Paul O’Mahoney at The Dublin Review of Books:

This latest addition to the prolific Žižek’s output is in large part culled from pieces of journalism published over the past twelve months, dealing with the migrant crisis and related phenomena, from the Paris terror attacks of November 2015 to the mass sexual assaults during new year’s celebrations in Cologne. The book allows for presentation of these reflections in a more considered and consistent form; and, while its tone, brisker pace and brevity may betray its journalistic origins, it is not inappropriate, given the urgency of the subject matter and the need for practical proposals, that it should have more references to other pieces of journalism and sociological research and fewer to the German Idealist philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis so associated with Žižek’s work.

The figure of the neighbour, in the abstract, the multiplicity of that figure’s potential manifestations and equally diverse forms of “troubles with the neighbours”, have always been central to Žižek’s work; it is thus no surprise that migrations unprecedented in the era of welfare state capitalism should not only occasion his direct reflections but also, and more unusually, force his hand as regards offering solutions. The current mass migrations of course present a dual challenge: on the one side, the European destination countries feel it acutely and fear it as a potential threat to their way of life, an unexampled form of present, and promise of future, “troubles with the neighbours”. The challenge facing those attempting to reach Europe meanwhile is not only to stay alive; it does not end with their gaining Europe but is only transformed into a fresh set of troubles in a new neighbourhood.

more here.

Josephine Livingstone at The New Yorker:

The medieval poem “Pearl” was written by someone whose identity we do not know, and is set mostly within a dream. Neither of these facts is unusual in medieval poetry. Authorship is often unclear for works from that period, and dreams were popular as literary devices: then, as now, dreams allow poets to illustrate ideas that might otherwise be inexpressible. The “Pearl” poet used the technique to account for an experience that still seems impossible to describe—the loss of a child.

In the poem, the narrator visits the spot where a pearl once slipped from his grasp and got lost among “Gilofre, gyngure, & gromylyoune, / & pyonys powdered ay bytwene” (“ginger, gromwell, and gillyflower / with peonies scattered in between”). Swooning into unconsciousness, he comes to in a dream, in a place he has never been before, where cliffs split the sky (“ther klyfez cleven”). Across a river, he sees his pearl again, but now the “perle” is no mere thing—she is a young girl, richly arrayed in an elaborate outfit covered in pearls. Pearl also seems to be her name, or at least it is how the man addresses her: “ ‘O perle,’ quod I . . . ‘Art thou my perle?’ ” In reply, she calls him a jeweller, and he refers to her as a gem (“ ‘Jueler,’ sayde that gemme clene”).

more here.

Anthony Madrid at The Paris Review:

Here is my own attempt at delivering the thing in all its roguish wit or egomaniacal misogyny:

Could Beatrice master the technique?
Or Laura write a sonnet—? Ach, enough.
I taught these Russian women how to speak.
God! if only I could make ’em all shut up.

One piece of serendipity that keeps nagging at me, which I shall not withhold here: it’s quite possible to make a new, macaronic epigram out of this material, wherein the second half translates the first. You’ll have to read it aloud to see how it strangely rhymes:

Ya nauchila zhenshchin govorit’…
No, Bozhe, kak ikh zamalchat’ zastavit’!
I taught these Russian women how to speak.
Now somebody show me how to make ’em stoppit!

It’s not necessary to read Akhmatova’s first two lines as if she is straightforwardly speaking from her own position, by the way. She may have thought—I’m convinced she did think—that it was obviously possible for a woman to “glorify love’s fire,” “create like Dante,” and so on; she had done it herself. So, when the greatest female poet of all time (in her own eyes and those of others) asks, “Can women write great stuff?” she’s channeling a voice not quite her own.

more here.

Judith Stark in The Conversation:

This is an enduring dilemma in the area of ethics and one that has recently come to light with charges of unethical behavior brought against a prominent philosopher, Professor Thomas Pogge of Yale University. Pogge has been accused of manipulating younger women in his field into sexual relationships, a charge he has strenuously denied.

Without making any judgment on the case itself, this situation raises larger questions about how the behavior of the experts in ethics is to be reviewed and evaluated.

