Over at Duck of Minerva, Patrick Jackson has an interesting take on the Pope’s speech.

What is really going on here is that the Pope is using ‘Islam’ as a convenient rhetorical shorthand for currents of Christianity that he disapproves of. This is an old Christian tactic — it’s been going on for millennia. (R. W. Southern has a short and brilliant little book on this, if anyone wants to know the gory details.) It’s a classic “use of the Other” — but in this case, the Other is not taking too kindly to the way that they are being used.

Let me clarify a bit. Benedict’s lecture wasn’t about Islam, and it wasn’t about the question of whether one should spread religion through conquest and violence. Instead, Benedict’s lecture was about the relationship between faith and reason in the Christian tradition. Indeed, his basic question — according to the “provisional” version of the text released by the Vatican — is whether “the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true.” At issue here is the somewhat abstruse theological question of whether the Hellenistic notion that God is the logos is correct, or whether the “voluntarist” position associated with skeptics from Duns Scotus to David Hume (and arguably with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein too, but that’s material for a much longer post — and probably for a different kind of blog) is correct. The former — God as the logos — position suggests that reason partakes of the divine and that therefore God cannot act unreasonably; the latter — voluntarist — position suggests that God is above reason, and is not bound by our conception of what is reasonable, and by implication also suggests that reason itself is more of a tool that we use to make sense of our world than it is a divinely-inspired way of seeing things aright.

So one might ask: What are out-of-context quotations from fourteenth-century Byzantine emperors, and especially quotations dealing with Islam and Mohammed, doing in such a meditation?

From Prospect Magazine:

It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works. In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous, and in their popular forms profoundly irrational. The agnostics must be right and the atheists very well may be. There is no purpose to the universe. Nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics has been reliably reported. To demand a designer to explain the complexity of the world begs the question, “Who designed the designer?” It has been clear since Darwin that we have no need to hypothesise a designer to explain the complexity of living things. The results of intercessory prayer are indistinguishable from those of chance.

Dawkins, as a young man, invented and deployed to great effect a logical fallacy he called “the argument from Episcopal incredulity,” skewering a hapless clergyman who had argued that since nothing hunted polar bears, they had no need to camouflage themselves in white. It had not occurred to the bishop that polar bears must eat, and that the seals they prey on find it harder to spot a white bear stalking across the ice cap. Of course, you had to think a bit about life on the ice cap to spot this argument. But thinking a bit was once what Dawkins was famous for. It’s a shame to see him reduced to one long argument from professorial incredulity.

More here.   And Dan Jones reviews the review above here.

From The Harvard Gazette:

In the United States, the best-off people, like Asian women in Bergen County, N.J., have a life expectancy 33 years longer than the worst-off, Native American males in some South Dakota counties – 91 versus 58 years. So concludes the most comprehensive study to date of who dies when and where in this country.

For the best-off versus worst-off males, Asians can expect to live more than 15 years longer than high-risk urban blacks. Asian females, in general, outlive poor, urban black males by more than 20 years and low-income rural Southern black women by almost 13 years.

The analysis led the researchers to the idea that there are “eight different Americas.” White middle America and black middle America are different from each other (whites live longer than blacks) and from low-income white America, Southern low-income rural black America, Northern low-income rural white America, high-risk urban black America, and Asian America.

More here.

William Grimes reviews Daniel Mendelsohn’s new book in the New York Times:

Mr. Mendelsohn, who would grow up to become a classics scholar and literary critic, made it his life’s mission to reach into his family history and fill in the blank pages. “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million” is the record of his extraordinary efforts to complete the stories that his grandfather told, and to reimagine the lost world of a generation disappearing before his eyes.

Mr. Mendelsohn sets out to do many things in this hugely ambitious book. First he tries to uncover the facts surrounding the deaths of six Jews trapped in a Polish town under Nazi occupation. But facts are not mere facts in his hands. They are the animating details that transform names — abstractions — into recognizable human beings.

More here.

Paul D. Thacker in Salon:

In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he’d been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.

At the time, Bush administration officials denied that they did any micromanaging of media requests for interviews. But a large batch of e-mails obtained by Salon through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the White House was, in fact, controlling access to scientists and vetting reporters. (The e-mails were provided to several members of Congress for comment; Rep. Henry Waxman’s office has now published them here.)

More here.

Steven Scholl at Informed Consent (JuanCole.com):

The implications of Amis’s deceptive rhetoric is that since Islamism won the Muslim civil war and is now the guiding force behind what we now know as Islam, which means that the majority of Muslims believe that Americans are “infidels” and therefore “unworthy of life.” This is pure racial and religious prejudice of the extreme kind.

