Autopsy With Sliced Human Brain, 2004.

Among the most celebrated artists of his generation, Damien Hirst has evolved a fresh and challenging attitude and approach to the production and exhibition of contemporary art. A media icon and household name because of his infamous shark in a tank of formaldehyde sculpture, Hirst is widely seen as the legitimate heir to Marcel Duchamp. Recipient of the prestigious Tate Gallery Turner Prize in 1995, Hirst’s work tackles the big subjects of art—love, desire, life, and death—with irony, wit, and complex references to science and culture.

The exhibition presents four works that represent major forms within Hirst’s practice: minimalist abstraction, hyperrealism, commercial product, and natural science specimen, suggesting a continuing involvement with post-modern tropes of representation and how he questions art’s role in contemporary culture and our relationship to the forces of change.

More here.

Richard Schickel in LA Times:

Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry
By Holly George-Warren.
  Autry deserves to be regarded as an important American figure — certainly a significant one in the history of Los Angeles — though no one but the rubes paid him more than the slightest heed. The writers and thinkers who set our cultural agenda never wrote even a discouraging word about him.

This is perhaps understandable. Born to a shiftless father and a sickly mother near Tioga, Texas, Autry received a primitive education and became a telegrapher for the St. Louis-San Francisco railroad. It was a job he clung to even as he began warbling and wandering as the “Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy.” Entirely self-taught as a singer and guitar picker, Autry had a pleasant, unpretentious voice and manner, and his records and radio work brought him to the modest hinterlands of fame. The movie business called in 1934, when he made the first of his 92 B-movie westerns. Soon thereafter, he had a network radio show and a relentless schedule of public appearances, mostly with rodeos that he owned.

Here, a certain mystery — which is not entirely solved by Holly George-Warren in her devoted but not very venturesome biography, “Public Cowboy No. 1” — enters our story. Put simply, it is: How in the world did Gene Autry become the richest cowboy in human history?

More here.

Carl Swanson in New York:

The initial public offering of Dana Vachon’s first novel, the Wall Street satire Mergers & Acquisitions, was still a few weeks off when we met for lunch at Le Colonial, a sort of Indochina theme restaurant on East 57th Street where the ceiling fans turn slowly and even the wait staff seem stunned by the nonexistent tropical humidity. Vachon is 28 and dressed for a Saturday of shopping in downtown Greenwich, in a blazer and open-necked Ralph Lauren shirt and loafers. He’d suggested this place because it was where the send-off party was held for Roger Thorne—the name of a character in his book—when he “left to be a war profiteer.” Except that never happened in the book. Oh, he meant the real-life Thorne, the one he met at JPMorgan, where he started interning in his sophomore year in college in 2000 and went to work in 2002.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Evolution for Everyone by David Sloan Wilson: David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University, takes a different and decidedly refreshing approach. Rather than catalog its successes, denounce its detractors or in any way present evolutionary theory as the province of expert tacticians like himself, Wilson invites readers inside and shows them how Darwinism is done, and at lesson’s end urges us to go ahead, feel free to try it at home. The result is a sprightly, absorbing and charmingly earnest book that manages a minor miracle, the near-complete emulsifying of science and the “real world,” ingredients too often kept stubbornly, senselessly apart.

In Wilson’s view, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has the beauty of being both simple and profound. Unlike quantum mechanics or the general theory of relativity, the basic concepts behind evolutionary theory are easy to grasp; and once grasped, he argues, they can be broadly applied to better understand ourselves and the world — the world both as it is and as it might be, with the right bit of well-informed coaxing. Wilson has long been interested in the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behavior, and much of the book is devoted to the premise that “goodness can evolve, at least when the appropriate conditions are met.” As he sees it, all of life is characterized by a “cosmic” struggle between good and evil, the high-strung terms we apply to behaviors that are either cooperative or selfish, civic or anomic.

More here.

From MSNBC News:

People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study. The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to  implausible reincarnation claims in the first place. Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

More here.

Matthew Polly in Slate:

The only thing more varied than the expressions of male vice is the ways in which men justify them.

It was 1 a.m., and, after searching for an hour, the fisherman and I had failed to find the Marine, who had rushed out of the pingpong show earlier in the evening and could now be just about anywhere in Pat Pong. Instead, we had bumped into the young woman from Cambridge and her Scottish boyfriend at one of the lean-to bars. I decided to join them because the night had the feeling of one that I would never forget but hopefully never repeat, and I didn’t want it to end. The fisherman decided to join the table, because he wanted to rationalize all the sins he had committed when he had disappeared into the pingpong show’s backroom brothel.

