Beverly Gray in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“It frightened the hell out of me. I’m still frightened.”

These words mark the reaction of a young Australian named Helen Caldicott to a story of the aftermath of mistaken nuclear war, in which those who never even took sides were faced with the slow advance of deadly nuclear radiation on their shores. On the Beach, first a best-selling novel and then a major Hollywood film, confronts the viewer with a number of questions: How would you behave if—in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse—you knew you only have a few weeks or months left to live? Would you carouse riotously, knowing the end is near? Deny that the entire thing is happening? Hope against all logic for a miraculous reprieve? Try to maintain a core of decency in the face of imminent death? Wish that you had done something long ago to prevent nuclear war in the first place?

The story’s effect on Caldicott, then a 19-year-old Melbourne medical student who’d just learned about genetics and radiation, was profound. She went on to become both a pediatrician and a feisty anti-nuclear activist, an inspiration to others in the non-proliferation community and in the nuclear humanitarian initiative. She is renowned for warning, “It could happen tonight by accident,” and with the onset of nuclear winter, “We’ll all freeze to death in the dark.”

But what about the book itself and the 1959 movie made from it?

More here.

Ha-Joon Chang in The Guardian:

There are books that you know before reading them will change you. There are books you read precisely because you want to change yourself. But The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy belonged to neither category. In fact, H2G2 (as a tribe of Douglas Adams fandom calls it) is special because I didn’t expect it to have any effect on me, let alone one so enduring. I don’t even remember exactly when I read it, except that it was in the first few years of my arrival in Britain as a graduate student in 1986. The only thing I remember is being intrigued by the description of it as a piece of comedy science fiction (SF).

I had been a fan of SF since I was 10 or 11, when I started devouring what I could from the rather meagre selection (often in simplified children’s editions) available in Korea in the 1970s and 80s. SF was serious stuff then: intergalactic wars and imperialism (Skylark), technological dystopia (Brave New World), post-apocalyptic worlds (On the Beach, The Day of the Triffids). It wasn’t supposed to be comical.

But H2G2 was the funniest thing I had ever read. It wasn’t just hilarious, it was beyond my then mental universe: a depressed robot that saves the lives of the novel’s protagonists by striking up a casual conversation with the enemy spaceship’s computer and unintentionally talking it into depression and then suicide; the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council surviving a recitation of bad poetry by gnawing one of his legs off; the title of the third book in the God-bashing trilogy by Oolon Colluphid, Who is this God Person Anyway?

More here.

Erica Klarreich in Quanta Magazine:

Neil Sloane is considered by some to be one of the most influential mathematicians of our time.

That’s not because of any particular theorem the 75-year-old Welsh native has proved, though over the course of a more than 40-year research career at Bell Labs (later AT&T Labs) he won numerous awards for papers in the fields of combinatorics, coding theory, optics and statistics. Rather, it’s because of the creation for which he’s most famous: the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), often simply called “Sloane” by its users.

This giant repository, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, contains more than a quarter of a million different sequences of numbers that arise in different mathematical contexts, such as the prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11 … ) or the Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 … ). What’s the greatest number of cake slices that can be made with n cuts? Look up sequence A000125 in the OEIS. How many chess positions can be created in n moves? That’s sequence A048987. The number of ways to arrangen circles in a plane, with only two crossing at any given point, is A250001. That sequence just joined the collection a few months ago. So far, only its first four terms are known; if you can figure out the fifth, Sloane will want to hear from you.

A mathematician whose research generates a sequence of numbers can turn to the OEIS to discover other contexts in which the sequence arises and any papers that discuss it. The repository has spawned countless mathematical discoveries and has been cited more than 4,000 times.

“Many mathematical articles explicitly mention how they were inspired by OEIS, but for each one that does, there are at least ten who do not mention it, not necessarily out of malice, but because they take it for granted,” wrote Doron Zeilberger, a mathematician at Rutgers University.

The collection, which began in 1964 as a stack of handwritten index cards, gave rise to a 1973 book containing 2,372 sequences, and then a 1995 book, co-authored with mathematician Simon Plouffe, containing just over 5,000 sequences. By the following year, so many people had submitted sequences to Sloane that the collection nearly doubled in size, so he moved it onto the Internet. Since then, Sloane has personally created entries for more than 170,000 sequences.

