An interesting interview with Jonathan Haidt about moral judgments, belief, reason, incest and so forth.

JH: Reason is still a part of the process. It just doesn’t play the role that we think it does. We use reason, for example, to persuade someone to share our beliefs. There are different questions: there’s the psychological question of how you came by your beliefs. And then there’s the practical question of how you’re going to convince others to agree with you. Functionally, these two may have nothing to do with one another. If I believe that abortion is wrong, and I want to convince you that it’s wrong, there’s no reason I should recount to you my personal narrative of how I came to believe this. Rather, I should think up the best arguments I can come up with and give them to you. So I think the process is very much the same as what a press secretary does at a press conference. The press secretary might say that we need tax cuts because of the recession. Then, if a reporter points out to him that six months ago he said we needed tax cuts because of the surplus, can you imagine the press secretary saying: “Ohhhh, yeah, you’re right. Gosh, I guess that is contradictory.” And then can you imagine that contradiction changing the policy?

Excerpts from an interview with Charles Simic at The Paris Review.

Don’t forget sausages sautéed with potatoes and onions! It’s also highly advisable to have a philosopher or two on hand. A few pages of Plato while working on a baked ham. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus over a bowl of spaghetti with littleneck clams. We think best when we bring opposites together, when we realize that all these realities, one inside the other, are somehow connected. That’s how the wonder and amazement that are so necessary to both poetry and philosophy come about. A “truth” detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.

This week in The New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt look at the rise and fall of crack cocaine, as a concern for the middle class.

“If so much crack is still being sold and bought, why aren’t we hearing about it? Because crack-associated violence has largely disappeared. And it was the violence that made crack most relevant to the middle class. What made the violence go away? Simple economics. Urban street gangs were the main distributors of crack cocaine. In the beginning, demand for their product was phenomenal, and so were the potential profits. Most crack killings, it turns out, were not a result of some crackhead sticking up a grandmother for drug money but rather one crack dealer shooting another — and perhaps a few bystanders — in order to gain turf.

But the market changed fast.”

From Discover Magazine:

In the 1880s inventor George Eastman hit upon an ingenious idea for making photographic film flexible so it could be stored in compact canisters instead of on heavy, fragile glass plates. The new film was portable enough to allow photographers to mail it to a developer and have their pictures sent back in a matter of days. Eastman built a camera around this new technology—the Kodak—and an entire industry was born.

The cell phone manufacturer Nokia recently introduced a new software package for camera phones and Windows PCs called Lifeblog, which combines e-mail and the passive diary mode of the photoblog in one artful package. In essence, Lifeblog records a timeline of all the events that flow through your cell phone’s memory. Schedule an appointment, and Lifeblog will put it on the timeline; take a picture, and Lifeblog will archive it; get an instant message from a friend, send an e-mail, or retrieve a voice-mail message—Lifeblog will store it away in its running account of your digital life. When you sync your phone with your PC, you can launch the Lifeblog program and see a rendered account of your time—a long thread of information, woven together with images you’ve captured along the way.

More here.

In The New York Times:

IN the summer of 1814, a young Virginian named Edward Coles — a protégé and family friend of Thomas Jefferson — wrote to his mentor asking for some advice. Coles, who had inherited slaves from his father, was considering setting them free, and sent off a letter seeking Jefferson’s blessing and guidance. When the reply came from Monticello, however, it scolded Coles for having ever considered ”abandoning this property, and your country with it.” Jefferson insisted he abhorred slavery, and foresaw its eventual demise, ”whether brought on by the generous energy of our own minds” or by a ”bloody process.” Until that presumably distant day, however, it was the duty of every slaveholding gentleman to shoulder the ancestral burden as best he could, for the good of both races: there was no place for free blacks in a slave-based society. In a letter to another correspondent several years later, Jefferson expressed himself in starker metaphorical terms: ”We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

These remarks — especially the famous ”wolf by the ear” comment — have long been quoted by historians to illustrate the supposed predicament of antebellum America: the South simply could not free its slaves, and since the North would not let it keep them, a bloody struggle between the two was inevitable. But what if Jefferson was wrong? What if the dreaded wolf would merely have licked his lips, trotted off and gone quietly about its business, had Southerners just mustered the courage to release their grip?

More here.

