Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:

In response to the latest terrorist atrocity, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and quite possibly the next secretary of state, suggested that the U.S. should investigate American Muslims to ascertain their level of commitment to sharia, or Islamic law. (Details about the attacker, and his motives, were still emerging as of Friday morning; police sources have said the attacker was a young French Tunisian, though at press time there was no official confirmation.) “Western civilization is in a war. We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in sharia, they should be deported,” Gingrich told Fox’s Sean Hannity. “Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization. Modern Muslims who have given up sharia, glad to have them as citizens. Perfectly happy to have them next door.”

…There is much to critique in Gingrich’s approach, but I was struck in particular by his statement that “Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization.” One of the Middle East countries that officially endorses sharia as a legal system is one of Gingrich’s most favored countries, Israel, which is, by his lights—and mine—a crucial component of Western civilization. Israel’s sharia courts, which are supervised by the Ministry of Justice, allow the more than 15 percent of Israel’s population that is Muslim to seek religious recourse for their personal dilemmas. These courts have been in operation since Israel’s founding, and yet the country does not seem to have been fatally undermined by their existence. Israel’s sharia courts raise complicated mosque-state questions (and the power of the Israeli rabbinate raises complicated synagogue-state questions) but, so far, Western civilization, in its Israeli democratic manifestation, seems to be holding on. So, apart from the obviously unconstitutional quality of Gingrich’s demand—and its deeply counterproductive national security component—another question is worth raising: Does the Israeli government’s support for the existence of sharia courts—the government actually pays the salaries of sharia judges—cast doubt on the Jewish state’s commitment to Western values? Should Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, be questioned by American authorities for advancing the cause of sharia? And what about Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, who, in a recent ceremony welcoming the appointment of seven new Muslim court judges, quoted the following passage from the Quran: “Indeed, did We send Our apostles with all evidence of truth, and through them We bestowed revelation from on high, and gave you a balance so that men might behave with equity.”

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Scott Atran in the New York Review of Books:

Mass murder has again been visited upon France and shaken the world. Again ISIS has claimed credit, though this time the link to the group seems confusingly ambiguous, feeding new fears in the West about random violence by alienated or radicalized Muslims anywhere. It raises the urgent questions: What does the attack tell us about the changing face of jihadist violence today? And how might our own response, in turn, be contributing to it?

The local driver of the truck that mowed down at least eighty-four people, including ten children, and wounded more than two hundred, on the Nice waterfront Thursday was a Tunisian citizen residing in France. He had a police record for road rage and wife beating, but was not on a terrorism watch list and had no known jihadi affiliations. Yet supporters of the Islamic State immediately celebrated his actions on social media, and French President François Hollande directly linked the attack to France’s war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

And on Saturday, the ISIS media outlet Amaq formally claimed the Nice truck driver as “one of its soldiers” who answered the call to kill anyone from a country in the coalition against it. Such formal claims have, until now, never been merely opportunistic but refer to those who have either sworn allegiance to ISIS (like the Orlando shooter) or have actually been involved in an ISIS plot (like the Paris and Brussels attackers).

All of this suggests that trying to pin down a direct ISIS connection—while ramping up operations against ISIS in Syria and Iraq—may be missing the point.

More here.

From Design You Trust, and more here.

Jason Furman in Evonomics:

Productivity growth—a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for rising incomes in the long run—has slowed since 1973, growing at a 1.8 percent annual rate, as compared to a 2.8 percent annual rate in the 25 years prior to 1973. At the same time, inequality in the United States is higher and, in recent decades, has risen faster than in other major advanced economies. In 2014, the top 1 percent captured 18 percent of income, up from 8 percent in 1973. These two major trends have been the major causes of the slowdown in income growth for the median household.

These dual trends—that is, the slowdown in productivity growth and the increase in inequality in recent decades—have many distinct sources, but insofar as they have some causes in common, there is the potential to address these causes in ways that simultaneously improve efficiency and equity. To this end, the evidence that a rise in rents is contributing to both phenomena is important.

