Rita Chin in Eurozine:

Since the 1950s, a massive influx of labour migrants has dramatically transformed the demographic makeup of Europe. Whether they came as guest workers or former colonial subjects, migrants from North Africa, South Asia and Turkey produced the first significant Muslim communities within Europe. During the half century that these groups have resided in Europe, the national debates about their presence have changed radically. Broadly speaking, public discussions initially focused on the economic manpower and the impact of employing migrants on the native working class. As Europeans began to acknowledge that temporary labourers had become permanent residents, political discourse shifted to migrants' cultural differences based on their nationality. Since the 1990s, the emphasis has been on religion (especially Islam) as the primary characteristic that separates these migrants from the societies in which they reside. “Islamophobia”, in short, has emerged as “the defining condition of the new Europe”.[1]

A striking aspect of contemporary European debates about immigrants is the focus on the Muslim woman as a key figure through which objections to Islamic difference have been articulated. This gendered framing of difference is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the distinctive gender norms of postwar migrants became a major theme once significant numbers of family reunions had taken place in the early 1970s. But recent pronouncements by figures such as the Somali-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Turkish-German sociologist Necla Kelek about the place of women in Islam have inflamed the debate.[2] Their highly sensational testimonials of female oppression under Islam have fuelled the tendency to characterize tensions between Muslim immigrants and Europeans as irresolvable. Muslim gender relations now serve as the most telling symptom of the supposedly intractable clash between European civilization and Islam.

Precisely because sexual politics plays such a critical role in defining the terms of the current pessimism about Muslims in Europe, it is important to trace when and how this process began, especially in relation to the shifting national public discourses on labour migrants over the past fifty years.

Curzio Malaparte translated by Walter Murch in the LRB (photo from wikipedia):

In February 1942 during the Siege of Leningrad I found myself attached to General Edqvist, the commander of a division of Finnish troops stationed near Lake Ladoga. One morning he asked me to pay him a visit.

We have just taken 18 Spanish prisoners, he said.

Spanish? I said. Now you’re at war with Spain?

I don’t know anything about that, he said. But I have 18 prisoners who speak Spanish and claim they are Spanish, not Russian.

Very strange.

We have to interrogate them. Of course, you speak Spanish.

No, actually I don’t.

Well, you’re Italian, so you’re more Spanish than I am. Go interrogate them.

I did as I was told. I found the prisoners under guard in barracks. I asked whether they were Russian or Spanish. I spoke in Italian, slowly, and they answered in Spanish, slowly, and we understood each other perfectly.

We are soldiers in the Soviet army, but we are Spanish.

One of them went on to say that they were orphans of the Spanish Civil War; their parents had been killed in the bombardments and reprisals. One day they were all put on board a Soviet ship in Barcelona and sent to Russia, where they were fed and clothed, where they learned a trade, and where they eventually became soldiers in the Red Army.

But we are Spanish.

In fact, I remembered reading at the time that the Russians had evacuated thousands of Red Republican children to the USSR to save them from the bombardments and famine of the Spanish Civil War.

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance:

Last week I got to spend time in the NBC studio where they record Meet The Press — re-decorated for this occasion in a cosmic theme, with beautiful images of galaxies and large-scale-structure simulations in the background. The occasion was a special panel discussion to follow a Stephen Hawking special that will air on the Discovery Channel this Sunday, August 7. David Gregory, who usually hosts MTP, was the moderator. I played the role of the hard-boiled atheist; Paul Davies played the physicist who was willing to entertain the possibility of “God” if defined with sufficient abstraction, while John Haught played the Catholic theologian who is sympathetic to science.

The Hawking special is the kick-off episode to a major new Discovery program, called simply Curiosity. I predict it will make something of a splash. The reason is simple: although most of the episode is about science, Hawking clearly goes all-in with “God does not exist.” It’s not a message we often hear on American TV.

