Jennifer Fisher Wilson in The Smart Set:

But just what blushing really reveals, even the blusher often cannot explain. There is a vicious circle in which a blush is both a sign of, and reason for, self-deprecation, according to Professor Ray Crozier, the chair in psychology at University of East Anglia in Norwich and a leading expert in research on shyness and blushing.

Indeed, scientists like Crozier really don’t know why people blush. This is not for lack of trying. Blushing has fascinated scientists for centuries. Even Charles Darwin held a “theory of blushing.” In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872, 13 years after The Origin of Species and one year after The Descent of Man, he describes blushing as “the most peculiar and the most human of all the expressions.” People of all races blush, no matter what their skin color, he asserted, but other animals do not.

Although blushing is a uniquely human characteristic, behaviors that often accompany blushing — such as avoiding eye contact or smiling — are used in appeasement displays by other primates, and overt attention — such as staring — triggers these responses in both humans and nonhuman primates.

More here.

Chad Lorenz in Slate:

By 2002, everyone in my family had become an Internet convert. For the technophobic older generation, signing up for an e-mail account was a concession to us youngsters—if the kids don’t call home, they thought, we’ll just reach them through the computer. Everyone was especially eager to send messages to my niece, a kid who wasn’t all that chatty on the phone but was almost always glued to her PC. But while the rest of us happily exchanged forwards and life updates, she almost never piped up. Eventually, I sussed out the truth: She was too busy sending IMs and text messages to bother with e-mail. That’s when I realized that my agility with e-mail no longer marked me as a tech-savvy young adult. It made me a lame old fogey.

More here.

Rachel Dvoskin in Scientific American:

If you saw Winged Migration or Fly Away Home, which delivered the first true bird’s-eye views of the world, you may have wondered how they got those wild geese to wear tiny camcorders on their heads. In fact, the cameras were in ultralight aircraft, which the birds accompanied—by choice. The crafty filmmakers took advantage of one of Mother Nature’s tricks called imprinting: If you had grown up thinking your mom was inside that noisy plane—or was that noisy plane—you’d have gladly tolerated it, too.

In the mid 1930s German ethologist Konrad Lorenz popularized filial imprinting, the process by which a newborn animal learns to recognize the unique characteristics of its parent, typically its mother. This phenomenon was termed imprinting (translated from the German word prägung) by Lorenz’s mentor, Oskar Heinroth, who believed that the sensory stimulus encountered by the hatchling was immediately, and irreversibly, “stamped” onto the animal’s brain. Lorenz demonstrated this with his famous goslings, which had spent their first hours of life with him and subsequently followed him everywhere; as adults they preferred the company of humans over fellow avians.

More here.  [Thanks to Scott Rosenblum.]

Joshua Kurlantzick in The New Republic:

In recent days, the Bush administration has slowly edged away from its outright support for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. “We don’t want to be seen to be looking, but we want to make sure we talk to a wide variety of people,” one

US

official told the Washington Post this week. “We encourage moderate political forces in Pakistan to work together,” echoed State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

The most visible of those “moderate political forces,” of course, is former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whom Washington desperately hopes can help Musharraf stabilize the country, possibly as prime minister with Musharraf remaining president. Bhutto, who enjoys an over 60 percent popularity rating in Pakistan in a recent poll, has strengthened her credentials as a moderate democrat over the last week and a half by relentlessly attacking Musharraf’s decision to impose a state of emergency and by calling for him to resign. And, indeed, Bhutto would be a better solution than military rule because she stands for some of the best historical values of Pakistani democracy. Unfortunately, she stands for some of the worst, too.

More here.

As a self-taught artist, Hergé had the truly talented inability to value his rare gifts. He was amazed that something he considered so frivolous should be taken so seriously. He considered his little drawings to be art without wings. His idea of art was something far loftier. Not impressed with his success he tried to become an abstract painter. As abstract art is the art form of the untalented — the artistic equivalent of crochet — naturally he failed. Hysterically he set about collecting modern art — to modern minds a dead giveaway. Miró, Delaunay, Dubuffet, Stella, Rauschenberg, Warhol (whom he knew), Lichtenstein. The list is as long and boring as life itself. He made his last acquisitions dying in his hospital bed. Talk about deadication.

