By Namit Arora

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.

Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.

From the start, Herodotus had trouble with the Iliad. He found it odd that the Trojans, ‘when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single [Spartan] girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam’. He doubted that Helen could have been taken from Sparta against her wishes, and even if she was, wasn’t that deed the work of a rogue, unworthy of such a large mobilization by the Greeks? What also didn’t sit well with his sense of human nature was the response of the otherwise reasonable Trojans to the Greek invasion, for ‘surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children and their city, merely that Paris might possess Helen.’

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

Anniversaries be they of marriages or births, are generally a time to celebrate (another lap around the sun, yeah!). They can also be a time of darker speculation: “What if I had stayed single, gotten married, married someone else, hadn’t been so career-focused, or hadn’t been born?” These “what if” scenarios are the subject of many novels and films (e.g., A Christmas Carol, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Family Man, and It's a Wonderful Life), because they link regret, acceptance, and possibility.

Anniversaries also focus our attention on particular dates or years. Two years ago, there was much celebration of the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth (1809) and the sesquicentennial of his publication of his On the Origin of Species (1859). In 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty and Edwin Drake discovered oil in western Pennsylvania. The competitive pursuit of liberty through the consumption of oil has characterized much of the late 19th and all of the 20th Century. With regard to the recent sesquicentennial of 1859, my purpose is not so much to ask “what if?” (as in the stories and films cited earlier) as it is to ask “what now?” The result is that I hope to offer a way to incorporate the full implications of Darwin, Drake, and Mill’s work to get us to the next big anniversary in 2059.

How did we get to 1859? To understand Darwin, we need to recall Malthus whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population established the idea that food production increased arithmetically (or linearly) while populations increased geometrically (or exponentially), thus growing populations would rapidly outstrip their food supply. Malthus' insights informed both Darwin's and Alfred Russel Wallace's formulations of natural selection and they acknowledged him explicitly in their writings.

Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 is most remembered for the principle of natural selection and its popularization into phrases like Herbert Spencer's (1864) “Survival of the fittest” and Alfred Tennyson's (1849) “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Even today, a reference to The Origin evokes the idea that life is hard and competitive. In a word: Darwinian.

The second great contribution of 1859 was Edwin Drake's discovery of oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania, which launched the American petroleum industry. Oil is an astonishingly energy dense material. A single 42 gallon barrel of oil may contain the energy-equivalent of about 25,000 hours of human labor. Oil also provides the chemical feed-stock for many items that we consider to be essential (e.g., chemicals including plastics and pharmaceuticals). Cheap, readily available oil has given us lots of energy to do many things and make lots of stuff.

The third great contribution of 1859 was John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which advocated for the moral and economic freedom of individuals from government and other citizens. Mention Mill today and terms like utilitarianism, libertarianism (both upper and lower case), and individual freedom come to mind immediately. On Liberty is perhaps best known for the phrase: “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

Combined with the seemingly inexaustible supply of cheap energy in the form of oil, competition and individuality became the defining metaphors for the development of western civilization in the late 19th and 20th centuries. A selective reading of the lessons of 1859 would be that life, including the human condition, is a struggle, energy is cheap and abundant, and the pursuit of individuality and freedom are paramount. Does this not sound like America in the first decade of the 21st Century?

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by Joy Icayan

I was recently in one of those hole-in-the-wall drinking places with friends from the human rights community. It was a rather decrepit place, just a bunch of plastic tables and monobloc chairs and a small booth that served dirt cheap beer and street food. In the mornings it was transformed into a canteen. The toilets in the restroom didn’t flush. Vendors peddling nuts, eggs and apples came in and out. We went there at least once a week to talk of politics and personal lives and take advantage of the cheap beer. That night, we had brought a friend—a French volunteer. She was in her sixties, spending her retirement visiting the world and talking to people. It was her first time in my country, and since she seemed game for everything, including travelling alone to mining-affected indigenous communities six hours from the city, we decided to bring her to our little hidden place.

