“When in doubt, dot,” Jennifer Bartlett has said, and so, as though to keep herself from doubting — her creativity? herself? — she obsessively dots, creating vivid grids of color dots. Sometimes grids within grids, as in Random Sequence, Random Changing Space and Color Titles with Samples (the subtitles of a stunning series of Untitled works from 1969). A useful way of understanding Bartlett is via of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, with its Democritean vision of nature as a system of atoms in motion. It was an enlightened scientific view intended to liberate people from animistic superstition, which sees every natural thing — a mountain, a tree, a stream — as inhabited by some deity who must be appeased and of whom one must be wary. But there’s one catch to the system: Venus starts it. She sets the invisible atoms in motion: They “swerve” — deviate ever so slightly from their neat paths — to converge, forming molecules of visible matter, because of the goddess’ power. Eros gets the cosmos going and keeps it moving, generates its complex togetherness. Eros keeps it from running down — becoming an entropic grid.

more from Artnet here.

It is as if some gauze or screen has been dissolved away from life, that was dulling it, and like Miranda you want to say, What a brave new world! You don’t remember feeling like this, because, younger, habit or the press of necessity prevented. You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.

—Doris Lessing, Time Bites

Doris Lessing, who turned eighty-seven in October, is telling us what “old” feels like. Not a believer in “the golden age of youth,” she “shudders” at the very idea of living through her teens again, even her twenties. Since she left Africa for England more than half a century ago, a single mother and a high school dropout with a wardrobe full of avatars—angry young woman, mother superior, bad-news bear, bodhisattva—she has published an astonishing fifty-five books. Although Time Bites is her first collection of articles, lectures, book reviews, and broadcasts, The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog is her twenty-fifth novel. Nor does the fact that she’s four inches shorter than she used to be make her a shrinking violet. “Old” is as nice as she gets in Time Bites. Her default mode is usually imperious, as if ex cathedrawere the normal respiration of her intelligence.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

From Science:

Imagine recharging your cell phone without plugging it in. Or powering your iPod while you walk around the house with it. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have taken the first steps towards such wireless energy transfer by conceptualizing a way to transmit electricity over room-size distances. One day, they say, the technology could power whole households or even motor vehicles wirelessly.

The MIT team calls the concept a nonradiative electromagnetic field. It involves two simple ring-shaped devices made of copper. One, connected to a conventional power source, would generate magnetic fields similar to those that power electric motors. These fields would stretch outward a few meters and would only affect the receiving–or companion device–which would be outfitted with a second copper ring tuned to a specific frequency. Team leader Marin Soljačić says he began working on the concept because he wanted to find a better alternative to having to recharge his laptop computer and cell phone so frequently. He presented the team’s findings today at an American Institute of Physics forum in San Francisco, California.

More here.

From Scientific American:

People who ate soy regularly as children have a lower risk of breast cancer, researchers reported on Tuesday. And men who eat fish several times a week have a lower risk of colon cancer, a second team of researchers told a meeting in Boston of the American Association for Cancer Research. The studies add to a growing body of evidence about the role of diet in cancer. Cancer experts now believe that up to two-thirds of all cancers come from lifestyle factors such as smoking, diet and lack of exercise.

Dr. Larissa Korde of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues at the University of Hawaii studied studied 597 Asian-American women with breast cancer and 966 women without the disease. The mothers of some of the women were also available to answer questions about what they fed their daughters as children. The women who ate the most soy-based foods such as tofu and miso when aged 5 to 11 reduced their risk of developing breast cancer by 58 percent, the researchers found. “Childhood soy intake was significantly associated with reduced breast cancer risk in our study, suggesting that the timing of soy intake may be especially critical,” Korde said. It is not clear how soy might prevent cancer, although compounds in soy called isoflavones have estrogen-like effects.

More here.