How wrong he was. There is no furniture quite so dull as art. Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them. And what is a frame but a warning that the wallpaper is not art? As you get older, entertainment soon ceases to be what it is for most bores — a substitute for culture. It is culture that is a substitute — and a poor one — for entertainment.

more from The Spectator here.

From Spiked:

There has been a rumour circulating that Martin Amis, Britain’s ‘greatest living novelist’, had lost his marbles. In the Eighties, Amis was the anti-nuclear darling of English letters. He spliced up the decade of greed in a glitter of satirical wordplay, to the beat of what his father Kingsley called ‘fucking fool’ politics. But with the Nineties, dentistry and divorce, Amis junior entered a period of experimental literature, and then – post 9/11- made some extraordinarily colourful rants about Islamism in the national press.

Last year, he popped up on BBC TV’s Question Time suggesting that the murder of Alexander Litvinenko sprang from the ‘Asiatic’ origin of Russians (you what, Mart?). Suddenly, commentators were arguing that he and Melanie Phillips were level pegging in the ‘lost it’ stakes: Mart had gone from right-on to neo-con and there was not a damn thing media London could do about it. Now, matters have come to a head. A couple of weeks ago, Marxist critic Terry Eagleton published an account of Amis’ post-9/11 essays which described them as the ‘ramblings of a BNP thug’. The press leapt upon Eagleton’s attack with glee, kicking at Amis until he was forced to write a letter defending himself to the Guardian.

Amis’ literary reputation, meanwhile, has gone the same way as the World Trade Center.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Scientists from Bangor University’s School of Ocean Studies in Wales recently killed the longest-lived creature ever discovered. It was a clam. A quahog clam, to be precise and it had been living off the coast of Iceland for a little bit more than 400 years until this autumn, when it was dredged up by the team of scientists and opened, thereby killing it, in order to study the rings inside its shell for information about changes in the environment. ABC News noted that as an infant clam it would have been alive at the same time that Shakespeare was staging Hamlet.

This brings to mind a few famous lines from Wordsworth’s poem “The Tables Turned.” He writes:

Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

These lines tend to get bandied about every time something like the clam incident occurs, which is often. We’re always killing things to find out about them or killing things for the greater benefit or for the Good or simply for pleasure. There is a way, as Wordsworth says, that our meddling intellect is simply murderous.

But it cuts the other way sometimes too. In another recent story we learn that certain frogs have been bred for translucency. A research team in Hiroshima, Japan — I’m not making this up — has crossbred the recessive genes in the Japanese brown frog in order to create frogs with transparent skin. No more dissection. No more classrooms littered with the corpses of our amphibian sacrifices to the Gods of knowledge.

More here.

From Sciencs:

Royalty has its privileges, even in the insect world. Queen honey bees can choose the sex of their offspring, a new study shows. Like a sharp stinger, that finding pokes a hole in the notion that queens are merely mindless egg layers and that worker bees have the final say on whether the queen lays eggs that give rise to males or females.

Every young queen goes on a mating flight and then stores the sperm she collects from multiple matings for the rest of her life, using it up bit by bit as she lays eggs. Males, called drones, emerge from unfertilized eggs, and females emerge from fertilized ones and become the workers. So if the queen adds sperm to an egg, it will produce a female; if she withholds sperm, the egg will produce a male. That would appear to give the queen control over the sex of her offspring. However, the dogma among entomologists is that workers control the type of eggs the queen lays. The workers build the cavities, known as cells, in which the queen will lay her eggs. A queen will lay an unfertilized egg in a particular cell only if the cell is big enough to accommodate a male larva, which is bigger than a female one. So by controlling how many cells they build of each size, the workers can limit how many male offspring the queen produces.

More here.

Amy Alexander in The Nation:

[I]n the weeks since October 14, when Cosby and Poussaint spent a full hour on NBC’s venerable Sunday morning talk show Meet the Press laying out their argument, a sectarian rift has opened in black America–at least the part with access to the Internet and the wherewithal to write op-eds and put up blogs. While Come On, People acknowledges the thick complexity of issues that lay beneath the long list of unhappy statistics affecting some blacks–high rates of homicides, homelessness, single-parent households–Cosby and Poussaint say they want black Americans to take ownership of devising solutions.

