The Tyranny Of The Guidebook

by Samir Chopra

Puerto-rico-3-daysOne winter vacation some years ago, as my wife and I waited for a ferry from Fajardo in Puerto Rico to the island of Culebra, I noticed on the walls of our waiting room a poster for the Cayo Luis Pena in the Culebra National Wildlife Refuge. As I gazed at dazzling blue waters and painfully white glistening sands, bewitched by the promise of the colorful aquatic creatures that frolicked below the waters of an oceanic snorkeling and scuba-diving paradise, I felt myself succumb, yet again, to the tyranny of the guidebook. I felt the terror of that most fearful of things: the inadequate, not properly-realized, not fully-treasured, missed-opportunity vacation; the tourism poster I was gazing at provided an artful reminder of all I stood to lose if I did not ‘get it right’ and see the sights it showcased. There is a mode of oppression the travel guidebook and poster have the market cornered on: making us feel like failures even when we manage to put down the laptop, take our fingers off the keyboard, dock the smartphone, and head out, bravely putting away our calendars, for the wilderness.

The artfully put-together tourism poster—like illustrations of improbably delicious-looking concoctions in cookbooks—promises us a glimpse of the impossible, the inaccessible, and the too-beautiful. Its photographs of attractions are invariably of ‘postcard’ or ‘coffee-table book’ quality, fit to be mailed to friends; they suggest the ‘attraction’ is not possible to actually visit: surely the photographer was granted ‘special’ access to the Shangri-La that beams at us from the poster? But the poster and the guidebook assure us with a devastating twin salvo that this place has been visited, and more damagingly, that if we do not visit it, we have somehow failed to meet some unknown evaluative standards for vacations. The guidebook does this acutely with listings of the “essential,” the “must-see,” the “ten things any visitor to X must do.” These are resisted by pronouncements like “That’s only what the editors of that guidebook think; what do they know?” But such rhetorical bluster is just that; under the weight of the prescription, our resolve crumbles. We become acutely conscious of the need to play by the guidebook and the poster’s playbook: Visit this place! Have these experiences! Or else!

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Pornography’s Silencing

by Carl Pierer Sexual Solipsism

A few months ago, this column discussed Rae Langton's argument that pornography subordinates women. This argument forms the first part of a longer paper re-published in her book Sexual Solipsism. The second part of this paper argues that pornography silences women. In light of recent events and discussions, this idea seems to have acquired a new relevance.

The second part of Langton's article builds on the speech act theory of the first. Silencing means, for Langton, the failure to perform a speech act. Her argument in this part of the paper is to first argue that speech acts can be silenced, secondly that there are silencing speech acts, and to conclude, thirdly, that pornography is a silencing speech act that silences the speech act(s) of women.

Along any one of Austin's three dimensions of a speech act, a speech act can fail to develop its force. So it is that along any one of these dimensions a speech act can be silenced. It is worth noting with Langton that when this happens there is an implicit power relation: because the dimensions of the speech act depend on qualifications concerning the speaker, the failure to perform along any of the dimensions is a measure of powerlessness.

The first, with undeniable political significance, is a failure to perform even a locutionary act. Potential speakers are intimidated, prevented from speaking, do not speak because they will not be listened to. They are not in the position to utter the words they want to utter. This is perhaps the most obvious case of silencing that comes to mind when thinking, for instance, about tyrannical regimes limiting free speech.

The second is a failure to accomplish what is intended by the speech: to comfort, without attenuating sadness, to invite, without guests coming, or to argue, without convincing. These are failures along the second dimension of speech acts, consequently they may be called perlocutionary frustrations. They too might have a political significance if failure along this dimension is, for example, due to the speaker's class or gender.

The third, of greatest interest for this article, is a failure along the third dimension. It happens "(…) when one speaks, one utters words, and fails not simply to achieve the effect one aims at, but fails to perform the very action one intends." This Langton calls illocutionary disablement. As mentioned earlier, certain speech acts require the speaker to have an authority to perform the illocutionary act: in the classic example, an ordained priest is required to pronounce the couple husband and wife in order for them to be married. This, Langton points out, means that the ability to perform an illocutionary act can be taken as a measure of authority and political power.

