Also in the Economist, medicine factors in race:

LAST month researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Mississippi Medical Centre published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. They had studied three versions (or alleles, as they are known) of a gene called PCSK9. This gene helps clear the blood of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), one of the chemical packages used to transport cholesterol around the body. Raised levels of LDL are associated with heart disease. The effect of all three types of PCSK9 studied by Jonathan Cohen and his colleagues was to lower the LDL in a person’s bloodstream by between 15% and 28%, and coronary heart disease by between 47% and 88%, compared with people with more common alleles of the gene.

Such studies happen all the time and are normally unremarkable. But this was part of a growing trend to study individuals from different racial groups and to analyse the data separately for each group. The researchers asked the people who took part in the study which race they thought they belonged to and this extra information allowed them to uncover more detail about the risk that PCSK9 poses to everyone.

Yet race and biology are uncomfortable bedfellows. Any suggestion of systematic biological differences between groups of people from different parts of the world—beyond the superficially obvious ones of skin colour and anatomy—is almost certain to raise hackles.

In the Economist:

[I]t is misleading to talk of women’s “entry” into the workforce. Besides formal employment, women have always worked in the home, looking after children, cleaning or cooking, but because this is unpaid, it is not counted in the official statistics. To some extent, the increase in female paid employment has meant fewer hours of unpaid housework. However, the value of housework has fallen by much less than the time spent on it, because of the increased productivity afforded by dishwashers, washing machines and so forth. Paid nannies and cleaners employed by working women now also do some work that used to belong in the non-market economy.

Nevertheless, most working women are still responsible for the bulk of chores in their homes. In developed economies, women produce just under 40% of official GDP. But if the worth of housework is added (valuing the hours worked at the average wage rates of a home help or a nanny) then women probably produce slightly more than half of total output.

The increase in female employment has also accounted for a big chunk of global growth in recent decades. GDP growth can come from three sources: employing more people; using more capital per worker; or an increase in the productivity of labour and capital due to new technology, say. Since 1970 women have filled two new jobs for every one taken by a man. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the employment of extra women has not only added more to GDP than new jobs for men but has also chipped in more than either capital investment or increased productivity. Carve up the world’s economic growth a different way and another surprising conclusion emerges: over the past decade or so, the increased employment of women in developed economies has contributed much more to global growth than China has.

Via Crooked Timber, The Couscous Kid over at Aaronovitch Watch has an extensive review of Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 posts).

Tracing Berman’s arguments back to his sources isn’t always easy. There’s a “Note to the Reader” at the end that lists a few of the works consulted, but Berman habitually cites books without providing page references, and that irritates. (Terror and Liberalism doesn’t have an index, either, and that also irritates.) Sometimes you don’t need to chase up his references to find fault with the book. He calls Franz Ferdinand the “grand duke of Serbia” on p.32, for example, and he’s become the “Archduke of Serbia” by p.40, when he wasn’t either; Franz Ferdinand was the Archduke of Austria, and Serbia lay outside the Habsburg lands. (Funny, though, that the errors in basic general knowledge should come to light when it comes to dealing with Serbia and Sarajevo, of all places.) But much of the rest of the time, it’s an interesting exercise to compare what Berman says with what his sources say. I haven’t done this comprehensively in what follows (even I’ve got better things to do with my time), and I’m not saying anything in what follows about the two chapters on Sayyid Qutb because I haven’t read any of his works and don’t know much about him, apart from what Berman tells me, and, as will be clear from what follows, I don’t think Berman’s an entirely reliable source. But I have done a bit of checking around with some of the books that I’ve got to hand. How does Berman use his sources? Often carelessly, and not especially fair-mindedly, as we shall see.

In debates over creationist doctrines, evolutionary biologists often are hard-pressed to explain how nature could make something as intricate as the human brain. Even Alfred Wallace, the 19th century biologist who discovered natural selection with Charles Darwin, could not accept that such a flexible organ of learning and thought could emerge by trial and error.

