Pinker broaches the knotty question of metaphor by quoting the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence and then, in a deft unpacking, reveals how riddled with spatial metaphors our abstract thought is: “Some people are hanging beneath some other people, connected by cords. As stuff flows by, something forces the lower people to cut the cords and stand beside the upper people, which is what the rules require. They see some onlookers, and clear away the onlookers’ view of what forced them to do the cutting.” He cites cognitive scientist George Lakoff as the “messiah” of the extreme theory that metaphor is all we have. While he praises some of Lakoff’s views, he faults him for refusing to accept the existence of true or false ideas and crediting only ideas with differing levels of usefulness and trendiness. He builds a convincing case, however, that even Lakoff firmly believes in truth and falsity and that Lakoff’s theory is thus self-undermining. Pinker, by contrast, champions the mind’s ability to make analogies and judge them for aptness or lack thereof. The centrality of metaphor in human thought does not inevitably lead to a flaccid relativism negating everything science and technology have brought us: “Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself.”

more from The LA Times here.

From The Washington Post:

A lovely story about the Holocaust might seem like a grotesque oxymoron. But in The Zookeeper’s Wife, Diane Ackerman proves otherwise. Here is a true story — of human empathy and its opposite — that is simultaneously grave and exuberant, wise and playful. Ackerman has a wonderful tale to tell, and she tells it wonderfully.

The book begins in the mid-1930s, when a young couple, Antonina and Jan Zabinski, were the directors of Warsaw’s elaborate, fecund zoo, which housed its animals not just in cages but in habitats meant to recreate their native wetlands, deserts and woods. Antonina was a Russian-born Pole whose parents were killed by the Bolsheviks in the early days of the Russian Revolution. Jan was a rarity: a Polish Catholic whose father raised him as a staunch atheist in a working-class Jewish neighborhood. The Zabinski household was a sort of madcap bohemia, full of artists, intellectuals and a rotating assortment of non-human friends, including a lion kitten, a wolf cub, a chimpanzee, a “sluttish” cat named Balbina, a kissing rabbit named Wicek, and a paunchy muskrat who practiced an “exquisite” ritual of morning ablutions.

More here.

Gary Taubes in The New York Times:

Once upon a time, women took estrogen only to relieve the hot flashes, sweating, vaginal dryness and the other discomforting symptoms of menopause. In the late 1960s, thanks in part to the efforts of Robert Wilson, a Brooklyn gynecologist, and his 1966 best seller, “Feminine Forever,” this began to change, and estrogen therapy evolved into a long-term remedy for the chronic ills of aging. Menopause, Wilson argued, was not a natural age-related condition; it was an illness, akin to diabetes or kidney failure, and one that could be treated by taking estrogen to replace the hormones that a woman’s ovaries secreted in ever diminishing amounts. With this argument estrogen evolved into hormone-replacement therapy, or H.R.T., as it came to be called, and became one of the most popular prescription drug treatments in America.

By 2001, 15 million women were filling H.R.T. prescriptions annually; perhaps 5 million were older women, taking the drug solely with the expectation that it would allow them to lead a longer and healthier life. A year later, the tide would turn. In the summer of 2002, estrogen therapy was exposed as a hazard to health rather than a benefit.

More here.

Paul Muldoon reads his “Sideman” and “See If I Care.”

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

It has been a long time since Andy Warhol started being Andy Warhol. Yet we still fail to appreciate the fact that art is happening largely on his terms. For anyone who was paying attention, Andy Warhol changed the rules for art and ushered in new times. The simplest way to put it is that he made it possible — with the soup cans and the Brillo boxes and the silkscreens of famous movie stars — to make art from the world of consumer goods, the world that we’ve all actually been living in for a few generations now. Some people still don’t want to forgive him for that. But, in the end, all he was doing was telling the truth. His best work is great because of how deeply Warhol was willing to accept that we live in the world that we do. The degree to which he allowed himself to accept this world made him weird, often creepy, and entirely fascinating. He made a kind of freakish experiment with himself, to become so utterly “what we are” that he was more like us than any of us could actually be. That made him uncanny and it is why his art is about truth, even as it glories in the purity of surface and appearance.

