In the Boston Review, Jon D. Hanson and Adam Benforado on how the Supreme Court makes justices more liberal.

While there have been a number of relatively reliable conservative justices over the years—Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Rehnquist being prime examples—and some important right-shifting exceptions—notably Felix Frankfurter, appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Byron White, appointed by John F. Kennedy—the tendency in recent decades to drift leftward has been strong enough to gain both popular and scholarly attention. Indeed, Larry J. Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, has suggested that about one quarter of confirmed nominees over the last half century have wound up “evolving from conservative to moderate or liberal.” . . .

So what actually accounts for this juridical drift? The short answer is that we are not who we think we are. Our inability to predict jurisprudential shifts of Supreme Court justices reflects a much broader phenomenon known to social psychologists as the “fundamental attribution error.” As countless experiments have shown, we generally assume that behavior is controlled by personality, attitudes, choice, character, and will. But these “dispositional” factors are often far less significant than “situational” factors such as unseen features of our environments and subconscious processes within us. By allowing disposition to eclipse situation, we often misunderstand why people behave as they do—and thus are surprised when our predictions fail. . .

At least three types of situational influences can have a large effect on a judge’s behavior and, hence, the extent of their juridical drift: the first is the unusual array of forces that sets judging apart from other lawyerly occupations such as legislating or advocacy; the second is the particular background and experiences of individual judges; the third is all the forces external to the court—including think tanks, the media, the academy, and public attitudes—that appear to strongly influence the judicial decision-making process.

Jill Abramson in The New York Times:

“Journalistas,” is an anthology that bills itself as the best writing by women journalists over the past 100 years. I first picked up the volume with annoyance – I hated the title and still do. It sounds silly and is redolent of all sorts of dopey words for female journalists, including one of my least favorites, editrix. And I’m not a fan of anthologies. Reading them is often like feasting on a meal of hors d’oeuvres. Such collections tend to dilute the narrative drive that makes much journalism compelling in the first place. And the idea of isolating “the best writing” from women journalists seemed dutiful, something aimed for Women’s History Month rather than a comfy couch on a cold day. Would this “greatest of” collection, limited to women, match up when read against the work of such lions as Joseph Mitchell or A. J. Liebling? And I have never been fully persuaded that women do really speak and write in an entirely different voice from men, so the idea of segregating them in a book did not thrill me.

But most of the pieces collected by Eleanor Mills (an editor at The Sunday Times of London) and Kira Cochrane (a novelist and former journalist) are so marvelous that I quickly cast aside my doubts. Their choice of writers, including Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West,Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy, as well as a number of British writers who were less familiar to me, is superb.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A new study finds that a cell once believed to serve neurons instead may perform the crucial function of regulating blood flow in the brain. The discovery challenges a basic assumption in neuroscience and could have implications for interpreting brain scans and understanding what occurs during brain trauma and Alzheimer’s disease. Oxygen is the main fuel of biological cells. It is transported throughout the body by way of the circulatory system. Not surprisingly, the brain is one of the most voracious consumers of oxygen, and a basic assumption in neuroscience is that the more active a brain region is, the more oxygen (and thus blood) its neurons require.

Star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes were traditionally thought of as housekeeping cells that helped nourish the brain under the direction of the neurons. The new study found that the astrocytes can directly control blood flow without being told. (Image from a human brain showing an astrocyte (green) reaching out to a blood vessel (yellow). The neurons (blue) are not in direct contact).

More here.

From The Organic Brew:

More here.  [Via Reformist Muslim.]

Very good article by Paul Rincon at the BBC, via Mark Trodden of Cosmic Variance:

In the 1970s, the theory known as the Standard Model was considered a triumph of theoretical physics, incorporating all that was then known about the interactions of sub-atomic particles.

Today it is regarded as incomplete, a mere stepping stone to something else.

Click here to see the Standard Model

The Standard Model cannot explain the best known of the so-called four fundamental forces: gravity; and it describes only ordinary matter, which makes up but a small part of the total Universe.

The $2.3bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern (The European Centre for Nuclear Research), which is paid for by contributions from Cern’s European member countries (including the UK), should reinvigorate physics’ biggest endeavour: a grand theory to describe all physical phenomena in nature.

