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

Manu Pillai in The Caravan:

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

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

More here.

Beverly S. Stohl in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

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

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

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

More here.

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

Joshua Batson in Hypocrite Reader:

An atlas of squares assembles into a cube.

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

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

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

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

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

More here.

Jamelle Bouie in Slate:

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

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

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

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

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

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

More here.

Phoebe Boswell. Marama, The Maulidi Series, 2014.

Charcoal drawing.

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

Natasha Lennard and Brad Evans in The NYT's The Stone:

Natasha Lennard: The premise of your book “Disposable Futures” is that “violence is ubiquitous” in the media today. There seems to be plenty of evidence to support this claim — just look at the home page of this news site for a start. But the media has always been interested in violence — “if it bleeds, it leads” isn’t exactly new. And the notion that there is just more violence in the world today — more violent material for the media to cover — doesn’t seem tenable. So what do you think is specific about the ubiquity of violence today, and the way it is mediated?

Brad Evans: It is certainly right to suggest the connections between violence and media communications have been a recurring feature of human relations. We only need to open the first pages of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” to witness tales of victory in battle and its communicative strategies — on this occasion the medium of communication was the burning beacon. But there are a number of ways in which violence is different today, in terms of its logics intended, forced witnessing and ubiquitous nature.

We certainly seem to be entering into a new moment, where the encounter with violence (real or imagined) is becoming more ubiquitous and its presence ever felt. Certainly this has something to do with our awareness of global tragedies as technologies redefine our exposure to such catastrophic events. But it also has to do with the raw realities of violence and people’s genuine sense of insecurity, which, even if it is manufactured or illusionary, feels no less real.

One of the key arguments I make throughout my work is that violence has now become the defining organizational principle for contemporary societies. It mediates all social relations. It matters less if we are actual victims of violence. It is the possibility that we could face some form of violent encounter, which shapes the logics of power in liberal societies today. Our political imagination as such has become dominated by multiple potential catastrophes that appear on the horizon. The closing of the entire Los Angeles city school system after a reported terrorist threat yesterday is an unsettling reminder of this. From terror to weather and everything in between, insecurity has become the new normal. We see this played out at global and local levels, as the effective blurring between older notions of homeland/battlefields, friends/enemies and peace/war has led to the widespread militarization of many everyday behaviors — especially in communities of color.

More here.

Dinaw Mengestu in Guernica:

Growing up, we had strange bedtime rituals. In Peoria, Illinois, when my sister and I were very young, my father would sit between our beds and tell us stories of animals who fought, lied, and cheated their way through the jungle world he invented for us. There were dense forests, green hills, and rivers. There were lions, crocodiles, zebras, giraffes, and laughing hyenas, which my father, in his raspy scarred voice, would imitate. The heroes of the stories were always two mischievous monkeys who could cheat all the other animals who, while taller, stronger, and more ferocious than them, lacked their wit. In the end the monkeys always found refuge at the top of the tallest trees—a vantage point from which, in retrospect, they would have had a clear view of all the havoc they had caused.

As a child, I didn’t think of the stories as being particularly related to Ethiopia, or, on a broader scale, Africa. I didn’t think about where this landscape, with trees that, according to my father, were larger than anything I could imagine, came from, or what these animals, whom my father spoke of as if real intimates, were doing in the crowded and deeply divided bedroom my sister and I shared. They were ordinary fictions, bedtime tales invented wholesale each night, sprung effortlessly from my father’s mind like a long, deep breath. And so there he is, in both memory and imagination, straddling the narrow space between our beds with these stories that my sister and I were both desperate to hear, clueless as to how far they had traveled to wash up, as if by accident, in Middle America.

My father, of course, eventually stopped with the stories. He might have done so because we no longer asked him to tell us them, or because we were old enough to read on our own, or because it was the mid-1980s, and Caterpillar, where my father worked, was going through a round of layoffs that would bankrupt my parents’ plans of buying their first home. Or perhaps he stopped because suddenly, everywhere we turned, Ethiopia, or one tragic version of it, was staring back at us.

More here.

Brittany Patterson in Scientific American:

Bacon lovers of the world, rejoice! Or at the least take solace that your beloved pork belly may be better for the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than the lettuce that accompanies it on the classic BLT.

This is according to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who found that if Americans were to switch their diets to fall in line with the Agriculture Department's 2010 dietary recommendations, it would result in a 38 percent increase in energy use, 10 percent bump in water use and a 6 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

The reason for this is because on a per-calorie basis, many fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood—the foods the USDA pushes in the guidelines over sugary processed food and fats—are relatively resource-intensive, the study finds. Lettuce, for example, produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than bacon.