There are two artists who best represent the legacy of Andy Warhol and have best exploited the possibilities opened up by what he was doing. One is Jeff Koons. The other is Damien Hirst. People love to despise Koons and Hirst just as much as they loved to despise Warhol. And like Warhol, the two keep making work that asks to be despised. They haven’t any other choice. That is the task before them.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Oliver Goodenough in the Vermont Rutland Herald:

Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a “dollar auction.” The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money.

The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand to lose no matter what, but that they can still buffer their losses by winning the dollar. They just have to outlast the other player. Following this strategy, the two hapless students usually run the bid up several dollars, turning the apparent shot at easy money into a ghastly battle of spiraling disaster.

Theoretically, there is no stable outcome once the dynamic gets going. The only clear limit is the exhaustion of one of the player’s total funds. In the classroom, the auction generally ends with the grudging decision of one player to “irrationally” accept the larger loss and get out of the terrible spiral. Economists call the dollar auction pattern an irrational escalation of commitment. We might also call it the war in Iraq.

Jonathan Haidt at Edge.org:

I study morality from every angle I can find. Morality is one of those basic aspects of humanity, like sexuality and eating, that can’t fit into one or two academic fields. I think morality is unique, however, in having a kind of spell that disguises it. We all care about morality so passionately that it’s hard to look straight at it. We all look at the world through some kind of moral lens, and because most of the academic community uses the same lens, we validate each other’s visions and distortions. I think this problem is particularly acute in some of the new scientific writing about religion.

When I started graduate school at Penn in 1987, it seemed that developmental psychology owned the rights to morality within psychology. Everyone was either using or critiquing Lawrence Kohlberg’s ideas, as well as his general method of interviewing kids about dilemmas (such as: should Heinz steal a drug to save his wife’s life?). Everyone was studying how children’s understanding of moral concepts changed with experience. But in the 1990s two books were published that I believe triggered an explosion of cross-disciplinary scientific interest in morality, out of which has come a new synthesis—very much along the lines that E. O. Wilson predicted in 1975.

More here.  And responses from David Sloan Wilson, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, and PZ Meyers.

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance:

The utility function encapsulates preferences by measuring how happy I would be if I had those goods. If a set of goods A brings me greater utility than a set B, and I have to choose between them, it would be rational for me to choose A. Seems reasonable. But a number of issues arise when we put this kind of philosophy into practice. So here are those that occur to me, over the course of one plane ride across a couple of time zones.

* Utility is non-linear.

This one is so perfectly obvious that I’m sure everyone knows it; nevertheless, it’s what immediately popped into mind upon reading the wine story. We need to distinguish between two different senses of linear. One is that increasing the amount of goods leads to a proportional increase in utility: U(ax) = aU(x), where x is some collection of goods and a is a real number. Everyone really does know better than that; the notion of marginal utility captures the fact that eating five deep-fried sliders does not bring you five times the happiness that eating just one would bring you. (Likely it brings you less.)

Over at tennis.com, Asad Raza has a remarkably insightful take on Roger Federer:

[I]t often struck me, while watching, say, Cornet-Jankovic, that twenty-five years from now the biggest and only question some young tennis fan might ask me would be: so you saw Roger Federer? (With, maybe, two secondary questions concerning Justine and Novak.)

A couple of times during press conferences, I noticed something kind of interesting about Roger Federer. I’ll get to it in a minute, but let me describe the scene first. Players enter Interview Room One, where all of the Rajah’s pressers take place, at the corner diagonally opposite from where the players enter. The players come in and turn right, to take their seat behind the microphone on the little dais or stage. Most players look to their left as they enter, just gauging the room and who is in it and how full it is. Federer, though, always keeps his head down and eyes averted, until he sits and begins to answer questions, when he makes direct eye contact with each questioner.

