Month: August 2013

The Shifting Landscape Of Literature

Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk responds to the suggestion that the growth of countries like India, China, and Turkey will “breathe new life” into the novel:

The novel is a middle-class art. And we see the proliferation of middle classes in India, China, definitely in Turkey, so everyone is writing novels. If you want to predict the future, I can predict that in Europe, in the West, the importance of literary novels will decrease, while in China, India, popular literature will continue. Innovation will come from there, because the populations are large, there will be a lot of production.

In a 2005 Paris Review interview, Pamuk ruminated on the complications of own identity as a “Turkish” novelist:

First, I’m a born Turk. I’m happy with that. Internationally, I am perceived to be more Turkish than I actually see myself. I am known as a Turkish author. When Proust writes about love, he is seen as someone talking about universal love. Especially at the beginning, when I wrote about love, people would say that I was writing about Turkish love. When my work began to be translated, Turks were proud of it. They claimed me as their own. I was more of a Turk for them. Once you get to be internationally known, your Turkishness is underlined internationally, then your Turkishness is underlined by Turks themselves, who reclaim you. Your sense of national identity becomes something that others manipulate. It is imposed by other people. Now they are more worried about the international representation of Turkey than about my art. This causes more and more problems in my country. Through what they read in the popular press, a lot of people who don’t know my books are beginning to worry about what I say to the outside world about Turkey. Literature is made of good and bad, demons and angels, and more and more they are only worried about my demons.

For a helpful list of essays by and about Pamuk, go here.

Burgers Won’t Satisfy World Hunger

Olga Khazan doubts that test-tube meat will do much for world hunger. She notes that “12.5 percent of the world’s population is considered ‘hungry,’ but many development economists say we already grow enough food to feed them all”:

The connection between high-tech food production techniques and hunger happens, [Joshua Muldavin, a professor of human geography] thinks, because the people behind it “need to find ways to legitimate ongoing investment in this form of technology. I think that’s a disservice to people who are working on those issues in more realistic ways. This just reinforces the notion that hunger is all about abundance.”

Instead, most famines occur because disasters cause crops, food delivery systems, and social networks to break down on a massive scale, or because corruption or inefficiency diverts food from needy people.

Previous Dish on lab grown hamburger here, here and here.

Reconsider The Lobster

Some news to discomfit seafood lovers and DFW fans: There’s now “strong evidence” that lobsters, crabs, and other crustaceans can feel pain:

One way [animal behavior research Robert] Elwood attempted to determine whether crustaceans can experience pain was to look at avoidance learning: Can the animals actually learn from pain, or do they just continue to respond to a stimulus? To answer this, Elwood and his colleague Barry Magee presented shore crabs with a choice of two different shelters. Entering one shelter resulted in an electric shock for the animal, which was repeated if the animal remained there. The other shelter was a safe haven. Crabs shocked the second time the experiment was run were far more likely to choose the other shelter in the next trial, while crabs never left a non-shocking shelter. This, says Elwood, shows that the shock is aversive.

“Assessing pain is difficult, even within humans,” Elwood told the Newcastle meeting. But there is a “clear, long-term motivational change [in these experiments] that is entirely consistent with the idea of pain.” Such evidence would be enough to prevent mice being subjected to the deaths that crustaceans experience, he says.

Writing from the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival, David Foster Wallace observed that “if you permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not,” the event becomes “something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.”

Conservatives Against Christie

The New Jersey governor is more popular with liberals than conservatives. Allahpundit wonders whether the far right would rally around Christie should he become the nominee:

I keep thinking that, for all the slobber over his “electability,” he might be so widely and deeply disliked by a small but significant minority of righties that they end up staying home if he’s nominee and costing him the election. To be “electable” with a few percentage points’ worth of conservatives sitting out, he’d have to offset them by grabbing more centrist Democrats than expected from the Democratic nominee. How likely is that if Hillary’s the pick and Bill Clinton’s out there every day for her on the trail?

Pareene argues that Christie is more extreme than he’s given credit for:

The ironic thing about this conservative distrust is that Christie actually would be a very conservative president.

He’s an anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage staunch Catholic who believes in low taxes and no regulations and all the rest of the important, eternally unchanging policies on the checklist. Christie’s branding is designed to make him attractive to moderates in the Northeast — this is how the press fell in love with him, obviously — but it’s just that: branding. On the issues, he’s a man solidly of the right.

