LInks

1. The economics of social status. And: the "Gervais Principle" (an analysis of corporate power dynamics).

2. Tribute to physicist Richard Feynman. 

3. Retrospective of David Graeber, anarchism, and the Occupy Movement. 

4. James Hamilton on the Reinhart and Rogoff kerfuffle. And Greg Mankiw and Ryan Avent.

Two Books on Samuel Johnson

Kate Chisholm reviews two books on Samuel Johnson at the Times Literary Supplement: Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone's edited anthology, Samuel Johnson: The arc of the pendulum, and Julia Allen's Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale: Sport, health and exercise in eighteenth century England. The review quotes Johnson on his struggles with the dictionary:

one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them

Allen's work reveals the surprising range of Johnson's physical activities (given his considerable bulk and reputation for melancholy):

Inspired by her knowledge of lexicography and a desire to rescue Johnson from caricature as a “stout, elderly-looking man in a wig”, Allen reproduces a collection of curious gobbets to illustrate the physical (as opposed to mental) activities enjoyed by Johnson and his contemporaries, and the opportunities for exercise afforded them by skating, riding, boxing, swimming, foot-racing and climbing. Of these we know that Johnson attempted all six; not something you might expect of a man noted for his physical awkwardness, depressive tendencies and prodigious hours devoted to his literary output. Yet, if anything, Johnson was a truly twenty-first-century man in his adoption of fast days and vegetarian diets, and his belief in the beneficial effects of exercise on mood and motivation. Allen gives us Johnson the swimmer, diving nude into the sea at Brighton; Johnson the physically daunting nephew of a champion boxer; and Johnson, aged fifty-nine, in defiance of time, space and the balanced life, rolling down a Lincolnshire hillside (is there such a thing in the fenlands?), “turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom”.

Who would have guessed it?: Johnson the boxer, the skinny-dipper; Johnson fasting, foot-racing, and rolling down a hill.

Links

1. "I was swallowed by a hippo."

2. The astounding art of Siyu Chen.

3. Newark mayor Corey Booker played Dungeons & Dragons.

4. The fantastic 1970s interiors of Verner Panton.

5. The sublime cluelessness of throwing lavish Great Gatsby parties. "It's like throwing a Lolita-themed children's birthday party."

6. "I hate fun."

7. The decline of state and local public investment.

8. The Open Borders Movement. 

9. "There are more people living inside of this circle than outside of it."

10. "I still love Kierkegaard."

Jeremy Bentham, Not Paul But Jesus

I just learned of the existence of Jeremy Bentham's Not Paul But Jesus. This work is in three volumes, only the first of which was published during his lifetime, under the pseudonym "Gamaliel Smith". In this work, Bentham argues that Jesus, unlike Paul, was not an advocate of asceticism or a foe of pleasure, and that Christians should return to the ethic of Jesus, and abandon the ascetic ethic of Paul. It's surely no coincidence that Bentham's interpretation of Jesus' ethics is consistent with Bentham's own pleasure-loving doctrine of utilitarianism.

In the third volume of Not Paul But Jesus, a critical edition of which has just been released for free over the internet (pdf), Bentham  argues, among other things, for the toleration of non-traditional sexual relationships ("the eccentric pleasures of the bed"), including homosexuality. This would have been quite radical in Bentham's time, so perhaps it is no surprise that this volume of the work went unpublished, even under a pseudonym.

As another example of just how radical the work is, chapter 13 is entitled "The Eccentric Pleasures of the Bed, Whether Partaken of by Jesus?", and in this chapter Bentham presents evidence from the Gospels to support the claim that Jesus had homosexual relationships with the Apostle John and with a certain "stripling of loose attire". Upon a cursory reading, I don't find Bentham's arguments in chapter 13 to be particularly compelling, but it is fascinating that Bentham should see fit to even make such an argument, particularly considering the attitudes of the majority of his contemporaries, and it is evidence of his extreme broad-mindedness and originality, which is in abundant evidence elsewhere in his life and works (such as in his advocacy of the auto-icon, a display case containing the mummified corpses of deceased scientists and other cultural luminaries, to help preserve their memory among the living; an auto-icon was created for Bentham himself, in accordance with his wishes, but the practice sadly failed to catch on).

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Tyler Cowen on Government and Public Goods

In a New York Times column, libertarian economist Tyler Cowen argues that the government should provide more public goods, including rewards for medical research, patent buyouts, and pandemic preparation.

A public good is a good characterized by non-excludability--once produced, it is difficult or impossible to exclude people from consuming it. In contrast, a private good is characterized by excludability. An example of a private good is Medicare, since the benefits can be limited to particular people. An example of a public good is a public health measure which reduces the risk of infection with a given disease to the members of a given population. Even vaccines, which can be given to particular people, have positive externalities, in that they reduce the risk of infection for others who are not vaccinated, and so they count as public goods.

It may seem surprising that a libertarian is arguing for more government production of public goods, and in a sense that is right given the current culture of 'libertarianism' in America, but in fact the libertarian or classical liberal ideology has included the view that the proper role of the government is to produce public goods and not private goods. The point is not made enough that, even from a libertarian standpoint, governments may fail by not doing enough, as well as failing by doing too much or engaging in activities which should be left to civil society. To my mind, another salient example of insufficient government action is prosecution of financial fraud and "white collar" crime.

Kintsukuroi

Cracked indigo bowl
A caring soul restored it
With veins of bright gold.

Links

1. Gypsy law (.pdf).

2. "The diploma's vanishing value." Community colleges provide a better deal than four-year colleges or universities.

3. The genetics and neuroscience of violence.

4. Profile of philosopher Daniel Dennett. In some ways Dennett is the modern-day version of Charles Sanders Peirce, except that people actually care about what he has to say.

