apes, it was actually the smallest when compared to overall brain size.

In humans, however, the lateral nucleus occupied a bigger fraction of the amygdala, and was larger compared to overall brain size, than in the other species. The team concludes that the amygdala’s lateral nucleus has enlarged relative to the rest of the structure since the human line split from the apes, and that this enlargement might reflect the “social pressures” of living in large groups.

More here.

It’s easy to say which nation has the fastest trains (France) or the largest number of prime ministers who’ve probably been eaten by sharks (Australia), but it’s impossible to know which country has the best writers, let alone the best poets. Even so, if cash money were on the line, you’d find few critics willing to bet against Poland. Since 1980, the Poles have two Nobel Prize-winning poets, 34 pages in the “Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry” (11 better than France, a country with 25 million more people) and enough top-flight artists to populate dozens of American creative writing departments, probably improving many of them in the process. The 19th-century Polish poet Cyprian Norwid said he wanted to see “Polish symbols loom / in warm expanding series which reveal / Once and for all the Poland that is real” — for decades now, those symbols and that reality have been hard to ignore.

Of course, for most of us, discovering “the Poland that is real” means reading works translated from Polish. The most significant such translation this year — possibly in many years — is Zbigniew Herbert’s “Collected Poems, 1956-1998” (Ecco/HarperCollins, $34.95), translated by Alissa Valles, which was published in February to (almost) universal acclaim.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

If no one has ever made a corollary to the effect that scientists who do elegant work in the laboratory often write elegantly as well, let me do so here. A good experiment is like a poem; it aims for essence. To the list of brilliant scientist-writers who come to mind — Lewis Thomas, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould — add Professor Sir Henry Harris (to give him his full due) of Oxford University.

Harris’ contribution to cell biology is immense: With one colleague, he developed the technique of cell fusion foundational to somatic cell genetics; with another, he devised the first systematic method for measuring genes along the human chromosome; with a third, he showed that certain genes are able to suppress malignancy. None of this would merit mention in a book review if he didn’t also write stories that open a world unknown to most of us — one that displays the rarefied intellectual culture of Oxford (and perhaps any great university) in all its human glory and failure.

more from the LA Times here.

Many of my New York City friends find my enthusiasm for Paterson, New Jersey, a little baffling and somewhat perverse. For many years I admired the place from afar, as a literary icon, of all odd things, because of my college research on William Carlos Williams. Paterson also has a resonance with contemporary national politics: two of the September 11 hijackers, Nawaf al Hamzi and the enigmatic, mild-looking, soft-featured rural Saudi Hani Hanjour, who piloted American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, lived in Paterson briefly.

In its crumbling melting pot isolation, virtually ignored by the rest of the country, Paterson appears to be an ongoing American experiment, but it is far from clear to the casual observer whether the experiment is working out. As in many of the less gentrified cities of the Eastern Seaboard, violent crime is endemic, but the city remains irrepressibly energetic. The city does not look like America thinks America is supposed to look, and yet it is a very American place.

from 3QDer, good friend, and Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, J.M. Tyree. More at AGNI here. For a link to the Flux Factory project “Paterson”, go here.

From The New York Times:

The day after the 9/11 attacks, President Deorge W. Bush declared the strikes by Al Qaeda “more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.” Bush’s “war on terror” was “not a figure of speech,” he said. Rather, it was a defining framework. The war, Bush announced, would begin with Al Qaeda, but would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” The global war on terror, he said, was the “inescapable calling of our generation.”

Six years later, most Americans still rightly believe that the United States must confront Islamic terrorism — and must be relentless in preventing terrorist networks from getting weapons of mass destruction. But Bush’s premises have proved flawed, and the war-on-terror frame has obscured more than it has clarified.

More here.