Barro thinks Christie is counting on these kinds of criticisms:

If Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) wants to win the presidency in 2016, he needs to look conservative enough to be the Republican nominee and moderate enough to be president. He’s successfully executing one part of a strategy to do this: Convincing liberal commentators that he’s an unreconstructed conservative given too much credit for moderation. When he draws their fire, he convinces conservatives that he’s one of them.

Bernstein’s view:

Christie is a viable candidate, but probably starts off with more things to overcome than do some of the others chomping at the bit. I’m afraid that’s about as much as you can say about nomination candidates in a wide-open field at this early point in the race.

What Can Europe Teach Us About Abortion? Ctd

Douthat examined the abortion polities of various European nations to glean lessons about abortion more generally. Scott Lemineux joins the discussion:

When I’ve tried to make the point that French abortion policy is not in fact more restrictive than abortion policy in most states, at least one commenter will try to rebut the point by bringing up France’s lower abortion rates. Raw abortion rates, however, aren’t in themselves useful when examining abortion access. There’s a missing denominator—what matters is not the overall abortion rate, but the number women who would obtain abortions but can’t get them. Legal restrictions on abortion, then, are just one variable—abortion rates might also be lower because increased use of contraception or generous parental benefits reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. This can be seen both in the countries that have higher abortion rates than the United States—where nobody can dispute the policies in these countries are more restrictive—as well as countries (such as Canada and the Netherlands) that have lower abortion rates than the U.S. as well as far more liberal abortion policies.

Can Scientists Make It Alone? Ctd

A reader writes:

In your coverage of crowd-sourced scientific research, I think there is an important aspect that needs to be discussed: ethical oversight. Not mentioned in the many write-ups of Perlstein or other like him is the lack of ethics oversight for the use of animals or human samples. (This is discussed in length with lots of links to other articles here.)

In brief, independent scientists outside of academia do not have to abide by the same standards or review process of ethical and humane conduct towards their test subjects, be they human or animals, as those of us in academic or industry institutions have to. I have no issues with the use of animals in research, as long as they are treated humanely and ethically … BUT I have been in research long enough (15+ years) to fear that if you remove the oversight and add to that the ever decreasing pool of funding that people are competing for (be it government grants or kickstarter campaigns), scientists will start to cut corners. As far as I know, none of the crowd-sourced science proposed or done so far has made use any form of institutional review of their use of animals or human samples.

The main reason they cite for not doing so is cost. You do not inspire my confidence that you will treat your test subjects ethically when the first thing you cut from your budget is an outside review of your ethical treatment of test subjects. The response of most of the people involved in the crowd-sourced science movement has been some version of “trust me, I would never hurt animals/people”.

In Love With An Operating System

The trailer for Spike Jonze’s upcoming film, Her:

http://youtu.be/rS8zOLOcPMQ

Waldman thinks the premise “doesn’t seem too far-fetched, both from the perspective of the software and our remarkable ability to imbue non-human things—both inanimate and otherwise—with human characteristics”:

[H]ave you ever had a crush on a character in a television show? You know you have. Think about what a limited amount you learned about that character—just a few hundred lines of dialogue, of course presented in the physical form of a very attractive Hollywood actor. Now that you’ve called up that memory, imagine if that character could have interacted with you, had long and frank conversations, and was programmed to be charming, understanding, affectionate, or whatever else might be most appealing to you. Couldn’t you develop feelings for that persona that were much more meaningful than what you felt for your old TV crush?

Bulls In A Bear Market

The dismal Spanish economy has taken a toll on bullfighting:

Bullfighting has seen its fair share of ups and downs since it emerged in its modern form in the 19th century, but some say it’s headed toward a crisis like no other. “There are fewer bullfights, fewer fans in the stands,” says Antonio Lorca, the El País newspaper’s bullfighting critic. “It hasn’t reached a critical level yet, but if nothing changes, it will.” The number of corridas and other spectacles featuring bulls fell by about 40 percent in five years to 1,997 in 2012, with the bleeding continuing this season. Funding is harder to come by, so countless lower-category bullrings, once echoing with the sound of applause, have gone silent.

Lorca also blames cultural factors for bullfighting’s decline:

“From a young age, kids in Spain are playing soccer and obsessively following their favorite players. Meanwhile, they identify less with bullfighting than ever before,” he says.  Lorca says the bullfighting world has failed to adapt to the changes that have taken place in Spanish society. He blames globalization, Walt Disney films and cartoons that depict animals as human-like. “So new generations of Spaniards have learned to love animals, which isn’t a bad thing. But the result is that bullfighting becomes something bloody, a form of torture for animals,” he says, a hint of nostalgia in his voice.