As with most professions, there are no “ethics police” in the professions themselves. We who work in these professions are expected to police ourselves according to our codes of ethics, as is the case, for example, with physicians, lawyers and clergy members. Obviously, law enforcement comes into the picture with actions that are against the law.

Of course, we know that these professions also harbor people who do engage in unethical behavior, but in the case of experts in ethics, should we expect a higher standard of good behavior simply because they are experts in ethics?

More here.

Breaking Pitch

My father raises his hand to signal “enough,”
but I'm still pitching, and the ball spins
off my fingertips–a breaking pitch
with so much stuff on it my imaginary batter
is too baffled to swing, so much stuff
the angels whistle, the crows near
the garbage cans take off in a flurry
of caws, and the mosquitoes burst in midair,
so much stuff my father, fear
in his eyes, hits the pavement,
behind him glass shattering.

Above the garage, Mrs. Golub, who runs
a vacuum cleaner over her wood floors every two hours,
yells out the window,”I told you something
bad would happen if you let that kid play here.”
And Miss Lamar pushes her long
nose into the screen, “See if my car
has any glass on it,” and Mr. Gorelick,
who sells silk ties to posh men's shops,
shouts, “Clean up the mess, boy.”

I hear the cars on Clayton Road,
their tinny horns, the wind shaking
down leaves, the sound of the breaking
pitch trembling the wires that cross
from neighborhood to neighborhood, echoing
in shells strung from my best friend's
doorway, the white horsehide glinting
in the sun, a flash of light,
a prophecy of greatness.

Shaking his head, my father comes toward me,
his tightened fists warning me that I'll be sorry.
“Helluva curve,” he mutters, “helluva curve.”

by Jeff Friedman
from, Working in Flour
Carnegie University Press
.

Andreas Kluth in 1843 Magazine:

Many Germans have been glued to a television series, “Where We Come From”, that explains Germany’s long, complicated and often tragic history. The “we” in the title, however, is deceptive, for the host and narrator is Sir Christopher Clark, an Australian historian knighted for his services to Anglo-German relations. His academic credentials are excellent. His book on Prussia, “Iron Kingdom”, may be the best on the subject. His tome on the first world war, “The Sleepwalkers”, became a bestseller. But Germany has plenty of its own historians. Why Clark? The answer starts with the dappled bow tie he wears as he drives around Germany in a red cabriolet vw Beetle: the quintessential Brit (Aussies are close enough) in the quintessential German vehicle. Then there’s the language. Clark speaks grammatically flawless German, but with enough of an English cadence to sound cheeky, witty and incisive. Occasionally he uses humour, which can still be shocking on German public television. Sometimes he even says nice things about the country’s past, which to Germans is truly shocking. He does not seem full of himself. To Germans that is refreshing.

German Anglophiles consider such attributes “Anglo-Saxon”. The term is stretchable in this context and includes anybody English-speaking, whether Celtic or Saxon, pale or brown, from down under or beyond the pond. Clark is not an isolated case. The late Gordon Craig, a Scottish-American historian, achieved similar success. So has Timothy Garton Ash, a historian at Oxford and Stanford, who wows Germans with pithy insights delivered in sophisticated German.

More here.

Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

I’m standing in the spiraling rotunda of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, and over me dangles a chaotic mess held together by translucent Plexiglas. In the shadow the sculpture casts on the wall, the shapes converge in a pleasing negative blending intention and happenstance – impossible to predict, yet clearly part of a plan. On evidence, this is an artist thinking experimentally, and in multiple dimensions.

The industrial designer, artist and photographer Lázló Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was certainly that. As the Guggenheim’s retrospective Moholy-Nagy: Future Present shows, the Hungarian pioneer of the Bauhaus and beyond worked in a dazzling array of media: film, photography, painting, sculpture, graphic design and typography. But behind the restless eclecticism, he adhered to the unifying theory (with the Constructivists) that art is integral to social transformation and must embrace new technologies. At a time of vast industrial expansion, he declaimed himself as “[n]ot against technological progress, but with it”, championing novel industrial materials — from Formica and aluminium to the Plexiglas in Dual Form with Chromium Rods (1946) in the rotunda. Drawn towards the airy, the transparent and the brilliantly coloured, he was also in love with light and movement: like contemporary Alexander Calder, he engineered moving parts and even electric motors into kinetic sculptures.