So, as to Treme the drama, Simon bought the framework of touristic mystification hook, line and sinker. He was not helped by his dependence on local writers like Elie and others who are embedded in the touristically reinvented discourse of New Orleans’s distinctiveness that is no longer capable of recognizing and reflecting critically on itself and can do no more than celebrate its black inflection. Simon was also undone by not having a clear critical perspective on neoliberal capitalism – as either free-market utopian ideology or pragmatic program for relentless upward redistribution – and its logic of systemic reproduction. He has a brilliant feel for the social and institutional impact of deindustrialization on cities and the urban working class at both individual and group levels. He portrayed that impact with truly rare grace and intelligence in The Wire. But he lacks a coherent view of the larger forces that drive deindustrialization, which he is inclined instead to characterize in moralistic terms. In The Wire this tendency extends to reifying the moment of postwar working-class economic mobility as a Golden Age, a natural moral order which greedy, self-centered or insensitive corporate elites and their minions have violated. Simon was thus primed to lap up the touristic narrative of cultural authenticity. Since Katrina, that narrative has swirled together with the powerful imagery of an impoverished and abandoned black New Orleans, victimized by racialized inequality and injustice. Despite its symbolic power, that imagery was in some ways more apparent than real. For example, blacks were displaced by the flood at only a slightly higher rate than whites.11 And it was poor people of every race who were disproportionately stranded on overpasses and at the Superdome or convention center and who have had greatest difficulty in returning to the city, restoring losses and reconstructing a normal life. Although news footage of stranded black New Orleanians immediately called forth a familiar narrative of racial injustice, the immediacy and certainty with which perception of those images linked to this narrative contrasted with an utter vagueness concerning causal processes through which the inequalities are reproduced and why, therefore, they are most accurately or effectively characterized as specifically racial.

more from Adolf Reed, Jr. at nonsite here.

Opposing sides in political debates often characterize one another as crazy, or a bit more politely, “irrational.” John McCain, for example, recently said that the view of opponents of the debt-limit increase was “worse than foolish” and “bizzaro.” Paul Krugman suggested that President Obama’s desire to compromise on the debt-limit might be “obsessive and compulsive.” Even Elizabeth Drew, reporting on the debt-limit process, writes, “Were they all insane? That’s not a far-fetched question.” In less vivid terms, the claim is typically that a rival group’s thinking is dominated by a mind-muddling ideology that cannot be supported by rational argument. People are, of course, frequently irrational; they ignore obvious facts or make silly mistakes in reasoning. But the mere failure to support some of your basic claims with good logical arguments does not show that you are irrational. Any argument requires premises that it assumes and does not prove. We may construct a further argument for an unproven premise, but that argument will itself have unproven premises. That’s why even mathematics, the most thoroughly rational enterprise we have, begins with unproven axioms.

more from Gary Gutting at The Opinionater here.

Here it is already August and I have received only one postcard this summer. It was sent to me by a European friend who was traveling in Mongolia (as far as I could deduce from the postage stamp) and who simply sent me his greetings and signed his name. The picture in color on the other side was of a desert broken up by some parched hills without any hint of vegetation or sign of life, the name of the place in characters I could not read. Even receiving such an enigmatic card pleased me immensely. This piece of snail mail, I thought, left at the reception desk of a hotel, dropped in a mailbox, or taken to the local post office, made its unknown and most likely arduous journey by truck, train, camel, donkey—or whatever it was— and finally by plane to where I live. Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived. The terrific thing about postcards was their immense variety.

more from Charles Simic at the NYRB here.

From The Paris Review:

In the early 1970s, during the period he was writing his second novel, Something Happened, Joseph Heller, approaching his fifties, fretted about his health. He was shocked by how bloated he looked in mirrors. The double chins in his publicity photos bothered him. He began working out regularly at a YMCA in the sixties on Broadway in Manhattan, running four miles a day on a small track there. “The Angel of Death is in the gym today,” said the Y’s patrons every so often. Not infrequently, ambulance crews showed up to cart away, on a stretcher, an elderly man in a T-shirt and shorts who had collapsed while running or doing chin-ups. While exercising, Heller avoided meeting anyone’s eyes. He pursued his laps with grim seriousness. He worried about the slightest ache or twinge—in his lower back, bladder, calves, the tendons of his ankles, or bottoms of his feet. Sometimes, faint vertical pains shot through his chest and up through his collarbone. This was a hell of a way to try to feel better. In this melancholy spirit (stretching, rolling his arms to ease the needling pains), he squirreled away portions of Something Happened in a locker at the Y, in case fire ran through his apartment or his writing studio, or he keeled over one day. In the spring of 1974—a fit fifty-one-year-old—he completed the manuscript to his satisfaction and decided to copy it for his agent. He took his teenage daughter, Erica, with him to the copy shop. “I figured if a car hit me, if I got mugged, or if I dropped dead of a heart attack, the manuscript might still be saved,” he later told Erica.

“I asked him what would happen if he had a heart attack and I got run over,” she recalls.