Now this place had a videoke machine in one corner and a television forever tuned to a horse racing channel in another. The videoke machine had one of those preprogrammed reels of scantily clad women, mostly Caucasian women in bikinis running along a beach, or pole dancing or walking or fixing their hair, or pouting at the camera. It was a constant barrage of cleavage and thighs and it went on whatever song you chose; eventually the clips repeated themselves, or the same women repeated themselves in different ‘storylines’. We were used to it; there were other reels you could choose, reels of marine life or cartoon characters, but most machines played the clips of the women. That night, someone from another table had requested to turn the machine on, and started a bad rendition of a love song.

Our French visitor stared at the video going on, it was just the camera doing a quick close up scan of a pretty woman’s body. We had been talking about mining. “Stop me,” she said “before I smash that screen.”

It had been something of a joke, of course, but until that moment none of us had seriously thought about what was wrong with the clips. Annoying and silly, yes, but that was it. It was everywhere–in the cheap bars, in rural clubs, even in some homes. And there was something rather ironic to that; that we would often meet there to discuss activism and the rights of vulnerable people, that at that time one of the most controversial bills in the Congress was something on reproductive health, a bill that proposed access to information and methods of reproductive health, and we couldn’t quite understand how people, a sizable portion of the population could oppose that.

“I really am going to smash that screen,” she said, and we knew her enough at that point, respected her guts, that we thought we had better leave.

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by Tom Jacobs

As almost every individual possesses some article which in itself is of little value, but in a collective view, becomes of real importance, the patrons of this institution solicit the attention of their fellow-citizens to the Museum, and request their aid towards forming a collection which promises fair to become an object of public utility.

–John Pintard, writing on behalf of the Tammany society, 1791

I am staring at a mastodon tooth and a squid beak. I bought them on ebay a few years back and they have become among my most prized possessions. This tooth was once in the jaw of a creature that lumbered through Kentucky around ten to twenty thousand years ago. This beak once in the body of a creature that inhabited the abyss where we can’t go (at least not without considerable applications of technology). We aren’t meant to be there, in those dark spaces of the earth. Yet they call to us, they interpellate us. We can’t not respond.

Let me begin with a story.

The first reported discovery of the bones of what would come to be known as the Mastodon was in 1705 in the little village of Claverack, right off the Hudson River and about seventy miles north of New York City. No one knew quite what to make of it, but the skull was itself interesting on many fronts—it had a strange looking hole in the middle of it, suggesting cyclopean possibilities.

Unearthed bones of the mastodon had been a point of considerable interest to American natural philosophers since the time of Cotton Mather, who speculated about their origins in a series of letters he sent to the Royal Society in 1712. Mather maintained that the fossil teeth were scientific proof of the existence of the human giants mentioned in the Bible, of the giants who walked in the earth, waaay back in the day. He writes in a letter of November 17, 1712.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

There are many things that fascinate me about Calcutta: the way it remains poised between the stagnant and the revolutionary, the contrast between the ubiquitous echoes of history and the seeming timelessness of much of the city's life, the faded intimations of a once grand modernist city, the oddly archetypal characters who wander its streets, the distinct discrete obsessions of its inhabitants. Perhaps all cities are seen this way by those who love them and perhaps such love is unjustifiable and untranslatable. The people I tell to visit are sometimes disappointed, and I can understand why; the city can seem oddly provincial for a place that was once so central to empire and India.

But, by way of partial and possibly incoherent justification, here are a few stories from the city, excerpts from a collection of memories gathered when I was working for a newspaper there. To me they seem to capture something essential about the city – the sort of story someone who knew the city would listen to with immediate recognition and often an exasperated fondness.

I

As soon as he heard what I was there for, the elderly waiter straightened up a little, handed his grimy rag (used for everything from wiping down tables to cleaning plates) to the junior waiter who followed him around and came and stood next to me.

