Mohammed Hanif in the New York Times:

According to our security analysts, the massacre of students and teachers at Bacha Khan University in Charsadda on Wednesday proves that we are winning against terrorism.

A month before that, Pakistan marked the first anniversary of the Army Public School attacks in Peshawar, where more than 140 people, the vast majority of them students, were slaughtered by the Taliban. Most were in their early teens. Never again, we said then. Parliament gave the military all the powers it wanted, and Pakistanis vowed to eliminate the killers of our children.

We marked the anniversary by honoring the dead and giving memorial shields to their parents. We put lots of flowers and candles around the young students’ pictures. Newscasters on television dressed up in the school’s uniform to express solidarity. The Pakistani Army’s public relations department released a music video with students waving flags and raising fists. The singing students pledged not only to defeat the Taliban, but also to educate the enemy’s children in revenge.

The army, however, did not answer the one question the parents of the dead students have been asking for more than a year: Who is responsible for the security of the children in a school managed by the army itself? Instead it released slickly edited music videos.

This year was declared the year that terror will end. Safe havens have been bombed into oblivion. Terrorists have been hanged and the rest are waiting for their turn, we are told. Hours after the attack in Charsadda, the Pakistani Army’s spokesman told the nation that Operation Zarb-e-Azb, its sweeping antiterrorism campaign, has been a success and the “results are there for everyone to see.”

Security experts, a group likely to find a silver lining in hell, say that the Taliban are targeting schools because these are soft targets – and that this is proof the Taliban have been weakened and can no longer attack cantonments or airports. Apparently, we are supposed to take solace in the slaughter of our children because our cantonments and airports are safe.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

“Don't look at them directly,” Rie Henriksen whispers, “otherwise they get suspicious.” The neuroscientist is referring to a dozen or so chickens loitering just a few metres away in the car park of a scenic observation point for Opaekaa Falls on the island of Kauai, Hawaii.

The chickens have every reason to distrust Henriksen and her colleague, evolutionary geneticist Dominic Wright, who have travelled to the island from Linköping University in Sweden armed with traps, drones, thermal cameras and a mobile molecular-biology lab to study the birds.

As the two try to act casual by their rented car, a jet-black hen with splashes of iridescent green feathers pecks its way along a trail of bird feed up to a device called a goal trap. Wright tugs at a string looped around his big toe and a spring-loaded net snaps over the bird. After a moment of stunned silence, the hen erupts into squawking fury.

Opaekaa Falls, like much of Kauai, is teeming with feral chickens — free-ranging fowl related both to the domestic breeds that lay eggs or produce meat for supermarket shelves and to a more ancestral lineage imported to Hawaii hundreds of years ago.

These modern hybrids inhabit almost every corner of the island, from rugged chasms to KFC car parks. They have clucked their way into local lore and culture and are both beloved and reviled by Kauai's human occupants. Biologists, however, see in the feral animals an improbable experiment in evolution: what happens when chickens go wild?

More here.

Piers J. Sellers in the New York Times:

I’m a climate scientist who has just been told I have Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

This diagnosis puts me in an interesting position. I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about the science of climate change, which is best viewed through a multidecadal lens. At some level I was sure that, even at my present age of 60, I would live to see the most critical part of the problem, and its possible solutions, play out in my lifetime. Now that my personal horizon has been steeply foreshortened, I was forced to decide how to spend my remaining time. Was continuing to think about climate change worth the bother?

After handling the immediate business associated with the medical news — informing family, friends, work; tidying up some finances; putting out stacks of unread New York Times Book Reviews to recycle; and throwing a large “Limited Edition” holiday party, complete with butlers, I had some time to sit at my kitchen table and draw up the bucket list.

Very quickly, I found out that I had no desire to jostle with wealthy tourists on Mount Everest, or fight for some yardage on a beautiful and exclusive beach, or all those other things one toys with on a boring January afternoon. Instead, I concluded that all I really wanted to do was spend more time with the people I know and love, and get back to my office as quickly as possible.

More here.

