Elias Muhanna in The Nation:

The medieval English allegorical poem Piers Plowman described the birth of Islam as the result of a clever hoax. Muhammad, it asserted, was a former Christian who had made a failed attempt to become pope and then set off for Syria to mislead the innocents. He tamed a turtledove and taught it to eat grains of wheat placed in his ear. In a scene reminiscent of the enchantment of Melampus, the Greek oracle who was granted the ability to understand animal speech when his ears were licked by snakes, Piers’s Muhammad mesmerized audiences by having the bird fly down during the course of his preaching and appear to whisper in his ear. Staging a moment of revelation from God, the false prophet led men to misbelief by “wiles of his wit and a whit dowve.”

In the centuries following Muhammad’s death in 632, many Christians like William Langland, the author of Piers Plowman, sought to make sense of Islam in the terms and symbols of their own faith. Was it just another schismatic sect led by a great here­siarch, as Dante portrayed it in his Divine Comedy? Or was it an ancient form of chivalry, a Saracen code of ethics? Did Muhammad’s followers think him a god? The figure of the prophet-as-trickster found in Piers Plowman was not the most outlandish attempt to explain the origins of Islam. Medieval French chansons de gestes attributed a welter of fantastical qualities to the cult of “Mahom,” including a pantheon of minor deities superimposed from Roman mythology.

More here. [Thanks to Zain Alam.]

re÷belief from Raymond McCarthy Bergeron on Vimeo.

Jonathan White reviews Jürgen Habermas's The Lure of Technocracy, in The Boston Review:

Like any critique of today’s EU, The Lure of Technocracy must be understood in the context of the political handling of the “Euro crisis.” As the global crisis of private debt was transformed in Europe into a question of public debt, and as concerns regarding the finances of particular countries provoked wider uncertainty about the Eurozone as a whole, EU officials implemented a series of emergency measures to restore order. These ranged from short-term bids to ensure the solvency of individual states (principally through credit facilities and cross-border loans) to deeper efforts to reshape national economies and reduce budget deficits. The latest round of this ongoing crisis management resulted in last summer’s clash between a government opposed to the austerity program (led by Syriza in Greece) and an array of institutions determined to impose it (led by the German government).

In these scenes of institutional redesign, Habermas discerns the “self-empowerment of the European executive.” There is no single institution that goes by this name. Among those Habermas denotes are the European Council, where the leaders of EU member-states gather for major decisions, and the non-elected institutions of the European Commission and Central Bank. Sometimes in concert with the International Monetary Fund, these institutions have enjoyed a level of influence over the handling of the Euro crisis unmatched by national legislatures and the European Parliament. Furthermore, by instituting new monitoring regimes to constrain national budgets—ostensibly rule-based but with much room for discretion—they have ensured the longevity of crisis powers beyond the horizon of the financial crisis.

Technocracy was also a theme of Habermas’s writing in the 1960s and ’70s, but it was a rather different beast then. In that period the ideology of expertise was concertedly in the service of a managed economy: it was a technocracy of the center-left, at least by today’s standards. Its critics, including Habermas and the student protest movement to which he responded, targeted paternalism, hierarchy, and large-scale bureaucracy; the principle of a planned economy was not in question. By contrast, technocracy today must be seen in the service of monetary economics. Its interventions are cast as exceptional actions to address unforeseeable contingencies, not as the normal business of government, and are geared to market stability and a privatized economy rather than the improvement of society more broadly. Today’s critique of technocracy, in short, is a critique of the New Right rather than the Old Left.

More here.

Seymour M. Hersh makes a controversial claim in the LRB:

A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria. The new intelligence estimate singled out Turkey as a major impediment to Obama’s Syria policy. The document showed, the adviser said, ‘that what was started as a covert US programme to arm and support the moderate rebels fighting Assad had been co-opted by Turkey, and had morphed into an across-the-board technical, arms and logistical programme for all of the opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. The so-called moderates had evaporated and the Free Syrian Army was a rump group stationed at an airbase in Turkey.’ The assessment was bleak: there was no viable ‘moderate’ opposition to Assad, and the US was arming extremists.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

‘Our policy of arming the opposition to Assad was unsuccessful and actually having a negative impact,’ the former JCS adviser said. ‘The Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists. So who was going to replace him? To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State.

