Making a photograph — a snapshot of a passing scene or the staging of a scene as though for posterity — has usually been understood as an act of consciousness, what Henri Cartier-Bresson called a ”decisive moment” of consciousness, but I suggest that it has less to do with consciousness than the unconscious. It has to do with that ”critical part of rapid cognition known as thin-slicing” — ”the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviors based on very narrow slices of experience” — those thin slices of experience we call photographs. “Thin-slicing is part of what makes the unconscious so dazzling” — and photographs so haunting and fascinating — “but it’s also what we find most problematic about rapid cognition. How is it possible to gather the necessary information for a sophisticated judgment in such a short time?” — in the blink of the camera’s eye, which seems to think without thinking, to refer to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking?(1)

more from Donald Kuspit at Artnet here.

Barbara Spindel in the Barnes and Noble Review:

Amitava Kumar wears many hats: Vassar College English professor, literary critic, journalist, poet, and novelist. Duke University Press has just published two books by the prolific writer. Nobody Does the Right Thing is a richly textured novel about a Bombay journalist struggling to reconcile his idealism with his desire to write a Bollywood screenplay. A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb is an impassioned critique of the war on terror that focuses on the cases of Hemant Lakhani and Shahawar Matin Siraj, two men that the U.S. government, with the help of paid informants, convicted of plotting acts of terrorism.

Kumar uses the cases of the two men, whom he sees as “accidental terrorists” created by a government desperate for suspects to prosecute, to argue that in the post-9/11 world, “public interest will need to be defined more boldly as the rights that offer protection against the encroachments of a security state.” Our wide-ranging email conversation covered the two books and also touched on Kumar's education in India, the role of politics in art, and the “ground zero mosque” controversy.

B&N Review: I thought I'd begin with A Foreigner. I'm wondering how the idea for the book was born and how you ended up focusing on Lakhani and Siraj. What did you find particularly compelling about their cases?

Amitava Kumar: I had just come out of Home Depot and turned on the car radio. On the news was Hemant Lakhani. His lawyer was saying how no real terrorist would have come to Lakhani. Lakhani was a bungler. And right there, in the parking lot, while loading boxes in my car, I thought I would write a story about it.

More here.

From The Economist:

When Barack Obama won the American presidency in 2008 his supporters cheered, cried, hugged—and in many cases logged on to their computers to look at pornography. And, lest Republicans crow about the decadence of their opponents, precisely the obverse happened when their man won in 2004.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a study by Patrick Markey of Villanova University, in Pennsylvania, and his wife Charlotte, who works at Rutgers, in New Jersey. The Markeys were looking for confirmation of a phenomenon called the challenge hypothesis. This suggests that males involved in a competition will experience a rise in testosterone levels if they win, and a fall if they lose.

The challenge hypothesis was first advanced to explain the mating behaviour of monogamous birds. In these species, males’ testosterone levels increase in the spring, to promote aggression against potential rivals. When the time comes for the males to settle down and help tend their young, their testosterone falls, along with their aggressive tendencies.

Something similar has since been found to apply to fish, lizards, ring-tailed lemurs, rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees—and humans. In many of these animals, though, there is a twist. It is not just that testosterone ramps up for breeding and ramps down for nurturing. Rather, its production is sensitive to a male’s success in the breeding competition itself. In men, then, levels of the hormone rise in preparation for a challenge and go up even more if that challenge is successfully completed. Failure, by contrast, causes the level to fall.

More here.

The View from East Rock (Day #17,119)

You stand at the helm of East Rock as

Though it were a ship setting sail. Your gaze

Reads the horizon like tea leaves, and,

Suddenly, you feel dwarfed by this ordinary

Sunset as if for the first time in 17,119 days.

Transfixed by the light and the longing,

You follow the ungodly caw-cawing of gulls

Gutting fish on a not-too-distant dock.

In fact, you too are restless tonight.

Or is it “restive?” You wonder about that.

And you remember wondering about

That before, and looking it up, and then

The forgetting. It seems as though forgetting

Should be harder than remembering,

Like running downhill is harder than up.