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Paul Lakeland at Commonweal:

Katie Roiphe’s new book takes up the question of how six writers especially well versed in death and dying dealt with their own impending deaths. As such, The Violet Hour is a study of intellectual and moral consistency under stress. To what degree did Susan Sontag stay faithful, in her struggle with cancer, to her commitment to illness as a metaphor? How did Freud’s speculations about the “death wish” play out in his own final passage? Was John Updike able to hold together the matter-of-factness about death displayed in his writing in the face of his own impending death—and maintain the burning zeal to keep writing to the very end? Where did Dylan Thomas’s neurotic obsession with imagined illness, and decades of destructive alcoholism, leave him in confronting his demise? What about the children’s author Maurice Sendak, in whose classic stories death was never far away and who on his deathbed remarked that, while he did not believe in any kind of beyond, “if nothing is where my brother and sister are, then that is where I want to be”? And Roiphe helps us get to know the great American novelist James Salter, the only one of her subjects she was able to interview. He emerges as a man aware of death but not fixated on it.

more here.

Ian Sansom at Literary Review:

Unexpectedly, yet perhaps inevitably, Evelyn Waugh is becoming more likeable as the years go by. Fifty years dead now, the vile, rude, snobbish, cigar-chomping, ear trumpet-brandishing, banana-gobbling bigot is slowly becoming, in distant memory and from a comfortable distance, a bit of an old sweetheart. The more one reads about him, the more one likes him. Even the banana incident – shortly after the Second World War he ate three precious, strictly rationed bananas intended for his children in front of them, an act that his son Auberon famously found difficult to forgive and even more difficult to stop talking about – seems in retrospect as much a prank as an act of pure unpleasantness, more jolly jape than great evil. Weren’t all 20th-century bourgeois bohemian families equally brutish and strange? That’s certainly what all the books and biographies seem to suggest, isn’t it? And where’s the harm in a bit of a teasing – the children all get over it in the end, don’t they? Auberon’s son Alexander unearthed some years ago a letter from Auberon to Evelyn, never sent, which certainly suggests that even Auberon didn’t really begrudge his old man his eccentricities. The letter begins, ‘Dear Papa, Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any other man in the world.’ Funny thing, that: as we get older it’s easier to forgive others, since we’re so much in need of forgiveness ourselves.

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Simon Jenkins in The Guardian:

Eighty-four people died late on Thursday night as a lorry drove for more than a mile through the Bastille Day crowds in the southern French city of Nice. The driver eventually died in a hail of police bullets. The incident, on a day when the French celebrate equality, liberty and fraternity, could hardly be more horrific. The victims are beyond help, but the French people should have whatever sympathy the world can usefully offer. The danger is that ritualised global responses to these incidents become their megaphone. They raise the multiplier impact of the terror – and also raise public expectation that “something can be done”. The French president, François Hollande, has extended for three months the state of emergency resulting from the Charlie Hebdo killings and the events in Paris last November. He has announced, yet again, that France is “at war” with the threat of Islamist terrorism. A further 10,000 army reservists are to be deployed. “Activities will be strengthened” in Iraq and Syria. In London and Washington counter-terrorism agencies are on alert, and President Obama is “being updated by his national security team”.

…Hollande might more usefully have called up 10,000 psychologists or 10,000 Islamic historians. As for strengthening France’s role in the Islamist civil wars in Iraq and Syria, it is hard to imagine anything more likely to incite other young men to suicide attacks. A Nice truck driver does not remotely threaten the security of the French state, any more than such acts do the security of America or Britain. The identification of the nation state with random killings of innocent people has become a political aberration. The implication that leaders can somehow prevent such attacks by armed response is a total distraction from the intelligence and police work that might at least diminish their prevalence. It nationalises and institutionalises public alarm. It leads governments into madcap adventurism abroad and “securitises” the private lives of citizens at home. What has happened in France is tragic and calls for human sympathy. Beyond that, there is nothing we can usefully do – other than make matters worse.