“Then we’re both in trouble,” Heller told her.

More here.

Diane Ackerman in The New York Times:

Graced by beautiful rings and ridges on their shells, diamondbacks look like a field of galaxies on the move. They inhabit neither freshwater nor sea, but the brackish slurry of coastal marshes. Mating in the spring, they need to lay their eggs on land, so in June and July they migrate to the sandy dunes of Jamaica Bay. The shortest route leads straight across the tarmac at Kennedy International Airport. Never mess with a female ready to give birth. On June 29, more than 150 diamondback terrapins scuttled across Runway No. 4, delaying landings, halting takeoffs, foiling air traffic controllers, crippling timetables and snarling traffic for hours. Cold-blooded reptiles they may be, but they are also ardent and single-minded. Don’t the plucky turtles notice the jets? Probably not as monsters. Even with polka-dot necks stretched out, diamondbacks don’t peer up very high. And unlike, say, lions, they don’t have eyes that dart after fast-moving prey. So the jets probably blur into background — more of a blowy weather system than a threat. But planes generate a lot of heat, and the turtles surely find the crossing stressful.

Mounted on the shoreline of Jamaica Bay and a federally protected park, indeed almost surrounded by water, J.F.K. occupies land where wildlife abounds, and it’s no surprise that planes have collided with gulls, hawks, swans, geese, and osprey. Or that every summer there’s another turtle stampede, sometimes creating two-hour delays. People around the world became obsessed with the plight of the quixotic turtles, a drama biblical in its proportions (slow, sweater-necked Samsons vs. steely Goliaths). It defied reason that small reptiles would take on whirring leviathans whose gentlest tap may crush them and whose breath can blow them to kingdom come. Many people also felt a quiver of disquiet, of something elemental out of place. Supposedly, in our snug, walled-in cities, we’re keeping nature in check, growing docile plants, adopting pets and erecting a buffer of steel and cement. If wild turtles can find their way into suburbia, can larger animals be far behind, ones with fangs and teeth, whose red eyes pierce the night? The answer is yes; it happens more often than one supposes.

More here.

Once, somewhere in the middle-top of Nevada, I saw a mustang. It was once and never again. Wild horses are not an everyday sight in America even though, in every American’s ego, there’s a horse running wild and free. I was traveling north, alone, and would eventually travel east, and all around me was the expansive, oppressive Southwest. For miles I had been driving in silence without a single hint of fauna, human or otherwise. I was semi-hypnotized by a dirt backdrop that went on, on and on, and by the realization that I was leaving all this Western stuff behind me forever. For a change of scenery, I turned my head to look left, and there it was: a light brown horse running fast alongside my car with the mountains behind it, spraying dust from its feet like you see in movies. I’ve always told people I saw a mustang that day, though in truth I know nothing about horses and can barely tell a mustang from a mule, especially if both are running. But I grew up in the Southwest, where sagebrush is considered a flower and all horses are mustangs. So a mustang it was I saw that day, and it took my breath away. Last week, I read that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management was planning a roundup of 1,700 wild horses in eastern Nevada. This happens every so often, though it’s an event largely distanced from Americans not living in the West. For much of the 20th century, America’s wild horses were seen as pestilence, primarily by American ranchers, and they were treated as such. Wild horse carcasses, on the other hand, were profitable sources of glue, clothing, violin bowstrings and, most lucratively, pet food. More than a million horses were destroyed in the United States between 1900 and 1950.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

How is it that Hungary, Central Europe’s democratic wunderkind of 1989, could find itself the European Union’s problem child two decades later, with a nationalist strongman at the helm, the economy in shambles, and a ferocious far right both in its parliament and in black uniforms patrolling its suburbs? Hungary’s dire condition—and how it came to pass—is the topic of the veteran Mitteleuropa expert Paul Lendvai’s most recent book, Mein Verspieltes Land: Ungarn im Umbruch, or My Squandered Country: Hungary Transformed, released last year in German and in Hungarian this past January. The 81-year-old Lendvai is one of the grand old men of Central European journalism, author of a stack of books translated into a dozen languages. But never before has one of his titles provoked such fierce reactions from the powers that be. The right-wing network of the Fidesz party, led by its undisputed front-man and Hungary’s current prime minister, Victor Orbán, has done all it can to discredit Lendvai. Thanks to a landslide victory in the 2010 elections, Fidesz now controls more than two-thirds of parliament, and the liberal and leftist oppositions have imploded. Yet the right is paying attention to My Squandered Country—perhaps too much attention for its own good. Without a penny of advertising the book emerged as Hungary’s best-selling nonfiction title this spring.

more from Paul Hockenos at The Boston Review here.

