I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

— Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

http://xkcd.com/876/#

By David M. Ewalt
Forbes.com

In May 2010, geneticist J. Craig Venter and his team made news by creating the first “synthetic life form,” replacing the genetic code in a bacterium with DNA they’d composed on a computer.

But during a presentation delivered Monday morning at the South By Southwest convention in Austin, Texas, Venter talked about two ways the landmark innovation went wrong.

In order to distinguish their synthetic DNA from that naturally present in the bacterium, Venter’s team coded several famous quotes into their DNA, including one from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man: “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

After announcing their work, Venter explained, his team received a cease and desist letter from Joyce’s estate, saying that he’d used the Irish writer’s work without permission. ”We thought it fell under fair use,” said Venter.

The synthetic DNA also included a quote from physicist Richard Feynman, “What I cannot build, I cannot understand.”

That prompted a note from Caltech, the school where Feyman taught for decades. They sent Venter a photo of the blackboard on which Feynman composed the quote –and it showed that he actually wrote, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”

“We agreed what was on the Internet was wrong,” said Venter. “So we’re going back to change the genetic code to correct it.”

He notices a gap on the shelf and searches the book skyscrapers rising from the floor for the missing volume. He locates it (A Dictionary of Birds, Part IV: Sheathbill–Zygodactyli), slides it back into place, hikes up his belt, lines himself up with his desk chair, and inserts his bottom — one more bulky reference work returned to its rightful home.

— Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists

By Nick Antosca
theparisreview.org

When my dad gave me a stack of his old college paperbacks, I think the education he hoped to foster was aesthetic, not erotic. But one of the books was Lolita, and to a twelve-year-old boy with passable reading comprehension skills, the twelve-year-old girl with the “honey-hued shoulders” and the apple-patterned dress was, above all else, sexy:

There my beauty lay down on her stomach, showing me, showing the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood, her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs.

At least Nabokov was teaching me fresh vocabulary. I had to look up nates, of course, but another new word, nymphet, was helpfully defined throughout the book. Suddenly I saw the world through wiser eyes. Who among my seventh-grade classmates, I wondered with a frisson, was such a creature? What girl had that “soul-shattering, insidious charm” that, while invisible to me, made the antennae of certain adult males tremble?

For much of middle school, I’d been enamored of a smart and introverted girl in my grade. I’ll call her Anna. Red-haired, freckled, and painfully pale, Anna was hardly a dead ringer for Dolores Haze, but I was observant enough to recognize the “ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb”—that marked her as a nymphet.

My imagination required a corresponding nympholept, and the Humbert Humbert of Brunswick Middle School could only be our affable fourth-period teacher, a tall, handsome, offhandedly suave man who was soon slipping in Anna’s bedroom window to ravish her—and be ravished by her—on a nightly basis, as a perturbed cocker spaniel looked on. (I’d once overheard her mention her dog at school.) I loathed and admired him. How could I ever hope to compete?

What Nabokov prettified with a murderer’s fancy prose style, I saw with bracing clarity. This was 1995, and hardcore Internet porn was not yet easily accessible to twelve-year-olds, but my imagination was ambitious. No permutation of heterosexual sex escaped it.

Let me re-emphasize that their trysts took place entirely inside my head. I spent most fourth periods in a daze, playing obscene scenarios on a mental loop. Whenever I tired of one (her parents are sleeping, and Anna and our teacher have to be quiet), another effortlessly assembled itself (our class goes on an overnight field trip, and Anna and our teacher have adjoining rooms). I was like the narrator of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, constructing an elaborate erotic saga that starred two people I hardly knew.

Underneath it all ran a current of guilt. Even if I didn’t quite grasp the nature of my radical misreading of the novel—Humbert’s a predator, not a competitor—I understood that for the majority of readers it didn’t tend to provoke reactions like mine. How weird and fucked-up was I?

Years later, in high school, Anna became my first girlfriend. Occasionally I’d look at her and remember with a jolt of mortification the six weeks or so she spent as one of my mental sex puppets. We had a running game of asking each other, “What are you thinking?” at unexpected moments, and the unspoken rule was that you had to answer honestly. I always did, but she never asked at the right time. That was probably for the best.

Nick Antosca is the author of Fires and Midnight Picnic, which received a Shirley Jackson Award.