I have spent endless hours talking with Muslims on the streets of Arab towns and never felt threatened or in harms way as an American visiting a Arab country; I have never spoken with Sunnis or Shi’is who feel that it is their religious duty to kill me or all non-Muslims because we are worse than animals. Muslims, from mosque preachers to garbage collectors, have never shown me the kinds of fanaticism that Amis leads us to believe are now pandemic in the Arab Muslim world. In my visits to the Arab world I have always been showered with kindness, hospitality, and enjoyed vigorous debates on religion.

More here.

Michael Rogers at MSNBC:

In 2025, when a worker actually needs to work with text, easy-to-use dictation, autoparsing and text-to-speech software allows him or her to create, edit and listen to documents without relying on extensive written skills. And any media analyst on Wall Street will confirm that the vast majority of Americans now consume virtually all of their entertainment and information through multimedia channels in which text is either optional or unnecessary. 

In both the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the ability to read long texts was seen as an unquestioned social good. And back then, the prescription made sense: media technology was limited and in order to take part in both society and workplace, the ability to read books and long articles seemed essential. In 2025, higher-level literacy is probably necessary for only 10 percent of the American population.

More here.  [Thanks to Serge Lubomudrov.]

From BBC News:

Scientists from the Millennium Seed Bank, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, have induced seeds from three species to germinate. They had been brought to Britain from South Africa by a Dutch merchant in 1803, and were found in a notebook stored in the National Archives. Given this history, the Kew team said they were surprised by their success. “They had been kept under pretty poor conditions,” said Matt Daws, a seed ecologist with the Millennium Seed Bank.

“They’d been in a ship for a year, certainly for months, coming back from the Cape, then they’d been kept in the Tower of London for a number of years; only in the last 10 years have they been in controlled conditions. “So I didn’t expect any of them to germinate,” he told the BBC News website, “and the three that did really are tough seeds.”

More here.

It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, “called Yale and told ’em to take this guy.” The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney’s networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave.

more from the New York Review of Books here.

From The Guardian:

More than 100 leading figures of literature, film and academia in India rallied this weekend against a “colonial-era” law making homosexuality a criminal offence. In an open letter, more than 100 influential signatories, including the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, the Booker prizewinner Arundhati Roy, and author Vikram Seth, said the law had been used to “systematically persecute, blackmail, arrest and terrorise sexual minorities” and had spawned intolerance.

They argued that section 377 of the Indian penal code perpetuated Victorian-era antipathy and bigotry towards gay people. “This is why we … support the overturning of [the law that criminalises] romantic love and private, consensual acts between adults of the same sex,” they said.

More here.

Who can look at Bernini’s Ecstasy Of St Theresa (1644- 47) with an innocent eye? On a scalding Roman summer afternoon some years ago, a trio of sandalled nuns came into the dark church of Santa Maria della Vittoria and approached the Cornaro Chapel. I was sitting in one of the pews opposite, unsettled as usual by what I was seeing – intermittently illuminated rapture. Every so often a coin would clunk into the pay-for-light box, and the most astounding peep show in art would proceed: the saint’s head thrown back, her mouth, its upper lip drawn back, opened in a moan, heavy-lidded eyes half-closed, shoulders hunched forward in both recoil and craving. Beside her, a smiling seraph delicately uncovers Theresa’s breast to ease the path of his arrow.

more from Simon Schama at The Guardian here.

In the end, Buruma spreads those arguments out in front of us rather than tying them up in a bundle; he has no concrete suggestions to make and no clear sense of where the Netherlands is headed. But of course, those who think they do know, know wrong; in this case, at least, Buruma’s sense of the lay of the land is itself invaluable: “The murder of Theo van Gogh was committed by one Dutch convert to a revolutionary war,” he concludes, in a passage that should recommend his book to anyone interested in European history as well as Europe’s future. “Such revolutionaries in Europe are still few in number. But the murder, like the bomb attacks in Madrid and London, the fatwah against Salman Rushdie, and the worldwide Muslim protests against cartoons of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper, exposed dangerous fractures that run through all European nations. Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theaters, and places of entertainment. . . . How Europeans, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, cope with this is the question that will decide our future. And what better place to watch the drama unfold than the Netherlands, where freedom came from a revolt against Catholic Spain, where ideals of tolerance and diversity became a badge of national honor, and where political Islam struck its first blow against a man whose deepest conviction was that freedom of speech included the freedom to insult.”

more from Bookforum here.

