Tony Perrottet in The Smart Set:

You might think a 2,300-year-old sex scandal would eventually lose some of its bite. But when it comes to paragons of masculinity such as world conqueror Alexander the Great, it doesn’t. With his 2004 film Alexander, writer-director Oliver Stone outraged stiff-necked military types with his depiction of the macho Macedonian king, history’s most brilliant warrior, flirting with his boyfriends up and down the Khyber Pass. In between gore-splattered battles, Alexander (played by Colin Farrell) flounces about in makeup at drunken Babylonian banquets, shoots suggestive glances to his male entourage, and indulges in a passionate kiss with one of his officers — all the sort of behavior that would be frowned upon in the U.S. military today, for example. But according to Paul Cartledge, professor of Classics at Cambridge University, the film is actually very coy about Alexander’s busy homoerotic life: There is no real doubt that he took a young Persian eunuch named Bagoas as his lover in Babylon, and that at the height of his power he was still carrying on a torrid affair with his studly childhood sweetheart, Hephestaion. On the other hand, we also know that Alexander sired at least one son — with his wife, the lovely Afghani princess Roxanne — and that he maintained a bevy of voluptuous mistresses as he stormed his way across the Middle East.

So was Alexander bisexual? In fact, the Greeks themselves would not have understood the question. They were shocked by Alexander’s love life for other reasons.

More here.

Tom Siegfried in Science News:

Supposedly, the proper use of statistics makes relying on scientific results a safe bet. But in practice, widespread misuse of statistical methods makes science more like a crapshoot.

It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.

Replicating a result helps establish its validity more securely, but the common tactic of combining numerous studies into one analysis, while sound in principle, is seldom conducted properly in practice.

Experts in the math of probability and statistics are well aware of these problems and have for decades expressed concern about them in major journals. Over the years, hundreds of published papers have warned that science’s love affair with statistics has spawned countless illegitimate findings. In fact, if you believe what you read in the scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.

More here.

Salamishah Tillet in The Root:

Leave it to Tyler Perry, a man best known for playing Madea, a modern-day Mammy, to try to redefine black feminism for the mainstream.

Perry admits that he didn't know much about Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, but that didn't stop him from taking on this black feminist bible nevertheless.

First produced on Broadway in 1976, For Colored Girls was written by Shange during the height of both the black power and feminist movements. Shange's play, much like the 1970s debuts of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland, was a coming-of-age story that uniquely featured the point of view and political experiences of black women.

Breaking long-standing cultural silence on topics such as domestic violence, sexual abuse and abortion in the experimental form of a choreopoem that combined words with movement, Shange created what the New Yorker's Hilton Als once described as a “firebomb of a poem. Through the 'colored girls,' the disenfranchised heard a voice they could recognize, one that combined the trickster spirit of Richard Pryor with a kind of mournful blues.”

But the play's boldness was not simply in its diagnoses of black women's blues but in its unwavering belief that black feminism was a viable remedy for those blues. Soyica Diggs Colbert, a scholar of African-American theater at Dartmouth College, says that the play's ultimate message was always one of black freedom.

“Through dancing, singing and coming together,” Dr. Colbert notes, “or what the play describes as 'a layin on of hands,' the women developed rites that begin to repair the damage caused by domestic and sexual violence. No easy resolution, but a triumphant one nonetheless.”

In the hands of Perry, one of Hollywood's most conservative black evangelical voices, Shange's feminist message of gender equality, reproductive justice and sexual liberation has been seriously compromised.

Jacob Mikanowski in The Millions:

This is what meeting one of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s narrators is like: you’re in a squalid cantina in Guatemala City, in an alley by the archbishop’s palace. Or maybe it’s a chic place in San Salvador, across from the mall, where the waiters are gorgeous and they serve fancy cold cuts with the rioja. They come late, and when they arrive they seem a little off – a little strung out, a little jumpy. Right away, they want to tell you everything, all at once: about the article in today’s paper by some has-been calling them a hack, Kati’s dress and how fat she looks in it, a conspiracy between drug dealers and the military police, the best place to get oysters, and isn’t marimba music terrible, the worst, and how they’d like to sleep with the Spanish girl from the human rights office, and did you hear about Olga?, of course she’d already fucked him before she died. It’s a torrent. You can’t get a word in edgewise so you just sip your beer or your wine and wonder if it’s the cocaine talking or something they got from their psychiatrist. But you are enjoying yourself, because however one-sided it is, they’re supplying everything a good conversation needs – sex, secrets, politics, and death, and because they’re funny, really funny, even as they’re being morbid or petty or paranoid. And they are paranoid – persecution-complex, Nixon-level paranoid. But as Kurt Cobain said, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. Besides, you think, in this country, who knows what’s true and what isn’t, so you relax and settle into a rhythm and take in every story as it comes. And that’s when the real mayhem starts.