Germany, Israel and Russia were in contact with the Syrian army, and able to exercise some influence over Assad’s decisions – it was through them that US intelligence would be shared.

More here.

Jacqueline Bhabha in Harvard Magazine:

The jubilation that accompanied the brief flowering of the Arab Spring is long gone as its deadly aftermath—in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere—spirals into transcontinental turmoil. We face the prospect of a grim winter. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people in flight from those indiscriminate civil wars (not to mention the chaos in Iraq and Yemen, the turmoil in parts of Africa, and the ethnic oppression in Myanmar) face arduous hurdles in search of safety and security in Europe and elsewhere, while potential hosts negotiate rising xenophobia (intensified by the November attacks in Paris) and increasing desperation in the face of apparently unending need caused by the continuing migrant arrivals. What alternatives exist? How can this apparent impasse be better tackled? And how should we think about the recurring migration and refugee “crises” that present themselves with almost predictable regularity on every continent? We need a new paradigm for thinking about twenty-first-century “distress migration,” because the post-World War II framework that still governs our laws and procedures is, in practice, defunct.

The Syrian Catastrophe

There is no question about the gravity of the need. The plight of Syrians is most acute. The vast majority of that country’s population (recently estimated at more than 16 million people) are trapped in situations of deadly conflict: flattened cities, escalating civilian casualties (more than 340,000 as of early November, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights), and the disintegration of quotidian life. A substantial minority, more than four million Syrians, eke out lives of “temporary permanence” in underfunded, overcrowded, and increasingly squalid places of refuge in neighboring states, in and outside of actual refugee camps. The prospects of a speedy return home are nil—yet humanitarian interventions are predicated on that assumption, as evidenced by temporary shelter arrangements and makeshift medical care.

More here.

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature:

Is string theory science? Physicists and cosmologists have been debating the question for the past decade. Now the community is looking to philosophy for help. Earlier this month, some of the feuding physicists met with philosophers of science at an unusual workshop aimed at addressing the accusation that branches of theoretical physics have become detached from the realities of experimental science. At stake is the integrity of the scientific method, as well as the reputation of science among the general public, say the workshop’s organizers. Held at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany on 7–9 December, the workshop came about as a result of an article in Nature a year ago, in which cosmologist George Ellis, of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and astronomer Joseph Silk, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, lamented a “worrying turn” in theoretical physics (G. Ellis and J. Silk Nature 516, 321–323; 2014). “Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe,” they wrote, some scientists argue that “if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally”.

First among the topics discussed was testability. For a scientific theory to be considered valid, scientists often require that there be an experiment that could, in principle, rule the theory out — or ‘falsify’ it, as the philosopher of science Karl Popper put it in the 1930s. In their article, Ellis and Silk pointed out that in certain areas, some theoretical physicists had strayed from this guiding principle — even arguing for it to be relaxed. The duo cited string theory as the principal example. The theory replaces elementary particles with infinitesimally thin strings to reconcile the apparently incompatible theories that describe gravity and the quantum world. The strings are too tiny to detect using today’s technology — but some argue that string theory is worth pursuing whether or not experiments will ever be able to measure its effects, simply because it seems to be the ‘right’ solution to many quandaries.

More here.

The Dog Was Crying To-night Night in Wicklow Also

In memory of Donatus Nwoga

When human beings found out about death
They sent the dog to Chuckwu with a message:
They wanted to be let back to the house of life.
They didn’t want to end up lost forever
like burnt wood disappearing into smoke
Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.
Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight
Cawing and headed back for the same old roots
And the same bright airs and wing-stretching each morning
Death would be like a night spent in the wood:
At first light they’d be back in the house of life.
(The dog meant to tell all this to Chuckwu.)

But death and human beings took second place
When he trotted off the path and started barking
At another dog in broad daylight just barking
Back at him from the far bank of a river.

And that is how the toad reached Chuckwu first,
The toad who’d overheard in the beginning
What the dog meant to tell. “Human beings, he said
(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),
“Human beings want death to last forever.”

