The Economist gives us an answer that it loves.

“One theory is that Homo sapiens had more sophisticated tools, which gave him an advantage in hunting or warfare. Another is that the modern human capacity for symbolic thinking (manifest at that time in the form of cave paintings and carved animal figurines) provided an edge. Symbolic thinking might have led to more sophisticated language and better co-operation. But according to Dr Shogren’s paper in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, it was neither cave paintings nor better spear points that led to Homo sapiens‘s dominance. It was a better economic system.

One thing Homo sapiens does that Homo neanderthalensis shows no sign of having done is trade.”

The al-Qaeda attack on the United States on September 11th, 2001 did much to realign political affiliations: Jude Wanniski writes occassionally for CounterPunch, Hitchens tours London with David Horowitz and Paul Johnson, not to mention how he turns his former comrades-in-arms into the targets of his famed and prodigous mad-lib like political verdict generator–the one that couples “soft”, “idiocy”, “cretin”, “nasty”, “stupid” with the target’s ethics, morality, judgement, imagination, and intellect. 

It once seemed to me that the aftermath of the attack for many on both sides of the spectrum was a return to an era when politics were clear–think the Spanish Civil War or the fight against the Nazis as the many “Bush=Hitler” signs suggest.  (It still does when the passions fire up.)  Enemies and enmity grew from the size of a louse to life-size to something world historical.  Here’s a piece by George Scialabba from n+1 that traces an evolution (or is it revolution?) of this sort in Hitchens’ thinking.  Somewhere in it seems to be a lesson about many on both sides.

“About any sufferings that cannot serve as a pretext for American military intervention, moreover, Hitchens appears to have stopped caring. . .  He is ‘a single-issue person at present,’ he wrote in endorsing President Bush for reelection. This issue, compared with which everything else is ‘not even in second or third place,’ is ‘the tenacious and unapologetic defense of civilized societies against the intensifying menace of clerical barbarism.’

. . .

Why? What accounts for Hitchens’s astonishing loss of moral and intellectual balance?

. . .

Randolph Bourne, criticizing the New Republic liberals of his era for supporting America’s entry into World War I, wondered whether

realism is always a stern and intelligent grappling with realities. May it not sometimes be a mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal through a sheer fatigue from intellectual suspense? . . . With how many of the acceptors of war has it been mostly a dread of intellectual suspense? It is a mistake to suppose that intellectuality makes for suspended judgments. The intellect craves certitude. It takes effort to keep it supple and pliable. In a time of danger and disaster we jump desperately for some dogma to cling to. The time comes, if we try to hold out, when our nerves are sick with fatigue, and we seize in a great healing wave of release some doctrine that can be immediately translated into action.

Compare Hitchens’s widely quoted response to 9/11: ‘I felt a kind of exhilaration . . . at last, a war of everything I loved against everything I hated.’ More recently, explaining to Nation readers last November ‘Why I’m (Slightly) for Bush,’ he testified again to the therapeutic value of his new commitment: ‘Myself, I have made my own escape from your self-imposed quandary. Believe me when I say . . . the relief is unbelievable.’ I believe him.”

There have been a number of aticles about the current show at the Japan Society in New York entitled Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. Having just had a chance to see it, I couldn’t recommend it more. Japan’s can be a difficult culture to penetrate. I’m not sure full penetration occurs here, but it would be hard to see this exhibit without some flashes of understanding.

Here’s the NY Times review from Roberta Smith.

The work of Aya Takano sticks in one’s mind, to say the least. The picture on this post is from her illustration for Hiroshi Homura’s “Mail Mania Mami’s Summertime Move With Rabbit.”

I don’t normally post links to The Atlantic because their online archive is only available to subscribers. But, with apologies to non-subscribers, here’s an exception made for David Foster Wallace’s “Host,” a gigantic and brilliant dissection of right-wing radio, which also has an innovative hypertextual color-coded element for its footnotes. Let me plead with readers to pick up a copy of the April Atlantic just to read this article. There’s other interesting stuff in there too, like this ideologically-skewed Hitchens review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday.

Paper by Michael S. Franklin and Michael J. Zyphur in Evolutionary Psychology:

This paper presents an evolutionary argument for the role of dreams in the development of human cognitive processes. While a theory by Revonsuo (2000) proposes that dreams allow for threat rehearsal and therefore provide an evolutionary advantage, the goal of this paper is to extend this argument by commenting on other fitness-enhancing aspects of dreams. Rather than a simple threat rehearsal mechanism, it is argued that dreams reflect a more general virtual rehearsal mechanism that is likely to play an important role in the development of human cognitive capacities. This paper draws on current work in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind in developing the argument.

More here.

Simon Jeffery in The Guardian:

The American feminist icon, writer and campaigner Andrea Dworkin, who linked pornography to rape and violence, died at the weekend, her agent said today. She was 59 years old.