Even at the rare moments when they aren’t narrated in first-person, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s novels feel like monologues. Like the best monologues, they float on a wave of relentless interiority, a steady stream of talk which feels like it is being pumped directly out of someone’s skull and which, however insane, carries the electricity of live thought (Moya has been lucky to have translators – Katherine Silver and Lee Paula Springer – who have been able to render this whoosh in English).

In an interview at The Quarterly Conversation, Moya claimed to be influenced by Elias Canetti’s conception of the writer as “a custodian of metamorphoses,” the writer as someone who has the ability “to metamorphose himself into the people of his time, no matter how weak, miserable or dark they are.”

In the fall of 2009, Helene Rosen, her husband, Yoni, and eight of their eleven children moved from Baltimore to Cusco, Peru, to harvest human hair.1 Helene is a forty-four-year-old Orthodox Jew and self-proclaimed “master sheitel designer” who began making wigs fifteen years ago, for ten dollars an hour; her custom hairpieces now sell for up to two thousand. “You can bring me any wig,” she said this past winter, sitting at the table in her spare dining room in Cusco, “and I can tell you how old it is, how much it has been worn, and if it has ever been repaired. I can tell you everything about it.” Helene first encountered sheitels, which Orthodox women have worn since the nineteenth century as an alternative to covering their hair (as Jewish modesty law dictates), in 1995. She had moved to Lakewood, New Jersey from Israel, where most Orthodox women wear headscarves called snoods rather than wigs.

more from Julia Sherman at Triple Canopy here.

Cinema is a strangely autistic medium, often offering aid and encouragement to obviously pathological misanthropes, which isn’t really a problem when that translates primarily into the form and content of their work — look at Stan Brakhage. Unfortunately, what you get when it translates further — into the very socioeconomic infrastructure for the creation of filmic artworks itself — is that poisonously hierarchical, anticreative cesspool known as Hollywood. And I’ve never even written a screenplay! There are exceptions, of course: Robert Altman and John Cassavetes were both legendary for their willingness to destabilize the pyramidal protocols of the Tinseltown factory and locate the creative heart of their cinematic art in the resultant chaos. But as often as not, their work wound up as meditations on the desperate impossibility of bridging the communication gap between humans; even the most egalitarian of team players ultimately are defeated by the inherent hermeticism of the medium. Whether through avant-garde eliminations of plot, character, the camera, authorial decision-making or intelligible pictorial content; or conversely through Imax, 3-D, Scratch ‘n’ Sniff and similar William Castle-type attempts at virtuality, the filmmaker’s efforts to reach out and establish contact with an audience comes up against a raised drawbridge that is as narrow as the 1/48-second gap between projected frames and as vast as the gulf between you and your ex.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

These two volumes of Günter Grass’s autobiography come in the wake of the controversy set off by the interview he gave to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2006, on the launch of the first volume in the trilogy, Peeling the Onion (Beim Hauten der Zwiebel), in which he admitted that he had served as a teenage member of the Waffen SS in the closing months of the war. It was an item that had failed to appear in the official biography published four years earlier. As a lifelong moral arbiter who had never been shy of pointing the finger at prominent figures with pasts to hide, the revelation made Grass into a kind of sitting duck. He made little attempt to defend himself, other than to say that he thought that his whole life as a writer had been an attempt to redress the indoctrination he had suffered during the Nazi era. His writing, as Michael Hamburger has pointed out, has always been characterized, in a cultural landscape with deep ideological divides, by its “prodigious equipoise”: Grass was ingenious at keeping his politics out of his imaginative life and defending his right to produce work that is “wrong and beautiful”. But there is something either extremely naive or perversely blind about not having come clean earlier, and some critics even accused him of timing his confession to generate interest in the autobiography. Grass may simply be a better writer than a moralist in that what counts for him is less the events than the business of interpreting them, and he has made plain his impatience with conventional autobiography. But autobiography has to pay tribute to document and fact – otherwise it is not what it claims to be.

more from Iain Bamforth at the TLS here.

Andrew Dermont in Big Think:

Studies have shown that people who have recently read online obituaries tend to be higher purchasers of weekend rental cars. Why this is true isn't exactly clear to Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda Inc., an online advertising company that was acquired by Aol. in 2007 for $275 million. But the correlation in the data is significant enough that Avis, Hertz, and Enterprise Rent-a-Car ads should start appearing in front of you soon after you have read about the passing of an old friend, a loved one, or (as is often the case when reading obituaries) someone you didn't know at all.

