Michelle Goldberg in DoubleXX:
And what about those women who condemned Clinton for remaining with a husband who humiliated her? “It turned out that many of them had suffered a faithless husband, too, but lacked the ability or the will to leave,” writes Steinem. “They wanted Hillary to punish a powerful man in public on their behalf.”
More here.
Anne Trubek in Smithsonian:
Cuneiform means “wedge-shaped,” a term the Greeks used to describe the look of the signs. It was used to write at least a dozen languages, just as the alphabet that you are reading now is also (for the most part) used in Spanish, German and many other languages. It looks like a series of lines and triangles, as each sign is comprised of marks—triangular, vertical, diagonal, and horizontal—impressed onto wet clay with a stylus, a long thin instrument similar to a pen. Sometimes cuneiform was formed into prisms, larger tablets and cylinders, but mainly it was written on palm-sized pieces of clay. The script is often tiny—almost too small to see with the naked eye, as small the smallest letters on a dime. Why so tiny? That remains one of cuneiform’s biggest mysteries.
More here.
The First and Second Great Awakenings, religious revivals that swept through the midcolonies in the late eighteenth century and the northeastern states in the first third of the nineteenth century, were followed, I have come to realise, by a third awakening in the latter half of the twentieth century, just as I was coming of age. Historians usually treat the earlier awakenings as surges of religious enthusiasm primarily or exclusively, though they are attended by a characteristic cluster of reform movements — enhancements of the status of women, broadening of access to education, mitigations of social and racial inequality. These were consistent even while the demographics of the country changed. The religious and denominational character of the earlier awakenings seems to have been as much a consequence of the old centrality of the churches as centres of civic life as it was a result of their role in stirring religious passion. I hasten to say that in these instances religious passion — and there were occasions of hysteria, fainting fits, visions — led to, and was consistent with, stable and thoughtful social change. The period in the twentieth century I would call the third great awakening was led by the black church, and sooner or later had the support of all the major denominations. But it was not, and is not, understood as an essentially religious movement, though as I have said the distinction between civic and religious is never clear, and was certainly not clear in this case.
more here.
“Paris,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “is a counterpoint in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the natural order: a menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active hotbed of revolution. But just as the slopes of Vesuvius, thanks to the layers of lava that cover them, have been transformed into paradisal orchards, so the lava of revolutions provides uniquely fertile ground for the blossoming of art, festivity, fashion.”
Such a statement reverberates through Luc Sante's “The Other Paris” like a thesis statement, an emblem of the city's soul. Paris, Sante wants us to understand, is both like and unlike other cities: an expression of class, of history, but also improvisational, serendipitous. “The city,” he insists, “— compact and curled within itself, a labyrinth — had to be played like a game.”
This is an idea — I'll admit it — that I love, not just in regard to Paris but also to the very essence of urban life. What are cities, after all, but what we make of them, the paths we carve through their maze of streets and neighborhoods, the individual existences we construct in relation to their collective ones?
more here.
The mystery in these pages is Goldberger’s own judgment of Frank Gehry’s architecture. We certainly see Gehry in the company of famous artists — Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Irwin were early friends — and we follow his meteoric rise to worldwide fame. We encounter a lot of powerful real estate developers, and learn the background stories of the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, 8 Spruce Street (to my mind Gehry’s most successful building, suggesting he is better at apartment towers than museums and concert halls) and, most recently, the Fondation Louis Vuitton museum. Yet Gehry’s entertaining and uncommonly intelligent biographer puts as much emphasis on details like the presence of Brad Pitt and Arianna Huffington at the architect’s 80th-birthday party as on the characteristics of the architecture itself. Reeling off names like Larry Gagosian, Bono, Ian Schrager, Candice Bergen and Ben Gazzara as being among the people to celebrate Gehry’s 82nd birthday, Goldberger seems to suggest that being famous matters as much, at least to Frank Gehry, as the social service and aesthetic impact of his buildings.
Bono sang at the funeral of the painter Balthus, whose biography I wrote. For me, that episode with Bono signified the infatuation with celebrity that had been one of the sillier aspects of the life of a gifted and brilliant artist.
more here.