In the Skeptic:

It is commonly held that religion makes people more just, compassionate, and moral, but a new study suggests that the data belie that assumption. In fact, at first glance it would seem, religion has the opposite effect. The extensive study, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religi-osity and Secularism in the Prosperous Demo-cracies,” published in the Journal of Religion and Society (http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html) examines statistics from eighteen of the most developed democratic nations. It reveals clear correlations between various indicators of social strife and religiosity, showing that whether religion causes social strife or not, it certainly does not prevent it.

The author of the study, Gregory S. Paul, writes that it is a “first, brief look at an important subject that has been almost entirely neglected by social scientists…not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health.” However, the study does show a direct correlation between religiosity and dysfunctionality, which if nothing else, disproves the widespread belief that religiosity is beneficial, that secularism is detrimental, and that widespread acceptance of evolution is harmful.

Paul begins by explaining how far his findings diverge from common assumptions. He even quotes Benjamin Franklin and Dostoevsky to show how old these common-misconceptions are. Dostoevsky wrote, “if God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” Benjamin Franklin noted, “religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful and beneficial to others.”

Gregory Paul’s article in The Journal of Religion and Society (there may be something of an ecological fallacy here):

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction.

William Dalrymple, in his new book The Last Mughal, suggests that the Great Mutiny of 1857, the Indian uprising against the British, contained precursors to Al Qaeda. In Outlook India, Irfan Habib responds. (Via signandsight.com).

[The historian] Percival Spear and ‘Talmiz Khaldun’ were doubtless pioneers in English in trying to look at the Mutiny in Delhi from the eyes of the Delhi court, citizenry and the sepoys. The fact that the sepoys had to live and get the money out of the Delhi citizenry always created problems for a city under siege by an implacable enemy. This was a situation partly specific to Delhi. But even so the role of the mutineers in facing these difficulties has been well underlined by Prof Iqbal Husain, for example, in his essay on Bakht Khan.

The reference to Bakht Khan brings me to consider Dalrymple’s rather unfortunate assumption that the Wahabis and Muslim sepoys were somehow the precursors of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This ignores the vital fact that religion in 1857 was the medium through which a growing resentment against the multiple inequities of the British rule was expressed. Ray brings this out fairly well. The Bengal Army sepoys throughout maintained a surprising inter-communal unity among them, a fact noted by Syed Ahmed Khan in his Asbab Baghawat-i Hind. He admitted that the Hindu and Muslim sepoys, having shed their blood together for their British masters for so long, were now so closely linked to each other in a common brotherhood that they could not but fight till the end once the uprising had begun. Such anti-colonial spirit suggests analogies as strong with Vietnam as with Iraq or Palestine. It would be too narrow to see it in a ‘jehad’ framework of our own creation.

In The Nation, Arthur Danto on Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib:

Though transparently modern, Botero’s style is admired mainly by those outside the art world. Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.”

When it was announced not long ago that Botero had made a series of paintings and drawings inspired by the notorious photographs showing Iraqi captives, naked, degraded, tortured and humiliated by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it was easy to feel skeptical–wouldn’t Botero’s signature style humorize and cheapen this horror? And it was hard to imagine that paintings by anyone could convey the horrors of Abu Ghraib as well as–much less better than–the photographs themselves. These ghastly images of violence and humiliation, circulated on the Internet, on television and in newspapers throughout the world, were hardly in need of artistic amplification. And if any artist was to re-enact this theater of cruelty, Botero did not seem cut out for the job.

As it turns out, his images of torture, now on view at the Marlborough Gallery in midtown Manhattan and compiled in the book Botero Abu Ghraib, are masterpieces of what I have called disturbatory art–art whose point and purpose is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts. Botero’s astonishing works make us realize this: We knew that Abu Ghraib’s prisoners were suffering, but we did not feel that suffering as ours. When the photographs were released, the moral indignation of the West was focused on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of entertainment. But the photographs did not bring us closer to the agonies of the victims.