5. Why Iceland. 

Links

1. Singapore's (racist?) strategy for increasing their birth rate.

2. Retire by 30?

3. 66 behind the scenes pics from the set of the The Empire Strikes Back. 

4. "Find what you love and let it kill you."

5. Fast food you can't eat in America.

6. Femivores (domestic-DIY feminists). 

Links

1. Police misconduct blog.

2. The rise of Big Data.

3. I missed this one: Karl Marx credit card. Hat tip to this Neo-Marxist round-up.

4. The best philosophy is Hume's skepticism.

5. Nobel-prize winning economist Daniel McFadden argues for an overhaul of consumer choice theory, drawing on fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. 

Hat tips to The Browser and Arts & Letters Daily.

Muso Soseki, "People's Abuse"

People's Abuse

People's abuse
has melted what was golden
and it has gone from the world

Fortune and misfortune
both belong to the land
of dreams

Don't look back
to this world
your old hole in the cellar

From the beginning
the flying birds have left
no footprints on the blue sky

--Muso Soseki (In Stephen Addiss, Stanley Lombardo, and Judith Roitman, Zen Sourcebook, [Indianapolis: Hackett], pp. 182-183.)

Links

1. Reinhart-Rogoff controversy scorecard.

2. Competency-based education.

3. Atul Gawande on why Boston's hospitals were ready.

4. David Chan's 6,297 reviews of Chinese restaurants.

5. Mormon bishop fends off woman's attacker with a katana.

6. What is a terrorist?

7. "Sailor suit old man."

Daigu Ryokan

Sixty years have passed for this frail old monk
Living in a shrine hut, far from the world of men.
At the base of the mountain I'm nestled in during the evening rain;
The lamp flickers brightly in front of my old window.

--Daigu Ryokan. (In Stephen Addiss, Stanley Lombardo, and Judith Roitman, Zen Sourcebook [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008], p. 259.)

Links

1. Zizek on Rand and the financial crisis.

2. Fruit flies do better when fed organic fruit.

3. The market for cupcakes crumbles. 

Virgil Henry Storr, Enterprising Slaves and Master Pirates

I have been reading Virgil Henry Storr's Enterprising Slaves and Master Pirates: Understanding Economic Life in the Bahamas. Storr is an economist at George Mason University. His book is an economic history of the Bahamas, and is of interest both in terms of its content and its methodology.

Content-wise, the Bahamas are a fascinating case; for example, slavery in the Bahamas operated differently than in other places in the West Indies, due at least in part to the poor Bahamian soil, which prevented plantations from being as profitable as elsewhere. Bahamian slaves were permitted to work for themselves on Saturdays, to relieve their owners from having to feed and clothe them. This allowed (or forced) slaves to engage in farming and crafts for their own benefit, and they had the right to sell their labor to others (though, predictably, their owners still received a cut). Storr argues that the peculiarities of slavery in the Bahamas introduced a spirit of enterprise among Bahamians, which is still a part of the culture today. Storr also argues that the Bahamian culture and economy was influenced by piracy and other piracy-like practices over the centuries, including wrecking and salvaging, blockade-running during the U.S. Civil War and bootlegging during Prohibition, all of which played a salient role in the economic life of the islands. There is thus a connection between profit and plunder (or at least, illicit activity) in the Bahamian culture.

Methodology-wise, Storr's work is a fascinating synthesis of two different research programs: Max Weber's economic sociology and Austrian economics (i.e., Mises, Hayek, and so on) on the one hand, and cultural studies and theory more generally on the other hand. Perhaps the root of this synthesis is Max Weber's own economic approach to sociology, but the later Hayek also placed great emphasis on the role of culture in the development of economic institutions. In any case, Storr makes a powerful case for the view that economists should pay more attention to culture in order to understand how economic agents and whole economies actually function. If this puts pressure on the methodological individualism of classical and neo-classical economics, it also pressures cultural and critical theorists to pay more attention to economic factors when producing their analyses of cultural and historical factors. For instance, an understanding of slavery and its legacy in the Bahamas is incomplete without an analysis of the Bahamian plantation economy, including the farming and piecework practices of the slaves there. Storr's research program is probably just beginning, but I hope it has an influence both on economists and on cultural theorists.

Touch

The ragged edge of loneliness, broken

By strangers’ gossip of sex and God.

Fertilized by dust spores of desire,

Womb’s fruit waxes tender, smooth

In the fullness of the day’s empty hours.

Sing in me, O muse,

The sound of an earthworm’s progress

The sight of a mosquito’s eye jelly

The taste of an oncoming storm

The touch of a mysterious stranger.

Invincible

The dead are mighty,
For only the living can be wounded:
Fingernails ripped off
Tongues stapled to a wall
Hearts attacked
Spirits sundered.

Neoliberal Links

1. Financial Times "Lunch with the FT" interview with philosopher Michael Sandel. 

2. Bruce Bartlett's critical assessment of Margaret Thatcher (she didn't significantly lower taxes and spending).

3. "Cognitive Biases and the Trouble with Moral Local Shopping." 

Kyong Ho

The moonlight of clear mind
Swallows the whole world;
When mind and light both go out
What is this?

--Death poem of Kyong Ho (1849-1912), Korean Son (Zen) Master.

Links

1.  Government-run raisin cartel.

2. Ghost marriages in China.

3. Global warming has "paused" but is not going away.

4. An evil Ranger?

Clifton's Cafeteria

Is it possible to eat mid-20th century style cafeteria food in downtown Los Angeles in the midst of kitschy decor inspired by the Santa Cruz region (and bearing an eerie resemblance to a live-action Yogi Bear set)?

Yes.

I ate their once, around a decade ago. A memorable experience, and I would go back (thought it's currently closed while undergoing restoration).

