David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow in the NYRB blog:

A new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) provides grim reaffirmation of something we already knew: sexual violence is epidemic within our country’s prisons and jails. According to the report, 64,500 of the inmates who were in a state or federal prison on the day the latest BJS survey was administered had been sexually abused at their current facility within the previous year, as had 24,000 of those who were in a county jail that day—a total of 88,500 people.

In fact, as we’ve explained before, the true national total is much higher. The BJS numbers don’t include thousands who we know are sexually abused in juvenile detention and other kinds of corrections facilities every year, nor do they account for the constant turnover among jailed detainees. Stays in jail are typically short, and several times as many people pass through jail in a year as are held there on any given day. Overall, we can confidently say that well over 100,000 people are sexually abused in American detention facilities every year.

As appalling as this figure is, mere numbers can obscure what is at issue here. So consider the case of Scott Howard. Scott was a gay, non-violent, first-time inmate in a Colorado prison when he was targeted by members of the “2-11 crew,” a white supremacist gang with over 1,000 members in prisons throughout the state. For two years he was forced into prostitution by the gang’s leaders, repeatedly raped and made to perform oral sex. Even after he told prison staff that he was being raped and needed protection from the gang, Scott was told that nothing could be done unless he named his abusers—even though they had threatened to kill him if he did. Because Scott is openly gay, some officials blamed him for the attacks, saying that as a homosexual he should expect to be targeted by one gang or another. And by his account, even those officers who were not hostile didn’t know how to respond to his reports, because appropriate procedures were not in place. They failed to take even the most basic measures to protect him.

The letters of the Iranian exile Fatemeh Shams to her imprisoned husband Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour in Virginia Quarterly Review:

My love!

In these thirty days, I have written letters to whomever I can think of. When I tired of appealing to the closed doors of law and (in)justice, where nobody heard my cries, I consulted your three martyred uncles. I told them that these days our youth are charged with defending the honor of our country—the same goal that they, your uncles, sacrificed their lives for—and now our youth are being imprisoned. I told them that your father named you after them so that the memory of their sacrifices and bravery would not escape our minds.

The dead were the first and last place of authority to which I took my complaints. In the visits that the families of the detained had with the authorities, your name was ever present. That day when they visited our dear Khatami, and I was exile-bound, I wrote him and asked him to bow his head on his pure prayer mat and pray for your safe return. I heard back that he is worried from the depths of his heart and will not stop at anything to free you and the others.

But it was not just these letters my lovely! Our families tried numerous times to exercise the fundamental right of obtaining an attorney. But each time, they were met with obstacles. They took away your right to visit with an attorney. Our calls have gone unanswered, and this is my share: no news of you, my own vagrancy, and this worry about your state.

The days that you have been in prison, with no news, have been historic. But the bitterest of these events was the grief of Sohrab’s mother.2 You were not present, you did not see how young Sohrab’s mother wept by his graveside. With every ounce of my being, I feel her twenty-six days worth of unknowing, uncertainty, and with each tear, I wish to wash away the blood that she has witnessed. This earth is once again being watered by the blood of its fallen youth, and the green sapling of freedom is growing from its core.

Two nights ago I said a prayer of gratitude because a friend brought word that your singing fills the nights in the solitary cells of Evin, though she had not been to see your face. But just knowing that the songbird of Evin still has his voice calmed my heart. As another friend said, your song tells us of your health and breath and aliveness. I know your heart is strong. I know you are standing strong and that the lack of news is due to your continual resistance. I know that if they had broken you and you had told them what they wanted to hear, I would have heard your voice by now, or even seen you. When at night the grief, stronger and many-rooted, attacks my body and soul, I cry for the weak constitution of your interrogators. Staring into your green, lively eyes and forcing you to write and confess to that which you do not believe. This act must require such a hardened heart. I cry for the repression of those who keep you from sleep for long stretches of time trying to make you give in to their dirty, false confessions, and I ask God to guide them and to give you strength.

Dmitry Babich and Peter Taaffe discuss Trotsky in The Moscow News. Babich:

Leon Trotsky is a unique figure in recent Russian history who is despised by all of Russia’s major political currents.

Gennady Zyuganov’s communists hate him because he was made into Bolshevism’s anti-Pope during most of the Soviet period. Russian liberals hate him because he had no respect for private property and for human lives, which he destroyed in the millions during his tenure at the top of Soviet power in 1917-24.