“What you must understand,” he said without preamble, “is that you can't just mix rice and meat together in any way. There is a process. And these days people come in asking for chicken biryani. How can that be? You tell me how that can be.” He was getting quite agitated now. “I tell them, biryani has to be made from meat. It is not a biryani otherwise. You can't boil chicken and mix it with rice. And people sell that as biryani.

And it must have some fat on it. You even get people complaining about that. You should write about it in your newspaper. Wait one minute.”

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by Misha Lepetic

Financial markets have a very safe way of predicting the future. They cause it.
George Soros, Der Spiegel

Purpose-built cities are nothing new, especially when an authoritarian government seeks to establish a new capital far from the distractions and chaos of the commercial capital. Recent and well-known examples include Abuja, Naypyidaw and Brasilia, but one can go further back into history to find others: St Petersburg and Washington, D.C. are principal examples from the 18^th century, and Ayutthaya was established in 1350 by King U Thong and remained the capital of the Kingdom of Siam until it was razed by the Burmese Army in 1767. Nature has been equally adept at forcing the hand of governments, however: Belmopan, the current capital of Belize, was built following 1961’s Hurricane Hattie, which nearly leveled Belize City (then the capital of British Honduras, if we are to be perfectly accurate in these matters).

Unilaterally decreeing the establishment of a city is not without its risks, of course. The urban form acquires its robustness through a complex, dynamic and unpredictable confluence of people engaging in economic, military and cultural activity. Another crucial ingredient is any city’s contextual relationship to the rest of the world, usually represented by access to either resources or control of valuable trade routes. Thus it is not surprising to learn of the fate of Akhetaten, hardly outlived by its founder, the Pharaoh Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamen. Now known as Amarna, it was founded by Akhenaten’s vision of a society unified through the worship of a single cult, that of the Sun or the Aten. However, 1353 BC proved to be a bit early for the monotheistic worldview, and following Akhenaten’s death both the city and his theological innovation were abandoned within a few years.

More recently, the purpose-built city has served another function: that of goosing GDP. It is well known that the Chinese government has thrown itself wholesale into the business of city-building. Depending on who is counting, there are upwards of dozens of metropolises designed to accommodate anywhere from 100,000 to millions of new inhabitants. While I have already written about at the over-reach of urban planning in attempting to design entire cities as effective places for people to live, in this case it is much more interesting to look at why these cities are being built in the first place.

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by Quinn O'Neill

For parents wishing to introduce their children to a scientific worldview, two new books may make the job a bit easier. Daniel Loxton’s book “Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be” recently won the 2010 Lane Anderson Award in the young reader category. It was also a finalist for the Silver Birch Award and is in the running for a third Canadian book award for children’s nonfiction. For the curious, the National Center for Science Education offers an excerpt here. The other book, Richard Dawkins latest, “The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True,” makes a clear distinction between myth and reality while explaining a range of natural phenomena. Both books are aimed at kids in the 8- to 13-year-old range but could certainly be understood and enjoyed by those much older.

Introducing children to current scientific thinking about human origins and other natural phenomena may seem like a no-brainer for many parents, but for others the idea may not hold much appeal. Jeremy Paxman interviewed Dawkins on the subject of myth and reality and raised what I think is an interesting question: are myths more comforting than reality? Or perhaps we should ask instead, “are delusions more comforting than reality?” since myths generally aren’t comforting unless one believes that they’re true. I think the answer is both yes and no.

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By Namit Arora

Public corruption is often defined as the misuse of public office for private gain. It tends to thrive when discretionary power is vested in officials amid a weak architecture of deterrence. A persistent feature of all societies, public corruption is today considered a problem of the developing world. Examples include politicians, bureaucrats, and other officials taking bribes to influence outcomes in business licensing, awarding contracts, registering property, citing traffic violations, disbursing education funds, and so on.

