I am . . . like all true professional soldiers,
A profoundly religious man: the true soldier has to be.
— Psychological Warfare; Lessons of War

Lessons of War

I. NAMING OF PARTS

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

by Henry Reed

More:
II. Judging Distances
III. Movement of Bodies
IV. Unarmed Combat
V. Psychological Warfare

From The Guardian:

For Tolstoy fans, 2010 is set to be a wonderful year. One hundred years after the great Russian novelist fled from his country estate outside Moscow – dying three weeks later in a small provincial railway station – the world is gearing up to celebrate him. In Germany and the US there are fresh translations of Anna Karenina; in Cuba and Mexico Tolstoy bookfairs; worldwide, a new black- and-white documentary. Dug up from Russia's archives and restored, the ­ original cinema footage shows an elderly Tolstoy playing with his poodles and vaulting energetically on his horse.

Next month also sees the UK premiere of The Last Station, an accomplished new drama about Tolstoy's final days. Starring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer and James McAvoy, this witty biopic recounts the eventful last two years of his life. Under siege from fin de siècle paparazzi, Count Tolstoy and his wife Sofya Andreevna squabble over his literary estate. Tolstoy wants to leave the copyright to humanity; the countess wants the revenues herself. Tired of marital conflict, Tolstoy runs away, then falls ill and dies on his train journey south.

More here.

From Science:

The New Yorker author, surgeon, Harvard University faculty member, and health policy adviser Atul Gawande told the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) today that checklists could help improve the quality of health care and lower costs. PCAST members seemed enamored with the idea of standardizing treatment and procedures, and also discussed how to raise the academic status of those working in the field. But another PCAST member—Google CEO Eric Schmidt—saw what Gawande was peddling as a potentially lucrative new market for the search engine giant. Here's Schmidt's dream of what a visit to the doctor will look like in 2015. It came during a question-and-answer session following Gawande's 15-minute presentation, drawn from his new book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. You can judge for yourself whether it's sensible or scary.

“My question has to do with the model of health care that we'll be facing in 5 or 10 years,” Schmidt began. “It's pretty clear that we'll have personalized health records, and we'll have the equivalent of a UPC sticker with your medical history. So when you show up at the doctor with some set of symptoms, in my ideal world what would happen is that the doctor would type in the symptoms he or she also observes, and it would be matched against the data in this repository. Then this knowledge engine would use best practices, and all the knowledge in the world to give physicians some sort of standardized guidance. This is a generalized form of the checklists that you're talking about.”

More here.

Nathan Schneider in the Guardian:

James Wood, a writer who himself has lived between the tugs of belief and unbelief, made an eloquent call in the New Yorker last August for “a theologically engaged atheism”. Concluding a review of Terry Eagleton's recent attack on Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, he imagines something “only a semitone from faith [which] could give a brother's account of belief, rather than treat it as some unwanted impoverished relative.”

At the American Academy of Religion meeting in Montreal last year, he may have gotten his wish, or something resembling it. Following an apocalyptic sermon from “death of God” theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer, to the podium came the ruffled Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a self-described atheist and “materialist through and through”, before an audience of religion scholars, theologians, and costumed adherents. He spoke of truths Christianity alone possesses and how Christ's death reveals that “the only universality is the universality of struggle.” Atheism, he explained, is true Christianity, and one can only be a real atheist by passing through Christianity. “In this sense, I am unconditionally a Christian”, said Žižek.

At e! Science News:

Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB), in cooperation with colleagues from Oxford and Bristol Universities, as well as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, have for the first time observed a nanoscale symmetry hidden in solid state matter. They have measured the signatures of a symmetry showing the same attributes as the golden ratio famous from art and architecture. The research team is publishing these findings in Science on the 8. January. On the atomic scale particles do not behave as we know it in the macro-atomic world. New properties emerge which are the result of an effect known as the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. In order to study these nanoscale quantum effects the researchers have focused on the magnetic material cobalt niobate. It consists of linked magnetic atoms, which form chains just like a very thin bar magnet, but only one atom wide and are a useful model for describing ferromagnetism on the nanoscale in solid state matter.

