Yasmeen Serhan in The Atlantic:

Many Palestinians would disagree on political grounds with my decision to watch Fauda. In fact, some have called for a boycott of the show. “It is an anti-Arab, racist, Israeli propaganda tool that glorifies the Israeli military’s war crimes against the Palestinian people,” the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement said of the show in March, adding, “By sanitizing and normalizing these crimes, Fauda is directly complicit in promoting and justifying these grave human rights violations.”

Yet the harsh reality of Israel’s continued military presence in the Palestinian territories isn’t absent from Fauda, despite this and similar criticisms. The show depicts an elderly woman being stopped at one of the many military checkpoints around and within the West Bank, where an armed Israeli soldier rummages through her bags. It also shows Israeli soldiers trashing and seizing property from a Palestinian home during a raid. And one of this season’s main plot arcs concerns a group of young Palestinian terrorists who realize that they’re more likely to gain entry into Israel proper (from which the vast majority of Palestinians are barred, except on certain holidays) if they speak Hebrew and pretend to be religious Jews from one of Israel’s West Bank settlements. These are the daily, almost mundane, images of occupation that linger in the background of Fauda.

More here.

Sheldon Lee Glashow in Inference Review:

This is the third and final essay in a three-part series. Parts one and two told of the development of the physical sciences from ancient times to the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics in the first quarter of the twentieth century. This part begins with the challenges posed by the atomic nucleus. Two forces of nature had been recognized, gravity and electromagnetism, but two more would needed to understand nuclear phenomena: a strong force to bind nucleons into nuclei, and a weak force to explain how they decay.

In this part, I describe the Standard Model of particle physics, which encompasses three of the four forces of nature. Gravity seems to play no role in the subatomic world. The strong force results from a gauge theory based on an unbroken SU(3) symmetry called quantum chromodynamics, the weak and electromagnetic forces from a broken SU(2) × U(1) symmetry. Together they form the Standard Model of particle physics, offering a complete, correct, and consistent description of all known elementary particle phenomena. Its formulation, unlike the theories of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, depended on the work of thousands of physicists and engineers and the generosity of many governments. Triumph though it is, for reasons both experimental and theoretical, the Standard Model is known to be incomplete.

More here.

Reihan Salam in The Atlantic:

In 2000, Congress made the fateful decision to extend “permanent normal trade relations,” or PNTR, to China. As the economists Justin Pierce and Peter Schott have argued, the permanence of PNTR status made an enormous difference: Without PNTR, there was always a danger that China’s favorable access to the U.S. market would be revoked, which in turn deterred U.S. firms from increasing their reliance on Chinese suppliers. With PNTR in hand, the floodgates of investment were opened, and U.S. multinationals worked hand in glove with Beijing to create new China-centric supply chains. The age of “Chimerica” had begun.

PNTR was a euphemism designed to get around the fact that the traditional term for “normal trade relations” was “most-favored-nation” (MFN) tariff status, which basically meant a plain-vanilla relationship. A country could enter into a preferential trade agreement such as NAFTA, the accord between the United States, Mexico, and Canada—say, plain vanilla with chocolate sprinkles on top. But short of that, MFN status meant imports would be treated as favorably as those arriving from “the most favored nation.” Absurd as it might sound, this linguistic convention had meaningful political consequences. To argue that we ought to have normal trade relations with China was one thing. Sure, why not? To make the case that China ought to be treated as our most favored nation was a more vexing PR challenge, not least in the wake of the brutal crackdown that followed the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

More here.

Lionel Shriver in The Spectator:

I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.) ‘This means we want our authors and new colleagues to reflect the UK population taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability.’ The email proudly proclaims that the company has removed ‘the need for a university degree from nearly all our jobs’ — which, if my manuscript were being copy-edited and proof-read by folks whose university-educated predecessors already exhibited horrifyingly weak grammar and punctuation, I would find alarming.

The accompanying questionnaire for PRH authors is by turns fascinating, comical and depressing. Gender and ethnicity questions provide the coy ‘prefer not to say’ option, ensuring that being female or Japanese can remain your deep dark secret. As the old chocolate-or-vanilla sexes have multiplied into Baskin Robbins, responders to ‘How would you define your gender?’ may tick, ‘Prefer to use my own term’.