Consumers today are knowingly and unknowingly providing businesses with more data than they've ever been capable of collecting before. Internet entrepreneurs, privacy analysts, and business consultants alike believe that for the next fifty years, capitalism around the world will (for better or worse) be focused on sussing out what all this data actually means. “We are finding things that are completely non-intuitive,” says Morgan. “This is just the very beginning of this enormous explosion of information being available about what people do, how they react to information, and how they interact with each other.”

More here.

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

If Walter Benjamin were alive today, would he be writing a little essay about “Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen,” the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art? It is easy to imagine Benjamin crafting a few intricate, elegant pages, combining a collector’s ardent admiration, an intellectual’s theoretical flights, and a novelist’s sensitivity to the pop-chic ambience at MoMA. I found myself indulging in this little fantasy the other day, as I read “Old Toys,” an essay Benjamin published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1928, about an exhibition at the Märkisches Museum, an event that definitely got his imagination going. Benjamin marveled at the works on display, speculated about the reasons for the exhibition’s popularity, and indulged in his quirky brand of Marxist analysis, observing that “[o]nce mislaid, broken, and repaired, even the most princely doll becomes a capable proletarian comrade in the children’s play commune.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

A brisk half hour walk a day will keep you healthy – and sane – say researchers. Eight people reveal what walking means to them

Simon Armitage, poet

I try to get in a bit of a walk most days. Most times it's a toss up between going for a walk and staying in and writing a poem, but it often leads to the same thing. I go on to the moors – we live on the edge of the Pennines and Saddleworth moor, and it can be quite bleak and quite dangerous. Sometimes I go off-piste, but there are issues around here with land ownership so sometimes I stick to the roads and the routes and sometimes I wilfully transgress, which gives me a kick. Some people have said there's a relationship between poetic meter and the fall of your foot – and possibly your heartbeat might be thought of as an iambic beat when it's amplified by walking. Often when I go for a walk I come back with a poem. There's a sense of creativity about it, and a sense of wellbeing that you are getting the organs and lungs and the blood moving. You never come back from a walk feeling worse – sometimes you come back feeling colder and wetter though, especially up here.

More here.

From Nature:

For physicists, a bit of antimatter is a precious gift indeed. By comparing matter to its counterpart, they can test fundamental symmetries that lie at the heart of the standard model of particle physics, and look for hints of new physics beyond. Yet few gifts are as tricky to wrap. Bring a particle of antimatter into contact with its matter counterpart and the two annihilate in a flash of energy. Now a research collaboration at CERN, Europe's particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, has managed, 38 times, to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap for more than 170 milliseconds. The group reported the result in Nature online on 17 November. “We're ecstatic. This is five years of hard work,” says Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman for the ALPHA collaboration at CERN.

An antihydrogen atom is made from a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron. The objective — both for ALPHA and for a competing CERN experiment called ATRAP — is to compare the energy levels in antihydrogen with those of hydrogen, to confirm that antimatter particles experience the same electromagnetic forces as matter particles, a key premise of the standard model. “The goal is to study antihydrogen and you can't do it without trapping it,” says Cliff Surko, an antimatter researcher at the University of California, San Diego. “This is really a big deal.”

More here.

Robert Sapolsky in the New York Times:

Despite rumors to the contrary, there are many ways in which the human brain isn’t all that fancy. Let’s compare it to the nervous system of a fruit fly. Both are made up of cells, of course, with neurons playing particularly important roles. Now one might expect that a neuron from a human will differ dramatically from one from a fly. Maybe the human’s will have especially ornate ways of communicating with other neurons, making use of unique “neurotransmitter” messengers. Maybe compared to the lowly fly neuron, human neurons are bigger, more complex, in some way can run faster and jump higher.

But no. Look at neurons from the two species under a microscope and they look the same. They have the same electrical properties, many of the same neurotransmitters, the same protein channels that allow ions to flow in and out, as well as a remarkably high number of genes in common. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.

So where’s the difference? It’s numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human’s 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.

Neuroscientists understand the structural bases of some of these qualities.

More here.

