Jessica Abrahams in Prospect Magazine:

We know there are fewer women in positions of power—in politics, the judiciary, business—than men. We know that women are less likely to speak up, and that when they do they are less likely to be listened to. What Mary Beard reveals so eloquently in less than 100 pages is the ancient foundations of these conditions—how so much of the way that women are treated now can be found reflected in classical stories. A Roman anthologist of the first century AD describes women’s speech as “barking” and “yapping”; compare that to Henry James, who wrote that women would turn language into “the moo of the cow… and the bark of the dog.” And to how we talk of women’s speech today: that they “whine” and “natter” and “nag.” Women have been told for millennia that their words are mere noise. As we grapple with an environment that has kept women silent about sexual abuse in our own society, a painful few paragraphs remind us of the story of Philomela in the Metamorphoses, whose rapist cuts out her tongue to prevent her from denouncing him. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus the raped Lavinia has both her tongue and her hands cut off to prevent her communicating at all.

It is striking how many contemporary parallels spring to mind. The exclusion of women from power is no coincidence—we have a “cultural template” for power, as Beard calls it, that is resolutely male. “You can’t easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male,” she writes. “You have to change the structure.” There are moments when the unconverted will remain unconvinced. Some might think she overstates the case. But Beard is right when she says that we must “try to bring to the surface the kinds of questions we tend to shelve” about whose voices we value, and why. For those who wish to consider those questions, Women & Power might be a good place to start.

More here.

Carlos Eire in The New York Times:

Eric Metaxas is exceedingly bold, for writing a biography of Martin Luther has always been a great challenge. To begin with, becoming a Luther expert requires a lot of reading. Jaroslav Pelikan, the eminent church historian who served as an editor of the American edition of Luther’s Works, often warned his students that more books had been written on Luther than on any other figure in Christian history, save for Jesus Christ. Add to this colossal bibliography the scores of huge tomes filled with Luther’s own writings in German and Latin, and the effort required for summing up his life and work will seem even more daunting.

But writing a Luther biography in 2017 is a special challenge, perhaps among the greatest any author can face, at least with regard to the competition from other authors. This is the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Reformation, so whether one likes it or not, we are all living through the “Year of Luther,” or Lutherjahr, as it has been called in his native land; publishers in Europe and North America are marking the occasion by flooding the world with Luther biographies. In the first 10 months of this year, over a dozen English-language biographies have appeared, including one in comic book form and one aimed at children. And all of these follow on the heels of at least another half-dozen magisterial biographies published in the past two decades, including Martin Brecht’s exhaustive three-volume masterpiece, “Martin Luther,” which Metaxas praises as “unsurpassable.” Needless to say, such excess could easily stun any reader, cause an outbreak of fatigue — Lutherjahrmüdigkeit as Germans might say — or scare away all would-be Luther biographers for years to come.

Most new Luther biographies are by historians who are Reformation specialists and, as one might expect, they have been aimed at an academic audience, even when written for trade publishers rather than university presses. Whatever fresh insights these biographies can claim rest more on interpretation than on the discovery of new facts.

More here.

Jackson Lears in the London Review of Books:

American politics have rarely presented a more disheartening spectacle. The repellent and dangerous antics of Donald Trump are troubling enough, but so is the Democratic Party leadership’s failure to take in the significance of the 2016 election campaign. Bernie Sanders’s challenge to Hillary Clinton, combined with Trump’s triumph, revealed the breadth of popular anger at politics as usual – the blend of neoliberal domestic policy and interventionist foreign policy that constitutes consensus in Washington. Neoliberals celebrate market utility as the sole criterion of worth; interventionists exalt military adventure abroad as a means of fighting evil in order to secure global progress. Both agendas have proved calamitous for most Americans. Many registered their disaffection in 2016. Sanders is a social democrat and Trump a demagogic mountebank, but their campaigns underscored a widespread repudiation of the Washington consensus. For about a week after the election, pundits discussed the possibility of a more capacious Democratic strategy. It appeared that the party might learn something from Clinton’s defeat. Then everything changed.