More here.

Jennine Khalik at ABC News (Australia):

The young men and women blowing clouds of grape and mint-flavoured smoke at a Middle Eastern shisha cafe in Sydney could pass for any group of friends.

They are a cluster of ordinary professionals and students, passing hookah pipes to each other, as they sip coffee, banter and glance at their smartphones.

The circumstances under which they know each other are bittersweet. They are members of an underground network of former Muslims across Australia, caught between secularism and Islam. Some fear persecution if their loss of faith is discovered, some fear for their lives.

Melbourne local Aisha* is one of more than 70 members of the network spread across the country.

Aisha was cut off from her family three years ago when things took a dark turn after she removed her hijab.

“I never actually told my parents I was an ex-Muslim because I was scared of their reaction,” she said.

More here.

Tina Jordan in the New York Times:

The chef, television host and author Anthony Bourdain was found dead on Friday at 61. CNN, the network on which his TV show “Parts Unknown” aired, said that he killed himself in a hotel in France, where he was working on an episode. He left his mark in restaurant kitchens and libraries — both fiction and nonfiction — and redefined the genre of food-tourism shows.

Here is what to read, what to watch and what to listen to by and about Anthony Bourdain.

More here.

Renee Gladman and Edie Fake in Paris Review:

Huw Lemmey in New Humanist:

“It is the unforeseen end
and the nothing before.
I am in everything, and nothing is still
just the port of my dreams.”
………………….. —Juan Ramón Jiménez

Gilgamesh – Tablet IX

……………………….. iii

“Who is it comes here? Why have you journeyed
through fearful wilderness making your way though dangers

To come to the mountain no mortal has ever come to?”
Gilgamesh answered, his body seized in terror:

“I come to seek the answer to the question
that I must ask concerning life and death.

This is the way Gilgamesh must go,
weeping and fearful, struggling to keep breathing,

whether in heat or cold, companionless.
Open the gate to the center of the mountain.”

Then the Male Twin Monster said to Gilgamesh:
“The gate to the entrance of the mountain is open…”

After the Scorpion Dragon Being spoke,
Gilgamesh went to the entrance of the mountain

and entered the darkness alone, without a companion.
By the time he reached the end of the first league

the darkness was total, nothing behind or before.
He made his way, companionless, to the end

of the second league. Utterly lightless, black.
There was nothing behind or before, nothing at all.

Only, the blackness pressed upon his body.
He felt his blind way through the mountain tunnel,

struggling for breath, through the third league, alone,
and companionless through the fourth, making his way,

and struggling for every breath, to the end of the fifth,
in the absolute dark, nothing behind or before,

the weight of the blackness pressing in upon him.
Weeping and fearful he journeyed a sixth league,

Read more »

Wesley Yang in Tablet:

It is easy to make anyone look moronic or sinister when you control the means of their representation. It is trivially easy to hang someone by their own words when you control where the sentences begin and end. You decide whether to seek clarification if someone speaks in an ambiguous or ungainly manner. You decide whether to print or broadcast the clarification. You place the words into a sequence that confers meaning onto them, or strips them of their intended meanings. You can use free indirect discourse to inject your own construction of your subject’s ideas in a way that preserves or alters their meaning.

All this came to mind as I read a profile published in the New York Times Style section of the University of Toronto psychology professor turned YouTube celebrity Jordan Peterson, and the thunderstorms of tweets that it engendered.

Peterson is by temperament exactly the sort of person born to be a target for digi-journalists and social-media mobs. He has an absolutist commitment to speaking his own truth at all times regardless of the consequences. He has opinions that cut against the grain of some of our most ferociously policed orthodoxies. He often speaks in a rather involuted private jargon with little concern for general intelligibility, and lacks awareness of how he comes across. There is something laughably sophomoric about the unbounded scope of his 19th-century intellectual ambition. He speaks to journalists, even those who plainly have it in for him, in exactly the same forthright manner as he does anyone else—as if he is free to indulge any thought experiment or rhetorical gambit he likes with a willing and sympathetic interlocutor in pursuit of the truth. He has behaved abominably at times and refuses contrition or regret on principle. He is stubborn as hell.

