From Scientific American:

The problem is that our bodies have evolved to crave copious amounts of rich and tasty foods, because historically such foods were valuable and rare. How can we modern humans resist? We shouldn’t, at least not entirely, says Barry Glassner, a University of Southern California sociologist and author of the forthcoming book The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know about Food Is Wrong (Ecco). When it comes to healthy absorption of nutrients, taste matters. Glassner cites a study in which “Swedish and Thai women were fed a Thai dish that the Swedes found overly spicy. The Thai women, who liked the dish, absorbed more iron from the meal. When the researchers reversed the experiment and served hamburger, potatoes, and beans, the Swedes, who like this food, absorbed more iron. Most telling was a third variation of the experiment, in which both the Swedes and the Thais were given food that was high in nutrients but consisted of a sticky, savorless paste. In this case, neither group absorbed much iron.”

Speaking of iron, Atkins is out and meat is bad, right? Wrong. Glassner notes a study showing that as meat consumption and blood cholesterol levels increased in groups of Greeks, Italians and Japanese, their death rates from heart disease decreased.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

The price tag for the Iraq War is now estimated at $700 billion in direct costs and perhaps twice that much when indirect expenditures are included. Cost estimates vary — Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the total cost at more than $2 trillion — but let’s be conservative and say it’s only $1 trillion (in today’s dollars).

As a number of other commentators have recently written, this number — a 1 followed by 12 zeroes — can be put into perspective in various ways. Given how large the war looms, it doesn’t hurt to repeat this simple exercise with other examples and in other ways.

There are many comparisons that might be made, and devising new governmental monetary units is one way to make them. Consider, for example, that the value of one EPA, the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, is about $7.5 billion. The cost of the Iraq War is thus more than a century’s worth of EPA spending (in today’s dollars), almost 130 EPAs, only a small handful of which would probably have been sufficient to clean up Superfund sites around the country.

More here.

Harlem 1969: Jesse Jackson, Nina Simone, B.B. King and 100,000 spectators gather for a concert worth remembering.

Richard Morgan in Smithsonian Magazine:

Ethel Beaty-Barnes, then an 18-year-old fresh from her high-school graduation, still remembers what she wore to the Sly & The Family Stone concert in Harlem in 1969: a floral halter top and matching bellbottoms, her hair in a sidebun. “It was so overcrowded. People were sitting in the trees. It was boiling hot but not one ounce of trouble,” she said recently from her home in Newark, New Jersey. The word “trouble” back then was a euphemism for chaos.

The concert she attended, what some now call the Black Woodstock, came on the heels of two of Malcolm X’s former aides being shot—one fatally. The local NAACP chairman likened Harlem at the time to the vigilante Old West (earlier that year, five sticks of dynamite had been found behind a local precinct house; a cop dampened the charred fuse with his fingers). So it came as little surprise when the NYPD refused to provide security for the festival. Instead, security came from the Black Panthers, 21 of whom had been indicted for plotting to mark Martin Luther King’s assassination by bombing Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Abercrombie & Fitch and other stores across Manhattan.

Besides Sly, the festival’s roster included B.B. King, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, the Fifth Dimension, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Moms Mabley, Pigmeat Markham and more. Speakers included then-mayor John Lindsay, introduced on stage as the black community’s “blue-eyed soul brother.”

More here.

Jody Rosen in Slate:

As the poet said, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid. But must one choose sides? Not if you listen to “Stewy” by D.B.’z, a rap group from Vallejo, Calif. The song is propelled by a deliriously catchy beat—big wobbly bassline, blasts of keyboard fuzz, and what sounds like a schoolyard full of Ritalin cases chanting taunts—and by a young voice intoning a chorus: “Mainy, cuckoo, silly, bananas/ Mainy, cuckoo, silly, bananas.” Mainy is slang term meaning, well, cuckoo, silly, bananas—craziness of the most inspired and enjoyable sort. A second refrain elaborates on this theme: “Stewy-ewy-ewy-ewy-ewy/Stewy!” To be stewy is to be extra-mainy, really silly. Midway through the song, guest rapper E-40 arrives to deliver his own variation on the theme. “Look at all my young dreadheads,” he exults. “They so dumb!”

