In the Guardian, Terry Eagleton reviews Patrick Parrinder’s Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day.

In the 18th century, as Nation and Novel shows, the rise of the novel is bound up with the forging of a new kind of Protestant national identity, as Britain consolidates its commercial and imperial power after the revolutionary upheavals of the civil war era and the Restoration. It’s no accident that Defoe writes a scabrous poem entitled “The True-Born Englishman”, as well as producing what Parrinder sees as a study in national character in the figure of the robustly individualist Robinson Crusoe. Henry Fielding wrote the original lyrics for “The Roast Beef of Old England”, while Samuel Richardson’s novels can be read among other things as Whiggish political allegories.

It took an outsider, Sir Walter Scott, to launch some of the most searching reflections on nationhood and national character. The art of Dickens, an author Parrinder reads as both an instinctive republican and a Little Englander, was praised by George Gissing as embodying the spirit of the English race. Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, which portrays an English nation at the mercy of (probably Jewish) foreign crooks and speculators, is one instance of that spirit at its most sourly xenophobic.

As the Victorian age passed into a world of mass migrations, new nation-states and the collapse of empires, national identity became an increasingly self-conscious literary topic. As Parrinder points out, the very idea of national identity, as opposed to national character, reflects a certain anxiety. National character, supposedly, is an objective set of features (in the case of the English, common sense, moderation, idiosyncrasy, philistinism, emotional reserve and so on), while identity is usually what you are still in search of. “What are we?” is a less unsettling question for a nation to ask itself than “Who are we?”

3QD readers may have noticed that some of us have a fixation on mirror neurons. Here is an archive of papers and discussions on mirror neurons moderated by Gloria Origgi and Dan Sperber.

The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of macaques and their implications for human brain evolution is one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade. Mirror neurons are active when the monkeys perform certain tasks, but they also fire when the monkeys watch someone else perform the same specific task. There is evidence that a similar observation/action matching system exists in humans. The mirror system is sometimes considered to represent a primitive version, or possibly a precursor in phylogeny, of a simulation heuristic that might underlie mindreading.

Today, mirror neurons play a major explanatory role in the understanding of a number of human features, from imitation to empathy, mindreading and language learning. It has also been claimed that damages in these cerebral structures can be responsible for mental deficits such as autism. The virtual workshop will address the theoretical implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. The discussion will try to set the explanatory scope of the phenomenon, and evaluate to what extent it can provide a new empirical ground for a variety of human mental abilities.

From the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, a talk by Philip Jenkins, author of Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America.

[S]o much of what I am saying is a reasonably familiar story, the idea of the rise of a Religious Right. But I would like to look at this in a slightly different way— I think a slightly unusual way.

In 1979 or 1980, anyone looking at the landscape of American politics could not fail to see the role of religion as a conservative force; not just religion, but traditional, orthodox religion. I would also suggest to you that exactly the same is true on a global scale. We might say this happens in the United States due to particularly American conditions. But the same American conditions do not cause similar changes—mutatis mutandis—in other societies and other religions.

Let’s just take the year 1977 as a focus.What happens in the year 1977? Look around the world. In Israel, for example, we have the Likud government, with an unprecedented mobilization of orthodox and traditional-minded Jews. In India, we have the defeat of the Congress Party by the Janata Party, which is the first successful mobilization of traditionally minded orthodox Hindus, and a party which would later become the BJP, the fundamentalist party there.

Above all, the classic example of Islam. In 1975, organized political Islam in most of the Arab world or the Islamic world is not a force. By 1979, it is very definitely a force. There is a dramatic change in just that four-year period.

What has happened? In 1979, for example, look at what is happening in the Muslim world: In February, you have the success of the Iranian Revolution, which sends reverberations around the Islamic world. You have the unsuccessful coup attempt by fundamentalists in Mecca—a remarkable event, which the Saudis try to deal with by making the devil’s bargain, by basically telling the fundamentalists that there’s a whole world out there just anxious to receive their message, and, “We’ll be very happy to give you the money. Just go and do it somewhere else.”