Louis Menand in The New Yorker:

Edmund Wilson disliked being called a critic. He thought of himself as a journalist, and nearly all his work was done for commercial magazines, principally Vanity Fair, in the nineteen-twenties; The New Republic, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties; The New Yorker, beginning in the nineteen-forties; and The New York Review of Books, in the nineteen-sixties. Most of his books were put together from pieces that had been written to meet journalistic occasions. He was exceptionally well read: he had had a first-class education in English, French, and Italian literature at Princeton, from which he graduated in 1916, and he kept adding languages all his life. He learned to read German, Russian, and Hebrew; when he died, in 1972, he was working on Hungarian. He was also an extremely fast and an extremely clear writer, talents that, in the magazine business, are prized above many others, and that would have made up for a number of shortcomings if he had had shortcomings to make up for.

More here.

“The French – who, with their grands projets, have so long been focused on trophy buildings – have noted that “sociability” and “liveability” are now the key criteria for urban design and have gone off in a new direction: towards the development of live, participatory events as ways of adding value to a place. Formal cultural festivals have been booming in France for years, but the new craze is for “les arts de la rue”…

These events that bring together street-level theatre, circus, music and dance, have spawned now well-known acts such as Royale Luxe, Iltopie and Generik Vapeur. And now these festivals are gaining mainstream acceptance. Eyebrows were raised this summer when the French minister of culture, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, usually the epitome of high culture, attended the Chalon event for the first time. Now, a professional association for street arts has been formed to represent the artists and producers, and festival organisers. “

more here

Label Rue festival will take place in Ganges, France in September, and will bring together artists performers and city officials to combine street performances with serious debate .

From The Connecticut News:

HARTFORD — Holding signs that read “Hate has no religion” and waving U.S. flags, about 150 Pakistani and other Muslim Americans rallied at the state Capitol Friday to denounce terrorism. They voiced concern that all Muslims may become unfairly stereotyped as terrorists as violence around the world continues. They also proclaimed their love for the United States and denounced those who have attempted to “hijack” their religion. Some at the rally said they’re concerned that the majority of Muslims have been too silent on the issue of terrorism. Iman Qasim Sharief, of the Mohammed Islamic Center in Hartford, said it is time for Muslims to raise their voices and denounce terror. “We are partners in this America,” he said.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.

A prophet of our world-historical moment, in his more than 25 works of fiction and nonfiction, Naipaul has examined the clash between belief and unbelief, the unraveling of the British Empire, the migrations of peoples. They are natural subjects for a writer who, as he has recorded in his many fully, semi- and quasi-autobiographical books, was born in Trinidad, where his grandfather had emigrated from India as an indentured servant. His father, a newspaper reporter and aspiring fiction writer, was the model for what is arguably Naipaul’s finest novel, ”A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961). At 18, Naipaul left Trinidad on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and has lived in England ever since. Alfred Kazin once described him as ”a colonial brought up in English schools, on English ways and the pretended reasonableness of the English mind.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

DID Bret Easton Ellis really crash a Ferrari while driving naked in Southampton? Was he married? Does he have a son? Did he have dinner at the White House, a guest of George W. Bush? A weeks-long crystal-meth binge? An exclusive orgy? Dates with both Christy Turlington and George Michael? Well, perhaps, at least according to the spellbinding opening chapter of “Lunar Park,” the new novel by Mr. Ellis that features as a protagonist an author of some repute named Bret Easton Ellis. But don’t ask him to sort it out.

“My worry is that people will want to know what’s true and what’s not,” he said recently. “All these things that are in the book – my quote-unquote autobiography – I just don’t want to answer any of those questions. I don’t like demystifying the text.” It is not the first time that Mr. Ellis, 41, has tried to refract the events of his life through those of his characters while at the same time evading attempts to tie the two together. Introduced as the bad boy of American letters, the brattiest of the Brat Pack that included Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and other chroniclers of young Reagan-era angst, Mr. Ellis has achieved over the last 20 years a level of notoriety and acclaim that has eluded most of his peers.

More here.

Why do Romantic writers personify technology? Why do Modern writers robotize it? Perhaps because one group of writers is studying its causes, and the other its effects on human culture and the human psyche. Is it because some Romantic writers worship technology? Consider Walt Whitman’s and Stephen Spender’s panegyrics on the steam locomotive. Do they view the creators and custodians of such power as little less than Gods? Adam was promised divine status by the serpent, and his descendants immediately set about building the first cities, and the tower of Babylon.

more here.

Jack Shafer points out the many ways in which Richard Posner’s review in The New York Times Book Review is sloppy.

