John Allen Paulos at ABC News:

Given the increasing religiosity of American culture, it’s perhaps not too surprising that a new study out this month finds that Americans are not fond of atheists and trust them less than they do other groups. The depth of this distrust is a bit astonishing nonetheless.

More than 2,000 randomly selected people were interviewed by researchers from the University of Minnesota.

Asked whether they would disapprove of a child’s wish to marry an atheist, 47.6 percent of those interviewed said yes. Asked the same question about Muslims and African-Americans, the yes responses fell to 33.5 percent and 27.2 percent, respectively. The yes responses for Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and conservative Christians were 18.5 percent, 18.5 percent, 11.8 percent and 6.9 percent, respectively.

More here.

Afshin Molavi in Smithsonian Magazine:

Saudi Arabia, long bound by tradition and religious conservatism, is beginning to embrace change. You can see it in public places like Al-Nakheel. You hear it in conversations with ordinary Saudis. You read about it in an energetic local press and witness it in Saudi cyberspace. Slowly, tentatively, almost imperceptibly to outsiders, the kingdom is redefining its relationship with the modern world.

The accession of King Abdullah in August has something to do with it. Over the past several months he has freed several liberal reformers from jail, promised women greater rights and tolerated levels of press freedom unseen in Saudi history; he has reached out to marginalized minorities such as the Shiites, reined in the notorious religious “morals” police and taken steps to improve education and judicial systems long dominated by extremist teachers and judges. But a look around Al-Nakheel suggests another reason for change: demography.

Saudi Arabia is one of the youngest countries in the world, with some 75 percent of the population under 30 and 60 percent under 21; more than one in three Saudis is under 14.

More here.

From Medical News Today via Majikthise:

Kandel’s remarks came during an interview with Science & the City, the webzine of the New York Academy of Sciences, about his new memoir, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (Norton, March 2006).

“There’s very little funding, there’s political censorship about what one does and how one speaks about it,” he said. “I think the scientific community is extremely concerned about the future of this country given the restrictions on science at the moment.”

He added later that these restrictions are “all the more tragic since biomedical research is at a wonderfully productive point right now and in a position to have a profound impact on the treatment of disease. Moreover, the country is training the next generation of scientists and unless more funding is forthcoming, we cannot assure their future or the American leadership in science.”

Science & The City spoke with the 76-year-old Columbia University professor of Physiology and Cell Biology at the launch of his new book at the Academy Readers & Writers lecture series. Kandel is a member of the Academy’s President’s Council.

More here.

Sam Harris in TruthDig:

Editor’s Note: At a time when fundamentalist religion has an unparalleled influence in the highest government levels in the United States, and religion-based terror dominates the world stage, Sam Harris argues that progressive tolerance of faith-based unreason is as great a menace as religion itself.  Harris, a philosophy graduate of Stanford who has studied eastern and western religions, won the 2005 PEN Award for nonfiction for The End of Faith, which powerfully examines and explodes the absurdities of organized religion. Truthdig asked Harris to write a charter document for his thesis that belief in God, and appeasement of religious extremists of all faiths by moderates, has been and continues to be the greatest threat to world peace and a sustained assault on reason.

An Atheist Manifesto

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?

More here.

See how he nak’d and fierce does stand,
Cuffing the thunder with one hand,
While with the other he does lock,
And grapple, with the stubborn rock:
From which he with each wave rebounds,
Torn into flames, and ragg’d with wounds,
And all he says, a lover dressed
In his own blood does relish best.

This is the only banneret
That ever Love created yet:
Who though, by the malignant stars,
Forcèd to live in storms and wars,
Yet dying leaves a perfume here,
And music within every ear:
And he in story only rules,
In a field sable a lover gules.

These closing stanzas of Andrew Marvell’s “The Unfortunate Lover” are among the most beautiful and chilling in English poetry. As the anonymous lover thrashes through his furious death and transformation into a gorgeous, grotesque work of art (In a field sable a lover gules might be paraphrased as “On a black field, a red lover”), Marvell too transforms his perception, from empathy and engagement into something like connoisseurship. I’ve come to think of “The Unfortunate Lover,” alongside a handful of other Marvell poems, as recasting in elegantly rhymed and discordant words Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” paintings: those astonishing orange, pink, blue, red, and lavender canvases of suicides, car crashes, race riots, and electric chairs. In a field sable a lover gules even suggests a fancy alternative designation for, say, Deaths on Red (1962) or Red Disaster (1963), and Marvell’s invocations of Death (“Yet dying leaves a perfume here”) and Disaster (“malignant stars”) suggest the series title itself.

more from poetryfoundation.org here.