Links

1. Why China prefers its own political model.

2. Claims about nitrogen fertilizer (or: against organic farming).

3. China's disappearing rivers (or: the hazards of development). 

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen."

("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.")

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7.)

Elan Vital

Swallow your own death in the morning

Over easy with salt and pepper.

By nightfall, you'll have digested it fully

Death in every cell, a vital nutrient.

Links

1. The real Mongolian barbecue: cook an animal in its own skin. 

2. Journalistic cliches avoided at the Washington Post's Outlook section.

3. Derrida as intellectual outcast.

4. Explosives artist Cai Guo Qiang. "[H]is great influence was Chinese Taoist spirituality."

Hat tips to Arts & Letters Daily and The Browser.

Links

1. Eating zoo animals, cats, dogs, rats, and donkeys in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war.

2. Adam Gopnik on the Mechanical Turk, a (fraudulent) 18th-century chess-playing automaton. According to Gopnik, Charles Babbage was inspired by the Turk to develop the concept of the difference engine, and Edgar Allan Poe was among those who realized the Turk had to be a fraud.

3. Myanmar gets daily newspapers (formerly banned by the government). 

Hat-tips to The Browser and Marginal Revolution.

No Human Can Fully Grasp the Complexity of Our Computers

A Google employee on the mind-boggling complexity of our computers. Corollaries include an explanation for the popularity of Steve Jobs, why computers are so frustrating, and why the patent system is broken.

Reflections

When all else is taken away, what remains is the relationship you have with being itself. If this relationship is sound, though you lose everything, at bottom you will be well. If this relationship is not sound, though you gain the entire world, you will not be well. Your relationship with being unfolds each moment, in ways you may not even be aware of. The magic power of attention can transform your relationship with being. In addition to the clear, well-lit parts of the mind, this attention must be applied to the dark, the silent, the hidden parts.

The Law of Karma

Sin is not just a demon crouching at the door;
It's a stain on your soul, treasured
By zealous memory, a captive longing
To be consumed by the chemical burn
Of enlightenment.

A Dream of the Beloved

The transcendent rapture of cleaning the dishes
Together. Holding hands, we enjoyed
The supreme bliss of aimless chatter
And shared soft kisses as the neighbors pulled into the drive.

Such was my one dream of the beloved.

Love, a Ghost

The first time I saw her, it was too early. 

The second time, too late. 

How could I be so inspired 

By love's hungry shadow?

Thoughts on Plato's Cave

Plato, in his Cave Allegory, taught that the sun of awakening rises high above the murky depths of ignorance. His peers, the authors of the Upanishads, held rather that the shining sun of the Self lies hidden in the innermost cavern of the heart. As far as I can tell, the Upanishads had it right. It is precisely those who insist on seeing by the clear light of day who end up knowing least. Coming to know requires an ever deeper exploration of the self's, of the world's, many shadow-strewn ways.

The Greatest Loves

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Beata Beatrix. 1864-1870. 

The ancients knew that the greatest loves are unrequited; or, if requited, unconsummated; or, if consummated, profoundly unhappy. Dante and Beatrice; Romeo and Juliette; Lancelot and Guinevere; et multa alia. It seems to be a decree of Fate that the greatest loves end in great disappointment or utter wretchedness.

D.I.Y.

Laundry de-odorizer: add 1/2 cup baking soda to a load before running a cycle.

Links

1. Times Literary Supplement review of David Foster Wallace's posthumously published The Pale King.

2. Onion AV Club interview with writer Neal Pollack. (What it means to be a writer today.)

3. Five Books interview with atheist Susan Jacoby.

4. Decline of the German bookseller business.

5. Tyler Cowen on the egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and civil libertarian core of economics.

As usual, hat tips to The Browser, Marginal Revolution, and Arts & Letters Daily.

The Book of Oghams

A page from the Book of Ballymote (Royal Irish Academy MS 23 P 12) containing ogham scripts.

Edit: This page from the Book of Ballymote is used by Andrew West at BabelStone to help interpret a peculiar bit of ogham found in a manuscript composed by a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon monk named Byrhtferth.

Links

1. John Nye on the war in Iraq.

2. Terry Eagleton's book-review-as-essay on the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.

3. Toronto's Monkey Paw bookshop: curators of printed curios and curiosities. A future for bricks and mortar book stores?

What Is the Point of Philosophy (by Way of the Jewish State)?

Joseph Levine, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has a well-written blog post at the New York Times about whether or not "Israel has a right to exist." Levine's thesis is that no people, including the Jewish people, has a right to a nation-state; nation-states do not exist for the sake of any particular people (in the sense of an ethnic group), but rather exist (or should exist) for the sake of all of the peoples who are their citizens.

This article is a great illustration of what the point of philosophy is. It's true that philosophers have often addressed questions which are of mainly theoretical interest, that they have (especially historically) attempted to answer questions which are best left to the empirical sciences, and that philosophy does not produce empirically verified or mathematically proven theories in the same way that the special sciences or mathematics do. So one may be forgiven for wondering what the purpose of philosophy is or if it even has one.

In a word, the point of philosophy is to think carefully and critically about thorny questions having to do with values or with the first principles of science, mathematics, or other disciplines. The tools of the philosophers in their quest for clarity are not microscopes and chemical assays, but rather logical and conceptual analyses.

A big part of both of these tools is the ability to make crucial distinctions (such as that between the ethnic and the civic sense of the term 'people'), which Levine aptly illustrates in his blog post about the Jews and Israel. Conceptual and logical clarity are not sufficient for resolving difficult questions of value or foundations, but they are necessary, and all too often lacking in debates about morality, politics, the arts, scientific methodology, and the like.

