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.

After Sir Mohammed (Iqbal)

Twist your curls to an even fiery radiance
Break a few hearts, shatter all the senses

When passion is revealed, can beauty be concealed?
Unveil yourself

I’m a shell, my luster tarnished; am a shard of pottery
But I can be a royal pearl

You’re a vast ocean, not merely a brook like me—
To share a shore or to be a shoreless sea?

My song of spring is a scorched sigh!
I’ll be a skylark— fly

“Leave this garden at once,” that was the command
A world will take longer to mend; wait now for me

At Ground Zero
You’ll be embarrassed

Deed-Reckoner
But so will I, surely

Rafiq Kathwari translated Iqbal, from the Urdu, working with Professors Richard Howard and Frances Pritchett at Columbia University as well as many other well wishers and friends who helped with the nuances of transliterations.

by Fred Zackel

A pride of lions in the night is Chaos. Out of Chaos comes Order.

So … In God We Trust.

That makes a nice bumper sticker. There is more, of course, that cascades from that turning point in our evolution.

For example, what we triggered by imagining the Divine might be our way of saying we imagine that we’re getting noticed by the Cosmos. American naturalist writer Stephen Crane (1871-1900) wrote the following doggerel:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”

That being the case, we humans invented God. Or the gods. Or the Goddess. As a night light.

I imagined you, God. You are a palimpsest of all the imagery my ancestors and family and culture could have imagined before me that they all slathered onto me like butter on bread.

The Divine is evolutionary technology. A weapon. Or a tool.

Being Human, we “imagineered” our Divines, all of them, to be extensions of us. To be solutions to our desperate straits.

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by Dave Maier

Nietzsche is often described as a “perspectivist” about knowledge and truth. His remarks on the matter, however, render the issue far from straightforward. He clearly means to reject some form of absolutism, but which? And what does he leave in its place? One's answer to this question depends quite a bit on whether or not one wishes to see Nietzsche as an ally in contemporary disputes. Postmodern relativists, for example, see Nietzsche as a champion of their cause, breaking the chains of “objectivity” and liberating us from the logocentric hegemony of Western rationality or some damn thing. Defenders of metaphysical realism (or of Christianity, Nietzsche's explicit target) are generally happy to agree, allowing them to dismiss him along with his postmodern disciples as wild-eyed lunatics.

However, a recent trend in Nietzsche studies has been to claim him as an exponent of scientific rationality rather than as a critic (as in the work of Brian Leiter and Maudemarie Clark). On these latter readings, Nietzsche's “perspectivism” must then be understood as not at all relativistic, and indeed compatible with, as Leiter puts it, seeing a naturalistic or scientific perspective as “the true or correct” one.

This is a bold claim, given that even though Nietzsche uses the term “perspectivism” only rarely (and usually in his unpublished work), he seems to be presenting his views on truth and objectivity as new and different, and (in the Genealogy of Morals) as central to his argument. In contrast, naturalist readers of Nietzsche must downplay these views as relatively commonsensical rejections of outdated metaphysics, a mere reaffirmation (with a tweak here and there) of relatively traditional Enlightenment empiricism – the real action in Nietzsche's argument against traditional morality occurring when, science having thus replaced metaphysics as the road to truth, we then turn to it and see what it in fact tells us about healthy human being(s).

In some ways this is a helpful corrective: it allows us to acknowledge the otherwise obscure influence of German materialism on Nietzsche's views, and to appreciate the biological basis of many of Nietzsche's arguments about psychological health. And, of course, it rejects the facile relativism attributed to Nietzsche by both detractors and admirers. However, I think it misses the mark. On my reading Nietzsche is neither a relativist nor a naturalist, but a … dare I say “perspectivist”?

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Burnt Love

My memory’s a divine brothel, he said
remembering a fog of lust

What drives a man is evanescent;
even that fierce flame. Jesus

how time clips wings and buries
even conflagrations in dust

In a pool of recall,
which is always troubled
by a new morning breeze,
you may never see
the forest or the trees—
but there is a gaze
beneath this trouble,
thought Narcissus, who
knew it was himself he saw
in ripple and wave among
desiccated leaves

My memory’s a divine brothel,
he said again
who could not put his mind
or finger on
the echo burnt love leaves

by Jim Culleny
9/1/11

by James McGirk

The lowland of online discourse – that virtual Benelux where bloggers, essayists, and opinion writers grope for fragments of attention – has been flooded with essays weighing the worth of writing degrees; particularly the Master of Fine Arts degree. Discussion tends to hit its annual zenith around September as magazines such as Poets & Writers release their annual rankings and thousands of fledgling authors begin preparing applications.

