Ken Silverstein on the Sucking that is Washington

I just no longer have the energy to cover Washington. I’ve loved working for Harper’s, but, as I told Mediabistro, “Washington and Washington politics has worn me down. Every time I write a story I feel like I wrote it a year ago and five years ago and 10 years ago. Nothing ever changes here.” I frequently find myself numb to political news and, even worse, to the lifeless, conventional wisdom peddled by the Washington media. When you can read an entire column by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz and never once feel the urge to cut out your own heart with a dull knife, you know that you no longer have the sense of outrage that is essential to reporting from our nation’s capital.

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/09/hbc-90007662

Race, as a historical category

Scholars have argued for decades that race is a socially constructed rather than a scientific concept or timeless biological reality.  Ideas and practices related to race change over time and differ from one country to another.

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/09/page/0076

In the Far East the frog is a symbol of freedom.

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/09/0083112

On pain, power and silence

I understood that she was in pain. I didn’t ask her about it because there was nothing to say. It was bad enough knowing about it; it would be far worse to discuss it, to name and acknowledge it. Talking about it would give pain a kind of power. Silence would, at least, deny its existence.

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/09/0083111

Profiency and Excellence

“The enemy of excellence is proficiency.”

-Scott Miller, psychologist from Illinois

The Problem with Conversation

The problem is with conversation itself, which is, by its nature, a lousy way to get at the truth. “When you’re talking to someone,” Burns says, attributing this bit of wisdom to Chris Rock, “you’re not talking to that person, you’re talking to their agent.”

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/09/0083100

The Dodo Bird Effect

Fortunately, all these paths [of psychological therapy] lead to the mountaintop, a miracle known to my profession as the Dodo Bird Effect: psychologist Saul Rosenzweig’s discovery, in 1936, that therapeutic orientation doesn’t matter because all orientations work. (Rosenzweig subtitled his paper “Everyone Has Won and All Must Have Prizes,” the verdict pronounced by the dodo in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.) The Dodo Bird Effect has been borne out by numerous studies since, with one elaboration. The single factor that makes a difference in outcome is faith: the patient must believe in the therapist, and the therapist must believe in his orientation. For therapy to work, both parties must have faith, sometimes against all reason, that their expedition will succeed.

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/09/0083100

Our culture’s worship of speed

More than the unionization of its carriers or the federal oversight of its operations, the most bemoaned evil of the U.S. mail is its slowness… No surprise there, given our culture’s worship of speed. I would guess that when the average American hears the word socialism the first image to appear in his or her mind is that of a slow-moving queue, like they have down in Cuba, where people have been known to take a whole morning just to buy a chicken and a whole night just to make love. Unfortunately, the costs of our haste do not admit to hasty calculation. As Eva Hoffman notes in her 2009 book Time, “New levels of speed . . . are altering both our inner and outer worlds in ways we have yet to grasp, or fully understand.”

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/09/0083081

The tenacity of Spaniards

Frontline, “Spain:  The Lawless Sea,” 2004 January:

In Madrid, the man in charge of the Spanish investigation, Adolfo Menendez Menendez, tells Schapiro that it was hard to identify the mysterious owners of the Prestige, the Coulouthros family, because they set up a network of front companies. Their company in Liberia that owned the Prestige owned nothing more. When the ship sank, there were no assets for Spain to try to recover.

So Spain is filing a $750 million lawsuit against the ship’s inspection company, Houston, Texas-based American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), which inspected the Prestige just six months before it sank and declared it seaworthy. Then it turns out that Kostazos, the original captain in St. Petersburg who had tried to contact the ship’s owners, also had sent a fax to ABS, alerting them to nine serious deficiencies aboard the Prestige, including cracked and corroded beam parts in the ballast tank.

Transcript of interview with Adolfo Menéndez:

“Quiero recomendarle que los españoles, además, tenemos una característica muy especial y es que somos un poco quixotes, y no nos importa entablar batallas contra molinos de viento por muy gigantescos que sean.  Tenemos tiempo, tenemos paciencia, y tenemos razón.”

Great Art Isn’t Subjective

The Week, Dec 7, 2007:

Beauty is not strictly in the eye of the beholder, a new study says. Great works of art appear to follow proportion and design that have universal appeal, at least in Western culture.

Italian neuroscientists showed images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures to by the likes of Michelangelo and da Vinci to 14 volunteers with no artistic training—some of whom had never been to a museum. Some of the images were altered so that the original proportions of the sculptures were slightly modified.

When subjects viewed the pictures of the original sculptures, scans of their brains showed a strong emotional response; they were clearly moved. There was much less response to the sculptures with subtle change in proportion.

“We were very surprised that very small modifications to images of the sculptures led to very strong modifications in brain activity,” researcher Giacomo Rizzolatti tells Livescience.com. He believes that the human brain may have a special attraction to images that demonstrate the “golden ratio,” an eye-pleasing proportion of 1-to-0.618 that shows up again and again in art and nature. This ratio can be found in a nautilus shell and spiral galaxies, and in Michelangelo’s Pietá and the Pyramids. When the brain sees these magical proportions, Rizzolatti says, it interprets them as evidence of great beauty.