A story that had circulated during the campaign without much effect resurfaced: it involved the charge that Russian operatives had hacked into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing emails that damaged Clinton’s chances. With stunning speed, a new centrist-liberal orthodoxy came into being, enveloping the major media and the bipartisan Washington establishment. This secular religion has attracted hordes of converts in the first year of the Trump presidency. In its capacity to exclude dissent, it is like no other formation of mass opinion in my adult life, though it recalls a few dim childhood memories of anti-communist hysteria during the early 1950s.

The centrepiece of the faith, based on the hacking charge, is the belief that Vladimir Putin orchestrated an attack on American democracy by ordering his minions to interfere in the election on behalf of Trump. The story became gospel with breathtaking suddenness and completeness. Doubters are perceived as heretics and as apologists for Trump and Putin, the evil twins and co-conspirators behind this attack on American democracy.

More here. [Thanks to Daniel Dennett.]

Haidt takes the stage at the 12:40 mark.

Brian B. Dille at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Getting clean through AA marks the dividing line in Denis’s life. In his 2000 Paris Review essay “Hippies,” he describes his youth as a “criminal hedonist” followed by growth into “a citizen of life with a belief in eternity.” AA meetings provide ritual, prayer, and fellowship that includes the sharing of struggles, confession, and accountability. Denis, who regularly attended meetings as long as I knew him, told me that he hated small talk and that AA meetings spoiled him in this regard — people there only talked about real, personal issues.

He also read Alcoholics Anonymous, the program’s so-called “Big Book,” throughout his sober life. In it, alcoholics working the steps are encouraged to use whichever religious tradition, if any, works for them — “We think it no concern of ours what religious bodies our members identify themselves with as individuals” — while the foreword to the Second Edition (1955) claims that AA includes “Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus, and a sprinkling of Muslims and Buddhists.”

I believe this perspective colored Denis’s thinking on religion. The last time I visited him, in 2015, something I said reminded him of an Emo Philips comedy bit that illustrates the absurdity of denominational hair-splitting, and he pulled it up on YouTube to share it with me.

more here.

Damion Searls at Lapham's Quarterly:

Jung’s proposal was a radical reorientation of human knowledge—in a commonly used intellectual metaphor, it was a kind of Copernican revolution. More than a century earlier, Immanuel Kant had made a similar move in philosophy, arguing that there was no stable center, that reality could not be perfectly, purely known; instead, what was knowable had to conform to our human ways of knowing. And in 1917, Freud described his own theories as a comparably dramatic shift, arguing in the eighteenth of his series of introductory lectures on psychoanalysis that his ideas offered a “great outrage against naive self-love”—the third one that humanity had been forced to undergo, after Copernicus’ discovery that our earth is not the center of the universe and Darwin’s finding that man is merely an evolved animal. This third and “most irritating insult flung at human megalomania” was, in Freud’s famous phrase, that the self is “not even master in his own home” but instead ruled by unconscious desires and forces. Jung, in a kind of combination of Kant and Freud, was proposing his own Copernican reorientation.

Jung continued to develop his ideas and in 1921 published Psychological Types, in which he proclaimed that every worldview “depends on a personal psychological premise.”

more here.

Laura Kipnis at Bookforum:

I’d long had it in the back of my mind to write something about Clancy Sigal, which according to my notes I’d provisionally titled “The Man Who Fascinated Women (Writers).” Whatever it is in me that’s drawn to wounded men—and Clancy was a great one of the species—I suspect the fact that Doris Lessing got to this one first, branding him as her property, was no small part of the allure. Clancy and I spoke once on the phone, mostly about his thing with Lessing, but I never followed through. I guess he gave up waiting, since he went ahead and died in July, at age ninety. I don’t think he’d mind some irreverence about his departure.

Our acquaintance, such as it was, started in a peculiar way. A decade or so ago I was asked to participate in the test-drive of a software platform, funded by a big foundation, designed to revolutionize the concept of the book group. A bunch of other women writers and I were supposed to read Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which had been scanned into this software, and type our comments in the margins of the book; then the reading public would join in, blogging about our comments, all of which would effectively transform TGN into an exciting interactive text. I think the master plan was that virtual book-reading collectives would soon erupt worldwide and literacy would flourish, though for reasons I never learned, none of this got past the beta stage.

more here.

