Walter Kirn in his blog:

All the kids now tell their friends “I love you.” Girls my daughter's age, 12, all say “I love you.” And so, sometimes, do boys my son's age, 10. They say it when they part ways after school. They write it in e-mails, in text messages, on Facebook. “I love you.” They even say it to their parents. “I love you,” they say, and then head off to the movies. “I love you,” they say, and then climb on the team bus. It's not something I did at their age, all those years ago, saying and writing “I love you” all the time, and it's not something that the other kids did, either, particularly not outside the home, the family, where love, as we then defined it, didn't exist. Outside the family, people 'liked' each other. Now they love each other. And they say so. Sincerely. With feeling. I've heard it. Authentic feeling. You can think it's a fad, but I've heard it: it's said with feeling.

Three weeks and three days ago my mother died unexpectedly at 71. She was in Iowa, visiting her boyfriend, which she did every year when the state fair was going. One morning he found her on the bathroom floor. She couldn't speak. Her eyes were open, but barely. An ambulance came and drove her to the hospital, to Iowa Methodist in downtown Des Moines (a city that is beige across the board and has terrible traffic at certain peculiar moments but then seems to empty out entirely), where someone ran a CAT scan and discovered a 'sizable mass' in her brain, behind her eyes. A surgeon went in and found an abscess there, 'encapsulated,' sealed off from other tissue, and immediately he drained it of built-up fluid and then bathed the area in antibiotics. The fluid, infected with something, was sent for tests. Hours passed. Night came. My mother remained unconscious, breathing with noisy mechanical assistance. A nurse said she saw her blink when spoken to sometime between four and five a.m. and rated her coma an optimistic '11' on a scale — an official coma scale — that runs to 15, for some reason, and starts at 3.

I got there a few hours later from Montana, fighting with my girlfriend the whole way.

More here.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Tim Riley has been a music critic for nearly three decades now. His first book, “Tell Me Why” examines the music of the Beatles, song by song. This month his latest book, Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music – the Definitive Life, a 700-plus page biography of John Lennon, is being released. I recently had a chance to talk to Riley about his book and his lifelong fascination with the Beatles. Here are excerpts of our conversation:

You’ve been reading and writing about the Beatles for much of your adult life. Was there really anything new for you to learn as you researched this book?
I learned so many different things. I can’t tell you. I just learned basically how little I know.

Like what?
Beatles scholars tend to be the only people who know that Alfred Lennon, Lennon’s father, left behind a memoir called “Daddy Come Home.” Alf’s story is fascinating because he came from the Blue Coat Orphanage, he was a song-and-dance guy on the boat in the merchant marines. He was an emcee on these ships and he was a song-and-dance man. He ran away from an orphanage to join a band. So there’s a lot of fascinating stuff there. Even people who have written about Alf seem not to know. [I also had a] key moment interviewing a key subject, [Beatles friend and associate] Barry Miles, I was trying to come up with the reason that Lennon was so quiet and passive in the “Let It Be” movie [made in 1969]. So as I’m doing my research I’m realizing that [he and Yoko Ono] had just had a miscarriage at that time. So I said to Barry Miles, “Is that the reason that he’s so passive?” And Barry Miles just waved me off. He said “Oh no no. We knew they were on heroin all through 1968. And we were glad. Because it got him off acid.” That was really like WOW! They were really dealing with a major drug problem. And we sort of know that. In mythic terms we know that he was a major drug user.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

When Marie Curie came to the United States for the first time, in May 1921, she had already discovered the elements radium and polonium, coined the term “radio-active” and won the Nobel Prize—twice. But the Polish-born scientist, almost pathologically shy and accustomed to spending most of her time in her Paris laboratory, was stunned by the fanfare that greeted her.

