I just discovered Meklit Hadero through Google Music Magnifier site. She’s an Ethiopian-born, San Francisco-based, jazz and soul singer songwriter:

Born in Ethiopia in the early 1980s, she grew up in Iowa, New York, and Florida. After studying political science at Yale, she moved to San Francisco and became immersed in the city’s thriving arts scene. “She sings of fragility, hope and self-empowerment, and exudes all three,” wrote a Chronicle reporter after witnessing an early performance in the city’s Mission District. “What’s irresistible, above all, is her cradling, sensuous, gentle sound. She is stunning.” She hasn’t looked back.

Named a TED Global Fellow in 2009, Meklit has served as an artist-in-residence at New York University, the De Young Museum, and the Red Poppy Art House. Meklit has also completed musical commissions for the San Francisco Foundation and for theatrical productions staged by Brava! For Women in the Arts. She is the founder of the Arba Minch Collective, a group of Ethiopian artists in diaspora devoted to nurturing ties to their homeland through collaborating with both traditional and contemporary artists there.

Check out her website for more stuff on her. She’s Google Music Magnifier’s artist of the week.

From New Scientist:

When a bee flies into your garden, it doesn’t see what you and I see. Flowers leap out from much darker-looking leafy backgrounds, and they have ultraviolet-reflecting landing strips that show the way to the nectar. Some spiders might even have evolved to exploit these displays, spinning UV patterns into their webs that could work to fool a bee into thinking that it was making a beeline for a tasty treat.

If the bee manages to resist the spider’s trap, she finds her way back home by checking the pattern of polarised light in the sky. All this is seen through the pixellated window of mosaic vision, with each unit of the insect’s compound eye providing one of the 5000 dots that make up an image.

It’s a world of vision that it is difficult to imagine, but we might get some clues from people with aphakia: a condition in which the lens of the eye – which normally absorbs UV light before it can reach the retina – has been removed in surgery or lost in an accident. Bill Stark, an insect-vision researcher at Saint Louis University in Missouri, lost the lens in his left eye after an accident when he was 10 years old. He says he can see UV light as a kind of “whitish blue”, which he would see washing the scenery at a funfair, for example. Because the sight in his left eye is not great, however, he cannot see the subtle patterns in flowers that bees do.

Here. H/T Tyler Cowen

Some Nigerians reminisce on the experience of attending a boarding secondary school. I did, and experienced almost all the horrors they describe. Enjoy.

Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times:

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

Here

If, like me, you have a daughter, consider saying Amen along with Tina Fey when you get to the end of it.

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.

May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.

When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half and stick with Beer.

Guide her, protect her when crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.

Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes and not have to wear high heels.

What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.

May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.

Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.

O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers and the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.

And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.

And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.

“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

Amen.

From Chris Blattman’s blog.

From keith Hart:

The anthropology of finance has flourished in the last decade or so. The doyen of this field is Bill Maurer who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, particularly new and experimental financial and currency forms and their legal implications. He is the author of Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason. One focus of his research is on the shifting regulatory landscape of the offshore Caribbean; and on the cultural implications of new forms of electronic money and payment systems and regulation of mobile phone-enabled payment systems. Maurer has recently been engaged in a series of collaborations with industrial and design professionals who work on the development of new digital and mobile phone-enabled money transfer and savings systems. This led to the founding of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. By exploring people’s creative uses of money beyond its traditional functions, he hopes to provoke deeper reflection on the multiple meanings of money. Maurer recommends a sceptical, pragmatic approach to money and is thus more interested in what people can do with money than what it means to them. Like Jane Guyer (Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa), he believes that anthropologists have bought too easily into the liberal economists’ idea of money as a means of exchange rather than as a means of payment.

It has now become almost commonplace for anthropologists to work in financial centres. Ellen Hertz (The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market ) was prescient in carrying out field research on the Shanghai stock market. Caitlin Zaloom (Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London) focused on how financial traders adjusted to new information technology. Both of these studies, however, are quite traditional in their focus, being concerned with the traders’ local practices and point of view, even if their business is global at another level. Karen Ho goes further by linking her ethnography to a broader analysis of political economy. Based on interviews with employees of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other great finance houses, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street explicitly engages with larger distributional questions, such as those involved in the system of granting bank employees large bonuses.