Botero’s images, by contrast, establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make vicariously our own. As Botero once remarked: “A painter can do things a photographer can’t do, because a painter can make the invisible visible.”

In City Journal, Kay Hymowitz asks a question that I also have asked on many an occasion: why are people so obsessed with the life of a celebrity they deeply hate, Paris Hilton?

Paris certainly knows how to show off her considerable evolutionary advantages to the camera, where it matters most these days; she adroitly tilts her perfectly styled head like that, angles her sweetheart chin just so, arches her long, lean back comme ça, and gives that sideways, heavy-lidded, come-hither look (now known as a Come Fuck Me) that has bewitched fans since the days of Silver Screen.

But the evolutionary theory of celebrity does not begin to explain Paris Hilton mania for one reason: people hate the woman. She must be the most powerful snark magnet in history…

[T]o check out the megabytes of commentary that follow Paris’s every embarrassing move is to be struck by a loathing that confutes the Darwinian explanation. Cries of “nonentity,” “rich white trash,” “no-talent,” “brainless hussy,” and “hotel heirhead” echo throughout cyberspace. Politically incorrect slurs like “tramp,” “tart,” “slut,” “skank,” and “skanktron” have suddenly become acceptable again, as long as Paris is their target…

[T]he reason for this bile goes even deeper than Grove’s accurate indictment. What drives Americans crazy about Paris is what has incensed Americans since before the Revolution: her haughty air of highborn privilege. She is our Marie Antoinette: “I’m the closest thing to American royalty,” Paris explained when she wrote to Prince Charles to ask for permission to use Westminster Abbey or Windsor Castle for her wedding to her soon-to-be ex-fiancé.

From The Powell Books:

No matter what side of the political spectrum you reside, there is a lot of material out there to re-affirm your belief structure. Unfortunately, very little of it seeks discourse between the two sides. There are, of course, Thomas Frank’s excellent What’s The Matter with Kansas, and Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics, but these were written in the aftermath of the 2004 election, and were more of a quest to see what it was that liberals didn’t understand about conservatives and how that cost them the election.

John Moe’s Conservatize Me: How I Tried to Become a Righty with the Help of Richard Nixon, Sean Hannity, Toby Keith and Beef Jerky enters this discourse with an admittedly lighter and more flippant approach. In Conservatize Me, Moe decides to turn himself into a human political guinea pig by immersing himself into the world of conservative culture. Cutting himself off from NPR (whose Seattle affiliate employs him), the New York Times, and other bastions of the allegedly liberal media, Moe imbibes Rush Limbaugh, country music, and copious amounts of beef jerky. The results aren’t as hilarious as the author probably thought they would turn out, but they still yield amusingly trenchant insights into the cultural division in America.

More here.

The final silent image in this movie, so filled as it is with striking and suggestive images, tells you more about Coppola, and perhaps our own historical moment, than it could possibly tell you about Marie Antoinette. It’s a mournful shot of the Queen’s state bedchamber at Versailles, ransacked by the revolutionary mob the night before the Queen and her family were forced to leave, its glittering chandeliers askew, its exquisite boiseries cracked and mangled. You’d never guess from this that men’s lives—those of the Queen’s guards—were also destroyed in that violence; their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris. But Coppola forlornly catalogs only the ruined bric-a-brac. As with the teenaged girls for whom she has such sympathy, her worst imagination of disaster, it would seem, is a messy bedroom.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