When applying a magnetic field at right angles to an aligned spin the magnetic chain will transform into a new state called quantum critical, which can be thought of as a quantum version of a fractal pattern. Prof. Alan Tennant, the leader of the Berlin group, explains “The system reaches a quantum uncertain – or a Schrödinger cat state. This is what we did in our experiments with cobalt niobate. We have tuned the system exactly in order to turn it quantum critical.”

Via Crooked Timber, Charles Murray goes to Paris and freaks out, over at the AEI blog:

I collected data as I walked along, counting people who looked like native French…it worked out to about 50-50, with the non-native French half consisting, in order of proportion, of African blacks, Middle-Eastern types, and East Asians. And on December 22, I don’t think a lot of them were tourists.

Mark Steyn and Christopher Caldwell have already explained this to the rest of the world—Europe as we have known it is about to disappear—but it was still a shock to see how rapid the change has been in just the last half-dozen years.

Henry Farrell, over at Crooked Timber, point us to this piece by Justin Vaisse in Foreign Policy:

By 2050, Europe will be unrecognizable. Instead of romantic cafes, Paris's Boulevard Saint-Germain will be lined with halal butcheries and hookah bars; the street signs in Berlin will be written in Turkish. School-children from Oslo to Naples will read Quranic verses in class, and women will be veiled.

At least, that's what the authors of the strange new genre of “Eurabia” literature want you to believe. Not all books of this alarmist Europe-is-dying category, which received its most intellectually hefty treatment yet with the recent release of Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, offer such dire and colorful predictions. But they all make the case that low fertility rates among natives, massive immigration from Muslim countries, and the fateful encounter between an assertive Islamic culture and a self-effacing European one will lead to a Europe devoid of all Western identity.

Despite their Europe-focused content, these books are a largely North American phenomenon. Bat Ye'or (or Gisèle Littman), an Egyptian-born British author, wrote one of the first of the genre in 2005, with Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, which argued that political subservience to a Muslim agenda was turning Europe into an appendage of the Arab world. But most of her recent followers, including Caldwell, the jocular and hyperbolic Mark Steyn, the shallow Bruce Thornton, the more serious Walter Laqueur, and the high-pitched Claire Berlinski and Bruce Bawer, write from the other side of the Atlantic.

It's not that Europeans don't produce books in the same vein. Consider Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci's The Rage and the Pride, a rabid attack on Muslim immigrants, or British columnist Melanie Phillips's Londonistan, castigating the British left for handing over the country to the Muslim Brotherhood. Still, there is no real European version of the Eurabia panic, and the books that do exist tend to be country-specific, and part of a fringe far right. They do not dominate the market, while works by a range of serious scholars, including Italian sociologist Stefano Allievi's work on European Muslims, German cultural anthropologist Werner Schiffauer's studies of political Islam among Turkish immigrants, British sociologist Tariq Modood's Multicultural Politics, and French political scientist Olivier Roy's Globalized Islam, have offered important, data-driven analyses that undermine the facile dichotomies of the Eurabia myth.

In The Kitchen

A jug of water

has its own lustrous turmoil

The ironing board thanks god

for its two good strong legs and sturdy back

The new fridge hums like a maniac

with helpfulness

I am trying to love the world

back to normal

The chair recites its stand-alone prayer

again and again

The table leaves no stone unturned

The clock votes for the separate burial of hearts

I am trying to love the world

and all its 8,000 identifiable languages

With the forgetfulness of a potter

I’m trying to get the seas back on the maps

where they belong

secured to their rivers

The kettle alone knows the good he does,

Here in the kitchen, loving the world,

Steadfastly loving

See how easy it is, he whistles

by Penelope Shuttle

From Scientific American:

California scientists have discovered clusters of autism, largely in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, where children are twice as likely to have autism as children in surrounding areas. The 10 clusters were found mostly among children with highly educated parents, leading researchers to report that they probably can be explained by better access to medical experts who diagnose the disorder. Because of the strong link to education, the researchers from University of California at Davis said the new findings do not point to a localized source of pollution, such as an industry, near the clusters.