About 100m below us, in a tunnel that runs in a ring for 27km (17 miles), the LHC is being assembled from its constituent parts like a vast, impossibly complex Meccano set.

When it is switched on for a pilot run in summer 2007, this huge physics experiment will collide two beams of particles head-on at super-fast speeds, recreating the conditions in the Universe moments after the Big Bang.

The beam collisions should create showers of new particles, revealing new physics beyond the Standard Model. In order for that to happen, the LHC needs to reach much higher energies than previous colliders.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise:

Get this, Italy has a law against making stuff up in public. Now, one vehement atheist is using the law to sue his former seminary classmate for allegedly conspiring with the Roman Catholic Church to promulgate false existential claims about a certain Jewish carpenter from Nazareth:

“I started this lawsuit because I wanted to deal the final blow against the Church, the bearer of obscurantism and regression,” [Luigi] Cascioli told Reuters.

Cascioli says Righi, and by extension the whole Church, broke two Italian laws. The first is “Abuso di Credulita Popolare” (Abuse of Popular Belief) meant to protect people against being swindled or conned. The second crime, he says, is “Sostituzione di Persona”, or impersonation. [AP]

The plaintiff will win his suit if he can convince a judge that Jesus didn’t exist.

Steve Silberman in Wired:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging – fMRI for short – enables researchers to create maps of the brain’s networks in action as they process thoughts, sensations, memories, and motor commands. Since its debut in experimental medicine 10 years ago, functional imaging has opened a window onto the cognitive operations behind such complex and subtle behavior as feeling transported by a piece of music or recognizing the face of a loved one in a crowd. As it migrates into clinical practice, fMRI is making it possible for neurologists to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders, evaluate drug treatments, and pinpoint tissue housing critical abilities like speech before venturing into a patient’s brain with a scalpel.

Now fMRI is also poised to transform the security industry, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy. I’m in a lab at Columbia University, where scientists are using the technology to analyze the cognitive differences between truth and lies. By mapping the neural circuits behind deception, researchers are turning fMRI into a new kind of lie detector that’s more probing and accurate than the polygraph, the standard lie-detection tool employed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for nearly a century.

More here.

Charles S. Maier reviews Tony Judt’s Postwar, in The Nation:

Writing in the early days of the cold war, Raymond Aron declared: “In our times for individuals as for nations the choice that determines all else is a global one, in effect a geographical choice. One is in the universe of free countries or else in that of lands placed under harsh Soviet rule.” Tony Judt cites this with approval but also includes Aron’s warning that politics compelled realism: “It is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable.” There is a breed of European liberal intellectual that admires Aron for his lucid tough-mindedness–a supercool Isaiah Berlin, closer in spirit to Clausewitz than to Herzen or Herder. Aron’s most consistent subtext was always: no kid stuff, no utopias, no illusions and, above all, no acting out. But let’s face it: The history of Europe has included massive spells of acting out, from the springtime of the peoples in 1848 to May ’68, from the French Revolution to the Velvet Revolution.

Postwar, Judt’s learned, massive and often quite wonderful summary of European public life since World War II, is a vast effort to square periodic acting out with Aron’s injunction to cast a cold eye–more precisely, to applaud Eastern Europe’s acting out in Budapest, Prague and finally in 1989, and to dismiss Parisian acting out in 1968.

More here.  [Tony Judt shown in photo.]

Editorial from Haaretz:

The public will decide which party should lead this camp, but it must be hoped that the Likud, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, will remain out of the picture. There is no longer room for a ruling party that is responsive to the interests and dreams of the settlers and leads the country to the brink of destruction solely because of a desire to retain settlements that have no right to exist and whose presence in the heart of Palestinian areas generates friction, hatred and exploitation for generations to come.

The coming days will reveal whether Kadima was just a passing political episode or a catalyst for a major and necessary political change. Granted, it was approved as an official party only two days ago, and it has no established political traditions to help it survive in the absence of its creator. But on the other hand, Kadima has a clear diplomatic message and a vital role to play in the stormy days to come.