Mark Lilla on Glenn Beck, in the NYRB:

…after reading these books and countless articles on the man, I’m coming to the conclusion that searching for the “real” Glenn Beck makes no sense. The truth is, demagogues don’t have cores. They are mediums, channeling currents of public passion and opinion that they anticipate, amplify, and guide, but do not create; the less resistance they offer, the more successful they are. This nonresistance is what distinguishes Beck from his confreres in the conservative media establishment, who have created more sharply etched characters for themselves. Rush Limbaugh plays the loud, steamrolling uncle you avoid at Thanksgiving. Bill O’Reilly is the angry guy haranguing the bartender. Sean Hannity is the football captain in a letter sweater, asking you to repeat everything, slowly. But with Glenn Beck you never know what you’ll get. He is a perpetual work in progress, a billboard offering YOUR MESSAGE HERE.

As anyone who witnessed his performance on the Washington Mall can attest, what makes him particularly appealing to his audience is not his positions, it is that he appears to feel and fear and admire and instinctively believe what his listeners do, even when their feelings, fears, esteem, and beliefs are changing or self-contradictory. This is the gift of the true demagogue, to successfully identify his own self, rather than his opinions, with the selves of his followers—and to equate both with the “true” nation.

To understand someone like Beck, and the people who love him, you need to stay on the surface, not plumb the depths or peek behind the curtain.

Morgan Meis on how to think like the ancients, in The Smart Set:

The entry for 'Television' laconically states that, “In its first decades television did not share cinema's appetite for the classical world.” This comes from a new publication by Harvard Press called The Classical Tradition. The situation for television changed in 1967 as “the future of the ancient world [was] resolved in an episode of Star Trek when the crew of a 23rd-century spaceship destroys the last surviving Olympian god on a distant planet.” Wonderfully laconic, once again. The entry for 'Sparta', by the way, the place from which we get the term 'laconic', begins with the sentences, “Sparta, for better or worse, is a brand, not just a name. Whenever we casually drop into our everyday conversation the two little epithets spartan and laconic, we are, unwittingly, paying silent tribute to our Spartan cultural ancestors—or rather to the Spartan 'tradition'.”

The Classical Tradition is billed as neither an encyclopedia nor a dictionary, but a guide. It is edited by a couple of classicists (Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most), and one art historian (Salvatore Settis). Its stated goal is to take the reader through the thickets of classical reference in Western culture from the classical era to the present. We do not learn our classics as we used to, argue the editors. But the modern world is still rife with classical references. Thus, the need for such a guide.

George Scialabba on T.S. Eliot's conservatism, in The American Conservative:

What kind of “system” did Eliot want? A Christian society, of course—his critique of capitalism strikingly parallels that of Rerum Novarum, Centesimus Annus, and other papal encyclicals. But like those venerable documents, Eliot’s writings, though they could be pointedly negative, were not vividly affirmative. He thought there should be a lot more people living on the land. He thought people should have to spend fewer hours working for a living. He enthusiastically endorsed this description of the goal: a “new type of society, which would give fullest scope both to the individual—thus securing the utmost variety in human affairs—and to the social whole—thus stimulating the rich, collective activities which would surely come to life in a society free to express its invention, its mechanical skill, its sense of the earth in agriculture and crafts, its sense of play.”

This sounds much more like William Morris than like Margaret Thatcher. But beyond these, he offered virtually no details. He was neither a visionary nor an activist but a critic.

I said that Eliot had much to teach us about two matters of contemporary relevance. About the first, distributive justice, he wrote much, directly if not programmatically. About the other, he wrote scarcely a word—not surprisingly, since it was hardly visible on the horizon before his death. I’m referring to the steady erosion of inwardness—Eliot would have said “spiritual depth”—resulting from the omnipresence of commercial messages (the “nightmare” of “advertisement”) and electronic media.

I have no doubt that Eliot would have reacted strongly and negatively to this development, so discordant with his sensibility and practice. As described in his critical essays, the gradual surrender of the artist’s personality to tradition, which is at the same time the mastery and transformation of the tradition, resembles the attitude of the narrator of the Four Quartets toward Being and history. In both cases, the prescribed motions of the spirit are inward and downward, the virtues prescribed are humility, gravity, receptiveness. The refrain of “Burnt Norton” has become a meme: “the still point of the turning world.”

Pankaj Mishra over at the NYRB blog:

Is Asia about to enter a new cold war? Accusing the United States of undervaluing the dollar, China has, after its mainly “peaceful” rise, recently assumed an aggressive posture toward its neighbors. In recent visits both to longstanding American allies (Korea, Japan) and to erstwhile enemies (Vietnam, Cambodia), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has proposed the US as a counterpoint to China. Seeking to match the Bush administration’s landmark nuclear agreement with India in 2005, Barack Obama is also supporting India’s case for permanent membership on the UN Security Council.

The columnist Thomas Friedman interprets such moves as “containment-lite,” invoking George Kennan’s proposal in 1947 that Soviet expansionism “be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” Apparently, such counter-force against China is already being applied. An Indonesian political scientist told the New York Times last week that his government feels the US is putting “too much pressure” on Indonesia and other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) “to choose sides.”