After Aquinas
.Try making a man with no soul, you who can do all things. Not quite all. Is it you or your end that’s manifest in forms fixed before you, or in the first sums the schoolchild learns, likewise unalterable. The triangle makes its dark refusal of all you might be, great indefinite. Spared a body and this staggered mind, you cannot know the joy our weariness embraces—what made you go without the saving play of memory. Yes, to forget and invent is denied you. Though you transcend time you too cannot change what was. The sad dream seizing you most of all, still you cannot feel sadness, only—who knows. Maybe you feel less and less the rumored maker, more like one who simply sees himself reflected, unforgiving, in a foreignness… Bound by such laws. A singular. You cannot make another of what you are, be less than yourself, disappear.
by Tomas Unger
from Ecotheo Review, July 2015
Andrew Robinson reflects on the most tantalizing of all the undeciphered scripts — that used in the civilization of the Indus valley in the third millennium bc.
Andrew Robinson in Nature:
More than a thousand Indus settlements covered at least 800,000 square kilometres of what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. It was the most extensive urban culture of its period, with a population of perhaps 1 million and a vigorous maritime export trade to the Gulf and cities such as Ur in Mesopotamia, where objects inscribed with Indus signs have been discovered. Astonishingly, the culture has left no archaeological evidence of armies or warfare.
Most Indus settlements were villages; some were towns, and at least five were substantial cities (see 'Where unicorns roamed'). The two largest, Mohenjo-daro — a World Heritage Site listed by the United Nations — located near the Indus river, and Harappa, by one of the tributaries, boasted street planning and house drainage worthy of the twentieth century ad. They hosted the world's first known toilets, along with complex stone weights, elaborately drilled gemstone necklaces and exquisitely carved seal stones featuring one of the world's stubbornly undeciphered scripts.
More here.
Draft article by Patrick O'Donnell for the Encyclopedia of Islam:
Democracy, or “rule by the people” (typically, a majority thereof) is a term that has been used to
describe a number of different kinds of government: from ancient Greek city-states (e.g., Athens) to the contemporary (liberal, corporatist, and social democratic) welfare states of Europe and North America, to the myriad post-World War II democracies (particularly since the 1970s) around the globe, North and South, East and West. Today, democratic rule is usually connected to Liberal ideas and ideals of governance and government by popularly elected officials who legislate and enforce the laws in accordance with constitutionally ensconced notions of individual liberties and civil rights, hence “the people” rule indirectly through those elected to represent their considered preferences and interests as expressed in the voting booth. Historically, Islamic juridical and political thought has legitimated various kinds of governance: from the despotic to the benign. Indeed, the bountiful intellectual fruits of Islamic traditions—philosophical, theological, jurisprudential, mystical—are capable of justifying (through the provision of what philosophers, after Bernard Williams, term 'internal' reasons) a wide array of political models and forms of political behavior and rule, including models and forms of democratic governance and government (Hashemi, 2009 and March, 2009). We cannot here address a recent claim by Wael Hallaq that is clearly germane to our discussion, namely, that “[t]he 'Islamic state,' judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both an impossibility and a contradiction in terms.”
More here.
Hamza Khaled in Narratively:
I was in fourth grade. It was the second week of school. My father picked me up with a look on his face — I thought it was because of his job as a fraud detective. Then when I got home I went to kiss my mom as usual, but she was crying. I had never seen her cry before. Not once. I asked her why she was crying. She didn’t answer. I thought someone had died, so I started crying too. Then my father pulled me back and said, “We need to talk.”
He sat me down on the ground and said, “Shut up, be a man. Men don’t cry. Are you a woman? Only women cry.” Then my mother came out and said it: “Your father divorced me.”
In Saudi Arabia men can initiate a divorce simply by saying “I divorce you” and just like that you are divorced. If he says it three times they are divorced forever; if it’s just once they are officially divorced, but have the option of reuniting.
I looked at my father shocked, and he said, “That’s right, now go pack your clothes. You’re going to live with your mother’s family.”
I was still so shocked I couldn’t move. He grabbed me by my collar and said, “Stop wasting my time.”
More here.