More here.  [No agreement with the views expressed in Haaretz is implied. Thanks Stefany.]

From The Philosophy Gift Shop:

[Thanks to Stefany Ann Golberg.]

Lindsay at Majikthise sent us this 7×7 meme. And I’ve swallowed the bait:

1. Seven things to do before I die

(i) Hang glide (ii) Be a bartender at a semi-legal after-hours place in the city(iii) Beat Abbas at Scrabble by a margin of at least 300 points (iv) Learn Spanish (v) Learn statistical quantum mechanics (vi) Memorize the Divine Comedy (in English), and (vii) Drive down the 16,000-mile spine that is the pan-American highway, Alaska to Chile, and then drive off to Tierra del Fuego

2. Seven things I cannot do

(i) Whistle with my fingers (ii) Bake desserts, especially custards (iii) Yell (iv) Watch cricket (unless it’s done a la Bollywood musical) (v) Salsa (vi) Write poetry and (vii) Understand Hegel

3. Seven things that attract me to [New York City]

(i) Its deposits of time (ii) Its deposits of memory (iii) That it’s always used but never emptied or exhausted (iv) Its quiet places (v) Its non-parochialism (vi) That the instability of its parts makes a stable whole and home and (vii) The view of Manhattan while coming over the bridge on foot or on subway

4. Seven things I say most often

(i) Okey dokey (ii) I’m not sure (iii) You’re insane (iv) Will you let me finish (v) Too te too te too te too (vi) That’s trivially true and (vii) What’s your point

5. Seven books (or series) that I love

(i) Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Laclos (ii) Mimesis, Auerbach (iii) The Man Without Qualities, Musil (iv) The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bounaparte, Marx (v) The Great Transformation, Polyani (vi) The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson and (vii) Fact, Fiction, Forecast, Goodman

6. Seven movies I watch over and over again (or would if I had time)

(i) Sans Soliel, Chris Marker (ii) Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick (iii) My Beautiful Laundrette, Frears (iv) Apocalypse Now, Coppola (v) Touch of Evil, Welles (vi) The Matrix and (vii) LOTR

7. Seven people I want to join in, too

(i) Jason Kottke (ii) Matt Jones (iii) Sean Carroll (iv) The folks at Fistful of Euros (v) Cosma Shalizi (vi) Brad Delong and (vii) Darcy Argue

On the useful site, Evolutionary Theories in the Social Sciences, a working paper by Richard Nelson on evolutionary theories of cultural change.

[T]here are at least four intertwined “details” about the evolution of human culture that differentiate that process from biological evolution in important ways. They are, first, the often major role of human purpose, intelligence, and intellectual interaction, both in the generation of variety, and in the selection process. Second, selection criteria and mechanisms seldom involve directly issues of human survival or reproduction. The well being of certain kinds of organizations may be at stake, but often not. Third, the entity that is evolving − an aspect of human culture − is a phenomenon that cannot simply be characterized as the aggregation of the population of traits possessed by individuals, but has a collective property. These aspects of the evolution of human culture all are involved in a fourth important difference; the way human individuals and groups are involved with culture and its evolution is different in many ways from the manner in which genes and living entities are related in the evolution of species.

In Atopia, Sabine Müller looks at Alexander the Great’s India campaign as work of propoganda.

In 327 B.C. Alexander the Great started his Indian campaign after the conquest of Persia. He was not the first indeed. In the 6th century the Persian king Darius I had ordered to explore this unknown area and to establish a sea trade (Dihle 1998, 2-3). For Alexander the Indian war was a political necessity. First of all the legitimacy of the Macedonian king derived primarily from successes in campaigning. Alexander had to establish his position repeatedly with military triumphs and conquests. The opposition of the Macedonians against his new representation and policy as a king of Asia after the conquest of the Persian empire had increased and was a serious threat to his authority. Alexander had to continue his march, carry on the war and keep his men busy to avoid a widespread inner revolt. Moreover by adapting the Persian kingship he had taken over the duty to secure the Eastern borders of the empire and to establish his reign over the Indian satrapies following the example of the Achaemenid kings. He could not take the risk to ignore the imperial tradition and to leave India unconquered.

