Bethel

Rowan Williams in the New Statesman:

It would help if we had a single, clear story we could believe about violence – it’s getting worse because of this or that factor in our world, so we know whom to blame; it’s getting better as we all become more educated and secular, so we don’t have to worry in the long term. But the evidence is profoundly confusing.

Richard Bessel begins his lucid and well-documented book with a round-up of contemporary views, from those who think first of the astronomical statistics of humanly devised injury and death in the 20th century to those (like Steven Pinker in a much-discussed recent book) for whom what matters is the gradual change in sensibility that has made us simply more sensitive to the suffering of others – as well as the relative absence of major international conflict in the past half-century or so. As Bessel observes, Pinker’s statistics will seem a little academic if you happen to live in South Sudan or Syria (or Baltimore or Johannesburg).

The paradox of our era in the modern North Atlantic world is that while we are probably objectively more secure against the casual daily risk of violence than our ancestors, we are more anxious and more outraged by the prospect as well as the reality of violence, and more prone to extend its meaning to forms of offensive or menacing speech and action that would not have registered for those ancestors. We are, in a word, more preoccupied with violence; hence the subtitle, A Modern Obsession.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

On the day we went to see the Great Serpent Mound, the rain plunged from the sky. Lightning shot down to the cornfields and made the cornfields roar. Everything was dark. Guides recommend that you come to the Serpent early or late in the day, when shadows alongside it are deep and the winding shape becomes bolder. But on the day we visited, the whole of Ohio was shadow, save the neat green grass of the Serpent’s skin, which was oddly bright.

When the first European settlers came to farm southwestern Ohio, they found earthen lumps scattered all around the land. They did not know what these lumps could be — some farmers went about flattening them, others farmed around them. In the 1840s, a local doctor and a newspaper editor from the town of Chillicothe investigated the mounds. They discovered wooden structures inside, built to house the dead of Native tribes whose names are lost to us now. Jewelry and effigies were placed around the cremated remains to keep the spirits company. Then the Mound Builders covered over the structures with layers of soil and sand. As the generations passed, new dead were buried on top of the old, and more earth was put on top, until the mounds grew higher and higher and the little wooden structure collapsed within.

more here.

Masha Gessen at Harper's Magazine:

A year ago, Sofi Oksanen, Finland’s preeminent contemporary writer, took the podium at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City. “Good evening, everyone,” she said, failing to smile. “I bring greetings from the bordering countries to Russia.” She paused to let the gravity of her nation’s geographic location sink in. She would devote the rest of her allotted seven minutes to a single, grim topic: the danger Russia poses to Western civilization. Other writers speaking that evening at Cooper Union’s Great Hall addressed societal and personal ills, some of staggering dimensions. But only Oksanen sounded genuinely scared. Indeed, she sounded like someone bringing a message from a country at war.

Three weeks later, Alexander Dugin, a once marginal philosopher whose ideas now seem to form the core of Putin’s politics, addressed a large crowd in Helsinki. He spoke of the threat that Western civilization poses to humanity and argued that Finland had a choice to make. It could stay with the West, which would increasingly pressure it to accept what he called a “posthuman,” and “postgender” reality, or it could side with Russia, which alone among the world’s powers was working to protect the traditional way of life. Dugin, whose long gray beard and dome-shaped forehead suggest a Russian Orthodox priest in civvies, stressed repeatedly that the choice would be Finland’s to make. “I am not advocating the annexation of Finland,” he said over and over again. “If I were, I would tell you.” If such a reassurance has ever calmed anyone, this was not the occasion.

more here.

Jake Bittle at The Point:

One of the first big splashes in American fiction this year was Ben Metcalf’s Against the Country, a three-hundred-plus-page tirade against the rural South by the former literary editor of Harper’s. In this novel, a narrator who happens to write exactly like Ben Metcalf recounts his childhood and adolescence in Goochland County, a real county in Virginia that almost every reviewer of the book has assumed is fictional. In fire-and-brimstone sentences that go on for hundreds of words, the narrator rages against those who glorify life in the countryside. Targets include Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone and Henry David Thoreau, but most importantly the pseudo-Metcalf’s own parents, who move the family to Goochland with the hope that living close to nature will be enriching. As Metcalf shows, the move proves to be just the opposite: Goochland, he tells us, is the land “in whose dirt our national evil was gestated, and out of whose grass it sprung, and on whose stock it immediately fed” (the sentence goes on for four more clauses). Nature, which Metcalf sees as malevolent, sets the stage for the ignorance that many Northerners see at the heart of Southern culture. Goochland provides “annoyance and lack and trepidation,” Metcalf says, “and what more is asked for our violence to germinate and grow?”

more here.

