From Scientific American:

Like tricking a dog into chasing a stick that is not thrown, a stage magician can create the illusion she has tossed a ball into the air when actually she has palmed it. Researchers report that the illusion, which they found could be rather convincing, results simply from watching the magician’s face and not from glancing where the palmed ball would have traveled. “People claim they’re looking at the ball but really they’re making use of social cues,” says a co-author of the report, psychologist and magician Gustav Kuhn of the University of Durham in England.

A magician performing the trick tosses a ball in the air twice and then pantomimes a third throw. “It’s one of these standard tricks in magic. I knew that it was quite powerful,” Kuhn says. To study the source of its power, Kuhn and his colleague Michael Land of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, videotaped Kuhn doing the trick in two ways: on the final fake throw, he would either look up where the ball should have flown or he would look down at his hand.

More here.

Ambreen Butt. Untitled. From the series “I Need a Hero”. 2005.

Watercolor, white gouache, on Wasli paper.

Ambreen is the 2006 recipient of the Morgan Maud Award at the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA. Her solo show at the MFA opens on Tuesday, Nov 21st.

More here & here.

The following column has been written by 3QD reader Ian McMeans, a game programmer by profession, who won the CPCP challenge that I posted last week. Thanks much, Ian.

How could we predict what a person will do next? We could assume their goal is to maximize their happiness, (a philosopher or economist would more precisely say maximize their utility), then predict that their next choice will do so. This is a common assumption in the real world, one that we make when interacting with other people, and especially in setting social policy: We argue people should be free to do as they like because their chosen actions must be the best for themselves. We like democracy because we assume the electorate will pick the candidates who will maximize their utility, and similarly we like free markets because they are driven to efficiency by our self-interested, utility-maximizing behaviour. If we want what’s best for people, we let them choose it.

Economics until the mid-20^th century was developed under this assumption, by treating involved actors as Homo economicus: perfectly rational and self-interested. (What’s interesting to me is that even with perfectly rational behaviour you can find surprising strategies that maximize utility in subtle ways). But what about real humans? We’re nothing like our rational approximation – real humans are a giant mess. Not only are we unable to predict what makes us happy, but we’re unable to correctly make the choices that would achieve those goals, failing twice. It’s like we aim at the wrong target and miss it. We regret our worst decisions while we make them, procrastinate, hope to get rich with the lottery, and have our opinions swayed by content-free advertisements. This is not rational (rational behaviour is utility-maximization, by definition).

Why should people’s suboptimal utility-maximization matter to us, aside from the accuracy of economics? There are people who believe (perhaps I’m one of them) that utility is the only goal worth pursuing, as a moral prerogative. Not just for yourself, but for every creature that can perceive utility and benefit from your actions. Utilitarianism is simple in concept (morality is maximizing happiness over all people and all time), and as a bonus it lets you use phrases like “Felicific Calculus”.

Since Utilitarianism is now our moral goal as of writing that last paragraph, how could we achieve our goal and get more utility for everyone? There are a few different approaches we could take, here’s one:

1) Make more of the things that give us utility.

Technology and our ever-increasing standard of life do a large part to improving our happiness. But why would this be the case – what determines which objects and activities make us happier? There is a teleological argument here from evolution, where the things that make us happy are the ones that made our ancestors flourish: good food, sex, signifiers of social status, curiosity satisfaction, avoiding pain. The mechanism behind this is evident: if we are happiness-seeking agents, then evolution will slowly pressure our species towards being happily rewarded for those behaviours that are well-correlated to genetically flourishing.

Imagine that natural selection gradually put together a utility scorecard, by trial and error it’s the one that makes people the best reproducers:

All the cavemen who thought poison mushrooms were delicious died, and didn’t pass on their ‘scorecard’. Our ancestors, (who sought out sweet apples because they carried the genes to enjoy them) passed on their sugar-enjoying genes to us. Fitness-maximization over the course of many generations becomes utility-maximization for each individual, and our utility is our ancestors’ measure of how much each action improves fitness.