“I suspect access to services plays the major role,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, senior author of the study published Tuesday in the journal Autism Research.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A decade from now, doctors could well be giving checkups to the bacteria in your digestive tract, super-smart computers could be responding to your unspoken thoughts, and a new green revolution could be well under way. At least that's the way more than a dozen experts on science and technology see it in a series of essays offered up today by the journal Nature. As great as all that sounds, the experts make it clear that not everything about the world in 2020 will be bright and shiny. In some cases, you might not think the future is worth the price you'd have to pay.

For example, take the idea of direct brain-computer interfaces. “The majority of search queries will be spoken, not typed, and an experimental minority will be through direct monitoring of brain signals,” Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, writes in his essay about the future of Internet search. “Users will decide how much of their lives they want to share with search engines, and in what ways.” That last part hints at the privacy debate ahead: If computers can read your mind, how can you be sure you've closed the door to your brain? Today's experiments with brainwave-computer interfaces, such as the system that lets you “tweet with your brain,” could open the door to tomorrow's cyber-snoops.

More here.

Waziristan, headquarters of Islamist terror, has repelled outsiders for centuries. Now the Pakistani government is making a determined effort to control the place.

From The Economist:

Waziristan, home to 800,000 tribal Pushtuns, is a complicated place. It is the hinge that joins Pakistan and Afghanistan, geographically and strategically. Split into two administrative units, North and South Waziristan, it is largely run by the Taliban, with foreign jihadists among them. If Islamist terror has a headquarters, it is probably Waziristan.

For terrorists, its attraction is its fierce independence. Waziristanis (who come mostly from the Wazir and Mehsud tribes) have repelled outsiders for centuries. Marauding down onto the plains of northern Punjab—now North-West Frontier Province (NWFP)—their long-haired warriors would rape, pillage and raise a finger to the regional imperialist, Mughal or British, of the day. No government, imperialist or Pakistani, has had much control over them. “Not until the military steamroller has passed over [Waziristan] from end to end will there be peace,” wrote Lord Curzon, a British viceroy of India at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

With 50,000 Pakistani troops now battling the Taliban in Waziristan, even that may be optimistic. One of the current drivers of the steamroller is Major-General Tariq Khan, head of the army’s 60,000-strong Frontier Corps (FC), whose forebears, rulers of neighbouring Tank, were often robbed by the hill-men. For him, Waziristan is “the last tribal area”.

More here. [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

Henryk M. Broder in Der Spiegel:

In 1988, Salman Rushdie's novel “The Satanic Verses” was published in its English-language original edition. Its publication led the Iranian state and its revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a “fatwa” against Rushdie and offer a hefty bounty for his murder. This triggered several attacks on the novel's translators and publishers, including the murder of Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi. Millions of Muslims around the world who had never read a single line of the book, and who had never even heard the name Salman Rushdie before, wanted to see the death sentence against the author carried out — and the sooner the better, so that the stained honor of the prophet could be washed clean again with Rushdie's blood.

In that atmosphere, no German publisher had the courage to publish Rushdie's book. This led a handful of famous German authors, led by Günter Grass, to take the initiative to ensure that Rushdie's novel could appear in Germany by founding a publishing house exclusively for that purpose. It was called Artikel 19, named after the paragraph in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights that guarantees the freedom of opinion. Dozens of publishing houses, organizations, journalists, politicians and other prominent members of German society were involved in the joint venture, which was the broadest coalition that had ever been formed in postwar German history.

More here. My own take on the Danish cartoons, from almost four years ago, can be seen here.

And here's what Seed Magazine has to say about the book:

What is time, and why does it seem to flow in only one direction? These questions are, well, timeless. But thanks to a bonanza of observational data in the last two decades, time has rapidly become a rigorous—if complex—topic of scientific study. Fortunately, people like Sean Carroll exist to provide entertaining, enlightening, and headache-free explanations. In Carroll’s first book intended for popular audiences, the Caltech theoretical physicist delivers a masterful overview of what time is—and what its one-way passage implies about the nature of the universe. Unifying cosmology, thermodynamics, and information science into a refreshingly accessible whole, From Eternity to Here will make you wish time’s arrow could fly in reverse, if only so you could once again read the book for the first time.