“You cannot just jump and assume that any vegetarian diet is going to have a low impact on the environment,” said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decision sciences and engineering and public policy and one of the authors of the study. “There are many that do, but not all. You can't treat all fruits and veggies as good for the environment.”

The researchers conducted a meta-analysis of life-cycle assessments quantifying the water, energy use and emissions for more than 100 foods. They found fruits have the largest water and energy footprint per calorie. Meat and seafood have the highest greenhouse gas emissions per calorie.

More here.

McKenzie Wark in Berfrois:

“I’m not proof of myself, myths are.” We are made of myths, among other things. They seem like they are personal, but myths are not really personal. They are pervasive, invasive. “The Wizard of Oz is on TV after I spend the entire day singing ‘If I only had a brain’ to myself.” Myths are a technology, produced and circulated by other technologies.

Whether voiced in the first, second or third person, I take the stories that Masha Tupitsyn tells about her person to be selectively true. As in Chris Kraus, they are neither entirely confessional nor fictional. They are in part a personal mythology, but they are also accounts of the techniques via which the myth of the self gets made out of situations, using bits and pieces, faces and voices, clipped and mixed from the media of a time. Our hearts and brains are transplants, but no less ours for all that. It’s a question of what one makes of it.

There are two places that figure in her origin stories: New York City as a place of everyday life; and summering in Provincetown, which is the site of a kind of utopian experience, another city for another life. Later, there will be other places: London, Rome, Berlin, the California coast. “Your fantasy has always been to run away. To a faraway place, into a book and into love with just one person.” The lost utopian moment never quite returns. The gap between its memory and the possibilities of loving and thinking, here and now, animates a certain critical energy.

This Provincetown of memory is a place of oceanic freedom. Going to the movies, sometimes with her mother, sometimes alone. The resource that is cinema, for the young: “Everyone thinks desire is make believe when it comes to famous people and movies. In that case, you can go all the way. Go for it.” Young Masha rides her bike around everywhere, with a headphone sound track, cruising with a kind of tomboy autonomy. “I was being the kind of boy I wanted boys to be with me.” This Provincetown is a place of wonder and growth, of being and letting be. It’s a place of being understood but alone.

More here.

Doug Ahler and David Broockman in The Monkey Cage:

Donald Trump is one of the most extreme presidential candidates to gain widespread support in contemporary American politics. Despite championing policies like the end of birthright citizenship, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and a registry of Muslims living in the United States, Trump has consistently polled atop the Republican field since July. A popular perspective thus attributes Trump’s success to a “right wing fringe” of GOP voters.

But this conventional wisdom misses something important: Trump meets the textbook definition of an ideological moderate.

Trump has the exact “moderate” qualities that many pundits and political reformers yearn for in politicians: Many of Trump’s positions spurn party orthodoxy, yet are popular among voters. And like most voters — but unlike most party politicians — his positions don’t consistently hew to a familiar left-right philosophy.

At Tuesday night’s debate, for example, Trump flanked the Republican party on the right and left — calling for killing civilians and saying the Iraq war was a mistake because it diverted money from domestic spending priorities. CrowdPAC thus lists Trump as far more moderate than the other Republican candidates.

How can Trump be both a moderate and an extremist? Our research has shown why support for extreme policies and so-called “ideological moderation” often go together — people who appear “moderate” on a left-right ideological spectrum often have extreme views on individual issues.

Here’s how this works: Measures of voters’ left-right “ideology” primarily capture the frequency with which their opinions fall on the liberal or conservative side on different issues. Many Americans’ policy opinions are mixed bags of liberal and conservative positions, earning them the distinction of being called “ideological moderates.” Just like Trump.

But, as Trump shows, holding ideologically mixed positions across issues, which political scientists call “ideological moderation,” doesn’t guarantee that those individual policy views are moderate at all.

More here.

John Mullan New Statesman:

Letter writing was an important part of Iris Murdoch’s life. Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, admiring and conscientious editors of this large selection of her letters, tell us that “she would spend up to four hours a day on her correspondence”. She took pride in her abilities as a letter writer. “I have in fact only once corresponded with anyone . . . who was as good at writing letters as I am,” she told the philosopher Philippa Foot, who was her correspondent for half a century. Readers who dip into this large volume might be puzzled by the self-estimation. The brilliant thinker, witty conversationalist and powerfully idiosyncratic novelist are hardly here at all.