Marcus Woo in Smithsonian:

Almost everyone succumbs to the ravages of time. Once quick and strong, both body and mind eventually break down as aging takes its toll. Except, it seems, for at least one species of ant. Pheidole dentata, a native of the southeastern U.S., isn't immortal. But scientists have found that it doesn't seem to show any signs of aging. Old worker ants can take care of infants, forage and attack prey just as well as the youngsters, and their brains appear just as sharp. “We really get a picture that these ants—throughout much of the lifespan that we measured, which is probably longer than the lifespan under natural conditions—really don't decline,” says Ysabel Giraldo, who studied the ants for her doctoral thesis at Boston University. Such age-defying feats are rare in the animal kingdom. Naked mole rats can live for almost 30 years and stay spry for nearly their entire lives. They can still reproduce even when old, and they never get cancer. But the vast majority of animals deteriorate with age just like people do.

Like the naked mole rat, ants are social creatures that usually live in highly organized colonies. It's this social complexity that makes P. dentata useful for studying aging in people, says Giraldo, now at the California Institute of Technology. Humans are also highly social, a trait that has been connected to healthier aging. By contrast, most animal studies of aging use mice, worms or fruit flies, which all lead much more isolated lives. “Maybe the social component could be important,” she says. “This could be a really exciting system to understand the neurobiology of aging.”

More here.

Ken Roth at Human Rights Watch:

The warring parties in Syria are to resume talks in Geneva on January 25 with the aim of ending a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians and displaced millions. What will it take for the talks to succeed?

In October in Vienna, the main foreign actors in the war, including Russia, adopted guiding principles for the talks. They speak of the eventual defeat of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) “and other terrorist groups,” maintenance of Syria’s prewar borders, and the protection of minority groups and state institutions.

Yet major points of dispute remain, and the Vienna principles outline no plan to build the trust among the warring parties needed to facilitate difficult compromises. Diplomacy will not be enough if the warring parties continue the attacks on civilians and other atrocities that are driving Syrians apart.

The war has continued for so long in part because both the Syrian government and the armed groups aligned against it believed that they could prevail militarily. Russia’s entry into the war may have helped to dispel those illusions. Its airpower has been enough to bolster the Syrian government against collapse but not to make significant progress against the opposition. Meanwhile, the rise of ISIS and its demonstrated ability to attack in Europe, as well as the mass exodus of Syrian refugees, have led many external actors to renew their push for a political compromise. They hope to encourage their Syrian allies to fight ISIS and other extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra rather than each other.

More here.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

While Oscar Wilde may have been drawn to beautiful young men and the love that dare not speak its name — a phrase coined by the pretty and ruinous “Bosie,” Lord Alfred Douglas — he gained his fame and success largely through the help of powerful women. In “Wilde’s Women,” Eleanor Fitzsimons reminds us of the many writers, actresses, political activists, professional beauties and aristocratic ladies who helped shape the life and legend of the era’s greatest wit, esthete and sexual martyr. To begin with, there was Wilde’s formidable mother, Lady Jane Wilde. A hot-blooded, Irish nationalist and proto-feminist during her youth, she raged that women were forced into lives of “vacuity, inanity, vanity, absurdity and idleness.” She contended, quite accurately, that “all avenues to wealth and rank are closed to them. The state takes no notice of their existence except to injure them by its laws.” But Speranza — as Lady Wilde was commonly called — also translated poetry from Russian, Turkish, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese. Her collections of Irish folk tales were much admired by W.B. Yeats and she produced the first English version of Wilhelm Meinhold’s great German witchcraft novel, “Sidonia the Sorceress.”

Like her husband, the eminent physician Sir William Wilde, Speranza belonged to Ireland’s intellectual, as well as social, aristocracy. Sir William had been a friend of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, Speranza was the niece of Charles Robert Maturin, author of the Gothic classic, “Melmoth the Wanderer,” and their house was located just down the street from that of Sheridan Le Fanu, editor of the Dublin University Magazine (and author of the best ghost stories of the mid-19th century). Born in 1854, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde grew up surrounded by many of the most interesting people of his time.

More here.

