Mehdi Hasan in New Statesman:

In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime – not an act of war – perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004. Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t). Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif’” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted? . . . Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?

More here.

Andrew Bisharat in National Geographic:

Expect Nothing

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
.

by Alice Walker

Another take on
expecting nothing

Ali Minai in Brown Pundits:

As with most organized religions, the foundational texts and beliefs of Islam can support both peaceful versions and violent ones. Until people recognize and admit that all of these are, in fact, “real Islam”, the issues underlying the problem of jihadi militancy cannot be addressed. If the violence is “not real Islam”, the implication is that Islam – as practiced by most Muslims – needs no reform. But that is manifestly not the case. The scourge of violence in the name of Islam will be removed only when Muslims in general come to reject all instances of violence in the name of Islam, including those that are celebrated in scripture and history. When conquerors who killed “infidels” are regarded as heroes of the faith; when the world is seen as divided into the “house of Islam” and the “house of war”; when dying for God is considered better than living for the sake of fellow humans; when non-Muslims are regarded as morally inferior; when many standard prayers end by asking God for “victory against the infidels”; and when apostasy and blasphemy are regarded as capital crimes – how can jihadi violence be seen as anything but the logical conclusion of such ideas and practices? And yet, these are all part of “mainstream” Islam – some of them derived directly from holy texts. What the extremists are doing is merely taking these ideas more literally and acting on them. The main thing separating most ordinary believing Muslims from the extremists is not so much the narrowness of belief – which they both share – but the willingness to match that belief with action. Small wonder, then, that the militants see non-violent Muslims as hypocrites, which in many ways is worse than being an infidel.

More here.

Kashalkar’s performance was dedicated to jod ragas, a particularly challenging melodic form. When singing a jod raga, the musician must fully elaborate two conjoined ragas—the complex melodic modes at the centre of Indian classical music. Each raga evokes a range of moods, and in a jod raga, the musician moves from one to the other only through their common swaras, or notes, attempting to keep the ambience of each distinct. Even while presenting a single raga, the singer faces the challenge of sustaining an emotional intensity, so that the rendition does not lapse into dry, mechanical exercise.

more here.

Patrick Duffy at The Dublin Review of Books:

The passenger pigeon (Ecotopistes migratorius), so-called because of its wandering, unpredictable migratory behaviour, ranged in enormous flocks from Canada to Florida, probably accounting for more than a quarter of all birds in North America. As a metaphor for the environmental impact of colonial settlement in the sixteenth, and population explosion in the nineteenth century, its extinction has many lessons. When European settlers made first contact with North America, they encountered an environment teeming with wildlife of incredible abundance. The awesomeness of American nature in the eyes of travellers from the Old World is well represented in accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Even before permanent settlement, the vast codfish shoals off Newfoundland were well-known to Europeans. By the 1630s French missionaries in Quebec were talking about une infinité de Tourtelles (turtle doves), feeding on wild raspberries, strawberries, acorns, grapes and the seeds of the forest – oak acorns, beech mast, red maple and American elm seeds, hazel and alder. The core range of the wild pigeon corresponded with the eastern and southern deciduous trees, and ultimately its fate was bound up with the fate of the forests.

more here.

Roxana Robinson at The Nation:

Marilynne Robinson’s novels are beautifully rendered works of realism, which is perhaps our most distinguished literary genre. They are intellectually complex and emotionally compelling. Miraculously, they also manage to be accessible, popular and commercially successful. So in many ways Robinson is a mainstream author, but in others she is in direct opposition to the traditions of Anglo-American literature.

Despite our various personal and political commitments to religion, when it comes to literature we have become a decidedly secular nation. The presence of religious doctrine, or Scripture, or theology, in mainstream fiction is scant. Religion seems directly at variance with the skeptical, rational, pragmatic realism that dominates our literary tradition. Whatever question the novel poses, God is not the answer.

In Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay muses, with conventional piety, “We are in the hands of the Lord. But instantly she was annoyed with herself…she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean…. The insincerity…roused her, annoyed her.” Now she wants to purify that lie “out of existence” and goes on to think, “How could any Lord have made this world?… there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that.” Mrs. Ramsay’s calm pronouncement affirms that it is possible to love the world, and the people in it, without a belief in God.

How would religion enter into fiction anyway?

more here.

Michelle Starr in CNet:

It's commonly accepted that life expectancy in the Middle Ages was pretty low, hovering around the early 30s — mainly because of the hazards of childhood. If a person made it to adulthood, the average was in the 60s — but, although that's comparable with today's global life expectancy, the world was still a much more dangerous — and openly vicious — place. It wasn't, for example, unusual for popes and kings to be assassinated.