I had heard the Sergeant’s words and understood them thoroughly but they were no more significant than the clear sounds that infest the air at all times — the far cry of gulls, the disturbance a breeze will make in its blowing and water falling headlong down a hill. Down into the earth where dead men go I would go soon and maybe come out of it again in some healthy way, free and innocent of all human perplexity. I would perhaps be the chill of an April wind, an essential part of some indomitable river or be personally concerned in the ageless perfection of some rank mountain bearing down upon the mind by occupying forever a position in the blue easy distance. Or perhaps a smaller thing like movement in the grass on an unbearable breathless yellow day, some hidden creature going about its business — I might well be responsible for that or for some important part of it. Or even those unaccountable distinctions that make an evening recognisable from its own morning, the smells and sounds and sights of the perfected and matured essences of the day, these might not be innocent of my meddling and my abiding presence.

. . . . Or perhaps I would be an influence that prevails in water, something sea-borne and far away, some certain arrangement of sun, light and water unknown and unbeheld, something far-from-usual. There are in the great world whirls of fluid and vaporous existences obtaining in their own unpassing time, unwatched and uninterpreted, valid only in their un-understandable mystery, justified only in their eyeless and mindless immeasurability, unassailable in their actual abstraction; of the inner quality of such a thing I might well in my own time be the true quintessential pith. I might belong to a lonely shore or be the agony of the sea when it bursts upon it in despair.

— Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

By Randy Kennedy
nyt.com

As literary coincidences go, it might not carry quite the same cosmic portent as Halley’s Comet appearing in the month of Mark Twain’s birth. But Monday happens to be both World Poetry Day and the fifth anniversary of the moment when a young American software designer named Jack Dorsey sent out to the world the first message using the service that soon became known as Twitter.

The ambrosial stuff of poesy it was not, except maybe to Dilbert fans: “inviting coworkers.”

But the confluence of these two events — both having to do with humanity’s deep and sometimes uncontrollable need to communicate — is occasioning a fresh outpouring of opinion about the future of Twitter as a vehicle for real creativity, not just for entertaining train wrecks like Charlie Sheen’s.

For much of Twitter’s life, the idea that its 140-character stricture could be a crucible for a new kind of ambitious writing has been, more than anything else, a punch line. The 2009 publication of “Twitterature” — a book in which 80 works of Western literature are boiled down into Twitter messages (“Laertes is unhappy that I killed his father and sister. What a drama queen! Oh well, fight this evening.”) — didn’t help matters.

But there’s evidence that the literary flowering of Twitter may actually be taking place. The Twitter haiku movement — “twaiku” to its initiates — is well under way. Science fiction and mystery enthusiasts especially have gravitated to its communal immediacy. And even litterateurs, with a capital L, seem to be warming to it.

For two years, John Wray, the author of the well-regarded novel “Lowboy,” has been spinning out a Twitter story based on a character named Citizen that he cut from the novel, a contemporary version of the serialization that Dickens and other fiction writers once enjoyed.

“I don’t view the constraints of the format as in any way necessarily precluding literary quality,” he said. “It’s just a different form. And it’s still early days, so people are still really trying to figure out how to communicate with it, beyond just reporting that their Cheerios are soggy.” (Mr. Wray’s breakfast-food posts are, at the very least, far funnier than the usual kind: “Citizen opened the book. Inside, he found the purpose of existence expressed logarithmically. From what he could tell, it involved toast.”)

The linguist Ben Zimmer said he thought the growing popularity of the service as a creative outlet could be ascribed to the same “impulse that goes into writing a sonnet, of accepting those kind of limits.” But he admitted that his favorite Twitter literature in recent weeks has not been exactly Shakespearean: the wildly profane and popular Twitter musings that purported to be by the Chicago mayor-elect, Rahm Emanuel, but whose real author was recently revealed to be the rock journalist Dan Sinker.

“The deeper you got into it,” Mr. Zimmer said, “the more novelistic it became, and it was really compelling. It’s almost impossible to see it working in a traditional novel format. But as a Twitter creation it was hilarious, and worth every word.”

Calling all bards! Week in Review asked four poets each to write a poem within Twitter’s text limit of 140 characters — title and author name not included. Share your own verse on Twitter using the hash tag #poetweet.

Twitter Poem

The poem creates a space.
It hides in a tent in a forest.
Making its own bed it falls asleep in the dark,
wakes up under a lamp or the sun.

Billy Collins, whose new book of poems is “Horoscopes for the Dead.”

earth donates

break in a wave train
fallout active plume cloud spills
red reactors give
cross characters translated
in kanji could say much more

Claudia Rankine, whose latest book of poems is “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.”

