In her 7 July 2010 post to the NYT blog, Well, Gretchen Reynolds writes “Your Brain on Exercise.”

Some of the most reverberant recent studies were performed at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. There, scientists have been manipulating the levels of bone-morphogenetic protein or BMP in the brains of laboratory mice. BMP, which is found in tissues throughout the body, affects cellular development in various ways, some of them deleterious. In the brain, BMP has been found to contribute to the control of stem cell divisions. Your brain, you will be pleased to learn, is packed with adult stem cells, which, given the right impetus, divide and differentiate into either additional stem cells or baby neurons. As we age, these stem cells tend to become less responsive. They don’t divide as readily and can slump into a kind of cellular sleep. It’s BMP that acts as the soporific. … The more active BMP and its various signals are in your brain, the more inactive your stem cells become and the less neurogenesis you undergo. Your brain grows slower, less nimble, older.

But exercise countermands some of the numbing effects of BMP, Dr. Kessler says. In work at his lab, mice given access to running wheels had about 50 percent less BMP-related brain activity within a week. They also showed a notable increase in Noggin, a beautifully named brain protein that acts as a BMP antagonist. The more Noggin in your brain, the less BMP activity exists and the more stem cell divisions and neurogenesis you experience. Mice at Northwestern whose brains were infused directly with large doses of Noggin became, Dr. Kessler says, “little mouse geniuses, if there is such a thing.” They aced the mazes and other tests.

I guess there is still a chance that you and I can become “little mouse geniuses.”  Hooray!

-RichardH

“Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?” is a (very) long article by Robert F. Worth in the 11 July 2010 issue of the New York Times Magazine about tribal politics, insurgency, and struggle in this desperately poor and factionalized country.

-RichardH

Olufemi Terry wins 2010 Caine Prize for his short story, ‘Stickfighting Days (PDF).’ The Caine Prize, awarded annually, is described as Africa’s leading literary award.

-RichardH

On the 7 July 2010 broadcast of Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviews Comedian Louis C.K. about his new FX TV show, “Louie,” and his life. Louis C.K. is honest, open, direct, and very funny. From the above URL, you can stream the show or download a podcast.

-RichardH

In his 29 June 2010 NY Times blog post, Ross Douthat writes, “Birthers,’ Polls and Public Ignorance.” Here are a few items that Douthat thinks should be taken with a grain of salt:

• There’s a new poll out, from Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes, showing that 24 percent of Americans don’t think that Barack Obama was born in the United States. [62 percent of Americans think Obama was born here, while 24 percent think he was not and 14 percent are unsure.]
• 6 percent of poll respondents think that Hawaii is not part of the country and 4 percent are unsure.
• 31 percent of the country couldn’t identify Dick Cheney as the vice president in 2007.
• Harris [pollsters] has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps.

Douthat says,

This is an entirely typical result: Large percentages of Americans, poll after poll suggests, don’t know what seem like basic facts about their country and the world. … [I]gnorance about public affairs cuts across party lines. And it isn’t even necessarily a devastating indictment of American culture. … [It] suggests a certain ignorance about important national issues, but also, perhaps, a healthy detachment from politics and public affairs, and a salutary focus on the private sphere instead.

He also says,

I don’t think that people who tell pollsters that Obama was born outside the United States are necessarily “dense.” Some of them are quite intelligent: Conspiracy theories are generally the province of people who are high on I.Q. and low on common sense.

-RichardH

“Why does looking at animals covered in oil make me sad, but looking at animals covered in oil and deep-fried make me hungry?” – Stephen Colbert

-RichardH

In the 1 July 2010 issue of Spiegel Online, Rory Stewart writes “The Real Reason We Are in Afghanistan,” Part 1 and Part 2. After explicating the noble motives and premises of our current counter-insurgency strategy, Stewart urges us to acknowledge our limits.

The only way in which we could move beyond the counter-insurgency theory, or the hundred other theories which buttress and justify the Afghan war, is by rejecting their most basic underlying premises and objectives. Instead of trying to produce an alternative theory (on how to defeat the Taliban, create an effective, legitimate and stable Afghan state, stabilize Pakistan and ensure that al-Qaida could never again threaten the United States) we need to understand that however desirable such things might be, they are not things that we — as foreigners — can do.

We can do other things for Afghanistan but the West — in particular its armies, development agencies and diplomats — are not as powerful, knowledgeable or popular as we pretend. Our officials cannot hope to predict and control the intricate allegiances and loyalties of Afghan communities or the Afghan approach to government. But to acknowledge these limits and their implications would require not so much an anthropology of Afghanistan, but an anthropology of ourselves.