Instead, all you can track is the wind

Rushing by, carrying leaves like you once

Carried children across Mill River, and

Before that, the silence of fireflies kindling

A path up the mountain that marks our

Once-upon-a-time New Haven. One by one,

Such moments slip like pearls off a strand,

And, as you blink, the strand itself blows by.

By K. Ann Cavanaugh
© 2010

From Scientific America:

The common industrial chemical bisphenol A (BPA) has been linked to many ills, including reproductive abnormalities, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Much of the evidence for these associations, however, has been drawn from animal or in vitro research and has been somewhat controversial as to its precise implications for human health.

Now, a human study has found strong links between BPA levels and semen quality—and the findings are not looking good, especially for men frequently exposed to the compound on the job.
Researchers studied the urine (where BPA can be measured) and semen of 218 male factory workers in China, some of whom make BPA or put it into other products (such as plastics and epoxy resins that line cans), and the remainder, whose work did not put them in direct contact with the chemical.

More here.

Christian Jarrett in the Research Digest blog of the British Psychological Society:

When attempting to change people’s behaviour – for example, encouraging them to eat more healthily or recycle more – a common tactic is to present scientific findings that justify the behaviour change. A problem with this approach, according to recent research by Geoffrey Munro at Towson University in America, is that when people are faced with scientific research that clashes with their personal view, they invoke a range of strategies to discount the findings.

Perhaps the most common of these is to challenge the methodological soundness of the research. However, with newspaper reports and other brief summaries of science findings, that’s often not possible because of lack of detail. In this case, Munro's research suggests that people will often judge that the topic at hand is not amenable to scientific enquiry. What’s more, he’s found that, having come to this conclusion about the specific topic at hand, the sceptic will then generalise their belief about scientific impotence to other topics as well (further detail). Munro says that by embracing the general idea that some topics are beyond the reach of science, such people are able to maintain belief in their own intellectual credibility, rather than feeling that they’ve selectively dismissed unpalatable findings.

The Digest caught up with Professor Munro to ask him, first of all, whether he thinks there are any ways to combat the scientific impotence excuse or reduce the likelihood of it being deployed.

More here.

William Dalrymple in the Times Literary Supplement:

In the autumn of 1986, the painter Derek Hill rang out of the blue and invited me to lunch at his club in St James’s. He was then about seventy; I was twenty-one. I was just back from a journey following in the footsteps of Marco Polo, and Derek wanted me to bring to the lunch some of the Mongol roof tiles I had found at Polo’s final destination, Kubla Khan’s summer palace at Xanadu. The lunch, he explained, was for a friend of his who particularly wanted to see them.

That friend turned out to be Bruce Chatwin, and the lunch was one of those encounters that happen only once or twice in a lifetime and that really do change the direction you end up taking. Chatwin, I thought, was simply astounding. As we sat in the panelled dining room, surrounded by whispering pin-striped clubmen, my small fragments of glazed tile were the starting point for a conversational riff that moved from the nomads of Mongolia in the thirteenth century and cantered over the steppes to Timurid Herat, then leapt polymathically to Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, Sufi sheikhs and the shamans of the Kalahari bushmen; before long we were being told about Taoist sages, Aboriginal “dreaming” pictures and ancient Cycladic sculpture and thence, as coffee came, via Proust and Pascal and Berenson, to Derek’s portraits, and the latter’s story about sharing a railway carriage with Robert Byron who performed a pitch-perfect imitation of Queen Victoria, using the train’s antimacassar as the Queen’s mourning veil.

At the end, Chatwin limped off on crutches to the London Library saying he needed to check some references for his forthcoming book on the Aborigines of Central Australia…

More here.

Tom Jacobs in Miller McCune:

As much as we stake our identity on such core beliefs, it’s unlikely we emerged from the womb as little liberals or libertarians. This raises a fundamental question: At what point in our development did such predispositions begin to form, to coalesce and to harden? What is it about our biology and/or psychology that propels us toward a liberal or conservative mindset?

