Larissa MacFarquhar at The Dubliner:

Noam Chomsky has spent no more than a month in Ireland, but he is one of the most influential thinkers in this country. An articulate critic of American Foreign Policy, Chomsky is regularly described – by sources as disparate as the Irish Times and the Socialist Workers Party – as a modern-day saint. Indeed, such is the blanket reverence for Chomsky that you will never read a bad word about him in Ireland. But Noam Chomsky is unique for other reasons too. Some of them aren’t so cute.

On Thursday evenings, Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and one of the most reviled, teaches a class about politics. There are nearly two hundred students and not enough chairs, so latecomers sit or lie down on the floor. On a recent evening, the students came to hear Chomsky speak about Iraq. He sat with his arms folded, a little hunched over on his stool, and began to talk into a microphone. He was wearing what he usually wears: shirt, sweater, jeans, trainers. His hair curled toward the middle of his neck and looked as though he didn’t pay it much attention. He spoke in a quiet monotone.

“When I look at the arguments for this war, I don’t see anything I could even laugh at,” he said. “You don’t undertake violence on the grounds that maybe by some miracle something good will come out of it. Yes, sometimes violence does lead to good things. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone. Do we celebrate that every year?”

More here.

Janet Tassel in Harvard Magazine:

Here is an image calculated to ruffle the feathers of all red-blooded Americans:

Consuming on credit, reluctant to go to the front line, inclined to lose interest in protracted undertakings: if all this conjures up an image of America as a sedentary Colossus—to put it bluntly, a kind of strategic couch potato—then the image may be worth pondering.

This charge of unfitness for duty has been laid at our doorstep by the lively young Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, Harvard’s (relatively) new Tisch professor of history and Ziegler professor of business administration. And he is far from done with us: “Consider…the question of peacekeeping. It has become abundantly clear that the United States is not capable of effective peacekeeping—that is to say, constabulary duties.” He clarifies his position:

Unlike most European critics of the United States…I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job.…The United States has good reasons to play the role of liberal empire, both from the point of view of its own security and out of straightforward altruism. In many ways too it is uniquely well equipped to play it. Yet for all its colossal economic, military and cultural power, the United States still looks unlikely to be an effective liberal empire without some profound changes in its economic structure, its social makeup and its political culture.

“All I mean,” continues Ferguson in his controversial book Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (2004), “is that whatever they choose to call their position in the world—hegemony, primacy, predominance or leadership—Americans should recognize the functional resemblance between Anglophone power present and past and should try to do a better rather than worse job of policing an unruly world than their British predecessors.”

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

From their freshman year in college they were inseparable pals, once called “the Mutt and Jeff of post-Kantian idealism.” That epithet somehow failed to catch on, even though both were philosophy concentrators and Tom Cathcart ’61 and Daniel Klein ’61 do stand six-foot-five and five-foot-eight, respectively. Both studied with Paul Tillich and Willard van Orman Quine, and took a junior tutorial with classmate and current U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Together they bucked the fashion of Harvard’s philosophy department, which considered existentialism softheaded, and got onto a jag of existential ethics for a time. “We were going around being obnoxious about what was an ‘authentic’ life versus an ‘inauthentic’ life,” says Klein.

Nearly half a century later, those epistemological theories, truth tables, and falsifiable propositions have borne fruit in Cathcart and Klein’s new book, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes (Abrams). Consider it Philosophy 101 as taught by Jackie Mason. A philosophical fallacy like post hoc ergo propter hoc—assigning a causal role to something simply because it preceded something else—becomes more engaging when illustrated:

A New York boy is being led through the swamps of Louisiana by his cousin. “Is it true that an alligator won’t attack you if you carry a flashlight?” asks the city boy.

His cousin replies, “Depends on how fast you carry the flashlight.”

More here.

Edward Wolff at the Levy Institute:

I find here that the early 2000s witnessed both exploding debt and the middle-class squeeze. While median wealth grew briskly in the late 1990s, it fell slightly between 2001 and 2004, while the inequality of net worth increased slightly. Indebtedness, which fell substantially during the late 1990s, skyrocketed in the early 2000s. Among the middle class, the debt-toincome ratio reached its highest level in 20 years. The concentration of investment-type assets generally remained as high in 2004 as during the previous two decades. The racial and ethnic disparity in wealth holdings, after stabilizing during most of the 1990s, widened in the years between 1998 and 2001, but then narrowed during the early 2000s. Wealth also shifted in relative terms, away from young households (particularly those under age 35) and toward those in the 55–64 age group.