From Slate:

From NPR:

We all have a hard time admitting that we’re wrong, but according to a new book about human psychology, it’s not entirely our fault. Social psychologist Elliot Aronson says our brains work hard to make us think we are doing the right thing, even in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Excerpt from the book:

Half a century ago, a young social psychologist named Leon Festinger and two associates infiltrated a group of people who believed the world would end on December 21. They wanted to know what would happen to the group when (they hoped!) the prophecy failed. The group’s leader, whom the researchers called Marian Keech, promised that the faithful would be picked up by a flying saucer and elevated to safety at midnight on December 20. Many of her followers quit their jobs, gave away their homes, and dispersed their savings, waiting for the end. Who needs money in outer space? Others waited in fear or resignation in their homes. (Mrs. Keech’s own husband, a nonbeliever, went to bed early and slept soundly through the night as his wife and her followers prayed in the living room.) Festinger made his own prediction: The believers who had not made a strong commitment to the prophecy—who awaited the end of the world by themselves at home, hoping they weren’t going to die at midnight—would quietly lose their faith in Mrs. Keech. But those who had given away their possessions and were waiting with the others for the spaceship would increase their belief in her mystical abilities. In fact, they would now do everything they could to get others to join them.

More here.

Ramachandra Guha in The Nation:

In the history of independent India, the most bloody conflicts have taken place in the most beautiful locations. Consider Kashmir, whose enchantments have been celebrated by countless poets down the ages, as well as by rulers from the Mughal Emperor Jahangir to the first prime minister of free India, Jawaharlal Nehru. Or Nagaland and Manipur, whose mist-filled hills and valleys have been rocked again and again by the sound of gunfire.

To this melancholy list of lovely places wracked by civil war must now be added Bastar, a hilly, densely forested part of central India largely inhabited by tribal people. In British times Bastar was an autonomous princely state, overseen with a gentle hand by its ruler, the representative on earth–so his subjects believed–of the goddess Durga. After independence, it came to form part of the state of Madhya Pradesh and, when that state was bifurcated in 1998, of Chattisgarh (a name that means “thirty-six forts,” presumably a reference to structures once maintained by medieval rulers).

The forts that dot Chattisgarh now take the form of police camps run by the modern, and professedly democratic, Republic of India. For the state is at the epicenter of a war being waged between the government and Maoist guerrillas. And within Chattisgarh, the battle rages most fiercely in Bastar.

More here.

Uzodinma Iweala in the Washington Post:

Last fall, shortly after I returned from Nigeria, I was accosted by a perky blond college student whose blue eyes seemed to match the “African” beads around her wrists.

“Save Darfur!” she shouted from behind a table covered with pamphlets urging students to TAKE ACTION NOW! STOP GENOCIDE IN DARFUR!

My aversion to college kids jumping onto fashionable social causes nearly caused me to walk on, but her next shout stopped me.

“Don’t you want to help us save Africa?” she yelled.

It seems that these days, wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crisis it has created in the Middle East, the West has turned to Africa for redemption. Idealistic college students, celebrities such as Bob Geldof and politicians such as Tony Blair have all made bringing light to the dark continent their mission. They fly in for internships and fact-finding missions or to pick out children to adopt in much the same way my friends and I in New York take the subway to the pound to adopt stray dogs.

More here.

Tim Madigan in Philosophy Now:

In Book VIII of his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle categorizes three different types of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of the good. Friendships of utility are those where people are on cordial terms primarily because each person benefits from the other in some way. Business partnerships, relationships among co-workers, and classmate connections are examples. Friendships of pleasure are those where individuals seek out each other’s company because of the joy it brings. Passionate love affairs, people associating with each other due to belonging to the same hobby organization, and fishing buddies fall into this category. Most important of all are friendships of the good. These are friendships based upon mutual respect, admiration for each other’s virtues, and a strong desire to aid and assist the other person because one recognizes their essential goodness.

The first two types of friendship are relatively fragile. When the purpose for which the relationship is formed somehow changes, then these friendships tend to end. For instance, if the business partnership is dissolved, or if you take another job, or graduate from school, it is more than likely that no ties will be maintained with the former friend of utility. Likewise, once the love affair cools, or you take up a new hobby or give up fishing, the friends of pleasure will go their own ways.

More here.