I am not hereby endorsing Levine's thesis or his arguments (though they are worth considering seriously), but as soon as I started reading his blog post, I could tell that he was a philosopher or had philosophical training, because of the obvious care he was taking to get conceptual and logical clarity before reaching his conclusion. Most non-philosophers regrettably do not sufficiently distinguish between related issues or concepts as carefully as Levine has done in this piece. I hope that Levine's work serves as a helpful illustration of the value of philosophy, even for such practical, political, "blood and soil" issues as the relations between Jews and Palestinians in the state of Israel.

Jeffrey Sachs' Great Paul Krugman Smackdown

Self-styled "progressive" economist Jeffrey Sachs delivers an energetic smackdown of economist Paul Krugman's over at the Huffington Post. Among Sachs' main points: the CBO's projections GDP growth in the wake of the stimulus have not been met; it matters quite a bit not just how much money the government spends, but what it spends it on; the interest payments on the debt will become uncomfortably large within ten years. Recommended reading for all citizens, not just policy wonks.

David Lynch

"I used to go to Bob's Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I'd have a milk shake and sit and think.

"There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner."

(David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 39.)

I wonder which Bob's he went to.

Dark Illumination

For Masters Kong and Lao

The clever-tongued thief of virtue

Grabs you with his rhinestone coat

A rich beggar snatching coins from passers-by.

His light is outshone by the hidden virtue

Of a hooded lantern, invisible from without

Grown brighter and brighter from within.

America's Biggest Foreign Policy Blunder?

Peter van Buren, a former state department official who worked in Iraq, paints a vivid portrait of the failures of the United States' invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, arguing that it constitutes the nation's worst foreign policy failure ever.

D.I.Y.

Make your own glass cleaner: Mix 1/4 cup white vinegar with 3 cups of water in a spray bottle. Spray and wipe down with newspaper.

Never buy commercially produced glass cleaner again!

China's Generation Gap

Chinese parents who came of age during the Cultural Revolution are separated from their children, the balinghou, by an immense cultural gulf. 

David F***ing Lynch

"Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

"Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn't know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn't know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it; that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.

"I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was."

(David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 33.)

Daniel K. Gardner (translator), The Four Books, and Edward Slingerland (translator), The Analects

Daniel K. Gardner's The Four Books is a translation of selected portions of the four great Confucian classics: Great Learning (Daxue), Analects (Lunyu), Mencius (Mengzi), and Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong; translated by Gardner as "Maintaining Perfect Balance"). These four books became the basis of the Chinese imperial examination system during the Song Dynasty, due to the influence of the "Neo-Confucian" (Daoxue) scholar Zhu Xi (1130-1200); previously, the Five Classics (Wujing) had been the basis for the imperial exams, but Zhu Xi argued that the Four Books served as a better introduction to the study of Confucian thought.

Gardner's aim in this slender volume is to introduce the student of philosophy not only to the Four Books themselves, but also to Zhu Xi's influential Neo-Confucian commentaries, through which Chinese students have traditionally approached and interpreted these classic texts. While Gardner does not translate Zhu Xi's commentary directly, his own commentary is peppered with quotations from Zhu Xi, and Gardner explicitly adopts a Neo-Confucian stance when explaining how the passages from the Four Books have traditionally been read. This choice does provide an effective introduction to the Neo-Confucian commentarial tradition, and to Neo-Confucianism generally, but at the expense of occasionally obscuring the original meaning of the texts.

By contrast, Edward Slingerland, in his translation of Confucius' Analects, makes use of a range of traditional commentaries, together with modern textual scholarship, in his own attempt to make sense of the Analects (in terms of their likely original meaning, to the extent to which this can be reconstructed). There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to both of these interpretive strategies, and there is likely room for both in preparing contemporary translations and editions of classic Chinese texts.

While Gardner's The Four Books largely accomplishes what it sets out to do, I would have preferred an edition which contains the complete versions of Great Learning, Analects, Mencius, and Doctrine of the Mean, even if this meant expanding the work to multiple volumes. Also, since Gardner in many cases merely paraphrases Zhu Xi's commentary, it would have been preferable to simply include a translation of Zhu Xi's commentary alongside the original text, supplemented where needed by Gardner's own notes or additions (perhaps noting those cases in which other commentators have disagreed greatly with Zhu Xi). Nevertheless, Gardner has produced an excellent introduction both to the Four Books themselves, and to the Neo-Confucian commentary tradition of Zhu Xi, which colored the reception of these texts in China for hundreds of years (and which still does). 

Confucius

"The Master said, 'A clever tongue and fine appearance are rarely signs of Goodness [ren].'" (Confucius, Analects 1.3. Translated by Edward Slingerland.)

Links

Hat tips to TheBrowser and Marginal Revolution.

1. The London Underground as a state of mind.
2. Are we living in the early 19th century? Income inequality and standard of living.
3. The current state of Africa. (The headline could be: The Economist calls for a Pan-African Union. Read to the end.)

Donald Ritchie, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics

Donald Ritchie's A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics is a learned introduction to traditional Japanese aesthetic concepts, such as wabi, sabi, and mono no aware. Ritchie lived in Tokyo and wrote about Japanese culture for decades. In his Tractate, Ritchie deftly handles traditional Japanese sources, telling famous tales such as tea master Sen no Rikyu's development of the refined yet rough and simple aesthetic later associated with the tea ceremony; he also appropriately clarifies and juxtaposes Japanese aesthetic concepts using Western aesthetic thinkers and artists such as Hume, Kant, and Oscar Wilde. The "tractate" form averred to in the title is that of an extended essay, which aptly serves Ritchie's goal of creating an introduction to his topic suitable for the literate novice. Recommended. I will be using portions of this tractate as a required reading for my aesthetics class this semester.