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How relativism is really a form of pragmatism

by Emrys Westacott

Batman-vs-relativism-part-3Of all philosophical doctrines relativism surely gets the worst press. It is routinely described by its critics as "foolish", "simple-minded", "sophomoric", or "obviously self-refuting." It has been blamed for everything from rising crime to falling rates of literacy. The received view among a large part of the philosophical establishment is that it was decisively refuted by Plato almost two and half thousand years ago. And in modern times many illustrious Champions of Reason, including Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, Jürgen Habermas, and Donald Davidson, have all sought to slay once and for all what Richard Rorty labeled "the relativist menace." But this fact in itself should give us pause. For as Alasdair MacIntyre says:

"Nothing is perhaps a surer sign that a doctrine embodies some not-to-be-neglected truth than that in the course of the history of philosophy it should have been refuted again and again. Genuinely refutable doctrines only need to be refuted once."

The two main species of relativism are usually described as "moral relativism", which asserts the relativity of moral values, and "cognitive relativism" which asserts the relativity of truth. Some form of moral relativism strikes many people, including professional philosophers, as somewhat plausible, or at least not very easy to refute. A relativistic view of truth, however, is widely thought of as a doctrine for the birds. After all, surely, some statements are just true, period; others are just false. Anyone who thinks otherwise should go and jump off a high building and see if there is any possible world in which the prediction that that this will be bad for their health turns out not to be true.

In my view, though, cognitive relativism is, at bottom, just a form of pragmatism, a philosophical outlook that is generally treated with much greater respect. I believe an effective way of showing this is by means of an analogy. First, though, a brief clarification regarding what relativists assert is in order.

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STEM SELLS (BUYER BEWARE)

by Richard King

Barbara_Askins _Chemist_-_GPN-2004-00022STEM. It sounds sciencey, doesn't it? A stem is a type of cell, after all, as well as one of the two structural axes of a vascular plant, or tracheophyte. There are also "stem groups" in evolutionary biology, and Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy, and Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modellers. Probably there's a group of physicists somewhere who play Jean-Michel Jarres covers and call themselves "The Stems". Yes, STEM is a sciencey acronym for the sciencey twenty-first century.

STEM, as 3QD readers will know, stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. And it is the go-to concept for anyone concerned with the future of our embattled species, especially when it comes to questions of how that species will continue to reproduce itself under conditions of waged labour and property and profit. Ever on the lips of politicians or at the fingertips of commentators, it is the universal remedy, not only to economic problems, but also to problems of social inclusion and democratic participation. Wondering about what kind of jobs we'll be doing in the future? Think STEM. Worried about the future place of women in the workforce? Think STEM. Beginning to doubt the wisdom of sending yet another generation of kids to college, where they can accumulate yet more student debt and keep the financial sector ticking over? Think STEM.

Well, STEM schtem, I say, at least until someone can tell me, in a bit more detail, what it is our kids are supposed to be doing with all these sexy, STEMMY skills. For to dig down past the bland assertions of Bill Gates and his analogues, through all the rather vague pronouncements about generic skills and job clusters and coding and systems thinking and the like, is to discover, well, not much at all. I must have read at least fifty reports on the importance of STEM in the last couple of years, and nearly all of them cite the same statistic that 75% of the fastest-growing occupations will require workers with a STEM education. Little mention is made of what these sectors are, or of how big those sectors might become (regardless of their rate of growth), and when one digs down a little further most of them seem to lead back eventually to a handful of slightly aged studies. It's all beginning to smell a bit fishy. What is going on?

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Anita Desai: my literary apprenticeship with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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Anita Desai in The Guardian:

Alipur Road was a wide avenue lined with enormous banyan trees, and my mother and I would go for walks along it – to Maiden’s Hotel, which had a small library, or further on to the Quidsia Gardens. And, across the road, I’d see a young woman pushing a pram with a baby seated in it and a little girl dancing alongside it. She was a married woman clearly, and I a student at the University of Delhi, but glancing across the road at her, I felt an instinctive relation to her. Why?

She was revealed to be a young woman of European descent – German and Polish – who was married to an Indian architect, Cyrus Jhabvala, and lived in rooms in a sprawling bungalow just off Alipur Road. When her mother, a German Jewish woman from London, visited her, Ruth searched for someone she could talk to. I think it might have been Dr Charles Fabri, the Hungarian Indologist who lived in the neighbourhood, who suggested she might meet my German mother, who had also come to India on marrying an Indian, 30 years before, in the 1920s.