The cures for our predicament do not lie in increasingly detailed adjustments to our current strategy. The solution is to remind ourselves that politics cannot be reduced to a general scientific theory, that we must recognize the will of other peoples and acknowledge our own limits. Most importantly, we must remind our leaders that they always have a choice.

—

That is not how it feels. European countries feel trapped by their relationship with NATO and the United States. Holbrooke and Obama feel trapped by the position of American generals. And everyone — politicians, generals, diplomats and journalist — feels trapped by our grand theories and beset by the guilt of having already lost over a thousand NATO lives, spent a hundred billion dollars and made a number of promises to Afghans and the West which we are unlikely to be able to keep.

So powerful are these cultural assumptions, these historical and economic forces and these psychological tendencies, that even if every world leader privately concluded the operation was unlikely to succeed, it is almost impossible to imagine the US or its allies halting the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan in the years to come. Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa may have been in a similar position during the Third Crusade. Former US President Lyndon B. Johnson certainly was in 1963. Europe is simply in Afghanistan because America is there. America is there just because it is. And all our policy debates are scholastic dialectics to justify this singular but not entirely comprehensible fact.

-RichardH

In the 2 July 2010 issue, the New York Times reports that, Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage.

[M]anufacturers who want to expand find that hiring is not always easy. During the recession, domestic manufacturers appear to have accelerated the long-term move toward greater automation, laying off more of their lowest-skilled workers and replacing them with cheaper labor abroad.

Now they are looking to hire people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker.

…

The Obama administration has advocated further stimulus measures, which the Senate rejected, and has allocated more money for training. Still, officials say more robust job creation is the real solution.

But a number of manufacturers say that even if demand surges, they will never bring back many of the lower-skilled jobs, and that training is not yet delivering the skilled employees they need.

…

Christina D. Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said the skills shortages reported by employers stem largely from a long-term structural shift in manufacturing, which should not be confused with the recent downturn. “I do think that manufacturing can come back to what it was before the recession,” she said.

-RichardH

In the 1 July 2010 issue of the New York Times, Gail Collins suggests two candidates for the title, ‘The Most Unhappy Fellow’.

(1) Senator Scott Brown (R, MA):

Brown ran as a sort of populist man of the people, but in April, he told The Boston Globe that he couldn’t support the then-current version of the [finance reform] bill. When asked what he wanted changed, Brown said: “Well, what areas do you think should be fixed? I mean, you know, tell me. And then I’ll get a team and go fix it.”

It was at this point that we began to suspect that Massachusetts’s junior senator is not a deep thinker.

Brown came around and voted for the bill when it passed the Senate. Then he backed away when it came out of conference committee because the conferees had added a tax on big banks.

Which Brown claimed he could not support. This was at the same time that he was refusing to give the Democrats a final critical vote on extending unemployment benefits. We have here a populist man of the people playing the role of friend to the big banks while not being particularly helpful to the long-term unemployed. What can I tell you? The guy is extremely popular in Massachusetts. Maybe it’s because he drives a truck.

The Democrats dove back into conference and got rid of a $19 billion tax just to make Brown happy. Now he says he’s going to spend the upcoming holiday recess pondering the bill’s implications.

(2) House Minority Leader John Boehner:

[In an interview with The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review] Boehner dismissed the financial reform package as “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” Once again, Democrats did the happy dance.

“That’s right,” said President Obama at his town-hall meeting on the economy in Wisconsin. “He compared the financial crisis to an ant. The same financial crisis that led to the loss of nearly eight million jobs.”

Boehner also called for means-testing Social Security so that retirees with “substantial non-Social Security income” don’t get payments. This should be popular with upper-middle-class Republican voters, whose great complaint has always been that the government insists on giving them too much money.

Perhaps most interesting was his attack on the Obama administration’s attempts to impose a moratorium on deep-sea drilling. “The deep-water drilling — maybe there’s a reason there to pause till we know what happened and we can make sure we can prevent it from happening again,” Boehner said. “But all of this other drilling that’s going on down there in the more shallow waters — there’s no reason to have a moratorium.”

This is actually a perfect description of the Obama policy. It was as if Boehner had denounced the health care reform law by saying that it would probably be a good idea to require people to have insurance and subsidize it for the poor, but that there was absolutely no reason to nationalize all the hospitals and have them run by the Army. Boehner looked burned-out in the interview, like a sullen college student sitting through a boring seminar. A very tanned, puffy-eyed, 60-year-old college student.

And to find out what Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC talk-show host and former Republican congressman, thinks Representative Boehner’s problem is, read the end of Collins’s article.

-RichardH

In the September 1975 issue of The Atlantic, Sanford Ungar wrote The Man Who Runs the Senate about recently deceased Robert C. Byrd.

-RichardH