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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Sune Engel Rasmussen in The Guardian:

Mohsin Hamid is depressed. The novelist, twice nominated for the Man Booker prize, has seen the three places he calls home – Pakistan, America and Europe – betray their fundamental ideals and become increasingly unwelcoming.

In Pakistan, where he was born, the elected government caved in to a mob of extremist protesters by sacking a minister they accused, essentially, of being a bad Muslim. In a country created as a homeland for south Asia’s Muslims, the fight over who fits that bill means hardly anyone is safe from unfounded accusations of blasphemy. Students have been lynched arbitrarily and, in 2011, the governor, Salman Taseer, was shot for criticising the blasphemy laws. To Hamid, the stunning capitulation to the mob signals the breakdown of an uneasy coexistence between the government, the military and the courts, allowing “raw power” to rule.

“These are incredibly disheartening times. I feel more depressed than I have in a long time about the political direction of Pakistan,” says Hamid at his home in Lahore, where he now lives with his wife and two children. “Since Pakistan was founded in 1947, there has been a conflict between the notion that citizens are equal, and that certain people can ascribe to themselves the right to decide who is Muslim,” he says. “The question is: who is Muslim enough? And 70 years after creation, the answer is that nobody is Muslim enough.”

But Pakistan is not alone in narrowing definitions of who belongs. Hamid thinks western countries that tout principles of equality fail one group in particular: migrants.

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Greg Waldmann at Open Letters Monthly:

Anthony Burgess probably knew more about music than any literary man since George Bernard Shaw. His life was marinated in sound, in listening, composing, analyzing, reviewing. Yet music confounded him. “We do not know what it is,” he writes in This Man and Music, ten years before his death in 1993. Where, for instance, do we place it in the continuum of art? Music, like prose, is linear, but unlike words, notes have no referents, no inherent value outside of the sounds they represent. Then why does music mean so much to us? And can there be moral value in that profundity, when Beethoven is esteemed by genocidal nationalists, or adored by a marauding droog in dystopian England?

It was partly an accident of history that Burgess was asking those questions. He was born a modern, in 1917 Manchester in the wake of a century of political and social tumult. The arts had responded, as they usually do. Painting had drifted away from faithful representation and literature was struggling with the relativity of perception. In music the old diatonic harmony of the Classical period, where the main notes were comfortably separated, their relationships clear, gave way to chromaticism, notes that were closely spaced or did not belong to the key of the composition.

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David Bentley Hart at The New Atlantis:

The entire notion of consciousness as an illusion is, of course, rather silly. Dennett has been making the argument for most of his career, and it is just abrasively counterintuitive enough to create the strong suspicion in many that it must be more philosophically cogent than it seems, because surely no one would say such a thing if there were not some subtle and penetrating truth hidden behind its apparent absurdity. But there is none. The simple truth of the matter is that Dennett is a fanatic: He believes so fiercely in the unique authority and absolutely comprehensive competency of the third-person scientific perspective that he is willing to deny not only the analytic authority, but also the actual existence, of the first-person vantage. At the very least, though, he is an intellectually consistent fanatic, inasmuch as he correctly grasps (as many other physical reductionists do not) that consciousness really is irreconcilable with a coherent metaphysical naturalism. Since, however, the position he champions is inherently ridiculous, the only way that he can argue on its behalf is by relentlessly, and in as many ways as possible, changing the subject whenever the obvious objections are raised.

For what it is worth, Dennett often exhibits considerable ingenuity in his evasions — so much ingenuity, in fact, that he sometimes seems to have succeeded in baffling even himself. For instance, at one point in this book he takes up the question of “zombies” — the possibility of apparently perfectly functioning human beings who nevertheless possess no interior affective world at all — but in doing so seems to have entirely forgotten what the whole question of consciousness actually is.

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Robert Kuttner at the NYRB:

The great prophet of how market forces taken to an extreme destroy both democracy and a functioning economy was not Karl Marx but Karl Polanyi. Marx expected the crisis of capitalism to end in universal worker revolt and communism. Polanyi, with nearly a century more history to draw on, appreciated that the greater likelihood was fascism.

