The Fathers’ Dark Triumph: terror and the end of revolution in J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

This paper interrogates the work performed by the figure of the terrorist in J.M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictionalised account of the events prompting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writing of the novel Demons. It does so to illustrate the waning of the cultural signs of revolt and revolution in the ways that they were valorised by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. The idea that writing is able to enact a revolt against the representational and epistemic violence of the symbolic order, is, I argue, one that Coetzee rejects. In denying writing revolutionary power, what emerges instead is the idea of art as itself terroristic: an act of violence rather than one of redemption.     

The Science of Orgasm Has Finally Come: A Review of: “The Science of Orgasm. By Barry R. Komisaruk,Carlos Beyer-Flores,and Beverly Whipple.”

This research sought to examine psychologically mediated effects of differential penis size. To investigate this issue, we asked male and female undergraduates (N = 284) to read erotic passages that differed only in the length of the penis that was ascribed to the male protagonist—3 in. long (small), 5 in. long (medium), 8 in. long (large), or no mention made of penis size (control condition). Arousal and attributional responses to these portrayals were then assessed. In addition, subjects' erotophobia‐erotophilia (their disposition to respond to erotic stimuli with negative to positive emotions) and their level of prior sexual experience were assessed. Results showed that the erotic passages were significantly arousing and that the manipulation of perceptions of penis size was highly effective. Despite the effectiveness of the manipulation, however, subjects did not report differential arousal or (for the most part) attributional responses to depictions of small, medium, or large penises. Correlational analyses revealed that erotophilic (versus erotophobic) persons may be more aroused by depictions of a large penis, and more sexually experienced males seemed to be more aroused by depictions of medium than by small or large penises. In all cases, however, the observed correlations were modest. Overall, the findings suggest that, for most individuals, penis size may be as unimportant on a psychological level as it appears to be on a physical level.     

The popularity and virality of political social media: hashtags,mentions, and links predict likes and retweets of 2016 U.S. presidential nominees’ tweets

What political social media messages resonate and get shared? We analyzed the first three months of tweets from Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump since winning their respective nominations and found that messages containing #hashtags, @usermentions, or http://www.websitelinks.com decreased likes and retweets. While these features are intended to increase audience exposure, their presence concurrently increases disfluency – the subjective experience of difficulty associated with cognition. These features make the message less visually clear (perceptual disfluency) and require the translation of symbols and text strings into meaning (orthographic disfluency). Features that improved processing fluency (i.e. embedded images) increased interactions. These findings underscore the importance of fluency in brief word-of-mouth transmissions and suggest strategies for social media users seeking to influence the voting public.     

The McDonald’s Equilibrium. Advertising,empty calories,and the endogenous determination of dietary preferences

A comparison of accepted nutritional advice with actual American dietary practice suggests that many people fail to eat well in spite of well-documented health consequences. Popular culture often labels the worst offenders as lacking in self-control, and many blame the aggressive advertising campaigns of the fast-food and snack-food industries for manipulating consumers into poor diets, but these conclusions are not easily reconciled with a neoclassical approach to economic decision theory. This essay considers the consumers diet problem in light of emerging evidence from the medical and behavioral sciences. In particular, it is argued that human evolution in the distant past resulted in an elegant solution to this problem (of search for a suitable diet in an uncertain environment), which any neoclassical economist would recognize. In modern environments, however, the signals that formerly provided information in the consumers search problem are subject to manipulation by food-producing firms. Confirmation by molecular biologists that many human responses to these signals are firmly encoded in our genes suggests a need to re-evaluate the welfare economics of the food industry.This essay was originally developed as part of the authors doctoral thesis. Earlier versions were presented at the 77th Annual Conference of the Western Economic Association in Seattle, Washington (June 2002) and in the workshop of the Bonn Graduate School of Economics (December 2002). Thanks are due to participants in these sessions and to Ted Bergstrom, John Conlisk, Bob Deacon, Ted Frech, David Haig, Jack Hirshleifer, Lynn Hunnicutt, Georg Nöldeke, Bob Schillberg, Chris Stoddard, Charlie Stuart, Walter Willet, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Graduiertenkolleg (DFG) 629 at the University of Bonn is gratefully acknowledged.This revised version was published in November 2004 with the correction to the title.     

The Marvels of Mt. Huang

MT. Huang rises above Anhui Province along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. With a circumference of 250 km, Mt. Huang is as grand as Mt. Tai, as steep as Mt. Hua, as cool as Mt. Emei, and as abundant with clouds and mast as Mt. Heng, as abundant in waterfalls as Mt. Lu and displays as many strangely shaped rocks as Mt. Yandang. Mt. Huang is well-known both in China and abroad and is considered a premier peak in the world. Everyone who visits Mount Huang—from tourists to poets to painters—is overwhelmed by the sight of it. This peak was first named Mt. Yi. In Chinese yi means black and bright. In 747 the