Waging war on India he moreover wanted to establish his declining authority. Nevertheless, his contemporaries regarded the campaign as an ambitious adventure to expand his new empire to the very limits of the world. The Athenian orator Aeschines commented: „Meanwhile Alexander had withdrawn to the uttermost regions of the North, almost beyond the borders of the inhabited world“ (Against Ctesiphon 165). So the tales about Alexander’s attempt to break on through to the end of the world were grounded on daily gossip of his very lifetime (Gunderson 1980, 5).

There can be no doubt that Alexander exploited the rumours for his propaganda. He had proved to be a master of creating his own myth in propagandist forms from the beginning of his reign on and he knew very well how to gain profit for his reputation as an invincible new Achilles from the ancient ideal of overcoming the present and conquer the whole world.

From the BBC:

A new documentary exploring the death of John F Kennedy claims his assassin was directed and paid by Cuba.

Rendezvous with Death, based on new evidence from Cuban, Russian and US sources, took three years to research.

One source, ex-Cuban agent Oscar Marino, said Havana had exploited Lee Harvey Oswald, who was arrested but shot dead before he could be tried. . .

Mr Marino told film director Wilfried Huismann that he knew for certain the assassination was an operation run by the Cuban secret service G2, but he declined to say whether it had been ordered by Mr Castro.

In Deutsche Welle, an interview with Huismann.

DW-WORLD: We know that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. But who ordered his assassination and why?

Wilfried Huismann: We settled the question of why in three years of research on this documentary in Mexico, USA and Cuba. Oswald had been an agent for the Cuban intelligence services since November 1962. He was a political fanatic and allowed himself to be used by the Cuban intelligence services to kill John F. Kennedy. It was a Cuban reaction to the repeated attempts of the Kennedy brothers, above all the younger Kennedy, Robert, to get rid of Fidel Castro through political assassination — a duel between the Kennedys and the Castros, which, like in a Greek tragedy, left one of the duelists dead.

From EGO Magazine:

“Study mathematics like a house on fire” – Charles Darwin

“We all stand on the shoulders of giants” – Isaac Newton

The two famous quotes by the founding fathers of biology and physics illustrates the crux of scientific inquiry. The first one was Darwin’s advice to young Francis Galton, a British polymath, geneticist and statistician, who later gave us some very useful statistical concepts such as correlation. The second quote is by Isaac Newton, who refers to the fact that science should not be a circular or lateral journey, but rather a cumulative progress: every scientist does not have to re-invent the scientific toolbox with each new question. Instead, science builds on the work and discoveries of those who went before us, while also constantly abstracting, refining and reordering of the components of the scientific framework.

But the lack of mathematics, or inability for biologists to stand on the shoulders of the mathematicians before them, and the resultant slow progress are precisely the characteristics that have become the bane of modern biology.

More here.

From Scientific American:

For the past few millennia, ants of the Attini tribe have tended gardens of fungus that they eat. Over the past few decades scientists have studied these agricultural insects, trying to understand how their gardens grew in the first place. Now a group of scientists have discovered that the ants carry a potent antibiotic bacteria in special pockets on their bodies that help control a parasite that can ruin their fungus harvest.

Entomologist Cameron Currie of the University of Wisconsin and his colleagues discovered the antibiotic bacteria in crescent-shaped pits on the exoskeletons of two species of Panamanian ants, Cyphomyrex longiscapus and C. muelleri, after scanning them with an electron microscope. The bacteria–of the Pseudonocarida genus–bloom on the individual face plates and other exterior parts of the ant, allowing it to rub the antiparasitic agent on its fungi crop. The ant also nurtures the microbe by secreting nutrients from special exocrine glands connected to the shallow pits.

More here.

In Words Without Borders, Marina Harss reviews one of my favorite novels, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966).

