Raza Rumi at the Hudson Institute website:

The rise of global Islamism in the form of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) will pose a major challenge to the security of both Western and Muslim-majority nations for years to come. The threat is particularly acute in Muslim countries because of Islamism’s capacity to claim that it represents Islam in its most pure, truest form. Importantly, the Islamist movement’s power and appeal also derives from its ability to claim that it is advancing both justice and freedom—political ends that the majority of Muslims naturally want for themselves. Many Islamists are able to justify their struggle and their violence by presenting their agenda as the only legitimate pathway for social and political reform. Muslim societies thus face an ideological quagmire; they desperately need a reform agenda movement that is consistent with their deepest faith traditions, but they have yet to successfully formulate an alternative to Islamism that can sustain a pluralistic, participatory politics.

In recent years, the search for an alternative to Islamism has been thwarted by the widening sectarian conflict within Islam, which has increased tensions and driven violence across the Muslim world. In light of this emergency, the need to reform Islamic jurisprudence and social thought has become more urgent than ever. Islamism’s menace to Muslims, however, has been compounded by the weakened state of critical thinking within Islamic religious and political traditions. In developing a reformist alternative to Islamism, Muslims do in fact have a substantial body of both historical as well as contemporary thinking that they can draw upon to help improve their political and social structures and create more just, inclusive societies.

More here.

William H. Pritchard in The Weekly Standard:

The title of Morris Dickstein’s memoir alludes to an often-quoted line from Robert Lowell’s epilogue to his last book of poems, Day by Day. “Yet why not say what happened?” is Lowell’s question to himself as he prays for “the grace of accuracy.” Dickstein, emeritus professor at CUNY Graduate Center and the author, most recently, of a cultural history of the 1930s, takes Lowell’s question as a personal challenge. Why not say what happened to a man who has lived “a slightly suffocating life” in a Jewish family in New York’s Lower East Side and Flushing, Queens, and who then came to maturity in the distinguished academic purlieus of Columbia and Yale? The “sentimental education,” as he calls it in his subtitle, has less to do with Flaubert’s dreary masterpiece than with a cultivation of the self as instanced in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a poem Dickstein loves: “An education of the feelings as well as the mind” is what he hopes to have explored in thinking and writing about his past.

Perhaps the first thing to note about his book is how much Dickstein must have enjoyed writing it, confronting his past and turning it into a satisfying story. His enthusiasm and high spirits are pervasive, whether he is remembering postwar block parties on Henry Street, a few blocks from the East River, or studying the Talmud at the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, where he stayed through the 12th grade, “at first perfectly content, then .  .  . increasingly restive, and finally in continual rebellion.” But the rebellion was never total. He continued to live with his parents in Flushing while an undergraduate at Columbia, and, as an observant Jew, kept kosher for long afterwards. When he and his wife (referred to as “L”) are tempted by Parisian cuisine, L breaks kosher with a baguette viande froide while Dickstein remains chaste, still following the rules of a way of life that had “nurtured and sustained” him.

His undergraduate years at Columbia, which he describes as “a college full of brilliant teachers and ravenous students,” were of special interest to me, as I had, in a single year of graduate study there, observed what Dickstein accurately calls the “rough-and-tumble classes” customary at the college. Even the least rough-and-tumble of professors, Lionel Trilling, whose undergraduate class I audited and about whom Dickstein writes with penetration, had the challenge of putting up with, and probably enjoying, the questioning and irreverent students.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Imagine a runaway train. If it carries on down its present course it will kill five people. You cannot stop the train, but you can pull a switch and move the train on to another track, down which it will kill not five people but just one person. Should you pull the switch? This is the famous ‘trolley’ problem, a thought experiment first suggested by Philippa Foot in 1967, and which since has become since become one of the most important tools in contemporary moral philosophy. (In Foot’s original, the dilemma featured a runaway trolley, hence the common name of the problem.)

When faced with the question of whether or not to switch the runaway train, most people, unsurprisingly, say ‘Yes’. Now imagine that you are standing on a bridge under which the runaway train will pass. You can stop the train – and the certain death of five people – by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. There is, standing next to you, an exceedingly fat man. Would it be moral for you push him over the bridge and onto the track? Most people now say ‘No’, even though the moral dilemma is the same as before: should you kill one to save the five?