A daily rant from Rantasaurus Rex:

Your disillusioned co-worker

So you claim to have developed some self-awareness finally.

Too bad you didn’t have any when you got mad at an innocent remark. You claim not to hold grudges, but you certainly blew it up to epic proportions.

Too bad you didn’t have any when you decided to get involved in a situation that had nothing to do with you. You grossly over-estimated your abilities as a peace maker.

Too bad you didn’t have any when you sent out snarky emails. Any reaction to your nastiness never elicited an apology. You were just “being honest”.

I really doubt your self-awareness. I think it’s more likely just more of your general self-centeredness. You are neither nice, nor honest. You’re just a bitch.

More here.

Robert Hanks reviews Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon by P. D. Smith, in the Financial Times:

Being so accustomed to the idea of manmade apocalypse, it’s easy to forget what a novelty it is. It really only entered the collective consciousness at the same time that it became technologically feasible, in the 1950s. To be precise, the idea entered US homes on February 26 1950, when, on an American radio talkshow, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard raised the possibility of a cobalt bomb which would envelop the world in a cloud of radioactive dust, poisoning every living thing. This is the weapon that is detonated at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove.

In Doomsday Men, P.D. Smith sets out to show how Szilard, and the rest of us, arrived at this seeming end-point – a prehistory of the atomic age. Three narrative strands intertwine through the first half of the book. One is the history of physics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – the Curies’ discovery of radium, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the realisation of the immense energy locked up in matter. Alongside this runs a history of military technology, the successive “superweapons” which, it was asserted, would bring an end to war: first by aerial bombardment, then poison gas, then germ warfare. The actual effect was the opposite – instead of making war less feasible, these weapons simply extended its reach, placing civilian populations in the front line.

More here.

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times:

A soulful blast from the past sparked by heart and a throbbing beat, “This Is England” returns us to 1983, when Ronnie and Maggie ruled their roosts with Teflon finesse and an iron grip. The place is a quiet town where rude graffiti litter the walls and teenage skinheads loiter, dressed in jeans, Ben Sherman shirts and Doc Martens boots, looking for something, anything, to do. The Falklands War has just ended, but another battle simmers on the home front, fueled by unemployment, rage, nationalism and the old ennui.

A modest, near-flawless gem, “This Is England” is the fifth feature by the young British director Shane Meadows, doing his best work since he first hit the festival scene in the mid-1990s with his hilarious, raw-hewn shorts “Small Time” and “Where’s the Money, Ronnie?” Like most of his films the new one takes place in the East Midlands, in England’s midsection, where Nottingham and Derby are, and where Mr. Meadows was born and, in early adolescence, became a skinhead. By turns gentle and brutal, “This Is England” is a humbly, if insistently political, autobiographical homage to that lost world of youth as well as a lament for its hopes, pleasures and passionate camaraderie.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

In the New Yorker, David Remnick on the former speaker of the Knesset and head of the World Zionist Organization, Avraham Burg, and how his falling out with the Israeli Left, Right and Center:

Burg has a fairly standard left-leaning view of the Palestinian question: even now, with Hamas in control of Gaza, the longer Israel delays in coming to terms with a sovereign Palestinian state, the more Palestinian society will radicalize and embrace maximalist, jihadi ideologies, and the more Israeli society will lose its moral sense. But some of the views that Burg expressed in the interview [in Ha’aretz] were far from standard. He told Shavit that civil disobedience would have been preferable to the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and that Israel should give up its nuclear weaponry in exchange for an unspecified “deal” with its Arab neighbors. Israel’s “law of return,” which allows any Jew around the world to immigrate and become a citizen, was “dynamite” in the Arab world, he said, and needed to be reëvaluated. One subject that especially infuriated [Avi] Shavit, and provoked countless letters to the editor, e-mail screeds, and editorial-page rebuttals, was Burg’s depiction of the European Union as an almost irresistibly attractive “biblical utopia” and his flouting of the fact that he holds a French passport, because his wife is French-born, and voted in the recent French elections. When Shavit asked Burg if he recommended that all Israelis acquire a second passport, Burg replied, “Whoever can”—a moment of determined cosmopolitanism. Shavit sarcastically called Burg “the prophet of Brussels.”