The question has long intrigued social psychologists such as John Jost of New York University. In a 2003 meta-analysis of 50 years of research, he summarizes the overwhelming evidence that political ideologies, “like virtually all other belief systems, are adopted in part because they satisfy various psychological needs.” Jost quickly adds that this “is not to say they are unprincipled, unwarranted, or unresponsive to reason or evidence” — only that the underlying motivation to believe in them emerges from somewhere other than the rational, conscious mind.

“Most of the research literature … suggests that conservatives are more easily threatened, more likely to perceive the world as dangerous, and less trusting in comparison with liberals,” he notes. This is fairly self-evident. If you perceive the world as a threatening place, you’re more likely to cling tightly to those you trust (i.e., your in-group, however you define it), and to warily eye those you don’t.

More here.

AS A COLLEGE STUDENT in the mid-1960s, I was assigned an array of books that for the most part were unremarkable and quickly forgotten. Of the few that really captured my interest was one that explored the trial and execution of a young, Jewish couple from New York convicted of conspiring to steal the secrets of the atom bomb. Invitation to an Inquest struck me as a powerful piece of investigative journalism and I told many friends the book was a must read. The authors, Walter and Miriam Schneir, persuasively argued that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were an innocent, progressive couple caught up in an anti-Communist, FBI-inspired witch hunt and that a “pathological liar” and “weirdly twisted creature” named Harry Gold was the government appointed finger man who fabricated a highly unlikely story that put them in the electric chair. Young, impressionable, and unschooled in the nuances of the case, my admiration for the book would remain intact for many years. Of course, I was aware that the guilt or innocence of the Rosenbergs was a controversial and much-debated issue with numerous and knowledgeable advocates on both sides. As time went on, I read other accounts of the case and my confidence in the Schneir thesis began to wane. For example, The Rosenberg File, Ron Radosh and Joyce Milton’s 1983 take on the case, was equally compelling and easily matched the Schneirs’ for solid historical detective work.

more from Allen M. Hornblum at The Fortnightly Review here.

There can be no turning two hundred without regrets. Even so, the element of wistfulness was bound to play an especially large role in the Argentine case. The surprise for me last month, as a yanqui spectator auto-marooned these past few years in Buenos Aires, while I strolled up and down the Avenida 9 de Julio—broadest street in the world, so they say—picking my way through the throngs of Argentines out celebrating the May Revolution of 1810, was that the experience of the bicentenario should look so joyous, as it was later reported to have been in polls of the huge numbers who took part, and that the official commemoration of two centuries of Argentine history should at the same time concentrate on several of the darkest passages in the country’s history. On the occasion of the big parade, fighter jets flew overhead and gauchos rode by on horseback, just as you might expect. But there were also actors depicting militant workers calling for a general strike, to evoke the hundreds cut down by paramilitary gangs in the semana trágica of 1919; a gigantic installation, suspended on guy-wires, of the constitution in flames; a float portraying the Mothers of the Disappeared who campaigned to know their children’s whereabouts during the ruling junta’s frenzy of state terrorism in the late ’70s; and another troupe of actors in business suits tossing funny money to the crowd in much the way—this was the idea—that the Argentina of the 90s had plunged into a delirium, soon punctured, of fictitious prosperity.

more from Benjamin Kunkel at n+1 here.

In January 1765, Mr and Mrs Ricketts, the new tenants of Hinton Manor in Hampshire, “became alarmed by the frequent opening and shutting of doors during the night”, a phenomenon that persisted even after all of the locks had been changed, and which soon came to be augmented by sightings of “a figure in a ‘snuff-coloured’ coat” and by the sounds of disembodied conversation between “a shrill female voice . . . and then two others with deep and manlike tones”. In 1695, the curate of Warblington, dispatched to investigate a haunted building, sensed “something in the room that went about whistling”. In 1879, a lady staying with “some north country cousins . . . at their house in Yorkshire” woke in the night to see “at the foot of the bed a child . . . a little girl with dark hair and a very white face . . .”, her eyes “turned up with a look of entreaty, an almost agonised look”. In 1682 in Spraiton, Devon, a shoelace “was observed (without the assistance of any hand) to come of its own accord out of its shoe and fling itself to the other side of the room”. A maid went to retrieve the thing only to discover that “it strangely clasp’d and curl’d about her . . . like a living eel or serpent”. In 1649, a party of Cromwell’s men, staying in “the Mannor-house of Woodstock”, were tormented by something “treading as they conceived much like a Bear”, which threw “a Glass and great Stones at them . . . and the bones of Horses, and all so violently that the Bed-stead and the Walls were bruised by them”. One hundred and fifty years later, Lord Brougham, reclining in his bath and “enjoying the comfort of the heat”, was confronted by the figure of his oldest friend, recently deceased but sitting, all the same, on a chair beside the tub, “looking calmly” at him.

more from Jonathan Barnes at the TLS here.