Take Cangrande I della Scala. Born in 1291, he rose to rule Verona in 1311 at the age of 20, and was a skilled warrior and ruler, claiming several additional territories for his family's rule. He was also the most prominent patron of poet Dante Alighieri, and was considered a brave, yet merciful man.

In the year 1328, at the age of 37, he took possession of the Padua region, after 16 years of bloody conflict. In 1329, he prepared to move on Mantua, formerly the seat of a trusted ally with whom he had become estranged, but postponed the action due to a change of government at Treviso, a territory long contested and the last slice of the Veneto region to fall into his control.

But his triumphal procession into Treviso was spoiled by a sudden, sharp illness. Rumour had it that Cangrande had become ill after drinking from a polluted spring a few days before. The most powerful man in Verona's history reached his lodgings four days after entering Treviso, took to bed and promptly died on 22 July 1329, at the age of 38. Immediately, rumours proliferated that someone had poisoned the nobleman.

Now, a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science has revealed that the rumoured poisoning was actually the case.

More here.

David Blair in The Telegraph:

Qatar and Saudi Arabia have ignited a “time bomb” by funding the global spread of radical Islam, according to a former commander of British forces in Iraq.

General Jonathan Shaw, who retired as Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff in 2012, told The Telegraph that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were primarily responsible for the rise of the extremist Islam that inspires Isil terrorists.

The two Gulf states have spent billions of dollars on promoting a militant and proselytising interpretation of their faith derived from Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth century scholar, and based on the Salaf, or the original followers of the Prophet.

But the rulers of both countries are now more threatened by their creation than Britain or America, argued Gen Shaw. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) has vowed to topple the Qatari and Saudi regimes, viewing both as corrupt outposts of decadence and sin.

So Qatar and Saudi Arabia have every reason to lead an ideological struggle against Isil, said Gen Shaw. On its own, he added, the West's military offensive against the terrorist movement was likely to prove “futile”.

“This is a time bomb that, under the guise of education, Wahhabi Salafism is igniting under the world really. And it is funded by Saudi and Qatari money and that must stop,” said Gen Shaw. “And the question then is 'does bombing people over there really tackle that?' I don't think so. I'd far rather see a much stronger handle on the ideological battle rather than the physical battle.”

More here.

Chrissie Giles in mosaic:

“She kept saying to me, ‘It’s going to be fine, isn’t it?’ And I’m saying, ‘We’ll do everything we can, let’s just do a few tests and figure out what’s going on.’ At that stage in my mind, I knew it was bad, but I still had to figure out exactly what flavour of bad it was.”

The woman was anxious to be home on New Year’s Eve to make a call to family overseas. But blood tests confirmed that she’d need to stay.

“She said to me, ‘Tell me the worst-case scenario.’ I looked at her. She looked at me. And in my mind I was thinking, ‘She’s not ready for this diagnosis.’ Then her relative stepped in and she said, ‘No, no, she means what’s the worst-case scenario in terms of how long does she have to stay in hospital?’

“At that moment, you realise that we all know exactly what we’re talking about, but we’re all accepting it to different degrees.”

Read the full piece here.

Stephanie Barbe Hammer in The Nervous Breakdown:

For Alan Dann

A woman came up to me in Bloomingdales and said she liked my glasses and I told her where to get them and she said, “what do you think I am — a millionaire?” and stomped off.

A woman came up to me in grad school and said she wished she was as smart as I was and I told her where to find the good theory books at the library and she said “what do you think I am — stupid or something?” and threw down her copy of Derrida’s On Grammatology and stomped off.

A woman came up to me in the airport in Montpellier and said “Ce livre — De La Grammatologie par Derrida – c’est à vous?” and I told her I had picked it up off the ground in North Carolina, and the woman said “Quoi? Vous êtes un connard Americain?” and lit a Gauloise and stomped off.

A woman came up to me in the hospital and said “this is your baby,” and I took the baby, but she said, “I can tell already you’re a terrible mother,” and threw the baby blankets at my husband and stomped off.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

McGill University researchers have identified a network of neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex of the brain that interact with one another to enable us to quickly filter visual information while ignoring distractions. The discovery could have far-reaching implications for people who suffer from diseases such as autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia and for brain-mind interface devices. Our ability to pay attention to certain things while ignoring distractions determines how good we are at a given task, whether it is driving a car or doing brain surgery.