If you have read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion – and if not, why not? – then you will have encountered a crisp, authoritative and unmistakeably English account of the scientific case against assuming the existence of a god. If you have read Christopher Hitchens’ new God Is Not Great you will have been rewarded by a wonderfully erudite, distinctly transatlantic version of the political and logical case against organised religion. Now comes the third part of what we might (though probably shouldn’t) call the atheist trinity, the philosophical case against monotheism. This one comes, bien sûr, from France. It is Michel Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism, just published in the UK.

While Dawkins makes a strong case for why one doesn’t require a thorough grounding in theology to refute religious certainties (you don’t need to be an expert in fairyology to dispute the existence of fairies), and Hitchens draws on his acute observational skills and tireless globetrotting to report on the way “religion poisons everything” – from “Belfast to Beirut to Baghdad, and that’s without leaving the B’s”– Onfray takes another tack entirely. As befits his role as “France’s most popular philosopher” (is there another country in the world where these two words go together?), Onfray delves deep into the internal logic of the three monotheisms, performing what he calls “a pitiless historical reading of the three so-called holy books”. Nor is he alone in his battle: he enters the field backed by a gang of thinkers as bizarrely incongruous as the Dirty Dozen – Epicurus, Nietzsche, Georges Bataille and Jean Meslier, Baron d’Holbach and Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham and Freud.

more from The New Humanist here.

From Publishers Weekly:

Nina Planck is a good, stylish writer and a dogged researcher who writes directly, forthrightly and with an edge. She isn’t afraid to make the occasional wisecrack (“No doubt, for some people, cracking open an egg is one chore too many”) while taking unpopular positions. Her chosen field—she is a champion of “real” (as opposed to industrialized) food—is one in which unpopular positions are easy to find. As Planck reveals, in her compellingly smart Real Food: What to Eat and Why, much of what we have learned about nutrition in the past generation or so is either misinformed or dead wrong, and almost all of the food invented in the last century, and especially since the Second World War, is worse than almost all of the food that we’ve been eating since we developed agriculture. This means, she says, that butter is better than margarine (so, for that matter, is lard); that whole eggs (especially those laid by hens who scratch around in the dirt) are better than egg whites, and that eggs in general are an integral part of a sound diet; that full-fat milk is preferable to skim, raw preferable to pasteurized, au naturel preferable to homogenized. She goes so far as to maintain—horror of horrors—that chopped liver mixed with real schmaltz and hard-boiled eggs is, in a very real way, a form of health food. Like those who’ve paved the way before her, she urges us to eat in a natural, old-fashioned way. But unlike many of them, and unlike her sometimes overbearing compatriots in the Slow Food movement, she is far from dogmatic, making her case casually, gently, persuasively. And personally, Planck’s philosophy grows directly out of her life history, which included a pair of well-educated parents who decided, when the author was two, to pull up stakes in Buffalo, N.Y., and take up farming in northern Virginia. Planck, therefore, grew up among that odd combination of rural farming intellectuals who not only wanted to raise food for a living but could explain why it made sense.

More here.

Susan Sontag was that unimaginable thing, a celebrity literary critic. Most readers of The New York Review probably would have been able to recognize her on the street, as they would not, say, George Steiner. An icon of braininess, she even developed, like Einstein, a trademark hairdo: an imperious white stripe, reminiscent of Indira Gandhi, as though she were declaring a cultural Emergency. Most readers probably know a few bits about her life, as they do not of any other critic: the girl Susan Rosenblatt—Sontag was her stepfather—in her junior high class in Arizona, with Kant, not a comic book, hidden behind her textbook. Her teenaged marriage to Philip Rieff that was her entry into highbrow society. (“My greatest dream was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people.”) Her trip to Hanoi in 1968. The mini-skirted babe in the frumpy Upper West Side crowd and her years as the only woman on the panel. The front-page news in 1982 when, after years of supporting various Marxist revolutions, she declared that communism was “fascism with a human face.” Her months in Sarajevo in 1993, as the bombs fell, bravely or foolishly attempting to put on a production of Waiting for Godot. Her struggle with cancer. Her long relationship with the glamour photographer Annie Leibovitz. We even know—from Leibovitz’s grotesque “A Photographer’s Life” exhibition and book—what Sontag looked like in the last days of her life and after her death.

more from the NYRB here.