I take their argument at face value, and I appreciate the goal of encouraging self-determination. (I also have a connection to Poussaint that gives me insight to his thinking: in 2001, he and I wrote a book together about African-Americans and mental health.) Unlike the overwhelmingly favorable response to broadcaster Tavis Smiley’s bestselling book The Covenant With Black America, reaction from African-Americans to Come On, People has been heated and decidedly mixed.

Much of the animus has to do with Cosby’s enormous wealth and recent accusations from women who claim they had sexual liaisons with the entertainer. And more to the point, Cosby’s notorious talk at a 2004 Brown v. Board of Education fiftieth anniversary event in Washington, DC–in which he railed in harsh language against the destructive behavior of “low-income” blacks–has led some African-Americans to doubt the sincerity of the performer.

The Republic of Abkhazia is one of the few countries, if you can call it that, where every tourist who shows up gets a handshake and a friendly chat with the deputy foreign minister. Or rather, it would be such a country, if it were a country at all. A wee seaside strip in the Republic of Georgia, Abkhazia hasn’t yet persuaded anyone to recognize its independence, even though it boasts many of the trappings of nationhood — a president, a parliament, and an army that guards the border in case the government in Tbilisi wants to invade again.

It also boasts grand natural beauty, an ambiguous history as a holiday playland of tyrants and diseased monkeys, and one of the most agreeable climates on earth. In Sukhumi, the capital, I can see why the Georgians have refused to give up Abkhazia without a fight. Wars break out naturally over territory gorgeous enough to fight for. And Abkhazia — a palm-lined coast supervised by a snowy green sierra — is cursed, like Helen of Troy, with enough beauty to inspire bloodshed of epic duration.

more from The Smart Set here.

In the Mail and Guardian (South Africa):

Earlier this year Habib again applied for a visa to the US, partly to enable him to address the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August. This time the US state department told him before his departure that his visa application would not be processed in time — despite Habib having made the application in May.

Last month the US government finally wrote to Habib about the matter. Charles Luoma-Overstreet, senior US consul in Johannesburg, told Habib: “I regret to inform you that … the department of state has upheld a finding of your inadmissibility under … the United States Immigration and Nationality Act.”

The letter included a copy of the section of the Act under which Habib had been denied entry. The section is headed “Terrorist Activities” and refers to “any alien who … has engaged in terrorist activity” or who “has, under circumstances indicating an intention to cause death or serious bodily harm, incited terrorist activity”.

These two definitions are part of a lengthy list that includes any “representative” of “a political, social or other similar group whose public endorsement of acts of terrorist activity the secretary of state has determined undermines United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorist activities”.

[H/t: Elke Zuern]

In the English-speaking world there is a common perception, largely due to Garnett’s translations, that Tolstoy’s style is classically simple and elegant. This is only partly true. Tolstoy writes with extraordinary clarity. No other writer can recreate emotions and experience with such precision and economy. His moral lexicon is penetrating and direct, without the nuances and ambiguities that make Pushkin so complex, and in this respect Tolstoy’s writing is relatively easy to translate (“goes straight into English, without any trouble,” Garnett said[7] ). But there are other elements of Tolstoy’s literary style, in War and Peace in particular, awkward bumps and angularities that have been ironed out, not just in Garnett’s translation, but in most of the subsequent translations of this masterpiece.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

Even the earliest of Turner’s 146 oil works on display exhibits the remarkable fundamentals that he would build on and transform – substantially – over time. Fisherman at Sea, the first oil painting Turner showed at the Royal Academy (in 1796, following several years’ worth of watercolour works), features elements that would dominate his later studies on the sublime. The full, featureless moon would be repeated again and again across all the modes of his paintings. The wan orb – this time, the sun – hanging low among the rising range of mountains and swoosh of furious weather in Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) represents stability in the face of nature and permanence through tumultuous history. On the other hand, the sulfurous sun in Calais Sands, Low Water, Poissards Collecting Bait (1830) seems to vaporise the ocean where it touches down in a blistering sunset. The sun’s fierce fire is juxtaposed against the frail, ghost crab-coloured fishwives searching for grub in the low tide.

more from The Guardian here.

