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The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al

at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.

Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.

just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 

Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.

Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.

And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”

devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

A sparrow’s song may sound simple, consisting of little more than whistles and trills. But to the sparrows, those few noises can take on vastly different meanings depending on small variations in context and repetition, researchers have found.

n humans, the ability to extract nearly endless meanings from a finite number of sounds, known as partial phonemic overlapping, was key to the development of language

social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

I have been arguing for years that academic activity is distinctive and that it is wrong, both descriptively and normatively, to mix it up with other kinds of activity, especially with politics. In response, I am often asked how a discussion, either in a class or at a conference like this one, could be kept purely academic if the subject matter on the table is itself inherently political. The answer is really quite simple:  Political subject matter could be the starting point of an intellectual inquiry in the course of which the political urgency originally attached to it is replaced by the academic urgency of getting something right, where “right” means accurately described or analyzed or rendered more problematic. (In the academic world not reaching a resolution is a good thing.)

The urgency presiding over the occasion was not the urgency of doing something, but of understanding something, and everyone agreed that the project of understanding was an endless one and that the best we could do in two days would be to expose areas of concern that had not yet been recognized or adequately formulated. The comment heard most often at the end of a session was, “ You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

that’s what we do when we’re doing the job properly — talking (or writing about) issues without ever coming up with a policy proposal or with an argument for supporting a party or a candidate.

Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley, Calif. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility. In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.

There are many well-rehearsed reasons for the change: the rise of television followed by the triumph of digital technology, the sending of instant messages instead of letters, the ‘‘visual turn’’ in our culture, the pervasive use of social media. In their wake, the whole notion of a linguistic birthright could be called quaint, the artifact of particular circumstances that have now vanished

For my parents, born in Boston, the English language was a treasured sign of arrival and rootedness; for me, a mastery of Shakespeare, the supreme master of that language, was like a purchased coat of arms, a title of gentility tracing me back to Stratford-upon-Avon.

Previously our ignorance kept us from unraveling nature’s secret process; when the process is understood knowledge replaces mysticism. He sums this up succinctly:

Education is essential because religion is effectively a struggle for power.

Since God is invented by man, it is through man that he is made known. Make people believe in your story and you can write whatever narrative you’d like. 

n November, the musician Grimes made a bold prediction. “I feel like we’re in the end of art, human art,” she said on Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. “Once there’s actually AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), they’re gonna be so much better at making art than us.”

Artificial intelligence has already upended many blue collar jobs across various industries; the possibility that music, a deeply personal and subjective form, could also be optimized was enough to cause widespread alarm.

While obstacles like copyright complications and other hurdles have yet to be worked out, musicians working with AI hope that the technology will become a democratizing force and an essential part of everyday musical creation.

Great literature, like great thinking, shows the way to clarity. It covers nothing up

Virgin cradles her dead son's head and leans imploringly into his face as if to revive him with her breath, while in the sky above, angels tear their garments and howl.

This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.

Daunt used the pandemic as an opportunity to “weed out the rubbish” in the stores. He asked employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay. Every section of the store needed to be refreshed and made appealing.

Daunt also refused to dumb-down the store offerings. The key challenge, he claimed was to “create an environment that’s intellectually satisfying—and not in a snobbish way, but in the sense of feeding your mind.”

Game theory Sports Previous Next Latest Game theory Latest from all our blogs Football and racist language Reclaiming the Y-word Nov 9th 2012, 16:28 by B.R. ENGLISH football grounds in the 1980s were not pleasant places. Fans were squeezed into caged terraces which were often left open to the elements. Hooliganism was rife and the country was in a state of moral panic as lurid images of fighting youths became a fixture on news bulletins. Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, convened a "war cabinet". Ken Bates, the chairman of Chelsea football club, suggested electrifying the fences in the stadiums to keep the warring factions apart. By the end of the decade English football reached its nadir. In 1985, 39 Italian football fans had been killed in Heysel, Belgium after a riot by Liverpool supporters. In 1989, Liverpool supporters themselves were the victims as 96 lost their lives at Hillsborough as a result of incompetent policing.Some time toward the beginning of that decade, aged around ten, your correspondent was taken to his first away game by his father, a fanatical supporter of Tottenham Hotspur. The game was a derby with Chelsea, a bitter London rival. Chelsea's fans were among the game’s most notorious. Many were skinheads; foot soldiers of extreme right-wing parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. Tottenham, because of the area in North London in which it is situated, had a large and visible Jewish following. It did not make for a pleasant combination. At one point during the first half the hostile Chelsea crowd fell suddenly silent. Quietly at first came a hissing sound, like someone letting out gas from a canister. Before long the hissing reached crescendo. It was a terrifying sound for a small boy. But I was too young to grasp the significance. Only later was I filled in: the Chelsea fans were mimicking the sound of cyanide being released at a Nazi concentration camp. As the years wore on, the abuse towards Spurs fans became less subtle. When clubs with a large right-wing following came to Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium, such as Chelsea, West Ham, Leeds and Manchester United, the anti-semitism was relentless. One common song ran:Spurs are on their way to BelsenHitler's going to gas ‘em againThe Yids from TottenhamThe Yids from White Hart Lane The Y-word. It was the most relentless chant of all. Thousand of opposition fans, faces snarled, would come together in spiteful mantra: “Yiddo! Yiddo!” It was directed towards Tottenham fans and players alike. It would go on for minutes at a time, many times in a game. After a while it was so commonplace that one became immune to it. At some point during that time, something odd began to happen. Tottenham fans began to appropriate the Y-word. Gradually they began to refer to themselves as Yids. The club’s supporters started to describe themselves as the “Yid Army”. Soon the word was being chanted solely by Tottenham fans referring to themselves in a spirit of celebration and of togetherness. It had been reclaimed in much the same way that the word “nigger” was taken back by black hip-hop artists and “queer” was by gays.As a result, the word died as an insult, at least within football grounds.

Building the best life does not require fealty to feelings in the name of authenticity, but rather rebelling against negative impulses and acting right even when we don’t feel like it. In a nutshell, acting grateful can actually make you grateful.

some people are just naturally more grateful than others. A 2014 article in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience identified a variation in a gene (CD38) associated with gratitude. Some people simply have a heightened genetic tendency to experience, in the researchers’ words, “global relationship satisfaction, perceived partner responsiveness and positive emotions (particularly love).” That is, those relentlessly positive people you know who seem grateful all the time may simply be mutants.

Evidence suggests that we can actively choose to practice gratitude — and that doing so raises our happiness.

“Almost every kid — and I mean virtually every kid — can learn math at a very high level, to the point where they could do university level math courses,”

“If you ask why that’s not happening, it’s because very early in school many kids get the idea that they’re not in the smart group, especially in math. We kind of force a choice on them: to decide that either they’re dumb or math is dumb.”

In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything.

Part of what adults need to learn about self-control is in those videos of 5-year-olds. The children who succeed turn their backs on the cookie, push it away, pretend it’s something nonedible like a piece of wood, or invent a song. Instead of staring down the cookie, they transform it into something with less of a throbbing pull on them.

Adults can use similar methods of distraction and distancing, he says. Don’t eye the basket of bread; just take it off the table. In moments of emotional distress, imagine that you’re viewing yourself from outside, or consider what someone else would do in your place. When a waiter offers chocolate mousse, imagine that a cockroach has just crawled across it

“If you change how you think about it, its impact on what you feel and do changes,”