“The first girl was from the north—”

“The first?” I interrupted. “Dude, how many were there?”

More (including slide show) here.

Neuroplasticity can allow for treatment of senility, post-traumatic stress, ­obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression—and Buddhists have been capitalizing on it for millenia.

Matthew Blakeslee in Discover Magazine:

If old dogs haven’t been able to learn new tricks, maybe that’s because no one has known how to teach them properly. Until quite recently orthodox neuroscience held that only the brains of young children are resilient, malleable, and morphable—in a word, plastic. This neuroplasticity, as it is called, seems to fade steadily as the brain congeals into its fixed adult configuration. Infants can sustain massive brain damage, up to the loss of an entire cerebral hemisphere, and still develop into nearly normal adults; any adult who loses half the brain, by contrast, is a goner. Adults can’t learn to speak new languages without an accent, can’t take up piano in their fifties then go on to play Carnegie Hall, and often suffer strokes that lead to permanent paralysis or cognitive deficiencies. The mature brain, scientists concluded, can only decline.

It turns out this theory is not just wrong, it is spectacularly wrong. Two new books, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain (Ballantine Books, $24.95) by science journalist Sharon Begley and The Brain That Changes Itself (Viking, $24.95) by psychiatrist Norman Doidge, offer masterfully guided tours through the burgeoning field of neuroplasticity research. Each has its own style and emphasis; both are excellent.

More here.

Joan Acocella in The New Yorker:

Many of the early inventors of the typewriter thought that what they were inventing was a prosthetic device for the blind. Why would ordinary writers need a writing machine? They had pens. Eventually, it became clear that such a mechanism could benefit the seeing, too, but, as we find out in “The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting” (Cornell; $29.95), by Darren Wershler-Henry, a professor of communication studies in Ontario, almost two centuries, roughly the eighteenth and the nineteenth, passed before that hope was realized. There was no single moment of discovery, no lone inventor crying “Eureka!” in a darkened laboratory. On the contrary, historians estimate that the typewriter was invented at least fifty-two times, as one tinkerer after another groped toward a usable design. One early writing mechanism looks like a birthday cake, another like a pinball machine. One was almost eight feet tall; another, a Tyrolean entry, was whittled largely from wood. Until about the eighteen-thirties, all typewriters lacked a keyboard, and when they got one it was usually modelled on that of the piano. Nor did they have a ribbon. That didn’t make its appearance until 1841; in most earlier machines the keys were inked by rollers or carbon paper.

More here.

A Chinese initiative sets out to train 1.3 billion scientists–one farmer at a time.

Mara Hvistendahl in Seed Magazine:

During the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 70s, China persecuted scientists and sent the Red Guard to the farthest reaches of the country to promote anti-intellectualism. This year, China is again sending delegates to the countryside, but this time they are spreading a very different sort of message: the virtues of scientific progress.

As part of its 15-year plan to develop nationwide science and technology literacy, particularly among farmers and migrant workers, Beijing has rolled out an 860 million renminbi ($111 million) initiative to introduce China’s vast, rural adult population to science. Formally established last year, the program uses unusual means such as “science trains” and “science circuses” to deliver its message. Academics and educators now tour the country, traversing even remote areas of Inner Mongolia and Gansu provinces, where they greet locals, hand out materials and books translated into the nation’s minority languages, and unfurl red banners that read “Spread the Scientific Spirit.”

More here.

Charles Taylor reviews Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear, in the New York Review of Books:

Radical Hope is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies. This has been the fate of many aboriginal peoples in the last couple of centuries. Jonathan Lear takes as the main subject of his study the Crow tribe of the western US, who were more or less pressured to give up their hunting way of life and enter a reservation near the end of the nineteenth century.

The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe’s great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

Lear concentrates on those last four words. What can they mean? Of course, they could be an expression of dejection, of depression. But he sets that aside for good reasons. He argues that if we interpret the statement psychologically, we are being “guided by our own sense of what is true” and ignoring the question of “Plenty Coups’s humanity” and the particular cultural circumstances in which he found himself. We have to take this expression more literally.

More here.