The Gift

he walked into the bakery to buy bread

a big man
well worn cowboy hat
gentle face

we were sitting at a table
drinking our papaya juice
and talking to the dona behind the counter

he turned to us and said
“uma cancão”
and began to sing in a soft sweet voice
he sang of his seventy-three years
he sand of his growing up
he sang of his family and the death of his wife
he sang of his travels
and he sang of his cows

I didn’t understand all the words
but I understood his song and marveled at its beauty

when he finished singing he smiled at us
took his bread
and walked out

there remained a silence
that was filled
with the gift of his song
.

by Robert Markey
from Poems from Brazil
ISBN 978-1517117993
.
.

Mary Midgley in The Philosophers' Magazine:

I noticed how confused current views about this are when I read a recent piece in the Guardian about how entomologists hunt the impressive Purple Emperor butterfly. Apparently they must lay out its favourite diet, which is chiefly carrion and various kinds of faeces. The writer says that Victorian observers were distressed by these tastes in such a noble animal and “observed these degraded moments with a morbid fascination. For the emperor, however, it is not a question of taste. It is thought that the males replenish themselves after mating with sodium and other chemicals from the rotting matter.”

Thus we see the conscientious butterfly holding its proboscis and resolutely taking its medicine so as to be sure of keeping its love-life in order … And this is the sort of picture that constantly emerges from contemporary evolution-talk, a picture that mixes up two quite different kinds of purpose. The butterfly’s own subjective purpose concerns what it wants to do. But the possible effect on the survival of its species is an evolutionary function, of which the butterfly knows nothing.

It is not surprising that these two ideas get mixed today. Official scientific thought doesn’t now try to distinguish between different forms of purpose; indeed it hardly recognises the concept of purpose at all. Subjective purposes – motives – were outlawed from science-speak by the behaviourists, along with the rest of our inner life. Though their effects are obviously real, they were blotted out so successfully from the perception of the learned that many conscientious thinkers still don’t dare to look at them. Instead, in a way that would have delighted B. F. Skinner, they still try to account for physical actions directly in physical terms. They pick out distinct behaviour-patterns and try to link each to an evolutionary function of its own, without reference to its meaning or its social context.

More here.

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Baffler:

At around the turn of the millennium, some disturbing findings surfaced in the biomedical literature. Macrophages—immune cells whose function is to attack and kill microbes and other threats to the body—do not gather at tumor sites to destroy cancer cells, as had been optimistically imagined. Instead, they encourage the cancer cells to continue their mad reproductive rampage. Frances Balkwill, the British cell biologist who performed some of the key studies of treasonous immune cell behavior, described her colleagues in the field as being “horrified.”

By and large, medical science continues to present a happy face to the public. Self-help books and websites go right on advising cancer patients to boost their immune systems in order to combat the disease; patients should eat right and cultivate a supposedly immune-boosting “positive attitude.” Better yet, they are urged to “visualize” the successful destruction of cancer cells by the body’s immune cells, following guidelines such as:

• Cancer cells are weak and confused, and should be imagined as something that can fall apart like ground hamburger.

• There is an army of different kinds of white blood cells that can overwhelm the cancer cells.

• White blood cells are aggressive and want to seek out and attack the cancer cells.

At a more respectable level of discourse, Harvard physician Jerome Groopman wrote an entire 2012 New Yorker article on scientific attempts to enlist the immune system against cancer—without ever once mentioning that certain types of immune cells have a tendency to go over to the other side.

But the evidence for immune cell collusion with cancer keeps piling up.

More here.

Corey Robin in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

As an archetype, the public intellectual is a conflicted being, torn in two competing directions.

On the one hand, he’s supposed to be called by some combination of the two vocations Max Weber set out in his lectures in Munich: that of the scholar and that of the statesman. Neither academic nor activist but both, the public intellectual is a monkish figure of austere purpose and unadorned truth. Think Noam Chomsky.

On the other hand, the public intellectual is supposed to possess a distinct and self-conscious sense of style, calling attention to itself and to the stylist. More akin to a celebrity, this public intellectual bears little resemblance to Weber’s man of knowledge or man of action. He lacks the integrity and intensity of both. He makes us feel as if we are in the presence of an actor too attentive to his audience, a mind too mindful of its reception. Think Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Yet that attention to image and style, audience and reception, may not only be not antithetical to the vocation of the public intellectual; it may actually serve it. The public intellectual stands between Weber’s two vocations because he wants his writing to do something in the world. “He never wrote a sentence that has any interest in itself,” Ezra Pound said of Lenin, “but he evolved almost a new medium, a sort of expression halfway between writing and action.”