Helen MacDonald in the New York Times Magazine:

We increasingly think that wild animals live in a world separate from our own, and that we are supposed to leave them there. We are happy to watch them and sometimes to feed them. But we physically interact with them only when they’re hunted, studied or in serious trouble. And the latter is usually our fault: We dislodge nests, soak seabirds in oil, hit deer and foxes with cars, pick up casualties from beneath glass windows and power lines. When I was 12, I reared a brood of baby bullfinches brought to me by a neighbor who had felled their nest tree. When the birds flew free, I felt I’d righted a wrong that thoughtlessness had perpetrated on the world. Against a backdrop of environmental destruction and species decline, anxieties about our impact on the natural world become tied to the tragedies suffered by individual animals. Just a few weeks ago, the news that an American hunter had illegally killed a lion called Cecil in Zimbabwe caused outrage across the world: It’s an apt illustration of how people care more about the fortunes of a single animal than those of its species. (It’s not as if people are furiously protesting the decline of large carnivores every day.) Tending animals until they are fit to be returned to the wild feels like an act of resistance, redress, even redemption. Rearing a single nest of finches in the 1980s didn’t halt the decline of bird populations. But my simple sense of the justice of saving them taught me simple, concrete things about finches I’d never otherwise have learned: how they slept, how they communicated, their idiosyncrasies.

More here. [For my sister Sughra Raza who is on a quest to save the wild elephants of the world.]

As Francis makes his first U.S. visit, his emphasis on serving the poor over enforcing doctrine has inspired joy and anxiety in Roman Catholics.

Robert Draper in National Geographic:

When about 7,000 awed strangers first encounter him on the public stage, he is not yet the pope—but like a chrysalis stirring, something astounding is already present in the man. Inside Stadium Luna Park, in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians have gathered for an ecumenical event. From the stage, a pastor calls out for the city’s archbishop to come up and say a few words. The audience reacts with surprise, because the man striding to the front had been sitting in the back all this time, for hours, like no one of any importance. Though a cardinal, he is not wearing the traditional pectoral cross around his neck, just a black clerical shirt and a blazer, looking like the simple priest he was decades ago. He is gaunt and elderly with a somber countenance, and at this moment nine years ago it is hard to imagine such an unassuming, funereal Argentine being known one day, in every corner of the world, as a figure of radiance and charisma.

He speaks—quietly at first, though with steady nerves—in his native tongue, Spanish. He has no notes. The archbishop makes no mention of the days when he regarded the evangelical movement in the dismissive way many Latin American Catholic priests do, as an escuela de samba—an unserious happening akin to rehearsals at a samba school. Instead the most powerful Argentine in the Catholic Church, which asserts that it is the only true Christian church, says that no such distinctions matter to God.

More here.

Cody Delistraty in Nautilus:

Tragedy can strike us any time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make the best of it. When Frank’s dog was struck and killed by a car in front of his house, he grew curious what Fido might taste like. So he cooked him up and ate him for dinner. It was a harmless decision, but, nonetheless, some people would consider it immoral. Or take incest. A brother, who’s using a condom, and his sister, who’s on birth control, decide to have sex. They enjoy it but keep it a secret and don’t do it again. Is their action morally wrong? If they’re both consenting adults and not hurting anyone, can one legitimately criticize their moral judgment?

Janet Geipel of the University of Trento in Italy posed fictional scenarios like these to German-, Italian-, and English-speaking college students in each student’s native language and in a second language that they spoke almost fluently. What Geipel found in her July 2015 study is that “the use of a foreign language, as opposed to a native language, elicited less harsh moral judgments.” She concluded that a distance is created between emotional and moral topics when speaking in a second language.

People are more likely to act less emotionally and more rationally when speaking their second language, according to Geipel. Nelson Mandela seemed to have understood this dynamic decades ago when he said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

The distinction is an important one: If moral decisions are contingent on the language in which they are posed then the decisions of people who must work in a foreign language on a daily basis—immigrants, international corporations, international institutions—would need to be reevaluated. Whether it’s Goldman Sachs in Paris or the United Nations in Burma, decisions made by people speaking their non-native languages appear to be less concerned with morality and more concerned with rationality and utilitarianism.