The “party of power” hates him because he was a revolutionary and every revolution is an anathema to United Russia. Nationalists hate him because he had no love or pity for Russia, viewing it merely as “fuel for world revolution” – and not the best, for that matter.

Unlike Nikolai Bukharin and other Bolshevist leaders, Trotsky never had his “moment of glory” in post-Stalinist Russia. Despite his books being published and his family’s tragic fate enjoying some sympathy (Trotsky survived all his four children and only one grandson out of five escaped Stalin’s epic ire), this country’s public opinion did not rehabilitate his ideas. It can be said that Russia once and forever rejected Trotskyism, firing at it on all cylinders.

Trotsky, however, returns the fire. Not via tiny groups of his followers in Russia, which are usually reduced to the third roles in the already not-too-strong anti-Putin protest movement. Just as he did during most of his life, Trotsky – even after his death – is damaging Russia from abroad.

“Western publications headed by former or acting Trotskyites tend to be post-Soviet Russia’s most acerbic critics,” explains Yury Rubinsky, the head of the department for French studies at the Moscow-based Institute of Europe. “To these people, Russia is not just a traitor, but a double and triple traitor.”

Seher Shah in Newsweek:

“Why have there been no great women artists?” asked American art historian Linda Nochlin in a landmark 1971 essay.

Four decades later, her question still stands: while a handful of Western female painters, sculptors, and performance artists—Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic—have achieved the same level of fame as their male counterparts, the West’s elite art world continues to be dominated by male artists, curators, dealers, and collectors.

Look elsewhere around the globe, however, and women are thriving in some of the most dynamic up-and-coming art scenes. They’re even achieving widespread success in a country not exactly known for women’s rights: Pakistan. Female artists from the developing Muslim nation have been recently feted in exhibits like last year’s Hanging Fire at New York’s Asia Society and the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial in Japan.

Women also hold prime positions of influence in Pakistan’s art system, running prestigious galleries such as Karachi’s Canvas and Poppy Seed, and heading key art institutes such as the School of Visual Arts at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore (under the direction of Salima Hashmi), and Lahore’s National College of Arts, which is overseen by Naazish Ataullah.

One reason for the unusually high ratio of female artists in Pakistan has to do with the fact that the art industry has not traditionally been viewed as a lucrative business by men, says South Asian art historian Savita Apte, who administers the internationally renowned Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Until very recently, creatively inclined males tended to focus on fields such as advertising or illustration, leaving the art field wide open for some very talented women.

Graham Greene hated interviews. He granted one in 1968 to BBC television (his brother, Hugh Carleton Greene, was then director-general) but made two stipulations: the interview should take place on the Orient Express, thundering across borders to Istanbul; and his face should not be shown on screen during the hour-long conversation, only his hands. They titled the programme The Hunted Man. Greene was always easier to hunt than to catch. Norman Sherry notes in the preface to his monumental biography: “A man who would write two versions of his diary is not a man who gives up his secrets easily.” Sherry’s attitude is baffled but deferential. Had he not worshipped Greene, he would never have spent the best (30!) years of his scholarly life on his project only to receive a cascade of scorn from critics when, in 2004, his third and final volume appeared.

more from John Sutherland at the FT here.

Reporting from Maui — We’ve been batting our way through W.S. Merwin’s yard for a couple hours, swatting mosquitoes in the streambed under the dark wet canopy of towering, philodendron-draped mangoes and looking at some 700 species of palm trees, every one of which he has planted by hand. He stops to touch them, saying things like, “Oh, this is Carpoxylon macrocarpa; they were thought to be extinct on Madagascar, but here it is.” Many of these trees are exceptionally rare. Then he pulls up in front of a short broad palm, rather unimpressive next to the other trees on his property on Maui’s northern shore, but he smiles as he fondles the leaf. “We think this Pritchardia minor is from the Kalalau Valley,” he says, referring to a spot in the rugged Na Pali cliffs on Kauai, also a key setting in Merwin’s epic narrative poem about Hawaii, “The Folding Cliffs.” “It gives me gooseflesh to think of it being here.”

more from Dean Kuipers at the LAT here.