Teaching the Bible in Texas Public Schools

I think the Bible should be taught in public schools, since its influence on world civilization (history, politics, religion, art, literature) has been profound. However, according to a recent article in the New York Times, the teaching of the Bible in Texas public schools involves possible violations of the principle of the separation of church and state. For example, some religion classes are taught by evangelical pastors, whose teaching is colored by their particular theology, and some public school students take their religion classes (which are part of the public school curriculum) in nearby churches.

The Year Thus Far in Links

1. What's wrong with ebooks.
2. Buddhist hell-realms depicted at Thailand's Wat Phong Rai Wua.
3. Christmas book flood in Iceland.
4. An environmentalist's reasons for supporting GMO and factory farming.
5. The wisdom of psychopaths? 
6. "The Deep End." Hand-drawn animation, white-out, and coffee. By Jake Fried.
7. China's new 'it girl' is a grandfather.
8. Music tastes and delinquency.
9. Prehistoric oral bacteria.
10. Head trauma sometimes unlocks creative talents.
11. The decline of Jewish delis.
12. "World's worst tattoo" inked in Bowling Green, Ohio.
13. The science of WEIRD people. 
14. Addictive junk food?
15. Out of control health care costs.
16. Five psychiatric disorders share genetic risk factors related to neural calcium channels.

Confucius

"The Master said, 'One who is Good sees as his first priority the hardship of self-cultivation, and only after thinks about results or rewards.'"

(Confucius, Analects 6.22. Translated by Edward Slingerland.)

D.I.Y.

Toothpaste: mix one part sea salt to one part baking soda. Make a 50/50 mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, and then add enough of this to the salt and baking soda to form a paste like consistency. Add a few drops of pure peppermint oil.

Stop buying mass-produced toothpaste! The homemade stuff is cheaper and (in my experience) works better.

Jerry's Map

World building as open-ended semi-random fine art project. Jerry Gretzinger also has a blog about his project.

Update (2014.10.26): Wired now has a piece about Jerry's map with extensive pictures.

Links

1. A plan to build a real-life Starship Enterprise.

2. Neuroscience and stage magic. (Hat tip to the Browser.)

3. A flowchart for changing habits.

The Future of TV = Broadcast + Broadband?

According to Tech Crunch, "Cord cutters"--households without cable TV--represent only 5% of TV households, but their number has grown over 22.8% the past year. I am a cord cutter myself; a big part of the reason is that cable companies do not allow consumers to purchase individual shows, but instead require that they purchase a large bundle of channels, even if consumers aren't interested in most of the programs that are in the bundle. At the Atlantic, UCLA sociologist Gabriel Rossman explains the economics behind cable companies' resistance to a la carte programming. He also links to an amusing cartoon from the Oatmeal which portrays internet piracy of cable TV shows as a response to cable companies' lack of flexibility in delivering content.

Robot Wars

Who would win: a 5-axis milling robot or a 3D printer that works in metal? According to this article, the future lies with 3D printers, but for the time being the safe money is on the milling robot.

The Nine Hells

1. Slavery in Mauritania.

2. Born and raised in a North Korean prison camp.

3. With U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

4. The madness of Philip K. Dick.

5. Mississippi hate crime.

6. Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.

7. Inside America's Ivy League fraternities.

8. The harassment of women in modern India.

9. Seeking justice for Haiti's rape victims.

Links

1. New York Times review of "Marley", the new Bob Marley bio-pic.
2. Wired profile of Joss Whedon.
3. Jennifer Tilly, poker player.
4. Chairs are dangerous.

The Quants Rule, OK

Atlanta, Montreal, Oslo, Paris. What do these cities have in common?

Recent social network research reveals the answer: Montreal leads North Americans' raido listening habits when it comes to indie music, while Atlanta leads for North American hip-hop. In Europe, Oslo is the leader for general music listening habits, and Paris leads for indie music. This means that what people are listening to on the radio now in Montreal (for example) will soon be what people are listening to across North America.

A related story: a school for quants doing research in network science at University College London. These are the job skills of the future. Adapt now, or forever hold your peace. Amen.

Links

1. Modern slave owner in Mauritania becomes an abolitionist.

2. China's 30 million cave dwellers.

3. E-books may make it harder to remember what you read. (Hat-tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Links

1. Ten lessons to learn from Jeremy Lin.

2. Tiny lizards in Madagascar.

3. Spartan vs. Athenian models of education. (Hat tip to The Browser.)

'Undue Weight' on Wikipedia

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the department of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University. The Chronicle Review recently published a piece of his, in which he recounts his many failed attempts to edit the Wikipedia page related to his area of expertise, the Haymarket Riot of 1886. The main problem: while Messer-Kruse's claims are backed up testimony from the trial available from the Library of Congress and by his own peer-reviewed articles, they conflict with the account given by the majority of published sources, which, according to Messer-Kruse, have been simply repeating the same errors for decades. The problem stems from Wikipedia's 'undue weight' policy, which requires that the content of Wikipedia articles reflect the majority of published works on a given subject (even if the majority happen to be in error):

[A] Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."

Given Messer-Kruse's experience, it would seem difficult or impossible for a new discovery by a researcher to make its way quickly into Wikipedia; as he puts it:

I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.

Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

I have recently been reading Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, a set of techniques for resolving disputes in a way that is nonviolent (as the name implies) but does that meets everyone's needs without compromise. NVC was developed by a clinical psychologist named Marshall Rosenberg; Rosenberg, a student of Carl Rogers, first used NVC to mediate disputes in schools that were desegregating in the 1960s, and more recently he has traveled to hot spots such as Bosnia, Rwanda, Israel-Palestine, and northern Nigeria to try to mediate disputes between people who have literally been killing each other. More prosaically, Rosenberg also leads workshops on NVC in the U.S. and other countries.