Much more info, including other reviews, here.

UPDATE: Sean has written the following message to his friends on Facebook:

I can't objectively recommend that you buy it, as I'm obviously biased. But I can suggest that, if buying it were something you might be tempted to do, you do so today. A great first day on Amazon can do wonders for a book's longer-term prospects. Just one click away:

http://is.gd/5PzZh

Thanks, and apologies again for the mass distribution. If you do splurge on the book, we'll be having a weekly book-group discussion at Cosmic Variance:

http://is.gd/5PBEy

Hope to see you there!

Sean

Rory Stewart in the New York Review of Books:

Cool poker-players, we are tempted to believe, only raise or fold: they only increase their bet or leave the game. Calling, making the minimum bet to stay, suggests that you can't calculate the odds or face losing the pot, and that the other players are intimidating you. Calling is for children. Real men and women don't want to call in Afghanistan: they want to dramatically increase troops and expenditure, defeat the Taliban, and leave. Or they just want to leave. Both sides—the disciples of the surge and the apostles of withdrawal—therefore found some satisfaction in one passage in President Obama's speech at West Point on December 1:

I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

But the rest left them uneasy. This was not, as they might have imagined, because he was lurching between two contradictory doctrines of increase and withdrawal, but because the rest of his speech argued for a radically different strategy—a call strategy—which is about neither surge nor exit but about a much-reduced and longer-term presence in the country. The President did not make this explicit. But this will almost certainly be the long-term strategy of the US and its allies. And he has with remarkable courage and scrupulousness articulated the premises that lead to this conclusion. First, however, it is necessary to summarize the history of our involvement and the conventional policies that have long favored surge and exit.

More here.

Sana Saleem in Dawn:

Transgender rights represent a relatively new frontier in civil liberties activism. In Pakistan, eunuchs have historically been disregarded and marginalised by mainstream issue advocates. The discriminations against eunuchs reveal our petty-bourgeois mentality that is mostly reluctant to recognise gender deviance.

Over the years, the complete isolation of eunuchs from the very fabric of our society has denied them access to education, employment and health care – a direct violation of fundamental rights. Instead, they are forced to beg, dance, and enter prostitution as the only means of livelihood. Forms of discrimination impacting them include housing discrimination, discrimination in public accommodations, and violence, rape and forced prostitution. Discriminatory behaviour has also forced eunuchs to resort to living in isolated colonies, shunned by society.

To demystify the shrouded lives of eunuchs here, we must begin with an understanding of our society. Ours is a society with a blatant male privilege – the patriarchal orientation reigns supreme as an institution that organises much of life, exhibiting a natural preference for sons over daughters. While we battle against gender discrimination, transgendered children have little or no space in the social set-up.

More here.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett in the NYT make the case that it is not:

THE Islamic Republic of Iran is not about to implode. Nevertheless, the misguided idea that it may do so is becoming enshrined as conventional wisdom in Washington.

For President Obama, this misconception provides a bit of cover; it helps obscure his failure to follow up on his campaign promises about engaging Iran with any serious, strategically grounded proposals. Meanwhile, those who have never supported diplomatic engagement with Iran are now pushing the idea that the Tehran government might collapse to support their arguments for military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets and adopting “regime change” as the ultimate goal of America’s Iran policy.

Ahmad Alehossein makes the case that it is, in Open Democracy:

Iran is known for over three thousand years of despotism. However, it is also known as the land of surprising political changes. Just during the last hundred years of its modern history, the country witnessed a revolution every 25-30 years: (1) the 1906-1911 constitutional revolution; (2) the chaotic 1941-1951 period which began with the fall of Reza Shah and ended with the rise of oil nationalization movement; and, finally, (3) the 1979 ‘Islamic’ revolution. Each revolution has emerged out of period of failed ‘reform from above’ and successive bifurcations in power. We may ask, then, if this is the right historical moment for a forth cycle of revolutionary change?

