Olivia Harrison in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Israel's recent military assault on Gaza serves as a reminder of the continuing urgency of the Palestinian question, which has been a topic of worldwide debate since the June 1967 war and returns to the center stage of global politics whenever Palestinian or Israeli blood is spilt. Something has changed in recent years, however, particularly after conflicts so disproportionate (the 2006 Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon, the 2008-2009 Gaza war) that it becomes difficult to speak of two “sides” in a conflict involving a military force, on the one hand, and a majority of unarmed civilians on the other.

But the increasingly uneven balance of forces is not the only thing that has tipped the scales in favor of the Palestinian people (if not their leadership) at dinner tables across the world. Palestinian civil society has also made itself heard more forcefully, particularly through non-violent protest actions (represented in films such Bil’in My Love and 5 Broken Cameras) and the 2005 West Bank-based call for an international campaign ofBoycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Modeled after the South African boycott campaigns, the BDS movement has received wide support from luminaries including Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, and Alice Walker. It has also garnered the support (sometimes partial or qualified) of an increasing number of Jewish activists against Israeli state violence, including groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace or intellectuals such as Judith Butler and Naomi Klein. The growing legitimacy of the BDS movement is a symptom of the changing fortunes of the Palestinian question. It also reveals the extent to which it has become a Jewish question.

More than 60 years ago, a similar evolution in public opinion occurred at another historical juncture.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

I should begin by confessing a history of prejudice, which reaches back more than two decades, to a different historical era. Some readers will have heard this story by now, and will likely be bored by it; but it is my story, and each time I tell it I see something new about myself. I became interested in Russia during the Cold War, and was disappointed by the onset of perestroika because, from a certain suburban American perspective, that made the place less bad-ass. I stole Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism from my California high school's library in 1988, shortly before dropping out.

Two years later, I surfaced in Leningrad –and here's the prejudice part– and found myself haughtily, condescendingly, imperialistically judgmental of what Russia at that time was able to put forth as a youth counterculture. Everything seemed imitative, derivative, shabby. Kids with long hair tied actual shoelaces around their heads, like some cartoon version of hippies they must have seen somewhere. I saw 'Sex Pistals', misspelled (and, I see now, beautifully botanicized), written in ballpoint pen on fake leather jackets.

I was disappointed. I was a youth –if not wholly exceptional in this regard– intent on revaluing all values, etc., and yet I was far more influenced by the standards of MTV glossiness than I myself could see. I was, I think now, part of a sort of advance reconnoitering mission for what in a few more years would be official IMF policy towards Russia: the demand that they move 'up', to our level, on our terms, the refusal to accept that a part of the world could decline to strive toward glossiness, and the belief that this gloss could only be attained through the ordeal of 'shock therapy'. That there was anything there to build on, indigenous, pre-Soviet and running like an underground stream from 1917 to 1989, never occurred to me or to Jeffrey Sachs.

More here.

Ramachandra Guha in Caravan:

Thompson may have been reading the Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), the Bombay journal where these thoughts and influences converge and meet. Rich in information and glowing with polemic, its pages are an index to the life of India. On subjects as varied (and important) as the economy, caste politics, religious violence, and human rights, the EPW has consistently provided the most authoritative, insightful, and widely cited reports and analyses. Among the journal’s contributors are scholars and journalists, but also activists and civil servants—and even some politicians.

Like other such journals around the world, the EPW commands an influence far out of proportion to its circulation. It has shaped intellectual discussion in India, and had a profound impact on policy debates. Can one see it, then, as an Indian version of the esteemed New York weekly The Nation? There are some telling similarities. For one thing, both are appallingly bad looking. The well-loved columnist Calvin Trillin said of the Nation that it was “probably the only magazine in the country [that] if you make a Xerox of it, the Xerox looks a lot better than the original”.

David Blackburn pushes back a little on Zoe Heller's review of Rushdie's Joseph Anton, in the Spectator:

The literary world anticipates Salman Rushdie’s response to Zoe Heller’s cauterisation of his memoir, Joseph Anton, in the New York Review of Books. Heller’s pointed review is deeply considered. It is a delight to read, even though some of its arguments are uneven and some of its conclusions are trivial next to the themes of Rushdie’s unlovely yet important book.

Heller is, in my view, right to slam the grandiloquence of Rushdie’s ‘de Gaulle-like third person’ narration. The technique succeeds in alienating Joseph Anton (Rushdie’s secret service nom-de-guerre) from normality; but its relentless oddness irritates to the point where the reader might lose sight of the fact that Joseph Anton is actually Salman Rushdie living in a grim part of the real world. It also leaves Rushdie open to mockery, perhaps deserved. The accounts of precious Joseph carousing with babes at Moomba and other flesh pots ‘to reduce the climate of fear around him’ are laughable.

