In the Harvard International Review, Jordan Boslego looks at if we can engineer social trust.

Why does anyone trust anyone else? Excessive risk avoidance closes off the potential benefits of cooperation, knowledge-sharing, and reputation (knowledge that the “game” of trust will have future moves) discourages betrayal. Trust enforces agreements that are either impossible or impractical to reliably enforce by state agencies, such as verbal promises. You may trust your relatives, co-workers, classmates, friends, and even your friends’ friends, but the puzzle of social trust is the idea of trusting strangers. Your only basis for whether to trust or distrust a complete stranger is your social conditioning, which may be influenced by your ethnic or cultural group, the characteristics and values of the society in which you live or grew up, your past experiences, and—more broadly—the historical tradition of your country.

The question is whether some countries do better than others at fostering identities strong enough to promote social trust among all citizens. It is hypothesized that these states will tend to be more democratic than ones with less social trust. It can be reasoned that social trust is important in consolidating democratic regimes, since for a democracy to function, citizens must trust that the elections have been fair, the officials are not corrupt, and that the government is representing their interests. By accepting the results of an election, a citizen is implicitly trusting every other citizen to choose the right candidate. At the same time, a certain level of political distrust keeps government in check, since citizens demand transparency and accountability from elected leaders. Distrust, wrote German sociologist Claus Offe, is not the opposite of trust: practices such as investigative journalism in fact make institutions more trustworthy by serving as a credible outside audit.

In the Boston Review, Barry Posen offers an plan to disengage from Iraq in 18 months. (with responses from Sen. Joseph Biden, Barbara Bodine, Vivek Chibber, Helena Cobban, Juan Cole, Sen. Russell Feingold, Randall Forsberg, Chris Preble, Nir Rosen, and Eliot Weinberger to come next month)

The United States needs a new strategy in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The war is at best a stalemate; the large American presence now causes more trouble than it prevents. We must disengage from Iraq—and we must do it by removing most American and allied military units within 18 months. Though disengagement has risks and costs, they can be managed. The consequences would not be worse for the United States than the present situation, and capabilities for dealing with them are impressive, if properly employed.

Some people argue that the United States should disengage because the war was a mistake in the first place, or because it is morally wrong. I do not propose to pass judgment on these questions one way or the other. My case for disengagement is different: it is forward-looking and based on American national interests. The war as it has evolved (and is likely to evolve) badly serves those interests. A well-planned disengagement will serve them much better by reducing military, economic, and political costs.

In Reason Online, libertarians, er, debate, school choice.

Marshall Fritz

Fritz is president of the Alliance for the Separation of School & State.

Most necessary reform: None. “Reform” implies the government is still involved. We need to transform America’s collectivist approach to education into free-market education. This means ending not only compulsory funding but compulsory attendance and content. We must separate schools from the state.

Biggest obstacle: Tax-funded school vouchers are the biggest obstacle to improving education. They will again trick parents into believing school improvement is just around the corner. They could delay return to a genuine free market by a generation or more. Vouchers replace today’s monopoly with a “monopsony” (single buyer). Schools will have only one customer to serve—and it’s not you. Follow the money.

In 2003, the author Shelley Jackson announced that she would publish a 2,095-word short story called “Skin” on participants who agree to be tattooed with randomly assigned words from her text. The tattooees alone will read the story, which will be complete when the last commissioned word is inscribed on its bearer, sometime in the next few years. It will not be published on paper. Jackson asks applicants (she has many more than she can use) to read her novel, The Melancholy of Anatomy, to ensure that they like her writing before committing to a word, because “Skin” is what she calls a “hidden track” (in the pop-music sense) of the book; both explore the relationship between words and the body.

more from The Believer here.

Top curators and critics make their picks in the December issue of Artforum.

Robert Storr
“ACCUMULATED VISION, BARRY LE VA” (INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PHILADELPHIA) For me, the past year’s most awaited, most revealing, and most beautifully executed exhibition was this miniretrospective organized by Ingrid Schaffner (who deserves her own high ranking on some roster for the string of exhibitions she has curated over the years). . . .

Alison M. Gingeras
PAUL MCCARTHY, “LALA LAND PARODY PARADISE” (HAUS DER KUNST, MUNICH) After years of intensive toil in his Pasadena studio, McCarthy delivered an epoch-making exhibition based on his two pet obsessions: pirates and cowboys. . . .

