Christopher Joyce at NPR:

Of all the things that make human beings unique, one that gets overlooked — literally — is the shoulder. It turns out that the shoulder altered the course of human evolution by giving us survival skills we never could have imagined without it.

To understand the shoulder, look at a human skeleton. What you see is an intersection. The head of your arm bone (the humerus) meets your collar-bone (the clavicle) and part of the shoulder-blade (scapula). They're held together with tendons and ligaments. The whole joint angles out horizontally from the neck, like a coat hanger.

“Because it's pointing straight out,” says David Green, an anthropologist at George Washington University who studies the evolution of the shoulder, “our arms are allowed to just kind of hang freely, and then we can flex our arms at the elbow and have our hands out front, and that's useful for manipulation. In apes, the joint actually points almost toward the ceiling.”

The ape shoulder is good for hanging from a tree, but when our ancestors started walking on two legs, the shoulder started to change. Early on, the joint descended lower on the chest. For a while, the shoulder-blade was more on the side, over the rib cage. Then it moved onto the back.

More here.

Ishaan Tharoor in Time:

Opposition to a proposed mosque near Ground Zero swelled into a furor this week after its planners on Aug. 3 passed the last municipal hurdle barring them from building it. New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg spoke passionately in defense of the project. “Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11 and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans,” Bloomberg said in a speech that day. “We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else.”

Bloomberg's predecessor didn't agree. The former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, claimed that the project, which is partially intended to be an interfaith community center, would be a “desecration,” adding that “decent” Muslims ought not object to his opinion. Other GOP politicians and talking heads who have far less to do with the events of 9/11 — or, for that matter, New York — have joined the chorus, arguing in some instances that a mosque near Ground Zero would be a monument to terrorists.

More here.

Prominent intellectual Tony Judt, one of the most respected historians of European history, has died at his home in New York City. Judt, who wrote “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,” was 62. His death on August 6 was announced by New York University, where the British scholar had taught for many years. The cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which attacks nerve cells and eventually paralyzes the victim. But his thinking remained unimpaired and he continued writing, including personal essays for “The New York Review of Books,” through 2010. The son of Marxist Jews, Judt was a left-wing Zionist in his youth who went on to criticize left-wing ideology and once described Israel as a “belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno-state.” He is survived by his wife Jennifer Homans, a dance critic, and two sons.

The following article by Tony Judt was published in The Guardian in May 2008:

Over the years, Judt has been notable, in particular, for his acid dismissals of “romantic” communists and their fellow travellers. Many of his targets have been French intellectuals – he has ripped into Sartre numerous times – but in Reappraisals he also, from his own position on the left, accuses Eric Hobsbawm of being a “mandarin” and calls the much loved EP Thompson a “sanctimonious, priggish Little Englander”. Since September 2001, however, Judt's articulate polemicism has taken a new direction – one that has transformed his life. Uneasy about the political reaction to 9/11 in the US, he soon began to publish a series of condemnations of Bush's international policies. But whereas his anti-communism sat comfortably with mainstream liberal opinion in America, his early opposition to the Iraq war threw him out of alignment with his usual allies, who were still rallying around the president following the terrorist attacks. Judt, who was born and has spent most of his life in Britain, began to feel more aware of being European – and different.

He raised hackles by labelling liberal commentators in America – including New Yorker editor David Remnick, Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman – Bush's “useful idiots”. But by far the biggest tumults Judt has caused have followed an essay he published five years ago, entitled “Israel: The Alternative”, which opened with the notion that “the president of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Israeli cabinet line”, and went on to contend that the time had come to “think the unthinkable” – the bringing to an end of Israel as a Jewish state, and the establishment in its place of a binational state of Israelis and Palestinians.

The essay was written for the New York Review of Books, and within a week of its publication, Judt had received a thousand messages of protest. From that time, Judt, who lost close friends over the article, has been regarded as nefarious by a large section of American Jewry.* Judt's political instincts can be traced, perhaps too easily, back to his upbringing. He was born 60 years ago into the Jewish community in London's East End. All his grandparents were Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe; his parents were “unapologetically Jewish, but secular, and not really Zionist. They were leftwing, even Marxist, but strongly against communism”. On his 12th or 13th birthday, Judt remembers, he was given a copy of Isaac Deutscher's masterly biography of Trotsky: “Failed communists were acceptable – Deutscher, Trotsky – it was the successful ones who weren't liked.”

More here.

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

Although I shelter from the rain

From The City Journal:

Was the Enlightenment a Good Thing? At first blush, the question sounds almost sacrilegious. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, after all, taught us to be democratic and to believe in human rights, tolerance, freedom of expression, and many other values that are still revered, if not always practiced, in modern societies. On the other hand, historians question whether the Enlightenment actually led to brotherhood and equality (it did not, of course), and even freedom, its third objective, was achieved only partially and late. Some have even suggested that its ideas of human “improvement” may have had unintended bad consequences such as twentieth-century totalitarianism, racism, and colonialism.

