I intend to reread this classic novel.
by Ruth Franklin
Senior Editor
Was ‘Frankenstein’ Really About Childbirth? March 7, 2012 |
“I have no doubt of seeing the animal today,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote hastily to her husband, William Godwin, on August 30, 1797, as she waited for the midwife who would help her deliver the couple’s first child. The “animal” was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would grow up to be Mary Shelley, wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein, one of the most enduring and influential novels of the nineteenth century. But Wollstonecraft would not live to see her daughter’s fame: She died of an infection days after giving birth.
The last notes that Wollstonecraft wrote to Godwin are included in the exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet,” which began last year at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and has now come to the New York Public Library. On display are numerous artifacts both personal and literary from the lives of the Shelleys, including manuscript pages from the notebook in which Mary wrote Frankenstein (with editing in the margins by her husband), which have never before been shown publicly in the United States. But it was Wollstonecraft’s scribbled note, in which she referred to her baby as “the animal”— the same word that the scientist in Frankenstein would use to describe his own notorious creation—that gave me pause. Could the novel—commonly understood as a fable of masculine reproduction, in which a man creates life asexually—also be a story about pregnancy?
Frankenstein is one of the great creation myths of all time: a scientist, drunk on knowledge and possibility, discovers the secret of animating matter and energizes a monstrous creature, which proceeds to wreak havoc on his life and that of everyone he loves. Perhaps inevitably, the novel has engendered its own creation myth, one that is nearly as uncanny as the tale of the monster itself. As Mary Shelley tells the story in her introduction to an 1831 reprint edition of the novel, she began writing it during a trip to Geneva in the summer of 1816, when she was only 18. The weather was wet, and the group—which included Mary, Percy (who was still married to his first wife, Harriet), and Lord Byron—passed the time by reading an old volume of ghost stories. After Byron proposed that each of them should write his or her own ghost story, Mary dreamed one night of a “hideous phantasm of a man stretched out .… On the working of some powerful engine, [it shows] signs of life, and stir[s] with an uneasy, half vital motion.” The story followed quickly: She started it in June 1816 and finished it by May of the following year.
Most critics have understood Frankenstein as a cautionary tale of the dangers inherent in intellectual hubris: the Tower of Babel reworked as science fiction. “We need look no further than the novel’s subtitle—The Modern Prometheus—to discover Frankenstein’s main theme: the aspiration of modern masculinist scientists to be technically creative divinities,” Maurice Hindle writes in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition. During the trip to Geneva, Byron and Percy Shelley were obsessed with new developments in natural philosophy, including the experiments of Erasmus Darwin with “galvanism”—the use of electrical current to stimulate inanimate objects. Mary had been listening to their discussions with great interest. Her father, a distinguished philosopher in his own right, had introduced her as a child to some of the great minds of the time, and she read widely in English literature and philosophy, including Milton’s Paradise Lost and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding—both foundational texts for Frankenstein.
Even considering Mary Shelley’s extraordinary education, though, there is something that does not quite fit together in this origin theory. As Miranda Seymour, author of a recent biography, has written, Shelley’s conception of an “ambitious young scientist who … became the first creator of a living human being without divine assistance [was] a shocking idea in her day and an extraordinary one for a young woman to choose for her first subject.” Mary admitted as much herself. “How [did] I, then a young girl, [come] to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” she wondered in 1831, in an introduction to a reprint edition of the now-seminal novel.
But Mary Shelley at 18 was far more experienced than the ordinary young girl. She had met her future husband in May 1814, when she was 16 and he, a few years older, was a pupil of Godwin’s; the two ran off together that summer, to the dismay of Mary’s father and Shelley’s wife. The following February, eight months later, she gave birth prematurely to a girl, who died after a few days. Soon Mary was pregnant again, and in January 1816 her son William was born. She and Shelley were married in December 1816, and she gave birth to their daughter Clara the following September.
In other words, not only was Mary Shelley pregnant during much of the period that she was writing Frankenstein, but she had already suffered the birth and death of an infant. Unsurprisingly, she was tormented by the loss: A journal entry in 1815 reads, “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lives.” The echoes of Frankenstein—in which the scientist, who hopes to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet,” at last sees it open its eyes and breathe—are unmistakable. And the birth of the “creature,” as he calls it at first, occurs only after “days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue”; later he refers again to the “painful labor.”
The monster is born fully formed, but his intellectual development follows the ordinary process of a human infant. While hiding out by a cabin, he learns language simply by watching and listening to the inhabitants, just as a child learns to speak. He even experiences the infant’s characteristic moment of recognizing its own reflection: “How was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool!” And he feels his creator’s rejection as keenly as he would the rejection of a parent. “Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?” he asks the scientist. The monster has a face that only a mother could love—but he has no mother.
The disasters that follow upon the “birth” of the monster are also of a piece with Mary’s own experience. Childbirth in the early nineteenth century was perhaps just as dangerous as experimenting with electricity, as Mary well knew, having lost her own mother. (The infection from which Wollstonecraft died was caused by a piece of the placenta that remained inside her.) Mary would nearly die herself a few years later after suffering a miscarriage. And, in an era when children often died young, it is not coincidental that the monster’s first victims are children: first a young boy called William, the same name as Mary’s son; then a teenage girl. (Uncannily, William Shelley lived to be only three; daughter Clara died at only a year old.)
“Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it,” Mary Shelley wrote in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein. By the time this edition appeared, she had survived six pregnancies and the deaths of four children; writing must have seemed far more reliable than child-rearing as a way to mold and fashion ideas. If there could be any further doubt about the connection between her maternity and her creativity, it is dispelled by the end of the essay. “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” she concludes. “I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days.”
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
The Elephant in the Courtroom
Daily Comment« Threatened Main March 6, 2012
The Elephant in the Courtroom
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
It’s been a rough few weeks for the conservative movement. The Republican Presidential primaries, while lurching toward a conclusion, made a conservative takeover of the White House look more unlikely. Congressional Republicans got bogged down in a debate about insurance coverage for contraception. And Rush Limbaugh, the town crier of the movement, lost a passel of sponsors after he made comments about a law student that were grotesque even by his standards. Still, amid these grim tidings, there remains for conservatives a reliable source of good news: the Supreme Court.
Last week, the Court heard arguments in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, a case of tremendous interest to both corporations and human-rights activists. The question there is whether foreign nationals can file lawsuits in the United States for serious violations of human-rights law. At the oral argument, the conservative majority showed considerable sympathy for the view that these cases had no business in the federal courts. Yesterday, the Court signaled even greater enthusiasm for that position. In a rare move, the Court ordered the Kiobel case re-argued next fall—and put before the parties the broader question of whether cases of this kind should ever be allowed to proceed. It’s very likely that the Court’s answer will be an emphatic no.
This the second recent occasion in which the Court ordered a re-argument; the other was the signature case of the Roberts Court: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Previously, the Justices had not done so since Warren Burger was Chief Justice. When Citizens United was first argued, in March, 2009, the issue was a fairly narrow and technical one: whether, under campaign finance law, a non-profit corporation could fund a pay-per-view broadcast of a political documentary in the thirty days before a presidential primary. If the Court had simply decided that question—which was all that was necessary to resolve the case—Citizens United would only be of interest to the cognoscenti. Instead, the Justices ordered Citizens United to be re-argued in September, 2009, and three months later issued an opinion that transformed American politics. The Court said that corporations (for-profit as well as non-profit) had the First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts on behalf of candidates.
These are only the famous cases. The conservative agenda thrives at the Court in lesser-known decisions, as well. Last spring, for example, in a case out of Arizona, the Court made it much harder for citizens to challenge government expenditures that support religion. This was part of a pattern of cases in which the Justices have erected barriers to lawsuits by individual citizens against the government or corporate defendants. In Arizona Christian School v. Winn, the Court gave the green light to states to give tax credits for individuals who send their children to parochial schools. As this decision illustrates, the Roberts Court is more amenable than its predecessors to lowering the barriers between church and state. (The issue is every bit as important as whether church-affiliated universities should provide birth control to their employees, but it has received a fraction of the attention.)
The Court also has affirmative action in its sights. In 2003, the Court, by a five-to-four vote, upheld the admissions program at the University of Michigan Law School in Grutter v. Bollinger. In the most famous opinion of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s long career, she said the cause of diversity in higher education was important enough to allow racial preferences, at least for the next twenty-five years. Now, just nine years later, the Roberts Court looks to be sending O’Connor’s handiwork to the dustbin. The Court just agreed to hear Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which is a direct challenge to Grutter. With Samuel Alito having taken O’Connor’s place (and Elena Kagan recused), the result in Fisher seems preordained. And later this month, the Justices will hear arguments on whether President Obama’s heath care-reform—the central achievement of his administration—should be declared unconstitutional.
There’s always an imbalance between what gets attention and what matters. Think of all the print and pixels spent on Herman Cain, or Sarah Palin. In its quiet methodical way, the Roberts Supreme Court is advancing the agenda that the Republican Presidential candidates are stumbling to achieve. Rush Limbaugh may be having a bad week, but John Roberts is having a good decade—with several more likely to follow.
The Elephant in the Courtroom
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
It’s been a rough few weeks for the conservative movement. The Republican Presidential primaries, while lurching toward a conclusion, made a conservative takeover of the White House look more unlikely. Congressional Republicans got bogged down in a debate about insurance coverage for contraception. And Rush Limbaugh, the town crier of the movement, lost a passel of sponsors after he made comments about a law student that were grotesque even by his standards. Still, amid these grim tidings, there remains for conservatives a reliable source of good news: the Supreme Court.
Last week, the Court heard arguments in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, a case of tremendous interest to both corporations and human-rights activists. The question there is whether foreign nationals can file lawsuits in the United States for serious violations of human-rights law. At the oral argument, the conservative majority showed considerable sympathy for the view that these cases had no business in the federal courts. Yesterday, the Court signaled even greater enthusiasm for that position. In a rare move, the Court ordered the Kiobel case re-argued next fall—and put before the parties the broader question of whether cases of this kind should ever be allowed to proceed. It’s very likely that the Court’s answer will be an emphatic no.
This the second recent occasion in which the Court ordered a re-argument; the other was the signature case of the Roberts Court: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Previously, the Justices had not done so since Warren Burger was Chief Justice. When Citizens United was first argued, in March, 2009, the issue was a fairly narrow and technical one: whether, under campaign finance law, a non-profit corporation could fund a pay-per-view broadcast of a political documentary in the thirty days before a presidential primary. If the Court had simply decided that question—which was all that was necessary to resolve the case—Citizens United would only be of interest to the cognoscenti. Instead, the Justices ordered Citizens United to be re-argued in September, 2009, and three months later issued an opinion that transformed American politics. The Court said that corporations (for-profit as well as non-profit) had the First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts on behalf of candidates.