She attended a luncheon on her first day at the house of Mrs. Andrew Carnegie before receptions at the Waldorf Astoria and Carnegie Hall. She would later appear at the American Museum of Natural History, where an exhibit commemorated her discovery of radium. The American Chemical Society, the New York Mineralogical Club, cancer research facilities and the Bureau of Mines held events in her honor. Later that week, 2,000 Smith College students sang Curie’s praises in a choral concert before bestowing her with an honorary degree. Dozens more colleges and universities, including Yale, Wellesley and the University of Chicago, conferred honors on her. The marquee event of her six-week U.S. tour was held in the East Room of the White House. President Warren Harding spoke at length, praising her “great attainments in the realms of science and intellect” and saying she represented the best in womanhood. “We lay at your feet the testimony of that love which all the generations of men have been wont to bestow upon the noble woman, the unselfish wife, the devoted mother.” It was a rather odd thing to say to the most decorated scientist of that era, but then again Marie Curie was never easy to understand or categorize. That was because she was a pioneer, an outlier, unique for the newness and immensity of her achievements. But it was also because of her sex.

More here.

The odds of more Haiti-scale destruction are growing by the day because the world is urbanizing. Two hundred years ago, Peking was the only city in the world with a population of a million people. Today, almost 500 cities are that big, and many are much bigger. That explains why the number of earthquake-caused deaths during the first decade of this century (471,015) was more than four times greater than the number during the previous decade, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. National Earthquake Information Center. If the fatality trend continues upward—and it will, because the urbanization trend is continuing upward, as is the trend of housing migrant populations in death traps—it won’t be long before we see a headline announcing 1 million dead in massive earthquake. Indeed, we’ll be lucky not to see it in our lifetimes. Just as we know how to build airplanes that don’t crash, we know how to construct buildings that don’t collapse. If you want to learn how to do it, grab some marbles and a Teflon baking sheet and follow the sixth-grade lesson plan on Discovery Online. We also know which cities are most at risk: Bogotá, Cairo, Caracas, Dhaka, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Katmandu, Lima, Manila, Mexico City, New Delhi, Quito, and Tehran. Los Angeles and Tokyo are prime candidates for a major quake, but they will probably survive, since they are well built—though L.A. could do better. New York is at greater risk than people realize.

more from Claire Berlinski at City Journal here.

In his Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough”, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: “Recall that, after Schubert’s death, his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave each piece, consisting of a few bars, to his favourite pupils. And this act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. If Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, that, too, would be understandable as an act of piety.” I have always been moved by this passage and by Wittgenstein’s use of the term “understandable”. Schubert’s brother acted in a way that was at once novel and immediately grasped. In any culture, there are rules for conduct in moments of extreme feeling – weeping, rending garments, burning candles. What was so affecting on 11 September 2001 and just afterwards was the directness and intuitiveness of the shrines, though there would have been some degree of emulation. Emulation presupposes understanding; one says to oneself, “I must do that, or something like that.” Cultural understanding is like linguistic understanding. We understand the meaning of gestures that we have never seen performed before, as we understand sentences that have never before been uttered. And we expect that kind of creativity from others in everyday life. By the time the first anniversary of the attacks came round, a number of my artist friends had told me of work they had made that somehow fell under the category of understanda­bility, as described by Wittgenstein.

more from Arthur C. Danto at The New Statesman here.

I was present in Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest, and Prague in 1989 when non-violent revolutions swept the Communists from power, creating a brand new model of regime change. I stood in Wenceslas Square as hundreds of thousands of people rattled their keys, unleashing an eerie, shimmering sound into the air, chanting, “Your time is up!” I had lived among the Czechs for a decade in the 1970s, and I felt the power of their relief as the hated regime slipped into history. So, not surprisingly, I was intrigued by the instant media punditry comparing the bloodless revolutions in central Europe with the recent wave of Arab uprisings in the Middle East. Even on television, I could see similarities between Prague 1989 and Cairo 2011: the peacefulness of protesters; the prominent role played by young people; the sparkling displays of public eloquence and wit; the sudden release from fear and the rebirth of civic pride; the infectious jubilation when the regime was finally brought down. But I saw big differences as well. In 1989, British historian Timothy Garton Ash, having a celebratory beer with Václav Havel, observed that in Poland it had taken ten years to overthrow the system, in Hungary ten months, and in East Germany ten weeks; Czechoslovakia would perhaps take ten days. He was simplifying, of course, yet his remark captured something of the truth of the moment: Soviet-style Communism was a unified system run, with some minor local variations, from Moscow, and its collapse overturned the old Cold War domino theory — the belief that if Communism were not contained militarily it would spread to other countries. The revolutions of 1989 marked the end of an era, and provided an occasion for joy and optimism to everyone who had lived so long in the shadow of nuclear Armageddon.