From BBC News:

Happiness researchers have been monitoring people’s life satisfaction for decades. Yet despite all the massive increase in our wealth in the last 50 years our levels of happiness have not increased. “Standard of living has increased dramatically and happiness has increased not at all, and in some cases has diminished slightly,” said Professor Daniel Kahneman of the University of Princeton. “There is a lot of evidence that being richer… isn’t making us happier”

The research suggests that richer countries do tend to be happier than poor ones, but once you have a home, food and clothes, then extra money does not seem to make people much happier. It seems that that level is after average incomes in a country top about £10,000 a year. Scientists think they know the reason why we do not feel happier despite all the extra money and material things we can buy. First, it is thought we adapt to pleasure. We go for things which give us short bursts of pleasure whether it is a chocolate bar or buying a new car. Second, its thought that we tend to see our life as judged against other people. We compare our lot against others. Richer people do get happier when they compare themselves against poorer people, but poorer people are less happy if they compare up. The good news is that we can choose how much and who we compare ourselves with and about what, and researchers suggest we adapt less quickly to more meaningful things such as friendship and life goals.

More here.

From Science:

With crushing heat and humidity, you’d think life would move sluggishly in tropical rainforests. But according to a new study, at least one thing proceeds more like the hare than the tortoise: molecular evolution. Faster evolution in the tropics than more temperate zones could help explain why rainforests are such hotbeds of diversity and have implications for how scientists calculate when one species diverged from another.

Scientists have uncovered hints that evolution progresses faster in regions closer to the equator than in those closer to the poles. But this consensus was never backed up with a solid explanation. “Nobody’s tested it properly,” says evolutionary ecologist Len Gillman of the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. One theory is that the tropics’ smaller population sizes make it easier for random genetic changes to accumulate and increase the genetic differences between populations. Another is that the faster metabolism of tropical species, spurred by hotter temperatures and more sunlight, offers more opportunities for cell division to go awry. This could lead to potentially useful DNA mutations.

More here.

Much of the work of a new restaurant resides in coming up with new inflections of old dishes, or familiarizing anchors for new dishes, in order to produce the right combination of novelty and intelligibility.  Depending on its target clientele, a restaurant chooses what to serve within a determinate field: a restaurant serving people who consider themselves Modern and International can serve foams in the confidence that they will be understood as a nod to Spain’s Ferran Adria.  A East Village diner can serve vegan hot dogs just as confidently.  The price of a dish itself is a reassurance of various things: this is expensive enough that I can trust it, this is cheap enough that I am not being ripped off like an Upper East Sider, the reasonable price of their grass-fed ribs demonstrates such an admirable commitment to the neighborhood!, etc.  More to the point, in New York, with its lack of a generally elaborated culinary canon, an established item must usually be reinvented in some way.  Our foie gras comes with pineapple jelly; ours with Venezuelan chocolate. 

Conversely, new concoctions must be tied to the gastronomic memory of diners.  Shrimp with grits and pork belly gets a poached egg on top, giving the dish a reassuring breakfast-for-dinner feel.  In lamb roasted with Armagnac and Thai chilies, the trusty liquor, with its aroma of French authenticity, balances the – whoa! – Thai chilies, the name of which is more the point than the actual flavor – bourgeois New Yorkers have timid, oversweet palates.  Wild mint lemonade: the drink is a short tone poem of buzzwords, foraging-tasty-comfortable.  Hopeless cases are the dishes that achieved a vogue long ago, but not long enough that they are ready to be resurrected.  Just as scenesters exhume styles from about twenty years ago (in the nineties, platforms and bells, nowadays, skinny ties and prom dresses), so food items are ready for reclamation only after proper aging.  The fried chicken and collards that James Beard brought back as part of his interest in American regional foodways are good again; pasta primavera and chicken florentine, no sir.  Go ahead and ask for tiramisu somewhere.  (Interestingly, there does seem to be a relation between a food’s perceived ‘ethnicity’ and its likelihood of return; just as people forget the Tagores and remember the Yeats’, they seem to forget the vindaloos and remember the quenelles of pike.)

