The so-called revisionist historians of the First World War can’t help appearing callous as they commend some of the strategic decisions of the British Army’s high command, while omitting to mention the massive suffering endured by its soldiers. Sometimes they remind one of Churchill’s comparison of Haig to a surgeon in the pre-anaesthetic era: if the patient expired under the knife, “he would not reproach himself”. By contrast, To End All Wars is a book that avowedly wears its heart on its sleeve. Nothing speaks more clearly or movingly of the spirit of futility that pervades Adam Hochschild’s perspective on the war than a recent discovery in the Saint-Symphorien military cemetery, east of Mons. There, by extraordinary coincidence, lie the first and last British soldiers to die in the war: sixteen-year-old John Parr of Finchley, North London, a golf caddy, who lied about his age in order to enlist, and George Ellison, a forty-year-old miner from Leeds, who survived all but the last ninety minutes of fighting. Parr and Ellison, killed within a few miles of each other, fighting to secure the same stretch of ground, are now buried under pine trees, seven yards apart.

more from Mark Bostridge at the TLS here.

In the wake of questions about Europe's future and the viability of the EU, in Eurozine:

I do not believe that nations should disappear nor do I believe in the prevailing wisdom that economic and monetary union can bring about political union, especially since the political forum continues to be the nation, and the best service one can render it from a democratic point of view is to respect the democratic structures within the framework of the nation-state. Therefore, I am in favour of a federation of nation-states. I am not asking the Germans and the French to give up being what they are, but I am saying to them: consider, in the real world, both your shared values and your shared interests. But, even if Europe does have these shared values, the nation is still an element of belonging that must be neither neglected nor given too much importance. We each have our own attachment to our national heritage. I am all the more inclined to say this because, as Freud said, we are nowadays fixated on small differences: Serbia and Montenegro, Flanders and Wallonia, Northern Ireland and the Republic; these are the things that we must fight against, not by preventing the existence of distinguishing features, but by saying to people: “Where does that get you?” Simultaneously, there are those values that lead us towards some form of convergence and, on the other side, moods of the times that urge us to create painful divisions. We have not heard the last of such divisions. And why is that? Because there is a malaise among people who are living through our times. They are frightened by globalization and, at the same time, attached to their territory, where they have attachments that are familial, geographical or otherwise. Between globalization on one side and local attachments on the other, the nation can no longer arrive at any kind of synthesis other than by exacerbating nationalism, and this can be seen in many European countries. Refusal of globalization, claiming that it is absolutely inimical, will not offer any solution either. Only by building a Europe that is a federation of nations can we find a response to this malaise, a response to the turmoil caused by globalization, a response that pays due respect to familial and geographical attachments; this is the way to create an equilibrium between globalization and the sovereign state that is prepared to delegate certain powers, by creating a strong and influential structure.

The reality is that, by building Europe, we have, it seems to me, a system that is ahead of the rest of the world. This is what we have to make our citizens realize. But our politicians see only the short term and the shifts in public opinion. As a result, there are two factors that are missing: awareness of our shared values and the challenge that Europe has to face. These two factors are a matter of survival or decline in the face of globalization and the kind of nationalism that is obsessed with minor differences. And this challenge is one that has to be faced by the strongest European power: Germany.

Germany is, in any case, in an extraordinary position. Never before has it been the lead nation in Europe to the extent that it is today. Previously, it accepted compromises and therefore concessions because of its past and also because of the political intelligence of Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, which I will never tire of praising. But today Germany holds the leadership. Does it realize this?

From more than a month ago in The Nation, Patricia Williams:

On the surface, Strauss-Kahn’s troubles are all about “women.” He has long had a reputation for salacious advances. On one hand, therefore, it’s tempting to assume the present accusations fit him as “in character.” On the other hand, given his prominence and the seismic stakes for the European Union, his well-advertised randiness, in the opinion of many, renders him the world’s easiest fall guy.

On the surface, furthermore, the case can be framed as one individual charging another with sexual crimes, period. Strauss-Kahn has been arrested, pleaded not guilty, released on bail, put under house detention. Ostensibly, he will be presumed innocent until a trial allows all the facts to be presented in an orderly fashion, witnesses to testify, motives to be assessed, credibility to be evaluated, irrelevant and extraneous information to be barred from consideration.

Unfortunately, what has unfolded is not that simple. The international media frenzy has all but obliterated any space for a presumption of innocence; and it has relentlessly impugned both Strauss-Kahn and his accuser in broad, vulgar stereotypes—not only about sex, but about wealth, Guinean colonials, socialism, fame, French masculinity, American Puritanism, Muslim women, Jewish identity and Africans as bearers of HIV. It will be very hard to see justice done against a backdrop of so much roiling passion, rumor-mongering and pure projection. The deliverance of due process requires restraint, not just in the media but among the citizens of America and of the world. So I would like to offer some modest caveats as this case proceeds through the digestive tract of a world obsessed with celebrity dirt.

