For his birthday (today), Morgan Meis gives us this, in The Smart Set:

Omit needless words!

That's what you'd have if you reduced the 105 pages of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White's The Elements of Style — which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year — to three words. The idea is that fewer words leads to clarity. Clearness and brevity go together, as do confusion and prolixity. You are also advised to avoid pretentious words like “prolixity” (though I'm not sure a more concise word exists in this instance). But when in doubt, omit, simplify, pare.

The fun of The Elements of Style is in Strunk's outrageous confidence. Bill was enjoying himself. He wrote the book as a manual for his English students at Cornell University. E.B White, Strunk's student at Cornell, loved the tone, the advice, and the man. How could he not? In the “Principles of Composition” section, the 15th principle is “put statements in positive form.” Strunk tells us to “avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language.” Here's his example of what to avoid:

The Taming of the Shrew is rather weak in spots. Shakespeare does not portray Katherine as a very admirable character, nor does Bianca remain long in memory as an important character in Shakespeare's works.

Here is how he fixes it:

The women in The Taming of the Shrew are unattractive. Katherine is disagreeable. Bianca insignificant.

I'm actually rather fond of Kate, especially before she gets tamed, but you have to love the example. The Elements of Style abounds in such wonders.

Tzvetan Todorov in Project Syndicate:

The newly published documents do not disclose the very facts of torture, which were already well known by whomever wanted to know them. But they do reveal a great deal of information about how the torture sessions unfolded and how the agents involved perceived them.

What is most striking is the discovery of niggling little rules, outlined in CIA manuals and co-opted by the government’s legal executives. One would have thought that torture was the result of blunders or unintentional excesses committed on the spur of the moment. On the contrary, these memos make clear that torture was a tactic formulated in minute detail.

In the Bush administration’s “guidelines,” torture can be divided into three categories, of varying levels of intensity: “baseline” (nudity, dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation); “corrective” (hitting); and “coercive” (water-dousing, box confinement, water-boarding).

For a facial slap, the interrogator was supposed to hit with fingers slightly spread, at equal length between the tip of the chin and the bottom of the corresponding earlobe. Dousing a naked detainee with water was to last 20 minutes if the water’s temperature measured 5 °C, 40 minutes at 10 °C, and up to 60 minutes at 15 °C. Sleep deprivation could not exceed 180 hours, but could start over again after eight hours rest.

Kirsty Allison in 3AM Magazine:

Tokyo’s streets are a homage to sci-fi fantasy, seventies style. Fields of mirrored skyscrapers are snaked by webs of towering monorails, glass-fronted mainstreet superstores flash with phosphorescent adverts. But like every Big Brother backdrop, a revolution occurs a few alleys back from the sheen, and in Tokyo, mazes of traditional cubed houses hold a variety of secret Steppenwolf doorways.

Behind one such door in the North of the city is a library bar with vintage issues of Visionaire and opulent Japanese-edition fashion photography books, it stands as a temporary salon for writers who don’t use pen & papers, or laptops, they write novels on their mobiles.

Drinking an £8 coffee, Ryu, king of the new ‘mohemians’, explains how he came to be credited as the first m-novelist.

“It came from necessity, I was working in a bar in Shibuya where the girls with the orange faces are” begins the 23 year old whose profits from his first m-book have allowed retirement to a desert island, where he’s profoundly in love with the local delicacy of octopus balls. In broken English and through a translator he goes on to tell how he felt disturbed by the repetitive cycle of observing chicks arriving to the scene, enticed by the appeal of darker life, slipping into a world of wrist-cutting, drugs, prostitution, debauchery and occasional degradation.

From his bar he assembled a team of groupies who spilt their stories to him. He emerged as a writer making notes on his phone about the new faces’ demise. “I sent the first notes and chapters to girls fresh to the area as cautionary tales, they told their friends, and their friends” Using emoticons to signify character moods and shortcuts of text speak, he uploaded test chapters to a website which got downloaded to phones.