Then Chuckwu saw the people’s souls in birds
Coming toward him like black spots off the sunset
To a place where there would be neither roots nor trees
Nor any way back to the house of life.
And his mind reddened and darkened all at once
And nothing that the dog would tell him later
Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves
In obliterated light, the toad in mud,
The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.
.

By Seamus Heaney

Huw Price in Aeon:

A few years ago, a physicist friend of mine made a joke on Facebook about the laws of physics being broken in Italy. He had two pieces of news in mind. One was a claim by a team at the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) in Gran Sasso, who said they’d discovered superluminal neutrinos. The other concerned Andrea Rossi, an engineer from Bologna, who claimed to have a cold fusion reactor producing commercially useful amounts of heat.

Why were these claims so improbable? The neutrinos challenged a fundamental principle of Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which says that nothing can travel faster than light. Meanwhile cold fusion (or LENR, for ‘low-energy nuclear reaction’) is the controversial idea that nuclear reactions similar to those in the Sun could, under certain conditions, also occur close to room temperature.

The latter was popularised in 1989 by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, who claimed to have found evidence that such processes could take place in palladium loaded with deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen). A few other physicists, including the late Sergio Focardi at Bologna, claimed similar effects with nickel and ordinary hydrogen. But most were highly skeptical, and the field subsequently gained, as Wikipedia puts it, ‘a reputation as pathological science’.

It turned out that my physicist friend and I disagreed about which of these unlikely claims was most credible. He thought it was the neutrinos, because the work had been done by respectable scientists rather than a lone engineer with a somewhat chequered past. I favoured Rossi, on grounds of the physics. Superluminal neutrinos would overturn a fundamental tenet of relativity, but all Rossi needed was a previously unnoticed channel to a reservoir of energy whose existence is not in doubt.

More here.

Jane Shmidt in Open Letters Monthly:

Earlier this year, a potentially fictitious, albeit tremendously entertaining, story was reported by Yahoo news about an Algerian man who sued his bride after seeing her without makeup for the first time on the morning after the wedding. The man claimed that he was deceived, unable to recognize her as the same woman he married. Beyond its evident humor, this story is a thinly veiled criticism of the application of makeup, suggesting that women treat their body as an object in a sale with marriage as the ultimate goal, and that they use makeup as a tool to mislead and capture a mate, to beguile the male gaze.

Bitter animosity toward women’s use of cosmetics is nothing new. In her book on makeup practices and production, Face Paint: The Story of Makeup, Lisa Eldridge – a renowned professional makeup artist – charts out the history of the debate on the value of applying color to the body. She finds that makeup has been considered a form of artifice, or even indecency, for a large portion of history from ancient Greece through the present, while, on the other side of the spectrum, some contemporary feminists have denounced makeup as an instrument of oppression that forces women to conform to an ideal.

More here.

Gretchen McCulloch in Quartz:

You’ve probably come across the singular pronoun “they” recently. Perhaps it was in the Washington Post’s recent addition of it to the paper’s style guide. Perhaps it was in this BBC article about gender-neutral pronouns. Perhaps it was in this viral Tumblr post comparing singular “they” to singular “you.” Wherever the source, singular “they” has become more popular in 2015 than ever before–so popular, in fact, that it’s Quartz’s (unofficial) nomination for Word of the Year.

Let’s clear something up right away. Using “they” to refer to a single person isn’t new, but words of the year rarely are. Rather, this usage has been simmering for many years, finally bursting onto the scene this year with a newfound prominence. And just in time, too. Language can and should keep up with cultural shifts, including developments in society’s understanding of gender. While some holdout grammarians and copy editors might squirm, it’s become increasingly clear that our current pronoun palette simply isn’t sufficient. Luckily, we already have a perfectly good word at the ready.

More here.

More here.

As Kerala was ushered into the modern era, closer to democracy and republicanism, the women of Travancore came to occupy a central role in its fortunes. In this excerpt from the book, Pillai delves into the history of Kerala’s unusual history of matriliny.