More here.

Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post:

Dear Sen. Schumer,

When you announced your decision to vote against the nuclear agreement with Iran, you explained your reasons in a nearly 1,700-word statement that is thoughtful in substance and civil in tone. And yet, in the end, I found it unconvincing.

I believe that the agreement is flawed. But it is the most intrusive, demanding and comprehensive set of inspections, verification protocols and snapback measures ever negotiated. Compare the detailed 159-page document with the United States' 1994 accord with North Korea, which was a vaguely worded four-page document with few monitoring and enforcement provisions.

You have three sets of objections, which I will get to, but you fail to note what must happen at the outset, before Iran gets widespread sanctions relief.

Iran must destroy 98 percent of its enriched uranium and all of its 5 percent to 20 percent enriched uranium, remove and store more than two-thirds of its centrifuges (including all advanced centrifuges), terminate all enrichment at its Fordow nuclear facility and render inoperable the key components of its Arak (plutonium) reactor. All of these steps must be completed to the satisfaction of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

It is difficult to imagine that a serious military campaign against Iran would set back its nuclear program as much as this deal does from the start. Fordow, for example, is buried deep in a mountain and would probably survive all but the most intense bombardment.

More here.

Rebecca Tucker in National Post:

When I think of Sylvia Plath, I think of crabmeat.

I think of tragedy too, and of the deceptively straightforward prose that characterized Plath’s short career as a novelist. But for one reason or another, the passage in The Bell Jar that has the most staying power is the one in which Plath details a ladies’ luncheon that gave everyone food poisoning: “When I finished the first plate of cold chicken and caviar, I laid out another,” Plath’s protagonist, Esther, recalls. “Then I tackled the avocado and crabmeat salad.” Food is a powerful narrative device, even (or, sometimes, especially) when it’s not being used to directly propel a story forward. The literary use of a meal, a snack, or a table setting can serve to provide, with great depth, the most context: in The Bell Jar, for instance, Plath could’ve described a poet Esther once met as deliberate, pretentious or effete; instead, she merely observed that he ate salad with his hands, making it seem like “the only natural and sensible thing to do.”

Cara Nicoletti’s new book, Voracious, is both a collection of such literary references to food and a psuedo-memoir, where recipes are used as a compelling narrative backbone. Nicoletti places memorable passages about food and eating within the context of her own life: Voracious is split into three sections — childhood, adolescence and college years, and adulthood — within which Nicoletti has catalogued a series of short essays about the importance of certain books, followed by a recipe she’s written based on a reference to food from each one. Her reflection on The Silence of the Lambs, for instance, has a recipe for crostini with fava beans and chicken liver mousse; a passage on Charlotte’s Web is accompanied, somewhat morbidly, by one for pea and bacon soup. Nicoletti’s recipe for The Bell Jar’s Crab-Stuffed Avocado appears mid-adolescence.

More here.

From ScienceDaily:

Many brain disorders vary between the sexes, but how biology and culture contribute to these differences has been unclear. Now Northwestern neuroscientists have found an intrinsic biological difference between males and females in the molecular regulation of synapses in the hippocampus. This provides a scientific reason to believe that female and male brains may respond differently to drugs targeting certain synaptic pathways. “The importance of studying sex differences in the brain is about making biology and medicine relevant to everyone, to both men and women,” said Catherine S. Woolley, senior author of the study. “It is not about things such as who is better at reading a map or why more men than women choose to enter certain professions.”

Among their findings, the scientists found that a drug called URB-597, which regulates a molecule important in neurotransmitter release, had an effect in females that it did not have in males. While the study was done in rats, it has broad implications for humans because this drug and others like it are currently being tested in clinical trials in humans.

More here.

A series of experiments has produced incredible results by giving young blood to old mice. Now the findings are being tested on humans.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

For much of history, people sought to halt ageing to achieve immortality – or at least to live for hundreds of years. These days, scientists tend to have more modest aims. In wealthy nations, basic healthcare and medical advances have driven up lifespan for the past century. Five years from now, for the first time in human history, there will be more over-60s than children under five years old. In 2050, two billion people will be 60 or older, nearly double the number today.

Behind that statistic lies a serious problem. People are living longer, but they are not necessarily living better. The old struggle with chronic conditions, often many at once: cancer, respiratory disease, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, dementia.