What emerges when one surveys New York’s food culture is a sense that certain dishes have ethnographic weight, or thickness, while others are believed to be inorganic impositions.  A New York Times (the absolute gold standard for food ideology) article about fried chicken depends on the M&G Diner up on 125th Street as the case for fried chicken’s indigenous connection to New York’s ‘soul.’  (That said, I love M&G’s fried chicken on Wonderbread very, very much.)  The vogues for gumbo, or ramps, however, will be harder to sustain that way.  At the top end, the foods that are granted permanent menu residence are not American regional at all: they are French.  The idea is of a taxonomized, fully articulated cuisine existing elsewhere, that must be strived for but can never be reached.  The scenes in Haneke’s Caché in which the ubër-bourgeois couple eats plain spaghetti or cheese and salami, however, are much more accurate as an index of modern Paris.  Without one partner living at home, not a lot of people are eating sauces gribiches or gigot d’agneau a la maison over there either.  There’s no going home again to your Provençal maman; French cuisine is curated and articulated in restaurants too.

New Yorkers stick to French, however, as part of a powerful cultural formation in which the worship of celebrity chefs often overwhelms all else.  Ask a New York food snob where their most memorable meals were, and you’ll hear the names Keller and Vongerichten and Boulud much more than you’ll hear ‘at a roadside roti shack in Flatbush,’ or ‘a bodega on Avenue A,’ or the obscurities you might expect from a modern-day A. J. Liebling with more self-respect than desire to genuflect.  There’s all too much faith in the real, actual superiority of these figures, despite the fact that you can go to, say, Babbo, and have the famous beef cheeks and find them oversauced and undersalted, because Mario’s in Sardinia or Las Vegas.  The use of taste as a form of distinction becomes very clear when you consider the reversal of fortunes of various meats over the last thirty years.  Where the tenderness and fatty evenness of beef tenderloin formerly held sway, the stringy, braise-requiring toughness of ‘peasant’ cuts like shanks and cheeks does today.  Those filet mignon and lobster tail eaters are now hopelessly déclassé, whereas the lover of sweetbreads or hanger steak announces herself as gastronomically up to date.

One food, however, that hasn’t seemed to need a resurrection at all, and that I believe stands in the middle of many of these opposing trends: the hamburger.  Unlike, say, penne alla arrabiata, a burger can be dressed up and down, served at the greasiest of spoons or to the most silvery palates.  Yeah, I know, Daniel makes one out of short ribs stuffed with foie gras for four thousand dollars.  I also know that you can get a perfectly passable one with decent fries for six bucks at Reservoir, or a million other places.  There are the neo-burger chains like Blue 9, or Better Burger, for your lover of Whole Foods-style marketing, just as fifteen years ago Paul’s on Second Avenue and the English muffin burger at Florent were the newest wave.  There are your supercool places, like Pop Burger and Burger Joint, the knowingly humble place hidden in the upscale Parker Meridien hotel.  There are the classics, Corner Bistro and Old Town and Union Square Café and Peter Luger, where the burger is made from porterhouse off-cuts and tastes like aged beef, which is weird.  Savoy has a grass-fed burger with mediocre house-made ketchup – sometimes the industrial choice is best.  There are the Williamsburg three, Diner and Relish and Dumont, which are all excellent – though Dumont’s burgers are slipping since they introduced their spinoff, Dumont Burger.  When I’m over at my friend Tricia’s, I often make late-night visits to White Castle – got a problem with that?  And there are thousands of other hamburgers in the city, at lunch counters (are any eating establishments, in New New York, as endangered and as beautiful as lunch counters?) and temples of cuisine and everything in between.