THE GOVERNMENT militiaman named Noor leaned out from the narrow service balcony and pointed at the trees flanking the airport highway a hundred yards away.
“We are fighting in that area to keep them from entering our street,” he said. A few months earlier, Noor said, the situation “was critical. They were too close.” Now, he said, rebels have been pushed a few miles away.
The war in Syria is a war of neighborhoods. Foreign fighters and foreign intervention have fueled the conflict, but at its heart is an intimate civil war between neighbors and relatives. Noor, a retired soldier, was running a family store when Syria’s popular uprising rapidly transformed into a bitter nationwide battle four years ago. He quickly formed a neighborhood militia, which was eventually absorbed into the paramilitary National Defense Force, that fights for the Assad government and is funded and trained by Iran.
In recent years, his neighborhood, Jaramana, remained a leafy and sprawling suburb of Damascus crowded with schoolchildren and informal sidewalk cafes by day. At night, it was a battleground, as rebels in neighboring suburbs attacked the strategically critical airport highway and lobbed shells indiscriminately, mirroring the government’s own tactics.
more here.
The notion that the world embodies “beautiful ideas” might seem to imply that some entity is required “out there” to have the ideas, rather than the more orthodox view that the world embodies mathematical orders at various levels in ways that we find beautiful as responsive observers. Wilczek’s use of the term “idea” without locating it in a specific conscious entity, whether a creative deity or ourselves, serves as an agnostic tease that allows him to identify mathematical harmonies in nature as ideas “out there” that chime with ideas within us. In doing so, he knowingly slides around the central question about who or what is responsible for the organization of the world at atomic and cosmic levels.
His incantation that the world is a work of art knowingly begs the same question. He states that “Nature loves to use such equations”, with reference to Maxwell’s laws. Nature (always with a capital N) implicitly becomes a kind of purposeful agency for the generation of the ideas. Elsewhere he asks, “Is the physical world, considered as a work of art, beautiful”? His answer is emphatically yes, but in this case he seems to allow that it is we who do the considering. For a philosopher, Wilczek’s ambiguity is likely to be irritating, but it allows him a notably productive and suggestive freedom to evangelize about the sublime beauty of the world we can observe and theorize via modern physics.
Wilczek’s evaded question recalls the kind of double truths of reason and revelation expounded in some Medieval and Renaissance theology.
more here.
In order to provoke a re-examination of a wide spectrum of assumptions with regard to Nietzsche’s philosophy and how that philosophy played out in his life, I’d like to revisit the ideas in a much maligned biography of Nietzsche, that was written by Lou Andreas-Salomé:Friedrich Nietzsche, The Man in His Works (1894).
The first time that I encountered Lou Salomé by name and image was in a cinema in Rome in 1984. I’d been invited to see the movie by a woman-friend who was an admirer of Liliana Cavani. Cavani’s film Al di lá del Bene e del Male (Beyond Good and Evil) is a fictional depiction of Salomé’s relationship with Friedrich Nietzsche and the Positivist philosopher Paul Rée. The story is loosely based on the time that the threesome spent together over eight months in 1882. It was easy for my friend and I to fall in love with the ‘idea’ of Lou Salomé: a liberated intellectual woman, a feminist of sorts — although she wouldn’t have claimed so — who lived across the cusp of previous centuries, who intrigued both of these men so much that they proposed to her. Salomé was a novelist and a poet. Nietzsche set one of her poems to music. She was a literary critic. Her first published work in 1892 was called Henrik Ibsen’s Female Characters. She was a theorist of the erotic; and finally she became a psychologist after studying with Sigmund Freud. Her biography of Nietzsche is really a psychological portrait though it reveals a deep engagement with his philosophical writings.
more here.
David Shultz in Science:
Researchers think the cells help create mental maps and allow us to navigate through space even in the absence of visual cues. “If you close your eyes and walk ten feet forward and turn right and walk three feet forward, the grid cells are believed to [track your position],” says neuroscientist Joshua Jacobs at Columbia University. Intriguingly, people withthe so-called e4 variant of a gene known as APOE—the largest genetic risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s later in life—are at a higher risk for developing abnormalities in their entorhinal cortex. Because the grid cells are found in the same region, scientists wondered if the reason Alzheimer’s patients are more likely to get lost and have difficulty navigating could be explained by damage to the network.