“Stewy” is one of 20 songs on Hyphy Hitz (TVT), a new compilation chronicling the Bay Area hip-hop genre known as hyphy (pronounced “hi-fee”), in which stewiness, maininess, dumbness are everything: the means and ends, the sun and moon and stars. The song titles tell the story: “Go Dumb,” “I’m a Fool Wit It,” “Get Stupid.” Stupid has been a term of praise in hip-hop for a couple of decades now. (“That beat is stupid.”) But hyphy elevates idiocy to a new level of esteem. When rapper Mistah F.A.B. boasts of doing “the dummy retarded” in “Super Sic Wit It,” he’s describing an aesthetic and philosophical ideal. Hyphy may be the most conscientiously “dumb” music in history. It’s also by far the best party going on in hip-hop right now.

More here.

From SafeNow.org:

The US government has a new website, http://www.ready.gov.  It’s another attempt at scare mongering in the style of the old “duck and cover” advice after WWII.

The fun thing is that these pictures are so ambiguous they could mean anything!  Here are a few interpretations:

More here.  [And click here to read more about what we at 3 Quarks Daily are all about.]

Julia Stuart in The Independent:

Love can be divided into three entities: lust, romance and attachment, according to anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher, who has been studying the subject for 32 years. These three brain systems can operate in any order and in any combination. You can fall in love with someone before you sleep with them; you can become deeply attached to somebody and then fall in love with them; and you can have a sexual relationship, fall in love and then become deeply attached.

Lust is a craving for sexual gratification, which you can feel for a whole range of people. Those caught up in romantic love focus all their attention on the object of their affection. Not only do they crave them, but they are highly motivated to win them, they obsessively think about them and become extremely sexually possessive. Perhaps illogically, if things go wrong. they are attracted to them even more. During this state the brain is driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter central to the reward system.

Romantic love is much more powerful than sex drive, says Dr Fisher, of Rutgers University, New Jersey. And she believes it to be a drive, rather than an emotion. “It doesn’t have any facial expression, it’s very difficult to control and it’s one of the most powerful neural systems that has evolved,” she says.

The third brain system is attachment – that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner. It is associated with the hormones vasopressin and oxytocin, which are probably responsible for the sense of peacefulness and unity felt after having sex. Holding hands also drives up oxytocin levels, as does looking deeply into your loved one’s eyes, massage, and simply sitting next to them.

More here.

Louis Menand in The New Yorker:

Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in “Casablanca” says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; Vince Lombardi did say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” quite often, but he got the line from someone else. Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell”; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man.” Marie Antoinette did not say “Let them eat cake”; Hermann Göring did not say “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun”; and Muhammad Ali did not say “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”; James Cagney never says “You dirty rat” in any of his films; and no movie actor, including Charles Boyer, ever said “Come with me to the Casbah.” Many of the phrases for which Winston Churchill is famous he adapted from the phrases of other people, and when Yogi Berra said “I didn’t really say everything I said” he was correct.

More here.

DeLong points to this interview with Duncan Foley, author of Adam’s Fallacy, in Radical Notes.

RN: You have distinctly mentioned right in the beginning of Adam’s Fallacy that for you this fallacy resides in the compartmentalization of spheres of life into the economic and the rest of social life. And you consider this dualistic view of social life as the essence of political economy and economics. Can you please elaborate on this? If this dualism is ideological can we understand it as essential for the reproduction of capitalist social life?

DKF: The specific fallacy is Smith’s claim that the pursuit of self-interest, which has to be balanced against regard for others in other human interactions, can be trusted to lead to good outcomes both for oneself and others in the context of competitive market interactions. This idea has reconciled many people to the morally troubling consequences of capitalist development. It leads, as I show in the book, to the development of political economy and modern economics as discourses which claim a “scientific” status but whose content is in one way or another a discussion of this moral philosophical question. The dualism may not be essential for capitalist reproduction, but it seems to me to be an inevitable outgrowth of the contradictions of capitalist social relations.

For the high-minded foreigner, traveling in America can be a dangerous business. Look what happened to Bernard-Henri Levy. In January of last year the glamorous and respected French public intellectual — who has accepted the term “anti-anti-American” as a definition of his attitude toward this country — published his philosophical travelogue “American Vertigo” (Random House) and found himself promptly dismantled on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. The reviewer was Garrison Keillor, gatekeeper of the Midwest, and he had almost too much fun: Dewlaps a-rumble, he charged Levy with bombast, grandiosity, and — most witheringly — a “childlike love of paradox.” He quoted mercilessly from Levy’s flightiest speculations and mocked his heaviest thoughts. He used the phrase “term paper.” It was brutal.