There is a new strategy open to us for chasing utility: if we want to be happy (without going to the trouble of satiating the traditional evolution-driven goals), we can simply trick our evolution-tuned brains into thinking we’re doing a good job when we’re not. We can trigger those evolutionary fitness-detectors without doing all the work of producing what the detector was designed to originally detect. For example, instead of real social contact, we can enjoy drama in movies. Instead of sugar, we can cook with nutrasweet. We can reward ourselves with books, videogames, and drugs. Is this cheating, or somehow misguided? I don’t think so, because our goal is happiness. Although we were ‘designed’ by evolution to pursue certain goals, why should we care about those goals? We can hijack those reward mechanisms for our own selfish ends. All we care about is the sensation of sweetness, not that sugar is available for digestion and its effects on our differential reproduction. Evolution hasn’t had time to build taste sensors that can differentiate between sugar and nutrasweet, and we can exploit that fact for our calorie-free enjoyment.

It seems the trick here was to follow the chain of causation, skipping the sweet apple and going straight to the sweetness-detector (the tongue) and interacting with it, to get the reward of sweetness. In fact, we can go further upstream with the same goal of avoiding unnecessary indirectness: we can travel along the nerves up to the brain. Why bother mucking about with nutrasweet and tongues? Instead of making things that give us utility indirectly, why not

2) Make more utility, directly.

This certainly seems promising, if a little metaphysically odd. What exactly is utility, and how would you go about manufacturing something as intangible as happiness? It’s not exactly like manufacturing cupcakes, (although that’s close). Wikipedia says:

In economics, utility is a measure of the relative happiness or satisfaction (gratification) gained by consuming different bundles of goods and services.

That seems a bit materialistic. Do we really only care about happiness from goods and services? We could certainly make people happier by manufacturing consumer goods and giving them away, but the economy is already hard at work on this. In fact, the economy is as efficient as it can get, barring the aforementioned lack of rationality on the part of participants. The Earth’s resources are already allocated towards our happiness.

What else could make people happy if not the effects of goods and services? What is happiness? As enlightened (philosophical) physicalists, we believe it must be reducible to some state of the brain – happiness is not stored in the mental res cogitens of an ephemeral soul hovering above us, but in the meat in our heads in electrical impulses, chemical signalling, or some other neurological mechanism. Luckily, there are people who have already figured out parts of it, and we can manipulate it, albeit crudely:

In the 1950s, Olds and Milner implanted electrodes into rat Nucleus accumbens and found that that the rat chose to press a lever which stimulated it. It continued to prefer this even over stopping to eat or drink. This suggests that the area is the ‘pleasure center’ of the brain.

(An aside: Have you ever wondered why your own emotional state is autonomous? If we had control over our own mental states, we would just choose to be happy all the time, regardless of external circumstances. Any ancient humans with that ability would have blissfully starved to death, and not passed on their genes. The reward mechanism is only indirectly accessible to us, so to mediate our own happiness we’re forced to pursue the goal of evolutionary fitness. Supposedly with meditation you can learn to maintain a state of happiness without cause, but this must have been rare or subtle enough in our ancestors to not affect how many children they raised. The wirehead rat was given control over its own mental state, and it acted in a perfectly utility-maximizing way.)

“If it was possible to become free of negative emotions by a riskless implantation of an electrode – without impairing intelligence and the critical mind – I would be the first patient.”
— Dalai Lama (Society for Neuroscience Congress, Nov. 2005)

It’s not hard to imagine a near future where this can be done with more precision, and to humans. Would this really make us happy? There’s an argument here that utility derived from these strange unnatural sources (like the wire going into the rat’s brain) is somehow illegitimate, that it’s not “true happiness” unless it’s earned in the difficult ways we eke out our own happiness from the evolution-sanctioned sources. I strongly disagree with this – as far as your brain is concerned, the way signals get into it are irrelevant, they’re all the same. Happiness is happiness. Why does the possibility of manipulating our own mental state like this make us feel so uncomfortable? People are afraid of having their preferences changed and losing those goals, like with the story of the lotus eaters, or Huxley’s Soma, or even the wirehead rat. The vision of being stupored and ignoring the things you currently care about is terrifying.