Marguerite Duras’s life story is well known, having provided the material for so much of her fiction. She was born in 1914 in Gia Dinh, Vietnam. Both her parents were teachers; her father died in 1921. Her early years were peripatetic; her mother eventually settled with her three children, in 1925, in Cambodia, building a house on a rice plantation that was four hours away from the nearest village. Subsequent years were spent paying for this house and seeking further funds to build a dam to protect their constantly flooded paddies. Duras went to study in Saigon at the age of fifteen and two years later, in 1931, left for Paris. The “Cahiers rose marbré”, the first notebooks in the collection, provide an account of this adolescence, written like a journal entry. It is notable just how much autobiography is present in her novels, especially in Un Barrage. Like her protagonist, Suzanne, we learn of a first relationship with a rich, indigenous man. There follow the beatings at the hands of her mother and elder brother. It wasn’t an unhappy period, it was savage, and Duras retells it through simple documentation, seemingly in an attempt better to make sense of her frame of mind at the time: “I believed what they called me. I don’t any more. I suffered like I was damned . . . enduring it like it was my fate”.

more from the TLS here.

From Nature:

Researchers have created a mutant mouse that lives longer despite eating more and weighing less — all thanks to the loss of a single protein. Without this protein, the body is less susceptible to the heart-pounding effects of the hormone adrenaline, and may become more resistant to some forms of stress. Scientists are already developing drugs to inhibit this protein, called type 5 adenylyl cyclase (AC5). “Clearly we would be very interested in such a compound,” says cardiologist Stephen Vatner, who is part of the team that discovered this effect. Currently, the main focus of ageing research is on using calorie restriction as a way of activating a metabolic ‘fountain of youth’. The new discovery, that knocking out a single cardiac gene could lengthen lifespan, was an unexpected byproduct of heart research.

Vatner, together with Junichi Sadoshima and other colleagues at the New Jersey Medical School at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, had initially set out to determine whether getting rid of AC5 leads to a healthier heart.

Drugs that block adrenaline signalling, called beta-blockers, are known to help patients who have had heart attacks or suffer from an irregular heartbeat. As the researchers revealed in 2003, mutant mice lacking AC5 were more resistant to heart failure caused by pressure within the heart. But in the process, the research team also realised that the mutant mice lived longer than their normal counterparts. Now, in a paper published in Cell this week², they report that the treated mice lived 30% longer and did not develop the heart stress and bone deterioration that often accompanies ageing.

More here.

Ben Zimmer in the Oxford University Press blog:

In our last installment, I noted that the increasingly common spelling of minuscule as miniscule is not just your average typographical error: it makes sense in a new way, since the respelling brings the word into line with miniature, minimum, and a whole host of tiny terms using the mini- prefix. It might not be correct from an etymological standpoint, since the original word is historically related to minus instead of mini-, but most users of English don’t walk around with accurate, in-depth etymologies in their heads. (Sorry, Anatoly!) Rather, we’re constantly remaking the language by using the tools at our disposal, very often by comparing words and phrases to other ones we already know. If something in the lexicon seems a bit murky, we may try to make it clearer by bringing it into line with our familiar vocabulary. This is especially true with idioms, those quirky expressions that linger in the language despite not making much sense on a word-by-word basis.

Take the idiom free rein, meaning ‘freedom of action or expression.’ Our blog editor Becca Ford recently passed along the usage tip from Garner’s Modern American Usage, which advises that this is the correct form, not free reign. “The allusion is to horses, not to kings or queens,” Garner writes, “but some writers have apparently forgotten the allusion.”

More here.