The Czech novelist Milan ­Kundera’s new essayistic book, “Encounter,” his fourth, is alternatingly elegiac and celebratory. An émigré from the Communist horror of what was then Czechoslovakia, he settled in Paris and proceeded to write in French. But he discovered in France “the sense that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying.” Still, there remain the particular artists whom Kundera celebrates — novelists, poets, composers, painters — who keep beauty alive. There are 26 essays, some of only a couple of pages, some rather longer. Let us examine a characteristic one, “What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt?” It begins by making reference to a 1999 article in a Paris weekly, “one of the more serious ones.” (Frequently Kundera will refer to a person or a piece of writing without identification, unclear whether for universalizing or diplomatic reasons.) It contained a special section on 18 “geniuses of the century,” featuring, among others, Coco Chanel, Maria Callas, Bill Gates, Le Corbusier, Picasso, Yves Saint Laurent and the little-known astronomy professor Robert Noyes.

more from John Simon at the NYT here.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:

A young man of striking looks, his long brown hair framing his face, his suit offset by an oversized wine-red cravat and a trademark spider brooch the size of a palm, is being followed around a vast hall by a film crew. He is one of the four men about to be honoured by an award that is among the rarest accomplishments in any field of intellectual endeavour—the Fields Medal.

The award’s monetary prize is insignificant—about $15,000—but the prestige it offers is incalculable. The actual medal, made of 14 carat gold, is 9 cm in diameter and bears the head of Archimedes in profile with an inscription in Latin from a passage by Manilius, a first-century Roman poet: Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri (‘To pass beyond your understanding and make yourself master of the universe’). The inscription on the obverse side translates to: ‘The mathematicians assembled here from all over the world pay tribute to outstanding work.’

Given once every four years for outstanding mathematical work completed before the age of 40, in the 70 or so years since the Fields Medal has been instituted, just 52 have been awarded—four of them this year at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) underway in Hyderabad, the first time in over a century of its existence that the conference is being held in India.

Three thousand assembled mathematicians rise in tribute as President Pratibha Patil awards the medal to the chosen four: Elon Lindenstrauss from Israel, Stanislav Smirnov from Russia, Ngo Bao Chau from Vietnam (originally, though now a naturalised citizen of France), and Cedric Villani from France (the man in the cravat).

More here.

Rachel Courtland in New Scientist:

AN IDENTICAL copy of you is also reading this story. This twin is the same in every way, living on an Earth and in a universe that looks exactly like our own. And there may be an infinite number of them. Such doppelgängers could be a natural consequence of our present conception of the universe. Now, some physicists say they could pose a serious problem for quantum mechanics. But a possible fix may also be in sight, and it could help tie abstract quantum concepts to concrete physical causes.

In the uncertain, fuzzy world of quantum mechanics, particles do not have fixed properties until they are observed. Instead, objects that obey quantum rules exist in a “superposition” of all their possible states simultaneously. Schrödinger's famous cat, for example, is both alive and dead until we take a peek inside the booby-trapped box in which it has been placed.

Because the probability that the cat will be found alive is based on a quantum event – the decay of a radioactive substance within the box – it can be calculated using a principle called the Born rule. The rule is used to transform the vague “wave function” of a quantum state, which is essentially a mixture of all possible outcomes, into concrete probabilities of particular observations (in this case, the cat being alive or dead). But this staple of quantum mechanics fails when it is applied to the universe at large, says Don Page at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

At issue is the possibility that there could be a multiplicity of copies of any particular experiment floating about the universe, just as there could be a multiplicity of yous. There could even be an infinite number of them if, as is thought, the early universe underwent a period of exponential growth, called inflation. Although this period ended very soon after the big bang in our observable region of space, inflation may have continued elsewhere, giving rise to a “multiverse”, an infinite space containing infinite copies of our Earth. “In an infinite universe, every possible thing would happen, and it would happen an infinite number of times,” says cosmologist Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

Anna Aslanyan's interviews Tom McCarthy, in 3 AM Magazine:

I seem to be surrounded by Tom McCarthy fans. In a small bookshop, I run into an acquaintance and, after a brief hello, he moves on to McCarthy’s latest novel, C. A friend who, upon reading his first, Remainder, realised her boss reminded her of its protagonist (she herself felt like one of its extras, the lady who is required by contract to fry insane amounts of liver), comes round and asks me what I make of the new book. Another friend tries to predict the author’s trajectory over the next decade and says about C, “You can’t pretend life is a literary quotation any more.” I realise that, when the conversation turns to the book, each of us is talking about a different one, which makes me think of my own perception of it as incomplete, perhaps totally skewed.

