Michael Gove in The Spectator:

Praying? What kind of people are you?

Well, the kind of people who built our civilisation, founded our democracies, developed our modern ideas of rights and justice, ended slavery, established universal education and who are, even as I write, in the forefront of the fight against poverty, prejudice and ignorance. In a word, Christians. But to call yourself a Christian in contemporary Britain is to invite pity, condescension or cool dismissal. In a culture that prizes sophistication, non-judgmentalism, irony and detachment, it is to declare yourself intolerant, naive, superstitious and backward. It was almost 150 years ago that Matthew Arnold wrote of the Sea of Faith’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ and in our time that current has been replaced by an incoming tide of negativity towards Christianity. In his wonderful book Unapologetic, the author Francis Spufford describes the welter of prejudice the admission of Christian belief tends to unleash. ‘It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. It means that we don’t believe in dinosaurs. It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die… That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of fantasy… That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in young minds…’

And that’s just for starters. If we’re Roman Catholic we’re accessories to child abuse, if we’re Anglo-Catholics we’re homophobic bigots curiously attached to velvet and lace, if we’re liberal Anglicans we’re pointless hand-wringing conscience–hawkers, and if we’re evangelicals we’re creepy obsessives who are uncomfortable with anyone enjoying anything more louche than a slice of Battenberg.

More here.

Philip Caputo in The New York Times:

The more powerful a country is, the more disposed its people will be to see it as the lead actor in the sometimes farcical, often tragic pageant of history. So it is that we, citizens of a superpower, have viewed the Vietnam War as a solely American drama in which the febrile land of tigers and elephants was mere backdrop and the Vietnamese mere extras. That outlook is reflected in the literature — and Vietnam was a very literary war, producing an immense library of fiction and nonfiction. Among all those volumes, you’ll find only a handful (Robert Olen Butler’s “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain” comes to mind) with Vietnamese characters speaking in their own voices.

…But this tragicomic novel reaches beyond its historical context to illuminate more universal themes: the eternal misconceptions and misunderstandings between East and West, and the moral dilemma faced by people forced to choose not between right and wrong, but right and right. The nameless protagonist-­narrator, a memorable character despite his anonymity, is an Americanized Vietnamese with a divided heart and mind. ­Nguyen’s skill in portraying this sort of ambivalent personality compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene and le Carré. Duality is literally in the protagonist’s blood, for he is a half-caste, the illegitimate son of a teenage Vietnamese mother (whom he loves) and a French Catholic priest (whom he hates). Widening the split in his nature, he was educated in the United States, where he learned to speak English without an accent and developed another love-hate relationship, this one with the country that he feels has coined too many “super” terms (supermarkets, ­superhighways, the Super Bowl, and so on) “from the federal bank of its ­narcissism.”

More here.

Steven Weinberg in The Guardian:

If you had a chance to ask Aristotle what he thought of the idea of writing about physical science for general readers, he would not have understood what you meant. All of his own writing, on physics and astronomy as well as on politics and aesthetics, was accessible to any educated Greek of his time. This is not evidence so much of Aristotle’s skills as a writer, or of the excellence of Greek education, as it is of the primitive state of Hellenic physical science, which made no effective use of mathematics. It is mathematics above all that presents an obstacle to communication between professional scientists and the general educated public. The development of pure mathematics was already well under way in Aristotle’s day, but its use in science by Plato and the Pythagoreans had been childish, and Aristotle himself had little interest in the use of mathematics in science. He perceptively concluded from the appearance of the night sky at different latitudes that the Earth is a sphere, but he did not bother to use these observations (as could have been done) to calculate the size of our planet.

Physical science began seriously to benefit from mathematics only after Aristotle’s death in 322BC, when the vital centre of science moved from Athens to Alexandria. But the indispensable use of mathematics by Hellenistic physicists and astronomers began to get in the way of communication between scientists and the public. Looking over the surviving highly mathematical works of Aristarchus, Archimedes and Ptolemy, we can feel a twinge of sympathy for Greeks or Greek-speaking Romans who tried to keep up with the latest discoveries about light, fluids or the planets.

It was not long before writers called “commentators” began to try to fill this gap.

More here.