Despite this profusion of rules, all far too complex to have impressed the Beau, there is one stipulation of Le Blanc’s that he has inherited directly from Brummell. Once tied, the necktie should never be altered in the hope of improving its appearance; if it is ill-tied, one must start again with a fresh cravat. What the wearer is after is a “curious mean” (as Virginia Woolf wrote of Brummell’s jokes) between skill and pure chance. The tying of a cravat involves the rigorous removal of human agency from the final appearance of the fabric: the knot is intentional, but the folds are entirely fortuitous. As Giorgio Agamben has put it, Brummell, “whom some of the greatest poets of modernity have not disdained to consider their teacher, can, from this point of view, claim as his own discovery the introduction of chance into the artwork so widely practiced in contemporary art.”7 Beau Brummell is a direct precursor of the dandy Marcel Duchamp. The dandy’s intention is in fact to make the garment-like the artwork-evanesce into pure gesture, to institute something like the “threadbare look” described by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly in his essay on Brummell and dandyism. In a brief craze, says d’Aurevilly, dandies took to rubbing their clothes with broken glass, till they took on the appearance of lace, became “a mist of cloth,” scarcely existed as clothes.8 Similarly, at its logical extreme, a well-tied cravat is a palpable immateriality, like a distant nebula or a puff of ectoplasm.

more from Cabinet here.

From Science:

Students who break into a cold sweat at the thought of a pop quiz might feel better once they learn about a side effect of test-taking: The practice appears to enhance memory, possibly even more than studying. What’s more, according to a new study, testing also helps students remember material that wasn’t on the exam in the first place.

Over the past several years, cognitive scientists have documented a phenomenon called the “testing effect,” in which taking a test, rather than studying, boosts an individual’s ability to remember the material later on. The research led psychology doctoral student Jason Chan and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, to wonder whether testing also affects memory for untested materials.

To test the theory, the team had 84 undergraduate students read a passage about toucans, a topic the researchers believed would be unfamiliar to psychology undergraduates. After reading the passage, one-third of the students were dismissed, one-third were asked to read an additional set of study materials that covered the same information as the original passage, and one-third were asked to take a brief short-answer test on the original material. The next day, all participants returned to take a final short-answer test, which included questions from the previous day’s brief test as well as new questions.   Students who took the test the day before scored, on average, 8% higher on the second-day test than did the two groups of students who did not take the initial test.

More here.

The persona Koons had chosen to come packaged in was, like the work that has made him one of America’s most influential living artists, fugitive and particularly difficult to read. The neat business suit, the clubman’s tie and the salt-and-pepper brush-cut hair suggested both the head buyer in the men’s apparel department at Bloomingdale’s and a retired astronaut still out of joint with life on Earth.

“I believe in advertisement and media completely,” Koons has said. “My art and personal life are based on it.” In an interview many years ago he described his idea of pleasure: dining with a group of friends, he recalled, he was moved to propose a toast. How lucky he was, he announced, to be in a beautiful place, surrounded by people he liked … As he stood there, he remembered, in a state of bliss, it was like being in an advertisement.

more from The Guardian here.

Yet the buzz accompanying this month’s arrival of the new translation by Robert Fagles, the emeritus Princeton professor whose translations of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” became bestsellers in the 1990s, suggests that Virgil’s problematic epic somehow still has its hooks in us for reasons that go beyond its stature as imperishable literature.

From John Dryden’s 1697 version in galloping heroic couplets — which did much to mold the sense and sensibility of an age that came to be dubbed “Augustan” — to Robert Fitzgerald’s magisterial blank-verse revamp in 1983, just about every major Anglo-American epoch has wanted to see itself implicated in Virgil’s master narrative, or feels impelled to remodel his mythic edifice in its own complicit fashion. And yet, it’s hard to escape the feeling that there’s something about our current age of clashing civilizations that imparts a brave new vibe to this latest Englishing of “The Aeneid.” Be it symptomatic of a passing phase or a full-blown complex, we all of a sudden seem to have Rome on the brain.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

It was a close contest with much back and forth between me and a few dogged problem solvers in the CPCP challenge, but we now have a clear winner: Ian McMeans was the first to give all the right answers. Ian, I hope that you will agree to write something for us this coming Monday. I shall look forward to it.

Craig L. also got all the answers right, but was just a tiny bit too late.

Two people each got 13 of the 14 problems right: my old friend from the philosophy department at Columbia, David Maier, and George Dickeson.