A coffee party – a kaffeklatsch – was arranged so the two could indulge in their shared language in this foreign setting. I can’t imagine how or why, but Ruth decided to follow their meeting, after her mother had returned to England, with many others, on a different level – that of daughters. With extraordinary kindness and generosity she would have me over to their house, one filled with books, the books she had brought with her from England where she had been a student at the University of London when she had met Jhab. Perhaps it touched her that I was so excited about being among her books, talking to her about books.

More here.

CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL AS THE HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF TRUMPISM: LESSONS FROM CARL SCHMITT

Crippled-america-3

Mark S. Weiner over at the Niskanen Center:

To understand the philosophical significance of climate change denial for Trumpism, it’s helpful to turn to the work of a thinker whose writings, it’s been suggested (and here), underwrite the movement’s “intellectual source code”: the German constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985).

For readers acquainted with Schmitt, the outlines of the emerging political philosophy of Trumpism seem eerily familiar. Over the course of his campaign and presidency, Trump has consistently expressed in action principles that Schmitt developed at the level of theory.

On Schmitt’s view, liberal states are weak and vulnerable, subject to corrosion from within—through capture by private interest groups—and conquest from abroad. In the American case, as Trump would have it, the United States has been “crippled” and reduced to “carnage” by self-interested financial and cultural elites, radical Islamic terrorists, cunning foreign trade negotiators, and illegal immigrants from Mexico.

The source of this vulnerability, Schmitt argues, is modern liberalism’s thin conception of political community and the state. Because liberals misunderstand the very nature of political life, they create conditions under which their nations implode.

According to Schmitt, a political community arises when its members coalesce around some aspect of their common existence. On this basis, they distinguish between their “friends” and “enemies,” the latter of whom they are ultimately prepared to fight and kill to defend their way of life.

A political community, that is, is created through an animating sense of common identity and existential threat—indeed, that’s how “the political” as a fundamental sphere of human value comes into being, and how it provides the cultural foundation of sovereignty and the state for a community of equals.

More here.

Have Scientists Found a Secret Chord for Happy Songs?

Alan Marsden in Scientific American:

New research published in the journal Royal Society Open Science attempts to tackle this issue by investigating the links between the emotions of lyrics and the musical elements they are set to. While the methods used are sophisticatedly statistical, the conclusions are extremely dry. The finding that a single chord type is most associated with positive lyrics is a huge simplification of the way that music works, highlighting the sheer scale of the challenge of creating a machine that could understand and compose music like a human can.

The data came from combining information from three large-scale public sources, two of them originally intended for entirely different purposes. The authors downloaded the lyrics and chord sequences of nearly 90,000 popular songs from Ultimate Guitar, a longstanding community website where users upload their own transcriptions of music.

To match the lyrics of the songs to emotions, the researchers took data from labMT, a crowd-sourced website that rates the emotional valence of words (the degree to which they represent good or bad feelings). The details of when and where the songs originated from were taken from Gracenote, the same database as your music player probably uses to show artists’ information.

By correlating the valence of words with the type of chord accompanying them, the authors confirmed that major chords were associated more with positive words than minor chords. Unexpectedly, they found that seventh chords—chords with four different notes rather than the usual three—had an even higher association with positive words, even in the case of minor seventh chords. This is in constrast to other studies which have placed the valence of seventh chords between minor and major.

More here.

Want to understand how history is made? Look for the networks

David Marquand in Prospect Magazine:

LeninNiall Ferguson belongs to an endangered species. In an age of academic specialisation, when most historians devote themselves to learning more and more about less and less, Ferguson is a polymath. He scorns disciplinary boundaries, mixing economics with computer science and anecdotes with sweeping generalisations. As he puts it, he seeks to undermine the “tyranny of the archives.” He uses evidence drawn from a much wider range of sources than most historians dare to examine. In the last two decades, he has published an astonishing range of learned and intellectually provocative books, ranging from a financial history of the world entitled The Ascent of Money, to a study of the bloody 20th century, entitled The War of the World. He is also the author of a biography of the banker Siegmund Warburg, and in 2015 brought out the first volume of a projected two-volume biography of Henry Kissinger, challengingly subtitled The Idealist. In some ways, The Square and the Tower is a summation of years of his intellectual achievement. It draws on the insights garnered in Ferguson’s previous books and on the research they reflect. But it is much more than that. In a host of ways it breaks new ground. Combining chutzpah, panache, imagination, learning and sardonic wit, it offers a new way of looking at and understanding half a millennium of human history.

