Rich Benjamin in The New York Times:

His dashing ascot billowing, his flat cap perched just so (to hide his bald spot), the cleft-chinned Harry Hay had some impressive head shots. As a student at Stanford in the early 1930s, he had come out to his classmates as “temperamental,” code for “homosexual.” In 1934, having dropped out of Stanford and moved to Los Angeles to try a career in pictures — and having already begun to hone his identity as sensualist and agitator — he joined the Communist Party. Around 1936, he turned up at a Halloween party dressed as “the demise of fascism.” The other homosexual bons vivants were stumped: none were terribly turned on to politics, so none knew what Harry’s costume meant. These men, and others like them across America, had no core ideology, no political groups to join, no leaders. Hay changed that. In 1950, he helped create the Mattachine Society, the country’s first gay rights organization, and demanded that the people it represented “be respected for our differences, not for our sameness to heterosexuals.” This year, the Human Rights Campaign, America’s largest advocacy and lobbying organization for gay, bisexual and transgender rights, appointed Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, as the first national corporate spokesman for its same-sex marriage campaign. “Ameri­ca’s corporations learned long ago that equality is just good business and is the right thing to do,” Blankfein says in a Web video. The organization also bestowed on Goldman Sachs its 2012 “corporate equality award.”

How does a movement get from there to here — from Hay to Blankfein? Linda Hirshman’s “Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution” sets out to explain, tracing the history of gay rights from the early 20th century to the present.

More here.

Reviewed by Timothy Snyder in the New York Times Book Review:

One man volunteered for Ausch­witz, and now we have his story. In September 1940 the 39-year-old Polish cavalry officer Witold Pilecki deliberately walked into a German roundup in Warsaw, and was sent by train to the new German camp. His astounding choice was made within, and for, Poland’s anti-Nazi underground.

Poland had been destroyed a year earlier by its two powerful neighbors: eastern Poland had been annexed by the Soviet Union; the western half, including Warsaw, was taken by Nazi Germany. The Soviets overwhelmed Polish attempts at resistance in their zone, but under the Germans, officers like Pilecki managed to establish confidential networks that would come to be known as the Underground State and the Home Army. Ausch­witz was set up to render Polish opposition to German rule impossible, and the first transport from Warsaw, in August 1940, had included two of Pilecki’s comrades. He went to Ausch­witz to discover what had become of them, and what the camp meant for Poland and the world. This he learned and conveyed.

Pilecki’s report on Ausch­witz, unpublishable for decades in Communist Poland and now translated into English under the title “The Ausch­witz Volunteer,” is a historical document of the greatest importance. Pilecki was able to smuggle out several brief reports from Ausch­witz in 1940, 1941 and 1942, and wrote two shorter reports after his escape in 1943.

More here.

Nathan Thrall in The New York Times's Sunday Review:

EARLIER this month, at a private meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his security advisers, a group of Middle East experts and former intelligence officers warned that a third Palestinian intifada was imminent. The immediate catalyst, they said, could be another mosque vandalized by Jewish settlers, like the one burned on Tuesday, or the construction of new settlement housing. Whatever the fuse, the underlying source of ferment in the West Bank is a consensus that the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, has reached a dead end.

Mr. Abbas’s political strategy was premised on the notion that security cooperation between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government would make Israel feel safer and remove its primary justification for continuing to occupy the West Bank, thereby clearing the way for a Palestinian state. Ironically, owing to the success of his efforts, many Israelis have had the luxury of forgetting that there is an occupation at all.

Thanks to the American- and European-financed peace that Mr. Abbas’s government has been keeping in the West Bank, Israelis have come to believe they can eat their cake and have it, too. A majority of citizens polled earlier this year said their state could remain Jewish and democratic without relinquishing any of the West Bank. Years of peace and quiet in Tel Aviv allowed hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets last summer to protest the high price of cottage cheese, rent and day care without uttering a word about Palestinians in the West Bank. The issue has ceased to be one of Israel’s primary security concerns. Mr. Netanyahu would have to be either politically suicidal or exceptionally forward-thinking to abandon a status quo with which a vast majority appears satisfied.

