Academics have become frequent visitors to Zuccotti Park, the 33,000-square-foot pedestrian plaza in the heart of New York City’s financial district that is now the site of a nearly monthlong protest, Occupy Wall Street.

Famous scholars like Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and Frances Fox Piven have spoken to the crowd, with their remarks dispersed, word-for-word, from one cluster of people to the next through a “human megaphone.” Many others, such as Lawrence Lessig, have lent their support from farther away, as the demonstrations have spread to cities and college campuses nationwide.

The movement has repeatedly been described as too diffuse and decentralized to accomplish real change, and some observers have seen the appearances by academic luminaries as an attempt to lend the protest intellectual heft and direction. Certainly, its intellectual underpinnings and signature method of operating are easier to identify than its goals.

Economists whose recent works have decried income inequality have informed the movement’s critiques of capitalism. Critical theorists like Michael Hardt, professor of literature at Duke University, and Antonio Negri, former professor of political science at the University of Padua, have anticipated some of the central issues raised by the protests. Most recently, they linked the actions in New York and other American cities to previous demonstrations in Spain, Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and in Athens, among other places.

But Occupy Wall Street’s most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.

via Intellectual Roots of Wall Street Protest Lie in Academe – Faculty – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

From the Guardian:

The Swedish Academy has responded to accusations of insularity over recent years by awarding the 2011 Nobel prize for literature to one of their own: the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.

Tranströmer becomes the eighth European to win the world’s premier literary award in the last 10 years, following the German novelist Herta Muller in 2009, the French writer JMG le Clezio in 2008 and the British novelist Doris Lessing in 2007.

Sweden’s most famous poet becomes the 104th literature laureate, joining former winners including Mario Vargas Llosa and Orhan Pamuk, and is the first poet to take the laurels since Wislawa Szymborska in 1996. Praised by the judges for “his condensed translucent images” which give us “fresh access to reality”, Tranströmer’s surreal explorations of the inner world and its relation to the jagged landscape of his native country have been translated into over 50 languages.

via Nobel prize for literature goes to Tomas Tranströmer | Books | guardian.co.uk.

Is global warming caused by humans? Is Barack Obama a Christian? Is evolution a well-supported theory?

You might think these questions have been incontrovertibly answered in the affirmative, proven by settled facts. But for a lot of Americans, they haven’t. Among Republicans, belief in anthropogenic global warming declined from 52 percent to 42 percent between 2003 and 2008. Just days before the election, nearly a quarter of respondents in one Texas poll were convinced that Obama is a Muslim. And the proportion of Americans who believe God did not guide evolution? It’s 14 percent today, a two-point decline since the ’90s, according to Gallup.

via Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge.

In my mind, it has too much action, or music.

via Siris: Immanuel Kant’s Guide to a Good Dinner Party.

A joyous night in Cairo. What bliss to be alive, to be an Egyptian and an Arab. In Tahrir Square they’re chanting, “Egypt is free” and “We won!”

The removal of Mubarak alone (and getting the bulk of his $40bn loot back for the national treasury), without any other reforms, would itself be experienced in the region and in Egypt as a huge political triumph. It will set new forces into motion. A nation that has witnessed miracles of mass mobilisations and a huge rise in popular political consciousness will not be easy to crush, as Tunisia demonstrates.

via Egypt’s joy as Mubarak quits | Tariq Ali | Comment is free | guardian

One of the most ambitious projects financed by the European Union (EU), SARTRE (Safe Road Trains for the Environment), that aims at making vehicle platooning or tailgating as streamlined as possible with automated cars, has now finally come out of the simulators and has conducted its first ever successful demonstration of this cutting edge technology at the Volvo Proving Ground in Sweden. As per the project SARTRE, the objective is to enable fully automated vehicles to move in a line, much like a convoy with the lead driver leading the way. The participating companies in the EU funded SARTRE project are SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, Ricardo plc, The Robotiker-Tecnalia Technology Centre, Applus+ IDIADA, The Institut für Kraftfahrzeuge of the RWTH Aachen University and the Volvo Car Corporation.”

Hard to know where to begin…

via SARTRE Vehicle Platooning: The Next Evolution In Fully Automated Cars | Trends Updates.

But the rock act sort of ends there. The expectation that bleary, red eyes are hidden behind sunglasses is quickly dashed. The four guys are chipper, chatty, clear-headed and in love with their jobs…

Leigh and Lawlor met in Austin through a mutual friend. “It wasn’t long before guitars came out and we started writing,” Lawlor says. “We had a blank canvas; we could make the band whatever we wanted. We decided it shouldn’t be too complicated and should include some positive messages about love and such. … We might read Sartre, but it’s not what we’re going to sing about.”

Link

I can see him now, our English teacher, Mr. Berman, a diminutive, bow-tied, bespectacled fellow, writing and underlining this long, foreign, unfamiliar word on the blackboard: “EXISTENTIALISM.” We dutifully scribbled into our looseleaf notebooks.

“It’s a post-World War II French philosophy, boys” he explained quite solemnly. “An existentialist is the author of his future. You, and you alone,” and he pointed to us, “determine the course of your fate.You are responsible for the decisions you make, and the path you take. Indeed, you construct your life.”

Sounds like the plot of one of those arcane but impressive books I read all those years ago, like The Stranger, or The Plague or No Exit: A young, multimillionaire football star with the all the promise of a glorious professional future ahead of him leaves the remote safety of his gated country mansion, and crosses the broad river, into the sinful city for a night on the town. He brings a handgun into a crowded nightclub. It accidentally discharges and he is wounded. He is bleeding, panicked. A calm friend drives him to a hospital where he signs in under an alias which, in the end, will not protect him.

Say What??

Hell, observed that relentlessly jolly fellow Jean-Paul Sartre, is “other people”. Obviously, he never had to endure triple French, grinding through that unputdownable masterpiece of his, Les Mains Sales – for which I sincerely hope he is discovering a whole new circle of damnation, and without anyone around to distract him from it. People, he might discover, have their uses. Even in hell.

In any case, judging by the increasing popularity of “single-unit living”, an awful lot of people must agree with him. I don’t – though there’s no doubt that people can be annoying, especially at breakfast, as discussed previously. And, of course, I wish they didn’t spill paint on the carpet or infect me with their wretched classroom nits. In an ideal world, I suppose, they would all sit stock still in another room, watching television with the volume off.