Timothy Noah in Slate:

…I quoted and attempted to parse the signature Lapham sentence, which appeared in the following form in the May 1999 issue of Harper’s:

The swarm of cameras following Monica Lewinsky on her progress through a Washington airport or a New York restaurant wouldn’t have surprised the Roman mob familiar with the expensive claques traipsing after the magnificence of the Emperor Nero, their eager and well-fed sycophancy presumably equivalent to the breathless enthusiasms of Barbara Walters.

In essence, Lapham was rephrasing Ecclesiastes: All is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun. Western civilization to contemporary news cycle: Been there, done that. It’s not a particularly penetrating thought, which is why it always needs to be dressed up with windy invocations from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and the like. Anyway, Lapham has a new magazine called Lapham’s Quarterly, comprising nothing but writings ancient, contemporary, and in-between, juxtaposed for maximum “all is vanity” impact and arranged under thematic headings like “Calls to Arms” and “Post-Mortems.”

More here.

John E. Joseph in the Times Literary Supplement:

As he lay dying, in 1913, of arteriosclerosis and influenza, still a lethal combination today, Ferdinand de Saussure must have been sure that, come the year 2007, no one would mark the centenary of his first course on general linguistics at the University of Geneva or the sesquicentenary of his birth, on November 26. His name, never widely known, was forgotten except among the few scholars who recalled his impressive Master’s thesis of thirty-four years earlier.

All this depressed him. A modest, even-tempered man, at the age of fifty-five he harboured no deep bitterness, yet the one thing that consistently upset him was being denied his due. On a visit, in 1911, to his sister Albertine, at Mettingham Castle in Suffolk, her husband, Major Hastings Ross-Johnson, raised a sceptical eyebrow at Ferdinand’s claim to descent from English nobility. In good aristocratic form, Saussure disguised his dismay, but as soon as he returned to Geneva he started writing to cousins for information that would confirm the lineage.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

The moment she drawled, “I’d like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair” in the 1932 film “Cabin in the Cotton,” Bette Davis became two things: a movie star and an icon of camp. She would remain both for the next 57 years of her life. And beyond. “Nervousness, hysteria and paranoia are defining features of Davis’s acting style,” Sikov observes. And the boundary between her art and her life was permeable. In a gratifyingly brief but persuasive bit of psychologizing, Sikov writes, “Davis’s torn nature suggests that she may have had a borderline personality, one that shifts between the commonly neurotic — anxiety, depression, emotional outbursts — and a baldly psychotic inability to perceive the point at which reality stops and paranoid fantasy takes over.”

But the real secret to her career and her life, Sikov suggests, is that “Bette Davis didn’t give a goddamn.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Legend has it that Marie Antoinette’s hair turned white the night before she was guillotined. Presumably the stress of impending decapitation caused her locks to lose color within hours. Extremely unlikely, scientists say, but stress may play a role in a more gradual graying process. The first silvery strands usually pop up around age 30 for men and age 35 for women, but graying can begin as early as high school for some and as late as the 50s for others.

Graying begins inside the sunken pits in the scalp called follicles. A typical human head has about 100,000 of these teardrop-shaped cavities, each capable of sprouting several hairs in a lifetime. At the bottom of each follicle is a hair-growing factory where cells work together to assemble colored hair. Keratinocytes (epidermal cells) build the hair from the bottom up, stacking atop one another and eventually dying, leaving behind mostly keratin, a colorless protein that gives hair its texture and strength. (Keratin is also a primary component of nails, the outer layer of skin, animal hooves and claws?even rhinoceros horns.)

Does stress accelerate this demise of the melanocyte population?

More here.

Colin Nickerson in the Boston Globe:

The Neanderthal extinction some 30,000 years ago remains one of the great riddles of evolution, with rival theories blaming everything from genocide committed by “real” humans to prehistoric climate change.

But a recent study introduces another explanation: Stone Age feminism. Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women’s work as well as men’s, so it’s a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women – the vital “reproductive core” of a tiny population – could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers.

A spate of recent discoveries has yielded intriguing clues about humanity’s closest cousin.

More here.