As Polanyi demonstrated in his masterwork The Great Transformation (1944), when markets become “dis-embedded” from their societies and create severe social dislocations, people eventually revolt. Polanyi saw the catastrophe of World War I, the interwar period, the Great Depression, fascism, and World War II as the logical culmination of market forces overwhelming society—“the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system” that began in nineteenth-century England. This was a deliberate choice, he insisted, not a reversion to a natural economic state. Market society, Polanyi persuasively demonstrated, could only exist because of deliberate government action defining property rights, terms of labor, trade, and finance. “Laissez faire,” he impishly wrote, “was planned.”

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Mary Wakefield in The Spectator:

Ten years ago, I had a strange debate about faith with a famous Jesuit and an agnostic psychoanalyst in a monastery on a cliff-top in Syria. At the time I thought I’d made some valuable additions to the discussion. The notes I took then record my own contributions with horrible precision. Looking back on it, I was just an observer. The main players were Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian priest who’d made his life in the Middle East, and Bernard S., a highly regarded Jungian analyst: neat, Swiss, troubled. The scene of this chat was Deir Mar Musa, a 6th-century monastery that Fr Paolo had restored, perched high on a ridge in the foothills of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. Mar Musa had been abandoned since the 9th century, but thanks to Paolo’s charm and drive not only was it rebuilt, but there was once again a community living there: young Christians devoted to what they called ‘dialogue’ with Islam. There were also dorm rooms for tourists such as Bernard and me. I’d done Damascus and wanted to feel intrepid. It was morning. The sky was pinkish and the desert below the clifftop, a soft mouse-brown. Fr Paolo was sitting at the communal breakfast table eating bread and yoghurt. ‘Big man. Big head. Grey habit,’ say my notes. I remember wishing there were eggs. Sitting opposite him was Bernard, slightly older, in his early sixties and with the agitated air of a man who’d been carrying a question a long time. He got straight to the point.

‘How can an intelligent man like you, Fr Paolo, believe in the truth of Christianity?’ he asked. ‘I understand its symbolic importance, but I’ve studied the early Church and I know how much Christianity took from Hellenism and the other resurrection myths. So while I believe in the historical Jesus… how do you have actual faith?’ Bernard S. was very distinctive-looking. Great furrows ran from points along his hairline and converged in a crease between his eyes, as if each separate anxiety had marked its own progress across his head. Paolo’s answer was the only answer a believer can really give. You take a leap and the light comes on. Ask and you shall receive. ‘All I know is my own experience,’ he said. ‘I learnt about Jesus Christ, I walked with him and, as I got to know him, I discovered his divinity — and he became the means for me to express my own divinity.’

More here.

From Scientific American:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is typically tasked with conducting critical science, and its myriad jobs include trying to prevent Zika-related birth defects and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among transgender women. But when the CDC makes its case for 2018 budget funds, it should not use seven specific words: evidence-based, science-based, vulnerable, fetus, transgender, diversity or entitlement, according to the Trump administration. The news, broken by The Washington Post, sent tremors through the public health and policy communities. “Are you kidding me?!?!” tweeted Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon. “This. Is. Unacceptable,” wrote the American Public Health Association. The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, did not immediately respond to Scientific American’s request for comment. How much does it really matter if a government agency avoids certain language in documents sent to Congress, the Office of Management and Budget and other agencies? Perhaps a great deal. Scientific American spoke with Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, about the significance of this recent news, why words matter and how language changes our perceptions of the world.

Skye C. Cleary and John Kaag at the IAI website (the article was originally published at The Independent):

The holidays are supposed to be about reconnecting with family, generosity, and celebrating Santa’s birthday. Or Jesus’s. For others, it’s supposed to be about the rededication of, and to, a sacred temple. But it’s not. Instead, it’s a dreidel-spinning, holly-wreathed distraction from the meaninglessness or loneliness of everyday existence. It’s a dreaded chore, filled with stressful shopping, hidden disappointment, and feigned joy. It is the season of vacuous gifts. It is supposed to be a season of amazement, and it is: people who are supposed to know you best turn out to be completely clueless. Or worse – you discover that the gift is the ultimate weapon.