Since the last presidential elections, the Iranian political system has entered into a route of successive bifurcations again, in which less and less options will be remained for major players to choose in dealing with the political crisis. A series of new events during the holiest Shi’ite month of mourning for the sacred martyrs have created deeper cracks in the regime’s capacity to deal with the growing resistance. Iranians’ historical mythologies have come to back up their resistance in such a very difficult time. Imam Hussein’s mythological-tragic narrative which was politicized through Ali Sharitai’s revolutionary interpretations of history during the 1970s against the Shah’s corrupt secular dictatorship has once again been revitalized. Hussein is resurrected in the political history of Iranian Shi’a, but this time against a corrupt theocratic regime.

Spencer Ackerman reviews Mark Danner's Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, in bookforum:

The book's reportage is divided into three sections: post-Duvalier Haiti, the atrocities of the Balkan wars, and the permanent emergency, in Iraq and beyond, that Danner memorably termed the “forever war” in a 2005 New York Times Magazine piece. Each period shows Danner's maturation: In Haiti, he gave a reporter's tour, but by the time he reached Baghdad, he was primarily a polemicist and a social critic. What has captivated him, and what he has used as a lens to view an ever-bleaker world, is justice, and the all too permeable divide that separates it from vengeance.

Haiti in the late 1980s set the template. The departure of a strongman acted like a pin pulled from a grenade, as official corruption merged with demagoguery and shattered a veneer of social unity; the nearby Americans did little and understood less. Caught between a weak civilian government and a fractured army, Haitians looked to “agriculture, working the earth,” for salvation, a priest told Danner. But the Americans, who offered meager aid, “saw it as inevitable that impoverished, peasant Haiti would become an 'urban country.'” The result was protracted dysfunction and exploitation, leading to the crisis that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and prompted US military intervention.

Bosnia forged Danner's perspective. He expressed outrage in his dispatches over the unwillingness of the world to stop the Serb elimination of Bosnian Muslims. Most writers who documented the Balkan wars romanticized a lost cosmopolitan Bosnia. To Danner, Bosnia was concentration camps, forest death marches, alleged safe areas, Christmas reprisal raids, and racial epithets. He provided lengthy descriptions of Omarska, the camp where grinning Serbs butchered men's genitals as a cautionary display. Glory-hound French generals were outwitted by Bosnian Serb commanders. All this occurred because no one had the courage to recognize evil, least of all the Clinton administration. There was no lost cosmopolitanism in Danner's Bosnia, only predators and prey.

Beau Willimon on the first trading day of the new year, following the decimations of the previous 28 months, in The Daily Beast:

2:39 p.m. (DJ 10590 +160 +1.55%)

By mid-afternoon, Wall Street was teaming with tourists. I decided to join their ranks and visit some of the local landmarks. Directly across Wall Street from the Exchange stands the Federal Hall National Memorial building. George Washington’s first inauguration took place on this site in 1789. Inside were a number of exhibits chronicling the history of the Wall Street area. Here you are reminded that Wall Street wasn’t always about finance. In fact, it used to be the northern extremity of the New Amsterdam, acquiring its name because of an actual wall used to stretch along its length, built by the Dutch to keep out the Native Americans in northern Manhattan.

I chatted up National Park Ranger E.L. Hooper, who showed me several floor-to-ceiling cracks in the masonry supporting the enormous rotunda—fissures caused by the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001. Federal Hall was closed for two years to repair the damage.

Since the business of Federal Hall is not business, but history, I asked Ranger Hooper if he felt insulated from all the financial activity across the street. “Pretty much,” he said, “but we get a couple hundred folks come in here every day asking where the Stock Exchange is, or thinking this building is the Exchange itself, or wondering why they can’t get inside the Exchange.” (The public viewing gallery at the NYSE has been closed since the 9/11 attacks.) “And it was pretty crazy around here during the financial crisis,” he added. “There were TV cameras everywhere, and we had all sorts of weird protests going on outside.” Among some of the protests he witnessed were a troop of bikini-clad women parading down the street on a chilly November day, a man who skulked around in a bear costume, and a duo of street performers—one of whom juggled hatchets while the other played saxophone on a pogo-stick, both wearing signs that read “This is what we’re forced to do for work now.”

