From EGO:

Remember when only one woman could flash that tricky one-two punch of cutting-edge dance-pop and mesmerizing, scandal-drenched visuals? To say that Madonna was an innovator is putting it mildly. To say that she was an instigator is stating the obvious. But to submit that she was the last female pop-culture revolutionary of the 20th century, well…now you’re getting somewhere.

Madonna is an artist for whom fame has reached such unscalable heights, and whose persona has become so infused in the limelight, that one often wonders what it is she became famous for in the first place. One often forgets that Madonna was the first female pop-star who truly owned and controlled her music, image, and career. And in the process she completely manipulated her audience and the media with her songwriting, her videos, and most importantly – her sexuality.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Like all revolutions in thought, this one began with anomalies, strange facts, odd observations that the prevailing wisdom could not explain. Casino gamblers, for instance, are willing to keep betting even while expecting to lose. People say they want to save for retirement, eat better, start exercising, quit smoking—and they mean it—but they do no such things. Victims who feel they’ve been treated poorly exact their revenge, though doing so hurts their own interests.

Such perverse facts are a direct affront to the standard model of the human actor—Economic Man—that classical and neoclassical economics have used as a foundation for decades, if not centuries. Economic Man makes logical, rational, self-interested decisions that weigh costs against benefits and maximize value and profit to himself. Economic Man is an intelligent, analytic, selfish creature who has perfect self-regulation in pursuit of his future goals and is unswayed by bodily states and feelings. And Economic Man is a marvelously convenient pawn for building academic theories. But Economic Man has one fatal flaw: he does not exist.

When we turn to actual human beings, we find, instead of robot-like logic, all manner of irrational, self-sabotaging, and even altruistic behavior.

More here.

From Science:

Bug parents have it easy. Instead of suffering the starving cries of their babies like bird and mammal mommies do, new research indicates that insects merely need a whiff of their kids to gauge what little ones need. The new findings reveal a novel way for offspring to communicate hunger. Moms receiving odors from ill-fed babies immediately set to finding more food. Mothers gassed with sated-baby odors, on the other hand, slowed their food search.

More here.

Phyllis Chesler in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Is feminism really dead? Well, yes and no. It gives me no pleasure, but someone must finally tell the truth about how feminists have failed their own ideals and their mandate to think both clearly and morally. Only an insider can really do this, someone who cares deeply about feminist values and goals. I have been on the front lines for nearly 40 years, and I feel called upon to explain how many feminists — who should be the first among freedom- and democracy-loving people — have instead become cowardly herd animals and grim totalitarian thinkers. This must be said, and my goal in saying it is a hopeful one. We live at a time when women can and must make a difference in the world.

More here.

Alex Perry in Time Magazine:

Today, there is old India and new India. One is epitomized by the surging chaos that fascinated generations of backpackers and travel writers. The other is the efficient center of outsourcing and IT that thrills today’s investment bankers. Where the two meet, there’s trouble. The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was elected on a tide of rural resentment against the booming cities in spring 2004. That rage continues. Government figures released last month show Naxal violence claimed 892 people last year, up from 653 in 2004. In November, hundreds of guerrillas overran an entire town, broke into its jail and freed almost 400 prisoners. The Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management says the Naxals now control a corridor stretching hundreds of miles across the central hinterland.

More here.

Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute certainly gets the nod for clunkiest title of the year. (Who would have bought Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By if he’d called it Aged Veterans of the Silent Screen Talk Shop to an Inquiring Young Scholar from England?) Luckily, the title of George Stevens Jr.’s collection of interviews isn’t at all indicative of the content. The interviews, culled from seminars held at the American Film Institute in its salad days, are valuable for all sorts of reasons. Here, waxing nostalgic—or just waxing—are George Cukor, William Wyler, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Hal Wallis, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Stanley Cortez, Ernest Lehman, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, King Vidor, Harold Lloyd, James Wong Howe, William Clothier, Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, Ingmar Bergman and Satyajit Ray … among others. There are phenomenal bullshit artists in the mix, and serious artists, and every gradation of craftsman in between, but the prevailing tone set by three quarters of the interviewees is a fierce idealism. Many of these men—yes, it is an all-male crew—say the same thing in different words.

more from the NY Observer here.