Predicting where a monkey will look next

The researchers recorded brain activity in macaque monkeys as they moved their eyes to look at objects being displayed on a computer screen while ignoring visual distractions. These recorded signals were then input into a decoder (running on a computer) that mimicked the kinds of computations performed by the brain as it focuses. There were some startling results. “The decoder was able to predict very consistently and within a few milliseconds where the macaques were covertly focusing attention even before they looked in that direction,” says Julio Martinez-Trujillo, of McGill’s Department of Physiology and the lead author of the paper. “We were also able to predict whether the monkey would be distracted by some intrusive stimulus even before the onset of that distraction.”

More here.

Mujib Mashal in Bloomberg Businessweek:

In a few minutes we reach the compound of the 1st Battalion 9th Marines—“The Walking Dead,” as a yellow logo proclaims inside one of its rooms. The U.S. Marines packed up a year ago, and all that’s left is a series of shipping-container offices that once housed U.S. Agency for International Development contractors. The desks and furniture are locked inside; the windows are covered in dust and cobwebs. But when the Marines ruled Nawa—the district governor’s office was within their compound—the Americans started Matie on his road to prosperity. In the U.S., wartime contracting is often associated with such names as Blackwater (now known as Academi), DynCorp International, Triple Canopy, and others, but on the ground in Afghanistan, the Pentagon depended on a small army of locals. And as hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money poured into the country, it created a new class of wealthy, entrepreneurial Afghans.

The October 2001 U.S.-led invasion and the subsequent allied military campaigns transformed the country. At the end of 2014, however, as the American troop presence draws down to 10,000 from a height of 98,000, it’s becoming clear that the U.S. dollar has reshaped Afghanistan even more than the military did. In private, U.S. officials admit they don’t know how much they’ve spent on the Afghan war. Independent analysts estimate its cost at about $1.6 trillion—factoring in inflation and long-term care for veterans. The money found its way not just into the hands of ruthless oligarchs, as in post-Soviet Russia, but also into those of teachers, translators, restaurant owners, and drivers who tapped into the gusher of cash to become millionaires and multimillionaires.

Read the rest here.

Philip Ball in Nautilus:

Is the natural world creative? Just take a look around it. Look at the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the diverse pattern and shape of leaves, the cunning stratagems of microbes, the dazzling profusion of climbing, crawling, flying, swimming things. Look at the “grandeur” of life, the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin put it. Isn’t that enough to persuade you?

Ah, but isn’t all this wonder simply the product of the blind fumbling of Darwinian evolution, that mindless machine which takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection? Well, not quite. You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive. “Darwin’s theory surely is the most important intellectual achievement of his time, perhaps of all time,” says evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner of the University of Zurich. “But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded his theory. And he couldn’t even get close to solving it.”

What Wagner is talking about is how evolution innovates: as he puts it, “how the living world creates.” Natural selection supplies an incredibly powerful way of pruning variation into effective solutions to the challenges of the environment. But it can’t explain where all that variation came from. As the biologist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1905, “natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.” Over the past several years, Wagner and a handful of others have been starting to understand the origins of evolutionary innovation. Thanks to their findings so far, we can now see not only how Darwinian evolution works but why it works: what makes it possible.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

By the end of the day yesterday, “I think, therefore I am,” alongside “Je suis Charlie,” had become one of the central slogans of the mass demonstrations, in Paris and around France, against the murder of the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo. For me this phrase has long been banalized by misappropriation (“I windsurf, therefore I am,” &c.), and routinized by its occurrence in a pedagogical setting: at least once every year for the past fifteen years I have attempted to explain to classes full of undergraduates what it means, and what it does not mean.

Yesterday, however, when I saw the phrase in its original Latin on a placard at the Place de la République, it suddenly came to life for me again. In a flash I was reminded of the full profundity of what René Descartes had meant to say in his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy. I also understood, as if suddenly, why this slogan had become so politically important in the current moment in France, and how, perhaps, it fails to capture what is truly at stake.

The French philosopher means to establish, in the second of his six Meditations, that thought is an indubitable indicator, indeed the only indubitable indicator, of his own existence as a metaphysical subject. No evil genius, however powerful, could possibly convince you that you exist, when in fact you don't exist, if you are able to think about the question of your own existence. Descartes proceeds to give a short list of various forms of thinking or cogitation (the Latin term is cogitatio): doubting, affirming, willing, denying, and so on. Even if you are simply doubting your own existence, it follows of necessity that you exist, since doubting is a form of thinking.