Battered by the mid-term elections, and aware of America’s diminished economic clout, Obama himself has been more circumspect in his pronouncements. The US, he said in Indonesia last week, is “not interested in containing China.” But many politicians, journalists, and strategists seem excited by the prospect of a dramatic new standoff, especially as the “war on terror” and the “struggle against Islamofascism”—campaigns deeply shaped by nostalgia for the cold war’s ideological certainties—enter an uncertain phase.

“India’s emergence as a great Eurasian power,” Robert D. Kaplan asserts, “constitutes the best piece of news for American strategists since the end of the cold war.” Charles Krauthammer argues that since China “remains troublingly adversarial,” India “must be the center of our Asian diplomacy.”

David Ingram reviews Herbert Marcuse's Towards a Critical Theory of Society: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse: Volume Two, edited by Douglas Kellner, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

As a philosophy graduate student, political activist, and close acquaintance of Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979) during the last seven years of his tenure at UCSD I was continually perplexed by his deep reverence for the classics – especially Aristotle – and his equally self-deprecating attitude toward all variety of theoretically untutored political activism. Unfortunately, he adopted the same attitude with respect to his own work, which he simply refused to discuss. However, the famous professor who could be cajoled into conducting private readings of Hegel only with the greatest reluctance (but who would most willingly teach Aristotle’s Metaphysics), could be persuaded at a moment’s notice to speak at virtually any student demonstration, no matter how humble the cause.

The lectures, essays and correspondence assembled in this volume – the second in a projected series of six volumes containing both previously published and unpublished works (including photographs) – reflect not the famous academic scholar of Hegel, Marx, and Freud, but the personally engaged political firebrand who was rightly regarded as the guru of the New Left and student anti-war movements. Together, they span a period that began with the pessimism of the late McCarthy era and end with the pessimism of the post-Watergate era, broken only by a brief period of revolutionary optimism in the late sixties. They chronicle both the development of Marcuse’s mature critique of “one-dimensional society” and his most utopian yearnings for a liberated society.

Several signature traits of the Marcuse style immediately come into view when reading these essays. They reflect an astounding synthesis of philosophy, social science, economics, and literature. Yet they are not academic works intended to persuade intellectual skeptics of the cause being argued for. Since almost all were written during the emotion-charged period spanning the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the student movement, they have the rhetorical ring of political manifestos. Most were clearly intended for consumption by student activists and like-minded professors who would have shared Marcuse’s Marxist slant on the state of global capitalism.

Therein lies their appeal (or lack thereof, depending on one’s political perspective). Marcuse had a knack for combining “high” culture and “low” culture in his writing in a way that defies easy description. True to the Marxist credo linking theory and practice, he could soar to the dizzying heights of speculative theory (mainly Freudian and Marxist) – interlaced with a good dose of Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, or any other philosopher who caught his fancy – and then just as swiftly dive to the depths of popular counterculture, replete with the poetic (and occasionally scatological) argot of the young people he so adored.

Annalee Newitz in io9:

When you watch the seconds tick by on a digital watch, you are in the realm of objective time, where a minute-long interval is always 60 seconds. But to your brain, a minute is relative. Sometimes it takes forever for a minute to be over. That's because you measure time with a highly subjective biological clock.

Your internal clock is just like that digital watch in some ways. It measures time in what scientists call pulses. Those pulses are accumulated, then stored in your memory as a time interval. Now, here's where things get weird. Your biological clock can be sped up or slowed down anything from drugs to the way you pay attention. If it takes you 60 seconds to cross the street, your internal clock might register that as 50 pulses if you're feeling sleepy. But it might last 100 pulses if you've just drunk an espresso. That's because stimulants literally speed up the clock in your brain (more on that later). When your brain stores those two memories of the objective minute it took to cross the street, it winds up with memories of two different time intervals.

And yet, we all have an intuitive sense of how long it takes to cross a street. But how do we know, if every time we do something it feels like it a slightly different amount of time? The answer, says neuroscientist Warren Meck, is “a Gaussian distribution” – in other words, the points on a bell curve. Every time you want to figure out how long something is going to take, your brain samples from those time interval memories and picks one. “You randomly sample from it,” says Meck. “So you might pull a 25 out of distribution, or a 36. You're only accurate in the mean.”

The good news is that, on average, you will predict correctly how long it takes to cross the street. The bad news is that occasionally, you'll pull an outlier memory from that bell curve and decide to cross the street much more slowly than you should.