Everybody knows what a painter is like. Bigger than life, flaunting convention in both his personal life and art practice, the great man stands at the threshold between the wilderness and civilization, channeling the creative forces of nature as he slathers, wipes, pokes, scrapes and daubs the oily patches of color in a fever of improvised choreography — pausing only to quaff a stein of ale or bang a model — until his latest masterpiece is birthed, ready to be unveiled to the astonished and scandalized bourgeoisie, who, if they play their cards right, may be accorded the privilege of paying through the nose to take the miraculous, revelatory canvas home.

As cartoonish a stereotype as this is, the only part I have any problem with is the implied gender exclusivity. Yet as a myth, its power and centrality have been such that painters (and most other artists) have been exploiting or struggling to undermine it for at least the past century. And they pretty much owe it all to Gustave Courbet, the 19th-century French painter who coined the term “realism,” launched painting on the path of sticky formalist self-absorption that wouldn’t peak until the advent of the Abstract Expressionists, and created a persona for himself that continues to be the template for the market- and publicity-savvy art star to this day.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

From The National Academies:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Interstate Highway System, which is considered one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century.

• The longest Interstate is I-90, which runs from Boston to Seattle, a distance of 3,081 miles. At 75 mph it would take you 41 hours to cover that distance non-stop. The second longest is I-80, which covers the 2,907 miles between New York City and San Francisco.
• Interstates 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 35, 40, 70, 75, 80, 90, 94 and 95 are all more than 1,000 miles long.
• The shortest Interstate is I-878 in New York City, which is all of seven-tenths of a mile long. That’s 3,696 feet.
• The highest Interstate route number is I-990 north of Buffalo, NY. The lowest is I-4 across Florida.
• The only state without any Interstate routes is Alaska.
• Interstates carry nearly 60,000 people per route-mile per day, 26 times the amount of all other roads, and 22 times the amount of rail passenger services. Over the past 40 years, that’s the equivalent of a trip to the moon for every person in California, New York, Texas, and New Jersey combined.

More here.

From Science:

On a genetic level, humans and apes are nearly identical, sharing between 96% and 99% of their DNA. So what makes us so different? A new study argues that it comes down to where, when, and how vigorously these genes are expressed. The work emphasizes the importance of gene activity in defining species, says study author Yoav Gilad, a geneticist at the University of Chicago.

More here.

From Majikthise:

Daniel Dennett’s new book Breaking the Spell has been systematically misrepresented by its critics. Frankly, I think a lot of them are getting hung up on the title. Breaking the Spell is not an attempt to discredit religion by subjecting it to scientific scrutiny. The “spell” Dennett wants to break is the taboo against the scientific study of religion. There is widespread concern that understanding religion as a natural phenomenon would undermine religious faith. Dennett agrees that disenchantment is an empirical possibility, but Breaking the Spell doesn’t use naturalistic explanations to refute or discredit religion…

It’s a widely-held article of meta-faith that religion is a force good in the world, irrespective of its truth or falsity. Dennett calls this stance “belief in belief.” Believers in belief insist that religiosity has robust real-world benefits that are, at least in theory, observable by all. They claim that religiosity makes people happier, better behaved, and so on. If religion is so good and science might tarnish religion, then maybe it’s irresponsible to probe too deeply. Even atheists might be prefer to leave well enough alone. Who are we to put our curiosity above the well-being of other people, even if we suspect that they are self-deluded? Some people worry that without religion there is no basis for morality. More cynical observers are concerned that the average person will see no reason to be moral without religion, despite sound non-religious arguments for ethical behavior.

Dennett argues that these worries are premature. The platitudes about the positive dividends of religion are themselves untested. In fact, we don’t know whether religion makes people happier, healthier, more trustworthy, or anything else…

More here.  See more at 3QD about the Dennett book here.

Tim Flannery in the New York Review of Books:

The invention of the microscope revealed wonders to the world, and permitted Jonathan Swift to quip:

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey
And these have smaller still to bite ’em
And so proceed ad infinitum.