The stakes rise dramatically with neoliberal reforms, when the state begins to transfer public assets to private firms—such as land, mines, and airwaves—usually under weak regulatory, supervisory, and legal frameworks. For instance, the big Bofors scandal of pre-reforms India of the 1980s involved $25 M, whereas the 2G telecom scam last year may have cost the exchequer $39 B. It is said that as developing countries turn into developed nations, bribery turns into another means of influence: lobbying.

It is widely believed that public corruption hurts macroeconomic growth. However, research on the impact of corruption on growth is not conclusive. China, among the most corrupt countries, has one of the highest growth rates. Perhaps China's GDP would have grown even faster without corruption, but that's a conjecture; theoretical explanations for China cut both ways. Some researchers now favor the view that the impact of corruption on macroeconomic growth depends on the nature of the regime and the kind of corruption there is. Some kinds can align in favor of growth, others against. Corruption of course has wider implications beyond growth. Various studies have shown its adverse impact in the microeconomic realm. Higher corruption reduces entrepreneurial activity, allocates talent less efficiently, and worsens services integral to human development. Finally, public corruption also eats away at social institutions, undermines the rule of law, erodes social trust, and can jeopardize public safety and hurt the environment.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

In 1977 an Australian media tycoon changed the world of cricket. His name was Kerry Packer, but in his approach to life and business there was little to separate him from Rupert Murdoch. Before Packer intervened, a game of cricket lasted five days, was played by players wearing white and required a level of athleticism that would not shame a Chess or Scrabble champion.

Packer’s intervention was the result of a tussle with the Australian Cricket Board over TV rights for his Channel Nine operations in Australia. He set up a league of his own outside the control of International Cricket Council, a coterie of largely English gentlemen who had run the game internationally as their fiefdom. Packer paid out large sums of money to attract the best players across the world, dressed them in colored clothes, reduced the duration of the game to a day or sometimes a night when it was played under floodlights. By the time of his reconciliation with the ICC a couple of years later, he had changed the game forever.

Thirty years later, as the power and wealth of the Board of Control for Cricket in India increased thanks to a growing economy and India’s success in the very form of the game promoted by Packer, the ICC already under siege, ceded a large measure of power to the Indian body which launched another league of its own, the Indian Premier League (IPL). Unlike the Packer League, the IPL, which is as avowedly commercial in its motivations, has done little to change or improve cricket. Rather, in bringing together Indian corporate interests and politicians looking for both money and power through their association with the game, the game as organized by the IPL has come to resemble a bout organized by the World Wrestling Federation. In the process IPL has actually managed to make Packer look like a visionary saint.

The media

On the face of it the story of cricket may have little to do with how the Indian media is shaping, but the same process the feeds an appetite for cricket, a growing middle class with money to spend and an economy that is expanding at the rate of 7 to 10 per cent every year, is feeding a demand for media. A recent survey in the Economist on newspapers across the world reported that India was a outsize exception to the worldwide trend of decreasing circulation and revenue, “Between 2005 and 2009 the number of paid-for daily newspapers in the country increased by 44% to 2,700 and the total number of newspapers rose by 23% to more than 74,000… In 2008 India overtook China to become the leader in paid-for daily circulation, with 110m copies sold each day. Newspaper and magazine advertising expenditure increased by 32% in the year to June 2010, according to Nielsen India, a market-research firm.’’

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“Several males hold a hand or foot of the rival so the victim can be damaged at will.”
— Poet C.K. Williams on chimpanzee behavior in his poem “Apes”

Survivable Bliss

seeing DNA’s serpentine double helix
a thought occurs that Adam’s snake
hissing from its tree was another kind of knowing
not thought of in those many-years BC when,
like the louts we were, tooling up,
grasping at straws, muddling in the muck of our minds,
pulling up gratuitous finds: dirt-caked fistfuls of hard nuggets
easy for even a simple basket of synapses to hold,
we set these word-stones before us on a log to see
and try to understand a new perplexity