The core of NVC involves four main steps: (1) observing actions, (2) identifying and stating feelings, (3) identifying and stating the needs which cause these feelings (when they are either met or not met), and (4) clearly articulating requests for actions. These four steps can be performed both on oneself and the person one is communicating with. Though easy to understand, it's actually quite hard to put these techniques into practice, due to the power of our habitual ways of interacting with people. My attempts to use NVC in the classroom and in my personal life have been difficult, but still effective--even if the only effect is to get greater awareness of what I am feeling and needing when someone does something (which makes it less likely that I will react with anger, resentment, or a passive-aggressive behavior).

One of Rosenberg's claims is that while people's preferred strategies for meeting their needs often conflict, the needs themselves could all be fulfilled if only they were willing to use different strategies to meet those needs. Now, like much of the theory behind NVC, I don't believe this 100%; there are surely some cases in which genuine needs conflict, such as lifeboat scenarios where there is only enough food or water for one person to survive. But like the other defects in the theory of NVC, this point does little to undermine the effectiveness of the techniques of NVC, which are quite practical. In the vast majority of human conflicts, even those involving physical violence, everyone's needs could be met without violence (even if not everyone's preferred strategies could be met without violence--such as if one side seeks to satisfy its need for security by killing off every member of the opposing side).

Another defect in the theory behind NVC is Rosenberg's claim that humans are not inherently violent; violence, he maintains, is something against human nature which we learn through our culture or society. To the contrary, since violence has been a part of every human culture, and since rates of death by violence were higher in stone age hunter-gatherer societies than they are in today's society, it is arguable that human nature includes the propensity for physical violence, and that if anything culture is gradually shifting our behaviors to less physically violent forms. But this theoretical quibble seems to have no bearing on the effectiveness of the techniques of NVC. These are grounded in careful observation of people's behaviors, coupled with acts of interpretation which seek to clarify feelings and needs, and finally with the formulation of clear action requests that can move dialogue forward more effectively than vague or judgmental criticism and demands.

My friend Lynn Ackerson first told me about NVC several years ago, but it took me a while before I actually looked into it further. I was turned off in part by the corny terms and techniques used by Rosenberg to communicate his ideas. As shown in the picture above, Rosenberg frequently uses tattered hand puppets to convey his points about NVC. This technique would be utterly laughable except that Rosenberg does seem to be in on the joke. It's a way of getting attention and of clearly summarizing points; when the "jackal" puppet says something, we know he is giving an example of violent communication, even when it doesn't sound like it--such as when someone snivels and says "I'm sad because you hurt me". Rosenberg also occasionally sings God-awful songs on his guitar (many of which he wrote himself!).

All of this, together with the problematic theory behind NVC, should be overlooked when one is considering the effectiveness of the techniques themselves. They are the real deal, and have been field-tested by Rosenberg in the worst conditions imaginable--when talking to groups of Christians and Muslims in northern Nigeria, some of who had killed relatives of those on the other side; when talking to convicted murderers and rapists in prison; when dealing with one's own road rage while driving behind the slowest car in the world! Likewise, Rosenberg's original inspiration for NVC was his own brutal experience as a child in Detroit in the 1940s, where he witnessed terrible race riots immediately upon moving to the city (in which many people were killed right in his own neighborhood), to being repeatedly beaten at his school starting on the first day because of the fact that he was Jewish. Rosenberg may occasionally indulge in cheesy or hokey antics, and his theoretical speculation seems off the mark, but NVC itself is no joke and should be practiced by more people.

Jonah Lehrer on the Incredible Shrinking Effect Size

Jonah Lehrer recently wrote an article in The New Yorker (and another in Wired) about decreasing effect sizes in the sciences. An excerpt from the former:

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.

Possible explanations for the problem include publication bias (journals like to publish interesting results), selective reporting of data by scientists, and data mining (scouring already collected data for interesting results, as opposed to collecting data to test an already determined hypothesis). One of the scientists interviewed by Lehrer proposes as a solution an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their plans for research and to document all of their results. Lehrer's Wired article is titled "Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us," but science rather seems to be revealing the problem with some of its own methods; the problem is real but potentially self-correcting. Lehrer also makes a philosophical mis-step when he invokes David Hume's skepticism about causation:

Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered—they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.” When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity—we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.

Hume was skeptical about the view that a cause is a necessary connection between cause and effect, not about whether a cause is a fact. Hume's point is that causal reasoning can be overturned by subsequent experience, unlike reasoning about relations of ideas (such as logical or mathematical truths), which is immune to empirical rebuff. Philosophical quibbles aside, Lehrer's articles are a useful layperson's introduction to this important issue.

Facebook is scary

Yesterday I played a facebook game called "D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter". I had never played a facebook game before, but I've played D&D and other role-playing games off and on since I was a lad. The game was disturbing. In order to do well, a player must recruit other people from facebook to play it. Players are also rewarded in the game for spending more time playing it, and for playing on consecutive days. The game is optimally designed to spread through social networks and to take up more and more of a person's life.

 Part of the appeal of games like D&D is that they allow people to create their own stories. Role-playing games offer a DIY alternative to the stories and entertainment created by the commercial media. But "D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter" is a preeminently commercial game. Its sole purpose seems to be to spread through facebook to as many users as possible and to get people to spend as much time on facebook as possible (presumably for the sake of generating ad revenue). In other words, welcome to the machine.

 After thinking about this game and why it bothered me, I started thinking about facebook in general. It's a great tool which has enabled people to connect, to reconnect, and to stay connected with people they care about. But the fact that it is a commercial enterprise should give us pause. The owners of facebook want us to spend more and more of our lives using their product. They want their product to become indispensable to our work, play, and intimate relationships. The life experience and connections between people have become commodities. There is a risk that we will live our lives for the benefit of and at the pleasure of a commercial enterprise.