By contrast, Palestinians today see their leadership banging its head against a wall, hoping against reason that a bit more good behavior will bring about an independent state. As a result, longstanding debates over how to achieve national liberation — by comforting Israel or confronting it — have now been resolved. Palestinians of all political stripes are no longer arguing about whether to make Israel’s occupation more costly, but how.

Maria Popova in Brain Pickings:

Little about your day so far, including reading this, would be the same were it not for logician, mathematician, avid reader, and computer science pioneer Alan Turing, who was born 100 years ago tomorrow. While he remains celebrated as instrumental in the invention of the computer, responsible for coining the very concepts of “computation” and “algorithm” in their present form, Turing — who has shaped nearly every facet of our modern lives — is also one of history’s most tragic figures. Beyond his intellectual prowess, another aspect of his character permeated his intellectual contribution and ultimately led to his untimely death, yet it remains at best a silent echo.

In 1952, Turing was criminally prosecuted by the U.K. government for his homosexuality, illegal at the time, and forced to take female hormones to “cure” his unlawful “disorder” — a process known as chemical castration — as an alternative to a prison sentence. Less than two years later, shortly before his forty-second birthday, Turing committed suicide. In The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer (public library), David Leavitt offers a poignant lens on how Turing’s homosexuality factored into his intellectual and creative triumphs and tribulations:

In a letter written to his friend Norman Routeledge near the end of his life, Turing linked his arrest with his accomplishments in an extraordinary syllogism:

Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines cannot think

His fear seems to have been that his homosexuality would be used not just against him but against his ideas. Nor was his notion of the rather antiquated biblical locution ‘to lie with’ accidental: Turing was fully aware of the degree to which both his homosexuality and his belief in computer intelligence posed a threat to organized religion. After all, his insistence on questioning humankind’s exclusive claim to the faculty of thought had brought on him a barrage of criticism in the 1940s, perhaps because his call to ‘fair play’ to machines encoded a subtle critique of social norms that denied to another population — that of homosexual men and women — the right to a legitimate existence. For Turing — remarkably, given the era in which he came of age — seems to have taken it as a given that there was nothing wrong with being homosexual; more remarkably, this conviction came to inform even some of his most arcane mathematical writings. To some extent his ability to make unexpected connections reflected the startlingly original — and at the same time startlingly literal — nature of his imagination.

Inability

Seeing you off at the edge of the city, leaving forest trees behind
wandering about in neighbourhoods of an entirely different city,
on the streets
inventing the forgotten city in the layers of my mind, all over again
building new houses, new quarrels, doors and streets, all new
I think I’ve been leaving empty spaces in between

When I go back one day I see – in an empty patch
someone has dug a hole in the ground and in the rain
children of the neighbourhood could drown there
I grieve that I can’t quite invent
the city in the same way –
In every attempt some patches remain empty
where just anyone could come and dig a hole,
let thorns grow.

by Kamlesh
from Jaratkaroo
Satvahan Publications, New Delhi, 1985

Christopher Lydon interviews John Lanchester at the ever-excellent Radio Open Source:

John Lanchester has written a sprawling neo-Dickensian novelCAPITAL about London in the age of funny money and the crash of 2008. He got the germ of it five years ago, noticing a parade of “florists, dog-walkers, pilates instructors” on his own once-modest street south of the Thames, being radically made-over for bankers and the blooming investment-services class — “manifestly symptomatic,” as he says, “of a boom that would turn into a bust.” Like Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend, CAPITAL has what the Brits call a “state of the nation” feel, delivered in the voice attributed to Dickens of the “special correspondent for posterity.” But of course he’s illuminating an affliction gone global by now, describing life as lived in New York, too, or Shanghai, or Boston for that matter. One moral that Lanchester has given his tale is: “We are not in this together,” inverting the Tory slogan. In conversation he adds a touch from the Gospel of Mark: “To them that hath shall be given.” I marvel at how casino capitalism and its costs come clearer, stranger, more ridiculous, more destructive, more outrageous in fiction than in fact – how the right novels can feel truer than the news.

More here.

Via Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt at Wonders & Marvels:

It is not often that my research is topical. Most people feign polite interest when I tell them I study sixteenth-century Spanish convents. But with the recent controversy over the Catholic Church’s scrutiny of the behavior and activities of American nuns, the subject of female monasticism has enjoyed an unprecedented timeliness.