No two brains are exactly alike, despite their overall anatomical similarity. Each brain changes throughout a lifetime, altered by experience and aging. Even the simplest mental activities, such as watching a moving dot, can involve slightly different areas in different people’s brains, studies show.

Underlying every personal difference in thought, attitude and ability is an astonishing variety of brain cells, scientists have discovered.

more from the LA Times here.

The neoconservatives now pretty much argue that they’re the new anti-totalitarian liberals. They more or less accepted the principles of the New Deal in the ’50s and ’60s, and largely feel that they’ve carried on the tradition of liberal interventionism. What I’d like to know from you is this: what part of Schlesinger, Truman, and Scoop Jackson’s lunch have the neocons not eaten?

That’s an important purpose of the book, to argue against that idea, and I would say a couple of things. The first is that the recognition of American fallibility is a very critical element of the liberal tradition, very central to Niebuhr’s thinking, which then became an important element in the Truman administration. That idea manifests itself internationally in a sympathy for international institutions, a belief that while it’s possible that the United States can be a force for good—indeed, that America must be a force for good in the world, which is certainly what neocons believe—that America can also be a force for evil. That since America can be corrupted by unrestrained power, America should take certain steps to limit its power and to express it through international institutions. That, I think, is the first element of the liberal tradition that has been lost in neocon thinking.

The second element that’s been lost, I think, is the recognition that America’s ability to be a force for good in the world rests on the economic security of average Americans. The early neocons had a certain sympathy for the labor movement, and the labor movement was a very important part of Cold War liberalism, because the ability of the United States to be generous around the world really depended on the government’s willingness to take responsibility for the economic security of its own people. Of course, that would have to mean something different today than it did in the 1950s. But widespread economic security remains a very important basis upon which the United States can act in the world, because it maintains the support of the American people for that action. I think that has been lost in neocon thinking since they adopted the—as I see it— quite radical economic ideology of the American Right.

more from the interview at the Atlantic Unlimited here.

On April 17th, to mark the centennial of the birth of the playwright Clifford Odets, Lincoln Center Theatre will open a new production of “Awake and Sing!,” Odets’s first full-length play and the one that made him a literary superstar in 1935, at the age of twenty-eight. In the years that followed, this magazine dubbed Odets “Revolution’s No. 1 Boy”; Time put his face on its cover; Cole Porter rhymed his name in song (twice); and Walter Winchell coined the word “Bravodets!” “Of all people, you Clifford Odets are the nearest to understand or feel this American reality,” his friend the director Harold Clurman wrote in 1938, urging him “to write, write, write—because we need it so much.” “You are the Man,” Clurman told him.

more from The New Yorker here.

On a blazing blue afternoon last winter, I met the Spanish expatriate novelist Juan Goytisolo at an outdoor cafe in Marrakesh. It was easy to spot the 75-year-old writer, sitting beneath an Arabic-language poster of himself taped to the cafe window. He was reading El País, the Spanish newspaper to which he has contributed for decades. Olive-skinned, with a hawk nose and startlingly pale blue eyes, he had wrapped himself against the winter chill in a pullover, suede jacket, checked overcoat and two pairs of socks.

Considered by many to be Spain’s greatest living writer, Goytisolo is in some ways an anachronistic figure in today’s cultural landscape. His ideas can seem deeply unfashionable. For him, writing is a political act, and it is the West, not the Islamic world, that is waging a crusade. He is a homosexual who finds gay identity politics unappealing and who lived for 40 years with a French woman he considers his only love. “I don’t like ghettos,” he informed me. “For me, sexuality is something fluid. I am against all we’s.” The words most commonly used to describe his writing are “transgressive,” “subversive,” “iconoclastic.”

more from the NY Times magazine here.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

If, like me, you are in the business of ideas, the presidency of George W. Bush is a dream come true. That is not because the president is fond of the product I produce; on the contrary, he may be the most anti-intellectual president of modern times, a determined opponent of science, a man who values loyalty above debate among his associates. But governance is impossible without ideas, and by basing his foreign and domestic policies on so many bad ones, President Bush may have cleared the ground for the emergence of a few good ones.