More here.

Miri Davidson over at the Verso blog:

I met Christine Delphy in 2003. Curiously, back then her name was not very familiar to me. Curiously – or maybe not. After all, though I was already a feminist and a sociologist, in my studies I had never heard any discussion of gender (except in the United States). My feminist sensibilities were fed by a strong feeling of injustice, but like any French woman who grew up during the backlash of the 1980s, I was long reticent to the idea that there is a structural sexism, something more than a question of men and women’s individual good will.

The late 1990s and 2000s were formative years, and reading Christine’s texts played a decisively important role in this. I could say that this meeting was, for me, part of that mass of little miracles that make engagement possible, desirable, and even necessary; and most importantly, joyous rather than sad. One among the many motivations at the origin of this film is the hope of remaking this miracle of political emancipation for other people, when everything, a priori, incites us to inaction.

Among Christine’s writings, I would firstly cite her ‘Our friends and ourselves’, which appeared in her book The Main Enemy. After a number of years hanging around the far Left [gauche de la gauche] and then being active in a mixed feminist group, this text was a long breath of fresh air, an ointment for the open wounds that had been inflicted by other activists’ unyielding sexism and the – slightly more euphemised – sexism of the intellectual world. Reading and rereading this text, I no longer had to deal with these little humiliations alone. I could talk about them in the non-mixed feminist groups that I now came to be active in, and together with these women friends mock the virilism of the activists determined to change the world with their testosterone.

Christine Delphy taught me to be a feminist with laughter. Her humour does not only consist of bon mots. It has privileged targets: the ‘masculine grotesque’ that Simone de Beauvoir talked about (‘this way of taking oneself seriously, this vanity, considering oneself important’) but also naïve and gauchely optimistic postures.

More here.

Chris Barden in China Now:

“Either Chinese characters die or China is doomed.” The author of these words-penned in the same ideographic text he wished to see scrapped—was none other than the writer and rebel Lu Hsun. Lu was one of China’s greatest 20th century writers, its most influential promoter of vernacular fiction, and a key proponent of the New Writing movement of the 1930s.

Although often remembered for donning multiple hats-medical student, artist, activist and political icon-few would associate the author of The Diary of a Madman with the proposed eradication of China’s most unique contribution to the world’s linguistic heritage–the more than 55,000 ideographs (hanzi) that make up the Chinese written language.

But while China’s hanzi were once the most salient symbol of its cultural dominance of East Asia, by the mid-19th century the empire found its ports colonized by much younger countries buzzing with languages that used measly 26-letter alphabets.
Meanwhile, literacy and written culture in China were hampered by the relative impenetrability of those aesthetically elegant, compactly square, meaning-rich ideographs. And China lagged fatally behind its onetime cultural dependent, Japan, which had effectively combined Chinese characters with two phonetic syllabaries. Japanese bomber pilots did not need advanced degrees in literature to read their flight manuals.

Like other reformers, Lu Hsun therefore called for a “Latinized” vernacular phonetic system to replace hanzi entirely, thus expediting a system whose goal was to effect a crucial expansion in literacy and a leveling of the unfair linguistic advantage of the undemocratic literati.

Because of this diseased, tetragonal legacy, fulminated Lu Hsun, “For thousands of years, the vast majority of our people have been martyrs to illiteracy, and China finds itself in its current state. While other countries have already developed technology to create rain, we are still worshipping snakes and summoning spirits.”

More here.

Emily Strasser in Guernica:

Today marks seventy years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. On this day seventy years ago, my grandfather was working in the top-secret lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee that was responsible for enriching the uranium that fueled the Hiroshima bomb. If he understood the extent of the project before news of the bombing crackled over the radio that day, I’ll never know. He would continue a career in nuclear weapons, as Oak Ridge was enlisted in the feverish race to build bigger and bigger bombs. How much his eventual mental and emotional collapse was fed by guilt, I can only guess. Oak Ridge taught secrecy. George died nearly four years before his daughter-in-law, my mother, held me in a Chicago living room and wept in a state of postpartum despair over the possibility that she had brought a daughter into a world doomed to nuclear annihilation.

Now I am twenty-seven, one year older than George was seventy years ago, and today, I am in Hiroshima.

How do we walk through a landscape that has seen this sort of death?