Murdoch moans about having to write philosophy lectures or prepare academic papers but there is hardly any philosophical rumination. She warmly praises the books she is sent by friends, but otherwise there is very little about what she reads or thinks. The only work of fiction she discusses in any detail is Watership Down (“the bunnies that I love”). The earnest PhD student researching Murdoch will have a tough job extracting anything about her literary intentions or intellectual development. She travels the world but, apart from when she finds herself surprisingly intoxicated by first Australia and then California, she invariably sounds as though she is somewhere near Oxford. She meets interesting and important people but they hardly get into the letters.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Kathinka Evers in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: In your view there are two types of neuroethics: fundamental and applied neuroethics and that the ‘fundamental’ aspect has been unrepresented in the field. Is your thought here that if the fundamental aspect isn’t worked out the applied aspect won’t be able to fully work?

KE: Yes. So far, researchers in neuroethics have focused mainly on the ethics of neuroscience, or applied neuroethics, such as ethical issues involved in neuroimaging techniques, cognitive enhancement, or neuropharmacology. Another important, though as yet less prevalent, scientific approach that I refer to as fundamental neuroethics questions how knowledge of the brain’s functional architecture and its evolution can deepen our understanding of personal identity, consciousness and intentionality, including the development of moral thought and judgment. Fundamental neuroethics should provide adequate theoretical foundations required in order properly to address problems of applications.

The initial question for fundamental neuroethics to answer is: how can natural science deepen our understanding of moral thought? Indeed, is the former at all relevant for the latter? One can see this as a sub-question of the question whether human consciousness can be understood in biological terms, moral thought being a subset of thought in general. That is certainly not a new query, but a version of the classical mind-body problem that has been discussed for millennia and in quite modern terms from the French Enlightenment and onwards. What is comparatively new is the realisation of the extent to which ancient philosophical problems emerge in the rapidly advancing neurosciences, such as whether or not the human species as such possesses a free will, what it means to have personal responsibility, to be a self, the relations between emotions and cognition, or between emotions and memory.

Observe that neuroscience does not merely suggest areas for interesting applications of ethical reasoning, or call for assistance in solving problems arising from scientific discoveries, as scientists of diverse disciplines have long done, and been welcome to do. Neuroscience also purports to offer scientific explanations of important aspects of moral thought and judgment, which is more controversial in some quarters. However, whilst the understanding of ethics as a social phenomenon is primarily a matter of understanding cultural and social mechanisms, it is becoming increasingly apparent that knowledge of the brain is also relevant in the context. Progress in neuroscience; notably, on the dynamic functions of neural networks, can deepen our understanding of decision-making, choice, acquisition of character and temperament, and the development of moral dispositions.

More here.

Ivan Hewett in The Telegraph:

Ask anyone to name the archetypal genius, and chances are it will be Ludwig van Beethoven. This is hardly surprising, as Beethoven largely created the image of what genius should be. When he was young, he was compared to Mozart; when he was old, to Shakespeare. His music could be loftily spiritual, blazingly dramatic, sweetly domestic, suavely aristocratic and rudely demotic, often within the space of a single work. It embraced much of music’s past, and even foreshadowed the future. What other composer born in the 18th century looked back to Palestrina and anticipated Chopin, Schumann, Wagner and even boogie-woogie? A giant reach, combined with common humanity: this is what Beethoven shares with other candidates for the title of “exemplary genius”. Then there are those qualities that mark him out as special: his determination to strike out on new paths, whatever the professional cost (as Roland Barthes put it, “Beethoven won for artists the right to reinvent themselves”). His scorn of high-born patrons, however much they revered him. His difficulties in love, which pointed to the impossibility of genius ever finding a true soulmate. His dreadful catalogue of illnesses, which he bore with stoic fortitude. Above all, his deafness. As a symbol of the tragic and tormented creator, it’s almost too perfect. Such a figure was bound to be mythologised, a process that started even before his death. We know now that Beethoven’s factotum Anton Schindler made things up in his memoirs. The earliest biographers and critics such as E  T  A Hoffmann vied with each other in hymning the world-changing nature of Beethoven’s music. Once he’d been lifted into the realm of myth, Beethoven could be remade to suit each new world view. For romantics he was the arch-romantic; for communists he was the great revolutionary artist; for modernists he was the great radical. More recent critics have tried to cut Beethoven down to near-human size, by revealing the mythmaking process at work.

Tia DeNora in her Beethoven and the Construction of Genius went further. She argued that Beethoven’s pre-eminence was due to the scheming of certain Viennese aristocrats, who “created” Beethoven to demonstrate the cultural superiority of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

More here.