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David Brooks in The New York Times:

We’ve all experienced the delicious madness when love first blooms — whether it happens in a bar, on a snowy street or when one person slips a hand into yours by a campfire. Your faces glow with that radiating aura. You marvel at the miraculous ways you are both the same! You’re up all night, sleepless, not eating. There are bursts of overflowing communication, and having crazy, silly fun in public. Every second apart produces an ache, and every minute together goes too fast. Your solar system has a new sun. For Jonah Lehrer, true love is not usually like this. In “A Book About Love” he argues that this wild first ecstasy feels true but is almost nothing. It’s just an infatuation, a chemical fiction that will fade with time. For Lehrer, love is more flannel pajamas than sexy lingerie; it is a steady attachment, not a divine fire. For Lehrer, attachment theory is the model that explains all kinds of love. Attachment theory was developed by researchers like John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in the decades after World War II. The basic idea is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. That secure base is established during the first years of life by having an attuned relationship with a parent. Most children are securely attached. Their parents mirrored their emotions and attended to their needs. They carry through life a mental model of how to establish reciprocal bonds. They can be brave and independent because they know how to be dependent on someone else.

But other children do not develop that attuned relationship early on. They carry avoidant, fearful or disorganized attachment models in their brains and are likely to have trouble bonding with others. The effects of early attachment styles reverberate. In one study, babies who had bad attachment patterns were nearly three times more likely to have chronic illness at age 32 than were securely attached babies. In the famous Grant study, done at Harvard, men who came from the most loving homes earned 50 percent more over the course of their careers than those from the unhappiest homes. They were much less likely to suffer from dementia in old age. As Lehrer writes, “Early attachment is more predictive of achievement than any other variable measured in the Grant study, including I.Q. scores.” Lehrer sees faith in God through the prism of attachment. Having an insecure attachment pattern in childhood nearly doubles the chance of having a sudden religious conversion as an adult. God is the ultimate secure base.

More here.

Summer Love Poem

We are not lovers
because of the love
we make
but the love
we have
We are not friends
because of the laughs
we spend
but the tears
we save

I don't want to be near you
for the thoughts we share
but the words we never have
to speak
I will never miss you
because of what we do
but what we are
together

by Nikki Giovanni

.

The life of Roman poet Catullus was stranger than fiction, but a new biography speculates far more than any history should.

James Romm in The New Republic:

“This bedspread, / Embroidered with the shapes of men / Who lived long ago, unveils the virtue of heroes / Through the miracle of art.” These lines, from a mini-epic by the Roman poet Catullus, speak of a coverlet given to Thetis, mother of Achilles, on her wedding day; Catullus is about to set its embroidered scene into motion using the “miracle” of poetry. With a racy title—Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet—and the use of this quote as epigram, classicist Daisy Dunn lays claim to a parallel miracle: The reanimation, for modern readers, of the poet himself. It’s a noble goal, but one that can be pulled off only by resorting to the dark arts of historical biography—guesswork, speculation, and the reconstruction of characters’ thoughts and feelings. Dunn’s book raises questions about how far these forms of necromancy can be taken before nonfiction passes over into fiction, and scholarship is eclipsed by romance.

The lure of these dark arts is strong for any scholar who approaches Catullus; the voice and emotional candor of this twenty-something writer—he died at age 30—are as alive as anything from ancient Rome. I vividly recall my first encounter, more than three decades ago, with the two dozen odes in which he charted a passionate and ultimately agonized love affair with the woman he called Lesbia, a name that evoked in his day the lyric genius of the Lesbos-born poetess, Sappho. “I hate and I love,” he wrote of his inability to get free of his obsessive passion for this woman. “Why do I do it, perhaps you will ask. / I don’t know why. But it’s happening, and it’s torment.” Catullus may have refined that elegiac couplet, today the most famous in all Latin literature, over days or weeks, but like so many of the poems about his feelings for Lesbia it reads like it poured straight out of him.

More here.

Sarah Zhang in Wired:

Perdue, the country's fourth largest poultry producer, won plaudits this week when it announced a suite of reforms to its chicken farms: windows, sunlight, access to the outdoors. Most notable, according to one press release, will be Perdue’s bid to replace the traditional way of slaughtering chickens with “controlled atmosphere stunning”—a turn of phrase so bland it can only be deliberate. Because they are, after all, still talking about killing chickens.