Matthew Higgs
“ROBERT RAUSHCENBERG: HOARFROSTS” (GUILD HALL, EAST HAMPTON, NY) The saddest summer show ever? Given that institutions tend to roll out holiday favorites or crowd pleasers for the summer season, the Guild Hall’s decision to exhibit Rauschenberg’s little known, rarely seen, and profoundly melancholic “Hoarfrost” series was a bold gesture. . . .

Thelma Golden
THE AUDIENCE AT “BASQUIAT” (BROOKLYN MUSEUM) I had an irrepressible desire to channel the enthusiasm of a Borscht Belt emcee as I walked through the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective. The audience embodied all of the clichés inherent to any conversation about “attracting a wider cross section of the public.” . . .

more here.

From The Guardian:

I once ordered a copy of Charles Booth’s 1889 Descriptive Map of London Poverty from the London Topographical Society. Weeks, then months, passed, and I heard nothing. I may even have forgotten that I had ordered it. Then, early one Sunday morning, I was woken up by the sound of the doorbell. An elderly gentleman in a deerstalker hat with a tube under his arm asked my name, confirmed that I was the intended recipient of Booth’s map, handed it to me, and was off. If only all purchases were made like that.

As any good geographer will tell you, all of life lies in maps and atlases, whether it be Booth’s analysis of London, or something more monumental, like Joan Blaeu’s magisterial Atlas Maior of 1665, recently reprinted by Taschen. If Booth’s map offers you a tour of London’s streets, Blaeu’s mammoth atlas is a round-the-world trip from the safety of your armchair. As Blaeu wrote, “we may set eyes on far-off places without so much as leaving home: we traverse impassable ranges, cross rivers and seas on safety … by the power of the imagination we swiftly journey East-West and North-South at a single glance”.

More here.

From The New York Times:

ON BEAUTY
By Zadie Smith.
Penguin Press, $25.95.
In her vibrant new book, a cultural-politics novel set in a place like Harvard, the author of ”White Teeth” brings everything to the table: a crisp intellect, a lovely wit and enormous sympathy for the men, women and children who populate her story.

PREP
By Curtis Sittenfeld.
Random House, $21.95. Paper, $13.95.
This calm and memorably incisive first novel, about a scholarship girl who heads east to attend an elite prep school, casts an unshakable spell and has plenty to say about class, sex and character.

SATURDAY
By Ian McEwan.
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.
As bracing and as carefully constructed as anything McEwan has written, this astringent novel traces a day in the life of an English neurosurgeon who comes face to face with senseless violence.

More here.

For those of you that missed it, Crooked Timber has a seminar on Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell has been extraordinarily successful, and for good reason. It’s won both the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards, but has also won a vast readership among people who don’t usually care for fantasy. On the one hand, Neil Gaiman describes it as ” unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years” (with the emphasis on the adjective ‘English’; see more below), on the other, Charles Palliser, author of the wonderful historical novel, The Quincunx, describes it as “absolutely compelling” and “an astonishing achievement.” We’ve been fans at Crooked Timber since the book came out – not least because it has funny, voluminous and digressive footnotes which seem near-perfectly calculated to appeal to a certain kind of academic.

In Japan Kenta Kobashi is legendary at what he does: con onlookers into believing he’s in a ball-crunchingly real fight. The stolid Kobashi stands 6-foot-2 and weighs 265 pounds, with a wide chest and a variety of facial expressions that put Jim Carrey to shame. If he embodies a Japanese archetype it’s that of the fearless warrior, though the wrestling ring is too expressive a place to allow for a warrior’s perpetually staid demeanor. On this uncommonly hot October evening, he enters the New Yorker Hotel Ballroom on Eighth Avenue wearing a black robe and red underwear. The crowd chants his name as he climbs into the ring. Standing across from his opponent, tri-state independent wrestler Joe Seannoa, he takes his palm and slaps it against “Samoa” Joe’s sumo-like chest. The crowd explodes.

more from n+1 here.