More here.

Yoona Lee in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In 1993 an unusually precocious 23-year-old named Alain de Botton rocked the literary world with the release of his first novel, On Love (also known as Essays in Love). Since then he has become a minor cultural phenomenon, thanks in part to his preternatural understanding of the human condition, unerringly articulate writing, and embrace of a mind-bogglingly broad array of subject matter, from commercial cookie manufacturing to Roman architecture. An accomplished polymath, de Botton is a journalist, novelist, and philosopher who has even founded a global, multichannel enterprise called The School of Life. For more than two decades, his second novel has been breathlessly anticipated by his admirers.

Written in de Botton’s characteristic style — accessible and sprinkled with friendly parenthetical asides — The Course of Love picks up where On Love leaves off. The main character of that novel, a Lebanese-German named Rabih Khan, has grown into a young man of 31. An architect now living in Edinburgh, he still slams doors during arguments, enjoys a good sulk now and then, and has a penchant for pragmatic, independent-minded women with ruddy hair and charmingly imperfect teeth. He is still an unabashed and incurable Romantic.

When Rabih meets his client, an unflappable Scottish woman named Kirsten McLelland, he quickly falls deeply in love. Soon they are dating, and at the end of the second chapter, de Botton summarizes their entire subsequent relationship in stark terms. The couple will marry and encounter major challenges along with the banality of domestic life. Over the course of 13 years, they will have a daughter followed by a son, and one will have an affair. “This will be the real love story,” the author concludes.

More here.

Sean Carroll in UnDark:

There are two things going on, both of which are crucial to the operation of a pendulum clock. One is a little gizmo called an escapement, which turns the back-and-forth-rocking of the pendulum into the one-way ticking of the clock. Robert Hooke, a rival of Isaac Newton’s, invented the first escapement back in the seventeenth century. The clock hands are driven by an “escape wheel” with pointed teeth that are angled in a uniform direction. The pendulum, meanwhile, is connected to a two-armed piece called the “anchor.” As the anchor rocks back and forth, one of the arms first pushes the escape wheel in one direction, and then the other catches the teeth so that the wheel cannot move in the other. In this way, the oscillations of the pendulum become the uniform motion of the clock hands.

All of this sounds good, and would seem at first to be sufficient: the angling of the anchor arms and the teeth on the escape wheel provide a directionality to the motion of the clock. Except: where did entropy come in? How does the universal arrow of time governed by increasing entropy become related to the local arrow of time of this particular clock?

The answer resides in the seemingly innocent lifting and pushing of the anchor. It seems, by looking at the drawing of an escapement, that the wheel can obviously move in only one direction. But the underlying laws of physics assure us that if something can move in one direction, it can also move in the reversed direction. In this case, that would involve the anchor briefly lifting up, with the escape wheel swiftly and spontaneously moving backwards while it was lifted.

Why doesn’t that happen, and what does it have to do with entropy?

More here.

Shoaib Daniyal in Scroll.in:

At the height of the Islamic Golden Age – a period from the mid-8th century to the mid-13th century when Islamic civilisation is believed to have reached its intellectual and cultural zenith – homosexuality was openly spoken and written about. Abu Nuwas (756-814), one of the great Arab classical poets during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, wrote publicly about his homosexual desires and relations. His homoerotic poetry was openly circulated right up until the 20th century.

Nuwas was an important historical figure – he even made a couple of appearances in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (known in Urdu as Alif Laila). It was only as late as 2001 that Arabs started to blush at Nuwas’ homoerotism. In 2001, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, under pressure from Islamic fundamentalists, burnt 6,000 volumes of his poetry.

Most modern Muslims, therefore, have little knowledge of what the Islamic Golden Age was really about, even though they keep on wanting to go back to it.

“ISIS have no idea what restoring the Caliphate actually means,” a tweet by Belgian-Egyptian journalist Khaled Diab said. “In Baghdad, it’d involve booze, odes to wine, science… and a gay court poet.”

More here.