A hot summer day, C not yet out, the Booker judges still busy deciding on this year’s longlist, I go to meet Tom McCarthy. On the way to the cafe, I remember the last time I interviewed him, a couple of years ago, when C was but a distant signal in the space, part of the white noise. Back then, Tom said the book was about mourning, quickly adding for my benefit: “Mourning with a ‘u’.” He was the first to burst out laughing, but the memory still does little for my confidence as a critic, so the first question I ask him is: “You’ve read my review of C – what did I get wrong?”

Tom McCarthy: I don’t think you can actually get things right or wrong when it comes to books. As a writer, you can only set up a number of possibilities, things to be interpreted. It there were one interpretation it would probably be a rather one-dimensional book. But then again… who am I to say? I can just share some anecdotes of its production.

3:AM: Let’s do anecdotes then. Your Black Box Transmitter project has been launched a while back. Is it related to the book in any way? I guess it’s a chicken-and-egg question.

TMcC: The precursor of the Black Box was the chicken – it was while I was researching it that I had the idea for C. This link between telephony and death, communications and family structures, which in literature have always been incestuous, from Sophocles onwards. Also, Nabokov is a large presence in the novel. I’ve been reading Ada – I think it’s his masterpiece, the best book by a long, long way. Strangely, a lot of Nabokovians don’t like it… Anyway, it’s all about encryption of some kind or another. Telephony is key – even though it is the one thing completely banned in the book. Again, this is by the same token as sex has been banned in Remainder. That book was all about sex, of course, so having it there in any explicit form would have diluted the message.

Espen Hammer review Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek's Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Much recent work on German Idealism has been approached from a Kantian angle. It has focused on issues of rationality and normativity, ignoring or rejecting as either irrelevant or incoherent many of the features of Post-Kantian German Idealism that seem to indicate a commitment to ontology. The central contention in this slim yet programmatic volume by Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek (containing individually written essays and a co-written introduction) is that the project of German Idealism — initiated by Kant yet radicalized and, as they see it, completed by Fichte, Hegel, and especially Schelling — was in fact deeply oriented towards a particular conception of ontology. This ontology needs to be understood, they argue, not just because it throws light on the aims of this movement as a whole, but because it contains insights that are relevant to contemporary philosophical concerns.

The text abounds with bold declarations, sweeping generalities, and promises of new beginnings:

The fetishism of quantification and of the logical form prevailing in much of contemporary philosophical discourse is characterized by a lack of reflection on its constitution. It is our aim to dismantle this lack and to argue that we are in need of a twenty-first-century Post-Kantian Idealism which would, of course, not be geographically restricted. The era of German Idealism is over, but the era of Post-Kantian Idealism has just begun (with neo-Hegelianism as its first necessary error) (14).

One may want to know what “the fetishism of quantification” or “the logical form” refers to, why neo-Hegelianism is reduced to a “necessary” error, or what it means to say that “the era of Post-Kantian Idealism has just begun” (is the beginning of this era perhaps marked by the publication of this book?), but the text offers no answers. The general sense one gets from reading this book is that the authors have been more interested in imparting a certain vision of what philosophy should look like than in patiently defending a specific claim or set of claims.

Mythology, Madness, and Laughter — these are hardly the kinds of concepts that mainstream scholars tend to use in order to characterize German idealism. Gabriel's and Žižek's interests are not in reason and rationality, the status of transcendental arguments, the meaning of objectivity, and the like — the kinds of issues one would normally expect to find discussed in book-length studies of the theoretical philosophies of figures such as Kant and Hegel — but in the darker, more romantic question of that mysterious “other” which is said to precede the constitution of a field of knowledge or the knowing, reflective, and rational subject.

A Day In Autumn

After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city's avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Mary Kinzie

From Harvard Magazine:

The good boy who turns to crime because he lives in a bad neighborhood is a common fixture of popular culture. Now that narrative has a newly discovered analogy in the world of cell biology. Professor of stem cell and regenerative biology and Jordan professor of medicine David Scadden and colleagues have demonstrated for the first time that changes in an environmental niche can actually cause disease. “Good” cells can turn “bad” in a bad neighborhood—leading to cancer.