Yet the debate has obscured the most hardy and irreversible effect of the Enlightenment: it made us rich. It is by now a cliché to note how much better twenty-first-century people live than even the kings of three centuries back. In thousands of large and small things, material life today is immeasurably better than ever before. Are we happier? Who knows? Are we more enlightened? Possibly. But are we healthier and more comfortable? Of course we are. And without sounding too cocky about how progressive history is, or too triumphalist about Western culture as the crowning achievement of human development (a view that a majority of historians label “whiggish”), I would like to suggest that what generated all this prosperity was the growth of certain ideas in the century after the British Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Picture: Paris’s first gas lamp, at the Place du Carrousel (1818).

More here.

I think we may have to go ahead and take the leap: Bolaño is a metaphysician. There, I’ve said it. I feel a little better. Bolaño dares to speculate about time. He has time on the brain. That’s a dangerous place to put your time, as the famous quote from Augustine long ago reminded us. Best just to experience your time, let it flow. Once you start thinking about it, the problems pile up. But that is the central problem for all Romantics, time and thinking. Reading through Antwerp again I’m struck by how much it is a novel of youth. That’s not to say it is a young book, but that it is interested in the idea of youth. Much like the poet Leopardi, Bolaño took little comfort in his youth. He was too busy feeling old. He was too busy watching each moment of his youth flittering away into the void of time. Poor Romantics, they don’t even get to have their own experiences, for the simple reason that they are already watching them.

more from me at The Owls here.

Jake Alter in The Immanent Frame:

Is secular feminism feasible in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim-majority nations of the world? Isobel Coleman, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that it cannot subsist on its own and that it must be allied with a form of Islamic feminism. In her most recent book, Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East, she argues that we are already witnessing the emergence of many progressive social movements within the Islamic world. At “On Faith,” she explained:

One question I get is why is there a need for Islamic feminism – isn’t secular feminism sufficient to push for women’s rights? Well, the most conservative countries of the Middle East do not now have, nor will they in the near future, secular systems. Moreover, secularism – meaning the separation of mosque and state – is not viewed in a positive light by millions of Muslims. If Muslim women in these countries must wait for a secular system to improve their status, they will be waiting a long time indeed. That does not mean that secular feminism and Islamic feminism cannot work together. Indeed, some of the most effective women’s rights campaigns in the Middle East in recent years have seen a blended approach between secular and Islamic feminism.

Her book highlights many of the movements active throughout the Muslim world, including the grassroots reform of the Muslim family code (Moudawana) in Morroco and various other movements in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. She also highlights the preeminent Islamic feminist thinkers involved in these movements. Her book does not overlook the plight of many women in various Muslim communities, but argues, rather, that the most effective approach to tackling these issues is through Islam itself—whether it be a practical or principled choice. The truth of the matter, she argues, is that secular feminism, in and of itself, will take many years to catch on in many of these societies, and it is thus time to begin looking to Islamic tradition to achieve the same goals.

Melody Dye in Scientopia:

In previous research, Mischel has found that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to perform worse than upperclass children on tests of delay of gratification. Given that he’s also found that the time children spend delaying in the cookie task is predictive of a suite of life outcomes – including everything from their later social well-being to their academic achievement and professional advancement – he makes a logical leap: Might social classes diverge, he asks, based on our ability to exercise self-control?

It’s critical that I note that Mischel is not a biological determinist on this [1]. He is not suggesting that people who live in poverty are all simply indolent and stupid, or that they are somehow morally suspect. To the contrary, Mischel tends to remove all moral weight or judgment from his discussions of self control, and in much of his work, characterizes control as a largely learned behavior. If he makes generalizations on the basis of class (which he does), I believe this derives more from his training as a scientist, and less from any particular political attitudes or leanings. He is simply looking to make sense of trends in human behaviors, and uses “delay of gratification” as a prism through which to understand them.

In any case, the question Mischel poses become doubly interesting in light of Ramscar and Tran’s findings. As detailed above, and in earlier posts, their results indicate that “self control” behavior in the cookie task is strongly tied up with verbal ability. Indeed, they found that vocabulary is a better predictor of delay times than age or cognitive control.

What I haven’t mentioned yet – and what may surprise you – is what predicts vocabulary.

As it turns out, one of the best predictors of how many words a toddler knows is socioeconomic status.

William Grimes in the NYT:

Tony Judt, the author of “Postwar,” a monumental history of Europe after World War II, and a public intellectual known for his sharply polemic essays on American foreign policy, the state of Israel and the future of Europe, died Friday. He was 62 and had lived in Manhattan.

The death was announced in a statement from New York University, where he had taught for many years. In September 2008, he learned that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In a matter of months the disease left him paralyzed and able to breathe only with mechanical assistance, but he continued to lecture and write.

“In effect,” he wrote in an essay published in January in The New York Review of Books, “A.L.S. constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole.”

Mr. Judt (pronounced Jutt), who was British by birth and education but who taught at American universities for most of his career, began as a specialist in postwar French intellectual history, and for much of his life he embodied the idea of the French-style engaged intellectual.