Christopher Benfey at The New York Review of Books:

A multivalent exhibition now at the New-York Historical Society, drawn from the sprawling folk art collection of the sculptor Elie Nadelman (1882-1946) and his independently wealthy wife, Viola (1878-1962), is far more interesting than even its organizers seem to realize. The more than two hundred objects on display range from clipper ship figureheads (“It was not just a sailor who carved this but an artist,” Nadelman remarked of a ravishing gilded eagle with detachable wings) to miniature carved animals, amid a trove of carefully selected pottery, exquisitely detailed needle-cases, and an early, ingenious earthenware roach motel—the glazed, funnel-shaped opening of which traps roaches lured inside by molasses. This staggering array of material is complemented by a dozen or so of Nadelman’s wondrous figurative sculptures, fashioned in weathered cherry or mahogany and often given an overlay of seemingly aging paint.

The big news of the exhibition is that Nadelman (along with Viola, already a well-informed specialist, before their 1919 marriage, in antique lace and embroidery) was also among the first generation of serious collectors of American folk art and among the first to use the Germanic derived notion of a national “Volk” to confer prestige on such objects rather than the pejorative adjective “primitive,” favored by early twentieth-century enthusiasts of African masks, “peasant” carvings, and Native American pottery.

more here.

Andrew Brown at The Boston Globe:

The campaign to get Britain out of the European Union is hard enough to understand if you are British. For foreigners it must be quite incomprehensible. Although Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are all solidly in favor of remaining, English attitudes towards Europe have become as delusional, and as powerful, as American attitudes towards gun control. We are suffering from national psychosis: post-imperial stress disorder.

Three dates are useful in understanding the deeper roots of what is happening to this country — 1945, 1956, and 1966. 1945, when the second world war ended, still feels like yesterday in the English imagination. We were bankrupt, with our cities bombed to rubble and hundreds of thousands of young men killed or wounded. Food, clothing, and petrol were all rationed and would be for another five years. But when you ask if British society was better then, a huge majority of the English people think it was. The overall figure is 51 percent worse today to 27 percent better, and when you break it down it is only those under 24 or non-white who think things have really gotten better since the war. Otherwise men and women from every region of the country believe that British society has got worse in the 70 years of European peace and unimaginable prosperity since the war.

The problem, you see, is that this peace and prosperity did not come on our own terms — which brings us to the second crucial date, of 1956. That was when the British Army, in collaboration with the French and the Israelis, invaded Egypt to recapture the Suez canal. I was there, though only a year old: My father was at the time the British consul in Ismailia, on the canal. He’d known things were going wrong for months, ever since he received a top-secret coded cable asking where the post office was in Ismailia — something that showed that an invasion was being planned, but that no one had any maps for it.

more here.

Rochelle Gurstein at The Baffler:

Who would have thought that Susan Sontag’s “One Culture and the New Sensibility”—widely regarded as an opening salvo in the long culture war against “elitist” standards”—is now fifty years old?

I revisited Sontag’s celebrated essay because I was reading a new book by George Cotkin called Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford University Press, 2015). Making my way through Cotkin’s twenty-three short chapters about the life and times of the many, many diverse figures he offers as representative of the new sensibility, I was surprised to find how elastic the concept had become. Cotkin locates its roots in the “minimalism” of John Cage in 1952, followed by Robert Rauschenberg’s early experimental work, Marlon Brando’s style of rebellion inThe Wild One, and six more predecessors. He then traces how it “exploded” in the 1960s—this is where Sontag appears (he calls her “the queen of the New Sensibility,” and its “cheerleader”), in between chapters on Lenny Bruce and Andy Warhol on one side and John Coltrane and Bob Dylan on the other, along with three more exemplars. Cotkin goes on to show how the new sensibility became a “cultural commonplace” by the 1970s, beginning with the plays, poetry, and radical political activism of the black nationalist Amiri Baraka, and then, after three more vignettes, his account comes to a close with Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, followed by Chris Burden’s performance pieces of 1974.

more here.

Bob Berwyn in Moyers and Company:

The concentration of heat-trapping CO2 pollution in the atmosphere has passed the 400 parts per million (ppm) threshold in Antarctica for the first time in at least 800,000 years, and possibly as long as 4 million years, scientists reported this week. The new measurements, reported by British and US research stations, show that every corner of the planet is being affected by the burning of fossil fuels, according to British Antarctic Survey (BAS) scientists who track environmental changes on the frozen continent. “CO2 is rising faster than it was when we began measurements in the 1980s. We have changed our planet to the very poles,” sad British Antarctic Survey scientist Dr. David Vaughn, who reported on the readings from the Halley VI Research Station.