Teeny tiny poem

Teeny tiny poem/just enuf 2hold/1 xllent big word/Impluvium/open-eyed courtyrd/collectng rain/as all poems do/ skylife, open/birds do:/ tweet

Elizabeth Alexander, whose latest book of poems is “Crave Radiance,” and who wrote and delivered a poem for the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

Low Pay Piecework

The fifth-grade teacher and her followers—
Five classes, twenty-eight in each, all hers:
One-hundred-and-forty different characters.

Robert Pinsky, whose “Selected Poems” will be published next month.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

— Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (via Sleepz and Thinkz)

If something could happen right now that is not likely to or impossible but that would really cheer you up if it did, just light you up like a child again, what would it be?

–Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.

I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.

Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun — slow dived from noon, — goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy! Yet is it bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ‘Tis iron — that I know — not gold. ‘Tis split, too — that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull, mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night — good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)

‘Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad — Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and — Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophecy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies, — Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!

— Moby Dick, chapter 37

By James Parker
theatlantic.com

I get it, believe me—the fever, the yearning, the collapsed distances. I once wrote a letter to Jimmy Osmond, transatlantically, inviting him to come and live with me over the summer holidays. And Jimmy, compared with this, was just a pie-faced kid in a white suit. This is perfection. This is a boy suspended above the masses in a heart-shaped trellis, a boy with his baseball hat reversed, cradling an acoustic guitar and exhorting his fans to prayer. This is a dancing hairstyle and an unbroken voice. This is the lyrical distillate of 50 years of hysteria. This is Galahad in puffy sneakers, brandishing his virginity like a lightsaber. This is barely even pop music—this is angelology.

By this, of course, I mean Justin Bieber, age 16 and eleven-twelfths. You are aware of him. He has sold a zillion records and stormed a zillion hot little hearts. What do you make of that mop of his? If you’re an un-Belieber, a hater, it makes him look like a Lego character with its hairpiece on backward; if you’re a fan, it’s a sign. Smooshed forward from his crown by the gales of love that pursue him always, laid on impasto by the Great Artist but then tapering into tip-of-the-brush teasings at his temples, it is beautiful. Bieber is beautiful. His music is beautiful. Some of it, anyway. “Baby,” even with the clonking middle-section rap from Ludacris, is elemental sentimental pop, three and a half minutes of spray-on serotonin and tingling Brill Building strings. “My first love broke my heart for the first time!” (Had Ludacris been available to the Brill Building songwriters, no doubt they would have used him too.) “U Smile” is a gorgeous Jacksonoid piano-pumper, with Bieber suffering chivalric agonies—“Your lips, my biggest weakness / Shouldn’t have let you know / I’m always gonna do what they say”—as his voice bears the melody aloft on a cluster of vowel sounds plump as Renaissance putti. Hey-yey! Wo-woah!

This year, just in time for Valentine’s Day, came the Bieber movie, a full-length in-cinemas-everywhere life-of-Justin 3-D epic called Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. Commercially speaking, this is rather remarkable. No one ever made a movie about Nik Kershaw. Perhaps, in preparation for the event, you already purchased your special $30 pre-release package (includes glow stick, bracelet, souvenir VIP laminate, and purple 3-D glasses). Never Say Never is Bieber’s Truth or Dare, his ABBA: The Movie, his (in a way) The Man Who Fell to Earth, and it follows other works of Biebography in emphasizing the up-from-Nowheresville side of the story. Proclaims the trailer: THEY SAID IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN. (Did they?) THEY SAID HE WOULD NEVER MAKE IT. (Who said that?) Whatever—the point is that Bieber overcame the odds. Born in 1994 and raised in Stratford, Ontario, with only his huge and unmistakable charisma to help him, he dramatically rescued himself from a null state of non-superstardom and Canadianness.

How did he do it? With YouTube, that’s how. Kissed in his cradle by the witch of the Web, Justin was throwing up little promo reels by the time he was 12. Singing a Brian McKnight song into the bathroom mirror. Or sitting on some municipal steps somewhere, busking mightily about the Lord: “You’re my God and my Fa-ther!” he bellows through the legs of passersby, the wooden body of his guitar reverberating with his shouts. “You’re forever the same / How could I feel so empty now when I speak your name?” (The song is an altered version of 1998’s “Refine Me,” by Jennifer Knapp.) He’s a handy little drummer, the clips show, and a nifty little dancer. He can blast through a ballad but is equally at home with the nibbled syllables and melismata of contemporary R&B. And the, ahem, “star quality” is impossible to miss: the insolent naturalness before the camera, the lifting eyebrows and swerving octaves.