The public intellectual is not simply interested in a wide audience of readers, in shopping her ideas on the op-ed page to sell more books. She’s not looking for markets or hungry for a brand. She’s not an explainer or a popularizer. She is instead the literary equivalent of the epic political actor, who sees her writing as a transformative mode of action, a thought-deed in the world. The transformation she seeks may be a far-reaching change of policy, an education of manners and morals, or a renovation of the human estate. Her watch may be wound for tomorrow or today. But whatever her aim or time frame, the public intellectual wants her writing to have an effect, to have all the power of power itself.

More here.

Orhan Pamuk in The Guardian:

I wrote The Museum of Innocence thinking of the museum, and created the museum thinking of the novel. The museum was not just some idea I chanced upon after the success of the book, nor was it a case of the success of the museum begetting the novel – as when certain blockbuster movies are transposed to book form. In fact, I conceived the novel and the museum simultaneously, and explained the complex link between them in the novel: a young man from a wealthy, westernised Istanbul family falls in love with a poor distant relation, and when his love goes unrequited, he finds solace in collecting everything his beloved has ever touched. Finally, as we learn at the end of the book, he takes all of these objects from daily life – postcards, photographs, matchsticks, saltshakers, keys, dresses, film clips, and toys, mementoes of his doomed love affair and of the Istanbul of the 1970s and 80s whose streets he wandered with his lover – and displays them in the Museum of Innocence.

Back in the mid-1990s, when I first began to work on this idea, my dream was to open the museum on the same day the novel was published. The novel would be the museum catalogue. The order of the entries and their accompanying texts would all be planned and manipulated meticulously, producing a catalogue that could be read and enjoyed as a postmodern sort of novel. But I finished the book before the museum, moulded it back into a traditional novel, without images or annotations, and published it in that form in 2008. When I opened the museum in 2012, I realised it still needed a catalogue to explain the design and composition of the exhibition vitrines I had laboured over endlessly, and to show the objects and photographs included in the collection, so I wrote and published The Innocence of Objects. Now, there is a fourth work, and one that I’d never imagined when I first embarked on this project: Grant Gee’s beautiful, enigmatic documentary film Innocence of Memories. This time I’m not the creative force behind the project; instead, my role is simply that of creator of the film’s true focus, the Museum of Innocence, and author of the texts featured in the film.

More here. (Note: For Abbas who was deeply moved by the Museum of Innocence this past June in Istanbul.)

John Sutherland at The New York Times:

At 17, Iris Murdoch was asked what she intended to do with her life. She gave a one-word answer: “Write.” Sixty years on, what may have been Dame Iris Murdoch’s last coherent words as she was sucked into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease were: “I wrote.”

She usually did it the hard way: longhand, preferably with a Montblanc fountain pen. Her writing encompassed 26 published novels as well as ­philosophical treatises, essays and, most time-consumingly, an ocean of letters. She ­dutifully replied to every one she received, unless they were “mad or spiteful.” Writing letters, Avril Horner and Anne Rowe note in their introduction to “Living on Paper,” their selection of Murdoch’s correspondence, routinely took up four hours of her afternoon.

They were not drudging hours. For Murdoch, there was a sheer joyousness in sitting down at her desk. “I can live in letters,” she told her oldest friend and sometime lover, Philippa Foot. She took pride in how good she was at it. “I have in fact only once corresponded with anyone (now departed from my life) who was as good at writing letters as I am,” she crowed to Foot — who was perhaps a little miffed at not being that “anyone.”

more here.