Manu Pillai in The Caravan:

Some anthropologists regard Kerala’s system of matrilineal kinship as the continuation of a practice that at one time existed all over the world, while others contend that it was conceived due to some mysterious, compelling circumstances that replaced patriarchy at a historical point. There are, however, two views on this that have been passed down within the region. One is mythological and based on a Malayalam treatise called Keralolpathi, as well as and a Sanskrit work called the Kerala Mahatmyam. These refer to the creation of Kerala by the legendary hero Parasurama, who is supposed to have hurled his battle-axe from Gokarna to Cape Comorin and claimed from the sea all the land in between. He is then said to have awarded this new region (conveniently) to Brahmins, after which he summoned (equally conveniently) deva (divine), gandharva (celestial minstrel), and rakshasa (demon) women for the pleasure of these men. The Nairs, the principal matrilineal caste, were the descendants of these nymphs and their Brahmin overlords, tracing their lineages in the maternal line. This version was dismissed quite appropriately by William Logan in his Malabar Manual as “a farrago of legendary nonsense.”

The other theory relates to the ancient martial tradition of the Nairs. Boys were sent off to train in military gymnasiums from the age of eight, and their sole occupation thereafter was to master the art of warfare. For them death by any other means than at the end of a sword on the battlefield was a mortifying ignominy and in their constant zeal for military excellence and glorious bloodshed, they had no time to husband women or economic resources. So a man would never “marry” a woman, as in other parts of India, and start a family with their children. Instead he would visit a lady in her natal home every now and then, solely for sexual purposes, and the offspring would be her responsibility entirely. Matriliny was, as per this theory, consequent upon the men purely being instruments of war rather than householders. So the onus of family and succession was taken care of by women, who formed large establishments and managed their affairs independently in the absence of men. While the military tradition of the Nairs, famous for its suicide bands called chavers, was well known, this theory is also more circumstantial than absolute.

More here.

Beverly S. Stohl in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The first time I didn’t meet Noam Chomsky was in 1992, when a TV news channel asked him to interview me about my ability to talk backward fluently. He said no. I’d like to believe he was actually away, or sick, or that he didn’t get the message at all, but most likely he brushed off the request, sticking to more serious issues. Another linguist, Steven Pinker, took the assignment and determined that my skill, rather than being a sign of linguistic brilliance, was just a trick, like “juggling lit torches from a unicycle” (which I have to admit is on my bucket list).

The second time I didn’t meet Noam Chomsky was a year later, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when I was interviewed in his office in Building 20, a decrepit army research building, by his longtime colleague and friend Morris Halle, for the position of Chomsky’s assistant. Morris met with several star-struck people whose priority was to become part of Chomsky’s inner world, but my skill set and lack of familiarity with his politics made me his choice for the position. When Morris learned that psychology was my field of study, he issued me a few caveats: “This will not be a warm and fuzzy position. You have not been hired to be Professor Chomsky’s friend.”

On my second day of work, a man in his mid-60s with longish graying hair and a chiseled face I recognized from photos arrived in my office looking preoccupied. He wore a gray crew neck sweater over a blue denim shirt and blue jeans rolled up to expose sensible white socks. He held two briefcases, one of heavy blue canvas and the other worn brown leather, with the letters “NC” stamped in faded gold at the top.

More here.

What follows is an essay adapted from a talk, delivered in 2010 to teenagers and parents in my hometown of Cupertino, California. The talk concerned the surfaces of things, like bodies and planets, and abstract surfaces, like the Möbius strip and the torus. The goal was to learn about the world by studying surfaces mathematically, to learn about mathematics by studying the way we study surfaces, and, ideally, to learn about ourselves by studying how we do mathematics.

Joshua Batson in Hypocrite Reader:

An atlas of squares assembles into a cube.

Imagine that you are an emperor regarding a great expanse from a tall peak. Though your territory extends beyond your sight, a map of the entire empire hangs on the wall in your study, seventy interlocking cantons. On your desk lies a thick, bound atlas. Each page is a detailed map of a county whose image on the great map is smaller than a coin.

You dream of an atlas of the world in which the map of your empire would fill but a single page. You send forth a fleet of cartographers. They scatter from the capitol and each, after traveling her assigned distance, will make a detailed map of her surroundings, note the names of her colleagues in each adjacent plot, and return.