These are only the famous cases. The conservative agenda thrives at the Court in lesser-known decisions, as well. Last spring, for example, in a case out of Arizona, the Court made it much harder for citizens to challenge government expenditures that support religion. This was part of a pattern of cases in which the Justices have erected barriers to lawsuits by individual citizens against the government or corporate defendants. In Arizona Christian School v. Winn, the Court gave the green light to states to give tax credits for individuals who send their children to parochial schools. As this decision illustrates, the Roberts Court is more amenable than its predecessors to lowering the barriers between church and state. (The issue is every bit as important as whether church-affiliated universities should provide birth control to their employees, but it has received a fraction of the attention.)
The Court also has affirmative action in its sights. In 2003, the Court, by a five-to-four vote, upheld the admissions program at the University of Michigan Law School in Grutter v. Bollinger. In the most famous opinion of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s long career, she said the cause of diversity in higher education was important enough to allow racial preferences, at least for the next twenty-five years. Now, just nine years later, the Roberts Court looks to be sending O’Connor’s handiwork to the dustbin. The Court just agreed to hear Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which is a direct challenge to Grutter. With Samuel Alito having taken O’Connor’s place (and Elena Kagan recused), the result in Fisher seems preordained. And later this month, the Justices will hear arguments on whether President Obama’s heath care-reform—the central achievement of his administration—should be declared unconstitutional.
There’s always an imbalance between what gets attention and what matters. Think of all the print and pixels spent on Herman Cain, or Sarah Palin. In its quiet methodical way, the Roberts Supreme Court is advancing the agenda that the Republican Presidential candidates are stumbling to achieve. Rush Limbaugh may be having a bad week, but John Roberts is having a good decade—with several more likely to follow.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
It's Magic
The smaller, quieter half of the magician duo Penn & Teller writes about how magicians manipulate the human mind
By Teller
According to magician Teller, "Neuroscientists are novices at deception. Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands o
Perception, Defined Teller Speaks on the Enduring Appeal of Magic Houdini Revealed In the last half decade, magic—normally deemed entertainment fit only for children and tourists in Las Vegas—has become shockingly respectable in the scientific world. Even I—not exactly renowned as a public speaker—have been invited to address conferences on neuroscience and perception. I asked a scientist friend (whose identity I must protect) why the sudden interest. He replied that those who fund science research find magicians “sexier than lab rats.”
I’m all for helping science. But after I share what I know, my neuroscientist friends thank me by showing me eye-tracking and MRI equipment, and promising that someday such machinery will help make me a better magician.
I have my doubts. Neuroscientists are novices at deception. Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.
I remember an experiment I did at the age of 11. My test subjects were Cub Scouts. My hypothesis (that nobody would see me sneak a fishbowl under a shawl) proved false and the Scouts pelted me with hard candy. If I could have avoided those welts by visiting an MRI lab, I surely would have.
But magic’s not easy to pick apart with machines, because it’s not really about the mechanics of your senses. Magic’s about understanding—and then manipulating—how viewers digest the sensory information.
I think you’ll see what I mean if I teach you a few principles magicians employ when they want to alter your perceptions.
1. Exploit pattern recognition. I magically produce four silver dollars, one at a time, with the back of my hand toward you. Then I allow you to see the palm of my hand empty before a fifth coin appears. As Homo sapiens, you grasp the pattern, and take away the impression that I produced all five coins from a hand whose palm was empty.
2. Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians.
3. It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing. We often follow a secret move immediately with a joke. A viewer has only so much attention to give, and if he’s laughing, his mind is too busy with the joke to backtrack rationally.
4. Keep the trickery outside the frame. I take off my jacket and toss it aside. Then I reach into your pocket and pull out a tarantula. Getting rid of the jacket was just for my comfort, right? Not exactly. As I doffed the jacket, I copped the spider.
5. To fool the mind, combine at least two tricks. Every night in Las Vegas, I make a children’s ball come to life like a trained dog. My method—the thing that fools your eye—is to puppeteer the ball with a thread too fine to be seen from the audience. But during the routine, the ball jumps through a wooden hoop several times, and that seems to rule out the possibility of a thread. The hoop is what magicians call misdirection, a second trick that “proves” the first. The hoop is genuine, but the deceptive choreography I use took 18 months to develop (see No. 2—More trouble than it’s worth).
6. Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself. David P. Abbott was an Omaha magician who invented the basis of my ball trick back in 1907. He used to make a golden ball float around his parlor. After the show, Abbott would absent-mindedly leave the ball on a bookshelf while he went to the kitchen for refreshments. Guests would sneak over, heft the ball and find it was much heavier than a thread could support. So they were mystified. But the ball the audience had seen floating weighed only five ounces. The one on the bookshelf was a heavy duplicate, left out to entice the curious. When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.
7. If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely. This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets. I’ll explain it by incorporating it (and the other six secrets you’ve just learned) into a card trick worthy of the most annoying uncle.
THE EFFECT I cut a deck of cards a couple of times, and you glimpse flashes of several different cards. I turn the cards facedown and invite you to choose one, memorize it and return it. Now I ask you to name your card. You say (for example), “The queen of hearts.” I take the deck in my mouth, bite down and groan and wiggle to suggest that your card is going down my throat, through my intestines, into my bloodstream and finally into my right foot. I lift that foot and invite you to pull off my shoe and look inside. You find the queen of hearts. You’re amazed. If you happen to pick up the deck later, you’ll find it’s missing the queen of hearts.
