Leah Hoffmann in Forbes:

Smiling nervously, the young woman walks forward in a straight line. Suddenly, she veers to the right. She stumbles and stops, attempting to regain her balance, and continues to walk forward. And then she veers off to the left.

No, she’s not intoxicated. The young lady’s vestibular system, which controls her sense of movement and balance, has been thrown off-kilter by two weak electrical currents delivered just behind her ears. (Click here to see video of a remotely controlled woman.)

This sort of electrical stimulation is known as galvanic vestibular stimulation, or GVS. When a weak DC current is delivered to the mastoid behind your ear, your body responds by shifting your balance toward the anode. The stronger the current, the more powerful its pull. If it is strong enough, it not only throws you off balance but alters the course of your movement.

GVS has been known about for at least a century, but it attracted relatively little interest until the last 20 years.

More here.

Maria Antonietta Perna in Metapsychology:

It might sound odd, but to a philosopher boredom is not boring at all.  Indeed, to the reflective reader the subject of boredom reveals itself as being surprisingly fascinating.  Perhaps one might advance the hypothesis that embarking on the adventure of gaining understanding constitutes the most effective antidote the victim of boredom has at her disposal.  The effect of such a remedy is further enhanced, one might suggest, when it is in some significant aspect of human existence that new insight is acquired, even when the aspect in question is none other than boredom.  In any event, reading Lars Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Boredom, one becomes captivated by the phenomenon itself and enriched with historico-cultural knowledge of both past and contemporary views of it.

More here.

Dave Zirin in The Nation:

In The Godfather, Part II, dying mob boss Hyman Roth wheezes the obscene truth to young Don Michael Corleone. “Michael,” he whispers, “We’re bigger than US Steel.” This scene updated for 2004 could have Yankees kingpin George Steinbrenner booming at pubescent Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, “Screw US Steel. We’re bigger than the damn mafia.” Just like Hyman Roth, “Big Stein” would be telling no lies. Professional sports are now the tenth largest industry in the United States, generating $220 billion in revenue every year. And just like Roth’s rackets, it’s a business that stinks to high heaven.

If, in 1900, a forward thinking person had predicted that sports would some day stand as one of the great pillars of American industry, that person would have been proclaimed mad and then subjected to some combination of leeching and lobotomy. The Victorian idea that sports undermined character and promoted a slothful work ethic dominated most people’s perceptions of organized play.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

It breaks a village: In Rushdie’s latest book, a cuckold turns to terrorism. If Salman Rushdie were a character in one of his own ornate epics, his rise to international notoriety as the target of a fatwa would be portrayed as his destiny. The events of Rushdie’s life are allegory for the unavoidable world-historical collision between rootless cosmopolitanism and theocratic absolutism, between civilization (with its values of secularism, skepticism, and relativism) and the gathering forces of a new medievalism. His greatest novels—Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh—percolate around just this kind of conflict, as India, or some subset of the subcontinent, tears itself apart. Rushdie repeatedly returns to the primal scene of a paradise squandered.

In his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown, the lost Eden is Kashmir, that landlocked sliver of loveliness caught in a bloody geopolitical tug-of-war between Pakistan and India in the aftermath of independence from Britain in 1947. Intertwined with an overripe love story is another tale altogether: the history of a country corroded and soured by sectarian struggle, deteriorating from a lively playground of legends and folk art into a breeding ground for terrorism.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens,” by Susan Clancy.” People who have memories of being abducted by aliens become hardened skeptics, of a kind. They dismiss the procession of scientists who explain away the memories as illusions or fantasy. They scoff at talk about hypnosis or the unconscious processing of Hollywood scripts. And they hold their ground amid snickers from a public that thinks that they are daft or psychotic.

They are neither, it turns out, and their experiences should be taken as seriously as any strongly held exotic beliefs, according to Susan Clancy, a Harvard psychologist who interviewed dozens of self-described abductees as part of a series of memory studies over the last several years. In her book “Abducted,” due in October, Dr. Clancy, a psychologist at Harvard, manages to refute and defend these believers, and along the way provide a discussion of current research into memory, emotion and culture that renders abduction stories understandable, if not believable.

