David Wise in Smithsonian Magazine:

The six CIA officers were sweating. It was almost noon on a June day in the Middle Eastern capital, already in the 90s outside and even hotter inside the black sedan where the five men and one woman sat jammed in together. Sat and waited.

They had flown in two days earlier for this mission: to break into the embassy of a South Asian country, steal that country’s secret codes and get out without leaving a trace. During months of planning, they had been assured by the local CIA station that the building would be empty at this hour except for one person—a member of the embassy’s diplomatic staff working secretly for the agency.

But suddenly the driver’s hand-held radio crackled with a voice-encrypted warning: “Maintain position. Do not approach target.” It was the local CIA station, relaying a warning from the agency’s spy inside: a cleaning lady had arrived.

From the back seat Douglas Groat swore under his breath. A tall, muscular man of 43, he was the leader of the break-in team, at this point—1990—a seven-year veteran of this risky work. “We were white faces in a car in daytime,” Groat recalls, too noticeable for comfort. Still they waited, for an hour, he says, before the radio crackled again: “OK to proceed to target.” The cleaning lady had left.

Groat and the others were out of the car within seconds. The embassy staffer let them in the back door. Groat picked the lock on the code room—a small, windowless space secured for secret communications, a standard feature of most embassies—and the team swept inside. Groat opened the safe within 15 minutes, having practiced on a similar model back in the States. The woman and two other officers were trained in photography and what the CIA calls “flaps and seals”; they carefully opened and photographed the code books and one-time pads, or booklets of random numbers used to create almost unbreakable codes, and then resealed each document and replaced it in the safe exactly as it had been before. Two hours after entering the embassy, they were gone.

More here.

George Scialabba in Boston Review:

If you’ve ever argued about politics with someone holding very different views, you surely know that Hume was right: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

In his fascinating, important, and exasperating new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt explores the root of those passions. A social psychologist at the University of Virginia and once a professed liberal Democrat, Haidt is dismayed by the rightward shift of the country’s political center of gravity over the last 30 years. Seeking to understand it, he looks for answers in the different characters of liberals and conservatives and proposes a new, or at any rate newly formulated, theory of our moral and political judgments, which he calls moral foundations theory.

As we all know and often forget, humans are not purely rational. Or, to put it another way, there’s more to rationality than is dreamed of in our everyday philosophies. We have a long, complex evolutionary history, which has left us with a tangled, multilayered psyche and many more motives than we are usually conscious of. With the help of research by a couple of generations of psychologists, anthropologists, and behavioral economists, Haidt has excavated these psychic structures. But before entering on a detailed description, Haidt pauses to emphasize the first principle of any adequate moral psychology: “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”

Experiments repeatedly show—to oversimplify only a little—that we all believe what we want, regardless of reasons. Changing one’s views in response to an opponent’s arguments is about as rare as an honest member of Congress. (Cases of both are known, but only a few.) Arguments are largely instrumental; they are meant for attack or defense. Most of the time, we argue like lawyers rather than philosophers.

More here.

Rohan Maitzen in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

IN THE OLD DAYS there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.

— George Eliot, Silas Marner

A recent sociological study found that atheists are America’s least trusted minority. Americans, the researchers concluded, “construct the atheist as the symbolic representation of one who rejects the basis for moral solidarity.” Most Americans, that is, apparently think of atheists not just as people who don’t share their specific beliefs about the existence of a divine being, but as ethical recusants who cannot be trusted.

This is not an expert view, only a popular one: no preponderance of evidence supports it, and philosophers can readily explain how it is possible to be good without God (some have even argued it is impossible to be good with God). But prejudices are difficult to dislodge, and science and reason often, paradoxically, prove ineffective tools. Even those of us who tend to agree with “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens can find their hectoring tone wearying. Perhaps what is needed to help move people past the differences they believe divide them — or, more precisely, past the different beliefs that do divide them — is neither a leap of faith nor a rule of logic, but an exercise of the imagination, a new construction of the atheist that would transform mistrust into sympathy, hostility into fellowship. One of our best allies in such a project is Marian Evans, who by her more familiar name of ‘George Eliot’ was (as noted by one of her contemporaries) “the first great godless writer of fiction.”

More here.

From Granta:

Mo Yan [who just won the Nobel for literature yesterday] is one of China’s most celebrated and widely translated writers. Born in the Shandong province in 1955 into a family of farmers, he enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army at the age of twenty and began writing stories at the same time. Since then he has written several novels and story collections, including Red Sorghum, Big Breasts & Wide Hips, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and most recently, Frog. This week he spoke toGranta editor John Freeman at the London Book Fair, about writing strong women, retaining idioms and puns even in translation and avoiding censorship.