Anyway, a couple of times during his press conferences, someone’s cell phone went off, each time with an annoyingly loud ring tone. Both times, everyone turned, first to locate and then to glare at the culprit: have you no shame? And both times, I noticed, Roger kept his eyes locked on his interlocutor, never glancing in the direction of the phone. I’m sure he was conscious, on one level, that there was an interruption occurring, but he had decided to ignore it. Not even a darting of the eyes towards the irritant. Both coming in the room with his head down and refusing to allow himself to be distracted or interrupted seemed to convey the same thing: he chooses to focus selectively, and focuses intensely once he does.

What function does philosophy have now? Is it becoming superfluous – because of the behavioural sciences, brain research and evolutionary biology? I am very careful about that. As far as the behavioural sciences are concerned, I think that people are too rash in looking for analogies – for example between human morals and animal altruism. That is what Konrad Lorenz, among others, did. As for brain research, I think it’s rather crazy what’s going on today.

Why?

They can only find out what types of processes are going on in which parts of the brain. But then those professors of brain physiology appear and present theories about the nonexistence of human freedom. And those theories are only based on the fact that they see themselves as scientists and believe in determinism. They are not even aware of the philosophical literature of the last decades, which tries to not see determinism and free will in opposition. I consider that to be completely untenable speculation.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Paris in 1600 was not exactly a city of lights. Only two years earlier, King Henri IV—a swaggerer and philanderer of questionable hygiene—had finally ended the thirty-seven years of brutal sectarian strife known as the Wars of Religion by converting to Catholicism (for the second time) and adopting the Edict of Nantes, giving a circumscribed freedom of worship to the Protestant Huguenots. But Parisians still remembered the bitter sieges they had been subjected to by the man who now ruled them and to whom they had reluctantly submitted only six years before. The country remained a mass of smoldering resentments and grudges, led by a coterie of nobles raised on warfare and sedition whose potential for rekindled conflagration was very real. The entire new generation of leadership was coarse, abysmally under lettered, sanguinary, and addicted to intrigue.

more from Bookforum here.

A tension runs through the work of Renzo Piano. Born in 1937 into a prominent family of Genoese builders, he has long stressed his commitment to craft, to the particularities of material and making, and, though his firm has multiple offices with international projects, it is still called Building Workshop. Yet Piano burst into public view with the Centre Pompidou (1971-77), which, designed with Richard Rogers, is the most celebrated of the high-tech megastructures of the period, and today he is also associated with large urban schemes, including the redevelopment of the old harbour in Genoa (1985-92) and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1992-2000), as well as massive infrastructural projects such as Kansai International Airport (1988-94), for which an entire island was engineered into being in the Bay of Osaka.

more from the LRB here.

Sherwin B. Nuland in The New Republic:

When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine by Barron H Lerner.

Since its beginnings some two and a half millennia ago, Western medicine — which would grow into the scientific medicine of the past few centuries — had been characterized by a relationship between doctor and patient that might be called beneficent paternalism, in which the physician determined what was best for the patient, who was expected to comply with all recommendations.

Enter the 1960s and the self-determination movement. For the first time in their long history of authority, the leaders of medicine were being asked — or more precisely, told — to re-evaluate their basic premise of authority, their presumption of effectiveness, and even their benevolence. Barron H. Lerner’s book is centered around the transformative events affecting medical practice that came into focus in and around the late 1960s, and the consequences of the new medical ethics. The story that Lerner tells is of the laity’s increasing involvement in matters traditionally left to the profession, including the lessening of its certainty of benevolence and scientific infallibility. Ultimately, the book issues an appeal of sorts — to both doctors and patients — hoping to ensure that a well-informed public will continue to make reasonable demands on scientists and physicians that can only result in “progress toward human community.”

More here.

From Science:

Scientists have for the first time coaxed salmon to produce trout sperm and eggs. These special deliveries might allow researchers to resurrect extinct species from frozen cells. The study clears a major conservation hurdle. Scientists often freeze eggs and sperm of endangered animals to keep viable genetic material around in case of extinction. However, fish eggs cannot be preserved this way because of their large size and high fat content. But undeveloped male sperm cells, called spermatogonia, do fine in a freezer. When thawed and implanted into another fish, they migrate to the gonads and grow into either sperm or eggs, depending on the sex of their host. This technique works within a species, but no one had tried transfers between fish species.