“He ignores journalistic history as he spots emerging “trends” and gets basic facts wrong. A 4,600-word piece about the decline of journalism should cite numerous specific transgressions, yet Posner is too lazy to collect the evidence. He names only Newsweek‘s Quran retraction, CBS News’ mishandling of the Air National Guard story, and the media’s saturation coverage of the Michael Jackson trial. . .

[W]hen Posner cites a rise in press sensationalism, what is his baseline year? Surely he’s familiar with the journalistic circuses run by such press titans as William Randolph Hearst, Col. Robert R. McCormick, Joseph Pulitzer, Harry Chandler, and press midgets like Walter Annenberg. . .

When Posner declares that media competition has pushed the established press to the left, he gives only one example: Fox News making CNN more liberal. Has Posner lost his cable connection? The success of Fox News convinced CNN of the opposite. CNN realized that the demographic that has the time and interest to watch a lot of cable news tends to be older and more conservative, as this Pew Research Center report indicates. If anything, the one-worldist CNN of founder Ted Turner has been vectoring right in recent years.”

In New Perspectives Quarterly, an interview with the writer Elif Shafak.

“NPQ: Modernization in Turkey came from above. Today modernization again comes from above in Turkey in the form of a soft Islam ideology that is trying to appease Europe in order for Turkey to get into the EU.

Shafak: I think we should take into account the fact that most of the Turks do want to join the EU, sometimes for different reasons. But it’s not only a political decision. The Turkish society too wants to join the EU. We should all struggle for it because it’s important for many reasons. I want to see the role of the military and the role of the state apparatus diminish in Turkey. I want Turkey to become a more civil society-based country rather than a state-centered country. Even academic intellectuals are so state oriented, they always think about the well being of the state but not really the well being of the civil society. . .

Turkey in the EU. Turkey’s inclusion in the EU is going to be good for both sides. We are living in a very dangerous time. There is the danger of the world being divided into two camps. There are people who believe in a clash of civilizations between the Muslim world and the Western world. . . My worldview is that it’s not a clash of civilizations but it’s a clash of opinions.

On the one hand we have the nationalists with a lot of xenophobia, people who want to live with their mirror images; on the other hand there are the cosmopolitans, people who are willing to live with others coming from different backgrounds. It’s also a big test for the Europeans because most Europeans are asking themselves ‘what are we going to do with so many Muslim minorities in the middle of the EU?’ So it’s a big question of coexistence for all of us.”

Alexander Cockburn seems to show some kind of aesthetic failing (to editorialize) here.

“I’ve never cared for the Taj Mahal, depicted on the biscuit tins of my childhood. And after seeing Akbar’s first palace compound at Fatehpur Sikri, I feel this more strongly. Kitsch is emotional blackmail and the Taj Mahal, blaring Shah Jehan’s bereavement, seems to me the very essence of kitsch. Part of the problem is Shah Jehan’s snobbery about red sandstone. Both here and a mile up river at the Fort he ordered white marble and in the case of the Taj Mahal the result is a sort of airless sterility. The manic symmetry amplifies this. Also, the Taj Mahal is just too big. Akbar’s tomb, a few leagues back down the road towards Delhi, though large, seems proportionate. But the vast Taj Mahal diminishes its skeletal contents, ensconced in two sarcophagi at its core. Shah Jehan was locked up by Aurangzeb in the Fort, a mile upstream, and spent many years looking down the river at his wife’s mausoleum, apparently squinting in a little piece of mirror at night to catch the reflection. When he died Aurangzeb shipped him downstream to join Arjumand in the comity of the sepulcher, though symmetry is for once controverted since his stone coffin is slightly larger and higher than hers. These days the river is shallow and dirty. In the mid seventeenth-century it was clear and twenty feet deep.”

Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali discuss Iraq, American foreign policy, imperialism, oil, democracy, exploitation, and, well, Noam Chomsky-Tariq Ali kind of stuff here, the audio archives of the Lannan Foundation.

In Foreign Policy, William Dobson looks at Japan’s chances of becoming a permanent member of the  UN Security Council.