more from Paul Wilson at The Walrus here.

Martin Nowak over at Edge:

0.6 billion years ago, 600 million years ago, we have complex multicellularity. Complex multicellularity, as opposed to simple multicellularity (because simple multicellularity is probably as old as life itself), because bacteria can form filaments that are essentially multicellular animals, structures. The curious thing people have explained to me is that the problem with complex multicellularity is that the organism has an inside and an outside, and the inside has to get oxygen. You have to transport oxygen to the inside of the organism, which is complicated, whereas the simple multicellularity that evolved early on essentially has only an outside because they are not really big structures. That gave rise to animals, to fungi, to plants, basically everything, and that was 600 million years ago.

You could ask, what's the other interesting thing that happened in the last 600 million years? There's one other thing that recently I would put in here because of my collaboration with Ed Wilson. This is the evolution of insect societies, which he would put into this slide at about 120-150 million years ago, because insect societies, or social insects, gave rise to a huge biomass. Wilson talks about two social conquests of Earth: the one caused by insects and the other one caused by us.

The other thing that happened in the last 600 million years of true great evolutionary significance, was the evolution of what I call “I”-life, and that I would equate with human language. Why is human language really out there with the origin of life, with the emergence of cells, and multicellularity? Because, in my opinion, it gives rise to a new type of evolution.

Up to this point, evolution is mostly genetic evolution. But suddenly, we have evolutionary processes that are not dependent on genetic changes. One person has an idea, we don't have to wait for a gene to spread in the population to spread this idea. It is the idea that spreads, and what transmits the idea is language. Language is somehow allowing now for more or less an unlimited reproduction of information, and that really defines us. You could say humans invented a new form of evolution, and that defines our adaptability and our success, maybe for the good and for the bad.

Gareth Evans in Project Syndicate:

Shortly before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Jewish extremist in November 1995, I met him in Tel Aviv. I was visiting Israel as Australia’s foreign minister to argue the case for rapid implementation of the Oslo peace accords – all the way through to negotiated acceptance of Palestinian statehood. I concluded my pitch by saying, with perhaps a little more cheek than was appropriate, “But of course I’m preaching to the converted.” Rabin’s response is etched in my memory. He paused, then said with a little half-smile: “To the committed, not the converted.”

For all his deep emotional attachment to the idea of Israel embracing all of historical Judea and Samaria, Rabin knew that the only way to ensure a democratic Jewish state with viable, secure borders was to accept a Palestinian state alongside it, equally secure and viable. They would share Jerusalem as a capital, and find a mutually acceptable solution to the enormously sensitive issue of the return of Palestinian refugees.

Rabin’s murder was a catastrophe from which the peace process has never recovered. No Israeli leader since has shown anything like his far-sighted vision, commitment, and capacity to deliver a negotiated two-state solution.

Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert came close, but not close enough. And since then Binyamin Netanyahu has lived down to every expectation of his statesmanship. His routine capitulation to the demands of the most extreme elements of a manifestly dysfunctional Knesset, and his continuing support of his impossibly divisive and pugnacious foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, have earned him little praise at home or abroad. One need not be naïve or in denial about the Palestinians’ multiple problems and missteps over the years to recognize that most of the recent obstacles to progress have been erected in Israel.