In cancer, a “single cell goes awry,” explains Scadden. This is thought to happen when the cell accumulates a series of genetic injuries that break down the internal mechanisms controlling such events as how many times it can divide and how long it lives. The cancer then creates daughter cells that can travel and establish new colonies—but not just anywhere. Different kinds of cancers have affinities for colonizing particular organs: prostate cancer goes to bone, breast cancer to brain and lung, pancreatic cancer to liver, for example. This has led scientists to try to define the facilitating properties of those particular surrounding environments. Scadden has studied the importance of environmental niches in determining cell fate for years. He has shown, for example, that characteristics of a bone microenvironment can determine what type of cell a blood stem cell (in bone marrow) will become. But the idea that the environment could actually be involved in the initiation of a new cancer was not well defined until his recent discovery, which was published in Nature earlier this year.

More here.

From Science:

In 2007, Marcus Bosenberg was ensconced at the leafy, bucolic University of Vermont campus with what some academic physician-scientists might consider a dream career. He was a Harvard University–educated, National Institutes of Health–funded scientist with his own lab and an active clinical practice in dermatology. A sought-after speaker who had developed a mouse model of melanoma, Bosenberg was just weeks from obtaining tenure. He had it all. And then he gave it all up. “I was never really thinking I would ever move,” he says. “I really enjoyed the life I had there.” The decision to move came after giving an invited talk to the Yale School of Medicine melanoma research group, a National Cancer Institute (NCI)–funded Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in interdisciplinary translational research. During his visit, he met a team that clearly enjoys working together, a trait not on display in some of his experiences at other academic institutions. Bosenberg was so impressed that he left Vermont to accept an untenured position in the Yale Department of Dermatology so he could work with this melanoma research team.

“You look at some institutions and there's a great group of potential investigators that could work together but don't, unless the grant cycle comes around again,” he says. “There's not enough time in life to be fighting. Here was a group that would be enjoyable to work with while at the same time hopefully discovering very important things for patients.” Three years later, Bosenberg is involved in projects that would have been out of reach at Vermont, working as part of an 80-member team led by veteran melanoma researcher Ruth Halaban, a molecular biologist who studies genes that control the malignant transformation of melanocytes.

More here.

A fan of Herman Melville must have patience. He must appreciate digression and the dissolution of pattern or plan. He must enjoy the sheer rush of words, a proper Biblical torrent of them. And he must be able to find pleasure in philosophical dialogue as much as in wild anecdote. But must he read Clarel? Can I call myself a Melville fan–which I am inclined, most strenuously, to do–without having tackled that blocky bulk of a book? It’s about a group of pilgrims in the Middle East. It consists largely of philosophical dialogues. And it’s five hundred pages long. Many is the time I’ve reached my hand towards it . . . only to pull back and choose to re-read Moby-Dick of The Confidence-Man instead. If you, too, have had these doubts, fear not! The Amateur Reader, author of the Wuthering Expectations blog, has come to our rescue! Along with Nicole of Bibliographing, she is reading Clarel and writing about the book–and the experience of reading it.

more from Levi Stahl at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Sometime after midnight, from an observation post at a small base in Paktya Province, American soldiers watched the battle begin. Tracer rounds streamed into the January sky, followed by the fire trails of rocket-propelled grenades. It was days before the new moon, and no light fell in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan but what leaked down from the stars. Holed up in the valley below, the Afghan police fired wildly, desperately, as though trying to fight back the darkness itself. The Americans radioed the police. The police didn’t answer. An artillery crew fired illumination rounds, flares attached to parachutes, trying to locate enemy positions. None was re­vealed. Finally, the Ameri­cans sent a convoy of soldiers speeding into the valley to support or save their allies or at least se­cure the dead. When the soldiers ar­rived, the policemen were hang­­ing out. “What’s up, dudes?” the police said.

more from Neil Shea at The American Prospect here.