Here it is bright hot summer, the air so humid I am instantly soaked through. The Peace Park, just blocks from the explosion’s hypocenter, is lush and green and thrumming with cicadas like I’ve never heard. I stand in front of the cenotaph, a stone tomb containing nearly 300,000 names of deceased A-bomb victims, those who died on August 6th and those who’ve died since; one volume is dedicated to, “a multitude of those whose names remain unaccounted for.”

It’s in the shadow of a saddle-shaped arch, which frames the Flame of Peace and the skeletal ruins of the now-iconic A-Bomb Dome behind. I watch as other visitors take turns posing in front of the arch. The gesture strikes me as strange, but I don’t know how to be in this place, either.

More here.

Graham Farmelo in The Guardian:

Leading scientists often talk about science in ways that are patently unscientific. In his new book, the Nobel prizewinning American theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek asks: “Is the world a work of art?” Such a question is surely impossible to consider in scientific terms, using only statements that could be proved to be wrong. Any answer to the question is certain to be merely a matter of opinion. Compared with other branches of science, theoretical physics has produced more than its share of scientific aesthetes, including Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac, who both had the rare experience of producing theories commonly described as beautiful, akin to great works of art. Perhaps it was partly for this reason that these two great scientists took as their lodestar the ill-defined concept of beauty. For Dirac, mathematical beauty was “almost a religion”. I doubt whether Wilczek would go that far, but he is deeply enamoured of the symmetries and harmonies at the heart of nature. A Beautiful Question is the most recent of the books he has written on this theme and in my view it is his best, most likely to appeal to readers who have plenty of curiosity but little or no knowledge of mathematics. (Full disclosure: he contributed to the collection of essays It Must be Beautiful that I edited over a decade ago.)

Wilczek begins with what he calls “a meditation” in ancient Greece. He especially admires Plato, who took a geometric approach to understanding matter and the universe. Although many of these ideas can now look strange to modern eyes, they also appear to be profound, influential and far-sighted. As Wilczek points out, modern theories of the most basic constituents of matter and their most fundamental interactions “are rooted in heightened of symmetry that would surely make Plato smile”. But it is in the sections of the book dealing with modern theories that Wilczek is at his most illuminating. He describes how Einstein brought “a new style into thinking about nature’s fundamental principles” using “beauty, in the form of symmetry”. Almost a century ago, this led him – after an eight-year struggle – to a new understanding of gravity, in terms of the curvature of space-time, in his monumental general theory of relativity.

More here.

Jyoti Madhusoodanan in Nature:

The latest biomedical technologies, from fetal stem cells to human gene editing, offer huge potential for treating disease. They also raise tricky ethical questions that can eventually result in guidelines on how to prevent their misuse. In an opinion piece in The Boston Globe, Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker argues that this sweeping ethical oversight delays innovation and offers little benefit. The article ignited much discussion on social media among bioethicists and researchers. Many disagreed with Pinker, including Daniel Sokol, a London-based bioethicist and lawyer, who wrote in a blog post that ethicists should at times ‘get in the way’. Research to alleviate human suffering is important, he added, but “misguided attempts to help can — and have — led to incalculable harm”. In his article, Pinker wrote that delays caused by bioethical regulations can lead to loss of life because potential treatments are withheld from patients. He added that the future of biotechnologies is so difficult to accurately predict that policies based on these predictions will not effectively reduce risk. “The primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence. Get out of the way.”

Bioethics is not meant to stand in the way of research, Sokol wrote — but the consideration of potential harms cannot be left to researchers alone. “Virtually everyone would, in good faith but quite wrongly, consider their research ethically exemplary,” Sokol wrote. Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University in California, pointed to an example of bioethics doing its job: the 1975 Asilomar conference, at which researchers, lawyers and physicians agreed guidelines on how best to use recombinant DNA technologies. “One might point out that maybe we didn’t have problems with recombinant DNA technologies because of Asilomar,” says Greely. “Some issues are worth thinking about because they could turn into concrete, real risks.”

More here.

Death of the Bookstore
.

“Today,” the eulogist said
to the gathering that stood alongside
the large wooden box which enclosed the store’s remains

now suspended on straps above empty space,
“we commit this venture to the ground
from which all things are formed

of star fabric, and to which we also
will return. This one we loved
joins too many of its siblings

vanishing too young. But as the body
is not the soul, a bookstore
is not a book. What sustains the one

is not the substance of the other.
Let us then take consolation: books
flourished long before this shop

opened, and live on
though we mourn today a familiar presence
dispersed to ash and wind.