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science:

If you ask someone to guess the number of sweets in a jar, the odds that they’ll land upon the right number are low – fairground raffles rely on that inaccuracy. But if you ask many people to take guesses, something odd happens. Even though their individual answers can be wildly off, the average of their varied guesses tends to be surprisingly accurate.

This phenomenon goes by many names – swam intelligence, wisdom of the crowd, vox populi, and more. Whatever it’s called, the principle is the same: a group of people can often arrive at more accurate answers and better decisions than individuals acting alone. There are many examples, from counting beans in a jar, to guessing the weight of an ox, to the Ask The Audience option in Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

But all of these examples are somewhat artificial, because they involve decisions that are made in a social vacuum. Indeed, James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, argued that wise crowds are ones where “people’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them.” That rarely happens. From votes in elections, to votes on social media sites, people see what others around them are doing or intend to do. We actively seek out what others are saying, and we have a natural tendency to emulate successful and prominent individuals. So what happens to the wisdom of the crowd when the crowd talks to one another?

Andrew King from the Royal Veterinary College found that it falls apart, but only in certain circumstances. At his university open day, he asked 82 people to guess the number of sweets in a jar. If they made their guesses without any extra information, the wisdom of the crowd prevailed. The crowd’s median guess was 751.* The actual number of sweets was… 752.

This collective accuracy collapsed if King told different groups of volunteers about what their peers had guessed.

From Guernica:

The professor Glenn Beck loves to hate speaks with Cornel West about waitressing, black nationalism, how the radical right helped her define her politics, and why she’s gloomy about America’s future.

The conservative media stalwart Glenn Beck may be partially responsible for reinstating Frances Fox Piven into mainstream sociopolitical discourse. Nary a mention of Piven goes by without referring to Beck’s tirades against her and social activist Richard Cloward, Piven’s late husband and collaborator, as well as the death threats made against her by users of Beck’s website The Blaze. He has repeatedly targeted Piven as a catalyst for, among other things, the “unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system” and “an overarching left-wing plot” against America. Due to one essay in particular, which she wrote over forty years ago, Beck has stated that Piven is “the enemy of the Constitution.”

Unfortunately for Piven, the controversy surrounding her scholarship largely exists because her most zealous critics never fail to distort her findings. Peter Dreier of Dissent astutely points out that her studies on protests encourage not the use of violence as a measure of civil disobedience but rather “the combined power of voting and grassroots protest to bring about change.” In her attempts to empower the disenfranchised and understand the impetus behind social unrest, she has been blamed for seeking to completely uproot America’s democratic ideals while, in fact, she strives to make the best of America accessible to more people. Among other works, Piven’s notorious 1966 Nation article “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” and her 1972 book Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (co-written with Cloward) have been cited by conspiratorial demagogues as leading to Obama’s election to the presidency and the successful passage of his healthcare plan. More reasonably, her works reflect an activist attitude that forgoes passive resistance as a mode to bring about greater societal change.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The strength, flexibility, transparency and high electrical conductivity of single-layer graphene make it a potentially unique and valuable material for the next generation of electronic devices. Made of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb pattern – think of a chicken-wire fence – it is 97 percent transparent and 1,000 times stronger than steel.

Researchers are working on ways to tune the properties of graphene for specific electronic applications. One way to do that is by doping – introducing small amounts of other elements, such as nitrogen or phosphorus, that either add or subtract electrons from the system. Widely used in silicon technology, doping has been carried out experimentally in single-layer graphene sheets; but until now, the details of how the dopant atoms fit into the sheet and bond with their carbon neighbors remained elusive. In a study reported Aug. 9 in Science, researchers from Columbia University, Sejong University in Korea and SLAC and Brookhaven national laboratories used a combination of four techniques to make the first detailed images of nitrogen-doped graphene film. They showed that individual nitrogen atoms had taken the places of carbon atoms in the two-dimensional sheet; that about half of the extra electron contributed by each nitrogen atom was distributed throughout the graphene lattice; and that this changed the electronic structure of the graphene sheet only within a short distance – about the width of two carbon atoms – from the dopant atoms. The ability to control the electronic structure at the atomic level has important implications for tuning the unique electronic properties of graphene for particular device applications.

