great review in the ny times, comparing the movie's focus on che's tactics to soderbergh's own obvious obsession with technical process. again, haven't seen it, but that rings true to me. in 'out of sight,' which i think is still his best movie, the technical brilliance matches the cool (not chilly) professionalism of the characters.

the ancient greeks sure must have had a lot of them. and it's amazing how the genes know to turn themselves on when men get sent to prison.

a science column in today's ny times referred to "humans’ peculiar erotic fascination with breasts." not even "human males"!

science gone wild!

for hinduism and buddhism, to the extent there is life after death, it is in the form of reincarnation, which is an interminable torment the religions' goal is to escape. the promise of life after death is in no way their "primary comfort," or any comfort at all. if you only mean christianity and islam, why not just say christianity and islam? why not extend an "admirable and refreshing gesture of cosmopolitanism" to your own writing, ms. miller? too eager to rush into scientism, i guess. healthy people commit suicide because they are malfunctioning little robots? we didn't understand that creaturely forces affected our lives and did battle with our reason before the theory of natural selection? let's re-read that copy of 'the birth of tragedy' and remember to keep science in its place.

"housekeeping" is probably the critical consensus' choice for best american novel of the last 30 years, beating out all the ambitious event-books during that time (underworld, american pastoral, infinite jest, etc). "to kill a mockingbird" would undoubtedly be the public's choice for the G.A.N. today, jane austen is a consensus top 5 novelist of all time.

a domestic scope or small canvas (or whatever the women's novel stereotype is supposed to be) is not an obstacle to critical success any longer. maybe we can talk about the reasons why (men no longer read fiction?), but i think this article is 30 years too late.

how long do we have to put up with sociobiology/evolutionary psych/whatever the hell they're calling this fake science now? i guess it's just idiotic enough to catch on with the masses

fodor had a good summary in the london review of books:

The years after Darwin witnessed a remarkable proliferation of other theories, each seeking to co-opt natural selection for purposes of its own. Evolutionary psychology is currently the salient instance, but examples have been legion. They’re to be found in more or less all of the behavioural sciences, to say nothing of epistemology, semantics, theology, the philosophy of history, ethics, sociology, political theory, eugenics and even aesthetics. What they have in common is that they attempt to explain why we are so-and-so by reference to what being so-and-so buys for us, or what it would have bought for our ancestors. ‘We like telling stories because telling stories exercises the imagination and an imagination would have been a good thing for a hunter-gatherer to have.’ ‘We don’t approve of eating grandmother because having her around to baby-sit was useful in the hunter-gatherer ecology.’ ‘We like music because singing together strengthened the bond between the hunters and the gatherers (and/or between the hunter-gatherer grownups and their hunter-gatherer offspring)’. ‘We talk by making noises and not by waving our hands; that’s because hunter-gatherers lived in the savannah and would have had trouble seeing one another in the tall grass.’ ‘We like to gossip because knowing who has been up to what is important when fitness depends on co-operation in small communities.’ ‘We don’t all talk the same language because that would make us more likely to interbreed with foreigners (which would be bad because it would weaken the ties of hunter-gatherer communities).’ ‘We don’t copulate with our siblings because that would decrease the likelihood of interbreeding with foreigners (which would be bad because, all else being equal, heterogeneity is good for the gene pool).’ I’m not making this up, by the way. Versions of each of these theories can actually be found in the adaptationist literature. But, in point of logic, this sort of explanation has to stop somewhere. Not all of our traits can be explained instrumentally; there must be some that we have simply because that’s the sort of creature we are. And perhaps it’s unnecessary to remark that such explanations are inherently post hoc (Gould called them ‘just so stories’); or that, except for the prestige they borrow from the theory of natural selection, there isn’t much reason to believe that any of them is true."

. . . lars von trier makes a shitty movie in which a woman is brutalized.

in a related story, the sun is setting in the west today. critics call the sun's move "provocative" and "challenging." "it makes me reconsider the role of light in today's society," said one critic.