From The New York Review of Books:

How do single people find partners in our fluid, urban world? One way, used by millions, is to sign up for one of the many matchmaking sites on the Internet (eHarmony.com, Match .com, Chemistry.com, JDate, Spark, and dozens of others). With many of them, you take a test, list your requirements, describe yourself, and of course pay. While some rely on your basic demographic data like age and whereabouts, others give you a personality test, and the questionnaires designed to match you up with other people are the work of such consultants as Dr. Helen Fisher, a research professor of anthropology at Rutgers, author of self-help books, including Why Him? Why Her?, aimed at helping people understand their own basic personalities and predict the types of people they’ll get along with.

Her analyses of academic studies and nearly 40,000 responses on Chemistry .com to a questionnaire she reprints in this book have led Fisher to propose a set of four fundamental personality types she calls Explorer, Builder, Director, and Negotiator, distinctions that resemble those in many other morphological systems we’ve all heard of: introverts and extroverts; Types A and B; the Humors—still used in homeo-pathy—Sanguine, Bilious, Lymphatic, and Nervous; endo-, ecto-, and mesomorphs; the classic Air, Earth, Fire, and Water; Ayurveda; the Chinese 5 Elements; the zodiac; and many others reaching back to the mists of time, referring to body types, psychological tendencies, character, or fate. The most influential modern personality inventories usually rely on a well-established one, the MBTI, developed to help with personnel placement during World War II, by Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who in turn relied on C.G. Jung’s typological system of introverted or (Jung’s spelling) “extraverted” thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting personalities.² Fisher relies on them too—as do many modern personnel departments, and even the Pentagon.

More here.

From The New York Times:

For busy, harried or distractible readers who have the time and energy only to skim the opening paragraph of a review, I’ll say this as quickly and clearly as possible: “The Death of the Adversary” and “Comedy in a Minor Key” are masterpieces, and Hans Keilson is a genius. First published in the Netherlands in 1947, “Comedy in a Minor Key” is only now appearing in English, in an eloquent translation by Damion Searls. “The Death of the Adversary” (skillfully translated by Ivo Jarosy) appeared here in 1962, but has long been out of print. Born in 1909, their author, the centenarian Keilson, lives with his wife in a village near Amsterdam where until recently he practiced medicine, a profession he followed in his native Germany until the Nuremberg laws forced him to flee to the Netherlands. There he was active in the Dutch resistance and later became known for his work with children traumatized by the war. Although the novels are quite different, both are set in Nazi-occupied Europe and display their author’s eye for perfectly illustrative yet wholly unexpected incident and detail, as well as his talent for story­telling and his extraordinarily subtle and penetrating understanding of human nature. But perhaps the most distinctive aspect they share is the formal daring of the relationship between subject matter and tone. Rarely has a finer, more closely focused lens been used to study such a broad and brutal panorama, mimetically conveying a failure to come to grips with reality by refusing to call that reality by its proper name.

More here.

Before venturing any trendspotting comments about American literature of the past decade, it’s probably worth scanning the ground hovering behind any exciting new figures stamped on the air—in other words, to observe again that novel-writing as an artistic practice has changed more slowly than almost any other, producing not only over the last ten, but over the last one hundred-and-fifty years mainly examples of what you might call the perennial novel. The perennial novel’s degree of realism or of sentimentality; its mixture of description, analysis, and dialogue; the social and psychological variety of its characters—all of these things and more shift across time, but only slowly. The novel of this past decade, then, is above all like the novel of previous decades; and it may be precisely because the novel is so open to changing historical content—new ways of talking, eating, and dressing, along with new technologies, manners, and beliefs—that the form itself displays such a glacial stability.

more from Benjamin Kunkel at n+1 here.

This was the Soviet moment. It lasted from the launch of Sputnik in 1957 through Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight in 1961 and dissipated along with the fear in the couple of years following the Cuban missile crisis in 1963. (It was already going, in fact, at the time of the 1964 election; it was a piece of Wilson’s appeal that was premised on a fading public perception and was dropped from Labour rhetoric shortly thereafter, leaving not much behind but a paranoid suspicion of Wilson among egg-stained, old-school-tie spooks.) But while it lasted the USSR had a reputation that is now almost impossible to recapture. It was not the revolutionary country people were thinking of, all red flags and fiery speechmaking, pictured through the iconography of Eisenstein movies; not the Stalinesque Soviet Union of mass mobilisation and mass terror and austere totalitarian fervour. This was, all of a sudden, a frowning but managerial kind of a place, a civil and technological kind of a place, all labs and skyscrapers, which was doing the same kind of things as the west but threatened – while the moment lasted – to be doing them better. American colleges worried that they weren’t turning out engineers in the USSR’s amazing numbers. Bouts of anguished soul-searching filled the op-ed pages of European and American newspapers, as columnists asked how a free society could hope to match the steely strategic determination of the prospering, successful Soviet Union.

more from Francis Spufford at The Guardian here.