The paradox of a contemporary museum becomes most overt when an institution that deals in established status enters a realm where doubt is both inevitable and essential. It isn’t clear that the museum is the best place for new objects to be tested. With so much invested-financially, culturally, and even politically-in these institutions, their tendency is to cover up the vital uncertainty of the moment (everything from the quality of the work to its meaning and eventual role in history) with a wealth of supporting material.

At the Dana Schutz exhibit at the Rose in Waltham, a wall paragraph informed visitors that her ouvre tells “the story of the history of painting in the twentieth century (German Expressionism, Matisse and the Fauves, Gauguin and the Symbolists, and Philip Guston, among others)…[in] a unique pictorial language that, just like her own narratives, has no beginning or end.”

The oblique grandeur of this claim-typical of curatorial attempts to prematurely canonize artists-inspires nothing so much as a nostalgia for commercial galleries, where at least they are only trying to sell you the thing.

More from Boston Globe Ideas here.

In the English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, Pascal Lardellier on 9/11, the internet, and the shape of information.

MEDIA coverage of the events of 11 September 2001 had to deal with an unexpected newcomer: the internet. But is the net a new medium or is it a counter-medium? We have to ask that question because the internet has encouraged circulation of a different type of information, while the conventional media relayed the standard version of the events as gospel, repeatedly showing nightmare images accompanied by a familiar institutional commentary, given by cohorts of pontificating experts.

Now, information highways are a spaghetti junction of alternative routes easily accessible to anyone who wants to get away from the main routes of the politically correct and ethnocentric, and that egress is often a good thing. Yet the digital counter-information saturating the net seems to be produced by some new version of the old socialist International organisations: internet users who want to spread the word about their findings or feelings, perhaps about 9/11. Their output spreads wide and loud, as the internet’s characteristic viral circulation has amplified the old word of mouth into unprecedented resonance. Electronic mail circulates files continuously, and can reach hundreds of contacts with a single mouse click.

The meeting between relatively new technology and the historic disaster of 9/11 coincided with the emergence of blogs, those sites where people are at electronic liberty to air own views. While in internet chat rooms there are no holds barred over challenging partisan official versions, adducing technical, economic or political arguments in support.

The net is a powerful tool that allows us to escape our hang-ups. Everyone who surfs can take part in the debate (often anonymously, which is also significant). They get involved in information in the making. Some might be over-zealous in their search for the truth. It is easy to take shortcuts when interpreting numerical data of no fixed abode or to consider the net an open outlet: catharsis is inherent in the venting of resentment.

In ScienceNOW:

U.S. universities foster “a culture that fundamentally discriminates against women,” says a report on the status of women in academic science and engineering issued today by the National Academies. Their underrepresentation is “deeply troubling and embarrassing,” according to the report, which suggests that institutions should create a body to collect data, set standards, and ultimately monitor compliance to increase the number of women in technical fields.

“Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” cites research demonstrating that women are paid less, promoted more slowly, bypassed for honors, and subjected to implicit gender bias from both their male and female colleagues. The 18-member panel–chaired by University of Miami president Donna Shalala and made up primarily of female university presidents, provosts, and senior professors–also finds no scientific basis to the argument that inherent differences between the genders are at the root of the problem.

The fundamental issue, the panel notes, is not attracting women into science but retaining them once they are trained. For example, the report says the culture still favors academics with a stay-at-home spouse–typically a wife. Fewer than half the spouses of male faculty members in the sciences are employed fulltime, whereas 90% of the husbands of women faculty work outside the home.

Seema Sirohi looks at the Indian soldiers who died on the fields of Europe during the Great War, in Outlook India.

More Indians than Belgians died defending the then neutral country. The names weigh down on people who gather daily in great numbers at this most visited WW-I monument.

As I read the names—only 54,896 are recorded—names like Baijnath Singh, Naik Ranbir Singh and Jemadar.

Sidh Nath begin to take form. In November 2002, the Indian government installed a small memorial in the garden hugging the memorial for “those from the Indian Army who fought gallantly in Flanders”. More than 60 per cent of the Indian deaths in WW-I were in the vicious fields around Ypres, a key town which stood in the way of Germany’s planned sweep across Belgium and into France. The Germans attacked the town from three sides, resulting in what are today known as the first and second battles of Ypres. The Indian Expeditionary Force was crucial in stemming the German tide from the start. Its strength in Europe rose to over 1,40,000 during the war, with India providing the most number of troops from any single country after the British. Although Indian soldiers died for the British across the world—in Egypt, Turkey, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Sudan, East Africa and West Europe—in Ypres they died even more.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has a thoughtful piece by Wyatt Mason on satire in America.