Her radical-feminist critique of pornography began with her first book, Woman Hating, published when she was 27. She campaigned frequently on the subject, helping to draft a law in 1983 that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women.

More here.

James Gleick reviews a biography of Oppenheimer in the Washington Post:

The atomic bomb would surely have come into existence without Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project, but the label “Father of the Bomb” could be attached to no one else. He felt his responsibility deeply. His self-lacerating conscience let him see with immediate and lasting clarity what his success meant for humanity. If he had done nothing else — if nothing else had happened to him — Oppenheimer would still be one of the 20th century’s great, complex, defining figures.

More here.

From American Scientist:

With the crowd going wild and sweat pouring from your every pore, you have to concentrate on the ball that is about to be launched in your direction. You must gather as much information about the pitch as quickly as you can in order to make crucial decisions.

As we will show, you get just a few hundreds of milliseconds to figure out what kind of pitch—perhaps traveling at almost 100 miles per hour—is heading toward the plate. In that instant, you must observe the ball’s spin and predict how it will move on its way to the plate. It’s a daunting computational task. Luckily, we can describe a few clues for you to use. And you will need them soon, because that fearsome pitcher is rocking back on his pivot leg. In a split second, his arm will swing through a great arc and send a baseball hurtling your way.

More here.

In the Village Voice:

With some high-profile releases in the past few years, increased press coverage, and tourist-friendly phenomena like Bombay Dreams, the Bollywood brand is quickly finding its place in American pop culture’s mainstream masala. Now, two uptown series attempt to flesh out the recent history of Indian cinema. Lincoln Center fetes mega-luminary Amitabh Bachchan, touted record-book-style as “the biggest film star in the world.” The title of Bachchan’s tribute is inspired by a 1999 BBC online poll that named him Superstar of the Millennium. Bachchan bested not only Sir Laurence Olivier and Charlie Chaplin but presumably Sarah Bernhardt and David Garrick; Bachchan’s sheer number of film roles—almost 150 since his debut in 1969—was no doubt a decisive factor. In his first hit, the violent revenge narrative Zanjeer (1973), the towering, baritone-voiced actor established the model for his later on-screen persona: the “angry young man” who takes on the powerful and unscrupulous but displays a charismatic decorum between smackdowns. In keeping with Bollywood’s market-friendly smorgasbordism, Bachchan served as Dustin Hoffman, John Travolta, and Sylvester Stallone rolled into one.

More here.

Max Rodenbeck in the New York Review of Books:

An extraordinary passion play has been unfolding in Beirut over the last few weeks. It is a drama that happens to pit forces which, in a particularly stark fashion, seem to represent the competing narratives that will ultimately define the Arabs’ vision of their recent past and soon-to-be-revealed destiny.

More here.

Tracy Staedter at the Discovery Channel:

A physics class competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., has students making art out of invisible forces.

The Weird Fields contest, part of the undergraduate course “Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism,” — encourages students to use a special computer program that converts mathematical formulas into visual representations of electromagnetic fields.

The resulting swirls, loops, circles and squares, while not necessarily corresponding exactly to those occurring in nature, offer a creative way to understand some of the most abstract concepts in physics.

More here.

From USA Today:

The American poet laureate, appointed by the librarian of Congress, does not write poems on public events like his British counterpart, who is appointed for life. He performs a minimum of official duties so he can pursue his own ideas to promote poetry.

Kooser’s idea was to offer a free weekly poem to U.S. newspapers. The second poem, Jonathan Greene’s “At the Grave”, was posted Thursday on the program’s Web site, http://americanlifeinpoetry.org/

More here.  Read some Kooser poems here, like:

From American Scientist:

The death of the last of the great evolutionary biologists of the 20th century concluded an intellectual movement in the study of evolution—a point of view whose most striking aspect was the extent to which all of the evolutionary history of life on Earth was perceived as a subdiscipline of biology. Whereas Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have called it a paradigm, Ludwik Fleck (author of Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, 1935) would have recognized the correlated demise of neo-Darwinism and the death of Professor Mayr as a paradigm lost.

An accomplished naturalist, Ernst Mayr began his work in 1923 at the age of 19. The last of his 25 books, a collection of essays called What Makes Biology Unique? Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline, was published by Cambridge University Press in the summer of 2004, one month after his 100th birthday!

More here.

Susannah Clapp in The Observor:

  Bringing the ancient Greeks closer to us is probably the only cultural achievement of the war in Iraq. The translation of the play’s action into the 21st century is more or less seamless: the chorus of lamenting women could be the background to the report of an atrocity; the cycle of revenge, with its bloody display of children’s bodies, now looks almost routine.