Hierarchies, Ferguson argues, have been part of the human condition since the neolithic age. But in the 500 years since Gutenberg invented printing and Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg church, hierarchies have been challenged again and again by networks, through which like-minded people communicate with each other, independently of those set in authority over them. Sometimes hierarchies have crushed networks; sometimes networks have undermined hierarchies. But the tension between them has been constant and inescapable. Ferguson’s cast list is astonishing: from Alan Bennett to Anna Akhmatova; from Immanuel Kant to Joseph Stalin; from the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, who annexed Peru for the vast domains of the Spanish crown, to John Buchan, the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps; from financier George Soros to traitor Kim Philby; from Donald Trump to Julian Assange; and from Hillary Clinton to Mark Zuckerberg. He has not chosen these seemingly disparate figures at random. They, and a host of others, illustrate a complex mix of interwoven stories.

But despite the complexity of Ferguson’s story, the basic argument is clear. Though he doesn’t say it in so many words, it is curiously reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. For Ferguson, networks are more creative than hierarchies. Their members are more engaged than the hierarchies they confront. Without them, the world would be a harsher, bleaker and crueller place. But when hierarchies fall, and networks carry all before them, the result, too often, is an anarchic war of all against all—like Hobbes’s state of nature. Again and again, Ferguson reminds us, triumphant networks have run amok, plunging their societies into bloodshed.

More here.

Baggini’s consolations for a post-truth world

Neo-Rauch-Alte-Verbindungen-e1510425243101

Hugh D. Reynolds interviews Juliana Baggini over at 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: In the first chapter, Eternal truths, you write: ‘One of the problems we face is not the absence of truth, but its overabundance.’ You make a case for maintaining divergence into two streams of truth: revealed, religious truths, and those more grounded in science. I can see that this is a pragmatic, perhaps vital split to reduce conflict, but isn’t it permitting a kind of truth bypass?

JB: There are lots of very sophisticated religious believers who make religion out to be a kind of primitive science – and it really isn’t. They’ll talk about Stephen J. Gould and the two Non-Overlapping Magisteria (see his Rock of Ages (Random House 1999)). I think that they are prescriptively right and descriptively wrong.

A lot of religious belief – even the majority – involves making factual claims about the world which do come into conflict with science and history. For Christians, a test of this is the Empty Tomb. I ask Christians: ‘are you saying that it does not matter – as a matter of fact – whether or not Christ’s tomb was empty and that he was resurrected?’ At that point, I find that, to a lot of them, it really does matter, despite all the fine talk about not wanting to confuse science and history with religion.

Having said that, it is the right door to push against. There are believers who are already there or half the way there. Rather than say ‘let’s forget about religion – let’s get rid of it’ – I think we should try and force people to walk the talk: to take more seriously the idea that, whatever religious truth is, it’s not the same thing as science and history. People find that easy to say, and difficult to do.

More here.

Rescuing Economics from Neoliberalism

Thatcher_Reagan_Camp_David_sofa_1984

Dani Rodrik in Boston Review:

A journalist calls an economics professor for his view on whether free trade is a good idea. The professor responds enthusiastically in the affirmative. The journalist then goes undercover as a student in the professor's advanced graduate seminar on international trade. He poses the same question: Is free trade good? This time the professor is stymied. “What do you mean by ‘good?’” he responds. “And good for whom?” The professor then launches into an extensive exegesis that will ultimately culminate in a heavily hedged statement: “So if the long list of conditions I have just described are satisfied, and assuming we can tax the beneficiaries to compensate the losers, freer trade has the potential to increase everyone's well being.” If he is in an expansive mood, the professor might add that the effect of free trade on an economy's long-term growth rate is not clear either and would depend on an altogether different set of requirements.

This professor is rather different from the one the journalist encountered previously. On the record, he exudes self-confidence, not reticence, about the appropriate policy. There is one and only one model, at least as far as the public conversation is concerned, and there is a single correct answer regardless of context. Strangely, the professor deems the knowledge that he imparts to his advanced students to be inappropriate (or dangerous) for the general public. Why?