A first reading of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North can be a bewildering experience. The episodic manner in which the story is laid out means that important information about the characters and their past is left out, thus giving the reader a sense of being lost in a strange country where he has lost his bearings. In fact, the novel should probably be read in light of the ever-shifting political and cultural landscape of Sudan since 1899, the year in which the British took control. Salih’s book charts, through the experiences of its two central characters—the nameless narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed—two generations of the European-educated Sudanese elite through the period of domination by the British and into the early years of self-rule. At the time in which the book was written (it first appeared in Arabic in 1966), the country had just experienced yet another upheaval, the overthrow of the home-grown military government of General Ibrahim Abboud and the introduction of a parliamentary system. Salih writes in an introduction to the 2003 Penguin edition that “the general climate in Khartoum in those days was exhilarating. . . . For some reason my work became incorporated into this process of intellectual questioning.” This is, of course, not the end of the story, and since 1989, the Sudan has been ruled by the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation, a repressive Islamic government which has, among other things, banned the publication of Season of Migration.

Harry Magdoff, Marxist commentator and one of the co-editors of Monthly Review, died on New Year’s Day. John Bellamy Foster has this obituary in MRZine.

Harry Magdoff — coeditor of Monthly Review since 1969, socialist, and one of the world’s leading economic analysts of capitalism and imperialism — died at his home in Burlington, Vermont on January 1, 2006.

Harry Magdoff was born on August 21, 1913 in the Bronx, the son of working-class Russian Jewish immigrants. His father worked as a housepainter. He grew up in a New York immigrant community at a time when war and revolution were common topics of conversation. On one occasion, he overheard a debate in a local park in which it was pointed out that Britain “owned” India. He was shocked and began to explore the history of colonialism. In 1929, at the age of 15, he encountered Karl Marx for the first time, when he found a copy of Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy in a used bookstore. Reading the famous preface, he was stunned. “It blew my mind,” he was to recall. Marx’s “view of history was a revelation. I didn’t understand the rest of the book, which cost me a quarter, but that got me started reading about economics. We were going into the Depression then and I wanted to figure out what it all meant.” The “determining element” in his emerging radicalism, however, was what he witnessed at the demonstration of the unemployed in Union Square in March 1930.

Richard Sparks thinks about the best way to rebuild New Orleans, in Issues in Science and Technology.

New Orleans will certainly be rebuilt. But looking at the recent flooding as a problem that can be fixed by simply strengthening levees will squander the enormous economic investment required and, worse, put people back in harm’s way. Rather, planners should look to science to guide the rebuilding, and scientists now advise that the most sensible strategy is to work with the forces of nature rather than trying to overpower them. This approach will mean letting the Mississippi River shift most of its flow to a route that the river really wants to take; protecting the highest parts of the city from flooding and hurricane-generated storm surges while retreating from the lowest parts; and building a new port city on higher ground that the Mississippi is already forming through natural processes. The long-term benefits—economically and in terms of human lives—may well be considerable.

To understand the risks that New Orleans faces, three sources need to be considered. They are the Atlantic Ocean, where hurricanes form that eventually batter coastal areas with high winds, heavy rains, and storm surge; the Gulf of Mexico, which provides the water vapor that periodically turns to devastatingly heavy rain over the Mississippi basin; and the Mississippi River, which carries a massive quantity of water from the center of the continent and can be a source of destruction when the water overflows its banks. It also is necessary to understand the geologic region in which the city is located: the Mississippi Delta.

“Russia!” is an exhibition well worth seeing. Visitors who know little about Russian art will see many important works and come away with a more complex view of the country and its culture. But the question remains: What “new perspective” has been provided on the “new Russia”? An unpleasant suspicion hovers over the exhibition that the art and its history were secondary considerations for the organizers and that the main point was that the “exhibition was realized under the patronage of Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation.” Was it all, in effect, a big advertising campaign, a mammoth photo-op designed to establish the bona fides of the new Russian patrons of the new Guggenheim global museum while providing America’s former rival with a glamorous opportunity to exorcise fifty years of stereotypes (unsmiling commissars, the Gulag, the KGB, bad teeth, long lines, admirable but irritating dissidents, mafioso “New Russians” in leisure suits dripping with gold jewelry, commandos in black masks, tanks on city streets…)? . . . The patrons and sponsors of “Russia!” were no doubt pleased with the publicity as well as the exhibition; those concerned about the accurate presentation of art and history, which should be the Guggenheim Museum’s mission, will feel differently.

more from The New York Review of Books here.