John Mullan in The Guardian:

Has fantasy fiction, for decades a thriving literary genre, finally taken its place in the literary mainstream? It hardly needs bien pensant “literary” admirers: the most successful fantasy novelists have not only their sales figures to encourage them, but also the host of companion volumes, analytical websites, conferences and online commentaries that characterise fantasy fandom. It is a genre that has always generated critical expertise, and fantasy novelists have long been in a dialogue with their readers that other novelists must envy (witness the attention given to every tweet made by Neil Gaiman to his 2.2 million followers). Fantasy’s devotees must feel rueful as the critics now rush to declare their addiction to HBO’s Game of Thrones – adapted from George RR Martin’s multi-volume fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire, and about to enter series five – or record their admiration of Terry Pratchett, as part of the overwhelming response to his recent death. The debt to fantasy fiction of The Buried Giant, the new novel by one of Britain’s leading literary novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro, must seem overdue vindication of the genre.

Ishiguro has spoken in the past few weeks of how the barrier between this once-disdained brand of fiction and “serious” novels is breaking down. If this is true, New Jersey-born George RR Martin has surely led the charge. Martin is the reigning laureate of fantasy fiction. His ongoing sequence of novels A Song of Ice and Fire (the first book of which gives its title to Game of Thrones) began appearing in 1996 and now comprises five long books (with two more promised). He has a host of fans who resent the low status accorded to their favoured genre and some distinguished admirers who rather agree. One proponent of Martin’s merits, accomplished literary novelist John Lanchester, has openly invited literary snobs to cross that apparently “unbridgeable crevasse” between the readership of fantasy and “the wider literate public”. Discussing the delights of Martin’s fantasy roman fleuve, Lanchester has celebrated not only its creation of a richly imagined world, but the prevailing “sense of unsafety and uncertainty” of that world.

More here.

“The evening goes blind, and you are only twenty.”
– Nathan Alterman, Late Afternoon in the Market

Woman Martyr

You are only twenty
and your first pregnancy is a bomb.
Under your broad skirt you are pregnant with dynamite
and metal shavings. This is how you walk in the market,
ticking among the people, you, Andaleeb Takatkah.

Someone tinkered with your head
and launched you toward the city;
even though you come from Bethlehem,
the Home of Bread, you chose a bakery.
And there you pulled the trigger out of yourself,
and together with the Sabbath loaves,
sesame and poppy seed,
you flung yourself into the sky.

Together with Rebecca Fink you flew up
with Yelena Konre’ev from the Caucasus
and Nissim Cohen from Afghanistan
and Suhila Houshy from Iran
and two Chinese you swept along
to death.

Since then, other matters
have obscured your story,
about which I speak all the time
without having anything to say.

by Agi Mishol
from Meevkhar veh-hadashim (New and selected poems)
publisher: Mossad Bialik and Hakibbutz Hameuchad
translation: 2006, Lisa Katz

Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu at The Point:

The historian E. P. Thompson wrote famously that he wanted to rescue the working class “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” For Thompson, the historian’s calling was to give voice to the voiceless and recreate the heroic struggles of everyday life. The aim of writing history, he believed, was to capture faithfully the experiences of those who had been neglected by traditional histories, written out of the heroic narratives of “great men.”

In Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third and most explicitly political book in her celebrated Neapolitan tetralogy, Ferrante tests literature’s capacity to answer Thompson’s challenge. She asks: Can writing actually capture life? Can it give voice to the voiceless? The narrator Elena Greco, herself a writer, has a subject that Thompson would find ideal: her best friend Lila. In contrast to Elena, who leaves Naples to attend an elite university, Lila’s schooling ends in the fifth grade, after her parents refuse to pay for further lessons. Eventually Lila marries a local grocer and then, following her divorce, remains in the Naples neighborhood where both girls grew up, and works for a time in a sausage factory.