What motivated you to write a book on the history of Russian philosophy?

I came to Russian philosophy via German literature, when I was fired by the use Thomas Mann made of the ‘Russian’ element. That led to an interest in the Russian intellectual tradition in its own right. Tracing the German philosophical sources for characteristic Russian attitudes and the metamorphosis of German aesthetic idealism in Russia opened up a whole field in the history of ideas. But I’d like to distinguish between ‘philosophy’ and ‘thought’ in the Russian context. For the best part of two centuries the subject studied in Russia and the West was ‘Russian social and political thought’, which effectively meant the utilitarian and egalitarian, activist tradition leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. In my lifetime, which coincided with the Cold War, the Soviet Union insisted this was the only body of Russian thought that mattered; that alternatives had ceased to exist after 1917. Most Western scholars and university departments followed suit, because the most urgent political question in the world was how Communism was born and how Russia came to be Soviet. I formed a different view because was lucky enough to study with the nephew of one of Russia’s last significant religious philosophers, Semyon Frank, who died in 1950. My subject was born thirty years ago when I traced the work of Frank and his contemporaries back to their nineteenth-century inspiration in two great Russian-style philosophers, Aleksei Khomiakov and Vladimir Solovyov.

more from Philosophy Now here.

In his two philosophical masterpieces—the Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method, 1637) and Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1642)—René Descartes affected an autobiographical mode. He aimed to “delineate my life as in a picture” and urged the reader to treat his text as a personal story—even a kind of fable—of a man who, though educated in one of “the most celebrated schools of Europe,” found himself beset with doubts and uncertainties from which he managed to extricate himself. Initially, the self-portrait strikingly anticipates that of Goethe’s Faust, who, having mastered philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and even theology, sees himself, at the end of his studies, as “a poor fool . . . no wiser than I was before.” Descartes’s Narrator, realizing that he must seek within, then describes his meditative itinerary, which leads to the discovery of the “true method by which to arrive at the knowledge of whatever lay within the compass of my powers.”

How close to Descartes as a person is this philosophical fable’s Narrator? The philosophy itself is not a fable—or at least it has to be judged by the same criteria to which any philosophical claim is subject. I am speaking rather of the portrait that Descartes paints of himself as a seeker of truths beyond rational doubt.

more from Bookforum here.

Reuters in Yahoo News:

Ginger can kill ovarian cancer cells while the compound that makes peppers hot can shrink pancreatic tumors, researchers told a conference on Tuesday. Their studies add to a growing body of evidence that at least some popular spices might slow or prevent the growth of cancer. The study on ginger was done using cells in a lab dish, which is a long way from finding that it works in actual cancer patients, but it is the first step to testing the idea. Dr. Rebecca Liu, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, and colleagues tested ginger powder dissolved in solution by putting it on ovarian cancer cell cultures. It killed the ovarian cancer cells in two different ways — through a self-destruction process called apoptosis and through autophagy in which cells digest themselves, the researchers told a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

A second study found that capsaicin, which makes chili peppers hot, fed to mice caused apoptosis death in pancreatic cancer cells, said Sanjay Srivastava of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

More here. (Thanks to Kirsten)

From Science:

Living to a ripe old age takes more than a healthy lifestyle: you’ve got to have the right combination of genes. The question is, which ones? Scientists now have several promising candidates thanks to the discovery of a gene variation in humans that appears to increase lifespan and lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The finding could eventually lead to the development of life-extending drugs.

Studies of worms and fruit flies show that variations, or polymorphisms, in a single gene can affect how long these creatures live. Scientists think humans carry tens or even hundreds of related polymorphisms. But they’re tough to identify –researchers have found only a few since the mid-1990s. In 2003, Nir Barzilai and Gil Atzmon, who study aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, discovered that people with a certain polymorphism of the cholesterol-influencing gene CETP lived longer than those without it. Now the researchers have identified another part of the longevity code.

More here.

Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times Magazine:

A thick afternoon fog enveloped the trees and streetlights of The Hague, a placid city built along canals, a city of art galleries, clothing boutiques, Vermeers and Eschers. It is not for these old European boulevards, however, that The Hague figures in the minds of men and women in places as far apart as Uganda, Sarajevo and now Sudan. Rather, it symbolizes the possibility of some justice in the world, when the state has collapsed or turned into an instrument of terror. The Hague has long been home to the International Court of Justice (or World Court), a legal arm of the United Nations, which adjudicates disputes between states. During the Balkan wars, a tribunal was set up here for Yugoslavia; it has since brought cases against 161 individuals. It was trying Slobodan Milosevic — the first genocide case brought against a former head of state — until his unexpected death last month. And now the International Criminal Court has begun its investigations into the mass murders and crimes against humanity that have been committed, and are still taking place, in the Darfur region of Sudan.

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

In “Why?” (Princeton; $24.95), the Columbia University scholar Charles Tilly sets out to make sense of our reasons for giving reasons. In the tradition of the legendary sociologist Erving Goffman, Tilly seeks to decode the structure of everyday social interaction, and the result is a book that forces readers to reëxamine everything from the way they talk to their children to the way they argue about politics.

In Tilly’s view, we rely on four general categories of reasons. The first is what he calls conventions—conventionally accepted explanations.

More here.

Jennifer Viegas at the Discovery Channel:

Testosterone-fueled boys created most prehistoric cave art, according to a recently published book by one of the world’s leading authorities on cave art.

The theory contradicts the idea that adult, tribal shaman spiritual leaders and healers produced virtually all cave art.

It also explains why many of the images drawn in caves during the Pleistocene, between 10,000 and 35,000 years ago, somewhat mirror today’s artwork and graffiti that are produced by adolescent males.

“Today, boys draw the testosterone subjects of a hot automobile, fighter jet, Jedi armor, sports, direct missile hit, etc.— all of the things they associate with the Adrenalin of success,” said R. Dale Guthrie, author of “The Nature of Paleolithic Art.”

More here.

David P. Barash in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Noting the role of the Royal Air Force in saving his country during the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill observed that never had so many owed so much to so few. We owe a great deal — indeed, literally everything — to evolution, and yet never have so many said and written so much about something they understood so poorly. Not that evolution is all that difficult to understand. Rather, so many people have such strong feelings about it, often connected to so many regrettable stock phrases, that clear thought has often been obscured. This is especially unfortunate in today’s intellectual — or, more to the point, anti-intellectual — climate, with the Bush administration persistently seeking to trump science with ideology.

Notwithstanding recent victories of science over so-called intelligent design in Pennsylvania and Utah, this particular struggle is not likely to end soon. The following catalog of misconceptions, along with responses, is therefore offered for scholars who may well find themselves confronting voices whose amplitude and frequency exceed their wisdom…

More here.

In Paik’s art and ideas, technology is an enabling rather than determining factor in a dynamic remix—offering the opportunity to expand beyond the artificial boundaries established by the art world, and to function outside the categories used by critics and art historians to package the interpretation of art. Paik was a master of working within institutions, surprising everyone by getting them to cooperate and support his projects. But he was also an activist who sought to change the ways museums and foundations worked, producing a momentum of support for younger artists—even while, true to his Fluxus roots, he was not interested in establishing a “school of video art.” He truly enjoyed challenging himself and finding energy in all forms of music and creative expression. Wanting to never be bored, he felt that change and surprise facilitated the making of art, whose greatest power is to give us new ways to observe and understand the world around us. Paik did just that.

more from Artforum here.

Critics are not often enthusiasts. There is a sense of keeping cool or detached, and even a phrase to describe it: critical distance. Sontag had the opposite impulse: critical intimacy. She claims in the introduction to Against Interpretation that she can write only about what truly engages her—“passionate interest” is her formulation. What it comes down to is that she criticizes what she loves—which made her work and her life a matter of such great intensity. As Craig Seligman wrote in his remembrance of her, “The greatness was in her cool, hardheaded essays on aesthetic matters; as an aesthete defending the senses against the intellect, the new against the established, silence against noise, she was magnificently coldblooded. But she was hotblooded and hotheaded when she turned to politics.” Sontag was hot, sharp, passionate about her subjects, though the prose in her essays is always careful, deliberate, and calm.

more from The Believer here.

From Science:

Here’s the long and short of it: A lens that electronically switches its focus from far to near may someday provide an alternative to traditional bifocal lenses.