JF: Many of your novels are located in a half-fictionalized town based on your Gaomi hometown, in a way similar to, say, Faulker’s American South. What is it that makes you return to this half-imagined community and does having a global readership alter the focus at all?

MY: When I first started writing the environment was there and very real and the story was my personal experience. But with an increasing volume of my work being published, my day-to-day experience is running out and so I need to add a little bit of imagination, sometimes even some fantasy, in there.

JF: Some of your writing recalls the work of Günter Grass, William Faulkner and Gabriel García Marquez. Were these writers available to you in China when you were growing up? Can you tell us a little about your influences?

MY: When I first started writing it was the year of 1981, so I didn’t read any books by García Marquez or Faulkner. It was 1984 when I first read their works and undoubtedly those two writers have great influence on my creations. I found that my life experience is quite similar to theirs, but I only discovered this later on. If I had read their works sooner I would have already accomplished a masterpiece like they did.

More here.

Social scientists frequently juxtapose spirituality to religion and identify the former by way of what it lacks in comparison to the latter. In particular, spirituality would appear to lack institutions, authority structures, community, and even history—all of which are considered integral to religion, such as it is widely understood today. Congregational identity, membership, and attendance are key markers for studies of Americans’ religious convictions, and the congregation, therefore, is taken to be an especially important, if not the definitive, site for the political and social mobilization of religious Americans. Against this backdrop, the rising number of “religious nones” (as well as shifts in congregational styles [see Chaves 2009]) emerge not only as new empirical facts but, insofar as their presence is measured against a norm of voluntary participation, also appear to engender a certain anxiety on the part of the scholars who study them (e.g., Olson 2010; Putnam and Campbell 2010). Though “religious nones” may be believers, they appear to lack the kinds of social connectivity that are recognizable to scholars, and that the latter have deemed essential to voluntary political participation. Insofar as spirituality emerges as a term associated with such individuals—and one that seems to sound the alarms about the problems of individualism—it appears as either the weak cousin or the crazy uncle of the norm that continues (or that should continue) to endure (see, e.g., Bellah et al. 1985), or as the spark of regeneration and the movement toward a “new” social order (e.g., York 1995).

more from Courtney Bender and Omar M. McRoberts at The Immanent Frame here.

In The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, even the “direct exchange of activities” has vanished. Here Žižek counsels refusing capitalism from the point of view of “a communism absconditus” without worldly instantiation or conceptual content. He defends this featureless vision by warning, with compact incoherence, against “the temptation of determinist planning”: determinism refers to inevitability, while planning implies voluntarism. Yet it requires no creed of either historical predestination or revolutionary infallibility to hazard an idea, presumably subject to revision both before and after the rupture with capitalism, of a better society. Whether such a hypothesis is called communist is a secondary question; as the poet (and revolutionary) John Milton put it in another context: “The meaning, not the name I call.” At the moment, Žižek’s communism is a heavy name very light on meaning.

more from Benjamin Kunkel at The New Statesman here.

Aspiring writers are usually dissuaded from the kind of gauche proscenium overture in which characters sit around discussing the protagonist, only to discover that the protagonist is conveniently at hand. And the coy titivations and velvet evasions (‘A momentary silence marked perhaps on the part of his auditors a sense of the magnanimity of this speech’) might properly alienate readers only slightly attracted to the lure of the Master. But the self-consciousness is here calculated. Isabel is a heroine in triplicate. She has just walked into a novel; she thinks of herself in heroic terms; and a group of gazers – or readers – watchful as a Greek chorus but endowed with greater agency, seems to have begun to plot this heroine’s destiny. We understand that the three men have effectively spent the first chapter in a long whine: ‘We’re so bored; give us a heroine to make things interesting!’ And here she is. But The Portrait of a Lady gets stranger before it gets more conventional. Instead of putting his heroine through her narrative paces, James slows down, and writes a kind of essay-portrait, almost a paternal introduction, on the subject of Isabel. Over the next forty or so pages, he serves up a mess of propositions, often contradictory.

more from James Wood at the LRB here.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

