Karan Mahajan in the New York Times:

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have gone on so long that the Middle East war novel has itself become a crusty genre — a familiar set of echoes coming back to us from ravaged lands. Many of these books are stirring on the level of detail but an equal number thoughtlessly valorize the American soldier or wallow in the morally vacuous conclusion that war is hell and that’s that. Where is the ferocious “Catch-22” of these benighted conflicts? Who will have the temerity to make these wars the subject of bracing comedy?

Mohammed Hanif, who at 54 is among the most revered Pakistani novelists of his generation, comes with an obvious pedigree to pull off such a stunt. A celebrated satirist and former air force fighter pilot, he has been profiled by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker and is reliably one of the subcontinent’s most contrarian and provocative voices. One pores over his Op-Eds in The New York Times savoring his insouciant bons mots, which encompass everything from India-Pakistan warmongering (“Schoolyard brawls have a more nuanced buildup”) to yoga instructors (“Drill sergeants trapped in poets’ bodies”). His greatest strength, though, in writing about an American war might be that he is not American. He is less likely to soften his work with patriotic (or even anti-patriotic) pieties that put America — as opposed to its victims — dead center.

More here.

David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine:

Jared Diamond’s new book, Upheaval, addresses itself to a world very obviously in crisis, and tries to lift some lessons for what do about it from the distant past. In that way, it’s not so different from all the other books that have made the UCLA geographer a sort of don of “big think” history and a perennial favorite of people like Steven Pinker and Bill Gates.

Diamond’s life as a public intellectual began with his 1991 book The Third Chimpanzee, a work of evolutionary psychology, but really took off with Guns, Germs, and Steel, published in 1997, which offered a three-word explanation for the rise of the West to the status of global empire in the modern era — and, even published right at the “end of history,” got no little flak from critics who saw in it both geographic determinism and what they might today call a whiff of Western supremacy. In 2005, he published Collapse, a series of case studies about what made ancient civilizations fall into disarray in the face of environmental challenges — a doorstopper that has become a kind of touchstone work for understanding the crisis of climate change today. In The World Until Yesterday, published in 2012, he asked what we can learn from traditional societies; and in his new book, he asks what we can learn from ones more like our own that have faced upheaval but nevertheless endured.

More here.

Eliza Mackintosh at CNN:

On a recent afternoon in Helsinki, a group of students gathered to hear a lecture on a subject that is far from a staple in most community college curriculums.

Standing in front of the classroom at Espoo Adult Education Centre, Jussi Toivanen worked his way through his PowerPoint presentation. A slide titled “Have you been hit by the Russian troll army?” included a checklist of methods used to deceive readers on social media: image and video manipulations, half-truths, intimidation and false profiles.

Another slide, featuring a diagram of a Twitter profile page, explained how to identify bots: look for stock photos, assess the volume of posts per day, check for inconsistent translations and a lack of personal information.

The lesson wrapped with a popular “deepfake” — highly realistic manipulated video or audio — of Barack Obama to highlight the challenges of the information war ahead.

The course is part of an anti-fake news initiative launched by Finland’s government in 2014 – two years before Russia meddled in the US elections – aimed at teaching residents, students, journalists and politicians how to counter false information designed to sow division.

More here.

Muneeza Shamsie in Newsweek Pakistan:

This January, Hussein Fancy, an American academic of Pakistani origin, received the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, awarded annually by the American Historical Association “to honor a distinguished book published in English in the field of European history,” for his groundbreaking work The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon. This isn’t the first prize awarded to this book: it had earlier been the recipient of the Jans F. Verbruggen Prize from De Re Militari for the best book in medieval military history and the L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies. These three very different prizes, each with different parameters, indicate the range and importance of Fancy’s research.

Through his exploration of the relationship between the Christian kings of Aragon in medieval Spain and their privileged, deeply religious Muslim soldiers, the jenets in the 13^th and 14^th centuries, Fancy sheds new light into “the interactions between Muslims and Christians in the Middle Ages” in a bid to “rethink the study of religion more broadly.” He questions the view of modern scholars that these Muslim-Christian alliances were essentially political and secular. He concludes instead that the Muslim jenetswere deeply religious. They were originally Berbers from North Africa where they were known as al Ghuzah al Mujahid and their collaboration with the Christian kings of Aragon “was neither opposed to something called religion, nor reducible to it.”