THE SECRET(S) First, the preparation: I slip a queen of hearts in my right shoe, an ace of spades in my left and a three of clubs in my wallet. Then I manufacture an entire deck out of duplicates of those three cards. That takes 18 decks, which is costly and tedious (No. 2—More trouble than it’s worth).
When I cut the cards, I let you glimpse a few different faces. You conclude the deck contains 52 different cards (No. 1—Pattern recognition). You think you’ve made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties (No. 7—Choice is not freedom).
Now I wiggle the card to my shoe (No. 3—If you’re laughing...). When I lift whichever foot has your card, or invite you to take my wallet from my back pocket, I turn away (No. 4—Outside the frame) and swap the deck for a normal one from which I’d removed all three possible selections (No. 5—Combine two tricks). Then I set the deck down to tempt you to examine it later and notice your card missing (No. 6—The lie you tell yourself).
Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience? A magician’s data sample spans centuries, and his experiments have been replicated often enough to constitute near-certainty. Neuroscientists—well intentioned as they are—are gathering soil samples from the foot of a mountain that magicians have mapped and mined for centuries. MRI machines are awesome, but if you want to learn the psychology of magic, you’re better off with Cub Scouts and hard candy
By Teller
According to magician Teller, "Neuroscientists are novices at deception. Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands o
Perception, Defined Teller Speaks on the Enduring Appeal of Magic Houdini Revealed In the last half decade, magic—normally deemed entertainment fit only for children and tourists in Las Vegas—has become shockingly respectable in the scientific world. Even I—not exactly renowned as a public speaker—have been invited to address conferences on neuroscience and perception. I asked a scientist friend (whose identity I must protect) why the sudden interest. He replied that those who fund science research find magicians “sexier than lab rats.”
I’m all for helping science. But after I share what I know, my neuroscientist friends thank me by showing me eye-tracking and MRI equipment, and promising that someday such machinery will help make me a better magician.
I have my doubts. Neuroscientists are novices at deception. Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.
I remember an experiment I did at the age of 11. My test subjects were Cub Scouts. My hypothesis (that nobody would see me sneak a fishbowl under a shawl) proved false and the Scouts pelted me with hard candy. If I could have avoided those welts by visiting an MRI lab, I surely would have.
But magic’s not easy to pick apart with machines, because it’s not really about the mechanics of your senses. Magic’s about understanding—and then manipulating—how viewers digest the sensory information.
I think you’ll see what I mean if I teach you a few principles magicians employ when they want to alter your perceptions.
1. Exploit pattern recognition. I magically produce four silver dollars, one at a time, with the back of my hand toward you. Then I allow you to see the palm of my hand empty before a fifth coin appears. As Homo sapiens, you grasp the pattern, and take away the impression that I produced all five coins from a hand whose palm was empty.
2. Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians.
3. It’s hard to think critically if you’re laughing. We often follow a secret move immediately with a joke. A viewer has only so much attention to give, and if he’s laughing, his mind is too busy with the joke to backtrack rationally.
4. Keep the trickery outside the frame. I take off my jacket and toss it aside. Then I reach into your pocket and pull out a tarantula. Getting rid of the jacket was just for my comfort, right? Not exactly. As I doffed the jacket, I copped the spider.
5. To fool the mind, combine at least two tricks. Every night in Las Vegas, I make a children’s ball come to life like a trained dog. My method—the thing that fools your eye—is to puppeteer the ball with a thread too fine to be seen from the audience. But during the routine, the ball jumps through a wooden hoop several times, and that seems to rule out the possibility of a thread. The hoop is what magicians call misdirection, a second trick that “proves” the first. The hoop is genuine, but the deceptive choreography I use took 18 months to develop (see No. 2—More trouble than it’s worth).
6. Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself. David P. Abbott was an Omaha magician who invented the basis of my ball trick back in 1907. He used to make a golden ball float around his parlor. After the show, Abbott would absent-mindedly leave the ball on a bookshelf while he went to the kitchen for refreshments. Guests would sneak over, heft the ball and find it was much heavier than a thread could support. So they were mystified. But the ball the audience had seen floating weighed only five ounces. The one on the bookshelf was a heavy duplicate, left out to entice the curious. When a magician lets you notice something on your own, his lie becomes impenetrable.
7. If you are given a choice, you believe you have acted freely. This is one of the darkest of all psychological secrets. I’ll explain it by incorporating it (and the other six secrets you’ve just learned) into a card trick worthy of the most annoying uncle.
THE EFFECT I cut a deck of cards a couple of times, and you glimpse flashes of several different cards. I turn the cards facedown and invite you to choose one, memorize it and return it. Now I ask you to name your card. You say (for example), “The queen of hearts.” I take the deck in my mouth, bite down and groan and wiggle to suggest that your card is going down my throat, through my intestines, into my bloodstream and finally into my right foot. I lift that foot and invite you to pull off my shoe and look inside. You find the queen of hearts. You’re amazed. If you happen to pick up the deck later, you’ll find it’s missing the queen of hearts.
THE SECRET(S) First, the preparation: I slip a queen of hearts in my right shoe, an ace of spades in my left and a three of clubs in my wallet. Then I manufacture an entire deck out of duplicates of those three cards. That takes 18 decks, which is costly and tedious (No. 2—More trouble than it’s worth).
When I cut the cards, I let you glimpse a few different faces. You conclude the deck contains 52 different cards (No. 1—Pattern recognition). You think you’ve made a choice, just as when you choose between two candidates preselected by entrenched political parties (No. 7—Choice is not freedom).