More here.
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The Aunts
They always went out together every afternoon,
The went to cafes, department stores—everything around them was a bird cage—
At other times they had tea on the patio
and they talked, they always talked with a slight uneasiness:
the memory of a difficult choice, still doubtful.
They talked. Of themselves always, always themselves, voracious, delicate.
Their eyes slid over appearances,
over the masks of things (enchantment or illusion?)
They’d remain sitting there, gifted with a false brilliance,
a lifeless freshness, for hours, entire afternoon talking about things,
about feelings, love, life.
That was their domain.
And they talked and talked, always repeating themselves, turning the same things over,
ceaselessly running through their fingers the stuff
extracted from their lives, kneading it, stretching it
until they formed between their fingers a lump, a little gray ball.
by Alfonso Quijada Urias
from Poetry Like Bread
Curbstone Press,1994
translation: Darwin J. Flakoll
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Nell Porter Brown in Harvard Magazine:
Published last year in Australia (Dovey lives in Sydney), Only the Animals elicited a helpful blurb from J.M. Coetzee, along with several awards; it was due out in the United Kingdom in August and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will release the American edition on September 15. Some of the book’s themes—conflict, abuse of power, and the amorphous origins of cruelty, inspiration, and empathy—also surface in Dovey’s very different debut novel, Blood Kin (2007). Set in a nameless country during a military coup, the slim, edgy book mines the complexities of collusion, with an undercurrent of danger and eroticism, through the first-person accounts of the ex-president’s barber, cook, and portraitist, all of whom are imprisoned at a remote country estate.
More here.
Michael Hardy in Texas Monthly:
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, recounts May’s story in his new, six-part television series The Brain, which premieres this evening on PBS. According to Eagleman, May’s brain had never learned to interpret the visual signals that are usually sent by our eyes; when those signals suddenly resumed, the data seemed random and meaningless. Blind, May was an expert downhill skier; sighted, he couldn’t tell his children apart. The lesson is that reality isn’t something we passively observe but rather something that our brain continually fabricates out of the myriad signals streaming in from our sensory organs. As Eagleman puts it, “What we experience isn’t what’s really out there, but a beautifully rendered simulation.”
The Brain is Eagleman’s attempt to unravel one of science’s greatest mysteries: how consciousness emerges from the three-pound lump of pink tissue inside our skulls. Rather than organize the documentary according to the parts of the brain—a division that makes little sense, Eagleman said, because nearly all parts are involved in nearly every brain function—Eagleman devotes each episode to a philosophical query like “What is Reality?” or “What Makes Me?”
More here.
This is the latest in a series of interviews about philosophy of race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with David Haekwon Kim, an associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Global Humanities initiative at the University of San Francisco and the author of several essays on Asian-American identity. — George Yancy
George Yancy and David Haekwon Kim in the New York Times:
George Yancy: A great deal of philosophical work on race begins with the white/black binary. As a Korean-American, in what ways does race mediate or impact your philosophical identity?
These sensibilities have also been formed by learning a history of Asian-Americans that is more complex than the conventional watered-down immigrant narrative. This more discerning, haunting, and occasionally beautiful history includes reference to institutional anti-Asian racism, a cultural legacy of sexualized racism, a colonial U.S. presence in East Asia and the Pacific Islands, and some truly inspiring social struggles by Asians, Asian-Americans, and other communities of color.
More here.
Adrian Kent in Aeon:
Despite the airy thinness of the foil, a small fraction of the particles bounced straight back at the source – a result, Rutherford noted, ‘as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you’. Instead of whooshing straight through the thin soup of electrons that should have been all that hovered in their path, the particles had encountered something solid enough to push back. Something was wrong with matter. Somewhere, reality had departed from the best available model. But where?
The first big insight came from Rutherford himself. He realised that, if the structure of the atom were to permit collisions of the magnitude that his team had observed, its mass must be concentrated in a central nucleus, with electrons whirling around it. Could such a structure be stable? Why didn’t the electrons just spiral into the centre, leaking electromagnetic radiation as they fell?
More here.