 I say all this as a fan of the free market who believes that competition is the best way of checking the market power of firms. The point is not that free market capitalism is bad because it has given birth to monsters such as facebook. The point is that we as consumers should be as intelligent and careful as possible about how we consume commercial entertainment and social media. Social media like facebook and Google+ are network goods, which means that the greater the number of people who use them, the more valuable they are. (If only a few people used facebook, it would be harder to find people you know and the product would be less valuable. The more people who use facebook, the easier it is to find people you know and to meet new people.)

This can make it hard for alternative social media to compete. But it is not impossible to unseat an established network good. For example, consider Microsoft's Windows operating system, a network good which now has several viable competitors. It's hard to say how things will play out, but the worst case scenario is that people become extremely dependent on facebook or other commercial social media in order to have satisfying work, play, and relationships. A better alternative would be a crowd-sourced, non-commercial social media platform.

Ruth J. Simmons on Leadership

An interview in The New York Times with Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown University, is full of insights about leadership and working with others:

I worked for someone who did not support me. And it was a very painful experience, and in many ways a defining experience for me. So having a bad supervisor really probably started me thinking about what I would want to be as a supervisor. That led me to think about the psychology of the people I worked with. And, in some ways, because I had exhibited behavior that was not the most positive in the workplace myself, it gave me a mirror to what I might do that might be similarly undermining of others. So I think at that juncture that’s really when I started being much more successful.

Recommended.

Critique of Thomas Friedman

Belen Fernandez has written a caustic but effective take-down of Thomas Friedman over at Guernica. An excerpt:

Friedman’s writing is characterized by a reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality. His vacuous but much-publicized “First Law of Petropolitics”—which Friedman devises by plotting a handful of historical incidents on a napkin and which states that the price of oil is inversely related to the pace of freedom—does not even withstand the test of the very Freedom House reports that Friedman invokes as evidence in support of the alleged law. The tendency toward rampant reductionism has become such a Friedman trademark that one finds oneself wondering whether he is not intentionally parodying himself when he introduces “A Theory of Everything” to explain anti-American sentiment in the world and states his hope “that people will write in with comments or catcalls so I can continue to refine [the theory], turn it into a quick book and pay my daughter’s college tuition.”

Fernandez also attacks Friedman's fecund use of puerile, semi-coherent metaphors.

David Graeber on the Anarchist Roots of Occupy Wall Street

The reader in social anthropology at the University of London has much to say in an essay at AlJazeera about the flaws of American democracy, the differences between anarchism and Marxism, and the nature of consensus-based decision making:

I should be clear here what I mean by "anarchist principles". The easiest way to explain anarchism is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society - that is, one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage or wage labour, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Anarchists wish to see human relations that would not have to be backed up by armies, prisons and police. Anarchism envisions a society based on equality and solidarity, which could exist solely on the free consent of participants.

I applaud the Occupy Movement's critique of American state capitalism, in particular the protection afforded politically connected business interests at the taxpayers' expense, and I agree with Graeber about the general superiority of consensus to democratic majoritarianism, but I doubt that society could ever produce order without armies, prisons, and police--or, for that matter, without a judicial system and legal code. However, I also think all of these things can exist without states, or at least without states as we know them (which unduly restrict the entry and exit of citizens). I therefore fully agree with Graeber that we don't need states to create social order, and in fact that states are frequently disruptive of such order (such as through foreign wars and the war on drugs).

Online Applications

"Mr. Zero" at The Philosophy Smoker has a post about online job applications. I agree that overall they are superior to paper applications in terms of less cost and less hassle. However, applications which simply ask for an email with .pdf attachments of CV etc. are orders of magnitude easier than those which require applicants to enter data into an online application database. The latter are more time-consuming, typically require data which are less relevant for academic jobs than other jobs at the university, and sometimes have issues relating to uploading documents (such as being unclear about precisely which documents need to be uploaded and which documents should be uploaded where).

Are Most Published Findings False?

The problems are evidently ones of small sample size and publication bias. John Ioannadis has been arguing as much for some time (here is an essay at The Atlantic by David H. Freedman about Ioannidis' work). I am not versed in statistics but the basic arguments are easy to follow. With small sample sizes it's easy to find an effect due to chance which is only overturned after the study is replicated and the results fail to hold. Publication bias refers to the tendency of journals to favor interesting results (a positive result for a new hypothesis--or possibly a null result for a confirmed hypothesis) over non-interesting results for publication. Researchers are also less apt to report uninteresting null results in the first place.

Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva's Brain

Over at berfrois, philosopher Owen Flanagan offers a precis of his recent book, The Boddhisattva's Brain, and a defense of naturalistic Buddhism. Here is an excerpt:

My answer for Buddhism is that if one subtracts the beliefs in karma, rebirth and nirvana, what remains is a philosophy that should be attractive to contemporary analytic philosophers. “Buddhism naturalized” contains a powerful and credible metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. The metaphysics is an event or process metaphysics. There are no things, only events that unfold in a great beginning-less unfolding, the Mother of all Unfoldings. The self is one of the impermanent events. The epistemology is empiricist: experience first, then reason and only then do we consult the “scriptures,” which are themselves fallible compilations of wisdom from previous experience. The ethics teaches that goodness comes from compassion and Lovingkindness to oneself and to all other sentient beings.

I believe that “Buddhism naturalized” is a serious contender, along with Confucianism and Aristotelianism, for a great wisdom tradition that offers a viable philosophy for 21st century secularists. It might seem odd to recommend these ancient theories as good for us now, but I do really think all three are worth a second look. The reason is that all three of these philosophies, from over 2 millenia ago, are less theistic, and thus more rational, in their core philosophy that the three Abrahamic traditions.