Introducing the American edition of his book “The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures,” published last week by Da Capo Press, Louis Theroux makes wary reference to the Keillor/Levy takedown, recognizing that he is to some extent on the same “Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics and Faux Culture Excursion” — the Borat tour, essentially — for which Keillor so derided the visiting Frenchman.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Orion:

In “Kodachrome,” Paul Simon sings, “Everything looks worse in black and white.” While I don’t entirely agree—penguins, polar bears, early Hitchcock films, and a December day in Gray’s River would all suffer from colorization—I happily echo his sentiments when he sings, “Give us those nice, bright colors.” Or, as Cézanne put it, “Long live those who have the love of color—true representatives of light and air!” I find no conflict between this view and my penchant for hoary hues.

Some people, when they discover that color vision is not general in mammals, feel bad for their pooches and pussycats. Yet our pets know nothing beyond their limited chromaticism, and even if they did, I’m not sure they would swap the exquisite sensitivity of their smell and hearing for what they might regard as the cheap trick of a parti-colored existence. Of the subtle range of perception they achieve through their noses and ears, we know nothing more than they know of our near-deaf progress through a colorful world. We haven’t even a word for nose-blindness! Yet anyone who reads Henry Williamson’s classic Tarka the Otter or Daniel Mannix’s The Fox and the Hound will apprehend something of our mammoth ignorance of these alternative sensory systems.

And what about the colorblind of our own species? Should we feel sorry for them?

More here.

From The New York Times:

It’s been a long 10 years since we’ve heard Carl Sagan beckoning us to consider the possibilities inherent in the “billions” of stars peppering the sky and in the “billions” of neuronal connections spiderwebbing our brains.

In the day, the Cornell astronomer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books like “The Dragons of Eden,” “Contact,” “Pale Blue Dot” and “The Demon-Haunted World,” impresario of the PBS program “Cosmos” and Johnny Carson regular was one of the world’s most famous and eloquent unbelievers, an apostle of cosmic wonder, critic of nuclear arms and a champion of science’s duty to probe and question without limit, including the claims of religion. He died of pneumonia after a series of bone marrow transplants in December 1996.

In his absence, the public discourse on his favorite issues — the fate of the planet, the beauty and mystery of the cosmos — has not fared well. The teaching of evolution in public schools has become a bitter bone of contention; NASA tried to abandon the Hubble Space Telescope and censor talk of climate change; and of course, religious fanatics crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center, leading to a war in the Middle East that has awakened memories in some corners of the Crusades.

Now, however, Dr. Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave. The occasion is the publication last month of “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God” (Penguin). The book is based on a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985, and it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Untitled, 2003.

Acrylic on canvas.

Digital image of painting taken Feb 11, 2007.

More here.

10 a.m. Woken up today to Nepzoid clawing my face. The cat, from Japan, is now without a doubt my arch-nemesis. It took me two weeks to find a Japanese cat with a “screwed-down hairdo”; the pet-store owners over there are wholly unhelpful. Ziggy seems pleased with him—last night, he scrawled “NEPZOID IS VOODOO” on the bathroom mirror after staring at himself and crying for over an hour.

12 p.m. Sitting in the parking lot, waiting for Ziggy’s dry cleaning. Mostly gloves and a feather boa or two, as usual. Last night, I asked him why he has so many left-handed leather mittens—huge mistake. He screamed something about his “sweet hands,” ran into the studio, and banged his penis heavily against an electric guitar.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Twins, quadratures and syzygies have long been part of Nigerian literature and myth, usually as a challenge to views of society based on the primacy of the individual. Given the way the country has gone, Nigeria now being a byword for scheming selfishness and corruption, it seems no accident that twins should play such a big role in the late renaissance of the Nigerian novel, as illuminated by Helon Habila, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Helen Oyeyemi.

That renaissance is a phenomenon for which any lover of African literature must be grateful, for not since the early 1970s has much emerged from the continent that has been able to make a global impact. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is the paralysing connection between a breakdown of societal mechanisms (including publishing) and the wider degradation of what might be described as “citizenship memory” – something by no means limited to Africa.

more from The Guardian here.