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

“Surround Audience” purports to examine “a world in which the effects of technology … have been absorbed into our bodies and altered our vision of the world … visual metaphors for the self and subjecthood.” Before you bristle — Excuse me, all art does this — not only are there no keyboards, workstations, or websites here, and only one helmet (Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's fantastically alluring depiction of layered linear space), there are, thankfully, no darkened rooms with portentous videos that make you wonder if curators are human beings aware that they're spending fortunes while abusing the curiosity, patience, and humanity of their audience. That's a big leap for the art world. These curators understand, finally, that there's no such thing as “digital art” (certainly no variety that could be defined by the machines it’s made of and through), only art that might be inscribed with its ethos. And while the show includes a tad too much arty-adolescent apocalyptic dystopianism, there's, happily, no annoying, New Age–y, utopian-Zeitgeist babble.

More important, it is full of artists thinking past objects of the digital era and addressing the much weirder experience of actually living in it and recognizing, all the while, that this landscape is already authored by and is us anyway, that there's little distinction anymore between inside and outside, and that engaging with technologies doesn't have to involve a computer, mouse, or iPhone.

more here.

Elif Batuman at The New Yorker:

The human drive to zap one’s head with electricity goes back at least to antiquity, and was originally satisfied by means of electric fish. “Headache even if it is chronic and unbearable is taken away and remedied forever by a live torpedo placed under the spot that is in pain,” the first-century physician Scribonius Largus wrote. He also used the torpedo, a species of ray native to the Mediterranean, to treat hemorrhoids. In the eleventh century, the Islamic polymath Avicenna reportedly recommended the placement of an electric catfish on the brow to counteract epilepsy. As late as 1762, a Dutch colonist in Guyana wrote that “when a slave complains of a bad headache” he should put one hand on his head and another on a South American electric eel and “will be helped immediately, without exception.”

The invention, in 1745, of the Leyden jar—a device to store static electricity—enabled many new experiments in electrotherapy, not all of them deliberate. In 1783, Jan Ingenhousz, a Dutch scientist, accidentally picked up a charged Leyden jar, causing an explosion that made him temporarily lose his memory, judgment, and ability to read and write. Having found his way home with great difficulty, he went to sleep. He woke to find that his mental faculties had not only returned but had sharpened: “I saw much clearer the difficulties of every thing,” he wrote in a letter to Benjamin Franklin. “What did formerly seem to me difficult to comprehend, was now become of an easy solution.”

more here.

Katherine Harmon Courage in Scientific American:

Your gut is the site of constant turf wars. Hundreds of bacterial species—along with fungi, archaea and viruses—do battle daily, competing for resources. Some companies advocate for consuming more probiotics, live beneficial bacteria, to improve microbial communities in our gut, but more and more research supports the idea that the most powerful approach might be to better feed the good bacteria we already harbor. Their meal of choice? Fiber.

Fiber has long been linked to better health, but new research shows how the gut microbiota might play a role in this pattern. One investigation discovered that adding more fiber to the diet can trigger a shift from a microbial profile linked to obesity to one correlated with a leaner physique. Another recent study shows that when microbes are starved of fiber, they can start to feed on the protective mucus lining of the gut, possibly triggering inflammation and disease. “Diet is one of the most powerful tools we have for changing the microbiota,” Justin Sonnenburg, a biologist at Stanford University, said earlier this month at a Keystone Symposia conference on the gut microbiome. “Dietary fiber and diversity of the microbiota complement each other for better health outcomes.” In particular, beneficial microbes feast on fermentable fibers—which can come from various vegetables, whole grains and other foods—that resist digestion by human-made enzymes as they travel down the digestive tract. These fibers arrive in the large intestine relatively intact, ready to be devoured by our microbial multitudes. Microbes can extract the fiber's extra energy, nutrients, vitamins and other compounds for us. Short-chain fatty acids obtained from fiber are of particular interest, as they have been linked to improved immune function, decreased inflammation and protection against obesity. Today's Western diet, however, is exceedingly fiber-poor by historical standards. It contains roughly 15 grams of fiber daily, Sonnenburg noted. For most of our early history as hunter-gatherers, we were likely eating close to 10 times that amount of fiber each day. “Imagine the effect that has on our microbiota over the course of our evolution,” he said.

More here.

Ariane Tabatabai in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

After months of negotiations, Iran and six world powers have finally reached a framework agreement on limiting the country’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The deal announced on Thursday is intended as the basis for a comprehensive agreement to be worked out by the end of June.