So where did we go wrong with this thought experiment? If wireheading is so objectionable, and we want to maximize happiness for Utilitarianism, how can we reconcile them? I think the solution is that wireheading doesn’t lead to an increase is happiness. If it incapacitates you with joy, then you won’t help other people, and (like the wirehead rat) you might end up ignoring the future effects of your actions, like a junkie. Trading a few days of starved wireheading isn’t worth losing a lifetime of milder joy and acting as a moral agent.

Could it be done more carefully? Instead of junkie-like wirehead dependence, what about just making everyone merely happy? It happens naturally to some people, could we trigger it artificially in everyone? Imagine your utility scorecard becomes this:

You aren’t in a wirehead daze, you’re just having a lot of fun doing ordinary things.

It seems far-fetched to discuss this so soon before the technology exists, but what could matter more than cessation of human (and animal) suffering? There is a lot we can do even with current technology (and without drugs) to make creatures less fortunate than ourselves happier across the world, but eventually it will be technologically feasible to make people happier by modifying the people, rather than modifying their environment. Remember our end goal is happiness, not satisfying the arbitrary cues natural selection has implanted in us. Instead of trying to get what we want, we can choose what to want.

This poses a problem for our conception of rationality, though. What does it mean to be a utility-maximizer who can change the rules of the game, and assign utility to actions at whim? It would change people’s behaviour in unpredictable ways, by letting them add incentive to tasks they wish they had more reason to do. Is this something we want in society? It’s conceivable that it could sow chaos: How many parents could resist the temptation of making their children enjoy exercise and diligent learning, and not enjoy fatty foods or gambling? How many dictators could resist the temptation to pacify a population? How many smokers and gamblers would choose to hate their old habits? What would you choose to want?

In terms of evolutionary teleology, we could choose to redirect the reward mechanism that guided our ancestors to flourish. This might not be a bad thing in terms of our species’ survival, because our preferences are already out of synch with what benefits us (A caveman who loved the taste of sugar would do well, but too much sugar harms modern man and leads to long-term disutility. Man hasn’t evolved distaste for too much sugar fast enough). We have the option of adapting people’s utility functions to the modern (and future) environment, to keep pace with technology without waiting for evolution to catch up and tweak us. This could be a great boon, or (if mishandled) a huge disaster. It seems like this is a risk we get with advanced enough technology – once we start intentionally modifying ourselves, things can change very very quickly (faster than cultural evolution has been driving us, because cultural evolution operates in the constraints of biology), and we take future change into our own hands. (Is this yet another possible answer to the Fermi paradox? All the aliens clever enough to make interstellar spaceships don’t live past the self-modification phase).

Non-sequitor 1: Why doesn’t runaway sexual selection eventually break itself? Peahens who make their selections based on other indicators of health (rather than plumage) would beget children who didn’t need to maintain expensive plumage, which is an advantage. Isn’t the evolutionary pressure to select for the traits that natural selection prefers, and sexual selection should track those good traits? It obviously doesn’t, why not? It seems to be circular logic that peahens are optimizing their childrens’ chances of being sexually-selected for the trait, because any trait could get runaway selection in that case.

Non-sequitor 2: Is there a noticeable difference in the effects of (lack of) advertising on Tivo users?

Last week I posted some math and logic problems. Here are the answers (I have chosen some of the succinctly-expressed answers submitted, rather than write them all out again myself):