“Of course, based on the merits, Japan is a natural candidate to take a permanent seat at the council’s table. Its share of financial contributions to the U.N. budget—now at 19 percent—has been second only to the United States since 1986. Indeed, its share is greater than the combined contributions of Britain, China, France, and Russia. During those years that the United States was in arrears to the world body, Japan actually stood as the single greatest underwriter of the U.N. system. Although Tokyo has trimmed its official development assistance in recent years, scores of Japan’s fellow U.N. members have benefited from the country’s generosity for decades. Nor are Japan’s diplomats strangers to the Security Council’s corridors. This year, Japan is serving its ninth term as one of the nonpermanent members to the council. Aside from Brazil, no country’s diplomats have logged as much time in this role.

But these same qualifications raise an important question: Has Japan truly conducted a foreign policy worthy of a world leader? What difference does it make if Japan frequently serves as a rotating member of the Security Council if its diplomats are seen as wallflowers? When has Japan introduced bold new initiatives or helped build coalitions to lead an international effort?”

From The Economist:

The true story of how your wife’s stalker rang her to discuss killing you isn’t supposed to provoke mirth. But when John Morreall, of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, related the events last week to a group of scholars in Tuebingen in Germany, they were in stitches as he divulged the details of how his wife tried to dissuade the confused young man by pleading that her mortgage was too large to pay without her husband’s help.

So why did they laugh? Dr Morreall’s thesis is that laughter, incapacitating as it can be, is a convincing signal that the danger has passed. The reaction of the psychologists, linguists, philosophers and professional clowns attending the Fifth International Summer School on Humour and Laughter illustrates his point. Dr Morreall survived to tell the tale and so had an easy time making it sound funny.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt at Space.com:

A host of hidden black holes have been revealed in a narrow region of the sky, confirming astronomers’ suspicions that the universe is loaded with many undetected gravity wells.

Black holes cannot be seen directly, because they trap light and anything else that gets too close. But astronomers infer their presence by noting the behavior of material nearby: gas is superheated and accelerated to a significant fraction of light-speed just before it is consumed.

The activity releases X-rays that escape the black hole’s clutches and reveal its presence.

The most active black holes eat so voraciously that they create a colossal cloud of gas and dust around them, through which astronomers cannot peer. That sometimes prevents observations of the region nearest the black hole, making it impossible to verify what’s actually there.

These hyperactive black holes are called quasars. They can consume the mass of a thousand stars a year and are thought to be precursers to large, normal galaxies. The exist primarily at great distances, seen as they existed when the universe was young.

More here.

William Lobdell in the Los Angeles Times:

In 1994, then-Archbishop of Portland William Levada offered a simple answer for why the archdiocese shouldn’t have been ordered to pay the costs of raising a child fathered by a church worker at a Portland, Ore., parish.

In her relationship with Arturo Uribe, then a seminarian and now a Whittier priest, the child’s mother had engaged “in unprotected intercourse … when [she] should have known that could result in pregnancy,” the church maintained in its answer to the lawsuit.

The legal proceeding got little attention at the time. And the fact that the church — which considers birth control a sin — seemed to be arguing that the woman should have protected herself from pregnancy provoked no comment. Until last month.

That’s when Stephanie Collopy went back into court asking for additional child support. A Times article reported the church’s earlier response. Now liberal and conservative Catholics around the country are decrying the archdiocese’s legal strategy, saying it was counter to church teaching.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

“Cézanne & Pissarro: Pioneering Modern Painting,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is a mind-numbingly schematic exhibition. It may have been mounted on West 53rd Street, but it has none of the imaginative reach or scholarly originality or quickening lucidity that we used to expect from the Museum of Modern Art. It’s just another gimmicky blockbuster, roughly on the model of that previous one-from-column-A-and-one-from-column-B fiasco, “Matisse Picasso,” which came to the Modern in 2003. As with “Matisse Picasso,” so with “Cézanne & Pissarro,” a pair of extraordinarily rich and varied artists are forced into a meaningless face-off–a confrontation that tells us next to nothing about the artists and more than we ever wanted to know about the bookkeeper minds of curators who are fixated on the most superficial correspondences. (That “Cézanne & Pissarro” was organized by Joachim Pissarro, the artist’s great-grandson, is not a fact I care to linger over.)

Like “Matisse Picasso,” “Cézanne & Pissarro” is an impersonation of a Museum of Modern Art exhibition. This one even steals its subtitle from William Rubin’s 1989 triumph, “Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism.” While that show zeroed in on a period of years when the two youthful Cubists were working hand-in-hand to create the language of abstract art, “Cézanne & Pissarro” insists on an apples-and-oranges juxtaposition of two painters who, although great friends and colleagues, were engaged in fundamentally different enterprises.

More here.