Or consider a dilemma first raised by Peter Singer forty years ago. You are driving along a country road when you hear a plea for help coming from some roadside bushes. You pull over, and see a man seriously injured, covered in blood and writhing in agony. He begs you to take him to a nearby hospital. You want to help, but realize that if you take him the blood will ruin the leather upholstery of your car. So you leave him and drive off. Most people would consider that a monstrous act.

Now suppose you receive a letter that asks for a donation to help save the life of a girl in India. You decide you cannot afford to give to charity since you are saving up to buy a sofa and bin the letter. Few would deem that to be immoral.

Again, there seems to be no objective difference between these two cases. Yet to most people they appear unquestionably morally different.

More here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction:

One of the issues I have with Steven Weinberg's list of 13 science books is that they showcase a very specific model of science writing – that of straight explanation and historical exposition. Isaac Asimov was very good at this model, so was George Gamow. Good science writing is of course supposed to be explanatory, but I think we have entered an age where other and more diverse forms of science writing have made a striking appearance. Straight, explanatory science will persist, but in my opinion the future belongs to these novel forms since they bring out the full range of the beauty and pitfalls of science as a quintessentially human endeavor. And since writing is only one form of inquiry, we also need to embrace other novel forms of communication such as poetry and drama.

Why do we need other models of science communication? The problem is best exemplified by popular physics and that is what I will be writing about here. As I have written earlier, one of the issues with today's popular physics writing is that it has sort of plateaued and reached a point of diminishing marginal returns: there are only so many ways in which you can write about relativity or quantum mechanics in a novel way. There are literally hundreds of books on these topics, and yet another volume that clearly explains the mysteries of quantum mechanics to the layman would not be especially enlightening.

Thus, among the most recent science books that buck this trend is one I have truly savored – Amanda Gefter's “Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn“. The book breaks new ground by not just recycling cutting-edge facts about the universe but by presenting these facts engagingly in the form of a very charming memoir about a daughter and a father (disclaimer: although I know Amanda in real life I had been entranced by the book before I met her).

More here.

Sylvain Levy in Art Asia Pacific:

In 2005, after almost 25 years of collecting art, my wife and I established Dslcollection after our first trip to China. For this project, we knew from the beginning that we did not want to just amass artworks. We wanted to embark on a “collecting project for the 21st century,” with a cultural perspective that reflects two tectonic changes that we are currently experiencing: the rise of China as a superpower, which is altering the face of the world, and the digital era that is transforming humanity as a whole. Today’s collectors have endless opportunities to show their collections to the public, from traditional methods such as museum loans to the post-internet model of sharing on social media or through virtual exhibitions. Yet most private collections are still in the “Digital Stone Age”; according to the website Larry’s List, in 2014 only 12 percent of collectors around the world were found to have an online presence. For Dslcollection, however, the digital world is more than just about having an online presence.

Firstly, the love for art is not a predetermined sensibility. Passion for art, like that for music, is nourished through exposure and education. Digital technology provides a channel for art to reach anyone with an internet connection, thus promising a future in which art is as ubiquitous to culture as popular music. But one has to be cautious with this global democratization—there is a difference between dissemination and vulgarization. A collection should be accessible, but also sophisticated. Collecting art and sharing it on a large scale, such as on the internet, comes with new responsibilities. Showing art virtually is not a new concept. Our vision for Dslcollection is greatly inspired by the late French novelist André Malraux, whose concept of musée imaginaire (“the museum without walls”) advocates presenting art outside the traditional confines of a museum setting. The same can be said of the Google Art Project, an online platform where users can access high-resolution images of artworks from partnering museums and institutions. The world’s art is literally at one’s fingertips.

More here.

Melvin Konner in Chronicle of Higher Education:

Women are not equal to men; they are superior in many ways, and in most ways that will count in the future. It is not just a matter of culture or upbringing. It is a matter of chromosomes, genes, hormones, and nerve circuits. It is not mainly because of how experience shapes women, but because of intrinsic differences in the body and the brain. Do these differences account for all the ways women and men differ? No. Are all men one way and all women another? Also no. But none of those considerations seriously impede my argument or deflect its key conclusion: Women are superior in most ways that matter now. And no, I do not mean what was meant by patronizing men who said this in the past — that women are lofty, tender, spiritual creatures. I mean something like the opposite of that. I mean that women are fundamentally pragmatic as well as caring, cooperative as well as competitive, skilled in getting their own egos out of the way, deft in managing people without putting them on the defensive, builders not destroyers. Above all, I mean that women can carry on the business of a complex world in ways that are more focused, efficient, deliberate, and constructive than men’s because women are not frequently distracted by impulses and moods that, sometimes indirectly, lead to sex and violence. Women are more reluctant participants in both. And if they are drawn into wars, these will be wars of necessity, not of choice, founded on rational considerations, not on a clash of egos escalating out of control.