Yet this particular criticism rather misses the point because Rushdie’s strange mix of heroism and preening is central to the book.

Ahmad Shokr in MERIP (image from Wikimedia commons):

The draft constitution does not reflect a democratic consensus, as many in the opposition have argued that it should. It reflects an emerging relationship between the Muslim Brothers and existing state institutions, like the army, along with a great deal of appeasement of the salafis, whom the Brothers have embraced as junior partners. The rush to a referendum suggests a deep anxiety among the state elites about continuing instability and a desire to seize the opportunity to cement a new political framework as quickly as possible. More worrisome than the text itself is the vision these leaders have for which voices count and which alliances matter in the new Egypt. Should this vision go unchallenged, the losers would be all those who have been calling for more pluralistic and inclusive system.

In his December 6 post, Jason Brownlee writes, “It is important that the ideological debate between liberalism and Islamism not be seen as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism.” Perhaps recent events in Egypt call for a rethinking of these terms. True, liberalism and democracy are not automatic counterparts, no more than Islamism and authoritarianism are. But the battle in Egypt is indeed one between a democracy that reflects the country’s political diversity and a remodeled authoritarianism, led by the Muslim Brothers and their allies, that seeks to circumscribe it.

Finding Flowers

Now I dreamt of you sleeping and dreaming,
beside me, in my bed, and of how it all was,
nothing happened except you sleeping and dreaming,
beside me, in my bed, and my looking at you,
and seeing how inexorably and all-pervasively
beautiful you were, how you were: all sleep and
dream and time, which gave itself ample time,
and how I knew that this immaculate waking
needs no kisses of shushing nostalgia,
when we think we’re dreaming of dreams
and religiously do the work, unseen by anyone.

by Pieter Boskma
from Het violette uur
publisher: Prometheus, Amsterdam, 2008
translation: 2012, Paul Vincent

From Edge:

There's a question that I've been asking myself for nearly three decades now and trying to get a research handle on, and that is why is the quality of public debate so low and why is it that the quality often seems to deteriorate the more important the stakes get? About 30 years ago I started my work on expert political judgment. It was the height of the Cold War. There was a ferocious debate about how to deal with the Soviet Union. There was a liberal view; there was a conservative view. Each position led to certain predictions about how the Soviets would be likely to react to various policy initiatives. One thing that became very clear, especially after Gorbachev came to power and confounded the predictions of both liberals and conservatives, was that even though nobody predicted the direction that Gorbachev was taking the Soviet Union, virtually everybody after the fact had a compelling explanation for it. We seemed to be working in what one psychologist called an “outcome irrelevant learning situation.” People drew whatever lessons they wanted from history. There is quite a bit of skepticism about political punditry, but there's also a huge appetite for it. I was struck 30 years ago and I'm struck now by how little interest there is in holding political pundits who wield great influence accountable for predictions they make on important matters of public policy. The presidential election of 2012, of course, brought about the Nate Silver controversy and a lot of people, mostly Democrats, took great satisfaction out of Silver being more accurate than leading Republican pundits. It's undeniably true that he was more accurate. He was using more rigorous techniques in analyzing and aggregating data than his competitors and debunkers were.

But it’s not something uniquely closed-minded about conservatives that caused them to dislike Silver.

More here.

John Gray in New Statesman:

Toleration is out of fashion. We tolerate what we judge to be bad or false and, for many, this is a stance that involves a kind of disrespect. It has become part of the ideal of equality to accept that everyone has a right not only to speak but also to be heard, and regarding anyone as not worth listening to seems to go against this ethos. Yet it is hard to see how we can do without the practice of toleration. It is said that we can reject or condemn mistaken beliefs while respecting those who hold them but the distinction breaks down when the beliefs are not just mistaken but detestable and pernicious. Apologists for Stalinism deserve ridicule and disdain, while Holocaust deniers merit nothing but contempt. If we are ready to tolerate the expression of such views, it is not because their exponents are worthy of respect but for the sake of the greater good of freedom. Protecting the freedom of people we rightly despise is hard. Since those we tolerate may not reciprocate, it can also be dangerous. However, putting up with disgusting views and the people who express them is a part of what freedom means – one that is as important as any panoply of rights. The contemporary cult of rights has encouraged us to think that freedom and human rights are practically coextensive. Yet no freedom of any importance can be secured by a rights-based legal system alone. America’s grandiose constitutional paraphernalia did not protect the country from the frenzy of McCarthyism, any more than the legal right to choice in abortion has prevented doctors who perform abortions there being threatened with violence and in some cases even murdered. Nor did American legalism prevent the authorisation of torture by the Bush administration. A legal structure that is supposed to secure basic freedoms will count for nothing if it is not supported by a larger culture of liberty in which the practice of toleration is central and fundamental.