Bill McKibben in the New York Review of Books:

Radio receives little critical attention. Of the various methods for communicating ideas and emotions—books, newspapers, visual art, music, film, television, the Web—radio may be the least discussed, debated, understood. This is likely because it serves largely as a transmission device, a way to take other art forms (songs, sermons) and spread them out into the world. Its other uses can be fairly pedestrian too: ball games and repetitive, if remarkably effective, right-wing commercial talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is the radio ratings champ; according to the industry’s trade journal he reaches 14.25 million listeners in an average week. Sean Hannity, working the same turf, trails him slightly.

But an equally large audience turns to the part of the dial where public radio in its various forms can be found. Public radio claims at least 5 percent of the radio market. National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes—are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week. These NPR shows have far larger audiences than the news on cable television; indeed, all four television broadcast networks combined only draw twice as large an audience for their evening newscasts.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in the New York Times:

Half a century ago the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow bemoaned the estrangement of what he termed the “two cultures” in modern society — the literary and the scientific. These days, there is some reason to celebrate better communication between these domains, if only because of the increasingly visible salience of scientific ideas. Still a gap remains, and so I’d like here to take an oblique look at a few lesser-known contrasts and divisions between subdomains of the two cultures, specifically those between stories and statistics.

I’ll begin by noting that the notions of probability and statistics are not alien to storytelling. From the earliest of recorded histories there were glimmerings of these concepts, which were reflected in everyday words and stories. Consider the notions of central tendency — average, median, mode, to name a few. They most certainly grew out of workaday activities and led to words such as (in English) “usual,” “typical.” “customary,” “most,” “standard,” “expected,” “normal,” “ordinary,” “medium,” “commonplace,” “so-so,” and so on. The same is true about the notions of statistical variation — standard deviation, variance, and the like. Words such as “unusual,” “peculiar,” “strange,” “original,” “extreme,” “special,” “unlike,” “deviant,” “dissimilar” and “different” come to mind. It is hard to imagine even prehistoric humans not possessing some sort of rudimentary idea of the typical or of the unusual. Any situation or entity — storms, animals, rocks — that recurred again and again would, it seems, lead naturally to these notions. These and other fundamentally scientific concepts have in one way or another been embedded in the very idea of what a story is — an event distinctive enough to merit retelling — from cave paintings to “Gilgamesh” to “The Canterbury Tales,” onward.

More here.

This video contains the most preposterous performance I have seen yet in a talk show, by the “Republican strategist” Jack Burkman. It is as offensive as it is ludicrous and laughable, and Robert Fisk and Anas al-Tikriti seem to have trouble deciding whether to get angry or break out in guffaws at the ridculousness of it all!

From Salon:

What makes a person gay? Is it genetics, upbringing, or some combination of the two? Over the past few decades, a slew of scientific research has bolstered the notion that sexuality is, at least in part, innate. Studies of the sexual behavior of various animal species have shown that homosexuality is not just a human phenomenon. Then there is the curious finding that the number of older brothers a male has may biologically increase his chances of being gay.

Now Simon LeVay, a former Harvard neuroscientist, has written, “Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation,” a comprehensive, engaging and occasionally quite funny look at the current state of the research on the topic. LeVay is one of the leading authorities in the field: Back in 1991, he discovered that INAH3, a structure in the hypothalamus of the brain that helps to regulate sexual behavior, tended to be smaller in gay men than in straight men. It was a watershed moment in our understanding of sexual orientation (the study was published at the height of the AIDS epidemic, when the disease was widely regarded in religious circles as divine punishment for the sin of being gay) and the first scientific finding to support the idea that gayness might be more than just a lifestyle.