Christopher Hart reviews Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England by Emily Cockayne, in Literary Review:

This book inhabits a grubby and squalid world, truffling out details that are vivid, colourful and sometimes downright nauseous. It’s a veritable feast of filth and foulness, and I loved every minute of it. The chapter titles tell you immediately what to expect: ‘Itchy’, ‘Mouldy’, ‘Noisy’, ‘Grotty’, ‘Dirty’. They sound like a South West Trains service. It’s not the benighted line to Yeovil Junction you’re on, however, but a journey back into the past: specifically, the past of an England where people still drank ale instead of tea for breakfast, defecated in the streets as if it were the right of every freeborn Englishman to do so, and hadn’t yet dreamt of Methodism, Temperance, or the Lord’s Day Observance Society. In other words, the emphatically pre-Victorian England of ‘Beef and Liberty’ in all its grimy, rumbustious, unapologetic vigour.

Emily Cockayne does not restrict herself to London, also taking us to Stuart and Hanoverian Oxford and Bath, as well as an overgrown village of some 2,000 inhabitants near the River Irwell, comprising no more than a dozen streets surrounded by meadows and orchards, called Manchester. Her study also delves into an impressive array of diaries, letters and obscure pamphlets. She turns up one Edmund Harrold, a Mancunian wig-maker who recorded his own sex life assiduously in his private journal, boasting one day, for instance, that he ‘did wife 2 tymes couch & bed in an hour an[d] ½ time’. Note how the spelling of ‘time’ changes in a single sentence. You can almost hear Harrold declaring in blunt Lancastrian tones, ‘I’ll spell it any bloody way I please.’

More here.

In The Nation’s VideoNation, two videos on Pakistan, one on the country through the eyes of students at the liberal National College of Arts and the other through the eyes of some students at Punjab University who are also members of the IJT, the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami.

The second part on Punjab University can be found here. (You can see a poster of Eqbal Ahmad, my late mentor and ardent, progressive champion of tolerance, democracy, and openness in Pakistan, in the background of one of the scenes with dissenters in Punjab University. The scene also has a heartening image of literature as a bulwark of human decency.)

Cosma Shalizi offers us this piece:

Today’s find, via Mind Hacks, is an online archive at UCSD dedicated to the memory of the great Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria. (Lots of the links are broken, though.)

Today Luria’s probably best known for the “neurographies” he wrote, like The Mind of a Mnemonist and The Man with a Shattered World, which inspired Oliver Sacks’s famous ventures in this line. But he actually made really important scientific contributions, which deserve to be remembered.

Luria began his career as a disciple of Lev Vygotsky, who had a fascinating pre-cognitive theory of how individuals acquire higher mental functions through a scaffolding provided by cultural traditions (especially language) and social interaction. Vygotskyism was an explicitly Marxist theory: it was supposed to be a scientific account of how thought arises from practice. While it is very hard to accept some of Vygotsky’s more extreme statements, there is I think a core of very real insight here, about both individual development and collective cognition, and one which moreover is fundamentally compatible with sound computational views of the mind.

To support the theory, Luria led an expedition to Uzbekistan which sought to document how the Soviet introduction of modern education and collective agriculture (!) was transforming the mentality of the natives. The resulting report — translated as Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations — is an astonishing mixture of fascinating experiments and conjectures, and equally fascinating displays of colonialist blindness. Most of Luria’s subjects were Uzbekistani peasants who’d been forced onto collective farms a few years earlier; a decade previously the whole province was the scene of the basmachi revolt, which was suppressed by the Red Army with the usual measures. It never crossed Luria’s mind, so far as I can tell, that a bunch of Russian academics, asking questions which clearly indicated that the Russians thought the Uzbeks were idiots, would meet with anything less than full and sincere cooperation.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, James Surowiecki interviews Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Wired.

From Wall Street to Washington, we’re constantly being told that the future can be forecast, that the world is knowable, and that risk can be measured and managed. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (shown) is having none of this. In his new book, The Black Swan, the finance guru and author of the surprise hit Fooled by Randomness argues that history is dominated not by the predictable but by the highly improbable — disruptive, unforeseeable events that Taleb calls Black Swans. The effects of wars, market crashes, and radical technological innovations are magnified precisely because they confound our expectations of the universe as an orderly place. In a world of Black Swans, the first step is understanding just how much we will never understand.
— James Surowiecki

Wired: If Black Swans are the crucial determining events in history, why do we think we can predict anything at all?

Taleb: After they happen, in retrospect, we think that Black Swans were predictable. We think that if we can explain why something happened in the past, we can explain what will happen in the future.

But with better models and more computational power, won’t we get better at predicting Black Swans?

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you’d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don’t have anything like that. And things are getting worse, not better, because the growing complexity of the world dwarfs any improvement in sophistication or computational power.