WHETHER we are alone in the universe is one of the oldest questions humans have pondered. For most of history, it has belonged squarely in the provinces of religion and philosophy. In recent decades, however, scientists also have been attracted to the problem in increasing numbers. Fifty-one years ago, a young astronomer by the name of Frank Drake began sweeping the skies with a radio telescope in the hope of stumbling across a message from an alien civilisation. Thus began SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — an ambitious enterprise to survey thousands of sunlike stars in our neighbourhood of the Milky Way galaxy for any signs of artificial radio traffic. When SETI began in 1960, it was regarded as quixotic at best, crackpot at worst. “A quest of the most adverse odds,” was the way distinguished biologist George Simpson expressed it. The prevailing opinion among scientists was that life was the result of a chemical fluke so improbable it would be unlikely to have happened twice in the observable universe. “Life seems almost a miracle,” wrote Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. It was echoed by another Nobel prizewinning biologist, Jacques Monod, in a bleak assessment: “Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.” In one of the most astonishing shifts of scientific fashion, the consensus today is that the universe is teeming with life. Christian de Duve, the Belgian-born biologist and another Nobel prizewinner, has gone so far as to call life a “cosmic imperative”, believing it is “almost bound to happen” on any Earth-like planet.

more from Paul Davies at The Australian here.

Gideon Levy in Haaretz:

It was the night that Benjamin Netanyahu was tossed out of the Prime Minister's Office in disgrace.

Netanyahu will stay in office for a time, but his time is up. Finished. He will squirm and make promises, make declarations and turn tail, he will trot out a few more tricks, but it won't help him an iota.

As of yesterday, he is a lame duck. Last night, Israel's 17th prime minister was handed his walking papers. When tens of thousands of Israelis across the country scream, “Bibi go home,” Bibi will indeed go home. Bye bye, Bibi, good-bye for good.

It was the night that every Israeli can and should be proud of being Israeli, as never before. Israel's true pride march took place yesterday. There can be no better public relations campaign for this despised, shunned country than the demonstration last night of this new Israel. The Foreign Ministry should broadcast the images to the entire world. Israeli democracy celebrated last night as it has not done in years, standing up against all those who would see it fall. Without violence, without superfluous police reinforcements, not Cairo nor even Athens, but something much more beautiful – a genuine light unto the nations.

More here.

Tom Vanderbilt in Slate:

Left turns are the bane of traffic engineers. Their idea of utopia runs clockwise. (UPS' routing software famously has drivers turn right whenever possible, to save money and time.) The left-turning vehicle presents not only the aforementioned safety hazard, but a coagulation in the smooth flow of traffic. It's either a car stopped in an active traffic lane, waiting to turn; or, even worse, it's cars in a dedicated left-turn lane that, when traffic is heavy enough, requires its own “dedicated signal phase,” lengthening the delay for through traffic as well as cross traffic. And when traffic volumes really increase, as in the junction of two suburban arterials, multiple left-turn lanes are required, costing even more in space and money.

And, increasingly, because of shifting demographics and “lollipop” development patterns, suburban arterials are where the action is: They represent, according to one report, less than 10 percent of the nation's road mileage, but account for 48 percent of its vehicle-miles traveled.

What can you do when you've tinkered all you can with the traffic signals, added as many left-turn lanes as you can, rerouted as much traffic as you can, in areas that have already been built to a sprawling standard? Welcome to the world of the “unconventional intersection,” where left turns are engineered out of existence. This is not necessarily a new idea: The “Jersey Jughandle” and “Michigan Left” were early iterations of this concept; rolled out widely in the 1960s, both essentially require drivers to first make a right turn, then either looping back or U-turning their way onto the road onto which they had wanted to turn left.

More here.

Tim Murphy in Mother Jones:

Last week, legislators in Tennessee introduced a radical bill that would make “material support” for Islamic law punishable by 15 years in prison. The proposal marks a dramatic new step in the conservative campaign against Muslim-Americans. If passed, critics say even seemingly benign activities like re-painting the exterior of a mosque or bringing food to a potluck could be classified as a felony.