Now I wiggle the card to my shoe (No. 3—If you’re laughing...). When I lift whichever foot has your card, or invite you to take my wallet from my back pocket, I turn away (No. 4—Outside the frame) and swap the deck for a normal one from which I’d removed all three possible selections (No. 5—Combine two tricks). Then I set the deck down to tempt you to examine it later and notice your card missing (No. 6—The lie you tell yourself).
Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience? A magician’s data sample spans centuries, and his experiments have been replicated often enough to constitute near-certainty. Neuroscientists—well intentioned as they are—are gathering soil samples from the foot of a mountain that magicians have mapped and mined for centuries. MRI machines are awesome, but if you want to learn the psychology of magic, you’re better off with Cub Scouts and hard candy
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Glenn Grothman, Wisconsin Senator, Proposes Law That Declares Single Parenthood Child Abuse
Huffington Post
2 March 2012
A controversial bill targeting single parents came to the table at the Senate Committee on Public Health, Human Services and Revenue public hearing in Wisconsin this week.
State senator Glenn Grothman, an admitted opponent of the social welfare establishment that he believes encourages women to have children out of wedlock, introduced Senate Bill 507, which would formally consider single parenthood a contributing factor to child abuse, if passed into law.
SB507 would require the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to emphasize that non-marital parenthood is a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.
According to the bill:
Section 1. 48.982 (2) (g) 2. of the statutes is amended to read: 48.982 (2) (g) 2. Promote statewide educational and public awareness campaigns and materials for the purpose of developing public awareness of the problems of child abuse and neglect. In promoting those campaigns and materials, the board shall emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.
Section 2. 48.982 (2) (g) 4. of the statutes is amended to read:
48.982 (2) (g) 4. Disseminate information about the problems of and methods of preventing child abuse and neglect to the public and to organizations concerned with those problems. In disseminating that information, the board shall emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.
Single parents make up a third of Wisconsin parents, The Annie E. Casey Foundation reports. And according to a 2009 report from the US Census Bureau, there are approximately 13.7 million single parents across the U.S., with single mothers outpacing single fathers five to one.
Grothman's previous attack on the left wing contended that because social programs are available to the poor, liberals want people to be poor and use them, financial benefits he says are driving the rise in single motherhood among low-income moms.
2 March 2012
A controversial bill targeting single parents came to the table at the Senate Committee on Public Health, Human Services and Revenue public hearing in Wisconsin this week.
State senator Glenn Grothman, an admitted opponent of the social welfare establishment that he believes encourages women to have children out of wedlock, introduced Senate Bill 507, which would formally consider single parenthood a contributing factor to child abuse, if passed into law.
SB507 would require the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to emphasize that non-marital parenthood is a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.
According to the bill:
Section 1. 48.982 (2) (g) 2. of the statutes is amended to read: 48.982 (2) (g) 2. Promote statewide educational and public awareness campaigns and materials for the purpose of developing public awareness of the problems of child abuse and neglect. In promoting those campaigns and materials, the board shall emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.
Section 2. 48.982 (2) (g) 4. of the statutes is amended to read:
48.982 (2) (g) 4. Disseminate information about the problems of and methods of preventing child abuse and neglect to the public and to organizations concerned with those problems. In disseminating that information, the board shall emphasize nonmarital parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.
Single parents make up a third of Wisconsin parents, The Annie E. Casey Foundation reports. And according to a 2009 report from the US Census Bureau, there are approximately 13.7 million single parents across the U.S., with single mothers outpacing single fathers five to one.
Grothman's previous attack on the left wing contended that because social programs are available to the poor, liberals want people to be poor and use them, financial benefits he says are driving the rise in single motherhood among low-income moms.
Cats and the Internet
Why Do Cats Run the Internet? A Scientific Explanation
by Perry Stein
Cats may not be man’s best friend, but they’re arguably something even better: man’s key to instant Internet pageviews. It’s a long-established fact that Internet content—whether it’s a cutesy video, a photoshopped inside joke, or a longform public health article—has a better chance of achieving coveted “viral” status if it somehow evokes the sound of purring.
But if we’ve come to accept that cats play an outsized role on the World Wide Web, our understanding of why that’s the case still lags. Most of us would simply plead that we happen to think of cats, and their various digital reproductions, as “cute,” but the sheer magnitude of their popularity suggests that there’s something more than a purely subjective phenomenon at work. Fortunately, natural and social scientists have managed to shed some light on the mystery.
The first thing to acknowledge is that there was a deep interest in cats long before there was an Internet. Miles Orvell, a cultural historian at Temple University who specializes in visual culture, said that what the Internet has done is leverage a preexisting fascination. “There’s a contagious effect of the Internet where something that is there as a latent possibility can emerge at large in society,” Orvell said. “It’s not so much creating this interest in cats, it’s more exploiting this interest that was already there.”
Orvell pointed out that Western culture’s interest in cats extends as far back as the ninth century, when an Irish monk wrote a poem about his cat called “Pangur Ban.” It would prove a lasting trope. Nine-hundred years later, Christopher Smart would write the poem “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry”; in the 1930s T.S. Eliot wrote his famed Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which later became the basis for the musical CATS. Outside of literature, cats became a staple of American popular imagery in the twentieth century, from television advertisements to Tom and Jerry. Cat videos on the Internet that garner millions of hits, Orvell says, should be thought of as an animated extension of the cat calendars of yesteryear.