By the late twentieth century fascination with the minuscule had begun to pall, and now it takes an exceptional book indeed to reawaken our interest. Thankfully, in David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth, Piotr Naskrecki’s The Smaller Majority, and Jeffrey Lockwood’s Locust we find three works that do so.

Life in the Undergrowth is Attenborough’s tribute to the terrestrial invertebrates. They are, he says, a group of creatures that make life possible for us—whether as scavengers, aerators of soil, or agents of pollination, to name only three of their functions— but because they are small we largely ignore them. As he succinctly puts it, “We are greatly prejudiced by our size.” This is the latest in a series of projects combining television and print in a unique manner that has become Sir David’s métier. His investigations encompass disciplines as diverse as paleontology, botany, zoology, and ethnography; and each is similar in scope to a doctoral dissertation. While most of us think of Attenborough principally as a television presenter, he is also one of the greatest ecologists, synthesizers of evolutionary science, and teachers of our age.

More here.

Nancy De Wolf Smith in the Wall Street Journal:

Yenny Wahid has a smile that could melt a Hershey bar at 100 yards. Her sunny disposition is all the more remarkable because Ms. Wahid is on what may be the world’s most difficult mission right now: She’s a prominent Muslim (and a woman at that) who speaks out against terror and the hijacking of her religion by ideologues who twist it to their own political ends.

After 9/11, many Americans assume that the radical Islamic agenda is to destroy the U.S. The reality is that attacks on Western targets are designed to function as brutal propaganda coups that will attract recruits to the cause of violent revolution. The main goal of ideologues like Osama bin Laden is to topple the governments of Muslim countries, including, most famously, the Wahabi royal regime of Saudi Arabia. But the real strategic plum, Ms. Wahid says, would be her native Indonesia and its 220 million citizens–with the largest Muslim population on earth.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

I wanted to write up a quick post to draw your attention to three very interesting pieces of human evolution in the news.

1. Modern evolution. A new paper presents the results of a systematic scan for human genes that have experienced natural selection in the past few thousand years. An impressive 700 regions turned up. The fact that humans have been evolving during recorded history is not new. The ability to digest lactose in milk as an adult, resistance to malaria, and other traits have long been recognized as having experienced strong natural selection after the dawn of agriculture. But this new study certainly sets the standard for all future work in this area, because it is so thorough. (Gene Expression takes you through the steps. The original paper is here.) The next logical step would be to add new populations to the database. The new study compares only three populations–Yorubans from Nigeria, Chinese and Japanese, and people of European descent in Utah. I wonder how different the evolutionary pressures are in other groups. Inuits get no benefit from malaria resistance, for example. Lactase digestion turns up in people descended from cattle herders. Are there adaptations for eating rice, cassava, or blubber?

More here.  And this also by Zimmer in The Loom:

This image came out a couple months ago in Nature, but I just came across it today. I quite like the way it sums up the history of life–something that’s maddening hard to do, since the time scales are so vast. It shows how life’s diversity has been accumulating for billions of years. This chart shows the timing of the earliest paeolontological evidence for different kinds of life, ranging from fossils to chemical markers. A few definitions may help. Phototrophic bacteria can harness sunlight to grow. Cyanobacteria are also known as blue-green algae (aka pond scum). Eukaryotes are species such as amoebae, plants, fungi, and animals. Algal kindoms include red algae and green algae (closely related to land plants). Some of these bars may need to be pushed back in time when earlier evidence is discovered. Some studies on DNA suggests that a number of such “ghost lineages” remain to be discovered.

 

“A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth.”

Charles Siebert in Discover Magazine:

Few things on Earth are spookier than viruses. The very name virus, from the Latin word for “poisonous slime,” speaks to our lowly regard for them. Their anatomy is equally dubious: loose, tiny envelopes of molecules—protein-coated DNA or RNA—that inhabit some netherworld between life and nonlife. Viruses do not have cell membranes, as bacteria do; they are not even cells. They seem most lifelike only when they invade and co-opt the machinery of living cells in order to make more of themselves, often killing their hosts in the process. Their efficiency at doing so ranks them among the most fearsome killers: Ebola virus, HIV, smallpox, flu. Yet they go untouched by antibiotics, having nothing really biotic about them.