Now the current way of killing chickens sounds undeniably grisly. Shackled upside down by their feet, a line of chickens gets stunned in a bath of electrified water before a rotating blade cuts their throats. Controlled atmosphere stunning, on the other hand, uses gas to knock the birds out before they die of oxygen deprivation or later bleed-out. The word I heard several times—from Perdue as well as the Humane Society of the United States—was “gentle.”

More here.

Faisal Devji in Aeon:

Even sophisticated people speak of Islam as if it is one thing. The devout, the haters and the indifferent often share this belief in Muslim unity. And for them all there is no greater display of Muslim unity than the Hajj.

The Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, is a grand and dramatic display of Islamic brotherhood without racial or national bounds. Or so it appears from the outside. But this way of seeing the pilgrimage is relatively new. It seems to have originated in accounts by 19th-century European travellers. The most active and best proponents of the myth of the Hajj have always been notable Western converts, such as the Galician Jew Leopold Weiss, who became the Islamic thinker and Pakistani politician Muhammad Asad, or Malcolm X, the activist for equality in the United States, who wrote about the Hajj in rapturous terms. Given that Saudi Arabia had abolished slavery only a few years before Malcolm X’s pilgrimage, his view of the Hajj as the embodiment of a longstanding and more just alternative society might have been a bit naïve.

Muslims themselves have also taken up the claim that the Hajj represents a kind of ideal society, free of the prejudices and divisions that dominate the profane world.

Proponents of the Hajj as a social ideal speak of the brotherhood it enacts. Brotherhood is a common and powerful metaphor of closeness. As all brothers know, however, brotherhood is rarely if ever about equality.

More here.

Harrison Fluss at The Jacobin:

In July 1820, G. W. F. Hegel and his students arrived in Dresden to see some of the city’s art. The year was not an auspicious one for liberal or revolutionary circles.

Napoleon’s armies disbanded, Europe’s reactionary powers restored the old order through the Holy Alliance. With police spies snooping around, positive sentiments for the French Revolution and the ghosts of progress were seldom exhibited. Such sentiments were forced underground by reaction, and to even speak favorably about the revolution in public or in official circles would be near-lunacy. That’s why in the case of Hegel — someone described as a Prussian-state philosopher — the scene Terry Pinkard describes is remarkable.

Hegel gathered friends and colleagues and ordered top-shelf champagne — Champagne Sillery, the most distinguished of its day. He passed bottles around the table, but “when it became clear that nobody at the table knew exactly why they should be drinking to that particular day, Hegel turned in mock astonishment and with raised voice declared, ‘This glass is for the 14th of July, 1789 — to the storming of the Bastille.’”

Needless to say, this toast astonished the students there, among them Eduard Gans, who would later become Marx’s law professor. How could Hegel be so reckless to express such dangerous sympathies at the height of Restoration Europe?

more here.

Adam Kirsch at Prospect Magazine:

To call a writer “elegiac” is to suggest that he or she is sad, but only a little. On these terms, Walter Benjamin cannot be called an elegiac writer; his interest in death, dying and the dead is too disquieting and pervasive. Yet there is no doubt that Benjamin is constantly drawn to what has disappeared, or is on the brink of disappearing. “The true picture of the past flits by,” he writes in his last major essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again.”

The modern age, Benjamin suggests, is defined by this sense of the precariousness of the past. Where history and tradition were once things to be handed down, generation by generation, they are now fleeting presences, which must be trapped in the same way birds or ghosts are trapped—deviously, by sideways approaches. “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it ‘the way it really was,’” he writes. “It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

If anyone was equipped by temperament and historical experience to appreciate this truth, it was surely Benjamin. Born into an assimilated German Jewish family in 1892, he stood in a difficult relationship with his own religious past. (This is one reason why he was such an early and profound reader of Franz Kafka, whose stories of fractured meaning emerged from the same Jewish milieu.)

more here.