More here.

Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Start with Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, and a robot that loves you no matter what. Add a knighted British physicist, a renowned French neuroscientist, and a prominent Australian philosopher/occasional blues singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists, mathematicians, anesthesiologists, artists, meditators, a computer programmer or two, and several busloads of amateur theorists waving self-published manuscripts and touting grand unified solutions. Send them all to a swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them with lots of free coffee and beer, and ask them to unpack a riddle so confounding that it’s unclear how to make progress or where you’d even begin.

Then just, like, see what happens.

The cover of the program for the Science of Consciousness conference, held recently in Tucson, shows a human brain getting sucked into (or perhaps rising from?) a black hole. That seems about right: After a week of listening to eye-crossingly detailed descriptions of teeny-tiny cell structures known as microtubules, along with a lecture about building a soundproof booth in order to chat with the whispery spirit world, you too would feel as if your neurons had been siphoned from your skull and launched deep into space.

More here.

Andrew Jordan in Inference Review:

Peter Woit is a senior lecturer in the department of mathematics at Columbia University. Educated at Harvard and at Princeton, Woit is known for his book Not Even Wrong, and for his blog of the same name.¹ Quantum Theory, Groups and Representations is based on a series of lectures that he gave at Columbia University.

And it is excellent.

An introduction to quantum mechanics very often follows a well-worn path. Wave functions are defined on a Hilbert space. Observables are represented as operators acting on quantum states. The evolution of a system is specified by Schrödinger’s equation. Analytic functions, Fourier transforms, eigenvalues, and matrices all play their accustomed roles. Matrices are particularly useful in quantum mechanics because, unlike the numbers, they do not necessarily commute under multiplication.

Is there a deeper structure beneath the quantum formalism? Yes, of course there is. It is a structure that appears when the symmetries of a quantum system are under analysis. In 1915, Emmy Noether demonstrated that differentiable symmetries give rise to conservation laws. Her work is a foundational document in quantum theory because it verifies the ancient insight that what is most important in any physical system is what remains the same in the system as the system is changing.

More here.

Ken Roth in the Washington Post:

As the World Cup begins next week in Russia, 2.3 million civilians in Syria’s Idlib province are facing an endgame of their own. The two events are linked because the Russian government could play a central role in avoiding mass atrocities in Syria but so far has played the role of accomplice.

World leaders should avoid the spectacle of celebrating the World Cup’s opening alongside the Kremlin leadership unless it stops the slaughter of civilians in Syria. The opening ceremony will be marked with pomp and fireworks on June 14.

The Syrian conflict has been characterized by the government’s deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian institutions such as hospitals and schools in areas controlled by anti-government forces, and its indiscriminate bombing of civilian neighborhoods in those areas, in flagrant violation of the laws governing armed conflict. This war-crime strategy is a major reason that the conflict has killed almost half a million people and has displaced some 60 percent of Syria’s prewar population, roughly half within the country and half as refugees.

More here.

Eric Betz in Discover:

Tom Bissell in The New York Times:

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

by James Wright
from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose
Wesleyan University Press, 1990

Kim Severson, Matthew Haag and Alissa J. Rubin in the New York Times:

Anthony Bourdain, whose madcap memoir about the dark corners of New York’s restaurants made him into a celebrity chef and touched off a nearly two-decade career as a globe-trotting television host, was found dead in his hotel room in France on Friday. He was 61.

Mr. Bourdain spent two decades in restaurant kitchens, at first shucking oysters and cleaning dishes in a Cape Cod seafood shack and later serving high-end meals in Manhattan, before accepting a friend’s offer to fly him to Mexico if he agreed to write a novel. It was the start of a second act as an author and then a host, redefining the staid genres of food writing and food-tourism shows with an inquisitive but rebellious image that endeared him to fellow chefs, restaurant-goers and travelers.

Christian de Rocquigny du Fayel, the prosecutor for the city of Colmar, in the Alsace region near where Mr. Bourdain was found, said the cause of death was hanging. “At this stage, we have no reason to suspect foul play,” he said.

More here.