A hamburger is almost always the best value on a menu, calorie-wise and fillingness-wise, which makes no sense in pure economic terms.  With the high price of beef today, the ingredients in a half-pound, house-ground cheeseburger are far more expensive than a few ounces of penne, some tomatoes and a garlic clove.  Yet the pasta dish is always more, for solely sociological reasons.  People expect a burger to be affordable (unless the principle is being knowingly contravened, a la Café Boulud), and the very fact that a burger is a sandwich makes a category distinction that classes it with working lunches and food you eat with your hands.  Hamburgers reverse the very civilizing process of Western society, away from forks and the other distancing implements with which the physical body has been repressed.  (I refer here to Norbert Elias on how and where Europeans used to eat, blow their nose, spit, and vomit.)  The bun, the American addition to the German Hamburg-er, returns us to the prehistory of the plate, when food was served on bread that one tore chunks off of at will.  Accounts of burger eating so often focus on the necessity that a good burger’s juices drip down chin and fingers: part of the inner meaning of the burger is its revocation of the European taboo against soiling one’s hands with food.  In this to eat hamburgers is to indulge in a populist desire to part company with gastronomy altogether, with the notion of an elaborated cuisine.  And for this reason the hamburger is the American food that doesn’t wax and wane, that New Yorkers can have anywhere and everywhere, and that’s always a good deal.  I eat a lot of them.

See All Dispatches.

Brian Jungen. Cetology. 2002

Plastic chairs (yes, it’s true!)

See more on this young and innovative Canadian artist here, here, and here.

From The Guardian:

For a decade now, we have lived with the glory of late Philip Roth. To punctuate his last four indelible novels of America and its discontents at the turn of the century, Roth has developed a periodic habit of making a sharp inward turn, an unblinking memento mori, as if to stir in himself the urgency for another major assault on his times.

The inward gesture was set in motion by the priapic Sabbath’s Theater, the book in which he asked himself, in part, whether he had still the potency for creation in the face of creeping mortality. He further interrogated that question in The Dying Animal and he gets even closer to the bones of it in this short, somewhat terrifying book. Everyman takes its title and its theme from the medieval play in which an unprepared sinner is informed by Death of his imminent judgment day. Everyman, in that 15th-century incarnation, is deserted as he faces his maker by first his friends and his family and then his wealth; these impostors are followed by his strength, beauty and knowledge. All that is finally stacked in his favour in the divine audit are his good deeds. It is not a cheerful tale.

Roth’s Everyman, who is godless and nameless, is already dead and nearly buried when we meet him.

More here.

Miniaturized satellites, in Nature:

A miniature satellite has arrived at the International Space Station (ISS), where it will take its first space flight in indoor comfort rather than in the harsh conditions outside the station.

Its inventors hope that the volleyball-sized probe will be the forerunner to a new generation of small satellites that can fly in formation, and possibly act as servicing robots for the ISS.

The probe arriving at the ISS this week is one of just three built by the SPHERES project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. The Synchronized Position Hold Engage Re-orient Experimental Satellite is designed to float in space while holding a precise position.

A flotilla of such satellites could eventually act as parts of a giant telescope, maintaining their position by communicating with each other using radio links, suggests David Miller, who leads the MIT team.

After peddling the idea that democracy in Iraq was easy as pie, Kanan Makiya decides to blame the facts, in NPQ.

The Shiite leadership have acted irresponsibly by not rising above their own sense of victimhood. This failure of imagination means they will lose more than anyone else in Iraq because they will be unable to reap the rewards of their own democratic majority status. Instead of consolidating their position, they risk provoking civil war. Iraq is on the precipice.

Though there are problems with the constitution over which one can quibble, the real issue is not the wording of the document itself or its decentralized, federal vision. It is a set of guidelines that in any case will be further interpreted down the road.

The destabilizing element is that there is no resolution over how powers are delegated or who, clearly, is accountable to whom. The Shiite leaders have not thought about the country as a whole. In the exile opposition, we have been thinking about federalism for 15 years, and even then we did not get very far in defining it. However, it is a new idea to the overwhelming majority of Iraqis who were not part of that exiled opposition; those inside the country barely grasp the concept. The relations of the regions to the center have not been thought through. The obvious implication that people filled with foreboding about the future will draw from such a document is that whoever has the most power—the Shiite majority—will implement the rules as they see fit.

Also in NPQ, Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ramadan, Imran Khan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Reza Aslan, all on Islam, reform and democracy, war and terrorism. Reza Aslan on the democratic promise held out by Iraqi’s constitution.