The existence of viruses was first surmised just over a century ago by Dutch botanist Martinus Beijerinck…

More here.  [Thanks to Atiya Khan.]

Steven Pinker in the London Times (via One Good Move):

I am a cognitive scientist, someone who studies the nature of intelligence and the workings of the mind. Yet one of my most profound scientific influences has been Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist. The influence runs deeper than the fact that the mind is a product of the brain and the brain a product of evolution; such an influence could apply to someone who studies any organ of any organism. The significance of Dawkins’s ideas, for me and many others, runs to his characterisation of the very nature of life and to a theme that runs throughout his writings: the possibility of deep commonalities between life and mind.

Dawkins’s ideas repay close reflection and re-examination, not because he is a guru issuing enigmatic pronouncements for others to ponder, but because he continually engages the deepest problems in biology, problems that continue to challenge our understanding.

When I first read Dawkins I was immediately gripped by concerns in his writings on life that were richer versions of ones that guided my thinking on the mind. The parallels concerned both the content and the practice of the relevant sciences.

A major theme in Dawkins’s writings on life that has important parallels in the understanding of the mind is a focus on information. In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins wrote: “If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

More here.

In his 1962 essay ‘After Abstract Expressionism’ Clement Greenberg argued that ‘[u]nder the testing of Modernism more and more of the conventions of the art of painting have shown themselves to be dispensable, unessential […] thus a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture – though not necessarily as a successful one’. The Modernist critic could hardly have guessed that this ‘tacked-up canvas’, for him merely a rhetorical possibility, would become an important touchstone for subsequent art practice, much as the monochrome had been for a previous generation of artists. The missing object and empty room have become Conceptual art’s degree zero, gesturing towards the conventions that ‘frame’ raw material as art and making room for the forms of openness, contradiction, paradox and irresolution that are contemporary art’s essential condition.

more from Frieze here.

Gordon Parks, the photographer, filmmaker, writer and composer who used his prodigious, largely self-taught talents to chronicle the African-American experience and to retell his own personal history, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93. . . .

“I’m in a sense sort of a rare bird,” Mr. Parks said in an interview in The New York Times in 1997. “I suppose a lot of it depended on my determination not to let discrimination stop me.” He never forgot that one of his teachers told her students not to waste their parents’ money on college because they would end up as porters or maids anyway. He dedicated one honorary degree to her because he had been so eager to prove her wrong.

“I had a great sense of curiosity and a great sense of just wanting to achieve,” he said. “I just forgot I was black and walked in and asked for a job and tried to be prepared for what I was asking for.”

more from the New York Times here.

Does masturbation lead to suicide bombing? One would think not. There is no more direct link to suicide bombing than there is to blindness or schizophrenia. But there may be a connection between sexual inadequacy or frustration and the pull towards violent extremism. This is the theme of an engaging novella, Seventeen, by the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1994. The story is set in the 1960s, when it was written.

more from Ian Buruma at The Guardian here.

From MSNBC:

A team of American-led divers has discovered a new crustacean in the South Pacific that resembles a lobster and is covered with what looks like silky, blond fur, French researchers said Tuesday. Scientists said the animal, which they named Kiwa hirsuta, was so distinct from other species that they created a new family and genus for it.

The divers found the animal in waters 7,540 feet (2,300 meters) deep at a site 900 miles (1,440 kilometers) south of Easter Island last year, according to Michel Segonzac of the French Institute for Sea Exploration.

More here.

From New York Times:

JUDITH RICH HARRIS calls “No Two Alike” a “scientific detective story.” The mystery is why people — even identical twins who grow up in the same home with the same genes — end up with different personalities. The detective is Harris herself, a crotchety amateur, housebound because of an illness, who takes on the academic establishment armed only with a sharp mind and an Internet connection. Does home environment — parenting style, marital harmony, the use or rejection of day care — shape a child’s personality, making her more agreeable, less aggressive or more extroverted? Nope. Research shows that twins don’t turn out more alike if they’re raised together than if they’re raised apart.

More here.