The case is clear and there’s no need for Harrison’s translation – fleshy, forthright, always robust, but sometimes overdone – to thump down every modern parallel. A few nods in the direction of the here and now work well: triumphant Greeks swagger about the coalition’s plans; there’s a lament about the price paid for democracy. These signals would have been enough. Darrell D’Silva’s otherwise powerful Odysseus takes things too far with his intermittent George Dubya accent.

And there is Vanessa Redgrave. You see the outlines of what she can do here and the uniqueness of what she does.

More here.

Nancy Morris in The American Heritage:

From the observation deck of the Aloha Tower there is a panoramic view of the Honolulu waterfront and a once infamous district known as Iwilei. Looking for local color, Somerset Maugham went slumming there and wrote this in his notebook: “You go down side-streets by the harbour, in the darkness, across a rickety bridge, and you come to a road, all ruts and holes; a little farther … there is a certain stir, an air of expectant agitation; you turn down a narrow alley, either to the right or to the left, and find yourself in the district… . The pretty bungalows are divided into two lodgings; each is inhabited by a woman, and each consists of two rooms and a kitchenette.”

A prostitute named Sadie Thompson, Maugham was to find, lived in one of those bungalows. Shortly after Maugham’s Iwilei adventure, the police shut down the district. Sadie was out of business and sailed off to Samoa. As it turned out, Maugham was on board that ship too and suffered through her loud gramophone and late-night trysts. In Samoa, temporarily stranded by a storm, he found himself in the same boardinghouse as Sadie. There was a reallife hypocritical missionary staying in the boardinghouse too, although he seems not to have met the final grim end of Maugham’s character Davidson. Sadie’s adventures became Maugham’s most famous short story, “Rain.” The writer did not even bother to change her name: Passenger lists published in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser record a “Somerset Maugham” and a “Miss Thompson” departing Honolulu for Pago Pago on the Sonoma, December 4, 1916.

More here.

From the BBC:

The United Arab Emirates says it will use robots as jockeys for camel races from next season.

The move comes after widespread international criticism of the use of young children to ride camels during the long and often hazardous races.

Officials say a prototype of the robot was successfully tested on Saturday.

Aid workers say there are up to 40,000 child jockeys working across the Gulf. Many are said to be have been kidnapped and trafficked from South Asia.

More here.  [Thanks to Alan Koenig.]

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

On July 9, 1985, a thirty-year-old American economist named Jeffrey Sachs stepped off a plane in La Paz, Bolivia, high in the Andes, where the inflation rate was three thousand per cent. Prices were rising so fast that on the streets of the capital people were frantically trading bags of depreciating pesos for dollars. Sachs, one of the youngest tenured professors in the history of the Harvard economics department, had established himself as an authority on inflation and international finance, and was someone who, in his own words, “thought that I knew just about everything that needed to be known” about his subject.

It was Sachs’s self-confidence that had earned him an invitation to Latin America. A few months earlier, during a seminar at Harvard on the Bolivian crisis organized by some Latin-American students, he had interrupted the speaker, strode to the blackboard, and announced, “Here’s how it works.” When he finished scribbling equations, a voice at the back of the room said, “Well, if you’re so smart, why don’t you come down to La Paz to help us?” Sachs laughed, but the speaker, Carlos Iturralde, a Bolivian businessman who later became his country’s foreign minister, wasn’t joking. Seven weeks after Sachs arrived in La Paz, some of his recommendations were implemented, and three years of hyperinflation came to an immediate end.

More here.

James Shreeve in the New York Times Magazine:

To test the potential curative powers of human embryonic stem cells, biologists want to inject them into lab animals. Creating such chimeras makes perfect sense, to a point: A sheep with a human liver? O.K. A mouse brain made up of human cells? Maybe. But a chimp that sobs?

More here.

Liz Else interviews Clare Shaw, author of Cancer: The power of food, in New Scientist:

As a child in Blackpool, Clare Shaw loved fish and chips, and her mother’s good old-fashioned cooking. Her first degree was in nutrition and dietetics at the University of London. And she stayed in London for her first job at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, working in general dietetics. She joined the Royal Marsden cancer hospital in 1987, and went on to become chief dietitian there in 1992. Her book Cancer: The power of food has just been published by Hamlyn.

Has science needed some persuading of the relationship between diet and cancer?

Yes. Conclusive evidence has been very hard to get, which made them cautious about false messages or easy sound bites. As a result they have been rather behind in talking to the public.

What do you think about the quality of advice out there about food and cancer?

A lot of the information that is aimed at the general public is not necessarily based on good scientific evidence. People find it difficult to know what is reliable and what is really just someone’s idea, just spin. Lots of people think they know about diet, so they’re all jumping on the bandwagon. Often messages about healthy eating do not fit politically with what everyone wants, whether that be the food industry, government or whomever.

More here, including a short guide for better eating.