The business of scoring this frustratingly debased game of contemporary conversation has been the main focus of “The Daily Show.” Stewart et al. have built careers as liberal foils to conservative talk radio. Where the Limbaughosphere thrives on a muscular, hectoring rhetoric, the mode of “The Daily Show” has been a lampooning of such bullying. Although “The Daily Show” can revel in the same kind of posturing, even if the stance is far more liberal, the best of its work is restrained in the Horatian manner. The show’s “artful ridicule” is at its most scrupulous when attentive to, critical of and vocal about abuses of language. When James Frey, author of the fraudulent memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” was being torn apart by an array of talking heads indignant over his distortions, Stewart offered a deadpan summation that spoke to the perfervid journalistic outrage. Pundits were upset with Frey, Stewart explained, “because he misled us. . .into a book we had no business getting into.” Armed with scrupulous syntax alone, Stewart ironically evoked two infamies that rhymed with Frey’s: the claim that the Bush administration had misled us into war and the observation that the media, so severe in its judgments of Frey’s lie-world, had remained less dogged before the administration’s possible untruths.

This is artful indeed, but a high point both for “The Daily Show” and contemporary satire more generally came shortly after The New Yorker published Seymour Hersh’s 2004 exposé, “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” …The irony — uncomplicatedly galling — seemed obvious enough, but its precise grade was measured nowhere more finely than in an exchange between Stewart and Rob Corddry, a player who has since departed. As Corddry explained to Stewart, his voice that of a schoolteacher instructing an uncommonly simple-minded child:

Jon, there’s no question what took place in that prison was horrible, but the Arab world has to realize that the U.S. shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a. . .well, that we shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter; our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember, Jon, just because torturing prisoners is something we did doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.

In Vanity Fair, Hitchens reviews Myra MacPherson’s biography of the great I.F. Stone, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone and the companion collection The Best of I. F. Stone.

Here is the kind of convention coverage you do not read anymore, will not read again, and have to be quite old even to remember. An unobtrusive freelancer, equipped only with hearing aid, notebook, and Coke-bottle glasses, was squinting and cupping his hand at the G.O.P.’s Nixonian cheerfest in Miami Beach in 1968:

“It was hard to listen to Goldwater and realize that a man could be half Jewish and yet sometimes appear to be twice as dense as the normal gentile. As for Agnew, even at a convention where every speech seemed to outdo the other in wholesome clichés and delicious anticlimaxes, his speech putting Nixon into nomination topped all the rest. If the race that produced Isaiah is down to Goldwater and the race that produced Pericles is down to Agnew, the time has come to give the country back to the WASPs.”

This could have been H. L. Mencken or Murray Kempton on his best day, but it was written by the great Isador Feinstein, always called “Izzy” but in 1937 amending his byline to I. F. Stone. This unusual American humanist didn’t really believe in “race” at all, could easily have quoted at length from both Isaiah and Pericles, sometimes in the original, and, as you readily see, could in a wry way make you laugh.

In the review, Hitchens makes a remarkable claim:

MacPherson makes the slightly glib assumption—as do the editors of the excellent companion volume, The Best of I. F. Stone—that, if he were around today, Izzy would be as staunchly anti-war and anti-Bush as she is. Having known him a bit, I am not so absolutely sure. That he would have found the president excruciating is a certainty. But he had a real horror of sadistic dictators, and would not have confused Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein with the Vietcong…Finally, I think he would have waited for some more documents to surface, and helped unearth them himself, before making any conclusive judgments about weapons programs or terror connections in Iraq.

In the Guardian:

Chinese surgeons have performed the world’s first penis transplant on a man whose organ was damaged beyond repair in an accident this year. The incident left the man with a 1cm-long stump with which he was unable to urinate or have sexual intercourse. “His quality of life was affected severely,” said Dr Weilie Hu, a surgeon at Guangzhou General Hospital….

Although the operation was a surgical success, surgeons said they had to remove the penis two weeks later. “Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off,” Dr Hu said. An examination of the organ showed no signs of it being rejected by the body.

Jean-Michel Dubernard, the French surgeon who performed the world’s first face transplant on a woman who had been attacked by a dog this year, said psychological factors were a serious issue for many patients receiving certain “allografts”, or organs from donors. “Psychological consequences of hand and face allografts show that it is not so easy to use and see permanently a dead person’s hands, nor is it easy to look in a mirror to see a dead person’s face,” he wrote in the journal. “Clearly, in the Chinese case the failure at a very early stage was first psychological. It involved the recipient’s wife and raised many questions.”

Miao Xiaochun. Ferry. 2002. C print.

More here and here on this contemporary Chinese photographer.

[Click on photo to see the whole thing in a smaller window.]