This is not a new idea. Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave an address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention in Washington, D.C., on January 19, 1869. She said, “The same arguments made in this country for extending suffrage … to white men, native born citizens, without property and education, and to foreigners … and the same used by the great Republican party to enfranchise a million black men in the South, all these arguments we have to-day to offer for woman, and one, in addition, stronger than all besides, the difference in man and woman. Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman’s thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.” She also said, “When the highest offices in the gift of the people are bought and sold in Wall Street, it is a mere chance who will be our rulers. Whither is a nation tending when brains count for less than bullion, and clowns make laws for queens?” Almost 150 years later, the highest offices are still bought and sold on Wall Street, and clowns make laws for queens.

More here.

Let me tell you about my marvelous god

Let me tell you about my marvelous god, how he hides in the hexagons
of the bees, how the drought that wrings its leather hands
above the world is of his making, as well as the rain in the quiet minutes
that leave only thoughts of rain.
An atom is working and working, an atom is working in deepest
night, then bursting like the farthest star; it is far
smaller than a pinprick, far smaller than a zero and it has no will, no
will toward us.
This is why the heart has paced
and paced, will pace and pace across the field where yarrow
was and now is dust. A leaf catches
in a bone. The burrow’s shut by a tumbled clod
and the roots, upturned, are hot to the touch.
How my god is a feathered and whirling thing; you will singe your arm
when you pluck him from the air,
when you pluck him from that sky
where grieving swirls, and you will burn again
throwing him back.

by Susan Stewart
from The Poetry Foundation

Jack Hanson at The Quarterly Conversation:

Throughout his life, Paul Celan was haunted by the experience of the Shoah, and his later works see him undergoing something analogous to the turn in Heidegger’s thinking. Until the publication of Breathturn (which marks the beginning of Breathturn Into Timestead), Celan was heavily influenced by both traditional poetry from a variety of languages and the surrealists with whom he spent much of his youth. Even his darkest poems, such as the famous “Todsfuge,” or “Deathfugue,” contain an element of metaphorical lightness, a pleasure in the play of images, despite the horror of their content.

A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling, he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he commands us to play up for the dance.

But, like Heidegger, Celan turned away from the traditional models of his field. This is not, of course, to say that he abandons the tradition of German poetry. If anything, despite his dissatisfaction with the trappings of an inherited poetics, Celan’s turn is his renewed attempt to carry through the Holocaust the central essence of that canon.

more here.

Walter Reich at the New York Times:

When we hear the phrase “concentration camp,” we usually envision the huge extermination centers the Germans built in Poland as part of their “final solution to the Jewish question,” their effort to murder every Jew they could find. But though it was relatively small, and though it wasn’t primarily an extermination center, Ravensbrück helps us understand how thoroughgoing an onslaught on humanity Nazi Germany perpetrated, and how central to its identity was its implacable urge to enslave and kill those it considered ­undesirable.

According to researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Germans established 980 concentration camps; 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 1,000 P.O.W. camps; 500 brothels where women were used as sex slaves; and many other places where victims were killed — 42,500 sites in all.

One of those sites was Ravensbrück, opened in 1939 and situated about 50 miles north of Berlin. The camp’s demography changed as the war progressed. At first the prisoners were what the Nazis called “asocials,” including prostitutes, “race defilers,”  “criminals,” Roma and Sinti, as well as political prisoners, especially Communists. But the camp’s population swelled as Germany conquered ever more of Europe, so that it came to include inmates from over 30 countries, including Jews.

more here.

Sarah Bakewell at the Financial Times:

In Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel Island, mynah birds are trained to fly around the island’s proto-hippy paradise calling, “Attention! Attention!” and “Here and now, boys!”, to keep people alert to the moment.

This seemed a fine idea in 1962, when the novel appeared, but it might work less well in today’s world. Our problem is not so much one of vague absent-mindedness as of bombardment by exactly the sort of uncalled-for twittering Huxley was proposing as a solution. Each time we walk down the street, take a cab, enter an airport or navigate the internet, we field volleys of demands on our attention from advertisers and corporations, as well as from supposed public service announcements and the general cacophony. We don’t need more alerts; we need filters for screening the existing ones out.