The American painter Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), whose work is the subject of a splendid exhibition at the DC Moore Gallery, was one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. He was also one of the most popular. He had the distinction, moreover, of creating a vision of the American landscape that established itself as one of the classic styles in modern American painting—a style in which the pastoral sentiments of his native Ohio are stripped of their innocence and charm and transformed into something far more sinister, a landscape of anxiety and dread.

more from Kramer at the NY Observer here.

From The Guardian:

From Lord Byron to Dylan Thomas and beyond, the famous philanderers of the art world may have had a touch of mental illness to thank for their behaviour, psychologists report today. A survey comparing mental health and the number of sexual partners among the general population, artists and schizophrenics found that artists are more likely to share key behavioural traits with schizophrenics, and that they have on average twice as many sexual partners as the rest of the population.

Schizophrenia is so debilitating that those with the condition are often socially isolated, have trouble maintaining relationships and so reproduce at a much lower rate than the general population. But cases of schizophrenia remain high, at around 1% of the population. “On the face of it, Darwinism would suggest that the genes predisposing to schizophrenia would eventually disappear from the gene pool,” said Dr Nettle.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The World Year of Physics goes into its final month with a Big Bang — a 12-hour marathon Webcast on Thursday that hops from Geneva to Egypt, from Jerusalem to Venice, from London to the South Pole. From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET, physicists and educators will hold forth on time travel and neutrinos, the legacy of Albert Einstein’s theories and the puzzles yet to be solved. And along the way, even MSNBC.com will come in for a little of relativity’s reflected glory. Our interactive presentation on “Putting Einstein to the Test” is one of the winners in the Pirelli Relativity Challenge for the best multimedia presentations explaining special relativity. The contest, which is presenting its awards at the Telecom Future Center in Venice on Thursday, drew about 250 entries from 40 countries.

More here.

From Nature:

Sealed membrane systems are a defining feature of cellular life. They provide a barrier between the cell and its external environment and, in eukaryotes, divide the interior of the cell into functionally distinct compartments. Membrane proteins comprise around a third of gene products in most organisms and research is being revolutionised by the structural analysis of increasingly complex macromolecular systems.

A flavour of the current excitement in cell and membrane biology can be obtained in the research articles and reviews presented in this Nature web focus.

More here.

It kills me to write this because I love the Museum of Modern Art. Aesthetically speaking it’s where we all come from, where we go to commune with our ancestors and become new again. Yet the more I go to the new MOMA–and I’ve been there over 50 times since it reopened a year ago this week–the more I think this crown jewel is becoming a beautiful tomb. At MOMA the unruly juice of art history, the chaos, contradiction, radicality, and rebellion, are being bleached out. Instead, we’re getting the taming of modernism–modernism as elevator music.

An observation by Jacques Lacan might describe the dire straits MOMA is in: “A madman who believes he is king is no more mad than a king who believes he is king.” Of course, this statement means a king who believes he possesses an inherent “king gene” is implicitly mad. Second, and more pressing, it means that to be king the people must believe you are king. Being king is a relationship.

MOMA is becoming a madman who thinks it is king.

more from Jerry Salz at the Village Voice here.

Kelley, whose most recent show opened recently at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, was the last artist—and by last, I mean both “most recent” and “last ever”—to pull off the great gambit of 20th-century art: He made things that, upon first inspection, you would think had no artistic qualities whatsoever, things that were not and could not possibly be art, let alone significant art. And yet there they were, in a gallery or museum, and after you spent some time with them, you began to think, Yes, of course this is art; and after a little more time, you began to realize that it was very significant art indeed. It now falls to me, and art writers like me, to exercise, for the last time, the great gambit of 20th-century criticism, and explain why. . . .

more from Slate here.

In all the chatter about a “new formalism” going on, folks who should know better tend to overlook that any so-called new formalism is still formalism—a crucial aspect summoned too often just as formula or a way of putting thought on crutches when confronting abstraction and nonrepresentation, instead of allowing it to stumble into the unknown. Artists create and de-create new forms, which mostly aren’t categorizable until they’ve already moved elsewhere. Like any other artist who actually wishes to accomplish something meaningful, Hill’s trying to sort through many things at once. I doubt he’d start with his “interest” in form, point blank, as what gets him out of bed, but neither would he prioritize grooving to the sometimes contradictory currents of Sturtevant, Billy Al Bengston (color as space, vernacular as history), and Fecteau (poetic rigor) over possibly testing the aesthetic potential of Spencer’s Gifts (the “adult” novelty shop specializing in the black-lit paraphernalia of stoner eroticism), fabric and glass arts, or the low-key cool of surf culture (coral, pastel beach stones, killer airbrushing) and its mum, soulful atmospherics.

more from Artforum here.