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuq8X4mn8P4

Terry Hartle in The Christian Science Monitor:

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.
.
by Robert Frost

Maya Jasnoff in The Guardian:

It’s a well-known saying that women lost us the empire,” the film director David Lean said in 1985. “It’s true.” He’d just released his acclaimed adaptation of A Passage to India, EM Forster’s novel in which a British woman’s accusation of sexual assault compromises a friendship between British and Indian men. Misogyny may not be the first prejudice associated with British imperialists, but it has proved as enduring as it was powerful. As Katie Hickman discovered when she started writing about British women in India, Lean’s view (if not Forster’s) “remains stubbornly embedded in our consciousness”. “Everyone” she talked to “knew that if it were not for the snobbery and racial prejudice of the memsahibs there would, somehow, have been far greater harmony and accord between the races”. Her book, vivaciously written and richly descriptive, offers a rebuke to such stereotypes. She animates a cast of British women who travelled to India before the 1857 rebellion. They included “bakers, dressmakers, actresses, portrait painters, maids, shopkeepers, governesses, teachers, boarding house proprietors … missionaries, doctors, geologists, plant-collectors, writers … even traders” – and some of them might not have been out of place in a Lean epic of their own.

…A clue as to how strange the Englishwomen may have appeared in turn comes from the 1838 diary of Fanny Eden (sister of the governor-general Lord Auckland), who on concluding a visit to one zenana was startled when her hostesses “took a fit of fun and instead of quietly pouring attar of roses over our hands” – as was conventional – “took to smearing our gowns all over with it, laughing vehemently at the utter ruin they were perpetrating”.

More here.

Emily Wilson in The New Statesman:

Simon Critchley’s latest book ends with an anecdote about a public conversation he had with the actor Isabelle Huppert. “Of course, what theatre is about is aliveness, a certain experience of aliveness,” she told him. “That’s all that matters. The rest is just ideas.” The remark left him “internally stopped” at the insight that theatre is indeed an “experience of sensory and cognitive intensity” that is “impossible to express purely in concepts”. The story explains the genesis of Critchley’s book: it articulates a struggle by a person trained as a philosopher, dedicated to the study of concepts, to explain his fascination with theatre in general, and ancient Athenian tragedy in particular.

Critchley has a longstanding interest in the relationship of literature and philosophy: as an undergraduate at the University of Essex, he began a degree in the former before switching to the latter. A philosopher of an eclectic kind, he is interested in continental thinkers such as Heidegger and Levinas, but has also published on football, suicide, subjectivity, David Bowie, Wallace Stevens and humour. Critchley’s central goal in his new book is to suggest a way of doing philosophy that acknowledges and somehow participates in the “aliveness” of theatre. At the same time, he offers a vibrant introductory ramble through Athenian tragedy and its reception in Plato and Aristotle.

More here.

Jan-Werner Müller in The Nation:

Of all the books that this new democracy-defense industry has produced, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die makes the most coherent case, by way of comparison, for why Trump’s presidency may well endanger one of the world’s oldest republics. As scholars who have worked primarily on Latin America and Europe, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how a global perspective should shake many people out of the complacency created by their cherished beliefs about American exceptionalism. Like all students of comparative politics, they are mindful that 1990s Venezuela, post-1945 West Germany, and interwar Belgium—all of which make an appearance in their book—differ profoundly. And yet they think one lesson can be generalized: that democracies depend not just on institutions like courts committed to protecting the rule of law; they also require informal norms that all political players need to observe to keep the democratic game going. Like many liberals, they think that serious norm violators such as Trump should be kept out of the game entirely, and so they call for reinforcing the power of elite gatekeepers as a powerful line of defense.

In his similarly titled How Democracy Ends, David Runciman, the most original theorist of democracy writing in the United Kingdom today, provides a convincing alternative to the products that come off the assembly line of the democracy-defense industry. The Cambridge professor is deeply wary of historical analogies. He worries that, by becoming fixated on fascism and other instances of democratic self-destruction, we will miss today’s real challenges—the catastrophe of climate change, above all, but also how social-media networks are undermining democracies in subtle yet potentially fatal ways. Democracy, Runciman says, is about keeping the future open and enabling people to change their minds after encountering different views and new information; the Internet giants, by contrast, profit from always giving us more of the same. Combine the power of algorithms with a state committed to all-out surveillance of its citizens and you get contemporary China, an authoritarian model that Runciman regards as a serious rival to democracies today.

More here.