Such ideas provide the starting point for Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction, which follows his successful The Case for Working With Your Hands (or Shop Class as Soulcraft, as the US edition was more evocatively called).

more here.

David Edelstein in Vulture:

Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning A Separation (2011) was a devastating portrait of an Iran in which there’s no common ground, everyone is forced to lie, and justice is a pipe dream. (But opiates are hard to find, so pipe dreams aren’t readily available.) The film was amazingly bleak, but so illuminating I came away strangely optimistic: The first step in curing a disease is being able to see it whole. Now comes the U.S. release of Farhadi’s earlier 2009 film, About Elly, which covers similar terrain but without A Separation’s breadth, its social panorama. In some ways, though, it’s an even more satisfying work — more contained, and strangely elegant in its mood of hopelessness. It’s breezy, then suspenseful, and gradually, crushingly sad. On its own terms, it’s a perfect film. As usual with Farhadi, the themes sneak up on you. The focus is on a small group of attractive, fairly well-to-do 30-something friends — several couples and some small children — who rent a house in a beach town. When it turns out that the house is only available for one night, they move to a dilapidated dwelling nestled in the dunes, the roiling ocean visible through its cracked windows. Though the living quarters are crude, the mood is ebullient. The odd one out is the title character (Taraneh Alidoosti), a schoolteacher no one really knows. She has been invited by a young mother, Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), as a potential match for her husband’s newly divorced friend, Amir (Shahab Hosseini), who now lives in Germany. Elly is pretty and modest and evidently devoted to her sick mother. But we hear her tell her mother not to disclose her whereabouts, and she’s anxious to return to Tehran before midnight of the first day. Something’s up.

Elly’s eventual disappearance might be straightforward, or it might be based on factors we don’t yet understand. She could be dead or back in Tehran or somewhere between the beach and the city. As the tension mounts, fissures open up.

More here.

Abraham Verghese in The New York Times:

On June 17, 1977, Rita and Doug Swan noticed that Matthew, their 15-month-old child, was having difficulty walking. Both parents were raised in the Christian Science faith, and they called a Christian Science practitioner, Jeanne Laitner, to pray for the child. Rita’s prior experience with an illness of her own is relevant to this choice: When repeated prayer “treatments” failed to give her relief from a painful ovarian cyst, she allowed physicians to operate. But she was viewed as having abandoned her faith. She was no longer permitted to lead church meetings or teach Sunday school. To Rita this loss of community was profound, and perhaps explains why, as her baby was getting worse, she did not seek medical care. Laitner claimed that Matthew’s continued illness was evidence of what, in the author’s words, was the parents’ “failure to fully embrace God and his majesty.” Another Christian Science practitioner, June Ahearn, was called in to pray. Her response to worried phone calls from the parents was: “It’s only been an hour and a half since you [last] called. He can’t possibly be in bad shape. It’s you and Doug with your fear that are holding this whole thing up!” Finally Ahearn allowed that the boy might have a broken bone as a cause of his severe neck pain; Christian Scientists are allowed to see doctors to set broken bones. Once Matthew was taken to the hospital, it became abundantly clear that he had meningitis, but his condition was so advanced that abscesses had developed in the brain. He died of what would have been a survivable illness had he been treated earlier.

With Matthew gone, members of Rita Swan’s church banded together, arguing that “children with meningitis die all the time . . . especially in hospitals”; Matthew’s death was evidence that medical science couldn’t do much better. Rita and Doug were ostracized for speaking out at what they saw as medical malpractice. Looking back, Rita Swan offered an explanation for her failure to treat her son, although she had a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt and her husband had one from the University of Vermont in mathematics. Both were well informed, but their faith had cut them off from life­saving treatment: “Christian Science has all the features of a cult,” she explained. “We should never have allowed ourselves to be isolated like that.”

Moonlight in Mourning of Someone
.

Ben Zimmer in the Wall Street Journal:

Copy editors might seem like stick-in-the-mud traditionalists when it comes to language change, but when I attended the American Copy Editors Society’s annual conference in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago, I found growing acceptance of a usage that has long been disparaged as downright ungrammatical: treating “they” as a singular pronoun.

According to standard grammar, “they” and its related forms can only agree with plural antecedents. But English sorely lacks a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun, and “they” has for centuries been pressed into service for that purpose, much to the grammarians’ chagrin. Now, it seems, those who have held the line against singular “they” may be easing their stance.

“They” most often turns singular in common usage when its antecedent is considered generic, not referring to a single known person. Nearly everyone would find that they can stomach the “they” in this very sentence, agreeing with “nearly everyone.”