“We’re not trying to work on existing systems and make them better. We’re looking for new directions that can potentially enable much higher efficiencies,” said paper co-author Theanne Schiros, a surface scientist at the Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Center at Columbia, who is investigating graphene as a possible electrode for novel photovoltaic devices.

More here.

Alexandria, Egypt: His name was Sayed Bilal, he was thirty years old, married, and his wife was pregnant. He was a practising Muslim, neither an activist nor an agitator. He had a job and did not stand out from the crowd in any way. He lived near the Thahereyya train station. On the evening of 5 January 2011, he received a phone call from state security agents telling him to report to the local police station in the Al Raml District at 10 p.m. to help with an inquiry. ‘Bring a blanket with you,’ he was told. ‘You might need one.’ Sayed Bilal is poor. A simple, unpretentious man, an average citizen. No one is happy to be summoned to the police station in such countries. But since he has nothing to reproach himself for, Sayed takes a taxi with a clear conscience and shows up at the appointed time. No one has come with him. He does not know that his last hour is fast approaching. And how could anyone have known that? Sayed Bilal has no criminal record at all and has never had to deal with his country’s police force. In fact, that is why he has been singled out: he is a perfectly ordinary man.

more from Tahar Ben Jelloun at Granta here.

De Kooning: A Retrospective,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is the most piercing, inexhaustible, and relentlessly intense full-on career survey I have ever seen in this country. It could only be better by being bigger. Packing the museum’s entire sixth floor with nearly 200 paintings, prints, sculptures, and drawings (these last the equals of Ingres, Seurat, and ­Picasso), this retrospective should permanently set the art-historical record straight on this artist. Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off. His work of the late fifties and sixties is maligned as facile or turgid, his sixties sculpture called kitsch, his ­abstract-figurative hallucinations of the seventies essentially ignored, his profound paintings of the eighties suspect. This show, organized by MoMA’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, proves that de Kooning started great and only got better.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Eighty years ago, faced with today’s economic events, nobody would have been in any doubt: we would obviously be living through a crisis in capitalism. Instead, there is a collective unwillingness to call a spade a spade. This is variously a crisis of the European Union, a crisis of the euro, a debt crisis or a crisis of political will. It is all those things, but they are subplots of a much bigger story: the way capitalism has been conceived and practised for the last 30 years has hit the buffers. Unless and until that is recognised, western economies will be locked in stagnation which could even transmute into a major economic disaster. Simply put, the world has trillions upon trillions of excessive private debt financed by too many different currencies whose risk is allegedly mitigated by even more trillions of financial bets which in aggregate do not minimise the systemic risk one iota. This entire financial edifice, underwritten by tiny amounts of capital, has been created over three decades backed by the theory that markets do not make mistakes. Capitalism is best conceived and practised, runs the theory, by hunter-gatherer bankers and entrepreneurs owing no allegiance to the state or society.

more from Will Hutton at The Observer here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Lisa Randall is a friend and collaborator, as well as a science superstar. She is one of the most highly cited physicists of all time, for a variety of contributions to field theory and particle physics, especially her work with Raman Sundrum on warped extra dimensions. Her first book, Warped Passages, was a major success, which naturally raises the question of what one does next. (Besides writing papers, I mean.)

So we’re very happy to welcome Lisa aboard to guest blog about her new book, just out today: Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. (Among other virtues, this book has the single most impressive collection of blurbers of any book ever written, from Bill Clinton to Carlton Cuse.) From personal experience I can verify that writing a book doesn’t just happen; it’s a tremendous commitment over an extended period of time, and once it’s done there’s not much chance to go back and change it. So deciding to write a book at all, and more importantly how exactly to target the writing, is a delicate and critical process.