The reason I think Biden got the best of things is straightforward. For the first hour, at least, he dominated the debate, pushing Ryan onto the defensive. Many of the points he made were telling and substantive ones—not merely bluster. Identifying a key weakness in the Republican platform, he repeatedly challenged Ryan to explain how he and Romney could pass a five-trillion-dollar income-tax cut without raising the deficit or increasing other types of taxes on middle-income Americans. “It’s mathematically impossible,” he thundered. Ryan didn’t have a convincing answer because there isn’t one. He cited six “studies” that he said had concluded that the Romney math adds up, but, as Justin Wolfers, of the University of Pennsylvania, quickly pointed out, these weren’t exactly all peer-reviewed analyses: four of them were blog posts or op-eds. Eventually, Ryan fell back on the largely discredited supply-side argument that the tax cuts would unleash growth and generate more revenues, saying that Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy had proved it could be done. To which a dismissive Biden replied. “Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy?”

More here.

From Slate:

Suppose you want to wake people up to the human cost of poverty and to energize them with some urgency towards productive social action. And suppose you are a skilled writer. Your public, though well intentioned, is ignorant and more than a little obtuse, inclined to think of the lives of the poor (especially, perhaps, the distant or foreign poor) as not equally real. How do you write, if you want to inform their perceptions and inspire useful choices? You could, of course, present your audience with a lot of data; but data don’t easily reach the part of our minds with which we see others as fully human. (It is said of Louisa Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times that she had learned of the poor of Coketown as if they were so many ants and beetles, “passing to and from their nests”). It is plausible to think what Dickens clearly thought: that you can’t really change the heart without telling a story. What Dickens knew intuitively has now been confirmed experimentally. C. Daniel Batson’s magisterial work on empathy and altruism shows that a particularized narrative of suffering has unique power to produce motives for constructive action.

more from Martha Nussbaum at the TLS here.

Minutes later, barrelling down Monument Avenue in my pickup truck, I began to experience the mental flashes neurologists call auras. At the time, I didn’t know them by that name, or by any name. They’d been happening since I was an adolescent – maybe every few months, always at times of high stress – and they were so bizarre and difficult to convey that I’d never tried to describe them to anyone. Here’s my best shot: Imagine your mind is tripping through a litany of memories. One memory in particular stands out because it’s simultaneously both familiar and foreign. (In my case, this is always an aural memory – something someone once said to me, or something I heard in a movie, or something I may have listened to over and over again on a storybook record when I was a child.) What is that sound/voice/musical phrase? Where is it from? You try to place it but are unsuccessful, and then – you can’t help yourself, it’s like running downhill and picking up speed – you become obsessed with placing it, and it’s this effort that starts a hot wave pulsing inside you, stemming from somewhere in the vicinity of your stomach and eventually climbing up your neck and welling into your head: wa-wa-wa.

more from Patrick Ryan at Granta here.

The paintings in Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series do not have the answers to what happened in Stannheim prison on October 18, 1977. They do not have the answers to any questions about who is at fault in this or any other public crisis. They do not ask us to condemn or to forgive. They do not defend any particular political perspective, either that of the prisoners or that of the society that imprisoned them. They do not invite us to take action, and they do not offer us emotional catharsis: in this respect, they are neither Brechtian nor Aristotelian. They are not cheap theater. They are not, I would argue, any kind of theater at all, and their relationship to spectacle has been invoked only to be quelled. They are not about voyeurism, and they do not really care what is happening to the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. They do not even represent the artist’s viewpoint, because viewpoint itself is one of the things they are questioning. They ask us to stand in front of them and contemplate what we think, what we feel, even as they quietly cut the ground out from under us. It is not a comfortable situation to be put in—it may even be “horrific,” as Richter said—but it is necessary, and truthful, and in that sense redeeming.

more from Wendy Lesser at Threepenny Review here.

Gyan Prakash reviews Partha Chatterjee's new book in Caravan:

IN HIS NEW BOOK, Partha Chatterjee returns to the Black Hole, excavating the layers of justifications covering British rule to reveal how these laid the groundwork for new norms and practices of governance. Chatterjee is a widely known and read historian and political theorist, and a professor at Columbia University. As one of the founder members of the Subaltern Studies Group, he is the author of several influential books and articles, almost all of them based on his intimate knowledge of Bengal’s history and culture. The Black Hole of Empire is his most ambitious book yet. Challenging existing understandings, reinterpreting the meaning of well-known events, and displaying an authoritative knowledge of an astonishing range of scholarly literature, we encounter a historian at the top of his game.