Jennifer Herdt over at The Immanent Frame:

Many commentators have taken Barack Obama to be proclaiming a new set of civic virtues or even a new civil religion to guide Americans into an uncertain future. Yet in his Inaugural Address, Obama himself argued otherwise: “Our challenges may be new, the instruments with which we meet them may be new, but those values upon which our success depends, honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old.” So we may well ask—how old are these values? In what traditions are they rooted? Are they religious or secular? For the answers to these questions will be reflected in Americans’ willingness—or unwillingness—to unite around them.

Obama terms these “values.” But they are for the most part more specifically virtues, that is, settled traits of character that dispose a person to act in excellent ways. And Obama does elsewhere speak of these as virtues, most revealingly, I think, in his early memoir, Dreams from My Father, written before he aspired to political office. During his college years, his growing consciousness of racism tempted him to wallow in hatred and despair, to cling to an identity of alienation from anything tainted by white culture, including its hypocritical moralism, its “needlepoint virtues.” Yet he eventually came to recognize these virtues as themselves unsoiled, to see that the fact that these were the values of his white Midwestern grandparents did not mean he had to reject them in order to be authentically black.

Pentagon Reports Army Mascot ‘Liberty’ Killed in Iraq

with reference to the Schama article on money and banks below…

Unaccustomed as they are to being told to stand in the corner wearing dunces’ hats, American bankers, so it’s been reported, are getting grouchy about the “stress tests” inflicted on them by the Treasury as a condition of receiving bail-out funds. They have, it’s rumoured, been “pushing back” against restrictions on executive pay. Beggars, it seems, can be choosers. But before they get just a bit above themselves, perhaps they should ponder the long history of the love-hate relationship between banking and government in America. They could do worse than to take a look at the $20 bill. For there, breaking into the space separating the words “Federal” from “Reserve” is the cresting mane of Andrew Jackson, the most hair-conscious president of the United States. Aside from cultivating his pompadour as the insignia of a free frontier spirit, his locks tied in an eelskin, the seventh US president was also the sworn enemy of paper currency and central banking. Jackson, who was in the White House from 1829-1837, was a new brand of politician in American life. No one would confuse him with the Virginian gentlemen-planters who had dominated high office in the early republic. He had been Indian fighter, scourge of the British and darling of the frontier crowds. But what really got his dander up was the Bank of the United States, the institution granted the monopoly to print paper money. The “Monster”, he declared at the height of his presidential knock-down battle with its president Nicholas Biddle, “wants to kill me but I will kill it”.

more from FT here.

Beggars
Rumi

come, beggars
sit with open hands
at the gate
of nothingness

God will bring bread
without the medium
of bread

sweetness
without honey or bee

when past and future
dissolve
there is only you

senseless as a lute
upon the breast of God.

from: Rumi, Fragments & Ecstacies;
Omega Publications, New Lebanon,1981
Translation: Daniel Liebert

From Nature:

Handling or even contemplating money can relieve both physical pain and the distress of social rejection, according to a study by Chinese and American psychologists¹. But remembering cash one has spent intensifies both types of hurt. The findings suggest that the mere thought of having money makes people feel physically stronger and less dependent on the approval of others to satisfy their needs. “Money activates a general sense of confidence, strength, and efficacy,” the researchers propose.

The study backs up previous experiments in which experimental subjects who had been subconsciously primed with thoughts of money were less likely to ask for help on difficult tasks. “Previous work hadn't gone as far as to link reminders of money to something at a physical perceptual level,” explains Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was involved in both past research and the present study, which was published in Psychological Science.

More here.

From Salon:

For as long as she's been a sociobiologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has been playfully dismantling traditional notions of motherhood and gender relations. In 1981's “The Woman That Never Evolved,” the newly minted Harvard Ph.D. blasted a hole in the dominant model of sexual selection, in which hypersexual males pull out all the stops to impress passive females. Despite the snickers of her male colleagues, Hrdy maintained that women are subject to sexual selection, too: Females apes, it turns out, frequently compete with each other for male attention, trick males into copulating with them, and engage in sexual activity for pure pleasure. Later, Hrdy's monumental “Mother Nature,” published in 1999, thoroughly refuted the idea that there is any such thing as maternal instinct: Mothers in nature often abort fetuses, favor healthy babies while nudging runts away, and even commit infanticide so that they can try to breed again under better circumstances.