Medical researchers tend to tackle these diseases separately. After all, the illnesses are distinct: cancer arises from mutated DNA; heart disease from clogged up blood vessels; dementia from damaged brain cells. The biological processes that underpin the pathologies vary enormously. Each, then, needs its own treatment. Yet some researchers take another view: the greatest driver of disease in old age is old age itself. So why not invent treatments for ageing?

More here.

Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books Daily (ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images):

William F. Buckley, Jr., important in conservative circles during the Nixon and Reagan eras, was not central to the time of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush (he called their Iraq war a failure). But there is some renewed interest in him now, in particular in his serial sparring with intellectuals and institutions on the left: a new documentary, Best of Enemies, recalls Buckley’s televised clashes with Gore Vidal at the 1968 political conventions; while a book by Kevin M. Schultz, Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties, presents its subjects as friend-foes with an outsize impact on their time.

Put these together with the fact that a major biography of Buckley is being written by Sam Tanenhaus, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review—and that another biography has been backed by the Buckley Program at Yale, itself a recent addition to the Buckley legacy—and it is a lot of attention being paid to a man who died seven years ago. The interest may, in fact, be fueled by overstatement.

I am sorry to see Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies being hailed for remembering a golden age when intellectuals fought out profound issues in public. There is more intellectual insight and incisive commentary on a single night of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show than in all of the mean broadcasts of Buckley and Vidal. One of the broadcasts, which the documentary makes much light of, took place while police and protesters were battling in the streets of Chicago—and things were not going so well inside the TV studio either, since at one point Buckley said to Vidal, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Buckley certainly hated Vidal, but not, I think, for being gay. He hated him for ridiculing his supreme values—Catholicism and the Market.

More here.

T. S. Eliot at The Times Literary Supplement:

In his little book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, published many years ago, Henry James has the following significant sentences:

“The charm [of Hawthorne’s slighter pieces of fiction] is that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole deep mystery of man’s soul and conscience. They are moral, and their interest is moral; they deal with something more than the mere accidents and conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it.”

The interest of this passage lies in its double application: it is true of Hawthorne, it is as true or truer of James himself. “They are moral, and their interest is moral”; this is the truth about all of James’s long series of novels and stories; a series of novels and stories which fell, accordingly, exactly upon the generations least qualified to appreciate the “moral interest”. Note the term “deeper psychology”. James’s book on Hawthorne was published in 1879. “Psychology” had not then reached the meaning of to-day, or if it had the meaning had not reached Henry James. One could not use the phrase now without surrounding it with a whole commentary of exposition and defence. But one feels that it is right; and that our contemporary novelists, under the influence of the shallower psychology by which we are all now affected, have missed that deeper psychology which was the subject of Henry James’s study.

more here.

Gal Beckerman at Bookforum:

There’s a shorthand phrase in Israel for describing the politics of war and peace that permeates everything: ha matzav, “the situation.” You might come upon a conversation between two people and ask, “What are you talking about?” And the response would simply be “the situation.”

This can mean whatever happened that morning—a café blown up, olive trees vandalized in the occupied territories, or the latest proclamation of “Death to Israel” from Tehran. But it can also capture the particular flavor of a collective existence that finds itself, on a regular basis, trounced by History—an unrelenting, never-forgotten force, as much a part of everyday life as whether the buses are running or it’s rainy outside.

Etgar Keret, the most internationally celebrated and widely read of his generation of Israeli writers, has been notably uninterested in “the situation.” His microstories are no longer than a couple pages each and don’t concern themselves much with Hezbollah or Netanyahu. The best of them are fantastical and arrive, very economically, at some strange wisdom about the inner life of the human animal.

more here.

The Editors at n+1:

IS HERSH PARANOID? In some ways, the label seems appropriate. He has written about the private lives of the Kennedys and claimed that high-ranking military officials are members of the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei (although, as Greg Grandin pointed out in the Nation, a number of current and former high-ranking military officials really have been members of extreme right-wing Christian sects such as the Knights of Malta). In its unending accumulation of detail after disastrous detail, Hersh’s reporting often has the screwball plotting of a Pynchon novel. If the subject matter weren’t so upsetting, his reports would be funny.