His mother took him to church and envisioned him as a singing prophet, but the world of Pop was calling to him, calling—had been all along. “The day I was born,” records his 2010 memoir, First Step 2 Forever: My Story, “Celine Dion was solid at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘The Power of Love.’”

Those YouTube videos garnered thousands of hits, eyeballs, unique visitors, one of whom was the Atlanta hip-hop manager Scooter Braun. Braun tracked Bieber to Stratford, flew him to Atlanta to meet the industry, Bieber signed a production deal with Usher, and the rest is history, or soon will be. Bieber wasn’t from the Disney factory, and he didn’t have a show on Nickelodeon, so the marketing plan was skewed toward his already established constituency in social media: lots of Facebooking and YouTubing and sugary tweets to his millions-strong Twitter army. “Music is the universal language no matter the country we are born in or the color of our skin. Brings us all together.” (May 19, 2010, 11:37 a.m.) Braun described the strategy to The New York Times: “We’ll give it to kids, let them do the work, so that they feel like it’s theirs.” The kids have performed reliably. “I’ve been a fan of him from when he posted his first video,” testifies a hard-core Belieber in Never Say Never, “and I’ll be his fan ’til he posts his last video.”

The Monkees had their TV show; Bieber has the Web. Carl Wilson, author of the acclaimed book on Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, has noted Bieber’s “McLuhanesque fluency” in cyberspace. It comes with a price. Sex slurs, death rumors, pranks, random venom, swarmings of hostility and obscenity: the underbrain of the Internet is magnetized to Justin Bieber. But the Beliebers have his back, furious little proselytes. Slag him off in a comments thread and they’ll be all over you: “You dumbass, every one like you hate JB cuz you envied him, actually I just don’t know why you hate him!!!” The occasional wistful note of grievance sounded via Twitter from Bieber HQ—“It’s funny when I read things about myself that are just not true. Why would people take time out from their day to hate on a sixteen-year-old?”—suffices to keep their indignation on the boil.

His claim upon their hearts is no mystery. The kid is teenybop-perfect, eagerly suspending his charm-particles in the requisite solution of pure nonentity. He smiles, he thanks, he praises; he displays a persona from which every hint of psychology has been combed out; and he wonders, mildly but without cease, just who the right girl for him might be. “I haven’t been in love yet but I’ve felt love,” he told M magazine in 2009. “It’s a beautiful emotion that you can’t really describe.” No matter that he could, presumably, be slathered in gratifications at the snap of his princely fingers; or that he drops a saucy hint, here and there, about Beyoncé or Rihanna or Kim Kardashian … Justin is alone, silhouetted against the blast of his fame. He pines nonspecifically, a knight-errant with cloche hair at the foot of an invisible tower. “Is she out there?” he calls, echoingly, at the end of “Somebody to Love.” “Is she out there?” And the pulse of longing goes forth, like sonar, to reverberate in the cells of a million unformed libidos.

It’s cruel, really. And they’ve been doing it for decades. Here’s David Cassidy in 1971, meek and un-phallic, soliloquizing his way through the Partridge Family’s “Doesn’t Somebody Want to Be Wanted”: “Y’know, I’m no different from anybody else. I start each day, and I end each night, and it gets really lonely when you’re by yourself. Now where is love? And who is love? I gotta know.”

But David Cassidy performed the rest of that song in a pushy, forgettable ’70s tenor. The Bieber voice—as captured, say, in the acoustic version of “One Time”—is more druglike: a chemical purity of tone with something frictional in the breath, a soft croak or crackle, the faintest rasp of incoming puberty. Potent stuff: the philosopher’s stone of the music industry. Add to it the shimmer of quasi-religious transcendence, the Protestant Pop ethic with which a video like “Pray” is loaded up—images of Justin embracing unfortunates while he sings about closing his eyes and seeing a better day—and you have a product to knock the Archies, the Bay City Rollers, and the Backstreet Boys right on their bubblegum asses.

Naturally, none of this can last. “I’m going down, down, down, down,” he sings in “Baby,” the voice itself depthless, evaporating as it hits the lower range. But he is going down. His collision with biology can be postponed no longer. Gravity, muscles, sag, paunch, depression, hair growing in the ears … All too soon, all too soon. For the music industry, for Justin Bieber, for us poor fools who adore him, this is the magic moment. And to gaze upon it without blinking, you will need those purple 3-D glasses.