Zombie-like feeding of the consumerist monster is the standard objection to holiday gift-giving. Yet there’s another, darker side to generosity: when it’s used as means of exercising power over another. We are expected to be appreciative of gifts, regardless of whether they’re wanted or thoughtful. A gift from an abusive spouse or parent can be a means of disarming the abused, or manipulating him or her into continued submission. Gift-giving can also easily turn into a competition to see who can give the best or most expensive one.

This latter approach to gift-giving has ancient roots. For example, as Marcel Mauss describes in The Gift, the potlatch is a Northwest Pacific Coast tribal ritual where some clan leaders would give away lavish amounts of merchandise such as clothes, canoes, and weapons in a display of wealth. It was partly about generosity, but often the merchandise was destroyed, making it much more about reinforcing the giver’s status and prestige at the top of the social hierarchy. Beneath the destruction, according to Mauss, was the simple fact that potlatch “gifts” were not gifts at all – they were given by people so powerful, so wealthy, that they could afford to burn their goods. Potlatch – and modern winter holidays – often celebrates this wealth. And that doesn’t seem good at all.

More here.

James Salter in the New York Review of Books:

The promised demonstration for the French took place at a racetrack outside of Le Mans and was flown in a greatly reconstructed airplane, since the one that had been shipped was virtually wrecked in customs at Le Havre. An expectant crowd, mostly local, sat in the grandstand along with many reporters and correspondents. It was August 1908, almost four years and eight months since the historic first flight. At three in the afternoon the gleaming white airplane was rolled out of its shed, and so deliberate were Wilbur’s preparations that it was after six before he quietly announced, “Gentlemen, I’m going to fly.” He was calm and self-confident though he and his brother had been continually regarded as bluffers and frauds. Berg said afterward:

One thing that, to me at least, made his appearance all the more dramatic, was that he was not dressed as if about to do something daring or unusual. He, of course, had no special pilot’s helmet or jacket, since no such garb yet existed, but appeared in the ordinary gray suit he usually wore, and a cap. And he had on, as he nearly always did when not in overalls, a high, starched collar.

He took off to cheers, then turned, and came flying back toward the crowd. He maneuvered gracefully, made several complete circles and ended by landing gently within yards of where he had started. He’d been in the air for a little less than two minutes. The crowd went wild. Louis Blériot, who was a flyer himself and present, was overwhelmed. So was France itself. There was immediate acclaim. Doubt about the Wrights’ achievement vanished; people were aware that another era had begun.

Through the summer and fall Wilbur remained at Le Mans flying and taking passengers up with him, continually drawing crowds that came by car and special train, magnates and kings as well as people from all over Europe.

More here.

Olivia Solon in The Guardian:

The Syrian volunteer rescue workers known as the White Helmets have become the target of an extraordinary disinformation campaign that positions them as an al-Qaida-linked terrorist organisation.

The Guardian has uncovered how this counter-narrative is propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government (which provides military support to the Syrian regime).

The White Helmets, officially known as the Syria Civil Defence, is a humanitarian organisation made up of 3,400 volunteers – former teachers, engineers, tailors and firefighters – who rush to pull people from the rubble when bombs rain down on Syrian civilians. They’ve been credited with saving thousands of civilians during the country’s continuing civil war.

They have also exposed, through first-hand video footage, war crimes including a chemical attack in April. Their work was the subject of an Oscar-winning Netflix documentary and the recipient of two Nobel peace prize nominations.

Despite this positive international recognition, there’s a counter-narrative pushed by a vocal network of individuals who write for alternative news sites countering the “MSM agenda”. Their views align with the positions of Syria and Russia and attract an enormous online audience, amplified by high-profile alt-right personalities, appearances on Russian state TV and an army of Twitter bots.

More here.