More here.

The quest to explore a rust-colored world that has captured humanity’s imagination enters a new phase with Wednesday’s scheduled launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. From NASA’s first successful Mars flyby 30 years ago to the twin rovers scuttling across Martian craters today, scientists have only scratched the surface in describing how the planet is put together, how it evolved, and most provocatively, whether it had – or still has – conditions that could cradle simple life forms. Now, scientists aim to get under Mars’ skin.

more from The Christian Science Monitor here.

Andrew Clarkin and Simon Pittuck of the Keith Talent Gallery in London have curated a strong group show at Cynthia Broan, the tenor of which is aptly summed up by the title–an agile fusion of the sophomoric and ham-fisted with the knowingly conceptual. Although much of the work engages with visible currents in the contemporary scene, the show is an illuminating introduction to a lineup of British artists who have staked out their own wry patch of land–imagine Rabelais with a post-ironic insecurity about what’s even funny anymore.

more from NYArts here.

From Despardes.com:

Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa-Agha is a scholar of Pakistan’s military and security affairs and a regular contributor to several Pakistani and internationally renowned opinion journals. Currently she  is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC where she is busy writing her latest book “Military Inc, The Politics of Military’s Economy in Pakistan”. In it, she analyzes Pakistan military’s vast commercial interests and its economic predation since 1953.

Ayesha Siddiqa also writes on Pakistan’s military affairs for Jane’s Information Group. She was asked to work as the Director of Naval Research with the Navy making her the first civilian and woman to work at that position in the Pakistan defense establishment. She has a  doctorate in War Studies from King’s College, London in 1996. despardes.com’s Editor-in-Chief Irshad Salim conducted a two-part online interview with her on the subject of her upcoming book, Pakistan affairs and post 9/11 scenario.

Q: Going back to Pak army biz, what are your findings?

A: Several. First, the military has become predatory engaging in political and economic predation. Second, political predation is not complete without economic predation. Third, military has mutated into a separate class that shares interests with other members of the ruling elite. Finally, because the military protects its vested interests, it leads to alienation of the masses.

More here. (Thanks to my friend Professor C.M.Naim)

From MSNBC:

At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. One of the Gross’s questions involved human consciousness. He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a “phase transition,” an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a “theory of everything” is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness. Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness.

It wasn’t that long ago that the study of consciousness was considered to be too abstract, too subjective or too difficult to study scientifically. But in recent years, it has emerged as one of the hottest new fields in biology, similar to string theory in physics or the search for extraterrestrial life in astronomy.

More here.

What some notable types are reading this summer.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor, Capote The Known World by Edward P. Jones and Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.

Bill Clinton, former President
Faith of My Fathers by John McCain and Mark Salter
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape
Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble by Lester Brown
Crusader’s Cross: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke
Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands

Heidi Klum, model, mogul
Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise Your Child in a Complex World by Jessica Teich and Brandel France de Bravo: It is a great book for new moms. It’s a small book but has some calming, practical ideas about how to keep things simple, trust your instincts and to not stress about the little things but instead, to just enjoy the process of helping your child grow up.

Janet Malcolm, writer, The Journalist and the Murderer
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and Daniel Harris’ Diary of a Drag Queen: What’s not to like?

Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University
I’ve been rereading all of Henry James and all of Faulkner and all of Whitman in preparation for a book entitled The Evening Lad. The subtitle will be “Twelve Writers Who Define America,” and they are three of the 12.

more here.

From our friend Ed Rackley at The Old Town Review.