Lydia Denworth in Scientific American:

Joshua Sokol in Quanta:

When Corina Tarnita was a budding mathematician, she found her interest in mathematics flickering, about to burn out. As a girl she had stormed through Romania’s National Mathematical Olympiad — where she won a three-peat from 1999 to 2001 — then on to Harvard University as an undergraduate and straight into its graduate school to study questions in pure mathematics.

Then suddenly, around a decade ago, it wasn’t so fun anymore. “I would still get a kick out of solving a problem,” she said. “The question is whether it was just kind of an ego kick.”

Facing a crisis of faith, Tarnita felt her future narrow to just a few paths. She had been offered a cushy “quant” job working for a bank. She could take time off. And then she found in the library an intriguing book with a colorful cover called Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life. The book’s author, the mathematical biologist Martin Nowak, was, conveniently, also at Harvard. The same week she had to decide on the job, she sent him an email asking to meet.

The meeting changed her life. Tarnita turned down the job and finished her doctorate with Nowak. (She completed her Ph.D. just a year after earning her master’s degree.) She began a project with him and the legendary biologist Edward O. Wilson that led to a 2010 Nature paper on the evolution of cooperative insects like ants and termites. Since 2013, she has continued to study biology using mathematical tools as a member of the faculty at Princeton University.

Since switching fields, Tarnita has focused her work on how living things orchestrate themselves itself into patterns on different scales.

More here.

Zaheer Kazmi in Aeon:

We live in a liberal world. In some senses, liberalism enjoys a global victory. Even its opponents often make their case based on essentially liberal ideals of a society built on political liberties or free trade to best maximise individual freedom. In the vital details, liberalism comes in many guises. As the grounds for revolution or a midwife to empire, over the past two centuries it has shaped how we see ourselves and the world.

While Europe’s empires may have worn liberalism like a badge of civilisation, liberal values were often taken up more vigorously in the lands they colonised, including in the Muslim world. Debates about ‘liberal Islam’ are almost as old as the ideology of liberalism itself. From the Aligarh movement in 19th-century British India to the al-Nahda, or renaissance, in the Arab world, Muslims have sought to synthesise Islam and liberalism to advance Islam’s civilisational progress.

The ‘Christian’ West might have established liberal societies, but it has struggled to produce liberal citizens. The resurgent fascistic movements in Europe and North America today seeking to restrict the freedoms of others are distinctly Christian and Western identity movements. On the other hand – and for largely historical rather than metaphysical reasons – Muslims have struggled to establish liberal states. Yet, by and large, within the liberal societies of the West, Muslims have been exemplary citizens, claiming their rights and pursuing their interests rather than focusing on persecuting others. Why then can the projects of Muslim liberals – who see liberalism in Islam – seem so quixotic?

More here.

Samira Shackle in New Humanist:

John Jeremiah Sullivan at The Oxford American:

In the African-influenced musics of Latin America one often hears a uniquely electrifying percussion instrument known as la quijada, the jawbone. Actually it goes by multiple names in several different Spanish-speaking countries, but quijada is the closest thing to standard nomenclature. The word, in a musical context, refers to the lower jawbone of an ass or, less commonly, a horse. When the animal dies, the instrument makers cut off the head and boil it, until all of the flesh is gone, then detach the jawbone, leaving the teeth intact. Or in certain places they bury the head first. This is thought to harden the bone somehow. Most often the whole lower bone of the animal’s jaw is used, such that the instrument is shaped like a giant wishbone. Other times the jawbone is (again, wishbone like) snapped in half, so that each side becomes a functional drumstick, and these sticks are then used to bang on another percussion instrument, of whatever kind. But a traditional quijada typically involves the whole jawbone.

There is a technical term for the kind of instrument it is, a wonderful word: idiophone. An idiophone is something that you hit to make a distinctive sound. That’s all there is to it. No strings, no flute-holes, just an object that you strike. A triangle would be the most obvious example. The root “idio” here means singularity or itself-ness or sole, as in, “alone.” Think idiosyncratic—not in sync with others, obeying its own rhythm. Or idiom—an expression that makes sense only in the language to which it belongs. Or idiot—one who can’t participate in the conversation.

more here.