The truth is that despite grumblings from those who were expecting a secular, liberal democracy to arise fully formed in the midst of a bloody and chaotic occupation, the constitution of Iraq is nothing short of a miracle. This is an enlightened charter of laws written in a lawless country embroiled in a civil war, whose framers were literally dragged onto the streets and beaten to death between meetings. And yet, in spite of the odds, Iraq’s leaders have drafted a constitution that reflects the values, interests and concerns of an overwhelming majority of a fractious population in a fabricated country that has never known anything resembling genuine democracy.

But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Iraq’s constitution is the way it has managed to balance the religious identity of the people (96 percent of whom are Muslim) with the requirements of democratic pluralism. Article Two of the constitution establishes Islam as “the official religion of the state” and “a basic source of legislation,” meaning that no law can be passed that contradicts “the fixed principles of Islam.” However, not only does the constitution deliberately leave those fixed principles to be defined by the natural democratic process in accordance with the changing values and sentiments of the Iraqi people, it unequivocally states that no law can be passed that contradicts the basic rights and freedoms outlined by the constitution. Among the first of these is that all individuals have a right to complete freedom of creed, worship, practice, thought and conscience. True, a constitution does not a democracy make. Still, as the template for a stable, viable, pluralistic and distinctly Islamic democracy, Iraq could not have hoped for a better founding charter.

In New Perspectives Quarterly, Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling on nuking Iran and what to do about proliferation.

The US government ought to recognize the taboo is in its favor and not try to develop a new generation of weapons with the aim of making them somehow useful on the battlefield. I’m afraid a lot of people in the Pentagon think, “We are so rich in nuclear weapons, it is a shame not to use them.” They should learn we are so rich in people and infrastructure that we will risk losing that if we encourage others, by our own example, to look positively on the use of nuclear weapons.

That is why, among other things, it is important to get the US Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty—not because testing is important, but because that treaty is a pillar of the taboo, another nail in the coffin of the idea of weapons use. The US, above all, should never say nuclear weapons should be used preemptively…

I don’t know if there is any way to stop the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons. If they do, we should try to persuade them to declare—as the Indians and Pakistanis have done—that they are for deterrence and defense, not for offensive use.

Further, we should assist the Iranians in making sure custody of their weapons is secure in any time of disruption. In the case of a riot in the streets, will the weapons be safe? Who might grab them in case of civil war?

From Nature:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued new guidelines showing how babies should ideally grow. Controversially, the new charts mean that more children in Western countries could be labelled as overweight. Doctors and parents already use charts to gauge if kids are gaining height and weight healthily. But they have flaws; they were drawn up in the 1970s and based on surveys of American children, when most babies were fed formula rather than the breast milk recommended today.

The WHO’s new Child Growth Standards are designed to show how children from birth to age 5 should grow when given a model healthy start in life. Researchers selected 8,440 children from Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman and the United States who were breast-fed, received good medical care and had mothers who did not smoke. They collected information on their height, weight and other growth milestones over 5 years.

More here.

If there were a statue of the Unknown Polymath it should look like Raymond Tallis: rangy, bearded, wide-eyed with disciplined wonder. For 30 years he has been rising at five in the morning to write for two hours before going off to work as a doctor. He has been a GP, a research scientist, and a professor of gerontology, one of Britain’s leading experts, who has published more than 70 scientific papers and co-edited a 1,500-page standard textbook of gerontological medicine. But in the solitary hours of the early morning he has also been a distinguished literary critic, poet and philosopher who has written a radio play about the death of Wittgenstein. On June 2 he is talking at the Hay festival about human exceptionalism.

more from The Guardian Books here.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment that he needled in prolific writings for more than half a century, died yesterday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

Mr. Galbraith lived in Cambridge and at an “unfarmed farm” near Newfane, Vt. His death was confirmed by his son J. Alan Galbraith.

Mr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his 33 books was “The Affluent Society” (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to re-examine its values. He wrote fluidly, even on complex topics, and many of his compelling phrases — among them “the affluent society,” “conventional wisdom” and “countervailing power” — became part of the language.

more from the NY Times here.