The roots of such behavior lie deep in the sociology and the culture of the economics profession. But one important motive is the zeal to display the profession's crown jewels in untarnished form—market efficiency, the invisible hand, comparative advantage—and to shield them from attack by self-interested barbarians, namely the protectionists. Unfortunately, these economists typically ignore the barbarians on the other side of the issue—financiers and multinational corporations whose motives are no purer and who are all too ready to hijack these ideas for their own benefit.

More here.

The Trouble With Globalization

Delong-Bradford-Chart2

Dani Rodrik over at the Milken Institute Review:

The logic of sustaining an open economy by compensating those who end up with smaller slices of the pie is impeccable. That’s how European nations, with their extensive safety nets and generous social benefits, integrated into the world economy. To this day, despite rising populism, international trade is not a very contentious issue in Europe. Anti-globalization ire focuses not on Chinese or Mexican exporters, but on faceless bureaucrats in Brussels and Frankfurt — and, of course, on immigrants. The United States, too, could have moved aggressively to compensate dislocated workers in the 1990s, when it opened its economy to imports from Mexico, China and other low-income countries in a major way. Instead, under the sway of market fundamentalists, the United States let the chips (and workers) fall where they may.

By now, the compensation approach has been tarred as “burial insurance.” The trade adjustment assistance programs that are habitually tacked on to trade agreements have provided inadequate aid — and to just a sliver of the affected population. That is partly by design: politicians have little incentive to implement strong compensation programs once trade agreements are approved.

More here. Also see in the Milken Institute Review, this piece by Brad Delong on Globalization:

Portions of the case against globalization have some traction. It is, indeed, the case that the share of employment in the sectors we think of as typically male and typically blue-collar has been on a long downward trend. Manufacturing, construction, mining, transportation and warehousing constituted nearly one-half of nonfarm employment way back in 1947. By 1972, the fraction had slipped to one-third, and it is just one-sixth today.

But consider what the graph to the left does not show: the decline (from about 45 percent to 30 percent) in the share of these jobs from 1947 to 1980 was proceeding at a good clip before U.S. manufacturing faced any threat from foreigners. And the subsequent fall to about 23 percent by the mid-1990s took place without any “bad trade deals” in the picture. The narrative that blames declining blue-collar job opportunities on globalization does not fit the timing of what looks like a steady process over nearly three-quarters of the last century.

on richard wilbur

Watch-richard-wilburPatrick Kurp at The Quarterly Conversation:

Robert and Mary Bagg have written the first biography of our greatest living poet, now age ninety-six, borrowing their title from Bogan’s prescient review of The Beautiful Changes, published seventy years ago. The Baggs draw upon previously unpublished journals, family archives, and interviews with Wilbur, his family, and friends, and these constitute the most valuable and interesting portions of the book. Wilbur is eminently quotable, in prose, verse, and conversation, but the book as a whole is a rather plodding affair. More about that below.

In an age when poets have jettisoned prosody and much verse is indistinguishable from prose, Wilbur has “remained true to his own poetic identity, refusing to develop fashionable, and usually transitory, styles,” in the words of his biographers. He has written precisely one poem in free verse, today’s lingua franca. In 2008, Wilbur told an interviewer: “The kind of poetry I like best, and try to write, uses the whole instrument. Meter, rhyme, musical expression—everything is done for the sake of what’s being said, not for the sake of prettiness.” Throughout his writing life, Wilbur has been accused of being effete, reactionary, elegant, and insufficiently transgressive and progressive. We learn from the Baggs, Wilbur was politely left-leaning as a young man, dabbled with pacifism, and has never been particularly interested in politics. Born in 1921, he served in World War II as a cryptographer with the 36th Texas Division.

more here.

how martin amis thinks

AmisKevin Power at the Dublin Review of Books:

So, as of 2017, the Amis Canon is still in order, with only some mild fluctuations in market value to trouble us (Updike, down ten at close; invest heavily in Bellow futures). With remarkable consistency, Amis has been praising more or less the same small group of (mostly male, definitely straight, definitely white) writers for four decades now. He even uses them to critique one another: “Bellow is quite unlike, say, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, to take two artist-critics of high distinction.” His critical insights are drawn from deep familiarity with a rigorously winnowed corpus. There have been no lately discovered enthusiasms; no essays in praise of younger novelists; certainly none in praise of writers from non-Anglophone countries (with the obvious, and meaningless, exception of Nabokov); and, increasingly, no full-length pieces about women writers of whatever vintage. (An essay in The Rub of Time on how Jane Austen’s novels have fared at the hands of filmmakers was originally published in The New Yorkerin 1997.) In much the same way, Amis’s critical principles, across forty years of reviewing, have remained intransigently firm. “Only connect the prose and the passion,” instructed EM Forster, at the crux of Howards End (1910). For Martin Amis, of course, the prose is the passion – or perhaps I should say, the passion is the prose.