Let those who deny the soul, the human urge
to story, the gratitude and pleasure in the mind
as we read and listen,

proclaim that the book, like this shop,
is dead
and the author dead

and the reader likewise.
Every cult is founded on the nonsensical,
and this one’s believers find comfort

in closing their eyes to the word in the world,
as if the deaf were to chant determinedly
There is no sound. Clay tablets,

papyrus, vellum scrolls
all bore the word, but the bound volume
outmatched them. And accompanying the book,

the bookstore—that carries its titles,
as we say: the tangibility, handiness,
capacity to be shared

amid the silence in which the imagination lives
that no electron, with its ephemerality, solipsism,
electric fans and beeps, can equal.

So be of courage, though today
a diminishment saddens us.
We give that which we cherished

to earth as a bulb in autumn
with the sure and certain hope
that after the vagaries of icy winter

a stalk will arise that lifts
petals of cheering color and delight.
In our grief, let us continue to honor

the spirit once housed in this departed
whose like, no matter what reversal or glory might yet be,
we shall never see again.”
.
.
by Tom Wayman
from The Hudson Review
Summer 2015

Chris Suellentrop in The New York Times Magazine:

In keeping with the state motto — ad astra per aspera, or ‘‘to the stars through difficulties’’ — Kansas politics have always been touched with a spirit of the avant-garde and the unorthodox, from popular sovereignty to prohibition and beyond. Today, thanks in large part to Brownback, the state is a petri dish for movement conservatism, a window into how the national Republican Party might govern if the opposition vanished. The 125 legislators of the House of Representatives include 97 Republicans; the Senate has an even greater percentage of Republicans, with only 8 Democrats among the 40 senators. With Brownback as governor, Kansas is in the midst of a self-described economic ‘‘experiment,’’ a project that, whatever you think of its merits, is one of the boldest and most ambitious agendas undertaken by any politician in America. Brownback calls it the ‘‘march to zero,’’ an attempt to wean his state’s government off the revenues of income taxes and to transition to a government that is financed entirely by what he calls consumption taxes — that is, sales taxes and, to a lesser extent, property taxes.

This fervor for budget-cutting is hardly unique to Kansas. At the federal level, the opposition party in the White House has kept the Republican majority in Congress from making much headway. But there are 23 states in the Union controlled entirely by Republicans, from statehouse to governor’s mansion — 24, if you count Nebraska’s technically nonpartisan, unicameral legislature — compared with just six (and Washington, D.C.) on the Democratic side. In these Republican states, the combination of the Great Recession with the anti-Obama elections of 2010 and 2014 has allowed legislators to make deeper cuts to the size and scope of government than has been possible in Washington for decades. In 2012, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, state governments spent $9 billion less than they did the previous year — the first such decline in 50 years. Many of these cuts have fallen on education. In Pennsylvania, for example, Gov. Tom Corbett cut funding for the state’s public universities by 20 percent, a compromise from his original proposal of 50 percent. Last month in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker, backed by Republican majorities in the state House and Senate, cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin system.

As many tax-cutting states have found later on, the party’s deep-seated opposition to tax increases of any kind can make balancing the budget a high-wire act.

More here.

Eric Homberger in The Guardian:

Among the western historians of the Soviet Union, Robert Conquest, who has died aged 98, had a unique place. In 1989-90 his account of the terror of the 1930s was translated and published in a Soviet journal. At the same time, a half-dozen other Soviet journals were publishing translated material from Conquest’s other books. He was not the first to describe the extent and workings of the Stalin tyranny, but he did so in fine detail. He had become, for a broad Russian readership, the man who told the truth about the terror, and Stalin’s murderous tyranny.

The Great Terror (1968) undermined the “official” Soviet story of conspiracy and treason. Conquest placed the murder in 1934 of the Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov, as the key to the mechanism of terror. He returned to this in Stalin and the Kirov Murder (1989), though no smoking-gun evidence has yet been found to confirm Stalin’s role.