My role in this race is to inspect and evaluate the performance of the recipients of our donated public funds. I check on whether the NGOs and UN agencies, swallowing millions of dollars a month, are providing the best possible relief services and supplies, and whether Darfuris have enough water, food and medicine to survive their sub-human conditions. Because I’m on a team of government advisors, we try to learn what civilian atrocities are ongoing and the identity of the perpetrators. But without a reliable system of justice, such knowledge is not tantamount to power. In Darfur where impunity reigns, knowledge is crushed by power. I realize this makes me a cog in the wheels of the “international community,” for better or worse. Western critics of foreign aid—Noam Chomsky and David Rieff come to mind—win extra plaudits by railing against the international community for its nebulousness and unaccountability. But like many impressions that cohere in direct proportion to your distance from them, this one dissolves under scrutiny. Unlike Chomsky, Rieff is a globetrotter, and generally game to visit hotspots like Burundi or Bosnia during the war. Unfortunately for pundits, vacationing in a warzone, even with journalistic intent and a moral calling, is a fallible guide to the intricacies of a conflict.

Michael Kimmelman in the New York Review of Books:

The news in early June came on what would have been Frank Lloyd Wright’s 138th birthday. The Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is part of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, had been issued a warning by the Higher Learning Commission—its accreditation endangered, its student body now down to ten pupils, its finances in shambles. But this was less surprising than the fact that the school still exists at all.

Wright founded what he called the Taliesin Fellowship in 1932, when his own financial prospects were dismal, as they had been throughout much of the 1920s. Having seen the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, his former boss, die in poverty not many years earlier, Wright was forestalling his own prospective oblivion. Considered a virtual has-been (“as an architect he has little to contribute,” concluded John Cushman Fistere in Vanity Fair in 1931, and Fistere was not the first to say so), Wright created the fellowship—tuition $675, raised to $1,100 in 1933, more than at Yale or Harvard—to indoctrinate aspiring architects in his gospel of organic architecture, for which they would do hours of daily chores, plant crops, wash Wright’s laundry, and entertain him and his guests as well as one another in the evenings with musicals and amateur theatricals. “Music is architecture at Taliesin,” Wright wrote in the school brochure for 1934, “just as architecture is a kind of music.”

More here.

“Noble Laureate Elias Canetti’s memoirs, Party in the Blitz, are irrepresibly bitchy, says Tim Adams, especially when it comes to TS Eliot.”

From The Guardian:

When he began these memoirs of his life in London the Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti was 85. He worked on them, on and off, up to his death four years later in 1994.

Never shy to face up to the truths of life, schooled as he was in the major political upheavals of the century, he nevertheless discovered extra license in his advanced age. The book seems to have been intended as a parting shot at the society he entered in England; a nicely calculated piece of sniping at the liberals who welcomed him, stiffly, when he escaped from Vienna after his writings had been banned by the Nazis in 1939.

More here.

Jack Handey in The New Yorker:

People of Mars, you say we are brutes and savages. But let me tell you one thing: if I could get loose from this cage you have me in, I would tear you guys a new Martian asshole.You say we are violent and barbaric, but has any one of you come up to my cage and extended his hand? Because, if he did, I would jerk it off and eat it right in front of him. “Mmm, that’s good Martian,” I would say.

You say your civilization is more advanced than ours. But who is really the more “civilized” one? You, standing there watching this cage? Or me, with my pants down, trying to urinate on you? You criticize our Earth religions, saying they have no relevance to the way we actually live. But think about this: if I could get my hands on that god of yours, I would grab his skinny neck and choke him until his big green head exploded.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The Loom:

I’ve got two stories in tomorrow’s New York Times about getting sick.

One is about malaria. I’ve always been fascinated by how parasites can manipulate their hosts for their own ends, and much of my book Parasite Rex is dedicated to explaining how this creepy remote control works. I’ve come across many new examples from time to time. Now a new study shows that the parasite that causes malaria can alter us humans to turn us into good mosquito bait. As with most stories about life, this one is ultimately about evolution—in this case, how parasites repeatedly have evolved ways to boost their own reproductive success by manipulating hosts like us.