You know something is wrong when you find yourself longing to be lying on a wooden plank in a Gulag barracks. The “residents” of Nazino Island could only wish for the stark comforts and liminal order of a labour camp over the ghastly scenario that played out before them in the early spring of 1933 in Western Siberia. In the middle of the night, they were dumped on a small, barren island in the midst of an icy, roaring river hundreds of miles from civilization. With no food, no shelter, not much for clothing, 6,000 people, plucked from the streets of Moscow a few weeks before, found themselves wondering how their lives had taken this ghoulish and, for most, fatal turn. Nicolas Werth’s Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag recounts a chapter in a horribly train-wrecked experiment in penal reform. Werth sifts the story of Nazino or “Cannibal” Island, from an assortment of Soviet archives to illustrate arguably the worst nightmare of the whole fiendish Gulag enterprise.

more from the TLS here.

Simenon has traditionally been classed with the serial manufacturers of mysteries, who assign their detectives one problem after another in an endlessly self-renewing process, a glorification not of crime but of drudgery: the novelist as omnipotent employer. He is closer, though, to Balzac’s encyclopedic ambitions, to the positivist notion that all of life can be pinned and mounted in a continuous series of fictional display cases. Simenon, in part on account of his background—the Belgian pessimism and fatalism and guilt and schadenfreude and morbid curiosity—became an encyclopedist of temptation and pain. Every one of his books is a lit window across the air shaft, through which a few people can be observed engaging in the business of everyday life, except that there’s something wrong. You the reader are pulled into the situation, maybe against your better judgment, by an irresistible wish to figure out what exactly is wrong with the picture. And then, helplessly, you witness spiraling chaos. The process is addictive, but it is neither banal nor complacent. Simenon’s genius—his native inheritance, refined into art—was for locating the criminal within every human being. At the very least, it is impossible to read him and remain convinced that you are incapable of violence. Every one of his books is a dark mirror.

more from Bookforum here.

IN 1996, the year Felix Gonzalez-Torres died, I made a version of his “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987–90, by hanging two identical battery-operated clocks side by side on my living-room wall. I had always admired his work, and, like friends who had foil-wrapped candies sitting on their bookshelves or a sheet of paper from one his stacks pinned to their walls, I too wanted to live with a Felix. A decade later, I still have my Felix. It’s hanging in my studio, and when I look up at it, I’m reminded of the economy, toughness, and beauty of his multifaceted practice, its wit and generosity, its impact on us all. Now, I didn’t know Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Felix Gonzalez-Torres wasn’t a friend of mine. And I’m no Felix Gonzalez-Torres. But Felix is the artist that artists of my generation feel on a first-name basis with. It is his interviews and writings that we pass along to students; his work that we make pilgrimages to see; his passing that we most deeply mourn.

more from artforum here.

From BBC:

A Tyrannosaurus rex would have had great difficulty getting its jaws on fast, agile prey, a study confirms.

A US team has used detailed computer models to work out the weight of a typical “king of the dinosaurs”, and determine how it ran and turned.

The results indicate a 6 to 8-tonne T. rex was unlikely to have topped 40km/h (25mph) and would take a couple of seconds to swivel 45 degrees.

Slowcoach dino

The team’s computer modelling system estimated the centre of mass position and the inertia (resistance to turning), which have ramifications for how T. rex would have stood and moved and what it would have looked like.

As well as predicting the dinosaur’s likely body mass and top speed (25-40km/h or 15-25mph), the computer calculations gave the team an idea of the turning ability of a T. rex. This has never been done before.

More here.

Alex Kirby at BBC:

Researchers from the wildlife conservation group Fauna and Flora International (FFI) say that more than 70 tree species used to make popular musical instruments are globally threatened.
The species include rosewoods, cedars, ebonies and mahoganies, and FFI has launched a special programme, SoundWood, to try to save them.
It is concentrating on two species:

• the African blackwood, known in Swahili as mpingo, which is used for making clarinets and oboes;
• the pau brasil, used to make violin bows.

FFI is also working to save other species widely sought for use in guitars, notably mahoganies and Brazilian and Indian rosewoods.
It says supplies of all these species are now in extremely short supply, because of logging and other forms of commercial exploitation.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Sporting a flashy pattern of lavender on black, this newfound species of toad is among two-dozen animals that scientists discovered recently in the highlands of the northern Amazon.