But in other respects, the term doesn’t fit. Hersh’s stories break down complex events into chains of isolated, largely reactive individual decisions. His reporting never points back, as Pynchon’s novels do, to shadowy conspiracies; there is no titanic clash between impersonal forces, no central organizing principle, only human action churning away. Near the beginning of Hersh’s book on the Iraq war, an intelligence official complaining about the “enhanced interrogation” tactics at Guantánamo says, “It was wrong and also dysfunctional.” A few pages later, this refrain is repeated by another source: “It’s evil, but it’s also stupid.”

more here.

Ali and Zaman in The Herald:

It was a 9mm gun, probably a Stoeger. Before Saad Aziz got this “samaan” through an associate, by his own admission, he had already plotted a murder. On the evening of Friday, April 24, 2015, he met four other young men, all well-educated like him, somewhere on Karachi’s Tariq Road to finalise and carry out the plot. As dusk deepened into night, they set off towards Defence Housing Society Phase II Extension on three motorcycles. Their destination: a café-cum-communal space – The Second Floor or T2F – where an event, Unsilencing Balochistan: take two, was under way. Their target: Sabeen Mahmud, 40, the founder and director of T2F. Two of Aziz’s associates, he says, “were just roaming around in the vicinity of T2F”. A third was keeping an eye on the street outside. Aziz himself was riding a motorcycle driven by one Aliur Rehman, also mentioned as Tony in the police record. When he received the message that Mahmud had left T2F, he says, he followed her. “Suzuki Swift, AWH 541,” he repeats her car’s make and registration number. As the car stopped at a signal less than 500 metres to the north of T2F, “Tony rode up alongside it.” Mahmud was in the driving seat, Aziz says. “Next to her was her mother, I think. That is what we found out from the news later. There was a man sitting in the back. I fired the gun four or five times at her.”

Sitting in a sparsely furnished room within Karachi Police’s Crime Investigation Department (CID), Aziz appears at ease even in blindfold. Recounting the events of that evening, he never sounds hurried or under duress. After shooting Mahmud, he says he and Tony turned left from the signal towards Punjab Chowrangi and reached Sharae-e-Faisal, crossing Teen Talwar in Clifton on their way. While still on the motorcycle, he messaged others to get back to Tariq Road. Once there, he just picked up his motorcycle and they all dispersed. “We only got confirmation of her death later from the news,” he says. “At that moment [of shooting], there is no way of confirming if the person is dead. You just do it and get out of there.” It was on February 13, 2015, when he says he decided that Mahmud had to die. That evening, he was at T2F, attending an event, The Karachi “Situation”: Exploring Responses. “It was something she said during the talk,” he recalls. “That we shouldn’t be afraid of the Taliban, we should stand up to them, demonstrate against them, something like that. That is when we made up our minds.” Later in the conversation, though, he adds, “There wasn’t one particular reason to target her: she was generally promoting liberal, secular values. There were those campaigns of hers, the demonstration outside Lal Masjid [in Islamabad], Pyaar ho jaane do (let there be love) on Valentine’s Day and so on.” He laughs softly, almost bashfully, as he mentions the last.

More here. (Via Dr. Fahad Qazi)

Julia Belluz in Vox (Semnic/Shutterstock):

When neuroscientists stuck a dead salmon in an fMRI machine and watched its brain light up, they knew they had a problem. It wasn't that there was a dead fish in their expensive imaging machine; they'd put it there on purpose, after all. It was that the medical device seemed to be giving these researchers impossible results. Dead fish should not have active brains.

The researchers shared their findings in 2009 as a cautionary tale: If you don't run the proper statistical tests on your neuroscience data, you can come up with any number of implausible conclusions — even emotional reactions from a dead fish.

In the 1990s, neuroscientists started using the massive, round fMRI (or functional magnetic resonance imaging) machines to peer into their subjects' brains. But since then, the field has suffered from a rash of false positive results and studies that lack enough statistical power — the likelihood of finding a real result when it exists — to deliver insights about the brain.

When other scientists try to reproduce the results of original studies, they too often fail. Without better methods, it'll be difficult to develop new treatments for brain disorders and diseases like Alzheimer's and depression — let alone learn anything useful about our most mysterious organ.

To address the problem, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation just announced a $3.8 million grant to Stanford University to establish the Center for Reproducible Neuroscience. The aim of the center is to clean up the house of neuroscience and improve transparency and the reliability of research. On the occasion, we spoke to Russ Poldrack, director of the center, about what he thinks are neuroscience's biggest problems and how the center will tackle them.

More here.