But why have cats specifically been so successful at soliciting our attention? One hypothesis is that there is a fateful link between cats and human babies that explains their Internet stardom. According to Michael Newall, a philosopher of art at the University of Kent, our inordinate interest in cats may derive from their formal resemblance to our offspring—their big eyes, smallish noses, and dome-shaped heads trigger the evolutionary nurturing instincts that we have evolved toward babies. There may even be a multiplying “superstimulus” effect at work: Newall posits that the exaggerated proportions of cats’ baby-like features prompt an exaggeratedly intense, and involuntary, response in people.
But the reason that cats have catapulted to cyber-fame isn’t purely biological: There are social factors at play as well. Steve Dale, a cat behavior consultant and pet journalist, told me that cat aficionados have been particularly drawn to the Internet because they lack other public safety valves where they can express their affection. “In the world of cats, there is no dog park,” Dale says. “For cat owners, the dog park is the Internet.”
Indeed, the Internet isn’t only a high-volume marketplace of cat memes—it’s also home to very intense communities of cat owners, who gather to share stories and seek answer about their pets. Mieshelle Nagelschneider, author of Random House’s forthcoming book Cat Whisperer, said that cat owners, have taken to the Internet as a means to actively, and collectively, reverse the stigma attached to them: Cat owners have long felt that they don’t get the respect of their counterparts who have dogs, even though there are more domesticated felines (a total of 86 million, according to the Humane Society) than canines. “I think the web has helped emerge this undiscovered beachfront property, that is cat owners,” Nagelschneider says.
There may be more deep-seated psychological responses at play as well. Cats’ famously reserved and withholding personalities naturally seduce us into paying closer attention to them. And unlike humans and dogs, cats are not only natural predators—they are also prey, a reason why cats often appear reserved and stealthy. Cats’ inherent vulnerability, Orvell says, naturally solicits our sympathy, and even puts us in touch with our own mortality. “There’s a complex set of reactions to cats, and the videos bring that into play,” Orvell said
The most compelling explanation for our interest in cats, however, may be the most simple: we’re in awe of them. Nagelschneider told me that we’re inclined to watch cats climbing trees or walking upside down on walls because we wish we could do so ourselves—or, in her words, “When we are watching these videos, they just blow our minds.” To whatever extent that's true, it's certainly worth a click.
Perry Stein is an intern at The New Republic.
by Perry Stein
Cats may not be man’s best friend, but they’re arguably something even better: man’s key to instant Internet pageviews. It’s a long-established fact that Internet content—whether it’s a cutesy video, a photoshopped inside joke, or a longform public health article—has a better chance of achieving coveted “viral” status if it somehow evokes the sound of purring.
But if we’ve come to accept that cats play an outsized role on the World Wide Web, our understanding of why that’s the case still lags. Most of us would simply plead that we happen to think of cats, and their various digital reproductions, as “cute,” but the sheer magnitude of their popularity suggests that there’s something more than a purely subjective phenomenon at work. Fortunately, natural and social scientists have managed to shed some light on the mystery.
The first thing to acknowledge is that there was a deep interest in cats long before there was an Internet. Miles Orvell, a cultural historian at Temple University who specializes in visual culture, said that what the Internet has done is leverage a preexisting fascination. “There’s a contagious effect of the Internet where something that is there as a latent possibility can emerge at large in society,” Orvell said. “It’s not so much creating this interest in cats, it’s more exploiting this interest that was already there.”
Orvell pointed out that Western culture’s interest in cats extends as far back as the ninth century, when an Irish monk wrote a poem about his cat called “Pangur Ban.” It would prove a lasting trope. Nine-hundred years later, Christopher Smart would write the poem “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry”; in the 1930s T.S. Eliot wrote his famed Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which later became the basis for the musical CATS. Outside of literature, cats became a staple of American popular imagery in the twentieth century, from television advertisements to Tom and Jerry. Cat videos on the Internet that garner millions of hits, Orvell says, should be thought of as an animated extension of the cat calendars of yesteryear.
But why have cats specifically been so successful at soliciting our attention? One hypothesis is that there is a fateful link between cats and human babies that explains their Internet stardom. According to Michael Newall, a philosopher of art at the University of Kent, our inordinate interest in cats may derive from their formal resemblance to our offspring—their big eyes, smallish noses, and dome-shaped heads trigger the evolutionary nurturing instincts that we have evolved toward babies. There may even be a multiplying “superstimulus” effect at work: Newall posits that the exaggerated proportions of cats’ baby-like features prompt an exaggeratedly intense, and involuntary, response in people.
But the reason that cats have catapulted to cyber-fame isn’t purely biological: There are social factors at play as well. Steve Dale, a cat behavior consultant and pet journalist, told me that cat aficionados have been particularly drawn to the Internet because they lack other public safety valves where they can express their affection. “In the world of cats, there is no dog park,” Dale says. “For cat owners, the dog park is the Internet.”
Indeed, the Internet isn’t only a high-volume marketplace of cat memes—it’s also home to very intense communities of cat owners, who gather to share stories and seek answer about their pets. Mieshelle Nagelschneider, author of Random House’s forthcoming book Cat Whisperer, said that cat owners, have taken to the Internet as a means to actively, and collectively, reverse the stigma attached to them: Cat owners have long felt that they don’t get the respect of their counterparts who have dogs, even though there are more domesticated felines (a total of 86 million, according to the Humane Society) than canines. “I think the web has helped emerge this undiscovered beachfront property, that is cat owners,” Nagelschneider says.