Two recent books by writers long identified with conservative points of view — one dealing with foreign policy, the other with domestic concerns — suggest just how bad the ideas associated with the Bush administration have been; America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press,2006) and Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (Doubleday, 2006).

More here.

From The Loom:

At the Loom we believe that the path to wisdom runs through the Land of Gross. We do not show you pictures of worms crawling out of frog noses merely to ruin your lunch. We do not urge you to check out these freaky videos of worms crawling out of frog mouths and fish gills merely to give you something to talk about at the high school cafeteria table tomorrow (Dude, you totally will not believe what I saw…) These images have something profound to say.

The worm in question is the gordian worm or horsehair worm, Paragordius tricuspidatus. It has become famous in recent months for its powers of manipulation. The gordian worm lives as an adult in the water, where they form orgiastic knots. They lay eggs at the edge of the water, which can only mature if they’re ingested by insects such as crickets. The worms feed on the inner juices of the crickets until they fill up the entire body cavity. In order to get back to the water, the gordian worms cause their hosts hurl themselves into ponds or streams. As the insects die, the worms slither out to find the nearest mating knot.

More here.

Arthur Danto on the 2006 Whitney Biennial, “Day for Night”, in The Nation:

The Biennial 2006 is in one sense exemplary: It gives a very clear sense of what American art is in the early twenty-first century. American art has been increasingly autonomous in recent times, and in large part concerned with the nature of art as such. To be sure, it has explored issues of identity politics and multiculturalism, and sometimes worn its political virtues on its sleeve. But gestures like Serra’s reflect artistic decisions, not something in the culture that the art passively mirrors. Even at its most political, the art here does not project much beyond the conditions of its production.

It would thus be a mistake to look to “Day for Night” for a reflection of the spirit of our time, much less a critique of what is wrong with the state of the world. By raising such expectations, “Day for Night” sets itself up for failure–through no fault of the art on view. Much of the work is smart, innovative, pluralistic, cosmopolitan, self-critical, liberal and humane. It might not aspire to greatness, or take much interest in beauty or in joy. But in general, the art in the Biennial mirrors a better world than our own, assuming, that is, it mirrors anything at all. Indeed, if contemporary art were a mirror in which we could discern the zeitgeist, the overall culture would have a lot going for it. The art doesn’t tell us that it is not morning in America, and we don’t need it to. We know that by watching the evening news.

In the Guardian, Orhan Pamuk writes about Gentile Bellini’s portraits of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.

…Gentile Bellini’s “voyage east” and the 18 months he spent in Istanbul as “cultural ambassador” that is the subject of the small but rich exhibition at the National Gallery. Though it includes many other paintings and drawings by Bellini and his workshop, as well as medals and various other objects that show the eastern and western influences of the day, the centrepiece of the exhibition is, of course, Gentile Bellini’s oil portrait of Mehmed the Conqueror. The portrait has spawned so many copies, variations and adaptations, and the reproductions made from these assorted images have gone on to adorn so many textbooks, book covers, newspapers, posters, bank notes, stamps, educational posters and comic books, that there cannot be a literate Turk who has not seen it hundreds if not thousands of times.

No other sultan from the golden age of the Ottoman empire, not even Suleyman the Magnificent, has a portrait like this one. With its realism, its simple composition, and the perfectly shaded arch giving him the aura of a victorious sultan, it is not only the portrait of Mehmed II, but the icon of an Ottoman sultan, just as the famous poster of Che Guevara is the icon of a revolutionary. At the same time, the highly worked details – the marked protrusion of the upper lip, the drooping eyelids, the fine feminine eyebrows and, most important, the thin, long, hooked nose – make this a portrait of a singular individual who is none the less not very different from the citizens one sees in the crowded streets of Istanbul today. The most famous distinguishing feature is that Ottoman nose, the trademark of a dynasty in a culture without a blood aristocracy.