Getting to this agreement was a crucial step, as virtually all technical issues have now been addressed, but much work still remains to be done. The coming months will involve a great deal of legal and political wrangling. In the United States especially, due to anxious allies (Saudi Arabia and Israel) and some domestic opposition (especially among Republicans in Congress), negotiations will keep the White House busy.

Nonetheless, this is a good agreement for both sides, as indicated by some of its key components.

First, most of the public discussion about the negotiations has until now been focused on quantifiable elements, such as the number of centrifuges and amount of low-enriched uranium that Iran gets to keep, and the length of the deal’s implementation. But perhaps the most crucial aspect lies in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) access to Iranian facilities. In the framework deal, Tehran has said it will once again voluntarily implement the Additional Protocol to its existing IAEA safeguards agreement, granting the nuclear watchdog more inspections authority.

More here. And there is also this: Iranians erupt with joy after nuclear deal.

Valeriu Nicolae in Eurozine (Photo: Steve Evans. Source: Flickr):

For most politicians and bureaucrats, the social inclusion of Roma is a terrifying and complex issue impossible to solve during a typical five-year term in office. After a sporadic few years of small efforts here and there, and decades of very strong but mainly empty rhetoric, Roma remain the most discriminated-against ethnic group in Europe and the most underrepresented within decision-making structures. Due to a chronic lack of expertise among senior management at the level of national government and inter-governmental institutions, tackling the situation of Roma is seen as a professional quagmire. It is very difficult to envision how the incentives required for conventional political parties to tackle this issue – such as opportunities for fast, impressive results, or electoral gains – could become available.

Paying lip service, preserving the status quo and avoiding controversy are, from a pragmatic point of view, the best career moves for many of the decision-makers involved. For the past two decades, most of the new appointments in high positions dealing with Roma have led to long periods of inaction, sometimes followed by the reinvention, rediscovery and repetition of previous measures. It is not rare for catastrophic approaches disguised as positive practices in sycophantic reports to make their way back on to the table of the new Roma tsars. This points toward the existence of structural racism within those institutions and the very poor standards of professionalism required for occupying these positions.

Accountability for failures or lack of progress in addressing Roma social inclusion is exceptionally rare for many reasons. Whether due to disinterest, or professional inability on the part of member states and inter-governmental institutions, the kinds of systems that can hold people and institutions accountable simply do not exist. Those in charge develop instead the ability to shift or avoid responsibility. Poor civic and political involvement of Roma within European societies results in the inability of Roma to exert sufficient, or any, political or social pressure to make structures and people accountable.

More here.

Aaron Brady in New Inquiry:

If you didn’t see it on twitter on facebook a few days ago, you may have seen it somewhere like Buzzfeed: Chinua Achebe has died again. First in 2013, and then again in 2015. First as tragedy and then as farce.

These sorts of things happen, a bit like forest fires. You can track down the place where it started if you want—as the novelist Porochista Khakpour did here—but to understand and predict a forest fire, you need to pay attention to why there was so much dry flammable material waiting for a spark. That spark is eventually going to come, but the fire only goes “viral” if there’s something there to burn.

With Achebe, there was something there to burn. While Facebook and Twitter are excellent vectors for this kind of misinformation, Chinua Achebe is the sort of writer who would die twice. For one thing, he’s a hyper-canonized writer whose sainthood outstrips his actual literary currency: because he is more deeply revered than he is deeply read, one can fall easily into the orthodox reaction to news of his passing—gestures like #RIP—without the encumbrance of a personal relationship to the author himself getting in the way. To a great many people (particularly non-Nigerians), the ideaof Chinua Achebe means a lot more than does the actual writer himself. Their experience of him is socially mediated, and socially mandated: his books are praised, assigned, and mythologized. Sometimes they are also read, but not as often as you’d expect.

More here.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

We're all irrational some of the time. Yet many past philosophers have put a great emphasis on human rationality as what sets us apart, and even made it a condition of moral action. In this episode of Philosophy Bites Lisa Bortolotti (@lisabortolotti) explores some different types of irrationality and the implications for human agency.

Listen to Lisa Bortolotti on Irrationality

Philosophy Bites is unfunded, please help us keep going by subscribing via Patreon or using the Paypal donation/subscription buttons on this weblog.