Subodh C. Agrawal of Chandigarh, India, takes honorable mention with 12/14 correct.

I will post the answers next week, giving the rest of you a chance to work out the problems that you couldn’t get immediately, and I will also post a particularly tough problem at that time. Thanks to the many other people who sent me lists of painstakingly expressed answers to the problem set.

Thanks for participating!

UPDATE: You can see Ian McMeans’ Monday column for 3QD here.

Brice Marden. Grove Group 3, 1972.

Graphite & beeswax on paper.

Current Marden retrospective at MoMA. More on him here.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

Throughout the midterm campaign season, at least one major issue was conspicuously absent from debate. Except in California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reinvigorated his bid for reëlection by vowing to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, climate change was barely mentioned. This can’t be wholly blamed on the politicians: according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, Americans still rank global warming as a low policy priority—far behind Iraq, the economy, and health care—with less than half of respondents designating it a “very important” issue.

Given the news out of Baghdad, it’s only natural that people would choose to focus on catastrophes unfolding in real time, but the longer that global warming is ignored the more intractable it becomes—a point made forcefully last week in a report issued by the British government. Unless the nations of the world come together to control emissions, the report said, we face the risk of “major disruptions to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century.”

More here.

Amanda Gefter in New Scientist:

…these students are part of a large, well-organised movement that is empowering parents to teach their children creationist biology and other unorthodox versions of science at home, all centred on the idea that God created Earth in six days about 6000 years ago. Patrick Henry, near the town of Purcellville, about 60 kilometres north-west of Washington DC, is gearing up to groom home-schooled students for political office and typifies a movement that seems set to expand, opening up a new front in the battle between creationists and Darwinian evolutionists. New Scientist investigated how home-schooling, with its considerable legal support, is quietly transforming the landscape of science education in the US, subverting and possibly threatening the public school system that has fought hard against imposing a Christian viewpoint on science teaching.

Ironically, home-schooling began in the 1960s as a counter-culture movement among political liberals. The idea was taken up in the 1970s by evangelical Christians…

More here.

Adam Kuper in Prospect Magazine:

Clifford Geertz, who died last month at the age of 80 of complications following heart surgery, was perhaps the most celebrated anthropologist of a distinguished generation that included Ernest Gellner and Mary Douglas. However, Gellner and Douglas always regarded themselves as social scientists. Geertz switched sides and became the prophet of a radical new humanism.

Geertz began his professional career as a graduate student in an interdisciplinary social science programme that Talcott Parsons had set up at Harvard. Parsons elected anthropology to be the handmaiden of sociology. It should treat the collective ideas and values that Parsons called culture. After all, people often behaved irrationally, to the despair of economists and policymakers. The job of anthropologists was to decode their symbolic statements, find out what they believed and so explain why they made irrational choices. This was particularly relevant to the study of the new states that emerged after the second world war, where culture seemed to be the main roadblock to rational political modernisation and economic “take-off” (a rocket-ship metaphor much in vogue at the time).

More here.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times Book Review on Dave Eggers’ new book:

After two mannered books (“You Shall Know Our Velocity” and “How We Are Hungry”) in which cleverness and literary gimmickry seemed to get the upper hand, Mr. Eggers has produced “What Is the What,” a startling act of literary ventriloquism that recounts the harrowing story of a Sudanese refugee named Valentino Achak Deng, while reminding us just how eloquently the author can write about loss and mortality and sorrow.

A devastating and humane account of one man’s survival against terrible odds, the book is flawed by an odd decision on Mr. Eggers’s part to fictionalize Mr. Deng’s story — a curious choice, especially in the wake of the uproar over James Frey’s fictionalized memoir earlier this year. But while we start out wondering what is real and what is not, it is a testament to the power of Mr. Deng’s experiences and Mr. Eggers’s ability to convey their essence in visceral terms that we gradually forget these schematics of composition.

More here.