While Lisa hasn’t yet become a regular blogger, she is active on Twitter, where you can follow her at @lirarandall.

—————————————-

In conjunction with the publication of Knocking on Heaven’s Door, I thought I’d take advantage of Sean’s kind invitation to post on Cosmic Variance to explain my motivations in writing my book. I haven’t done a lot of blogging myself but I am impressed at the care and interest that go into science blogs. They are a way of sharing developments as they happen and an opportunity to have meaningful discussion of results.

I talk about a lot of science in my book. So I thought rather than summarizing it all—at least in this post—I’d focus on the question of why I wrote this particular book. I waited several years before even considering embarking on a second book project. I certainly didn’t want to simply repeat the content of my previous book, and my own personal goal is always to branch out into new arenas—in this case into new types of writing–while still remaining true to my physics roots. I didn’t know the exact book I was after but I did know some of the topics I considered important and timely.

More here.

Kenneth Goldsmith in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” I've come to embrace Huebler's idea, though it might be retooled as: “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”

It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours.

The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term “unoriginal genius” to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, “moving information,” to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.

More here.

From The Talks:

Mr. Caine, what is it like to get older?

You are going to make every moment count. I mean, you better make every moment count. Live your life now; start in the morning. You mustn’t sit around waiting to die. When it happens you should come into the cemetery on a motorbike, skid to a halt by the side of the coffin, jump in and say: “Great I just made it.”

So death doesn’t scare the hell out of you?

Well I always get worried when people say to me, “Oh we’re having a retrospective of your work.” I always think it’s sort of a threat. You know, hurry up and die. So I always get a bit worried when those things happen and that makes me think of death, but I’m a stubborn bastard.

You just refuse to think about it too much?

You quite often see these middle aged people on television who’ve won the fight against cancer and now they want to live their lives differently and enjoy every moment. Before they just went along and now they’ve had this scare that they were going to die. I had that scare that I was going to die when I was nineteen when I was a soldier, so I have been living my life that way for sixty years now.

What happened to you as a soldier that made you appreciate every moment?

I was a soldier in Korea and I got into a situation where I knew I was going to die – like the people know they are going to die of cancer, except then we got out of it. But it lasted with me – I was nineteen. That formed my character for the rest of my life. The rest of my life I have lived every bloody moment from the moment I wake up until the time I go to sleep.

More here.

From The Independent:

The Palestinians won't get a state this week. But they will prove – if they get enough votes in the General Assembly and if Mahmoud Abbas does not succumb to his characteristic grovelling in the face of US-Israeli power – that they are worthy of statehood. And they will establish for the Arabs what Israel likes to call – when it is enlarging its colonies on stolen land – “facts on the ground”: never again can the United States and Israel snap their fingers and expect the Arabs to click their heels. The US has lost its purchase on the Middle East. It's over: the “peace process”, the “road map”, the “Oslo agreement”; the whole fandango is history.

Personally, I think “Palestine” is a fantasy state, impossible to create now that the Israelis have stolen so much of the Arabs' land for their colonial projects. Go take a look at the West Bank, if you don't believe me. Israel's massive Jewish colonies, its pernicious building restrictions on Palestinian homes of more than one storey and its closure even of sewage systems as punishment, the “cordons sanitaires” beside the Jordanian frontier, the Israeli-only settlers' roads have turned the map of the West Bank into the smashed windscreen of a crashed car. Sometimes, I suspect that the only thing that prevents the existence of “Greater Israel” is the obstinacy of those pesky Palestinians.

But we are now talking of much greater matters. This vote at the UN – General Assembly or Security Council, in one sense it hardly matters – is going to divide the West – Americans from Europeans and scores of other nations – and it is going to divide the Arabs from the Americans. It is going to crack open the divisions in the European Union; between eastern and western Europeans, between Germany and France (the former supporting Israel for all the usual historical reasons, the latter sickened by the suffering of the Palestinians) and, of course, between Israel and the EU.

More here.