Liza Batkin in n+1 (image via Badlands Unlimited):

EARLY IN CLAUDIA LA ROCCO’S NEW COLLECTION, in a poem entitled “Just go for it, go for it,” she writes: “Some things were accurate and some weren’t, he says. Yes, no, maybe, I dunno. You can’t always trust the people you interview. I mean, you never should.” These halting, doubtful lines introduce a voice far from the one most of La Rocco’s readers will be familiar with, the public voice of the New York Times’ longtime daily dance critic. Here instead is a voice that revises itself within a single chain of thought—yes, no, maybe; can’t always, never should—and tosses authority aside with a slangy “I dunno.”

While a dance critic at the Times, from 2005 until 2012, La Rocco reviewed performances at every dance venue in the city, from Lincoln Center, Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, and Danspace, to the literal underground of subway cars. Her reputation among professional dancers and choreographers is made apparent by her involvement in a variety of collaborative performances, including one with Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener that she writes about in the collection. In 2012 she left her regular dance post and has since written primarily for the theater and book review sections of the Times. She has also continued to write about dance for the Brooklyn Rail and Artforum. The Best Most Useless Dress includes dance reviews and essays that previously appeared in all these publications.

Because it arrives two years after La Rocco’s resignation from the Times dance beat, the collection might seem a gesture of summation. But The Best Most Useless Dress is more than a compilation of old dance reviews; La Rocco has surrounded them with poems and punctuated the writings with photographs and scans of handwritten notes. The result is a strange hybrid of voices and media that provides a unique perspective onto a critic’s concerns.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria at Dissent:

July 15, 1961

The trouble had begun in the 1950s, when Mohammad Ali Bogra, the prime minister of Pakistan, fell in love with his secretary. No one begrudged the boss, balding and middle aged, his dalliance. He was, after all, a powerful man, adept at making the right impression. When he spoke, it was with just enough British vowels pinned to his Bengali consonants to announce his class, and with just enough stately reserve to proclaim his pedigree. When he put on his neatly tailored suits he added a carefully chosen tiepin or a curious boutonniere: the hint of nonconformity that would lend him an air of (utterly unthreatening) eccentricity.

It could have been predicted—even expected—that such a master of aesthetic arithmetic would wish to sample the best of what was available beyond amenities like cigars and wine. The secretary he romanced was not just any woman shuffling papers, but a white woman, an American, selected by the discerning Mr. Bogra while he served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States before he became prime minister.

Despite his savvy with suits, accent, and politics, in the matters of the heart Mohammad Ali Bogra made a miscalculation. In adding up the delights his new companion could offer, and in glibly remembering that he, as a Muslim and as prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, was allowed four such companions, he left out an essential digit.

more here.

Gisle Selnes interviews Alberto Toscano at Eurozine:

GS: Could you perhaps take us back to the beginning of the concept of fanaticism and especially the significant conjunction between politics and religion? It has its origin in ancient religious cults, and then it re-emerges in the revolutionary Christian movements in the sixteenth century…

AT: It's a term that originates in ancient Rome to describe certain religious cults, linked to groups that had come to Rome from what we now would call the Middle East or Near Asia. The word fanatic comes from fanum, temple, the same root from which we get profanation, which is of course one of the things that fanatics are said to be particularly obsessed with. Recently one of the main things the Islamic State has been known for is destruction of temples, and the whole question of iconoclasm is also part of this. But fanaticism was originally intended to designate a kind of religion, a seemingly violent or uncontrolled religion of the other. There is an interesting story of false etymology as well; during the Enlightenment, a lot of thinkers presume or project into this idea of fanaticism that which has to do with fantasy, the fantastic and phantasms.

Within the Enlightenment itself, or at least within the eighteenth century's intellectual and philosophical movements that we can link to the Enlightenment, the concept of fanaticism had a whole set of contested and contradictory uses. Among these we identify a popular idea in the 2000s, formative of liberal political thought: the distinction or opposition between tolerance and fanaticism. This is of course the Enlightenment response to the menace of religious wars, and it is at the crux of Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance, where the philosopher would be on the side of tolerance, and those who tried illegitimately to mix political action with religion would be on the side of fanaticism. Fanaticism is the source of the worst in a society: civil war.

more here.