Conquest demonstrated that the show trials of old Bolsheviks were the product of faked evidence, torture, blackmail, threats and deceit. He explained in carefully documented detail the mechanism of the arrests, interrogations – the “conveyor” of continuous interrogation, denial of food and sleep, and extreme physical abuse – and the mechanics of the trials.

He was less persuasive explaining why the terror was created, falling back on Stalin’s motivation, his unquenched drive for absolute power. Critics have continued to challenge Conquest’s view, elaborated in Stalin: Breaker of Nations(1991), that in the last analysis the purge depended upon the personal and political drives of Stalin alone. The Great Terror, with revised editions in 1990 and 2007, remains Conquest’s major work, in measure endorsed by the flood of revelations that followed the opening of the Soviet archives in the 90s.

Further studies deepened his account of the terror. Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (1978) and his history of the collectivisation of agriculture, The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), were forensically argued investigations of aspects of Soviet life that had been denied or ignored by myopic western commentators.

More here.

Joanna Scott in The Nation:

In a recent profile in The New York Times Magazine, Toni Morrison was asked about the purpose of fiction. A good story, she said, results in “the acquisition of knowledge.” This is the case that must be made for fiction if the genre is going to survive as an art. Fiction gives us knowledge. Of what? If the goal is to document our time and place, nonfiction and film offer more dependable accuracy. For intimate expressions of the human predicament, there’s poetry. If it’s immediate impact we want, there are the visual arts and music. Who needs fiction that requires readers to work to understand it?

The value of fiction was clear to Virginia Woolf, who argued that nonfiction consists of half-truths and approximations that result in a “very inferior form of fiction.” In Woolf’s terms, reading ambitious fiction isn’t comfortable or easy. Far from it: “To go from one great novelist to another—from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith—is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that.” The illuminations that fiction offers are gained only with considerable effort.

More here.

Kelly Clancy in Nautilus:

You’ve probably heard the myth that the average person uses only 10 percent of their brain. It’s a seductive lie because it suggests that we could be more than we are. Sci-fi movies like Limitless and Lucy, whose protagonists gain super-human abilities by accessing latent mental capacities, have exploited the myth. Neuroscientists, on the other hand, have long loathed it. Eighty years of studies confirm that every part of the brain is active throughout the course of a day. Save those who have suffered serious brain injury, we use all of our brains, all of the time.

But, like many legends, the 10 percent myth also carries a grain of truth. In the last 20 years, scientists have discovered that our cortex follows a strangely familiar pattern: A small minority of neurons output the vast majority of activity. It’s not that we don’t use 90 percent of our brain, but that many neurons remain eerily quiet even during use. The story behind this silence is more profound than the boosted IQs and temporary clairvoyance from the movies. It speaks to the basic principles of how our minds represent reality in the first place.

More here.

Erick Neher in The Hudson Review:

In critical circles, Satyajit Ray is a name held in the same high regard as fellow mid-century Art Cinema titans Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa. But the Indian director and his works have never quite passed into the general consciousness in the manner of his contemporaries. Although his films reliably show up on all-time best lists, especially his landmark “Apu Trilogy,” and especially the first of those films, Pather Panchali, he lingers on the sidelines in the U.S. A major factor in this neglect has been the accessibility and the condition of his films. For decades, the only available projection prints have been of poor quality, and home video issues looked washed out, scratchy, unfocused. Fortunately, the invaluable Criterion Collection has recently undertaken a massive restoration of the three Apu films, and new Digital Cinema Projection (DCP) “prints” are currently traveling across the country and will eventually be used for new Blu-ray and DVD releases. The results of the restoration are sensational; the films probably didn’t look this good on their initial release.

The Apu films are a classic Bildungsroman, following the central character from birth to manhood, through trials and triumphs. Pather Panchali (generally translated as “Song of the Little Road” and first shown in 1955) introduces Apu’s Brahmin family, living in poverty in a tiny Bengali village.

More here.