My goal in this essay is not to enter the twenty-first century polemic; I’m much more comfortable in the sixteenth century. I would offer, however, the following observation: that certain assumptions and even stereotypes undergird the remarks of some of the participants in the current debate. And here is where history can be so useful. Arguably, we root some of our modern interpretations of nuns in what we think convents were like in the premodern period.

Read more here.

Kathryn Schulz in Vulture:

Whose woods these are I think you know. Because, really, how could you not? Other than the ones where Dante got lost, they might be the most famous woods in the history of verse; certainly they are the most famous woods in American literature. I am talking, of course, about the forest in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

I can recall with some clarity my first encounter with those woods, which was also my first encounter with Frost. I was in the fourth grade. The poem was on the blackboard, and my teacher asked for a volunteer to read it aloud. Guess who raised her nerdy hand? “My little horse”—oh, damn; too late, I saw it coming—“must think it queer”: My classmates hooted. Eventually I finished, and we discussed the poem for a while. Then we read it aloud again, this time en masse—the way, each morning, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

A quarter-century later, I’m sitting at a different desk, looking at the same poem—this time in The Art of Robert Frost, a new book by British professor Tim Kendall. In the annals of Frostiana (and they are vast), Kendall’s book is an unusual hybrid, part anthology, part critical study: 65 poems with two or three pages of understated, illuminating commentary about each. It’s a good way to revisit Frost—and, per Frost, revisiting him is precisely what we should do. Kendall quotes this passage as the epigraph to his book: “A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A.”

For years the Turing Test has been used to compare humans with computers. Now sociologists are using it to compare humans with each other.

Evan Selinger in The Atlantic:

This weekend marks the centenary of Alan Turing's birth. Turing was one of the greatest computer scientist of all time. In a 1950 paper that outlined what has come to be known as the Turing Test he offered a way out of endless philosophical speculation about whether computers could ever be classed as 'intelligent.' He said that if human judges ask interview questions of a hidden computer and a hidden person and cannot tell the difference after five minutes, the computer should be considered intelligent. Nowadays, programmers compete yearly for the Loebner Prize, which is won by the computer that is most often mistaken for a human.

But the Turing Test's application is no longer limited to questions of artificial intelligence: Social scientists too are getting in on the action and using the test in a completely new way — to compare different human subjects and their ability to pass as members of groups to which they do not belong, such as religious and ethnic minorities or particular professional classes. With the Turing Test, sociologists can compare the extent to which subjects can understand people who are different from them in some way.

In the words of sociologists, what they're now studying is called “interactional expertise.” The easiest way to understand what interactional expertise entails is to contrast it with a more common idea, contributory expertise. Contributory experts are the typical array of professionals (physicists, chemists, lawyers, economists, musicians etc.) who develop specialized knowledge and skill through formal education and long experience.

Interactional experts, by contrast, are not primary practitioners.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in Tehelka:

Sometimes fellow writers and journalists ask me how I choose whether to write in Urdu or English or Punjabi. I usually start my answer with a self-deprecating remark: I can write badly in three-and-a-half languages. Like most self-deprecating remarks this one barely conceals a boast: I read and write Urdu; I can also borrow my ideas from ancient Punjabi, unlike you posh prats who rely entirely on English. But why would someone boast about their ability to read and write in their mother tongue (Punjabi, in my case) or express themselves in their national language?

I guess you show off because most people who write in English cannot pick up a newspaper in their local language to find out what yesterday’s riot was about. It’s not their fault. They went to good schools, sometimes schools so good that the main purpose of their education was to ensure their talents remained unpolluted by local languages and cultures.

When I was growing up in Pakistan, the complete inability to read or write in your mother tongue was a prerequisite for upward mobility. Pakistan’s founding father — the self-made aristocrat Mohammed Ali Jinnah — could barely string a sentence together in Urdu, a language that he imposed on Pakistan as its national language with tragic consequences.

More here.

An interview with Patrick Jackson in Theory Talks:

If IR is about real-world events out there, traditionally the relations between states, then why should we pay attention to philosophy?

