Month: February 2011

Wendell Steavenson recaps the revolution:

I caught up with [Sherif Omar, medic to the protesters] and asked him about his group of political activists. They had decided that they would continue to meet and discuss ways in which they could help the country but wouldn’t form a political party. I asked him if he was worried that the Army might take control entirely. He said that there was bound to be chaos in the future and that friends of his had expressed concern. “But I was saying, ‘Guys, look what we have done already. There’s no impossible.’ ” Many people celebrating said that there could never be another dictator now that the public had found its political voice. “We know the way to Tahrir Square,” one told me.

A reader writes:

THANK YOU for today’s Mental Health Break!  I’m sitting here grinning ear-to-ear, and the reason why is a little complicated.

I first came to know the music – the Adagio from Aram Khachaturian’s ballet “Spartacus” – as a freshman in my high school’s competitive marching band.  I’m not kidding: while I was in high school, we also “marched” music by Igor Stravinsky and Charles freaking Ives. Anyway, my older sister, with whom I am very close, was a senior in the band when I was a freshman; this was the only time we were in a field show together. At 14, it was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard, and probably had a lot to do with why I ended up becoming a professional classical musician.

I encountered it again a few years later in the Coen brothers’ wonderful (and underrated) film The Hudsucker Proxy, but until today I hadn’t heard it for almost 8 years.  It instantly brought me back to the place of youthful awe and wonderment in which I first heard it, and that, to me, is the best Mental Health Break of them all.

(It doesn’t hurt that the film is also gorgeous!)

Robert Krulwich explores why it happens, why evolution hasn't stopped it, and why it makes him nervous:

These ants are completely blind so they get about by sniffing trails left by the ants in front of them. They, in turn, leave chemical trails of their own. The system works smoothly when everybody's going in a straight line in one direction… But when the lead ants start to loop, bad things can happen (and remember we humans loop too, we can't hold a straight course over long distances without external points of reference). If the ant-in-front loops and intersects with its old trail, the whole crowd then turns in on itself and everybody gets caught in the endless circle.

Daniel J. Sharfstein recounts the life and ancestry of O.S.B. Wall, a famous DC African American whose children chose to live as white:

Because of its secrecy, "passing for white" has long been the province of literature, not history. Over the last 200 years, dozens of novels, plays, and movies have imagined African-Americans who become white, as well as whites who discover a trace of black ancestry. Most have treated passing as a tragic masquerade: Becoming white means abandoning family, moving far from home, changing names and identities, and living in constant fear that the secret will be betrayed. This conventional narrative has made it easy to regard the history of migration across the color line as something outside of African-American history—marginal to the black experience, almost its negation. When histories of race mention people assimilating into white communities, such accounts hardly ever follow them past the point of becoming white. These individuals fade out of existence. …

[T]he story of Wall's children suggests that becoming white deserves a place in black history and in the larger history of race in the United States.

A reader writes:

"And a conviction is growing among some archaeologists that there was no sweeping transformation to “behavioral modernity” in our species’ recent past."

Heh? I've been in anthropology for forty years, and have studied these matters in the history of the discipline going back much further. I've have little idea what this assertion is about a "sweeping transformation to “behavioral modernity” in our species’ recent past. Anthropologists have rarely ever offered such a depiction of our evolution.

The popular media, on the other hand, has indeed worked over the meme of the cave man endlessly. For one, it has been thirty years+ since anthropologists began insisting that hunting of big game was only part of the scenario, that "gathering" of foodstuffs and hunting of small game was easily as important, and that sociality was probably very complex and varied.

Queen Mary 2: Atlantic Timelapse from Adonis Pulatus on Vimeo.

Stefany Anne Golberg explores “The hallucinations of Frédéric Chopin,” an article published recently in the journal Medical Humanities:

“The hallucinations of Frédéric Chopin” is thus in the tradition of what some call neurotheology, the attempt to medically explain spiritual experiences. The not-always-subtle subtext is that unexplainable visions, or other divine madnesses, have no place in our enlightened, modern world. Neurotheologists have never been comfortable with the idea that romantic visions exist, and far less comfortable with madness as the catalyst for works of genius. The impetus behind these diagnoses is a desire to secularize genius, or to democratize it, and in some cases, to do away with the notion of genius altogether. …

In the end, [authors] Caruncho and Fernández say they want to separate romance from reality, but their diagnosis leads to a conclusion no less romantic, and no less religious, than the legend: that our own bodies can generate within us a sensation of the divine.

Princeton, Massachusetts, 12.15 pm

Nicholas Barber sizes up the two main films for best picture:

[T]he choice between “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” isn’t between a British film and an American one, but between a reassuring film and an unsettling one. As excellent as “The King’s Speech” is, it tells us that things were better in the olden days when everyone knew their place, and when a stiff upper lip was all it took to win a war against the Nazis. There are chilling moments—Bertie’s stories of his abused childhood, David’s sneering at his younger brother—but they lead us to the comforting conclusion that love and friendship conquer all, disabilities can be overcome, and, as long as you believe in yourself, good will prevail over evil.

“The Social Network” is another matter. It offers more questions than answers, leaving us to debate which of its characters are heroes and which are villains, who’s been exploited and who’s done the exploiting. It makes some viewers want to log straight onto Facebook, and others vow never to Update their Status again. And it doesn’t let us relax, as “The King’s Speech” does, by being set 60-odd years ago in the art-deco past. It’s a film about now.

My periodic Anglophobia has prevented me from making The King's Speech a priority for viewing. That – and the fact that I've come to hate going to movie theaters when you can see the same thing at home in the not-so-distant future without someone talking on their cell-phone, talking through the movie, and paying the cost of a real meal for an order of Bunch-A-Crunch and Coke Zero.

I don't really care about this Hollywood circle-jerk, but I'd love to see David Fincher's direction recognized, Toy Story 3 win Best Picture, and Restrepo win Best documentary. In general, I'd say this year's Oscars remind me a little of the new season of American Idol. I didn't think I could be weaned back on – but the emphasis on quality of singing/movie-making and the diversity of the field – has sucked me back in.