I’ve never gotten malaria (knock on wood), but I have just experienced the subject of my second piece: appendicitis. Three weeks ago I got appendicitis, and if I lived 150 years ago my appendix would have probably ruptured and I’d have died. Fortunately, I got to the hospital without a hitch and had a straightforward operation to get the appendix out. Once the anesthesia cleared from my head, I began mulling how odd it was that I was born with an organ so exquisitely suited to failure and so useless to me. The manipulations of the malaria parasite are remarkable adaptations, but the appendix is, to a great extent, an maladaptation.

In the article, I offer some of the ideas scientists have had about how we all ended up with an appendix, but there was one interesting take on the appendix that I didn’t have room to include in my story.

More here.

From CBS News:

When the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan destroyed two 1,600-year-old Buddha statues lining Bamiyan Valley’s soaring cliffs, the world shook with shock at the demise of such huge archaeological treasures.

Now, artist Hiro Yamagata plans to commemorate the towering Buddhas by projecting multicolored laser images onto the clay cliffsides where the figures once stood.

“I’m doing a fine art piece. That’s my purpose — not for human rights, or for supporting religion or a political statement,” said the 58-year-old artist, whose other laser works include a permanent display at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Against a canvas of desert darkness, 14 laser systems will project 140 overlapping faceless “statues” sweeping four miles across Bamiyan’s cliffs in neon shades of green, pink, orange, white and blue. Each image will continuously change color and pattern.

More here.

From the BBC:

Scientists say they have been able to monitor people’s thoughts via scans of their brains.

Teams at University College London and University of California in LA could tell what images people were looking at or what sounds they were listening to.

The US team say their study proves brain scans do relate to brain cell electrical activity.

The UK team say such research might help paralysed people communicate, using a “thought-reading” computer.

More here.

Eye of the Beholder

In a hospital, her head completely wrapped in bandages, a young woman waits for the result of a last-ditch operation to alter her disfigured face so she will not have to be sent to live at a reservation of outcasts. Throughout the episode, the viewer hears the voices of the doctors and bedside family members but never sees their faces. When the bandages are finally removed, they reveal a plain-faced woman with several visible scars. The woman’s father says the surgeon probably did the best he could under the circumstances and sends his daughter to Sarah Lawrence.

more here.

From The Nation:

On July 19 in the northeastern city of Mashhad, Iran, two teenagers, Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari, were put to death for a crime involving homosexual intercourse. Asgari, at least, was underage at the time of the offense. Before the execution Marhoni and Asgari were detained for approximately fourteen months and received 228 lashes each for drinking, disturbing the peace and theft. Despite appeals from the defendants’ lawyers and protests by Iranian human rights activists such as Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Supreme Court upheld the verdict and sentence, which was carried out by public hanging.

The hangings were first brought to international attention by the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA), a state-controlled wire service. A brief article posted on ISNA’s website on the day of the execution included three photographs of the youths. One depicts them blindfolded on the gallows with two hooded men securing nooses around their necks. In another they are visibly shaken and in tears as they are interviewed by journalists en route to the hanging.

More here. (Photograph from ISNA).

From The Washington Post:

MADAME BOVARY’S OVARIES: A Darwinian Look at Literature: Human nature, evolved over millions of years and present in our genes, expresses itself not only in bedrooms, boardrooms and battlefields but in creative human pursuits, including literature. This, anyway, is the premise of an amusing, if over-ambitious, book by psychologist/zoologist David P. Barash and his college-student daughter, Nanelle. The Barashes line up exemplary works of fiction from Homer to Saul Bellow alongside the major claims of evolutionary psychology. The prehistoric origins of human conduct and desires, so the idea goes, should be able to tell us something about the conduct and values of characters in fiction. Among the authors’ best insights is their description of Jane Austen’s fiction in terms of sexual selection theory. Darwinian evolution depends on natural selection: Unfit individuals die off in a hostile environment, while the survivors pass their fitness on to descendants. But for Darwin, there is also a second, parallel and quite distinct process that drives evolution: sexual selection.

More here.