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society has been receiving more attention, in Time Out New York and The New York Times. Having seen them a few times, all I can say is if you haven’t, you should. You can finding listings of their next gigs, and recordings of some of the pieces, over at the Secret Society blog. From the Times:

DARCY JAMES ARGUE’S SECRET SOCIETY (Tuesday [April 18th]) As the name implies, this 18-piece big band is calibrated for maximum intrigue, with a sound that suggests Steve Reich minimalism as well as orchestral jazz in the lineage of Bob Brookmeyer (one of Mr. Argue’s mentors). The ranks of the band include such hale improvisers as the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, the tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin and the trombonist Alan Ferber. 10 p.m., Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, between Houston and Bleecker Streets, Lower East Side, (212) 614-0505; cover, $12. (Nate Chinen)

Brad Delong explains why he’s decided to experiment with video posts on his blog…

in video.

Cosmologists like big ideas. After all, their chosen subject is nothing less than the universe itself – how did it start, what is it made of and how will it end? Some of these big ideas have catchy names, such as the big bang, but others are more prosaic. However, these names can be misleading. Cosmic inflation, for example, might sound dull, but it is actually one of the boldest ideas in the history of physics and astronomy.

In a nutshell, inflation is the term used to describe an extremely short period of turbocharged expansion that happened immediately after the big bang. Moreover, after years of trying, astrophysicists have just reported the first experimental evidence that inflation actually happened. Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-workers made the breakthrough after a painstaking analysis of three years of data from the WMAP satellite.

more from The Guardian here.

F. Scott Hess appears in many of his paintings — perhaps most provocatively in The Painter and His Daughter (2003) and Riverbed (2004) — suggesting that they are all self-portraits in principle. In Time, Mind and Fate (all 2005), the mature, hard-eyed Hess appears in softer surrogate form, without his Mephistophelean goatee and moustache, as though he were a callow youth just starting his career as a painter (the clean-shaven painter pictured is, in fact, Hess’ student) and thus innocent as to the ways of the art world rather than a seasoned veteran of its wars, holding his own in it. Hess has described himself as a “reluctant realist,” and realism is not a fashionable position, suggesting that Hess casts himself as an alienated outsider, all the more so because his realism is grounded in Old Master craft and intelligence. And, even more subtly, in an Old Master formalism — more complicated, devious and expressively insinuating than modernist formalism — that informs the narratives which mask it. For Hess is as much a formalist — and a not-so-reluctant one, as I hope to show — as a realist. Like Old Master realism, Hess’ realism speaks in symbolic tongues and formal paradoxes, which is not exactly to speak plainly.

more from Donald Kuspit at artnet magazine here.

For decades, the world has been haunted by ominous and recurrent reports of impending demographic doom. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s neo-Malthusian manifesto, The Population Bomb, predicted mass starvation in the 1970s and ’80s. The Limits to Growth, published by the global think tank Club of Rome in 1972, portrayed a computer-model apocalypse of overpopulation. The demographic doom-saying in authoritative and influential circles has steadily continued: from the Carter administration’s grim Global 2000 study in 1980 to the 1992 vision of eco-disaster in Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance to practically any recent publication or pronouncement by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

What is perhaps most remarkable about the incessant stream of dire—and consistently wrong—predictions of global demographic overshoot is the public’s apparently insatiable demand for it. Unlike the villagers in the fable about the boy who cried wolf, educated American consumers always seem to have the time, the money, and the credulity to pay to hear one more time that we are just about to run out of everything, thanks to population growth. The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s disaster tale both sold millions of copies. More recently, journalist Robert D. Kaplan created a stir by trumpeting “the coming anarchy” in a 2000 book of the same name, warning that a combination of demographic and environmental crises was creating world-threatening political maelstroms in a variety of developing countries. Why, of all people, do Americans—who fancy themselves the world’s pragmatic problems-solvers—seem to betray a predilection for such obviously dramatic and unproved visions of the future?

more from The Wilson Quarterly here.