The natural lens in your eye is supposed to bend light rays and focus them on the retina at the back of the eye. If the eye is misshapen or not strong enough to do the job itself, glasses help bend the light rays through a process called refraction–the same one that makes a stick appear to kink when one end is submerged in water. Just how much a given lens bends light depends on its precise shape and curvature. Bifocals are essentially two lenses ground into a single piece of glass or plastic. In contrast, the new electronic lens is flat and focuses light through a phenomenon known as diffraction, in which light waves overlap either peak-to-trough to cancel one another out, or peak-to-peak to reinforce one another.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Play hooky, disappear for the weekend, have a fling, binge-shop like a Wall Street divorcée. Spontaneity can be a healthy defiance of routine, an expression of starved desire, some psychologists say. Yet for scientists who study mental illness and addiction, impulsive behavior — the tendency to act or react with little thought — has emerged as an all-purpose plague.

In recent years, studies have linked impulsiveness to higher risks of smoking, drinking and drug abuse. People who attempt suicide score highly on measures of impulsivity, as do adolescents with eating problems. Aggression, compulsive gambling, severe personality disorders and attention deficit problems are all associated with high impulsiveness, a problem that affects an estimated 9 percent of Americans, according to a nationwide mental health survey completed last year.

More here.

“The France team that won the 1998 World Cup was hailed as a symbol of a new harmonious multiracial nation. But now the country is racked by riots and football has become a racial battleground. Andrew Hussey, in Paris, speaks to the heroes of the World Cup-winning team and traces how the dream of 98 became a nightmare of violence and fear.”

From The Observer:

It is now less than eight years since Didier Deschamps, the stand-in captain of the France football team, held the World Cup before an exultant crowd in the Stade de France. But the triumph of his team, such a symbol of progressive multiculturalism, seems already to belong to another era. This much was clear to me on a cold night in early March this year in the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. I was there to watch Paris Saint-Germain take on Olympique de Marseille, in the so-called Derby de France, which is traditionally the biggest and most hard-fought event in the French footballing calendar.

There is a long history of rivalry and, more latterly, violence between their supporters, who between them represent the two polarities of French life: the hard-headed metropolitan arrogance of Paris and the freewheeling, exhibitionism of the Mediterranean south.

More here.  [Thanks to Mark Blyth.]

“She loves hip-hop, decorating her jeans and pillow fights. So how does she manage as Mrs Rushdie?”

Giles Hattersley in the London Times:

It might have been the way she slumped into her seat like an overgrown teenager, or the second time she said “dude”. Whenever it was, at some point I began to ask myself the same question that bitchy members of the London literati did two years ago: why on earth did Salman Rushdie marry her? She may be beautiful, have an arts degree from Clark, the American liberal college, and speak five languages (Hindi, Tamil, Italian, Spanish and English), but something about Padma Lakshmi makes it hard to take her seriously.

“So, dear,” The Sun once asked, “what first attracted you to the millionaire novelist Salman Rushdie?” Probably because of such remarks Lakshmi rarely grants interviews, but she is in London and keen to promote her British acting debut in ITV’s Sharpe’s Challenge — in which she happens to be very good.

It is also half-term for her stepson Milan, Rushdie’s eight-year-old from his third marriage. Despite her husband’s unhappy memories of the capital (years of living under a fatwa), the couple still spend about four months a year here. Usually they reside in Manhattan.

We meet in a members’ bar near her Notting Hill flat. She arrives late to a collective turning of heads. Looking bored in a vest and jeans, her beauty is still transcendent although her voice does rather spoil the effect. She is a nasal valley girl…

More here.

Dear Readers,

Alas, we did not win in either of the categories that we were finalists in. Best Group Blog was won by Shakespeare’s Sister with FireDogLake as runner up, while the Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition was won by Echidne of the Snakes with Bag News Notes the runner up.

Our sincerest congratulations to them, and to all the other winners. Please do click on the above links and check them out.

We feel honored to have made it into the top ten finalists in each category that we were nominated it, and we’ll be back next year to CRUSH everyone else, dammit! (And if that doesn’t work, maybe we’ll start our own %*&*@&%@$ awards. Yeah… that’s the ticket!)

Seriously though, thanks so much to everyone who took the time to vote for us. We really do appreciate it a lot, and please do keep visiting and telling others about 3QD, will you?

For more details and the winners of all the other categories, click here.