. . . I am one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud.

— Moby Dick, “The Ship”

By Dan Kois
nymag.com

I stare at the two curtains side by side on my computer screen. I try to focus on the task at hand: Which image has a photo hidden behind it? And what might it be? The alpine lake at sunset? The loving husband embracing his wife?

I choose the curtain on the left. Behind it are a naked man and woman, fucking.

The pair’s sleek, airbrushed bodies flash on my monitor for precisely two seconds, long enough for me to wonder: Did they know? When these two posed, could they guess that one day this JPEG would wind up on a Mac Mini in a lab at Cornell University? Did he know that from his depilated testicles might be launched the first salvo in the war against the ESP skeptics? Did she know her O-face might change the face of science? Could they see the future?

Maybe so, if you believe the research of ­Daryl Bem. According to “Feeling the Future,” a peer-reviewed paper the APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology will publish this month, Bem has found evidence supporting the existence of precognition. The experiment I’m trying, one of nine Bem cites in his study, asks me to guess which of two curtains hides a photograph. (Some of the images are erotic, some neutral, in an attempt to see if different kinds of photos have different effects.) If mere chance governed each guess, I’d be right 50 percent of the time. Naturally, I’d guess correctly more like 100 percent of the time if you showed me where the photo was before I chose.

But what about if you showed me the photo’s location immediately after I chose? Perhaps, if I had ESP, I could peek into the future and improve my guesswork, even just a little bit. Over seven years, Bem tested more than 1,000 subjects in this very room, and he believes he’s demonstrated that some mysterious force gives humans just the slightest leg up on chance.

Responses to Bem’s paper by the scientific community have ranged from arch disdain to frothing rejection. And in a rebuttal—which, uncommonly, is being published in the same issue of JPSP as Bem’s article—another scientist suggests that not only is this study seriously flawed, but it also foregrounds a crisis in psychology itself.

The scourge of responsible psychological research stands behind me, wearing a red cardigan and an expression of great interest. “How were your results?” Bem asks. He points out that I scored better predicting the location of erotic photos—in Bem’s hypothesis, more arousing images are more likely to inspire ESP—than I did boring old landscapes and portraits. In this dingy lab in the basement of an Ivy League psych department, is the future now?

Even before Daryl Bem, 72, began studying ESP, he was a mind reader—or rather, a mentalist, who performed Kreskin-style magic acts for students and friends. He knew how easily audiences could be tricked, so he was a skeptic about parapsychology, or PSI. “Like most psychologists,” he says, sitting on an elderly couch in his townhouse two miles from Cornell’s campus in Ithaca, “I knew all the ways in which people could fool themselves and interpret coincidences as premonitions.” But reading the existing PSI research changed his opinion about how the brain works. Years ago, he says, “the model of the brain we had was more of a switchboard: stimulus in, response out. Now we have a richer metaphor for thinking about the brain: the computer.” His hands trace a flourish in the air, as if to say Presto!“Short-term and long-term memory have analogs in the computer. There’s stuff in RAM that’ll disappear when you turn the computer off, and there’s stuff you’ve saved to disk. The computer does an enormous amount of unconscious processing—that is, stuff that does not appear on the screen, if you think of the screen as the consciousness.”

Over seven years, Bem measured what he considers statistically significant results in eight of his nine studies. In the experiment I tried, the average hit rate among 100 Cornell undergraduates for erotic photos was 53.1 percent. (Neutral photos showed no effect.) That doesn’t seem like much, but as Bem points out, it’s about the same as the house’s advantage in roulette.

Thinking counterintuitively about ESP appealed to him. “My career has been characterized,” he says, “by trying to solve conundrums where I just don’t believe the conventional explanation.” More than 40 years ago, Bem’s doctoral dissertation challenged the dominant paradigm of social psychology, Leon Festinger’s concept of cognitive dissonance. Bem’s groundbreaking “self-perception theory” suggests that rather than possessing an ironclad sense of self, we define our own emotions and attitudes using the same haphazard external cues (If I bite my nails, I must be nervous) that others use when observing us. “It’s a clever theory,” Bem says, “but what made me rich and famous is that I called the article ‘Self-­Perception Theory: An Alternative to Cognitive Dissonance.’ ”

“I always loved living alone,” Bem says. “And then the other thing is, I identify as gay.” He tucks his white-socked feet under a couch cushion and remembers an early date with Sandra. “I said, ‘Well, I’m from Colorado, and I’m a stage magician, and I’m predominantly homoerotic.’ And she said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone from Colorado before.’ ” He chuckles at his well-­practiced joke.