Researchers at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology collected spermatogonia from adult rainbow trout and injected them into sterile salmon embryos. The researchers raised the fish to sexual maturity and found that 10 of the 29 male salmon produced trout sperm, and five of the 50 female salmon produced trout eggs. In comparison, a control group of sterile salmon that did not receive transplants had no mature sex cells at all. As the team reports in the 14 September issue of Science, when it combined eggs and sperm from the recipients, a new generation of healthy trout hatched. Co-author Goro Yoshizaki says his team used sterile recipient fish so that only donor-derived sex cells could be produced. That way, when the researchers mixed eggs from the female salmon with sperm produced by the males, they got “100% trout.”

More here.

The current pope calls our opinion “the dictatorship of relativism” and says, plainly, that the view that religion is a private matter and that its potential public role is defined on the basis that it is a private matter is an act of aggression against religion. And the late Pope, as an acknowledged enemy of an open, secular society, called this view the “unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit”.

Therein lay for him the meaning of the story of the Fall – and this is a coherent theological interpretation: “That is what the words of the book of Genesis refer to: ‘Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil’; that is to say, you will decide for yourselves what is good and what is evil.”[8] The pride of the secular society actually consists in living in this kind of sin.

more from Eurozine here.

The year is 1800. Americans go to the polls to elect a President. Which Founder do you favor? The Federalist incumbent, sixty-four-year-old John Adams, or the Republican challenger, fifty-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who, awkwardly enough, is currently serving as Adams’s Vice-President?

Consider your vote carefully. This is the most important election in American history. What Jefferson dubbed “the revolution of 1800” marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. (Before that, whoever placed second became the Vice-President, which is what happened to Jefferson in 1796.) It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College. At the time, many people, not all of them members of the Adams family, thought that it might spell the end of the American experiment. As Edward J. Larson observes in his new book, “A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign” (Free Press; $27), “Partisans worried that it might be the young republic’s last.”

more from The New Yorker here.

In 1576, having sought refuge from public life and taken up residence in the library of his family estate near Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne gave instructions for an engraved medal to be placed on a wall above his writing desk: Que sais-je? This admonishment to be sceptical in the face of received knowledge was to be Montaigne’s motto during the composition of the Essais, the great record of his mind over the last two decades of his life. “Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre”, cautions Montaigne; “ce n’est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject si frivole et si vain.” A finer example of what the rhetoricians call praeteritio could hardly be found, as Montaigne’s winking warning invites the reader to accompany him on a kind of holiday journey as he embarks on the thrilling endeavour of sketching the intellectual terrain of Renaissance humanism.

Four and a quarter centuries later, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the margin of my time arrives as the record of a properly Montaignean project – the adventures of Clive James’s agile mind as it confronts the culture and history of the century just ended.

more from the TLS here.

In the TLS, Paul Duguid reviews Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s internet is killing our culture:

If debates about the internet are turning to examinations of our culture, this is to be welcomed. The turn may reflect an exasperation with the way economic concepts have come to dominate such discussions. Even the New Yorker, the stately home of cultural debate in America, now feels obliged to provide room for a “financial” page. Changes that fall under the heading Web 2.0 do have cultural implications. For example, collectively produced and dynamically changing pages, like those of Wikipedia, unsettle implicit notions about what a page is and how it might be understood, notions that extend back at least to the rise of print culture, if not to the appearance of the codex. The end of the page as we knew it will be unsettling not only for biblio- philes, but even for such Web 2.0 businesses as Google, whose empire depends on its ability to rank pages, and the inherent assumption that with these there is something relatively constant and coherent to rank.

A debate pitting [Raymond] Williamsites such as Benkler, who are in support of expanding popular culture, against [Matthew] Arnoldians such as Keen, who write in defence of a circumscribed “High Culture”, would not be new, but, in the context of the internet, it might nonetheless be worth having. Unfortunately, Keen, who seems happy on the plains, lamenting the loss of NBC programming, is less likely to thrive on the higher altitudes he has chosen.