If the world is infinite, some surveyors will return with bad news: they were the member of their band to travel the furthest and uncharted territory lies on one side of their map. But if the world is finite, there will be many happy surprises: a friend last seen in the capitol is rediscovered thousands of miles from home, having taken another path to the same place. Their maps form an atlas of the world.

You have another dream, in which the whole world is contained in your capable hands, miniature and alive. Upon waking, you begin to tear the pages out of the atlas and piece them together, using the labels on the edge of each page to stitch it to its neighbors, constructing ever larger swaths of territory.

Soon you are left with six grand charts. You fit them together and they lift off the table to form a cube.

More here.

Jamelle Bouie in Slate:

There is no question that Trump has run the most unapologetically racist and nativist campaign since George Wallace made his first national play in 1964. And, like Wallace before him, it’s been successful, drawing tens of thousands of people to massive rallies across the country. Trump probes their fears, excites their passions, and gives them voice in a way they love and understand. “We have losers. We have people that are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain,” Trump declares. These voters may feel anxious about their economic status. But they also hold racial and cultural resentments. They’re worried about their futures and they dislike immigrants, Muslims, and blacks.

On Monday, the Washington Post looked at the white supremacists and white nationalists who cheer Trump as an asset to their movement. Trump has opened “a door to conversation” and “electrified” some members of the movement, says one leader in the Ku Klux Klan. “I think a lot of what he says resonates with me,” says David Duke, a “Grand Wizard” in the Klan and former Louisiana politician. In a similar piece for the New Yorker, writer Evan Osnos spoke to Jared Taylor, a prominent white nationalist who described the situation as such. “I’m sure he would repudiate any association with people like me,” said Taylor, “but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.” These voices are self-serving, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Trump has shot to the top, fueled by vicious rhetoric against Latino immigrants and Syriain refugees. He has shared racist memes about black Americans and called for a ban on Muslim travel to the United States. And each time, his support ticks higher.

Economic anxiety plays a part here. But maybe Trump has discovered something we all like to deny: That in the 21^st century, the racist vote is larger, louder, and more influential than we ever thought.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Over the past few million years, the ancestors of modern humans became dramatically different from other primates. Our forebears began walking upright, and they lost much of their body hair; they gained precision-grip fingers and developed gigantic brains. But early humans also may have evolved a less obvious but equally important advantage: a peculiar sleep pattern. “It’s really weird, compared to other primates,” said Dr. David R. Samson, a senior research scientist at Duke University. In the journal Evolutionary Anthropology, Dr. Samson and Dr. Charles L. Nunn, an evolutionary biologist at Duke, reported that human sleep is exceptionally short and deep, a pattern that may have helped give rise to our powerful minds. Until recently, scientists knew very little about how primates sleep. To document orangutan slumber, for example, Dr. Samson once rigged up infrared cameras at the Indianapolis Zoo and stayed up each night to watch the apes nod off. By observing their movements, he tracked when the orangutans fell in and out of REM sleep, in which humans experience dreams.

… Dr. Samson and Dr. Nunn found that the time each primate species spends asleep generally corresponded to its physical size, along with other factors, such as the average number of primates in a group. The one big exception: humans. We sleep a lot less than one would predict based on the patterns seen in other primates. From time to time while sleeping, we slip into REM sleep and dream. All told, we spend about 22 percent of sleep in REM, the highest ratio of REM to total sleep in any primate, the researchers reported. Dr. Samson and Dr. Nunn have an explanation for how humans ended up sleeping so little, and so often in REM. Over tens of millions of years, they assert, changes in our ancestors’ ecology drove the evolution of new sleeping patterns. Humans increasingly have been able to achieve a good night’s sleep. A number of studies suggest that REM sleep benefits the brain. Some scientists argue that it sweeps out molecular debris, and others say it consolidates new memories into lasting impressions. But it was not easy for our monkey-like ancestors to reach REM sleep. They slept on branches, and their nights were anything but easy. As monkeys try to sleep today, they get roused by winds, tree snakes and the jostling of their fellow primates. “It’s like economy class on a plane,” said Dr. Samson. Monkeys, he believes, have to rest longer to get the benefits of REM sleep.

More here.

Phoebe Boswell. Marama, The Maulidi Series, 2014.

Charcoal drawing.

More must-see works of this brilliant artist here, here, and here.