1. Light both ends of the first rope, and one end of the second.  When the first rope is completely burnt, light the other end of the second rope.  The 45 minute mark is when the second rope is completely burnt.
2. Take X coins and flip them.  These form one pile, the rest of the coins form the other.
3. Take the chicken and drop it off at the finish. Come back and get the dog, drop it off at the finish and grab the chicken again. Come back with the chicken, drop it off at the start and grab the corn. Drop off the corn with the dog. Head back to grab the chicken, and return to the finish.
4. 3 cuts.  Cut each link in one chain.  Separate them, and use the links to join the ends of the 3 intact chains.
5. She has two children, one of which is a daughter. Here are the possibilities: Boy/Boy — this is impossible. Boy/Girl, Girl/Girl, or Girl/Boy. So it’s a 1/3 chance that both children are girls.(NOTE: This answer is wrong, but I am leaving it here to explain the extensive debate in the comments below. The correct answer is 1/2.)
6. Pick a jellybean from the box labeled blue&red. You can be sure that the all the jellybeans in there are the same color. The box labeled with the other color actually contains both blue and red. The box labeled with the color of the picked jellybean actually contains jellybeans of the opposite color.
7. Unchanged. The floating cube displaces its own weight in water.
8. First weight three coins against three others. If the weights are equal, weigh the remaining two against each other. The heavier one is the counterfeit. If one of the groups of three is heavier, weigh two of those coins against each other. If one is heavier, it’s the counterfeit.  If they have equal weight, the third coin is the counterfeit.
9. Same amount of water in wine as wine in water. Think about it: however much water is missing in the one gallon jug of wine has to be in the other container and vice versa.
10. 1&2 cross in 2 minutes. 1 returns in 1 minute. 5&10 cross in 10 minutes. 2 returns in 2 minutes. 1&2 cross in 2 minutes. Total: 17 minutes.
11. Anywhere 1 mile north of the line of latitude near the South pole which is 1 mile in circumference will do, as will an infinite number of points below that point, all around the earth.
12. 3, 3, and 8. The only groups of 3 factors of 72 to have non-unique sums are 2, 6, 6 and 3, 3, 8 (both add to 14). The presence of a single oldest child eliminates 2,6,6.
13. Let’s say it takes 24 hours to circle the planet. So each plane can carry
    12 hours of fuel. At midnight THREE planes set out with full tanks. By 3 AM they have gotten 1/8 of the way around. Each has 9 hours of fuel remaining. Plane 1 gives 1/4 tank to each of 2 and 3, filling them up; it has 1/4 left and turns around. By 6 AM #2 and #3 have gotten 1/4 of the way around; each has 3/4 tank (9 hours )remaining.  2 gives 3 3 hours of fuel, filling him up and leaving himself with 6. He heads for home. 1 arrives home and refuels. At noon 3 is half way around. He has 6 hours of fuel remaining.  2 arrives home and refuels. 1 and 2 set out in the other direction. At 3 PM 3 is 5/8 of the way around, with 3 hours remaining. 1 and 2 are 7/8 of the way around; 1 fills 2 up and heads for home with 6 hours remaining. At 6 PM 3 is 3/4 of the way around and running on fumes.  He meets 2, who immediately gives him 3 hours of fuel, leaving himself with 6.  1 arrives home, refuels, and sets out again. At 9 PM 3 is 7/8 of the way around and running on fumes again, while 2 is down to 3 hours.  Luckily here comes 1 with 9 hours of fuel; he gives 3 3 hours. At midnight they all arrive safely; plane #1 even has 3 hours of fuel left.
14. Flip the first switch and leave it on for ten minutes.  Turn it off, turn on the second switch and go upstairs.  Look at the lamp and feel its bulb if it’s off. If it’s on, the second switch controls the light. If it’s off and warm, the first switch controls the light. If it’s off and cool, the third switch controls the light.
15. I repeated question number 9 here by mistake.

Oh, and I had promised a harder problem. Here it is (Jesse Mazer mentioned it in the comments to the original post as well, I believe):

You have 12 balls. One of them is either lighter or heavier than the others. You have a scale and can only use it three times to find out which ball is different, AND whether it is lighter or heavier. How will you do it? Good luck.

Don’t post answers in the comments. Email them to me at s.abbas.raza [at] att.net

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Things have not been going so well on the political front for the advocates of intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism). This election season their allies on state boards of education in Kansas and Ohio went down to defeat. On the scientific front, things have never really gone well. The Discovery Institute in Seattle claims that it has spent millions on research. They have precious little to show for it. As I wrote last year, a single evolutionary biologist produces more papers in peer-reviewed biology journals than the entire staff of the Discovery Institute. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single paper that actually claims that intelligent design is supported by original evidence. The closest they got to such a minimal standard–a review of the Cambrian explosion–was later retracted by the journal. The Discovery Institute claims that it’s got all sorts of stuff in the works, but they aren’t ready to share it with the world. Instead, they’d prefer to attack journalists.