By putting toleration at the heart of his inquiry, Brian Leiter has done a service to political thought. Focusing on whether religious practitioners can be given special exemption from generally applicable laws on grounds of conscience, he aims to formulate a universal principle of toleration. “A practice of toleration is one thing,” he writes, “a principled reason for toleration another.” As Leiter sees it, Thomas Hobbes’s view of toleration as a means to peaceful coexistence was “nothing more than pragmatic” and even John Locke – author of A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) – argued only that government was ill-suited to effect changes in belief. Instead Leiter is looking for a “pure” form of toleration, one based on principles having to do with the nature of human knowledge and the good life, and finds versions of this sort of toleration defended in the writings of John Rawls and John Stuart Mill.

More here.

Chinese statistics are always overwhelming, so Yang helps us to conceptualize what 36 million deaths actually means. It is, he writes, “450 times the number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki” and “greater than the number of people killed in World War I.” It also, he insists, “outstripped the ravages of World War II.” While 40 to 50 million died in that war, it stretched over seven or eight years, while most deaths in the great Chinese famine, he notes, were “concentrated in a six-month period.” The famine occurred neither during a war nor in a period of natural calamity. When mentioned in China, which is rarely, bad weather or Russian treachery are usually blamed for this disaster, and both are knowledgeably dismissed by Yang. The most staggering and detailed chapter in Yang’s narrative relates what happened in Xinyang Prefecture, in Henan Province.

more from Jonathan Mirsky at The NY Times here.

The physical book seems like a fitting reward for the labour of writing a book. It is flattering that third parties – typesetters, printers, designers – are roped in on your behalf. A physical book represents closure, whereas ebook publication means becoming part of the eternal, energy-sapping flux of the internet. You have to do all your own marketing: blogging or tweeting about how great you are in defiance of all those childhood injunctions to be modest; and there are people out there who aspire to pick your work apart electronically, “remix” it in the name of some democratic hippyish ideal. If you become involved in that sort of interactivity, then you might have to spend a long time defending your vision or just lying awake and worrying about the assaults made upon it by people who, surely, ought to be making their own stuff up. Fortunately we writers, being writers, can write about this. Whereas I don’t believe I have read a single work by a milkman lamenting that most people now buy their milk from a shop instead of having it delivered, books fretting over the death of print form one of the genres of the moment.

more from Andrew Martin at the FT here.

If you grew up, as I did, in a pedestrian city, much of Jeff Speck’s “Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time” falls into the category of no-brainer. Of course, a walking culture is better than an automotive one, better for our bodies and our souls. And of course, street life has to develop organically, from the proper urban conditions — “a citywide commitment to creating an environment that people want to live in,” Speck notes, quoting Adam Baacke, assistant city manager for planning and development in Lowell, Mass. Of course, bikes and mass transit are a key part of the mix, as is a human sense of scale. “It is often surprising to measure some of America’s favorite and most successful public spaces — New York’s Rockefeller Center, San Antonio’s River Walk, San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square — and discover how small they actually are,” Speck tells us.

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

From Smithsonian:

Pardis Sabeti pulls a BMW SUV into the breezeway at Harvard’s Northwest Laboratory, an airy, minimalist structure of smooth concrete, tropical hardwood, and lots and lots of glass. The 36-year-old hyperkinetic physician and geneticist renowned for her computational approach to studying evolution and public health directs a 22-member laboratory that occupies prestigious top-floor space in this citadel of science. On this Sunday afternoon in October, she is meeting two of her graduate students to work on, of all things, a holiday greeting card. (The tradition began in 2008 when she bought everyone cheesy holiday sweaters from Kmart for a group photo; last year’s card featured a full-blown re-enactment of Raphael’s famous Vatican fresco The School of Athens, depicting the accumulation of knowledge through reason.) Daniel Park, 33, is already in the passenger seat of Sabeti’s car when Dustin Griesemer, a 24-year-old MD-PhD candidate, climbs into the back. Sabeti, wearing modishly rectangular eye­glasses and brown knee-high boots, starts the five-mile drive to Sky Zone, an indoor trampoline park. Twenty minutes later, Sabeti, Park and Griesemer are snaking between packs of grade-schoolers to check out a pit called the Foam Zone. They sit down at a metal table near the snack bar and Griesemer explains why this year’s card should play off the viral music video “Gangnam Style.” Sabeti takes out her phone and watches on YouTube as an impeccably dressed South Korean rapper named Psy dances in horse stables, saunas, buses, motorboats and subways. The group is in agreement: A “Gangnam Style” homage will be impressive even if lab members aren’t hurtling through the air. The trampoline park will have to wait for another time.