First, we do not know what happened. We can choose to believe what we want, but it serves no civic purpose to allow one’s personal hunches to stand in the way of being open to the specific evidence-based possibilities that will be presented in a court of law. For example, French intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy’s publicly stated conviction that a proper first-class maid never cleans alone is spectacularly boneheaded. Even if it were true that housekeepers traveled only in “brigades,” it’s a generalization, a stereotype, irrelevant to whether DSK committed the crimes of which he is accused. At the same time, it is no less reflexively patronizing to conclude, as many women apparently have, that solely because the accuser is female or an immigrant or poor or Muslim or a widow that she could ever be anything other than truthful. And that is indeed all we know about her—that she is a poor Muslim widow from Guinea. Nor, of course, should we know much more about her identity, as a matter of due process. But, again, that process requires patience for victims’ stories to be played out in the appropriate place and time; it is not an invitation to plug the holes in our knowledge with bold imaginings.

Over at The Science Network:

Mark Oppenheimer in the NYT Magazine:

Last month, when the New York congressman Anthony Weiner finally admitted that he had lied, that his Twitter account had not been hacked, that he in fact had sent a picture of his thinly clad undercarriage to a stranger in Seattle, I asked my wife of six years, mother of our three children, what she thought. More specifically, I asked which would upset her more: to learn that I was sending racy self-portraits to random women, Weiner-style, or to discover I was having an actual affair. She paused, scrunched up her mouth as if she had just bitten a particularly sour lemon and said: “An affair is at least a normal human thing. But tweeting a picture of your crotch is just weird.”

How do we account for that revulsion, which many shared with my wife, a revulsion that makes it hard to imagine a second act for Weiner, like Eliot Spitzer’s television career or pretty much every day in the life of Bill Clinton? One explanation is that the Weiner scandal was especially sordid: drawn out, compounded daily with new revelations, covered up with embarrassing lies that made us want to look away. But another possibility is that there was something not weird, but too familiar about Weiner. His style might not be for everyone (to put it politely), but the impulse to be something other than what we are in our daily, monogamous lives, the thrill that comes from the illicit rather than the predictable, is something I imagine many couples can identify with. With his online flirtations and soft-porn photos, he did what a lot of us might do if we were lonely and determined to not really cheat.

That is one reason it was a relief when Weiner was drummed from office. In addition to giving us some good laughs, he forced us to ask particularly uncomfortable questions, like “what am I capable of doing?” and “what have my neighbors or friends done?” His visage was insisting, night after night, that we think about how hard monogamy is, how hard marriage is and about whether we make unrealistic demands on the institution and on ourselves.

That, anyway, is what Dan Savage, America’s leading sex-advice columnist, would say.

From The Washington Monthly:

The Washington, D.C., area is replete with landmarks— Ford’s Theater, the Watergate Hotel, the homes of Frederick Douglass and Red Cross founder Clara Barton—where, at a particular moment in time, history was made. There is no official placard marking Trinity College as such a site, but there probably should be. For roughly twenty years in the 1960s and ’70s, the small, austere, and relatively obscure women’s college graduated prominent female scientists, scholars, doctors, educators, judges, and public servants in numbers far out of proportion to its size. The true import of this achievement is only now being realized, as the school’s graduates hit the pinnacle of their careers. The historic advances of last year’s health care reform effort, for example, bear the fingerprints of an uncanny number of Trinity alumnae.

The tale of Trinity’s golden years is, in many ways, a “right college, right time” kind of story. In the days when most of American higher education was single sex and Catholics rarely mixed with mainstream institutions for reasons of mutual suspicion, Trinity—a Catholic women’s college distinct in its dedication to academic rigor—had the pick of the brightest graduates from girls’ parochial schools.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Anyone who has ever seen a streaky line of vapor, known as a contrail, behind a high-flying aircraft knows that airplanes can produce their own clouds. But in rarer cases aircraft can also punch round holes or carve long channels through existing, natural clouds.

Those hole-punch and canal clouds arise from the strong cooling effects of airflow past a plane's propeller or over a jetliner's wing, according to a new study. That cooling can spontaneously freeze water droplets in the cloud and stimulate precipitation, the study's authors say.
The phenomenon requires a very specific set of cloud conditions and so is unlikely to have significant large-scale effects, but it could have an impact on regional weather near airports. A team of researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and the University of Wyoming in Laramie report the new findings on the inadvertent aircraft cloud seeding in the July 1 issue of Science.

More here.