In September, Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute posted a 31-page attack on fellow scienceblogger Chris Mooney. Mooney is the author of the excellent Republican War on Science, which details some of the strategies the Discovery Institute uses to promote Intelligent Design, and the resounding rejection of intelligent design by the courts. As I wrote at the time, Luskin’s charges were empty.

Now I’m getting the Mooney treatment.

More here.

We at 3QD want to cheer the engagement of our friend Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance and our friend and contributor Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics and offer them our congratulations! If you feel so inclined, you can congratulate them here and here. In their own words:

[Sean] How in the world is one expected to find such a person, in a world full of interesting but flawed characters? Well, there’s always the blogosphere. Two kindred spirits, tapping away at their matching MacBook Pros, could find each other across thousands of miles in a way that was heretofore impossible.

All of which, in a fumbling and hopefully-charming way, is to say that it’s happened. I’ve fallen hopelessly for the beautiful and talented Jennifer Ouellette, science writer extraordinaire and proprietess of Cocktail Party Physics. I first plugged her blog (completely innocently! honestly!) back in March, and we met in person at an APS meeting, of all places. Best conference ever.

And, various cross-country jaunts and countless emails later, we’re engaged to be married. If it’s clear that you’ve found the perfect person with whom you want nothing more than to spend the rest of your life, you might was well get the presents, right?

And Jennifer:

Some may wonder: why Sean Carroll, and not some other bloggy physicist or science type? I could provide a laundry list of reasons stretching into infinity, since one rarely needs an excuse to sing the praises of one’s beloved. But I’ll spare my readers. Let’s just say that the man has his very own bag of plush plagues, stuffed toys that represent the biblical ten plagues of Egypt. There’s even a tiny black cube of darkness. With eyes. I covet Sean’s bag of plagues, and figure the best way of sneakily appropriating them for my own is to enter into the bonds of matrimony. Community property and all that.

But the real reason is best illustrated by this: On Wednesday, after I’d finished my blogging duties at the Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco, we drove to his new home in Los Angeles via the “scenic route” along the coast. At sunset, we stopped briefly to refuel and to admire the brilliant orange, red and purple hues stretching across the horizon, and savor the peaceful sound of waves lapping against the shore. It was the perfect romantic setting to cap off a long and tiring several days. Sean is nothing if not romantic. So he put his arms around me and whispered, “Wouldn’t it be fascinating to take a Fourier transform of those waves?”

I will never listen to ocean waves or view a beautiful sunset in quite the same way again.

Anna Hall sends me this. OK, it’s a BMW plug, but the whole thing is very beautiful (via Ecogeek). The second video is not a BMW commercial.

Africa is a mess and it’s not going to get better any time soon. That’s the awful truth that’s so hard to face — or to state publicly — for those of us who have had a long, intimate relationship with the continent. Mine has lasted for almost forty-five years. But from the very start, my experiences in Africa began conflicting with my hopes, indicating trouble afoot, foretelling that our utopian dreams were going to lead to crushing disappointments. Of course, we should have known what the entire twentieth century taught: that all utopian dreams fail, not least those wrapped in progressive rhetoric. Still, the reality in so much of Africa has been infinitely more appalling than anything we might have feared.

more from The Walrus here.