With that settled, they head back to Harvard Square, and the conversation in the car segues to music, as it often does with Sabeti. Besides being an award-winning scientist, she’s the lead singer and bass player in the indie rock band Thousand Days, which has released four albums. “I have no innate sense of flux or flow or spatial cadence,” she says, explaining why the melodies in Thousand Days songs “go all over the place.” (Still, the band, which can sound like a spikier, more energetic version of 10,000 Maniacs, received an honorable mention in a Billboard World Song Competition.) “I have no sense of structure.” What she unquestionably does have is a fierce determination to succeed. Her single-mindedness has led to a groundbreaking tool to determine whether a specific variation of a given gene is widespread in a population as a result of having been favored by natural selection. And her recent work to understand the genetic factors that influence individual human responses to diseases like malaria, as well as her genetic analyses of pathogens to pinpoint potential weaknesses, could potentially lead to new approaches to treating, and perhaps eradicating, deadly scourges. Beyond that, Sabeti says she wants to show the world that the best way to produce top-flight scientific work is to nurture researchers’ humanity and empathy—and have fun.

More here.

Roxane Gay in the Virginia Quarterly Review (via Siva Vaidhyanathan):

My favorite definition of a feminist is one offered by Su, an Australian woman who, when interviewed for Kathy Bail’s 1996 anthology DIY Feminism, described them simply as “women who don’t want to be treated like shit.” This definition is pointed and succinct, but I run into trouble when I try to expand it. I fall short as a feminist. I feel like I am not as committed as I need to be, that I am not living up to feminist ideals because of who and how I choose to be. I feel this tension constantly. As Judith Butler writes in her 1988 essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”: “Performing one’s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all.” This tension—the idea that there is a right way to be a woman, a right way to be the most essential woman—is ongoing and pervasive.

We see this tension in socially dictated beauty standards—the right way to be a woman is to be thin, to wear make up, to wear the right kind of clothes (not too slutty, not too prude, show a little leg, ladies), and so on. Good women are charming, polite, and unobtrusive. Good women work but are content to earn 77 percent of what men earn. Depending on whom you ask, good women bear children and stay home to raise them without complaint. Good women are modest, chaste, pious, submissive. Women who don’t adhere to these standards are the fallen, the undesirable. They are bad women.

Butler’s thesis could also apply to feminism. There is an essential feminism, the notion that there are right and wrong ways to be a feminist, and there are consequences for doing feminism wrong.

Essential feminism suggests anger, humorlessness, militancy, unwavering principles, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman, or at least a proper white, heterosexual, feminist woman—hate pornography, unilaterally decry the objectification of women, don’t cater to the male gaze, hate men, hate sex, focus on career, don’t shave. I kid, mostly, with that last one. This is nowhere near an accurate description of feminism, but the movement has been warped by misperception for so long that even people who should know better have bought into this essential image of feminism.

Max Fisher in the Washington Post's WorldViews blog [h/t: Linta Varghese]:

In 2002, Psy walked onto the stage at a massive performance meant to protest the large U.S. military presence in South Korea. He wore an outlandish, glittered red costume and gold face paint. As the crowd cheered him on, Psy lifted a large model of a U.S. tank and, to cheers and applause, smashed it against the stage.

Two years later, Psy joined several other performers in a concert, this one also protesting the United States and its military. He rapped a song titled “Dear American.” The song is not his – the original is by South Korean metal band N.EX.T – but here are the lyrics, in English and in Korean, in case any readers would like to suggest a better translation:

싸이 rap : 이라크 포로를 고문해 댄 씨발양년놈들과
고문 하라고 시킨 개 씨발 양년놈들에
딸래미 애미 며느리 애비 코쟁이 모두 죽여
아주 천천히 죽여 고통스럽게 죽여

Kill those —— Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives
Kill those —— Yankees who ordered them to torture
Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law, and fathers
Kill them all slowly and painfully

Americans don’t hear much about these anti-American protests in South Korea. It’s a strong American ally, after all; a liberal free market democracy; home to tens of thousands of American troops; and a partner, ever since so many Americans fought and died in the Korean War, in containing North Korea’s threat to the world. Shouldn’t they love us?

This is all true, but the Korean-American alliance can sometimes look a bit different from the other end of the Pacific. Some crucial events inform – though do not, on their own, fully explain – why Psy and other Korean performers would show such animosity toward the United States.

On June 13, 2002, one of the many U.S. military vehicles in South Korea struck and killed two 14-year-old girls walking along the side of a road outside Seoul. Because of the terms of the U.S.-South Korean treaty that allows for America’s military presence there, the incident was considered a “military operation” and thus outside of Korea’s jurisdiction. A U.S. court martial acquitted the driver and his commander.

Furious at the acquittal, Koreans protested for months, some seeing echoes of the foreign empires that had dominated their country for centuries. Universities became hotbeds of anti-American rage.