More here.

From Nature:

People have used mind control to change images on a video screen, a study reports. The volunteers, whose brains were wired up to a computer, enhanced one of two competing images of famous people or objects by changing firing rates in individual brain cells.

The research, by Moran Cerf from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and his colleagues, demonstrates how our brains, which are constantly bombarded with images, noise and smells, can, through conscious thought, select what stimuli to notice and what to ignore (see video). The research is particularly exciting, says neuroengineer John Donoghue of Brown University, “because it shows how we can now peer into the process of thinking at a level we have not been able to get at before”. Donoghue was responsible for the first successful transplantation of a chip into the motor cortex of a tetraplegic man, enabling him to move a computer cursor and manipulate a robotic arm with his mind.

…

In the last six years or so they have shown that single neurons can fire when subjects recognise — or even imagine — just one particular person or object. They propose that activity in these neurons reflect the choices the brain is making about what sensory information it will consider further and what information it will neglect.

More here.

Over at The Immanent Frame:

NS: What makes modern sociological terms like “secularism” and “secularization” useful for interpreting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature? Is there a danger of falling into misleading anachronism?

CJ: There’s always that danger when we use a term from one historical period to describe aspects of another one. “Secularism” first emerges in Victorian England as a self-description, a way to avoid being labeled an atheist, and it has a long history within Christianity before that, as the secular, or worldly, time before the Second Coming. “Secularization” is a bit trickier, since it aims to describe a process and to give that process the aura of scientific neutrality, like the weather. I think the danger is not so much anachronism—which, frankly, I don’t think is a bad thing anyway—but rather forgetting that terms are never merely descriptive. So, I use the term, and I try to be reflexive about it. It’s comforting for many people to see themselves as living on the far side of a secularization process, and it’s that sense of comfort that I’d like to disrupt a bit.

NS: What does it mean for you to be reflexive?

CJ: What I mean by “reflexivity” is really just a critical consciousness that whenever you invoke a term, you are also invoking its history—the conditions under which it was forged and the uses to which it has been subsequently put. At the same time, we need these terms: something has changed over the course of modernity, for instance, and I’m comfortable with calling that change “secularization,” as long as it’s defined very carefully and I know what the stakes are in a given definition. Reflexivity is just my shorthand for the process, which I take to be central to serious intellectual practice, anyway—to strike the balance between using a term or concept or idea and simultaneously being aware of what you’re doing when you use it. It’s a mental habit of disembedding from the stuff you really care about—which, appropriately enough, is a pretty good definition of the secular!

My most beloved and second oldest friend, my younger sister, turned a new decade a few days ago. It was an occasion to openly appreciate the happiness she brings me. A recent study suggests that this effect is wholly normal. Deborah Tannen in the NYT offers some further thoughts on the topic:

“Having a Sister Makes You Happier”: that was the headline on a recent article about a study finding that adolescents who have a sister are less likely to report such feelings as “I am unhappy, sad or depressed” and “I feel like no one loves me.”

These findings are no fluke; other studies have come to similar conclusions. But why would having a sister make you happier?

The usual answer — that girls and women are more likely than boys and men to talk about emotions — is somehow unsatisfying, especially to a researcher like me. Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women’s styles of friendship and conversation aren’t inherently better than men’s, simply different.

A man once told me that he had spent a day with a friend who was going through a divorce. When he returned home, his wife asked how his friend was coping. He replied: “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it.”

His wife chastised him. Obviously, she said, the friend needed to talk about what he was going through.

This made the man feel bad. So he was relieved to read in my book “You Just Don’t Understand” (Ballantine, 1990) that doing things together can be a comfort in itself, another way to show caring. Asking about the divorce might have made his friend feel worse by reminding him of it, and expressing concern could have come across as condescending.

The man who told me this was himself comforted to be reassured that his instincts hadn’t been wrong and he hadn’t let his friend down.

But if talking about problems isn’t necessary for comfort, then having sisters shouldn’t make men happier than having brothers. Yet the recent study — by Laura Padilla-Walker and her colleagues at Brigham Young University — is supported by others.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]