With some exaggeration, one could say that in October 1956 the peoples of Europe and North America, together with their legitimate governments, decided to put an end, once and for all, to the age of revolutionary change. And they were right to do so. To avoid another world war, the existing orders had to integrate, in some way or another, the social and political dissatisfaction of the age; this became the supreme commandment of the day. Expressing deep regrets, with bleeding heart and being fully conscious of their responsibility, they opted not to support the headless and hundred-and-fifty-years overdue Hungarian revolution either by diplomatic means or by sending volunteers or weapons. This had nothing to do with the Suez crisis. Only the dimmer types in Hungary can console themselves by believing that it was due to some business about ships that the Americans and the European democracies couldn’t pay attention to them. Besides the danger of another world war, they had other good reasons not to do anything. Had they decided to support the Hungarian revolution, it would have soon turned out that the capitalist – socialist dichotomy had remained, irrespective of the ideological hysterics of Russian imperialism (also seriously belated). The Hungarian revolution – contrary to popular opinion, and despite all of its anti-communist excesses – was not an anti-socialist revolution, and in its first phase not even an anti-communist one. It was clearly an anti-Stalinist revolution and clearly a plebeian one, it wanted independence and it wanted no part of the Russian empire; it was a democratic revolution that had no tolerance for foreign rule, for autocracy or for the arbitrary rule of collectives. It should not for a moment be forgotten that in that memorable year, the working class was still intact, along with the Christian democratic and social democratic traditions, and so was the agrarian proletariat, with its own, extremely vital social movements.

more from Eurozine here.

In many countries, the return of the nation-state has caused an introverted mood; the theme of Europe has been devalued, the national agenda has taken priority. In our talk-shows, grandfathers and grandchildren hug each other, swelling with feel-good patriotism. The security of undamaged national roots should make a population that’s been pampered by the welfare state “compatible with the future” in the competive global environment. This rhetoric fits with the current state of global politics which have lost all their inhibitions in social darwinistic terms.

Now we Europe alarmists are being instructed that an intensification of European institutions is neither necessary nor possible. It is being claimed that the drive behind European unification has vanished and for good reason, since the objectives of peace between the European peoples and the creation of a common market have been met. In addition, the ongoing rivalries between nation states are said to demonstrate the impossibility of a political collectivisation that extends beyond national boundaries. I hold both objections for wrong. Allow me to name the most urgent and potentially risky problems that will remain unsolved if we stay stuck along the way to a Europe that is politically capable of action and bound in a democratic constitutional framework.

more from Sign and Sight here (via TPM).

Four or five miles along the asphalt road that runs east from Kaala, a small town in central Angola, a Chinese construction company has carved an unexpected right turn, a broad dirt path that runs over a rise through scrubby forest. The path, which has no marking, winds past a basketball court — recreation for the work force — and then empties out into a vast plaza of meticulously smoothed earth. Dump trucks ferry loads of dirt back and forth. At the far end of the plaza, obscured by tree trunks that have been uprooted and laid carefully on their sides, are train tracks. The whole scene, invisible from the road, conjures the stupendous designs of the evil genius in a Bond film.

The weed-covered tracks are the remnants of a railway built by British engineers a century ago to transport precious minerals from the heart of the continent to the port of Lobito, more than a thousand miles away. The Angolan government is paying a consortium of Chinese companies $1.9 billion to completely reconstruct the tracks, the bridges, the stations, the equipment, all shattered by a quarter-century of warfare and neglect. The construction company working near Kaala had prepared the ground to build a factory that would turn out tens of thousands of iron railroad ties. An Angolan security guard who came out to cross-examine us said that the work force was still waiting for material to arrive. He asked us politely to leave. We complied, and as we drove back to the provincial capital, Huambo, we turned down another dirt road and found another Chinese company building an agricultural high school.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

The defining images of the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968 were smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and published anonymously, to protect the photographer and his relatives. Ironic, with the benefit of hindsight, since a glance at the pictures is enough to identify the perpetrator: Josef Koudelka, one of the least anonymous, most recognisable photographers in the medium’s history. These pictures – of the citizens of Prague, swarming the streets as tanks rumble towards them – fixed the events of August 1968 in the mind as firmly as the one of the student in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square would do two decades later. The difference is that, where the Tiananmen picture was detached, taken from a distance, Koudelka’s were snatched by someone caught up in the swirl and danger of events, as much a participant as his subjects.

more from The Guardian here.