The Tennessee bill, SB 1028, didn't come out of nowhere. Though it's the first of its kind, the bill is part of a wave of related measures that would ban state courts from enforcing Sharia law. (A court might refer to Sharia law in child custody or prisoner rights cases.) Since early 2010, such legislation has been considered in at least 15 states. And while fears of an impending caliphate are myriad on the far-right, the surge of legislation across the country is largely due to the work of one man: David Yerushalmi, an Arizona-based white supremacist who has previously called for a “war against Islam” and tried to criminalize adherence to the Muslim faith.

More here.

Eve’s Fall Through Technology

1. The Telegram

Ate the apple. Stop.
Serpent in love. Stop.
Leaves browning,
berries sprouting mold.
Everything dropping,
staining my feet. Stop.
Can you forgive me?

2. The Telephone

I can let it ring all night, high-pitched bells
black as the bags under your eyes.
Are you still jealous I was chosen?
He slithered off
fast as the snuff of a candle.
But my ringing won’t stop.

3. The Fax

Enclosed is my confession. Read it over, sign, date, and send back ASAP.

The serpent wound up
my inner thigh.
Risk-taking was my halo,
paradise calibrated.
He tore the seam between us.
I know you are hungry. I know
you are lost. My days
are a frayed immersion.
I peel and core and slice
apple after apple
to taste their rot.

4. The Email

After you blogged me off, everyone shunned me.
Even the spam has stopped.
My inbox so empty
I surf unjammed
to nowhere.

5. The Text Messages

Is this really what you want?
Me marooned 8? Me :’’’)? Me SOZ?
No, not SOZ.
RU there? WTF
ILU IHA
The serpent is not my BF.
TARFU
I dn’t know how t stop fruit from falling.
Only t run louder than any letters can spell
You want grace?
LF

by Pamela Garvey
from Blackbird, Spring 2011

Key
8 = infinity
:’’’ = weeping
SOZ = sorry
IHA = I hate acronyms
BF = boyfriend
TARFU = things are fucked up
LF = Let’s fuck

From The New Yorker:

Oscar Wilde was not a man who lived in fear, but early reviews of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” must have given him pause. The story, telling of a man who never ages while his portrait turns decrepit, appeared in the July, 1890, issue of Lippincott’s, a Philadelphia magazine with English distribution. The Daily Chronicle of London called the tale “unclean,” “poisonous,” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” The St. James Gazette deemed it “nasty” and “nauseous,” and suggested that the Treasury or the Vigilance Society might wish to prosecute the author. Most ominous was a short notice in the Scots Observer stating that although “Dorian Gray” was a work of literary quality, it dealt in “matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera” and would be of interest mainly to “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys”—an allusion to the recent Cleveland Street scandal, which had exposed the workings of a male brothel in London. Within five years, Wilde found himself convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons.”

The furor was unsurprising: no work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire. The opening pages leave little doubt that Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorian’s portrait, is in love with his subject. Once Dorian discovers his godlike powers, he carries out various heinous acts, including murder; but to the Victorian sensibility his most unspeakable deed would have been his corruption of a series of young men. (Basil tells Dorian, “There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable.”) At the Wilde trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from “Dorian Gray,” calling it a “sodomitical book.” Wilde went to prison not because he loved young men but because he flaunted that love, and “Dorian Gray” became the chief exhibit of his shamelessness.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Shortly after the singer Amy Winehouse, 27, was found dead in her London home, the airwaves were ringing with her popular hit “Rehab,” a song about her refusal to be treated for drug addiction.

The man said “Why you think you here?”

I said, “I got no idea.”

I’m gonna, gonna lose my baby,

So I always keep a bottle near.

The official cause of Ms. Winehouse’s death won’t be announced until October pending toxicology reports, but her highly publicized battle with alcohol and drug addiction seems to have played a significant role. Indeed, her mother echoed a sentiment heard everywhere when she told The Sunday Mirror that her daughter’s death was “only a matter of time.” But was it? Why is it that some people survive drug and alcohol abuse, even manage their lives with it, while others succumb to addiction? It’s a question scientists have been wrestling with for decades, but only recently have they begun to find answers. Illicit drug use in the United States, as in Britain, is very common and usually begins in adolescence. According to the 2008 National Survey of Drug Use and Health, 46 percent of Americans have tried an illicit drug at some point in their lives. But only 8 percent have used an illicit drug in the past month. By comparison, 51 percent have used alcohol in the past year. Most people who experiment with drugs, then, do not become addicted. So who is at risk?

More here.