Now a professor emeritus at the University of California at Davis, Hrdy is back with another book, “Mothers and Others,” and another big idea. She argues that human cooperation is rooted not in war making, as sociobiologists have believed, but in baby making and baby-sitting. Hrdy's conception of early human society is far different from the classic sociobiological view of a primeval nuclear family, with dad off hunting big game and mom tending the cave and the kids. Instead, Hrdy paints a picture of a cooperative breeding culture in which parenting duties were spread out across a network of friends and relatives. The effect on our development was profound.

More here.

Jurgen Neffe's article from Die Zeit, in signandsight:

In the shadows of the global financial crisis of the early 21st century, another revolution is gathering pace, whose repercussions reach far beyond the current correctable economic buckling. It impact on the world will compare with Gutenberg's. And with it, the era of the printed book will come to a close. Dissolved digitally like sound and image beforehand, limitlessly copyable, globally downloadable by the million with the click of a mouse, the book is entering the world of multimedia like its disembodied cousins from film, photography and music. This is the disintegration of the oldest serially produced data carrier in terms of form and content.

The medium of enlightenment is losing its message and probably some sense and sensibility along the way. Sooner or later bound piles of printed paper will be available only as luxury items in specialist shops, like vinyl records today. Even the most iron-willed bibliophiles won't be able to get their hands on Gutenberg's legacy in its current from. The collapse of the book industry, much as we mourn it, follows the logic of a long chain of bygone trades, crafts, manufacturing processes and business procedures.

The change is unstoppable, the only moot point is how long it will take to arrive. But we're not talking generations. I mean, who still remembers the typewriter, that so recently so indispensable friend to all typers and texters? Aren't we all witness to how furiously email is turning the screw on the letter. And Wikipedia on the faithful old lexicon?

Over at Edge, video presentations of Eric Weinstein; Nouriel Roubini; Nassim Taleb, a panel discussion of Eric Weinstein, Nouriel Roubini, Richard Freeman, and Nassim Taleb; Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander; a panel discussion of Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Bill Janeway, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose; and Doyne Farmer. (Scroll towards the bottom.) John Brockman's introduction:

In December, Edge published “Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?” by Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose, and Lee Smolin. The paper was prompted by a suggestion by Eric Weinstein for an “Economic Manhattan Project”.

This led to the Perimeter Institute conference: “The Economic Crisis and its Implications for The Science of Economics”. According to the organizers, “Concerns over the current financial situation are giving rise to a need to evaluate the very mathematics that underpins economics as a predictive and descriptive science. A growing desire to examine economics through the lens of diverse scientific methodologies — including physics and complex systems — is making way to a meeting of leading economists and theorists of finance together with physicists, mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists in an effort to evaluate current theories of markets and identify key issues that can motivate new directions for research.”

Richard Lewontin reviews some recent books on Darwin in the NYRB:

The Darwin-Wallace explanation of evolution, the theory of natural selection, is based on three principles:

1) Individuals in a population differ from each other in the form of particular characteristics (the principle of variation).

2) Offspring resemble their parents more than they resemble unrelated individuals (the principle of heritability).

3) The resources necessary for life and reproduction are limited. Individuals with different characteristics differ in their ability to acquire those resources and thus to survive and leave offspring in the next generations (the principle of natural selection).

It seems amazing that two naturalists could independently arrive at the same articulated theory of evolution from a consideration of the characteristics of some species of organisms in nature, their geographic distribution, and their similarities to other species. This amazement becomes considerably tempered, however, when one considers the social consciousness and economic milieu in which the theory arose, a milieu marked by the rise of competitive industrial capitalism in which individuals rose in the social hierarchy based, presumably, on their greater entrepreneurial fitness.