From despardes.com:

Cricketing legend and Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan along with a large number of party’s workers left Lahore in a motorcade for Shahiwal for the opening salvo of a movement against Musharraf’s government.

According to media reports, the Shahiwal administration has refused permission to him for holding a public meeting or taking out a procession in the open ground fearing law and order situation. They have advised him to address the gathering anywhere within the boundary walls or at any of the marriage halls, but without the use of loudspeakers.

Prior to departing for Shahiwal, Imran Khan reportedly told media, “Our movement is peaceful, therefore, the government should not put hurdles in its way, otherwise, all the responsibility for the situation will lie on the administration.” Khan also said the other opposition parties should also resign from the assemblies, following MMA. Friday evening, an Indian TV channel aired a program in which Imran Khan discussed cricket, politics and personal life with the Indian audience.

More here.

From Guardian:

Paul Muldoon’s Oxford lectures, The End of the Poem, offer a trenchant and clever analysis of the power of poetry, even finding space to salute Christ as a ‘great punster’, says Peter Conrad. Paul Muldoon’s premonitory title does not mean what it seems to say: these lectures, delivered during his time as professor of poetry at Oxford, are far from being an obsequy for the art. Poems, if they are good, need never end. A poem, as Auden said when explaining how one was written, cannot be finished: it is simply abandoned by a poet who can add no more to it. The reader then takes over and, with luck, discovers another kind of endlessness: reading leads to rereading, as the words are coaxed into releasing subtler, richer meanings, dilating into ever ampler contexts.

Unlike many of his predecessors, Muldoon chooses not to generalise about poetry. Instead, he explicates individual poems, one per lecture. The procedure demands close attention, but the results are revelatory. Reading here is a collaborative recreation and, at their best, Muldoon’s interpretations – sometimes whimsically tenuous, often breathtaking in their intellectual boldness – are like improvised, free associating poems.

More here.

When people talk about the explosion of art in New York in the 1970s and ’80s, they usually mean the Ramones and Television and punk rock, or Jean-Michel Basquiat and the downtown arts scene. But a lively literary movement was taking place, though it has received considerably less attention. Around the time Patti Smith was recording her debut album, “Horses,” the cultural provocateur Kathy Acker was mailing acquaintances mimeographed stories that juxtaposed violence and vulnerability under the name “the Black Tarantula.” The writer and performer Constance DeJong was creating multimedia works with Philip Glass. At the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, the monologuist Eric Bogosian was giving his first solo performance. Taken together, according to Brandon Stosuy, the editor of “Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992,” this activity represents the birth of an underground literary movement that was just as vibrant as the musical revolution taking place. “Though much of it is out of print and difficult to locate, Downtown writing has never been more relevant,” Stosuy claims.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Some people prefer to contemplate the maps of London rather than navigate their way around its physical streets. Branwell Brontë, immured in the parsonage of Haworth, closely studied any map of London he could find. He familiarised himself with every street, and every junction, so that he could discourse freely and effectively with any Londoner passing through his neighbourhood. It was as if he had himself become a resident of the city. He never set foot in the cap ital during his short life; but he felt that he knew it intimately. It was an illusion, of course, but all maps are illusions.

The history of London may be said to unfold, map by map, in symbolic fashion. The map is a symbol, not a record or a description. It bears as much relation to the actual shape and nature of London as the sculptures of Canova or Rodin bear to the human form. The map is an idealisation, a beautiful illusion of symmetry and grace. It gives form and order to the formless and disordered appearance of the capital. In the British Library’s forthcoming exhibition “London: a life in maps”, there is a gallery of shapes and perspectives, decorous and intriguing in turn, all of them creating a wholly different London.

more from The New Statesman here.