There may be more deep-seated psychological responses at play as well. Cats’ famously reserved and withholding personalities naturally seduce us into paying closer attention to them. And unlike humans and dogs, cats are not only natural predators—they are also prey, a reason why cats often appear reserved and stealthy. Cats’ inherent vulnerability, Orvell says, naturally solicits our sympathy, and even puts us in touch with our own mortality. “There’s a complex set of reactions to cats, and the videos bring that into play,” Orvell said
The most compelling explanation for our interest in cats, however, may be the most simple: we’re in awe of them. Nagelschneider told me that we’re inclined to watch cats climbing trees or walking upside down on walls because we wish we could do so ourselves—or, in her words, “When we are watching these videos, they just blow our minds.” To whatever extent that's true, it's certainly worth a click.
Perry Stein is an intern at The New Republic.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Long Live the Library
From the New Republic
by Leon Wieseltina
The oldest book in my library was published in 1538. It is Sefer Hasidim, or The Book of the Pious, the first edition, from Bologna, of the vast trove of precepts and stories, at once severe and wild, of the Jewish pietists of Germany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Next to it, and towering over it, which is as it should be, stands Moreh Nevuchim, or The Guide of the Perplexed, the handsome Bragadin edition from Venice in 1551. And next to Maimonides’s masterpiece stands the great 1669 edition of Thomas Browne, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths, another sort of guide to perplexities, along with Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus and their fine engravings of the urns and the quincunx. Nothing elevates a room more than the presence within it of objects whose significance is in no way derived from oneself. These things are not mine; I am theirs. (This can be true also of younger objects: further along the row of treasures is the exquisite first printing, in Boston in 1895, of The Black Riders and Other Lines by Stephen Crane, a small book with a black flower swirling like a vice on its front and its back, and an undistinguished copy of the Book of Job, published in Zhitomir in 1872, that I rescued from the trash in a ruined synagogue in Lvov, or more correctly Lemberg, which is the volume in the room that burns my fingers.) But really the oldest book in my library is a beat-up copy of The Portable Nietzsche—the edition with Seymour Chwast’s woodcut-like image of the master and his unfortunate moustache, not the later one that Oliver Stone anachronistically placed in the hands of Val Kilmer in one of the most risible scenes in The Doors—because it is the book that has been with me the longest. I bought it in 1969 for $1.95 at the Eighth Street Bookshop. I was taking an evening course on the pre-Socratics—I was a monster of voracity, even at seventeen and under a yarmulke—a few blocks away at the New School, and my masterful instructor, a certain Professor Jonas, urged me to read more philosophy, including Nietzsche. The dog-eared passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra are embarrassing now (“Light am I; ah, that I were night!”), but then this was Nietzsche’s only book for adolescents. After some years I learned who Professor Jonas really was, and after some more years he and I enjoyed a warm laugh when I told him the story of his impact upon me in those Village evenings. But all the miles of shelves on all the walls of all the apartments and houses and offices in which I have lived and worked were erected on the foundation of that paperback, Viking Portable Library P62. This is the other variety of significance that attaches to books, the subjective sort, which transforms them into talismans. Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their ethereality and become experiences, turning points in an insufficiently clarified existence, and thereby acquire the almost mystical (but also fallible) intimacy of memory. In this sense one’s books are one’s biography. This subjective urgency bears no relation to the quality of the book: lives have been changed by kitsch, too. What matters is that one’s pores be opened, and that the opening be true. “What is the Ninth Symphony,” Karl Kraus declared, “compared to a pop tune played by a hurdy-gurdy and a memory!”
THE LIBRARY, like the book, is under assault by the new technologies, which propose to collect and to deliver texts differently, more efficiently, outside of space and in a rush of time. If ever I might find a kind word for the coming post-bibliographical world it would be this week, when I have to pack up the thousands of volumes in my office and reassemble them a short distance away—they are so heavy, they take up so much room, and so on; but even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. And a book is more than a text: even if every book in my library is on Google Books, my library is not on Google Books. A library has a personality, a temperament. (Sometimes a dull one.) Its books show the scars of use and the wear of need. They are defaced—no, ornamented—by markings and notes and private symbols of assent and dissent, and these vandalisms are traces of the excitations of thought and feeling, which is why they are delightful to discover in old books: they introduce a person. There is something inhuman about the pristinity of digital publication. It lacks fingerprints. But the copy of a book that is on my shelf is my copy. It is unlike any other copy, it has been individuated; and even those books that I have not yet opened—unread books are an essential element of a library—were acquired for the further cultivation of a particular admixture of interests and beliefs, and every one of them will have its hour. The knowledge that qualifies one to be one’s own librarian is partly self-knowledge. The richness, or the incoherence, of a library is the richness, or the incoherence, of the self.
“I HAVE ALWAYS IMAGINED that paradise will be a kind of library,” wrote Borges. I would not go so far: paradise had better be more than a tweaked version of what I already know, even if the price I pay for such a conception of it is that I never see it. And if paradise lies in the future, it will certainly not be a library. A different arrangement awaits our minds. But there is no disgrace in historical obsolescence. There is only solitude, and fewer interruptions. (Paradise is fewer interruptions!) We are regularly sustained by what is gone. So into the movers’ boxes again the books go—this morning, for example, an abraded copy of the 1946 printing by Schocken of The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, which I cherish for the Hebrew stamp on the title page, which reads “Cultural Service/Central Library/34-516/Israel Defense Forces,” and for the English stamp below it, which reads, “Presented by the Women’s International Zionist Organization ‘WIZO’ to men and women serving in the Israel Defense Army.” They gave Kafka to the troops.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the March 15, 2012 issue of the magazine.