After leaving Federal Hall, I treated myself to a hot dog from a street vendor. While I was waiting in line, I got to talking with a Jamaican security guard from Deutsche Bank named George. George had been working on Wall Street for seven years and grown familiar with many of the employees who passed through the Deutsche Bank doors every day. “When things were good, it was so busy in the morning you almost got knocked over from all the people rushing down the street,” he said.

Wendy Doniger in The Times:

Manisha Ma Bhairava worships the Goddess and engages in Tantric ceremonies in the cremation grounds at Tarapith, in Bengal. Lal Peri is a devotee of the Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalander. Tashi Passang lives as a Tibetan monk in Dharamsala, in India. Hari Das is possessed nightly by a god during a cycle of theyyam ritual performances every December to February in Kerala. Rani Bai is a sacred prostitute (a devadasi) in a town in northern Karnataka. Kanai is a blind minstrel who sings with the Bauls (“crazies”), an antinomian sect, at Kenduli, in West Bengal. Mataji wanders as a member of a sect of Digambara (“sky-clad”, that is, naked) Jains at Sravanabelgola. Mohan was a low-caste singer of the epics of the cavalier hero and deity Pabuji in Rajasthan. Srikanda Stpathy is a Brahmin idol-maker in the temple town of Swamimalai in South India.

What do these nine people, the subjects of William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives, have in common? All are in some ways purveyors of the sacred, but beyond that the patterns blur. They are Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim. Four women, five men. Only one (the idol-maker Srikanda, who serves as a kind of baseline point of contrast for all the others) is a Brahmin. Six of them inherited their jobs, while three of the four women, and one man, chose to renounce conventional life for various extreme forms of religion. What binds them together is the unusual suffering that they have undergone – all but Srikanda, whose chief sorrow is that his son wants to become a computer engineer instead of carrying on the family tradition.

More here.

I’m thinking here of Daisy crying stormily over the shirts that Gatsby tosses onto a table in a soft rich heap. These are shirts, Nick tells us, with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. “They’re such beautiful shirts,” Daisy says, sobbing into their thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” The scene connects a rich guy’s wardrobe and turbulent emotion—beauty and sadness—in a surprising (but not inexplicable or mysterious) causal relationship. Like most literary surprises, Daisy’s reaction to what Nick calls the many-colored disarray seems correct, even inevitable. If Gatsby’s shirts made Daisy speak in tongues or punch Carraway in the gut, we would be surprised, all right, but not convinced or moved. Or consider Isaac Babel’s “First Love,” a story that conjoins delirious desire and genocide, and that contains this sentence: “For five of my ten years I had dreamed with all the fervor of my soul about having doves, and then, when I finally managed to buy them, Makarenko the cripple smashed the doves against the side of my face.” Bird and face, peace and violence, passion and pogrom—juxtaposed, smashed, improbably but credibly. Surprises are, in their effect and regardless of content, instruments of wonder and spirit. A surprise lifts aliveness toward consciousness, where it does not (and cannot) permanently reside. There are many reasons to read literature, of course. One very good reason to read literature is to be surprised. In reading, we perform the nearly oxymoronic feat of seeking surprise.

more from Chris Bachelder at The Believer here.

Back in junior high school health class, we were told that the brain has two different hemispheres — the left and the right. The left brain, the textbook stated, is responsible for language, math, and science, logic and rationality. The right brain was the artistic one, the creative half of the brain. But that’s not quite true. Neuroimaging and experiments on patients with split brains and brain damage to only one hemisphere have allowed a much more detailed, and fascinating, accounting of how the two parts interact with the world, and how they combine to become a unified consciousness (and, in some cases of mental disorders, how they occasionally don’t). Iain McGilchrist has combined scientific research with cultural history in his new book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World to examine how the evolution of the brain influenced our society, and how the current make up of the brain shapes art, politics, and science, as well as the rise of mental illness in our time — in particular schizophrenia, anorexia, and autism.

more from Jessa Crispin at The Smart Set here.