Read more »

Paul Di Filippo’s short novel “Cosmocopia” (Payseur & Schmidt: 106 pp., $65) is an art book, in multiple senses of the phrase. There is an artist at its center: Frank Lazorg, whose career describes a trajectory from commercial to fine art, beginning in the 1950s with comics, focusing on “hyper-real yet fantastical book covers for paperback-original novels” during the next two decades (“a gallery of demons and brawny warriors, luscious-bottomed maidens and brawling barbarians, aliens and otherworldly explorers”) and concluding — or so it seems — with vivid depictions of “mental landscapes, surreal collages, visions of dimensions beyond.” A stroke has left him physically weak and creatively impotent. “Cosmocopia” is the story of his artistic redemption, a tried-and-true mode, which Di Filippo transforms into a fable at once ludicrous and heartfelt. “Cosmocopia” is also an art book because it costs 65 clams, comes handsomely bound as a horizontal artifact and shares space in a large box with a 513-piece jigsaw-puzzle of a Jim Woodring illustration inspired by the work (putting the pieces together is tough because everything’s gray). The set also includes a deliciously fiendish full-color scene (also by Woodring) of Lazorg at his demented peak, painting his model blood-red.

more from the LA Times here.

The public’s memory of what Nazi Germany was and did has been, in recent years, mangled and trivialized. Widely seen but misleading films and politicized accusations of countries perpetrating “holocausts” against various groups have debased people’s sense of the real nature of the Germans’ deeds during World War II. Which is why Richard J. Evans’s “Third Reich at War” couldn’t have come at a better time. The book may well be not only the finest but also the most riveting account of that period. If any work of accurate history has a chance to correct the distortions of public memory, this is it. The story of Germany between its invasion of Poland in 1939 and its collapse in 1945 is a complex one. Its details have been reported in thousands of publications. In this book — the last in a magisterial trilogy covering the entire history of the Third Reich — Evans, a professor of history at Cambridge, brilliantly weaves together the diverse strands of the monumental evil at the heart of that story. The result is a narrative tapestry we can now see whole.

more from The NYT here.

The Unwritten Sequence
E. V. Ramakrishnan

Reader, this is the story of a sequence
I very much wanted to write:

An unwed mother
gives birth to twins:
a precocious child
who grows up to be a leader of people
and a mentally retarded one given to wandering naked.
The mother grieves for
the gifted and cares for the dimwitted.
Her agony is great but the whole village stands by her.
The weaver, the farmer,
the healer, the barber, the mason
and the carpenter were to be portrayed in detail.
There is also a policeman
who goes in search of the absconding
leader and returns with his missing brother.
Finally, and this was to be the climax,
the leader is killed in what looks like
a fake encounter.
At the burial,
The dimwitted brother wears a shirt
for the first time in his life.

I could never complete the sequence.
Perhaps what I knew of the weaver,
the farmer, the healer, the barber,
the mason and the carpenter was not
adequate or what I knew of the police-
man exceeded the needs of the poem.
I could never decide whether I was with
the precocious and the gifted
or with the dimwitted and the lost.

from: Terms of Seeing: New and Selected Poems;
Konark Publishers, New Delhi, 2006

From Himal Southasian:

China has the world’s fastest-slowing economy. According to official statistics, gross domestic product skyrocketed a staggering 13.0 percent in 2007. In fact, in all likelihood that figure was even higher, with poor sampling procedures failing to properly take into account the output of small manufacturers, which at the time constituted the most productive part of the economy. Even without that extra bump, however, this put China in the top echelons in terms of economic growth.

Last year, however, the economy tumbled. GDP growth, Beijing tells us, was 10.6 percent in the first quarter, 10.1 percent in the second, 9.0 in the third, and 6.8 percent in the fourth. The decline continued this year, with growth reported as 6.1 percent in the first quarter, the lowest rate since China began issuing quarterly GDP statistics in 1992. The falloff is even more dramatic if we dig a bit beneath these numbers. China’s National Bureau of Statistics reports GDP by comparing a quarter with the corresponding one during the preceding year. If, instead, it compared a quarter to the preceding one – as most countries do – it would have reported essentially no growth during the fourth quarter and, possibly, a contraction. And we have to remember that small manufacturers are suffering more than other producers, so current statistics still do not reflect the real drop-off in output. When other distortions in the statistics – some the result of fakery – are taken into account, it becomes clear that no economy is currently falling faster than China’s.

More here.