Among the new creatures are four frogs, six species of fish, a dozen kinds of dung beetles, and a type of ant never before seen by scientists.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

In the summer of 1962, Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting are married in the English university city of Oxford. The wedding “had gone well; the service was decorous, the reception jolly, the send-off from school and college friends raucous and uplifting.” Now they are alone, dining “in a tiny sitting room on the first floor of a Georgian inn” at Chesil Beach, on the English Channel. They are happy, yet almost indescribably nervous: “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”

This breathtaking novel, Ian McEwan’s 11th, tells the story of that night. Like a number of his previous books — among them The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, Black Dogs and Amsterdam — On Chesil Beach is more a novella than a novel, weighing in at around 40,000 words, but like those other books it is in no important sense a miniature. Instead, it takes on subjects of universal interest — innocence and naiveté, self-delusion, desire and repression, opportunity lost or rejected — and creates a small but complete universe around them. McEwan’s prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan’s accomplishment.

More here.

Dianne Cardwell in the New York Times:

Frank Gehry, the architect known for buildings adorned with undulating banners of titanium, is set to make his first foray into the world of monkey bars and swings with a new playground at Battery Park, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday.

The playground’s design, which will transform an aging, underused expanse of gray-pebbled concrete, is to be unveiled this year, city officials said, and will include an environmentally friendly restroom building with a planted roof and walls.

“Everything Frank Gehry touches is unique, and I’m sure it will be a great park,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference yesterday.

The playground is part of a larger redevelopment of the Battery, which includes a bikeway connecting the East and West sides of Manhattan, gardens and the restoration of Castle Clinton, a fort that later became an opera house and an immigration station. The city has set aside $4 million to build the playground, with the Battery Conservancy, a nonprofit group, planning to raise whatever additional funds are needed.

More here.

3QD friend and former contributor Mark Blyth in an email message:

Last weekend I went to Bobigny — a Paris burb — where friend … Mark Gore puts on concerts. There I saw La Secte Phonetik – a three piece French Rap group that blew me away.

All their music is vocal loops that they build up on stage and then perform over — it’s amazing to watch as well as listen to.

Bienvenue dans la Secte (live au Canal 93)
Uploaded by HippocampeAncien

More videos and info here.

John Allen Paulos looks at I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, in his highly recommended Who’s Counting column, at ABC News:

I just read of a panel discussion held in Colorado, for example, whose subject was the number of levels of reality present if Stephen Colbert, anchor of the faux news “Colbert Report,” were to interview Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of the characters Borat and Ali G.

Colbert is, one senses, a very nice guy, but he is also a comedian who pretends to be a self-centered, overbearing blowhard of a television pundit. Cohen is intelligent and thoughtful, but he is also a comedian pretending to be an ignorant, anti-Semitic homophobe. We sit at home watching the interview and forming little ancillary “I” symbols in our minds for each of these men as well as for their ancillary sub “I” ‘s.

This self-referential tangle, being indefinitely extensible and recursive, leads to strange psychological effects, one being that the characters played by Colbert and Cohen can be more truthful in disguise than they can if they present themselves straight.

That we can understand these various levels and personas, their interaction, and analogies to other situations is testament to how natural are some of the seemingly abstract ideas in “I Am a Strange Loop.” Humor, in particular, calls on our ability to model others’ personalities, understand their points of view, and stand outside ourselves.

More here.

In the NYRB, a call to name and shame Iran for its assault on free inquiry, human rights and civil society, and for the arrest of Haleh Esfandiari.

The arbitrary detention and confinement of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, a prominent Iranian-American scholar and the director of the Middle East program at the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., is the latest distressing episode in an ongoing crackdown by the Islamic Republic against those who, directly or indirectly, strive to bolster the foundations of civil society and promote human rights in Iran. Over the past year and a half, this onslaught has targeted prominent women’s rights activists, leaders of nongovernmental organizations, student and teacher associations, and labor unions.

In recent weeks, scores of women’s rights activists have been harassed, physically attacked, and detained for no greater a crime than demonstrating peacefully and circulating petitions calling for the elimination of discriminatory laws and practices. University students across the country have faced expulsion, arrest, and imprisonment for peacefully protesting the erosion of the administrative and academic independence of their universities.