Like Chatterjee’s other works, The Black Hole of Empire also focuses on colonial Bengal. It covers the period from the birth of British rule in the 18th century to the 20th-century nationalist mobilisations against the Raj. He places his Bengal-centric account on a larger canvas, tracing the origins of the global norms and practices of modern European imperialism—and those of the modern state itself—in local history. He invites us to see the contemporary predicaments of the Indian state and its moral and legal legitimacy in light of the drama played out in Britain’s prized possession in the east.

At the centre of the book is an attempt to trace the emergence of theories and norms in the actual business of empire. It is not an account of abstract debates on political theory, law and economics but a narrative of the actual conquerors, rulers and their opponents. The work of empire on the ground mattered; it was there that enduring theories and practices of the modern empire and the state were forged.

Chapter 1 of the book can be found here.

Over at Jacobin Magazine, first Alex Gourevitch:

I come from the minority on the Left that is skeptical of environmentalism. This is not skepticism of the science, but of the politics and ideology of environmentalism.

Consider the difference between Hurricane Mitch, a Category 4 hurri­cane, and Hurricane Andrew, a Cat­egory 5.

1992’s Andrew was a more power­ful storm than Mitch, but Andrew hit Florida, where it killed about 80 peo­ple and left about 125,000 temporarily homeless. Due to the wealth and social organization of the region, most people had a place to take refuge, and nearly everybody had found a new place to live within a year.

Mitch hit Central America – mainly Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua – in 1998. It was catastrophic, killing 11,000 people, with just as many miss­ing, and it left 2.7 million people home­less. The economic devastation led to a cholera outbreak.

Why the difference?

The answer lies with Central Amer­ica’s poverty and underdevelopment.

Max Ajl, Peter Frase (both also in Jacobin) and Chris Bertram (over at Crooked Timber) respond to Gourevitch. Bertram:

No doubt Alex can find plenty of instances of people mouthing the sentiments and opinions he condemns. But the trouble with this sort of writing is exemplified by the endless right-wing blogs that go on about “the left” and then attribute to everyone from Alinsky to the Zapatistas a sympathy for Stalinist labour camps. Just like “the left”, people who care about the environment and consider themselves greens come in a variety of shapes, sizes and flavours. Taking as typical what some random said at some meeting about the virtues of Palestinians generating electricity with bicycles is inherently problematic. Alex argues in the piece that “the Left” should support the industrialization of “the Global South”. Well, it might be right that some countries should industrialize more. But countries don’t all have to go through some developmental phase involving smoky factories. What’s important is that people in the Global South should, where possible, have the benefits of a modern infrastructure, well-built houses, secure energy supplies, decent transportation, and so forth. Industrializing might be one way of getting those things, but it is hardly the only way.

Jacob Bernstein in the NYT:

EVERYWHERE Tony Marx goes, he does a lot of smiling and nodding. As the president of the New York Public Library (a job he took over in July 2011, after eight years as the president of Amherst), it is his job to smile and nod at big-name writers around whom the library plans events.

It is his job to smile and nod at the business leaders who serve on his board. It is his job to smile and nod at heads of foundation boards, at members of the City Council and officials in the Bloomberg administration, whom he lobbies for money and patronage, since the library (like most publicly financed institutions) has been subject to brutal budget cuts over the last four years.

Anyway, smiling and nodding are certainly what he was doing on an early September evening at a cocktail party for the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art at the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle, working the room, introducing himself to anyone and everyone, offering tours, giving pats on the back and providing reassurances to people who appeared to be slightly wary of him.

Mr. Marx has had to reassure a lot of people of late.

From Guardian:

Celebrated Israeli novelist David Grossman is working with Boualem Sansal, an award-winning Algerian writer who came under harsh criticism for visiting Jerusalem earlier this year, to launch a writers' drive for peace which calls among other things for a halt to the “inhuman and immoral” situation in Israel. Supported by some of international literature's most respected names, including Claudio Magris, Antonio Lobo Antunes and Liao Yiwu, the authors will present their appeal at the closing session of the World Forum for Democracy on Thursday. Their document states that there is still a “possible solution” for the Israel-Palestine conflict, where “Israel has maintained the Palestinians under occupation for more than 45 years”, but “but maybe not for long”. The writers are therefore pushing for a Palestinian state to be created next to Israel, both with secure borders, “on the basis of painful compromises for both parties … such as the abandonment of settlements or their exchange for land, the renouncement of the right of return of the 1948 refugees, the sharing of Jerusalem”.