Taken together, the works selected by Verso embody the creation and development of a dissenting tradition that set out to question and subvert the established order. Yet while this was once the prin-cipal strength of these thinkers, it has become something of an Achilles heel. A collective reading exposes all that has gone wrong with radical thought in the 20th century. Traditions, and intellectual traditions in particular, rapidly ossify and degenerate into obscurantism. They have to be constantly refreshed, renovated and reinvented. It is time that radical thought broke out of its confining structures. It is time to put Adorno’s anxieties about mass culture and media to rest; to move forward from Baudrillard’s and Derrida’s postmodern relativism to some notion of viable social truth; and for criticism to stop messing about with signs and signifiers, and instead confront the increasing tendency of power towards absolutism.

more from the New Statesman here.

From Science:

The summer Olympics only come around every four years, and for elite athletes vying for a spot on their national teams, failure to qualify can be crushing. Now, researchers have taken a look at how the brain deals with dashed Olympic dreams. Their findings hint at a possible explanation for why athletes who’ve suffered tough losses often have a hard time getting back on top of their game.

Not surprisingly, the swimmers rated their own videos more wrenching to watch. And their brains showed signs of their emotional pain, with heightened activity in the parahippocampus and other emotion-related areas that have been implicated in depression. (None of the swimmers had a prior history of depression). Moreover, the premotor cortex–a region that plans actions such as the arm and body movements needed to swim–seemed to be inhibited when the swimmers watched their bad race, the researchers reported here 9 April at a meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. To Davis, this suggests that bummed out athletes might perform poorly because their premotor cortex isn’t sufficiently fired up.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Novelists should thank Gustave Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it begins again with him. He is the originator of the modern novel. Take the following passage, in which Frédéric Moreau, the hero of “Sentimental Education,” wanders through the Latin Quarter, alive to the sights and sounds of Paris: “At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses’ workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller’s stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps.” This was published in 1869, but might have appeared in 1969; many, perhaps most, novelists still sound essentially the same. Flaubert scans the streets indifferently, it seems, like a camera. Just as when we watch a film we no longer notice what has been excluded, so we no longer notice what Flaubert chooses not to notice. And we no longer notice that what he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness. How superb and magnificently isolate the details are — the women yawning, the unopened newspapers, the washing quivering in the warm air. Flaubert is the greatest exponent of a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of the habitual with the dynamic.

More here.

The responses and counter-responses to Mearsheimer and Walt’s controversial LRB piece on “The Lobby” (AIPAC) continue. This week’s include ones from Alan Dershowitz, Frank Solomon, and Robert Pfaltzgraff. There is also a comment on the affair by the editors of the London Review. (Mearsheimer and Walt are scheduled to respond next week.)

[The Editors]:Besides those published here and in the last issue, we have received a great many letters in response to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s piece – not all of them edifying, though we haven’t received any death threats, as one correspondent from New Jersey feared we would. There have been a number of accusations of anti-semitism, as Mearsheimer and Walt predicted, and some very unpleasant remarks about Arabs, but also dozens of messages praising the article. Most readers understood that Mearsheimer and Walt were writing about US foreign policy and its effects on the Middle East, though there have also been a few congratulatory messages of an anti-semitic nature. The letters accusing Mearsheimer and Walt of having written an ‘anti-semitic rant’ and those congratulating them for having exposed a ‘secret Jewish’ – or, as one individual felt the need to spell it, ‘J E W I S H’ – ‘conspiracy’ have something in common: they come from people who appear not to have read the piece, and who seem incapable of distinguishing between criticism of Israeli or US government policy and anti-semitism.

We don’t usually publish letters of simple praise, which meant that only letters putting the case against Mearsheimer and Walt appeared in the last number of the LRB. This led one correspondent to write: ‘Your obvious slant in the letters you have chosen to publish regarding the Israel Lobby establishes, once again, that Israeli apologists are alive and well and living at the London Review of Books.’ It may be impossible to write or publish anything relating to Israel without provoking accusations of bias.