We arranged our grunts in natural tropes
that came easy enough to temporarily allay
this snake’s hard truth, now so painful
to our ears, as if a thousand-mile bank of
the speakers of Metallica
had suddenly boomed in Paradise
impossible to unplug even to today
when what we really need is a little quiet;
not a silence of the lambs, just the bare stillness
required to hear something other than a hiss
so as to learn to spin the chimpanzee twists of DNA
into simple survivable bliss
‘
;
by Jim Culleny
9/9/11

by Mara Jebsen

At the Highline on a schizophrenic New York morning:

It was a misty grey day, and I walked under a short underpass, and when I came out on the other side– it was a hot, sunny day. Then it rained again. “Welcome to New York” I said to myself, though I’ve lived in New York nine years. It is a place that won’t resolve itself.

I love the Highline, and when I go there, in my head I always sing “You must take the A train, if you wanna shoo-be-doo way up in Harlem”. I took the A train, but not all the way to Harlem—at 18^th street I stayed and smelled the marvelous grassy stuff growing in light-green whorls around and over rusty train tracks. I wondered whether it was worth taking a picture of them. I did, and it wasn’t worth it.

The camera was stupid and I was stupid to use it. There wasn’t a thing in the photo to help me communicate how I like the feeling of peeking. Every once in a while you’ll get a glimpse of the skeleton–the insides of a thing, like a city, for example. I think the Highline is so calming because it bares its bones, its history. It isn’t totally razed over and new. It allows ghost trains to ride over abandoned tracks, but the heathery grass-stuff is so elegant that the image asserts a reconciliation between the hopes of old technologies, old purposes and. . . not necessarily the future, but the now.

These train tracks also remind me of other ones, which were heaped with goats and garbage.

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by George Wilkinson

The points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful ciruiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Web of his Soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean full of symbols for his spiritual eye.

–Keats, letter to Reynolds

The webs of orb spiders are truly fascinating structures. Although the details of their construction are adjusted to local conditions, members of a given species create highly characteristic patterns. It is thought that orb webs arose once in the spider lineage, aided by two interacting innovations: extreme behavioral stereotypy, leading to regularly spaced radial lines and sticky spirals; and the ability to suspend webs on frames of structural threads, allowing spinning of webs just about anywhere.

The web is an extended phenotype of the spider. It modifies and interacts with the environment, and in turn influences spider health, since an effective web leads to a well-fed spider. Since web construction requires a complex sequence of actions by the animal, it is also an external display of the spider’s health. There is a fascinating literature on the effects of pesticides and drugs of abuse on spider webs.

I came to the topic of spider webs from this Wired article, chronicling parasites that subvert the behavior of their hosts. Among these, Hymenoepimecis wasps lay their eggs on orb-weaving spiders. The growing wasp larva interferes with the spider’s nightly web spinning, inducing the spider to spin modified webs, until, on the same evening that the larval wasp kills the host, the spider makes a specialized “cocoon web” which will support the larval cocoon a few hours later. What is really arresting about this phenomenon is that the construction of the cocoon web is also highly stereotyped, consisting of many repetitions almost identical to one subroutine of normal orb weaving. Furthermore, if the parasite is removed, some spiders recover, again in a characteristic nightly sequence. As a geneticist, this makes me really wonder what genes operate, and in what order, to generate the elaborate spider behavior and allow its shunting by the parasite.

William Eberhard, the scientist who first reported the Hymenoepimecis parasitism, has performed numerous experiments regarding the mechanism by which the larva manipulates the spider’s behavior. It is fast-acting, apparently chemical (i.e. circulating), and has long-term, dose-dependent effects. The extreme hypothesis– that the larva secretes a single neuromodulator– would be consistent with the stereotypy of the larva’s impact and the inverse order of web changes during recovery. There are examples of multiple behavioural responses to single neuromodulator, for example the effect of octopamine on honeybee foraging. And, of course, sex hormones in humans also can correlate with repetitive subroutine behavior.

Picture: A normal orb web (top) and a web constructed by a spider treated with benzadrine.