Via Language Log, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson, & Jeremy R. Gray, “The seductive allure of neuroscience explanation“, in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on non-experts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Seamus McGraw in Radar:

“There’s no doubt about it—the Gangster Disciples are the biggest [gang] in the Army,” says Chicago Police Lieutenant Robert Stasch, who has spent 30 years tracking the group’s rise from a handful of street-corner hoodlums to what he calls “the most sophisticated criminal enterprise in the United States.”

Founded three decades ago by Larry Hoover, the Gangster Disciples have worked to burnish their image, says Stasch. They have courted politicians and sought to enhance their legitimacy. At one point Hoover changed the group’s name to “Growth and Development” and tried to portray himself as the leader of a community organization. According to Stasch, “They even set up a political action committee … that would actually go to various cities and states, and even to the federal level, in an attempt to get gang-friendly legislation enacted.”

Now, with the unintended help of the U.S. Army, the gang is extending its reach worldwide. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article last year, Gangster Disciple graffiti has been spotted all over Iraq. The gang’s initials and main symbol, the six-pointed star, have been tagged on concrete blast barriers, armored vehicles, and even remote firebase guard shacks. In an astonishing study of just three Army bases over the past four years, a Department of Defense detective identified more than 300 active gang members.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Ed Folsom and Jerome Loving in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

The publication of significant previously unpublished work by one of America’s best-known authors is always a major literary event, but when it is an unpublished piece by Mark Twain about another of America’s legendary writers, Walt Whitman, it is cause for a double celebration. This is especially the case with these two writers whose lives overlapped (Samuel Clemens was born in 1835, nineteen years after Whitman’s birth, and he died in 1910, eighteen years after Whitman), but had so little to say about each other. This seems odd to us since we now think of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Mark Twain’s many novels as sharing in the very creation of an idiomatic, realistic, gritty new national literature, and so we imagine them as literary compatriots. But it was only during his last years that Whitman even occasionally referred to the novelist, after Samuel Clemens donated money to several fund-raising projects to help out the aged and infirm poet.

Asked in 1889 about Mark Twain as a writer, Whitman said, “I think he mainly misses fire: I think his life misses fire: he might have been something: he comes near to being something: but he never arrives.” While he said that he admired certain aspects of Twain’s work, Whitman probably discounted him as a mere humorist, one of those “writers of the left hand,” who hid not only behind their pseudonyms but also the literary frame that separated them from their vernacular storytellers.

Over at Crooked Timber Kieran Healy takes notice of some poll results:

I read the other day that a recent Gallup poll found that about 83 percent of Americans felt interracial dating was OK, and I believe this was a new high-water mark for this view. There was a degree of understandable concern about the remaining 17 percent, but (some people said) it’s only been forty years since Loving vs Virginia. And, as it turns out, it could be worse. The idea that the Earth orbits the Sun has had rather longer to catch on…

Sean Carroll provides the numbers:

more than 83% of Americans now think that interracial dating is acceptable. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Hey, that means that there’s still 17% of Americans that think interracial dating is not okay.” Well, yes. But everything is relative. Apparently the folks at the General Social Survey, just for kicks, decided to ask Americans to come clean about their feelings toward heliocentrism. As it turns out, about 18% of Americans are in the “Sun moves around the Earth” camp. A full 8% prudently declined to have an opinion, leaving only 74% to go along with Copernicus.

Of course the answer to whether the universe is heliocentric is not so straightforward. Sean again:

[In the wake of General Relativity] the concept of a global reference frame and the more restrictive concept of an inertial frame simply do not exist. You cannot take your locally-defined axes and stretch them uniquely throughout space, there’s just no way to do it. (In particular, if you tried, you would find that the coordinates defined by traveling along two different paths gave you two different values for the same point in space.) Instead, all we have are coordinate systems of various types. Even in Newtonian absolute space (or for that matter in special relativity, which in this matter is just the same as Newtonian mechanics) we always have the freedom to choose elaborate coordinate systems, but in GR that’s all we have. And if we can choose all sorts of different coordinates, there is nothing to stop us from choosing one with the Earth at the center and the Sun moving around in circles (or ellipses) around it.

I would note that views on interracial dating probably affect the lives of more people, the way we treat others, family dynamics and the like far more than disagreements about whether the solar system is heliocentric or geocentric.