By 1964, Celmins had already experienced a crisis with her previous Abstract Expressionist painting style as a grad student at UCLA (having fled with her family from war-torn Latvia for a new life in Indianapolis — almost certainly an improvement). Inspired by the epically mundane paintings of Giorgio Morandi, the cranky theories of Ad Reinhardt and the ob-comp-lit of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman, Celmins broke through by painting deadpan realist images of the objects sitting around her Venice studio — a toaster, a fan, a double gooseneck lamp, a hotplate, a space heater. These unmediated records of the perception and translation of visual phenomena from three-dimensional reality to two-dimensional reality were the template for Celmins’ eventual disappearance into the work.

You can sense Celmins groping toward this near invisibility in the first room of the chronologically ordered exhibition. While much has been made of the autobiographical overtones of her trompe l’oeil renderings of warplanes (or, more precisely and essentially, of clippings from books and magazines depicting warplanes), the inclusion here of images depicting the Bikini nuclear test, a skyful of clouds, the aftermath of Hiroshima, and space-probe photos of the surface of the moon suggests an attempt to achieve a kind of symbolic neutrality — a flattening — of the extremes that make up human experience. Evil may or may not seem banal, but it is most certainly mundane.

more from the LA Weekly here.

Ebrahim Musa in the Boston Review:

As I walked one morning last spring through the town of Deoband, home to India’s famous Sunni Muslim seminary, a clean-shaven man, his face glowing with sarcasm, called out to me. “Looking for terrorists?” he asked in Urdu. “I have every right to visit my alma mater,” I protested. With a sheepish grin he turned and walked away.

I shouldn’t have been so annoyed. The century-old seminary in Deoband had come under intense scrutiny after the Taliban leadership claimed an ideological affiliation with it via seminaries in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Journalists, politicians, and diplomats have since September 11 descended periodically on this town near Delhi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, long considered the intellectual and spiritual heartland of Indian Islam.

Once the Taliban was linked to Bin Laden, every aspect of India’s Muslim seminaries, or madrasas, became stigmatized. Top-level U.S. officials, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a chorus of journalists, pundits, and scholars have declared all madrasas to be breeding grounds for terrorists, but they have done so without any evidence and without an understanding of the complexity of these networks of schools, which are associated with multiple Muslim sects and ideologies.

More here.  [Photo shows Darul Uloom, Deoband.]

Elizabeth Weil in the New York Times Magazine:

Lethal injection is the most recent attempt to find a way to transport condemned inmates from life to death in a manner that does not offend our civilized sensibilities. Over the past 100 years, states have chosen from, and discarded, as many as five execution techniques. As a dominant method, the noose has been replaced by the electric chair and the electric chair by lethal injection. Some states also cycled through the firing squad and lethal gas (all five methods still remain options in one state or another). Each change in technique was based on the notion that the new method would be better — more dignified, less gruesome — and in some ways each has been. Nooses, if the drop is too short, can leave bodies twitching for up to 45 minutes, and if the drop is too long, as it was for Saddam Hussein’s half brother, the condemned can fall with so much force that his head is ripped off. Firing squads are considered too violent. Lethal gas takes too long; the 1992 lethal-gas execution of Donald Harding in Arizona was so long — 11 minutes — and so grotesque that the attorney general threw up and the warden threatened to quit if he were required to execute someone by gas again. The electric chair often results in horrible odors and burns; in Florida, in the 1990s, at least two inmates heads’ caught fire, and the chair routinely left the condemned’s body so thoroughly cooked that officials had to let the corpse cool before it could be removed.

More here.

Sarah Vine in The Times (of London):

Well, zut alors! A distinguished French literary professor has become a surprise bestselling author by writing a book explaining how to wax intellectual about tomes that you have never actually read.

Pierre Baynard, 52, specialises in the link between literature and psychoanalysis, and says it is perfectly possible to bluff your way through a book that you have never read — especially if that conversation happens to be taking place with someone else who also hasn’t read it. All of which just goes to confirm what I’ve always thought about French academics, which is that mostly they are oversubsidised frauds.

Obviously I haven’t read Mr Baynard’s book; but it is in the spirit of his oeuvre that I shall proceed to write about it anyway.

More here.

Howard Zinn in The Progressive:

Fifteen years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but not about the Holocaust of World War II, the genocide of six million Jews. It was the mid-eighties, and the U.S. government was supporting death squads in Central America, so I spoke of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador, victims of American policy.

My point was that the memory of the Jewish Holocaust should not be circled by barbed wire, morally ghettoized, kept isolated from other atrocities in history. To remember what happened to the six million Jews, I said, served no important purpose unless it aroused indignation, anger, action against all atrocities, anywhere in the world.

More here.