by Leon Wieseltina
The oldest book in my library was published in 1538. It is Sefer Hasidim, or The Book of the Pious, the first edition, from Bologna, of the vast trove of precepts and stories, at once severe and wild, of the Jewish pietists of Germany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Next to it, and towering over it, which is as it should be, stands Moreh Nevuchim, or The Guide of the Perplexed, the handsome Bragadin edition from Venice in 1551. And next to Maimonides’s masterpiece stands the great 1669 edition of Thomas Browne, the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths, another sort of guide to perplexities, along with Urn-Burial and The Garden of Cyrus and their fine engravings of the urns and the quincunx. Nothing elevates a room more than the presence within it of objects whose significance is in no way derived from oneself. These things are not mine; I am theirs. (This can be true also of younger objects: further along the row of treasures is the exquisite first printing, in Boston in 1895, of The Black Riders and Other Lines by Stephen Crane, a small book with a black flower swirling like a vice on its front and its back, and an undistinguished copy of the Book of Job, published in Zhitomir in 1872, that I rescued from the trash in a ruined synagogue in Lvov, or more correctly Lemberg, which is the volume in the room that burns my fingers.) But really the oldest book in my library is a beat-up copy of The Portable Nietzsche—the edition with Seymour Chwast’s woodcut-like image of the master and his unfortunate moustache, not the later one that Oliver Stone anachronistically placed in the hands of Val Kilmer in one of the most risible scenes in The Doors—because it is the book that has been with me the longest. I bought it in 1969 for $1.95 at the Eighth Street Bookshop. I was taking an evening course on the pre-Socratics—I was a monster of voracity, even at seventeen and under a yarmulke—a few blocks away at the New School, and my masterful instructor, a certain Professor Jonas, urged me to read more philosophy, including Nietzsche. The dog-eared passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra are embarrassing now (“Light am I; ah, that I were night!”), but then this was Nietzsche’s only book for adolescents. After some years I learned who Professor Jonas really was, and after some more years he and I enjoyed a warm laugh when I told him the story of his impact upon me in those Village evenings. But all the miles of shelves on all the walls of all the apartments and houses and offices in which I have lived and worked were erected on the foundation of that paperback, Viking Portable Library P62. This is the other variety of significance that attaches to books, the subjective sort, which transforms them into talismans. Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their ethereality and become experiences, turning points in an insufficiently clarified existence, and thereby acquire the almost mystical (but also fallible) intimacy of memory. In this sense one’s books are one’s biography. This subjective urgency bears no relation to the quality of the book: lives have been changed by kitsch, too. What matters is that one’s pores be opened, and that the opening be true. “What is the Ninth Symphony,” Karl Kraus declared, “compared to a pop tune played by a hurdy-gurdy and a memory!”
THE LIBRARY, like the book, is under assault by the new technologies, which propose to collect and to deliver texts differently, more efficiently, outside of space and in a rush of time. If ever I might find a kind word for the coming post-bibliographical world it would be this week, when I have to pack up the thousands of volumes in my office and reassemble them a short distance away—they are so heavy, they take up so much room, and so on; but even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. And a book is more than a text: even if every book in my library is on Google Books, my library is not on Google Books. A library has a personality, a temperament. (Sometimes a dull one.) Its books show the scars of use and the wear of need. They are defaced—no, ornamented—by markings and notes and private symbols of assent and dissent, and these vandalisms are traces of the excitations of thought and feeling, which is why they are delightful to discover in old books: they introduce a person. There is something inhuman about the pristinity of digital publication. It lacks fingerprints. But the copy of a book that is on my shelf is my copy. It is unlike any other copy, it has been individuated; and even those books that I have not yet opened—unread books are an essential element of a library—were acquired for the further cultivation of a particular admixture of interests and beliefs, and every one of them will have its hour. The knowledge that qualifies one to be one’s own librarian is partly self-knowledge. The richness, or the incoherence, of a library is the richness, or the incoherence, of the self.
“I HAVE ALWAYS IMAGINED that paradise will be a kind of library,” wrote Borges. I would not go so far: paradise had better be more than a tweaked version of what I already know, even if the price I pay for such a conception of it is that I never see it. And if paradise lies in the future, it will certainly not be a library. A different arrangement awaits our minds. But there is no disgrace in historical obsolescence. There is only solitude, and fewer interruptions. (Paradise is fewer interruptions!) We are regularly sustained by what is gone. So into the movers’ boxes again the books go—this morning, for example, an abraded copy of the 1946 printing by Schocken of The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, which I cherish for the Hebrew stamp on the title page, which reads “Cultural Service/Central Library/34-516/Israel Defense Forces,” and for the English stamp below it, which reads, “Presented by the Women’s International Zionist Organization ‘WIZO’ to men and women serving in the Israel Defense Army.” They gave Kafka to the troops.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the March 15, 2012 issue of the magazine.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Adjusting to the Information Age
It seems that I am an increasing victim of the Information Age, or, as Brother Gates once termed it, the "Information Highway." It's not that I wish to get off the road, just that I have to fashion my own way of moving down the highway. I grew up with the almost innate belief that you could "look it up." The answer is in a book somewhere. Just find the right book and look it up. Yes, I Google and even occasionally use Wikipedia (though I don't automatically believe anything I read there), but I still trust only respected scholars and peer reviewed material. I am firmly on the side of the respected scholar over the so-called wisdom of the crowd. Oh, the snobbery of it all! The trick is to use digital tools with discretion.
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