More here.

Jonathan Meades at Literary Review:

Ian Nairn famously made his name with an edition of the Architectural Review entitled 'Outrage', a noisy jeremiad against the uniformity, insipidity and imaginative bereavement of the suburbs he encountered on a long, dispiriting drive from Southampton to Carlisle.

That was in 1955. The date is significant. Building licences had been lifted only a few months previously. Materials were in short supply. Rationing, officially abolished the previous year, continued in effect. Construction was in the doldrums. Britain was not yet being remade. Architects were waiting to be called on. Nairn was only twenty-four years old. His widely disseminated vituperation against what he called 'subtopia' (essentially dull sprawl and characterless terrains vagues) was matched by a touchingly naive faith in the curative power of architecture, a faith that is perhaps easily professed when architecture remains on the page or a matter for discussion. It was a faith he was to lose. He felt betrayed by the men of clay in bow ties. In early 1966 he published a two-page article in The Observer entitled 'Stop the Architects Now'. Architects, he contended, more often than not delivered a 'soggy, shoddy mass of half-digested clichés' (plus ça change).

This prompted a number of enjoyably bitter ad hominem attacks from, inter alia, the old fool Lionel Esher (president of the Royal Institute of British Architects), the apparently rather dense editor of Architects' Journal and countless affronted dunces demanding they be told what 'qualifications' Nairn held to mete out such sweeping condemnation.

more here.

Abby Scher at Dissent:

The first thing you notice about Reading, Pennsylvania, the small city that lies an hour and a half north of Philadelphia, is its many parks and muscular civic buildings. Mount Penn anchors the east of the city with a steeply landscaped park and a historic district of graceful homes. The Blue Mountains rise in the distance.

“This is all WPA [the federal building program during the Great Depression] and the Socialists,” says Bill Vitale, an architect who serves as chair of the Mayor’s Sustainability Committee, waving his hand at the park’s greenery. Reading was one of those rare cities, like Milwaukee, whose working-class voters regularly elected socialists to represent them both in the statehouse and in the mayor’s offices from 1910 to the mid-1940s. In Reading, the Socialists were the good-government party, and their administrations extended and modernized the sewer system, built playgrounds, and turned private-sector jobs into better-paying municipal ones.

Before I arrived, civic leaders warned me that because of its good bones, I wouldn’t be able to tell at first glance that Reading was under Act 47, the Pennsylvania law governing municipal bankruptcy, or that it is one of the poorest cities of its size in the nation. Just over 39 percent of its 88,000 residents lived in poverty in 2013. Many of them are the working poor: Reading’s unemployment rate in the summer of 2014 was about 6 percent.

more here.

Jonathan Clarke at The Millions:

In 1943, Dwight MacDonald, one of the co-founders of the literary journal Partisan Review, lost an internal power struggle over its editorial direction and left to found a new magazine, Politics, that better suited his vision. The reasons for MacDonald’s split with the other PR founders, Phillip Rahv and William Phillips, are complex and have been examined at length elsewhere, but in principle they involved both a difference of opinion regarding the participation of the United States in the war against Germany and Japan (which MacDonald opposed) and the question of whetherPartisan Review would be principally a journal of leftist politics (as MacDonald wished) or one equally committed to independent-minded literary and cultural criticism. After MacDonald’s departure, Partisan Review did not abandon politics, but it remained known as a journal open to distinguished work even from those who differed from the editors ideologically. Before finally closing in 2003, PR would go on to publish criticism — by fellow travelers (Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin) and ideological enemies (Saul Bellow, Robert Penn Warren) alike — that set a standard that other journals of opinion still strive to match.

Ancient squabbles at a now-defunct literary magazine, involving a good deal of now dated Marxist cant, are not inherently very interesting. But the Partisan Review, both in its high editorial standards and in its struggles to resolve inherent tensions between the domains of politics and art, continues to be a point of reference in our literary culture. The founders of n + 1 have cited PR as an example, even as they have produced a journal with a hipper, more contemporary voice; several of the core PR critics, including Lionel Trilling, remain culture heroes; and New York Times critic A.O. Scott maintains what amounts almost to an obsession with PR, citing its writers in his work, contributing an admiring introduction to a collection of essays by another PR stalwart, Mary McCarthy, and undertaking a book project surveying the American novel since World War II that seems consciously to invoke Kazin’s landmark study of the preceding period, On Native Grounds.

more here.