Here is a column I wrote shortly after reading karen Ho’s book.

Thanks to Funlayo for the link.

You can also listen to behavioural economist Dan Ariely on the same topic on the BBC Worldservice progamme Forum here.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Joschka Fischer, former leader of the German Green Party and former foreign minister of Germany, writes in Project Syndicate:

… political power, not the requirements of energy policy, is what makes giving up nuclear energy so difficult. As a rule, the path to nuclear-power status always begins with so-called “civilian” nuclear programs. The supposed “civilian” nuclear ambitions of Iran have thus, for instance, led to a large number of such “civilian” programs in neighboring states. Honni soit qui mal y pense!

And, of course, the reactions of the nuclear powers to the disaster at Fukushima will be watched and analyzed closely by the so-called “clandestine threshold countries.”

So how will the world – first and foremost, the main nuclear powers – react to the Fukushima disaster? Will the tide truly turn, propelling the world towards nuclear disarmament and a future free of nuclear weapons? Or will we witness attempts to downplay the calamity and return to business as usual as soon as possible?

Fukushima has presented the world with a far-reaching, fundamental choice. It was Japan, the high-tech country par excellence (not the latter-day Soviet Union) that proved unable to take adequate precautions to avert disaster in four reactor blocks. What, then, will a future risk assessment look like if significantly less organized and developed countries begin – with the active assistance of the nuclear powers – to acquire civilian nuclear-energy capabilities?

In case you don’t know, we are currently having debates on nuclear power plants in Germany, and the Fukushima problem might have helped the Green Party gain control of the conservative Baden-Würtemmberg, the richest state in Germany (think Porsche, Mercedes Benz, Bosch), where the CDU, the ruling party, has ruled for the past 58 years. The interesting thing is that the Greens have now inherited four nuclear power plants in the state, and people are watching to see how they deal with the situation.

The National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, recently trippled its exhibition place in a renovation and expansion that lasted about three and a half year. This makes it the largest museum in the world – it beats New York’s Metropolitan Museum, formerly the largest museum in the world, by about 20,000 square feet. The first exhibition?

On the occasion of the re-opening, several German museums and their curators were invited to create programming and exhibitions on the art of the Enlightenment: a survey of artifacts from an era of European creativity, scientific progress, and openness of thought.

This is in a period that China is embarking on what has been described as “the most intense crackdown on free expression in years”.

H/t Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen. Their weekly programme on pop culture and the arts is always a delight to listen to. It is also available as a podcast.

It is difficult to carve out any part of the piece because it is a discussion of a post by Russ Roberts, but let’s try this:

Whenever you hear the term ‘Darwinian’ from anyone other than historians of science, assume the crash position; it’s going to get real ugly. There’s a lot here to correct (but we like helping!). First, evolutionary biologists do predict past states: whenever we reconstruct evolutionary histories (phylogenies), we reconstruct the ancestral past states. And if we have molecular data, we can often attach a rough estimate of time to those states. We certainly can get the order in which events occurred estimated reliably.

And:

But where Roberts goes off the rails is his statement that economists try to predict specifics and that’s impossible to do. I personally wouldn’t blame an economist who didn’t get the timing exactly right on the collapse of Big Shitpile. But what was disturbing was that very few economists–or at least those that interacted with the public–were saying that the combination of rapidly rising housing prices, high personal debt and stagnating wages were a disaster waiting to happen. Contrast that with how evolutionary biologists approached the problem of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Bruce Levin and Frank Stewart published the first population genetics treatment of the evolution of resistance. In 1977.

Read it in full here.

By the way, once a week, Russ Roberts interviews an economist on economic issues, historical and contemporary. The interviews are normally interesting, even if one does not agree with some of the points that are raised. I made my Anthropology of Capitalism students listen to his discussion of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments with Dan Klein, and the class discussion that followed was very interesting.