Well, I think that the thing that philosophy does for us—and by ‘us’ I mean IR scholars broadly understand, those of us who are in some sense interested in global affairs—we’re interested in producing knowledge of global affairs that is in some sense valid. I think that’s a really important qualifier because there are lots of people that are interested in global affairs primarily so they can go out and change it. I have lots of students like this, who want to study (for example) what’s going on in sub-Saharan Africa so they can go out and improve people’s lives, which is excellent work and they should go do that, and if they do it well they’ll make an excellent near-term impact. But if they’re interested in knowing things and generating knowledge about global politics that is in some sense valid, that’s another matter. A lot of things are packed into the phrase ‘in some sense’ because there’s diversity in things can be valid. And I don’t think this is what philosophers find useful in the philosophy of science. What the social sciences should find useful in the philosophy of science, or in philosophy in general, is that the exercise of elaborating the logical structures and the preconditions of the assumptions of particular modes of knowing can provide some useful clarity for those of us that are mostly engaged in our everyday work in grappling with the stuff of the social world. Philosophy allows you to pull back from that stuff a little bit, reflect on exactly what it is that you’re doing. There’s a way in which the study of philosophy or the reading of philosophy can serve as a moment for methodological and theoretical reflection.

Now I know this is not what philosophers of science think they’re doing, because they’re not particularly interested in providing moments of reflection for IR scholars or other social scientists. Ok, fine, but we’re not in philosophy, we’re here in IR, so we have to just sort of operate from where we are. On that basis I think that it’s useful to read philosophy—it’s useful for any sort of social-scientific field, but it’s particularly useful for IR to have that kind of moment of reflexivity—methodological reflection—precisely because in our very subject matter itself, which is global, there are diverse answers to those questions. This is not to say that we necessarily have to always adopt the perspective of people we study or to say that we have to ignore the perspective of people we’re studying, but it’s to say that we should need to probably confront the question of what we’re doing when we make sense of the world and how it relates to what the people we’re studying are doing in making sense of the world.

From The Paris Review:

The two designers never met, but their histories are remarkably parallel: both were born to upper-crust Italian families led by scholar-patriarchs, weathered Catholic upbringings, and found fashion late. A jilted young Schiaparelli experienced the dawn of Dada in New York before moving to Paris, where she debuted her first couture collection at thirty-seven. Prada kindled counterculture while earning her Ph.D. in political science in Milan in the 1970s, studied mime for a half decade (I know), and then took over her family’s luxury-goods company. She got into ready-to-wear when she was thirty-nine.

Until curators Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda brought this Impossible Conversation to the Metropolitan Museum, not even Prada knew how kindred they are. Until the exhibition, she cited her famous Surrealist lip print from Spring 2000—a motif of floating red lips dotting pleated skirts—as a nod to Yves Saint Laurent. She hadn’t considered YSL was giving lip service to Schiap, who put the pucker on a suit at the urging of Dali. (Call it art for a really cute skirt’s sake.) There are many similar overlaps, which the curators group into categories like “Naif Chic,” saccharine clothes that Prada says explore “innocence as a choice”; “Hard Chic,” which showcases the designers’ interests in menswear and military uniforms; and “Ugly Chic,” items culled from the collections that intentionally subvert standards of feminine beauty, forgoing pink for palettes of neon bile and dirty sand.

More here.

From Nature:

Late in May, the direct-to-consumer gene-testing company 23andMe proudly announced the impending award of its first patent. The firm's research on Parkinson's disease, which used data from several thousand customers, had led to a patent on gene sequences that contribute to risk for the disease and might be used to predict its course. Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the company, which is based in Mountain View, California, wrote in a blog post that the patent would help to move the work “from the realm of academic publishing to the world of impacting lives by preventing, treating or curing disease”. Some customers were less than enthusiastic. Holly Dunsworth, for example, posted a comment two days later, asking: “When we agreed to the terms of service and then when some of us consented to participate in research, were we consenting to that research being used to patent genes? What's the language that covers that use of our data? I can't find it.”