To make Team Amis, you must be a writer, not necessarily of brilliant novels, or even of brilliant chapters, but of brilliant sentences and brilliant paragraphs. Amis’s critical method is to quote the bits he likes – the brilliant bits – and to point out why he likes them; or, conversely, to quote the bits he doesn’t like, and to point out that they are clichés.

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Bob Dylan as Odysseus

3913Zoe Williams at The Guardian:

Does Thomas ever hear a couplet that’s a little bit trite and panic that that’s the real Dylan and the genius is just an accident? Shaking his head confidently, he replies: “Too many accidents.” In a way, the classical allusions of Dylan’s later work bring him back to his earliest roots in blues and folk, albeit in a roundabout way. “Think about melancholy – the song ‘Not Dark Yet’ ends with the singer getting near the end. But it’s just such a beautiful song. The beauty of the song is compensation for the melancholy. We’re all going to die, so how do you deal with that fact? You can believe in an afterlife, or you can focus on the beauty that the human mind can produce through art. I think that’s why, like Eliot or Dante, or my guys, Virgil, Ovid, because of his genius, he’s always hooking into poetic traditions. Gospel, folk, always folk. There are folk traditions in ancient Greece and Rome, they’re what people sing, how they deal with mortality. Take someone like Virgil, whose Eclogues is really at the root of western pastoral poetry: he has these songs, which are shepherds competing with each other, it’s a cultural reality turned into high art. Dylan could hear a song and absorb it probably within a couple of hearings. When he gave the Nobel lecture, he talks about becoming all of these characters, from the ballads, from the folk songs.”

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Hidden Spring: A grassroots alliance between Israelis and Palestinians

Emily Raboteau in Orion Magazine:

IsraelIT WAS UNUSUALLY HOT FOR JUNE, and the heat was dry at the desert’s edge. The semiarid South Hebron Hills were stubbled with brown scrub and thistles and strewn with bone-colored rock. Though it was not quite summer and not yet noon, my guide, Ahmad S., estimated the temperature at thirty-seven degrees Celsius or, as my mind translated it, almost one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. “Drink,” Ahmad, a water lab technician, reminded me. I lifted my canteen to my lips and, without thinking, drained it. A first-world privilege, this—to be thoughtless about water. We were at the ankles of the West Bank, far off the utility grid, in the cab of Ahmad’s dusty truck. Ahmad, twenty-nine, Palestinian, comes from a town northwest of Hebron called Halhul. When I met him he was a newlywed. His new wife had been married once before. Because she was a divorcée, Ahmad’s brothers looked on her as used goods but he’d dissented from that point of view and married her for love. With his light-brown skin, gelled hair, gold chain, slim-fitting jeans, and Nikes he could have passed for one of the Dominican guys in my neighborhood in New York City. But apart from Ahmad’s slick look, I found nothing familiar in the desolate landscape. We may as well have been driving on an asteroid. The desert was bewildering to me as a city dweller, and not just because of its harsh quiet and the vast field of vision it offered, but also because of the pitiless way it exposed one to the sun. No buildings to offer cover or shade. No straight lines. Just rolling hills of rubble and saffron-colored dust. I felt jet-lagged, carsick, and ill at ease.

Judea, the right-wing Zionists call this place. The apostle Mark called it “the wilderness.” I couldn’t comprehend how such barren hills could sustain life. I’d been to Brazil’s Sertão, the steppes of New Mexico, and to Andalusia, in Spain, where the spaghetti westerns were filmed. None of those deserts were as dry as this. Yet to the north of us grew the vineyards of Mount Hebron, famed for its grapes since biblical times. The foothills to the west extended into Israel. To the east dropped the Jordan Valley, where the storied river, once crossed by the Israelites, bottoms out into the Dead Sea. In Israeli-settler parlance, and according to the Torah, God granted this land to the Jews.

More here.