Sansal, whose books are banned in Algeria but who has won prizes for his work in France and took the German book trade peace prize last year, met Grossman, whose son, Uri, was killed in 2006 when a missile struck his tank in southern Lebanon, in May when he travelled to Jerusalem for an international literary festival. The threats and criticism he received for going to Israel led him to the idea of gathering writers to speak up for peace in the world. “Before I went to Jerusalem I came in for a lot of harassment [but] I did not let it intimidate me,” Sansal told the Guardian. “I decided to go to Jerusalem anyway, to mobilise people. Our enemies are organised, but we are not. Our way of fighting is literature, it's meeting, it's dialogue. We need to fight with these things.”The appeal from the authors, who include Daniel Pennac, Tomi Ungerer and Peter Esterhazy, also states that it is “urgent” that the international community “intervenes firmly to bring the Iranian nuclear programme under control”, warning that Iran is accelerating “its nuclear programme to achieve its hegemonic pretensions on a political, military and religious level, and Arab countries in the region might be driven to follow a similar path”.

More here.

From Nature:

On a chilly, January night in 1986, Elizabeth Ebaugh carried a bag of groceries across the quiet car park of a shopping plaza in the suburbs of Washington DC. She got into her car and tossed the bag onto the empty passenger seat. But as she tried to close the door, she found it blocked by a slight, unkempt man with a big knife. He forced her to slide over and took her place behind the wheel. The man drove aimlessly along country roads, ranting about his girlfriend's infidelity and the time he had spent in jail. Ebaugh, a psychotherapist who was 30 years old at the time, used her training to try to calm the man and negotiate her freedom. But after several hours and a few stops, he took her to a motel, watched a pornographic film and raped her. Then he forced her back into the car. She pleaded with him to let her go, and he said that he would. So when he stopped on a bridge at around 2 a.m. and told her to get out, she thought she was free. Then he motioned for her to jump. “That's the time where my system, I think, just lost it,” Ebaugh recalls. Succumbing to the terror and exhaustion of the night, she fainted. Ebaugh awoke in freefall. The man had thrown her, limp and handcuffed, off the bridge four storeys above a river reservoir. When she hit the frigid water, she turned onto her back and started kicking. “At that point, there was no part of me that thought I wasn't going to make it,” she says.

Few people will experience psychological and physical abuse as terrible as the abuse Ebaugh endured that night. But extreme stress is not unusual. In the United States, an estimated 50–60% of people will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives, whether through military combat, assault, a serious car accident or a natural disaster. Acute stress triggers an intense physiological response and cements an association in the brain's circuits between the event and fear. If this association lingers for more than a month, as it does for about 8% of trauma victims, it is considered to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The three main criteria for diagnosis are recurring and frightening memories, avoidance of any potential triggers for such memories and a heightened state of arousal.

More here.

Mo Yan in Granta:

I have to admit that, though I did not make it public, I was personally opposed to my Aunty’s marriage plans. My father, my brothers and their wives shared my feelings. It simply wasn’t a good match in our view. Ever since we were small we’d looked forward to seeing Aunty find a husband. Her relationship with Wang Xiaoti had brought immense glory to the family, only to end ingloriously. Yang Lin was next, and while not nearly the ideal match that Wang would have provided, he was, after all, an official, which made him a passable candidate for marriage. Hell, she could have married Qin He, who was obsessed with her, and be better off than with Hao Dashou . . . we were by then assuming she’d wind up an old maid, and had made appropriate plans. We’d even discussed who would be her caregiver when she reached old age. But then, with no prior indication, she’d married Hao Dashou. Little Lion and I were living in Beijing then, and when we heard the news, we could hardly believe our ears. Once the preposterous reality set in, we were overcome by sadness.

Years later, Aunty starred in a TV program titled ‘Moon Child,’ which was supposed to be about the sculptor Hao Dashou, though the camera was always on her, talking and gesturing as she welcomed journalists into Hao’s yard and gave them a guided tour of his workshop and the storeroom where he kept all his clay figurines, while he sat quietly at his workbench, eyes glazed over and a blank look on his face, like a dreamy old horse. Did all master artists turn into dreamy old horses once they became famous? I wondered. The name Hao Dashou resounded in my ears, though I’d only met him a few times. After seeing him late on the night my nephew Xianquan hosted a dinner to celebrate his acceptance as a pilot, years passed before I saw him again, and this time it was on TV. His hair and beard had turned white, but his complexion was ruddy as ever; composed and serene, he was a nearly transcendent figure. It was during that program that we learned why Aunty had married Hao Dashou.

More here.