Applying to an art school is a particularly harrowing and personal experience. Other professional schools use board scores to sort applicants. Meaning an applicant generally knows where he or she stands. A perfect LSAT and GPA all-but guarantees a slot in one the United States’ coveted Top 14 law schools, for example, but there is no writing equivalent. MFA programs look for talent and potential, and without any reliable metrics, the writing sample and biographic statement become the only deciding factors. Judging the worth of a writing sample and – this is as important – weighing it against who an applicant is, is an intensely subjective process. For an admissions committee a forty-five-year-old journalist may not seem as good a fit as a twenty-two-year-old, even if the former is a much better writer. But try telling that to an applicant who has paid $150 in fees, harassed former professors for letters of recommendation, and waited six months for a decision. For an applicant his or her work is being judged and more often than not found wanting.

This bitter and excruciatingly personal application ordeal is at the core of many arguments against writing programs. Those worrying that fledgling writers emerge from programs bland and timid, producing work any cliché-wary MFA would know not to describe as “cookie-cutter,” are criticizing the winnowing-out process. A writer enters a program having pleased an audience of older, established writers; therefore the only way to succeed is to continue appealing to those mandarins. Many writers also consider MFA programs akin to a pyramid scheme, imagining an opaque bureaucracy of gatekeepers and tastemakers feeding off of the flocks of naïve wannabe writers. While there are certainly elements of truth to both critiques, there is something deeply repellent about the idea of judging artwork in liberal humanist culture and I think that’s what is feeding into this extreme paranoia about these programs.

Far less has been written about what actually goes on in a creative writing program, so, having just completed my own thesis, I thought I’d describe my MFA experience.

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by Jeff Strabone

In 1977, when the Stranglers asked the immortal question, 'What ever happened to those heroes?', they were wondering not about super-heroes but, rather, more earthly characters like Leon Trotsky and Lenny Bruce. Today, I want to ask about that other group of heroes, the ones being strangled by the corporations who control them: Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Captain America et al., all now owned by a pair of global entertainment companies, Disney and Time Warner.

As reported everywhere last week, DC Comics has 'rebooted' its entire universe of characters. If you are not a comic book collector, you may have wondered what this news means. How can the Man of Steel, for instance, be rebooted? I am going to tell you exactly what it means and why it matters to everyone who cares not just about imaginary men in tights but about serious questions of culture, corporate ownership of national treasures, and the decline of a great American institution: the super-hero comic book.

Most people enjoy serial narratives of one sort or another. A serial narrative is an ongoing fictional story written in segments over time.

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by Ryan Sayre

Though last month’s Virginia earthquake was felt as far north as New Brunswick, many of us up the Eastern Seaboard between thereabouts and Virginia were left sorely disappointed to have been entirely passed over by this rare event. Of course, for many of us, any early afternoon ground disturbance was dutifully pegged by our subconscious as construction, a passing truck, maybe a passing spell of vertigo, and then unceremoniously shuttled off to that compartment of the brain reserved for non-events and non-memories. The source of disappoint for those of us driving in cars or mowing our lawns tuesday afternoon was something akin to that felt by Major Chichester-Smith who, engaged in a wrestling match with a Yokohama bound train’s lavatory faucet at two minutes to noon on Sept. 1, 1923, was surely the only person in the whole of Tokyo not to have felt the magnitude 7.9, Great Kanto Earthquake. While, thankfully, we can’t share in the Major’s surprise at disembarking from a mode of conveyance only to be looking over a city mysteriously transfigured into total ruin, those of us who were bouncing down the road or off on a jog the Tuesday before last have it well within our rights to assert along with the Major that we failed to notice the earthquake only because we were already at the epicenter of its essence: ‘shaking.’

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by Meghan Rosen

Are you in the market for a healthy, stable, long-term relationship? Turns out you may not have to look further than your gut. Or, more specifically, the trillions of microbes that inhabit your gut. Yes, you and a few trillion life-partners are currently involved in a devoted, mutually beneficial relationship that has endured the test of time. Don’t worry though, they’ve already met your mother.

We’re exposed first to our mother’s microbial flora during birth; these are the pioneering settlers of our gastro-intestinal (GI) tract. In the following weeks our gut becomes fully colonized with a diverse array of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Although our gut microbes are generally about an order of magnitude smaller in size than human cells, when counted by the trillions, they add up.

In fact, these intestinal interlopers (along with their fellow skin, genital and glandular neighbors) can account for up 2% of a person’s total body mass). That’s right, a 175lb man could be carrying more than 3 pounds of microbes in and on his body. Most of these microbial tenants, however, are crowded together in the lower part of his large intestine: the colon.

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