Things get trickier when the antecedent of “they” more clearly refers to one person. Areader of this column may not like what they see in this sentence, for instance.

More here.

Saul Austerlitz in The New Republic:

Hannah Arendt was a good friend. When she was a teenage girl, she was forbidden by her mother and stepfather from visiting an acquaintance named Anne Mendelssohn, but she went anyway, walking to a nearby town at night, throwing pebbles at Anne’s window, and cementing a lifelong friendship. She came to the rescue of her friend and intellectual sparring partner Mary McCarthy after she suffered a traumatic miscarriage, as Jon Nixon tells us in his engaging biography, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship, and again while she was going through an emotionally draining divorce. She sent care packages to her former teacher and mentor Karl Jaspers when he and his wife were stuck in Germany, impoverished and hungry, after the war. She protected her husband Heinrich Blucher, as much a friend as a romantic partner, during his professional difficulties as an academic.

Arendt’s web of allegiances opens up a new avenue of approach into her career. More than a bodiless thinker, or a walking scandal, Arendt is depicted here as a woman hungry for companionship, and for the exchange of ideas. It also opens up an area of inquiry into the complex and under-explored dynamic of friendship. “Friendships are not the application of some theory of friendship,” Nixon writes, “nor do they rely on an ongoing reflective meta-dialogue between the friends regarding the nature of their friendship. … There is a great deal that is appropriately and courteously implicit in friendship.” Nixon intends Arendt to be an exemplar of what he repeatedly hints is a now-lost era.

Arendt saw friendship as a middle ground between the solitude and solipsism of internal dialogue, and the terror of the public square. It was a protected space in which ideas could be unveiled, sanded down, hardened, and polished. Her friends were her intellectual compatriots, and her boundless loyalty toward them was also an expression of her deep-seated appreciation for their kindnesses. Friendship was an intensely appealing concept for a woman who spent much of her life as a refugee among refugees, a Jew expelled from her country of birth, adrift in foreign countries. It was a protective amulet, as well as a symbol of the higher values crushed under the boot of totalitarianism. Nazism’s mission was “to eradicate totally any trace of human freedom,” and friendship’s playfulness and compassion was a symbol of rebellion against fascism’s inhumanity.

More here.

Rachel Kaadzi Ghanash in The NYT Magazine (Katy Grannan for The New York Times):

[W]hen the poet Henry Dumas went to his death, the way so many black boys and men do, it was Morrison, who never had a chance to meet him and published his work posthumously, who sent around a book-party announcement that was part invitation, part consolation, which read: “In 1968, a young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read.”

Two years after Dumas’s death, Morrison published her first novel, at 39. In many ways, she had prepared the world for her voice and heralded her arrival with her own editorial work. And yet the story of Pecola Breedlove, a broken black girl who wants blue eyes, was a novel that no one saw coming. Morrison relished unexpectedness. The first edition of “The Bluest Eye” starts Pecola’s story on the cover: “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow.”

Morrison’s work, since she published that first novel, has always delivered a heavy load. Her books are populated by both history and the people who are left out of history: a jealous, mentally ill hairdresser with a sharp knife (“Jazz,” 1992); a man who as a child suckled at his mother’s breast until those in the community found it odd (“Song of Solomon,” 1977); an enslaved woman, who would rather slice her own daughter's neck than let captivity happen to her (“Beloved,” 1987); and a destitute little girl, belly swollen with her father’s child, holding a Shirley Temple cup, desperate to have Temple’s bright blue eyes (“The Bluest Eye,” 1970).

On one level, Morrison’s project is obvious: It is a history that stretches across 11 novels and just as many geographies and eras to tell a story that is hardly chronological but is thematically chained and somewhat continuous. This is the project most readily understood and accepted by even her least generous critics. But then there is the other mission, the less obvious one, the one in which Morrison often does the unthinkable as a minority, as a woman, as a former member of the working class: She democratically opens the door to all of her books only to say, “You can come in and you can sit, and you can tell me what you think, and I’m glad you are here, but you should know that this house isn’t built for you or by you.” Here, blackness isn’t a commodity; it isn’t inherently political; it is the race of a people who are varied and complicated. This is where her works become less of a history and more of a liturgy, still stretching across geographies and time, but now more pointedly, to capture and historicize: This is how we pray, this is how we escape, this is how we hurt, this is how we repent, this is how we move on.

More here.