Enal Hindi at Harper's Magazine:

My father was a dark, skinny man. In the winter, when he would walk through the doors after work, his big nose was always red and watery. He was a country boy, born in Al-Jadeera, a small village near Jerusalem in Palestine. When he was, twenty-six years old, he left his family and his land full of rich olive and fig trees to come to America for job opportunities. When my siblings and I were young, growing up in Chicago, my father used to tell us he had planted pomegranate and citrus trees back in Palestine for us to enjoy anytime we decided to visit. The fig trees were for my mom—her favorite fruit. My father loved his figs and pomegranates. He told us his favorite part was picking them off of a tree he planted in his parents’ garden. When I started sixth grade, we moved back to Palestine. My father enrolled us in the village school. We couldn’t afford the private school in the city that tailored to English speaking students, educated in the United States. My father walked into the principal’s office and explained why holding us back a grade level would be extremely detrimental to our education. “They will try to keep up in Arabic with the rest of the kids. If they don’t by the end of the semester, we can talk. But they are smart girls; I know they will keep up.” My father knew the significance of keeping us in our grade level, even if all the classes in the village school were taught in Arabic. Thanks to him, we transitioned into our appropriate grade levels, and never missed a grade. He spent many hours helping us with our homework, translating from Arabic to English and vice versa. He assigned extra readings and asked us to transcribe long stories in Arabic to improve our grammar and writing.

more here.

Declan Ryan at the TLS:

On Christmas Day the musician Shane MacGowan will turn sixty, an apparently unlikely outcome for someone as committed to vices liquid and miscellaneous. The young MacGowan, with his unkempt quiff, pronounced ears and mouth like a derelict building, seemed to be operating from within his own personal lock-in; fixed with a snarl and an implication of random violence, he emerged as a kind of Tom Waits of the Kilburn High Road. To think of him as only a boozer or iconoclast, however, is to miss much of his appeal and achievement. The depth and nuance of his talent developed over the course of three remarkable records in the mid 1980s, albums which made it clear that the man whose eye you’d avoid on the night bus was steadily producing a body of rich, sophisticated songs, with lyrics indebted to seventeenth-century poets and referencing Irish historical figures as diverse as Charles Stewart Parnell and John McCormack.

As the frontman of The Pogues, a band of gifted musicians, MacGowan dragged Irish music into the mainstream. He arranged traditional songs as well as composing his own, his melodies and lyrics built on the staples of old emigrant laments and the energies of fireside cèilidh sessions; mournful songs of exile and loss, superstitions and hauntings, bawdy drinking songs. The Pogues’ hardy perennial Christmas hit, “A Fairytale of New York”, is the best known of MacGowan’s originals but by no means his only, or even his most accomplished, ballad.

more here.

John Bragh in The Guardian:

To what extent are our conscious intentions and strategies in control of our choices and decisions, our feelings and actions? The 20th century provided three different answers to this basic existential question: Freud’s psychodynamic theory placed a hidden and self-destructive unconscious mind in charge; Skinner and the behaviourists put control instead with the outside stimulus environment. Finally, cognitive science threw out the behaviourists and reinstated the conscious mind at the helm. When I started out in the 70s, these three camps were arguing but with hardly any actual evidence, so I began to study these issues scientifically. Before You Know It is the culmination of more than three decades of such research, from labs around the world, on the variety of unconscious influences in everyday life. These 10 books were my signposts along the way.

From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing by Adam Crabtree (1993)
It all starts with Freud, right? Except it didn’t. Here, Crabtree details the 120 years of psychologically based treatments of physical ailments that occurred before Freud, starting with Mesmer’s “magnetic healing” and leading eventually to the “talking cure” of Freud and Pierre Janet. This historical context shows that Freud’s work was the culmination of such efforts, rather than their starting point. Even in the late 19th century, many people believed that mental illness was caused by evil demons. Freud turned this supernatural explanation into a natural one by locating this “demon” inside the patient’s body as a separate “unconscious mind”.

2. Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner (1971)
The book that got me started in psychology, a bestseller when I was taking a high-school psychology class. Skinner’s last-gasp appeal to the general public, following the “cognitive revolution” in psychology of the 60s, arguing that we had no actual freedom of will, that our conscious thoughts were not causal at all. But we so wanted to believe otherwise that we persisted in the illusion. However, Skinner was not entirely wrong. Subsequent research (on humans) showed that events in the outside world can indeed affect us directly and unconsciously – but only through activating internal cognitive mechanisms that he had long insisted were irrelevant.

More here.