The language is there, in both places. To be fair, the terms of service is a bear of a document — the kind one might quickly click past while installing software. But the consent form is compact and carefully worded, and approved by an independent review board to lay out clearly the risks and benefits of participating in research. “If 23andMe develops intellectual property and/or commercializes products or services, directly or indirectly, based on the results of this study, you will not receive any compensation,” the document reads. The example points to a broad problem in research on humans — that informed consent is often not very well informed (see 'Reading between the lines').

More here.

From the editors of n + 1:

According to many on the American left, the “elitist” is a right-wing bogeyman sustained by the mendacious organs of the actual elite — the moneyed one — and by the reactionary reflexes of an anti-intellectual public. Working-class whites, we’re told, vote in the interests of billionaires on the mistaken assumption that culture, not economics, is the main political battlefield, and that godless eggheads, not greedy businessmen, are their true class enemies. The 1-percenters bankrolling the Tea Party thereby deflect the attention of “bitter clingers” away from the wealthy and toward the clubby arrogance of the other 1 percent — the fraction of American students who graduate each year from the top tier of colleges.

The eggheads make sensible targets. Over the last thirty years, the university has replaced the labor union as the most important institution, after the corporation, in American political and economic life. As union jobs have disappeared, participation in the labor force, the political system, and cultural affairs is increasingly regulated by professional guilds that require their members to spend the best years of life paying exorbitant tolls and kissing patrician rings. Whatever modest benefits accreditation offers in signaling attainment of skills, as a ranking mechanism it’s zero-sum: the result is to enrich the accreditors and to discredit those who lack equivalent credentials.

More here.

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes about the balance of family and high-level careers for the next generation of women, via The Atlantic:

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

More here.

Miss Lasqueti, recalling how the man she first worked for once lifted a corner of a tapestry and showed her how the colors were more brilliant on the back than on the surface, remembers him saying, “This is where the power is, you see. Always. The underneath.” Years into his adulthood, Michael visits a gallery that has an exhibition of paintings done by Cassius and discovers the underside of his time with Cassius on the boat, Cassius whose whisper Michael could never unlearn. The paintings, depicting the evening when the ship enters Port Said, are from a child’s perspective of the night and Michael feels he is watching “where Cassius was emotionally, when he was doing these paintings.” “Goodbye,” he recalls, “we were saying to all of them. Goodbye.”

more from Shastri Akella at The Common here.

When I first traveled to Cambodia in March 1993, it was as a correspondent to cover the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia operation. From March 1992 to 24 September 1993, about 22,000 troops from around the world were sent to police a process of monitoring a ceasefire, overseeing elections, and political rehabilitation. Civil war continued, with the Khmer Rouge holed up in the northwestern part of the country near the Thai border. It had been fourteen years since the Khmer Rouge had been chased out of Phnom Penh. While UNTAC forces created a platform of stability essential to rebuild a new government structure and hold elections, the absence of peace, which lasted for years after UNTAC left, worked to the advantage of the Khmer Rouge by delaying their day of reckoning. What no one envisioned in 1993 was that those responsible for the Khmer Rouge regime would be held accountable for their crimes against humanity and genocide. More than eighteen years after I first reported on the UNTAC operation in Cambodia, I returned to witness the opening day of Case 002 in a hybrid court. The structure, operation and selection of the court personnel is an experiment.

more from Christopher G. Moore at Evergreen Review here.

It’s a visceral kind of criticism, sexy, strange, and suspenseful. Nabokov said to read for the tingle at the tip of the spine. Dickinson spoke of poems that took off the top of her head. Language enters McLane’s body like a current. Her whole body bucks and shudders. Her responses are forcefully somatic—“Some of her poems bypassed my brain and registered directly on the nerve endings”—and matched by the syntactical sophistication of her thought, her attraction to contradiction. Witness her response to the conclusion of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” (“everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go”): “Some days this seems coercively tidy and moral and obligatorily epiphanic and another instance of romantic ideology and sickening other days it seems a parable for living or rather attending.” Criticism is a temporal art, she reminds us. Our judgments are subject to mood; they are various and fickle. McLane destabilizes the authority of the critic—and the poem. “Poems aren’t for teaching; they insinuate,” she writes.

more from Parul Sehgal at Bookforum here.