From despardes.com:

The real inflection point of this presidency was not Iraq; rather, it was Hurricane Katrina. Rightly or wrongly, Bush was perceived not just as unprepared for a major hurricane strike, but also as oblivious to the seriousness of the humanitarian disaster in New Orleans. This perception solidified the opposition of the U.S. left, denied the president any help from the American center and cracked the heretofore unified American right. The result was a president in danger of losing his core supporters, without whom no president can effectively rule. Similar circumstances condemned past statesmen such as Wilson, Truman, Johnson and Nixon into the unenviable company of failed presidents. (GW Bush picture here).

Since Katrina, the Bush administration’s fortunes have only slid further, with three critical defeats standing out most glaringly. First, its primary congressional ally, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, has been indicted for fundraising improprieties. Second, the administration’s efforts to shuttle Harriet Miers into the Supreme Court resulted in a break within the Republican Party. Third, the vice president’s chief of staff — Lewis “Scooter” Libby — has been indicted for disclosing the status of undercover intelligence officers to the press, a charge that may well be pressed against political mastermind Karl Rove, and perhaps even the vice president himself.

More here.

From Science:

It seems that 9-year-old boys aren’t the only male creatures who will join together to torment their female counterparts. When male lizards largely outnumber females, they direct their aggressiveness toward mating partners, population biologists report. Such belligerence, they say, could put lizard populations at risk of extinction.

Lizards were separated into two populations, each with about 70 members. In one population the adults were three-quarter males, and in the other they were three-quarter females. Lizards were allowed to emigrate to another population of the same bias in sex ratio. The mortality and emigration rates of male lizards were unaffected by sex ratio imbalances, the team reports online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But females were 2 to 3 times more likely to die or be wounded by males when their environment was male-dominated than when it was female-dominated. The team concluded that rather than fighting off male competitors, the too-numerous male lizards forced the females into mating.

More here.

Adam Kirsch in The New Yorker:

Has there ever been a great poet as tempting to laugh at as William Wordsworth? The tradition of mocking him is as old as the tradition of revering him. In 1807, when Wordsworth published “Poems, in Two Volumes,” the fashionable reviewers competed in the ingenuity of their scorn. Francis Jeffrey, the critical dictator of the Edinburgh Review, declared that “if the printing of such trash as this be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted.” Jeffrey remained the chief bane of Wordsworth’s career—in 1814, his review of “The Excursion,” a nine-thousand-line epic, began with an airy “This will never do”—but he was just one of many who felt the need to cut the poet down to size. “For nearly twenty years,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained in “Biographia Literaria,” Wordsworth’s poems “have well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph.”

More here.

David P. Barash in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Rather than defending their discipline, many among the literati have mourned its imminent demise. Thus, in his book The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science, Max Eastman concluded that science was on the verge of answering “every problem that arises,” and that literature, therefore, “has no place in such a world.” And in 1970 the playwright Eugene Ionesco wondered “if art hasn’t reached a dead-end, if indeed in its present form, it hasn’t already reached its end. … For some time now, science has been making enormous progress, whereas the empirical revelations of writers have been making very little. … Can literature still be considered a means to knowledge?”

Balancing Eastman and Ionesco — humanists pessimistic about the humanities — Noam Chomsky is a scientist radically distrustful of science: “It is quite possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” Should we see the two cultures, instead, the way Stephen Jay Gould used to describe science and religion: as “nonoverlapping magisteria”? But in fact, they do overlap, most obviously when practitioners of either seek to enlarge their domain into the other. And when this happens, there have inevitably been cries of outrage, reminiscent of the Snow-Leavis squabble. Thus Edward O. Wilson’s effort at “consilience” evoked strenuous opposition, mostly from humanists. Reciprocally, more than a few scientists — Alan Sokal most prominently — have been outraged by postmodernist efforts to “transgress the boundaries” by “privileging” a kind of poly-syllabic verbal hijinks over scientific theory building, empirical validation, and careful thought.

More here.