The always brilliant Rochelle Gurstein is back at TNR with a superb, lovely essay:

It has long been a sociological truism that we live in a world with few meaningful public forms, social customs, or religious ceremonies. Yet it is only when we face such devastating events as the death of a loved one that we learn what such truisms mean in lived experience: at the time of our most desperate need, we find ourselves abandoned to our own devices. It is not only that the bereaved must find their way as if no one before them had ever lost a husband or a wife; those who would comfort them are equally at a loss as to what to say or do. Priests still perform last rites, religious services continue to be conducted at funerals, and even non-observant Jews are loath to give up the custom of “sitting shivah”; but what remains of the old rituals and words of consolation has come to feel increasingly hollow. 

Yet it would be wrong to imagine that those who lived in societies with well-established rituals of mourning somehow had an easier time reconciling themselves to their shattered lives. Personal letters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occasionally include the shocking news that a grieving husband or wife could not properly recover and has died. Nor does it appear that religious faith necessarily makes that reconciliation any less torturous. Consider the case of C.S. Lewis, one of Christianity’s greatest modern defenders, who kept a journal of his spiritual collapse after his wife, Helen Joy Gresham, died following a long and excruciating ordeal with bone cancer.

More here.

Sandra Upson in Scientific American:

Ask why most people are right-handed, and the answer might fall along the same lines as why fish school. Two neuroscientists suggest that social pressures drive individuals to coordinate their behaviors so that everyone in the group gets an evolutionary edge.

Approximately 85 percent of people prefer their right hand, which is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain. One theorized benefit of locating a particular function in one hemisphere is that it frees the other to deal with different tasks. But that idea does not explain why population-wide trends for handedness exist in the first place. Moreover, evidence gleaned in recent years has overturned the long-held belief that human handedness is a unique by-product of brain specialization attributable to language. A suite of studies has revealed brain lateralization in species from fish to primates. Last August, for instance, scientists discovered that in the wild, chimpanzees show hand preferences.

The presence of lateralization throughout the animal kingdom suggests some benefit from it, contend neuroscientists Giorgio Vallortigara of the University of Trieste and Lesley Rogers of the University of New England in Australia. Also, last August, in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the two presented evidence to support their idea that social constraints force individuals toward asymmetry in the same direction. They noted, for example, that baby chickens attack more readily when a threat appears on their left. And Rogers has found that chicks with more asymmetrical brains form more stable social groups: perhaps by approaching each other on the right, she hypothesizes, the chicks fight one another less and are more likely to notice predators.

More here.

Helen Briggs at the BBC:

Antarctica’s buried lakes are connected by a network of rivers moving water far beneath the surface, say UK scientists.

It was thought the sub-glacial lakes had been completely sealed for millions of years, enabling unique species to evolve in them.

Writing in the journal Nature, experts say international plans to drill into the lakes may now have to be reviewed.

Any attempts to drill into one body of water risks contaminating others.

More here.

Christopher Avery in Harvard Magazine:

In his new book, The Chosen, Jerome Karabel ’72, Ph.D. ’77, offers a provocative account of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale from the late 1800s to the present—a period when the “Big Three” were transformed by the addition of representative numbers of women, minorities, and others who could never have enrolled before. Such a dramatic shift warrants explanation, and two decades of original research uniquely qualify Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, to provide it.

At heart, The Chosen is a great story. Karabel brings life to a century’s worth of faculty meetings and administrative maneuvering, providing an account that is both entertaining and authoritative. He also reveals many dirty secrets of the admissions process: primarily that the definition of “merit” was slanted in the past to ensure a sufficient number of “paying guests” for the universities to thrive financially. This will disquiet readers—particularly graduates of the Big Three—because of its clear implication that the admissions process is suspect, rather than sacrosanct.

More here.

The complete collection of maps from Carnegie’s, Deadly Arsenals: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Threats

Click on each map to view a larger image. Windows users should hold the cursor over the image and click on the icon appearing in the lower right-hand corner to expand the map to its full size.

The first five maps reflect the worldwide proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and their missile delivery systems. The country maps show the major nuclear installations, both civilian and military, in each country.

More here.  [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]