There’s a degree of truth to all these explanations. But the main reason that Pakistan isn’t receiving attention or aid proportionate to the devastation caused by these floods is because, well, it’s Pakistan. Given a catastrophe of such epic proportions in any normal country, the world would look first through a humanitarian lens. But Pakistan, of course, is not a normal country. When the victims are Haitian or Sri Lankan — hardly citizens of stable, well-government countries, themselves — Americans and Europeans are quick to open their hearts and wallets. But in this case, the humanity of Pakistan’s victims takes a backseat to the preconceived image that Westerners have of Pakistan as a country.

more from Mosharraf Zaidi at Foreign Policy here.

“One life, one writing,” Robert Lowell said. The writer’s experience is all of a piece, and so too, however disparate it may seem, is the work to which it gives rise. The personal emphasis here is typically poetic, but novelists have long shared the desire to give a higher unity to their careers, transform a succession of works into something larger and more coherent. The method selected is apt to reflect its time. In the nineteenth century—a period whose greatest inventions, it’s been said, were society and history—Balzac and Zola produced vast sociographic supernovels, many volumes long, that sought to transcribe the whole of contemporary society. Hardy, defending his provincial world from metropolitan encroachment, gathered his work within an autonomous imaginative principality—a method emulated by Faulkner and García Márquez. High Modernism’s self-mythologizing artist-heroes took a different tack, Proust placing his own figure at the center of a single never-ending, all-encompassing epic—the self expanding to fill the work, the work expanding to fill the career—with Joyce and Musil doing roughly likewise. Different unifying strategies appear today. The autobiographical persona that runs like a spine through Philip Roth’s corpus represents a multiplication and refraction of the authorial image that is perfectly in tune with our culture of mediated self-exposure. David Mitchell, one of British fiction’s brightest stars, forges his links surreptitiously, characters from one novel showing up, as if by chance, in the margins of others—a strategy that mimics the fortuitous, far-flung connections of a globalizing age. And then there is Javier Marías, the acclaimed Spanish novelist: annual Nobel speculation, 5 million books in print, high praise from Pamuk, Sebald and Coetzee. As his oeuvre has lengthened—and in particular, with the gradual publication of his magnum opus, the three-volume Your Face Tomorrow—its coherence has gathered only slowly and in retrospect.

more from William Deresiewicz at The Nation here.

Amitava Kumar in Vanity Fair:

[The stabbed taxi driver, Ahmed H.] Sharif released a statement via the New York Taxi Workers Alliance: “I feel very sad. I have been here more than 25 years. I have been driving a taxi more than 15 years. All my four kids were born here. I never feel this hopeless and insecure before,” said Mr. Sharif. “Right now, the public sentiment is very serious (because of the Ground Zero Mosque debate). All drivers should be more careful.”

We might wish to make allowance for the role of the N.Y.T.W.A. in injecting the correct dose of political context, as in the critical parenthetical insertion in the remark quoted above; nevertheless, an event like this, especially in New York City, cannot be insulated from the vicious rhetoric that has swirled around us in recent weeks. The blogosphere is already alight with accusations that Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have blood on their hands.

Tempting as it may be to repeat this analysis, I don’t wish to discount another factor: the sense of power, and even the false intimacy with the Other, that [Michael] Enright [the alleged assailant] would have experienced in Afghanistan. His behavior inside the cab also goes to show how embedded he is in the narrative of the U.S. military adventure. Are only Palin and Gingrich to be blamed for it?

Like a number of successful novel sequences or film franchises, the James Bond movies have spawned a stream of books that analyze, often too solemnly, the artistic merit and the cultural relevance of the original works. These books tend to be written by people who take great pleasure in complete immersion in their subject. A book on, say, Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed detective is likely to know what kind of pipe Sherlock Holmes smoked, or where Dr. Watson underwent his training in medicine. The James Bond scholar (there’s a phrase!) is likely to know that Noël Coward was considered for the role of Dr. No, and that if Cary Grant had been willing to sign on for more than one film, he very well might have been cast as the lethal British spy. Very well and good, you say—an author ought to know his subject. The problem is that such arcane trivia tends to cloud out the bigger picture; fandom, with its purely obsessive approach, does not always produce the most considered or insightful judgments. Most James Bond books (and I do not mean the fiction on which the films are based) tend to get lost in the universe under review—and, to paraphrase Ian Fleming, this world is not enough. Fans of Conan Doyle or P.G. Wodehouse or Star Trek know what I mean, however loathe they may be to admit it.

more from Sinclair McKay at TNR here.