Bem and his partner, Bruce Henderson, a professor of communication studies at Ithaca College, just celebrated their fifteenth anniversary. They’ve never lived together. “He’s a total slob,” Bem confides. “His place looks like somewhere you’d find a body amid all the junk and the cats.” (Insists Henderson: “I have what seems like 100 cats but is in reality only one very old one.”) Bem’s home, by contrast, is tidy. Decorative owl knickknacks perch attentively atop the window seat, flanking a doll of Edna Mode, the fashion designer from The Incredibles.

Despite “a certain irreverence toward the academy,” as Henderson puts it, Bem never senses any resentment from inside Cornell. “The faculty all have the property of being sufficiently arrogant,” Bem explains, “that it doesn’t trouble them to have a flake in their midst. They value the kind of non-­conformity that leads you to new things. That’s why they’re here rather than at the University of Mexico, or whatever.”

Thomas Gilovich, Bem’s department head, agrees: “You have to be a very solid university to have the luxury of having someone like Daryl around.” Before retiring to emeritus status, Bem taught a variety of classes, including a seminar on the culture wars. “My purpose every week,” he says, “was to give them an aha! experience, where they say, ‘I’ve never thought of an issue in that way.’ ” He publishes less than other academics of his stature. “It’s not embarrassingly low, but in pure publication terms, you’d probably be surprised,” says Gilovich. But when he does publish, it’s a showstopper. As Gilovich puts it, “His impact factor is high.”

Still, Cornell’s grad students never assist with Bem’s ESP studies, at Bem’s insistence, to avoid possible career-­hampering stigma. “I tell students, ‘Only undergraduates and tenured professors should study this stuff,’ ” he says. Bem got tenure “in 1968, 1969, or 1970, I’m not sure which,” well before he ever started studying PSI. Because he can’t get grants, he pays for his research himself.

Gilovich has known Bem for 33 years. (“Daryl and Sandy taught us how to play bridge.”) He has an unforced affection for his colleague, and he’s dubious of warnings that science might suffer if Bem’s research turns out to be bunk. “I feel like science is strong enough,” he says. “It’s a very corrective discipline. If an idea is boringly wrong, it’ll be forgotten. If it’s excitingly wrong, other people will do research and will find out.”

I ask him about Bem’s research plans for the spring semester: to recruit students in Gilovich’s Intro to Social Psych class and feed them answers after they’ve taken the ­multiple-choice quizzes. If Bem’s results are positive, would that be a violation of Cornell’s Code of Academic Integrity?

Gilovich laughs. As long as everyone in the class has the same opportunity, he says, it should be okay. “Look, there are a lot of skeptics who say, ‘Oh, the world’s interesting enough.’ Yeah, it is, but if there were other, you know, realms, dimensions, whatever, that we don’t know about—that would be even better.” He’s quiet for a moment. “It would be cool if it’s true. I’m just … I’d bet a lot of money it’s not.”

Before PSI, Bem made his biggest splash in the nonacademic world with a politically incorrect but weirdly compelling theory of sexual orientation. In 1996, he published “Exotic Becomes Erotic” in Psychological Review, arguing that neither gays nor straights are “born that way”—they’re born a certain way, and that’s what eventually determines their sexual preference.

“I think what the genes code for is not sexual orientation but rather a type of personality,” he explains. According to the EBE theory, if your genes make you a traditionally “male” little boy, a lover of sports and sticks, you’ll fit in with other boys, so what will be exotic to you—and, eventually, erotic—are females. On the other hand, if you’re sensitive, flamboyant, performative, you’ll be alienated from other boys, so you’ll gravitate sexually toward your exotic—males.

EBE is not exactly universally accepted. “The evidence is overwhelming that sexuality is constitutionally based,” Glenn Wilson, a professor at London’s Gresham College and the co-author of a book on the psychobiology of sexual orientation, tells me in an e-mail. “Bem’s theory has no merit. It does not specify why one individual would be affected by ‘alienation’ rather than another.”

Bem seems unconcerned. “Colleagues of mine, especially those in biological science, say, ‘Daryl, your theory is beautifully written and well argued and almost certainly wrong.’ Which is fine!” He laughs. He’s moved on in search of other magic tricks—more aha! moments to rile, and perhaps expand, the world of research psychology. “I’m perfectly happy to be wrong.”