Camille Paglia in Hollywood Reporter:

The entertainment industry has seen feminist spurts come and go. Helen Reddy's 1972 smash hit “I Am Woman” became the worldwide anthem of second-wave feminism. In 1985, Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox did the slamming duet “Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves.” The Spice Girls encapsulated sex-positive third-wave feminism with their 1997 manifesto Girl Power! Performing at the 2014 Video Music Awards, Beyonce flashed “FEMINIST” in giant letters behind her, but questions were raised about the appropriation of that word by a superstar whose career has always been managed by others, first her parents and now her domineering husband, Jay Z. With gender issues like pay equity for women actors and writers coming increasingly to the fore, girl squads can be seen as a positive step toward expanding female power in Hollywood, where ownership has been overwhelm­ingly male since the silent film era. For all its dictatorial overcontrol, however, the early studio system also provided paternalistic protection and nurturance for young women under contract. Marilyn Monroe was a tragic victim of the slow breakdown of that system: The studio made her, but in the end it could not save her from callous predators, including the Kennedys.

Young women performers are now at the mercy of a swarming, intrusive paparazzi culture, intensified by the hypersexualization of our flesh-baring fashions. The girl squad phenomenon has certainly been magnified by how isolated and exposed young women feel in negotiating the piranha shoals of the industry. A dramatic example of their vulnerability was the long-lens pap photo of Swift sitting painfully sad and prim on a Virgin Islands taxi boat after her tumultuous 2013 holiday breakup with pop star Harry Styles. Given the professional stakes, girl squads must not slide into a cozy, cliquish retreat from romantic fiascoes or communication problems with men, whom feminist rhetoric too often rashly stereotypes as oafish pigs. If many women feel lonely or overwhelmed these days, it's not due to male malice. Women have lost the natural solidarity and companionship they enjoyed for thousands of years in the preindustrial agrarian world, where multiple generations chatted through the day as they shared chores, cooking and child care. In our wide-open modern era of independent careers, girl squads can help women advance if they avoid presenting a silly, regressive public image — as in the tittering, tongues-out mugging of Swift's bear-hugging posse. Swift herself should retire that obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine of wheeling out friends and celebrities as performance props, an exhibitionistic overkill that Lara Marie Schoenhals brilliantly parodied in her scathing viral video “Please Welcome to the Stage.”

More here.

Recursive

More neurons
in the brain

than stars
in the Milky Way—

some structure,
however tentative—

and the fact
of other forms

doesn’t fail to
astound me

so much as
it renders me

speechless,
the lawful world

incomprehensible,
the arbitrary world

consumed by lapses—
coffee and oranges

in an office lonely
as a picture occurs—

your hand on a book—
and in this body

more transactional
than animal

the day goes by—
quite by—
.

by Shannon Tharp
from Ecotheo Review, 1/23/2015

Julie Lythcott-Haims in Quartz:

In Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, our adolescents kill themselves at four to five times the national average. The majority of the children who have taken their own lives have put themselves in the path of the CalTrain whose tracks cut through the very center of town. But their deaths only temporarily halt our community’s forward momentum.

As both a Palo Alto parent and a former Stanford dean, I believe it’s time for Silicon Valley to confront a heartbreaking paradox. We’ve sown a set of educational, technological, and economic opportunities that are meant to shape a brighter future for our own children, our nation, and the world. Yet growing up here can make our kids feel hopeless and helpless about whether they actually have any chance of attaining the grand futures we have in mind.

In theory, parents want to know what’s going on. But when The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin published a thoughtful, in-depth analysis after coming to town to interview teenagers, educators, clinicians, and families, the outrage over her article rivaled the outcry that followed our most recent spate of suicides.

How dare this “stranger” try to tell us about our own community, people complained in emails and social media posts. How dare she suggest that our problem is not simply severely depressed kids who didn’t get the help they needed because of a lack of resources and social stigma?

More here.

Olivier Roy's take from a conference organised by the German federal police (via Kenan Malik):

9) The religious dimension.

The revolt is expressed in religious terms for two reasons:

– Most of the radicals have a Muslim background, which makes them open to a process of re-islamisation (almost none of them being pious before entering the process of radicalisation).

– Jihad is the only cause on the global market. If you kill in silence, it will be reported by the local newspaper; if you kill yelling “Allahuakbar”, you are sure to make the national headlines. The ultra-left or radical ecology is too “bourgeois” and intellectual for them.

When they join jihad, they adopt the Salafi version of Islam, because Salafism is both simple to understand (don’ts and do’s), and rigid, providing a personal psychological structuring effect. Moreover, Salafism is the negation of cultural Islam, that is the Islam of their parents and of their roots. Instead of providing them with roots, Salafism glorifies their own deculturation and makes them feel better “Muslims” than their parents. Salafism is the religion by definition of a disenfranchised youngster.

Incidentally, we should make a distinction between religious radicalisation and jihadist radicalisation. There is of course an overlap, but the bulk of the Salafists are not jihadist, and many jihadists don’t give a dam about theology. None of the radicals has a past of piety.

More here (pdf).