Memorials to death by violence surround Khoury. Hariri’s shrine is a short walk from the main entrance of the an-Nahar offices, up through Martyrs’ Square, where a statue commemorates the Syrian and Lebanese anti-Ottoman radicals betrayed by the French and hanged by Jemal Pasha in 1916. On the front of the an-Nahar building itself is a banner-size portrait of Gebran Tueni, editor and grandson of the founder, who was killed by a car-bomb last December. Earlier in the year, after the huge ‘independence’ demonstrations aimed at Damascus, the same thing had happened to Samir Kassir, a colleague and great friend of Khoury’s. Kassir, part Palestinian, part Syrian, wholly Lebanese, was a founding member of the DLM. Like Tueni, though well to his left, Kassir was a vociferous critic of Syria. Khoury remembers trying to get through the police cordon around Kassir’s car in Ashrafiyyeh: he could see the slumped head and shoulders and thought his friend was still alive. ‘But the bomb had been placed directly under the driver’s seat,’ Khoury said, ‘and the head and shoulders were all that was left.’ Kassir’s glass-partitioned office, separated by a few yards of open plan from Khoury’s, is more or less as it was on 2 June 2005. ‘We just closed it and left it,’ he explained. ‘So Samir is still with us.’ On Kassir’s desk a few old copies of Le Monde are turning yellow. A mousepad gathers dust.

more from the LRB here.

In the post-war books that Firbank wrote and set abroad, things are rather different. In them the death of England, the imaginative liberation from English custom, indifference, cliché and hypocrisy, is engineered and celebrated in a very personal and defiant fashion. His own gay presence, as observer and admirer of young men, is unignorably strong. One of the concomitants of this change of setting and view is a change in manner, a more conventional handling of narrative, a clearing of texture. He becomes much less difficult. The books are still extraordinary: The Flower Beneath the Foot (1923), a hauntingly funny fantasy of court intrigue in which the jilting and heartbreak of a young woman culminates in a harrowing tragic ending; Sorrow in Sunlight, the following year, Firbank’s shortest, quickest and most brilliant novel, set on an imaginary Caribbean island, and his first to be published in the United States, just as it was the first he was actually paid for; and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, his most involved approach to a self-portrait, rejected by his enterprising new American publishers “on moral grounds”, and published, by Grant Richards again, six weeks after Firbank’s death. These books are all masterpieces, and in any full celebration of Firbank they would be the crown. But I have chosen to concentrate on that earlier mysterious period when Arthur Firbank emerged as Ronald Firbank, in his unprecedented novelty and complexity.

more from the TLS here.

Douglas K. Smith in Slate:

Private-sector companies have ready access to a gargantuan capital market of tens of trillions of dollars globally. Nonprofit organizations, by contrast, are crippled by capital-raising efforts that are minuscule, inefficient, and badly organized. As a result, nonprofits that have developed solutions for critical and growing challenges—in fields like education, health care, housing, economic development, and environmental sustainability—often struggle to grow.

This is a problem with a solution that is entirely within the power of our legislatures. Like the private sector, nonprofits need investors who take risks in pursuit of financial return.

More here.

From Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:

ISRAEL’S ASSAULT on Lebanon that began in July was not so much a war as a conflagration. Round-the-clock bombing and shelling by the Israeli air force continued day after day, causing hundreds of civilian deaths, and inflicting trauma and misery on hundreds of thousands more. Targets of the precision bombing included a U.N. observer post, Red Cross ambulances, roads, bridges, power systems and communication networks. Residents of neighborhoods under siege were bombed as they tried to flee. Others were buried under rubble when whole buildings collapsed and rescuers were unable to reach them. Trucks carrying medical and relief supplies were hit, and many of the sick and wounded died as hospitals ran out of generator fuel, antibiotics, even water and food.

Within days Israel turned Lebanon from a modern country that was still rebuilding from past Israeli invasions, into a place of desolation and death. And it did so with wholehearted help from the United States. When the Israelis began running out of munitions, the Bush administration rushed them a shipment of 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs designed to penetrate deep into the ground. The missiles would be dropped on their targets from American-made warplanes.

The European Union, the French government, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned Israel’s military operations as an “excessive use of force” that “cannot be justified.” Amnesty International accused Israel of “war crimes.” The United States alone gave a green light to Israel to continue its attacks. “I’m not sure at this juncture we’re going to step in and put up a stop sign,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said, as the number of dead rose and Lebanese corpses lay unburied in the ruins of their homes.

More here.