Flanagan is a balanced and rational commentator on Buddhism and other wisdom traditions, and I agree with him that these have much to offer for modern secularists (and, I would add, adherents of Abrahamic faiths as well). However, I wonder whether subtracting karma, rebirth, and nirvana from Buddhism leaves one with Buddhism at all, or something else entirely. This is not to say that we should retain these outmoded elements of Buddhism, but rather that perhaps we should abandon the label 'Buddhism' altogether. Less radically, adopting a term like 'Neo-Buddhism' (akin to the already current neo-Aristotelianism and neo-Confucianism) might make more sense then referring to naturalistic Buddhism as 'Buddhism' in an unqualified sense.

"Shadow Wolves": A Tale of the Border

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times describes a unit of Indian trackers employed by the government to patrol the border with Mexico, which is currently being used as a highway for smuggling drugs and illegal immigrants, in the vicinity of the Tohono O'odham Nation. From the article:

When the U.S. Border Patrol clamped down on crossings in an area east of the reservation five years ago, smuggling rings moved their routes to the forbidding 60-mile backcountry corridor that crosses Tohono O'odham lands. Two billion dollars worth of marijuana, cocaine and heroin have moved through the reservation since then, according to ICE estimates.

The Shadow Wolves use GPS locaters, high-powered radios and other modern tools, but it is their tracking skills and their feel for the hidden box canyons, caves and seasonal watering holes that make them formidable counter-narcotics agents.

The article is revealing mainly for what is left in the background--the failure of the government's war on drugs, and the difficulties facing this country's American Indian population, who are now facing some of the fallout from that war.

Department of Unintended Consequences

Democrats' Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act may lead employers to rely more on part-time workers, who are not covered by the act. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution comments.

G.E. Pays No Tax

Via Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution; Mr. Tabarrok comments: "GE’s tax bill illustrates both why our corporate tax rate is too high and too low. The nominal rate is too high which encourages a real rate which is too low."

The Newt

"In the crowded race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney may be the tortoise, but Newt Gingrich is the newt. And newts are highly adaptive salamanders that regenerate limbs when wounded and emit poison when challenged."

This is a softball piece, with the exception of the vicious and spot-on opener.

Links of Interest

1. Carne Ross on the leaderless revolution.
2. James Ford on liberal religion and ecological consciousness.
3. Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Bergdorf's (both formerly of Bowling Green State University) research on rodent laughter.
4. Shakespeare was a gangster.
5. You can't argue with ratings.

Hamilton Morris, I Walked with a Zombie

At Harper's, an excerpt from a new book by Hamilton Morris on Haitian zombies. Morris plans to pick up where Wade Davis (author of The Serpent and the Rainbow) left off. Here is Morris having a conversation with Alex, a Haitian whom he hired as a guide:

I have hinted but not explained to Alex why I’m in Haiti. I am fully aware that what I’m doing is considered by some to be in poor taste and, perhaps worse, slightly obvious. It is approximately six hours into our meeting that I feel at liberty to broach the subject of zombification. We are eating lunch. Alex is more than happy to offer his opinions: “Many Americans think the zombie is a myth, but in Haiti it is a fact that is not questioned except when the upper class wish to impress an American. The politicians and the rich want to abandon the traditional ways, but zombies are real. They work like a slave or a maid. They work on the computers as well, making accounts.”
“What kind of accounts?” I ask.
“Eh, like spreadsheets, they make Excel.”

Another revelation comes from an interview with Max Beauvoir, the famous Vodou priest:

“Wes Craven [director of the film version of The Serpent and the Rainbow] is a filmmaker who understands the Haitian people.”

Hat tip to thebrowser.com.

Eight Books on the Effectiveness of Higher Education

At the New York Review of Books, Anthony Grafton reviews a raft of books discussing the enormous problems facing higher education today. An example from his discussion of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift:

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Grafton's analysis of the eight books under review is judicious but reaches few conclusions. This is only appropriate given the complex nature of the problems facing higher education, which resist easy analysis (let alone resolution).

Science Is Hard

Why don't more Americans have degrees and jobs in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields? According to Christopher Drew of The New York Times, part of the answer, at least, is that science is so darn hard to study.

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, who notes in his characteristically wry manner that "Science itself is even harder."

Maple Syrup: A Story of Freedom, Purity, and Authenticity

"So long as the maple forests stand, suffer not your cup to be sweetened by the blood of slaves."

Psychology's Magician

A fascinating (if at times insufficiently critical) profile of Carl Jung at The New Atlantis. I didn't finish reading it (busy preparing for a presentation), but what I did read held my attention (Freud, phallus, faith). Timely considering the new film by David Cronenberg. Also, the author's name is fascinating in its own right.

Is Philosophy the Most Practical Major?

Is Philosophy the Most Practical Major?

No.

An Economist Critiques the Humanities

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution recently blogged about the increase in the number of students with humanities degrees and the lack of growth in the number of students with STEM (sciences, technology, engineering, and math) degrees. As a lover of the arts and letters, it's hard to fault students for pursuing degrees in the humanities, but it's hard to argue with the evidence that students pay a price for pursuing degrees in these less marketable fields. Tabarrok further argues that the government is wasting its money by subsidizing degrees in disciplines with fewer positive externalities for the economy. Another factor is the increasing costs of higher education, which do not appear to be producing increasing gains (either economic or in terms of personal growth and development).

Links of Interest

1. Profile of David Graeber, anthropologist and theorist behind Occupy Wall Street.

2. Scathing critique of Rick Perry's crony capitalism.

3. What happens at a Zen retreat run by Brad Warner.

4. Julian Baggini reviews Owen Flanagan's The Bodhisattva's Brain and James Austin's Meditating Selflessly.