Thomas Bunstead's translation at The Quarterly Conversation:

At the moment when the wind gusts in from the south, the wind that arrives from Arizona, soaring up and across the several sparsely populated deserts and the dozen and a half settlements that over the years have been subject to an unstoppable exodus to the point that they’ve become little more than skele-towns, at this moment, this very moment, the hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging from the poplar are subjected to a pendular motion, but not all with the same frequency—the laces from which each pair hangs are of different lengths. From a certain distance it constitutes a chaotic dance indeed, one that, in spite of all, implies certain rules. Some of the shoes bang into each other and suddenly change speed or trajectory, finally ending up back at their attractor points, in balance. The closest thing to a tidal wave of shoes. This American poplar that found water is situated 125 miles from Carson City and 135 from Ely; it’s worth the trip just to see the shoes stopped, potentially one the cusp of moving. High heels, Italian shoes, Chilean shoes, trainers of all makes and colours (including a pair of mythical Adidas Surf), snorkelling flippers, ski boots, baby booties and booties made of leather. The passing traveller may take or leave anything he or she wishes. For those who live near to U.S. Route 50, the tree is proof that, even in the most desolate spot on earth, there’s a life beyond—not beyond death, which no one cares about any more, but beyond the body—and that the objects, though disposed of, possess an intrinsic value aside from the function they were made to serve. Bob, the owner of a small supermarket in Carson City, stops a hundred feet away. From the nearest to the farthest thing, he enumerates what he can see: first the very red mudflat, followed by the tree and the intricacies of its shadow, beyond that another mudflat, less red, dust-bleached, and finally the outline of the mountains, which appear flat, depthless, like the pictures they had in the Peking Duck Restaurant across from Western Union, which shut down, he thinks. But above all, seeing these overlapping strips of colour, the image that comes most clearly to mind is the differently coloured strata formed by the horizontally layered produce on his supermarket shelves. There’s a batch of bacon fries halfway up that come in with a little gift-like offering of round Danish butter biscuit tins strapped on with sticky tape, the lids of which feature a picture of a fir tree with baubles on (he doesn’t know this). Both trees are beginning to stoop.

more here.

Michael Marrus at The Financial Times:

Beginning with the advent of the Nazi party to power in 1933, Cesarani insists that anti-Semitism was not central to the consolidation of its hold on Germany. Persecution and murder did not proceed in an orderly way. From the beginning, and in various ways throughout its 12-year domination, Nazism’s destructive rampage was characterised by “improvisation and muddle”. Again and again, he documents what one author once called “the twisted road to Auschwitz” — the absence of detailed objectives, planning or clear lines of authority — even as Nazism constantly understood Jews as remorseless enemies. Nazism proceeded against the Jews implacably but inconsistently, and to the victims sometimes bewilderingly.

“This shambles was the matrix for subsequent policy initiatives,” Cesarani writes. “Having allowed hurriedly conceived, partially thought-out policies to create a situation that satisfied no one and caused much restlessness amongst loyal party comrades, the Nazi leadership had to figure a way out. This [became] a familiar pattern.” When dealing with the Jews, German instruments were “low-cost and low-tech”.

Even in eastern Europe, where military operations facilitated the radicalisation of anti-Jewish measures, the destruction of Jewry did not flow from a clearly determined plan and a rational allocation of resources. Speaking of Poland, the densest killing ground, he notes that “policy was drawn up on the hoof. What later appeared to be the first stage of a carefully thought-out strategy of anti-Jewish measures was in fact a set of hasty improvisations.”

more here.

ALAN EHRENHALTJAN in The New York Times:

Nineteen eighty was a year of hope for conservatives in America, but it was a hope diminished by decades of consistent failure at the grass roots. Republicans hadn’t controlled either chamber of Congress, or a majority in state legislatures, for a quarter-century. Most governors were Democrats, as had been true since 1970. Not only was the Republican Party overmatched at winning elections, but those with the strongest ideological convictions — “movement conservatives,” as they liked to call themselves — were a faint voice even within Republican ranks. But at the end of that year two things happened. One, as we all know, was the election of Ronald Reagan as president. The other was an utterly private event whose significance would not be noticed for years. Charles and David Koch, the enormously rich proprietors of an oil company based in Kansas, decided that they would spend huge amounts of money to elect conservatives at all levels of American government. David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, but when the campaign was over, he resolved never to seek public office again. That wouldn’t be necessary, he and his brother concluded; they could invest in the campaigns of others, and essentially buy their way to political power.

Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. After the voting that year, Republicans dominated state legislatures; they controlled a clear majority of the governorships; they had taken one chamber of Congress and were on their way to winning the other. Perhaps most important, a good many of the Republicans who had won these offices were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together. It is this conservative ascendancy that Jane Mayer chronicles in “Dark Money.” The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out.

More here.