In Harvard International Review, Alex De Waal on intervention:

However attractive it might be from a distance, actually providing physical protection for Darfurians with international troops is not feasible. And unfortunately, the clamor for UN troops has consumed most of the diplomatic energies of the United States and its allies over the last 18 months, diverting efforts from achieving a peace agreement that was within grasp a year ago but has now slipped away. And as a direct result, the existing AU troops have been left without funds, and sometimes without food or fuel, and above all without any effort to upgrade their numbers and capability.

Meanwhile, the focus on numbers, armor, and mandate obscured the fundamental question of the concept of operations. What are the troops there to do? Effective peace support is nine parts political work and community relations to one part force or the threat of force, but the Darfur debate has focused on force alone and not the politics of stability. Making Darfur the test case for the R2P has not helped the search for political solutions in Darfur. It unrealistically raised the hopes of the rebels and intensified the fears of the government. This illustrates the blind alley down which the concept of humanitarian intervention has led many idealistic, principled, and concerned people.

There is no such thing as humanitarian military intervention distinct from war or counterinsurgency. Intervention and occupation should not be confused with classic peacekeeping, which is difficult enough even with a ceasefire agreement and the consent of the parties. If we want an intervention to overthrow a tyranny, protect citizens from their own government, or deliver humanitarian aid during an ongoing conflict, we should be honest with ourselves – we are arguing for a just war. And if we wish to make this case, let us be clear that the war is political (and must be very smartly political to succeed); that military logic will dictate what happens (including probable escalation and various unpredictable factors); and that it will entail bloodshed including the killing of innocent people.

In the BBC:

Scientists have revealed details of the world’s only known case of “semi-identical” twins.

The journal Nature says the twins are identical on their mother’s side, but share only half their genes on their father’s side…

These twins, who were conceived normally, only came to the attention of scientists because one was born with sexually ambiguous genitalia.

The child was discovered to be a hermaphrodite, and has both ovarian and testicular tissue, while the other child is anatomically male.

But genetic tests show both are “chimeras”, and have some male cells – which have an X and Y chromosome, and female cells – which have two X chromosomes.

The most likely explanation for how they were formed is that two sperm cells – one with an X chromosome and one with a Y chromosome – fused with a single egg.

From Edge:

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, “[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

More here.

From BBC News:

Fungus enthusiast Edward Gange amassed 52,000 sightings of mushroom and toadstools during walks around Salisbury over a 50-year period. Analysis by his son Alan, published in the journal Science, shows some fungi have started to fruit twice a year. It is among the first studies to show a biological impact of warming in autumn. “My father was a stonemason, and his hobby was mycology,” recounted Alan Gange, an ecology professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. “For 50 years of his life, he went out and recorded the appearance of mushrooms and toadstools around Salisbury, and he also got his friends in the local natural history group to bring back samples they found when they were out walking.

“When he retired, he bought himself a computer, taught himself (the database program) Excel, and typed in all these 52,000 records.” Now Mr Gange senior finds his enthusiasm and diligence rewarded as a named author on a paper in one of the two most eminent scientific journals in the world. “I’m on top of the world, I can’t quite believe it yet,” he told the BBC News website.

More here.

Marion Fourcade and Crooked Timber’s Kieran Healy, who offered us yesterday a funny spoof of one of my favorite DeLong segments, the morning coffee, have an interesting paper on markets.

What kind of moral order does capitalism rest upon? Conversely, does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, and social bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social science itself. In this review, we evaluate how today’s scholarship approaches the relationship between markets and the moral order. We begin with Albert Hirschman’s characterization of the three rival views of the market as civilizing, destructive or feeble in its e&ects on society. We review recent work at the intersection of sociology, economics and political economy and show that these views persist both as theories ofmarket society and moral arguments about it. We then argue that a fourth view, which we call “moralized markets,” has become increasingly prominent in economic sociology. This work sees markets as cultural phenomena and moral projects in their own right, and seeks to study the mechanisms and techniques by which such projects are realized in practice.

In ScienceNOW Daily News:

On the day the Iranian government defused an international crisis by releasing 15 British sailors held captive since 23 March, a French newspaper revealed that Iran has also prevented a French scientist from leaving the country for more than 2 months. Sociologist Stéphane Dudoignon, of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, was arrested on 30 January after taking photos of a religious procession in southeastern Iran. He was later released, but he has not received his passport and other documents and is stuck in Tehran.

The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs had kept Dudoignon’s detention under wraps, but confirmed it after it was reported today by the newspaper Le Monde. The French government says it has asked Iran to release Dudoignon, who also teaches at the Graduate School for Social Sciences Studies in Paris.