Independently, researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week also reported a similar reading from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Before humans started wide-scale burning of coal, oil and gas in the mid-1800s, the CO2 level had been steady at about 280 ppm for many millennia. Since then, the concentration has increased in lockstep with fossil-fuel combustion, at a rate of about 2.1 ppm per year. The steady increase means more and more heat is trapped near the surface of the Earth, melting ice caps, intensifying heat waves and droughts, raising sea levels and killing corals reefs. CO2 concentrations in the Northern Hemisphere first reached the 400 ppm level in 2013, said Pieter Tans, head of NOAA’s long-term greenhouse gas monitoring program. In 2014, they stayed above the mark for three months, and last year for five months. This year, climate trackers said they increased at a record rate and they’re set to stay above that level for many decades, if not centuries, depending on future fossil-fuel combustion.

More here.

Abigail Zuger in The New York Times:

In a telling passage toward the end of his latest celebration of antidepressant drugs, Dr. Peter Kramer looks back on the pleasures of his long psychiatric career. He mentions the good company of his patients, his teachers, his colleagues. Then he turns to his favorite medications. He seems to choke up a little. “To get to meet Prozac and then to work in concert,” he writes without a trace of irony. “I am conscious of the privilege.” One needs no better evidence that the relationship between prescribers and their pills is quasi human, a partnership that may be utterly rational or wildly emotional, bolstered by wishful thinking, undone by bitter suspicion. Such has certainly been the case for antidepressants. Their safety and efficacy have been questioned repeatedly over the last decade. Some patients maintain the drugs are poison, while some experts have suggested they are just pricey, overused placebos. Foremost among the drugs’ champions has been Dr. Kramer, the author of “Listening to Prozac” in 1993 and a professor at Brown Medical School, who now offers a long, point-by-point defense composed of anecdotes and data.

Dr. Kramer’s bottom line is well summarized by the double meaning of “Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants” — he argues that antidepressants work just about as well as any other pills commonly used for ailing people, and that the drugs keep people who take them reasonably healthy. Antidepressants are not magic, Dr. Kramer acknowledges; they come with a risk of side effects, and their use in children can be quite problematic. But he has found them immensely helpful in the care of pretty much every variety of depressed adult. Further, he can back up his impressions with statistical proof. The reader with no particular ax to grind will emerge from the book with two impressions. One is that Dr. Kramer’s data is extremely persuasive. A second is that future rebuttals may well be just as persuasive, thanks to the staggering difficulties of subjecting psychoactive agents to rigorous scientific analysis. For its articulate, heartfelt demonstration of all those problems, the book is invaluable.

More here.

by Kelly James Clark

Maarten Boudry has argued here at 3 Quarks Daily that religion and religion alone motivates ISIS and ISIS-like extremists to violence. He claims (without citation) that other factors, “socio-economic disenfranchisement, unemployment, troubled family backgrounds, discrimination and racism,” have been “repeatedly refuted.” Thinking that religion plays any lesser motivational role is, he claims, “a dramatic failure of imagination.”

Since the claim that religion plays a lesser motivational role in extremist violence is empirically well-supported, I think Boudry's claim is “a dramatic failure of imagination.” Moreover, I think it's dangerously uninformed.

Let's start with uninformed.

It's easy to think that the troubles in Ireland were religious because, you know, Protestant vs. Catholic. But giving the sides religious names hides the real sources of conflict–discrimination, poverty, imperialism, autonomy, nationalism and shame; no one in Ireland was fighting over theological doctrines such as transubstantiation or justification (they probably couldn't explain their theological differences). It's easy to think that the Bosnian genocide of 40,000 Muslims was motivated by Christian commitment (the Muslim victims were killed by Christian Serbs). But these convenient monikers ignore (a) how shallow post-Communist religious belief was and, more importantly, (b) such complex causes as class, land, ethnic identity, economic disenfranchisement, and nationalism.

It's also easy to think that members of ISIS and al-Qaeda are motivated by religious belief, but…

Read more »