Sheila Fitzpatrick at The London Review of Books:

The saving grace of the Warsaw Palace, in Hatherley’s eyes, is that, in contrast to the Moscow Seven, it is a ‘social condenser’, a label borrowed from the Moscow avant-garde of the 1920s for public buildings offering citizens a range of activities (including, in the Warsaw case, a multiplex cinema, a swimming pool, a concert hall, museums complete with dinosaurs, an art gallery and cafés) and thus inculcating collective ideology. The pleasures of being socially condensed are left a bit vague, probably because Agata was not much exposed to them as a child, but there are some very likeable riffs about Polish ‘milk bars’ that appear to be public cafeterias (known in Russian as stolovye) where you line up for food and don’t tip. Hatherley and Agata particularly like the one in the Bratislava Trade Union Headquarters, where anyone who walks in can get an enormous three-course meal for about three euros. What Hatherley values, despite the absence of airs and graces, toilets and any encouragement to linger over your food, is ‘that sense of filling, slightly stodgy comfort which features so often in the memories of those who remember “real socialism”’. Perhaps that’s so in Eastern Europe, but I’m not sure it’s how Soviet citizens would remember stolovye. For Russians in late Soviet times, ‘filling, slightly stodgy comfort’ was to be found at home, not in the outside world. Homes, and, for that matter, dachas, are absent from Hatherley’s landscapes of communism. Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was the ‘old apartment’ (the title of a long-running television programme of the 1990s) that was the focus of nostalgia for a lost ‘socialist’ world. Hatherley’s ‘Memorial’ chapter includes Berlin’s curious Museum of the GDR on the Spree, presenting consumer goods of the 1970s and 1980s in a spirit combining Ostalgie and condescension, but not the nostalgia-infused old apartment museums that sprang up in some Russian provincial towns.

more here.

Robert Anthony Siegel at The Paris Review:

“Imagine you lost everything that really mattered to you, and then you had a dream, and in that dream you found out that you never really lost it, because it can’t be taken away from you. That’s how Vermeer makes me feel.”

The poet Michael White was trying to explain to me his obsession with Johannes Vermeer—with his psychologically charged interiors and enigmatic female figures. Michael’s fascination arose from a chance encounter with the artist’s work in Amsterdam, where he had gone to distract himself from a divorce so destructive that it had left him deeply depressed, feeling as if he would live out the rest of his life alone.

Though I was working with him at a university in North Carolina, I didn’t know him well enough at the time to understand the emotional hardship he was going through—or that his experience in the Rijksmuseum with Vermeer’s quietly ambiguous images had led him to travel the world on a quest to see every one of the master’s paintings. In fact, none of that was clear to me until I read his new memoir, Travels in Vermeer, a book that’s part travelogue, part meditation on the meaning of art.

more here.

Power
.
this is how we dress
power:
with whistles and muskets and gunpowder
from outriders
flashing lights
smoked glass windows
motorcades
titles
minus handshakes
minus smiles
minus sorrow.
we dress power
like a pestilence.

by Chenjerai Hove
from Rainbows in the Dust
Baobab Books, Harare

Justin E. H. Smith in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

An honest list of execution devices and methods would include the electric chair, the gas chamber, and the guillotine, but also the brazen bull, drawing and quartering, and suffocation by elephant. The latter were devised to maximize the anguish of the victim, and to elevate the experience of onlookers to the level of sublime spectacle. Edmund Burke had some decades before the French Revolution speculated that typical European theatergoers, in the middle of a gripping tragedy, would, upon hearing of a public execution taking place outside, immediately abandon their tragedians to get a glimpse of the real thing. Human beings are gawkers, particularly at the suffering of others. And yet just as Burke was writing, a transformation was taking place in the way capital punishment was carried out in Europe: It migrated from public squares to prisons, out of sight of ordinary citizens. This migration was part of a broader shift in society’s tolerance for open cruelty; the same era also saw the retreat of animal butchery from open-air markets to the closed space of the abattoir.

Discretion suits our need to think of ourselves as having overcome the cruelty of our ancestors. Yet it is also in tension with the ideal of transparency. Among the few liberal democracies that still make use of the death penalty, there is a basic and likely irresolvable conflict between the modern rejection of death as spectacle and the equally modern imperative for popular oversight of the things a state does in the name of its citizens.

We are witnessing a resurgence of forms of violence that strike us as terribly unmodern, such as ceremonialized beheadings and stonings, often for crimes that can count as crimes only to the extent that a closed community works itself into a fuss about them: apostasy, adultery, and so on. There has also, of course, been an apparent resurgence of nonstate political violence targeting civilians over the past few decades — “terrorism,” we call it, in unconscious allusion to the revolutionary bloodshed in France in the wake of 1789.

More here.