Marco Roth in n + 1:

From the thumbnail headshot accompanying his essay in the Times, “the drone philosopher,” as I’ve begun to think of him, appears to be in his late twenties, or a boyish 30. In an oddly confessional-style first paragraph, he recalls what it was like to watch the second Iraq War from his college dorm television. He has clean-shaven Ken-doll looks and a prominent squarish jaw, recalling the former Republican vice-presidential candidate and representative from Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, Paul Ryan. I doubt the drone philosopher would be flattered by the comparison. The tone of his article makes him out to be a thoughtful liberal, more interested in weighing complexities than in easy solutions, simultaneously attracted by and wary of power, not unlike the commander in chief he hopes will one day read his papers.

I can make out a bit of wide-striped collegiate tie, a white collar, and the padded shoulders of a suit jacket in the photograph. I know I’m being unfair, but I don’t trust his looks. Since Republicans have become so successful at branding themselves the party of white men, I now suspect that any white guy in a suit may harbor right-wing nationalist tendencies, much as the CIA’s rules governing drone strikes have determined that groups of “military age” men in certain regions of Pakistan and Yemen may be profiled as terrorists.

More here.

Mohsin Hamid has picked the three winners from the nine finalists:

1. Top Quark, $500: Ali Eteraz, The Death of the Urdu Script
   
2. Strange Quark, $200: Olga Tokarczuk, Everywhere and Nowhere
3. Charm Quark, $100: Matthew Jakubowski, Honest work: an experimental review of an experimental translation

Here is what Mohsin had to say about them:

It was a great collection of pieces — a real pleasure to read during a hot summer week in Lahore. Here are the winners.

1. Ali Eteraz, “The Death of the Urdu Script” (Medium). Typography, a “murder” mystery, geopolitics, history, D.E.I.T.Y., Apple vs Microsoft vs Twitter, a third way between Arabization and the West, penmanship — this piece had it all. Succinctly far-ranging and wonderfully poignant, I hope it's widely read and helps save the script it champions.

2. Olga Tokarczuk, “Everywhere and Nowhere” (n + 1). For the traveler in each of us. A lovely flow, supple musings. Fabulous. “Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness–these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don't travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids.”

3. Matthew Jakubowski, “Honest work: an experimental review of an experimental translation” (3:AM Magazine). A brief flickering of something that brings to mind “Pale Fire,” this text about a text about a text about a text is magical and wise. It shimmers.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free, in fact we encourage you, to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Many thanks also, of course, to Mohsin Hamid for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed by Sughra Raza, me, and Carla Goller. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Ekua Holmes. All Weather Friends.

More here and here.

Justin E. H. Smith in the New York Times:

Like many institutions that have become more concerned with equality in the past few decades, academic philosophy today aims to be more inclusive. In general, university departments are now striving to consider the experiences and concerns of a broader range of people than have traditionally played the social and professional role of the philosopher. This makes sense. In an increasingly global intellectual landscape, the removal of barriers to entry for previously excluded groups of people and schools of thought is productive and fair.

It may be, however, that the full implications of the project of inclusiveness have not fully been grasped by the people promoting it. A dwindling number believe that it would be enough to simply change the make-up of philosophy departments without changing the content. Increasingly, these two projects are seen as connected: philosophy will not attract long-excluded groups of people if members of these groups do not see themselves — their traditions, standpoints, and idioms — represented in syllabi and in publications. But what would it mean to reconceive philosophy in order to adequately represent these?

Let us start by doing some math: not the number-crunching of human resources or admissions offices, but the mathematics of infinite series.

There is a formula for calculating the value of π that runs as follows:

1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – … = π/4.

This, to be precise, is an alternating series that converges toward a value of the ratio of the circle’s circumference to its diameter.

More here.

Michael Byrne in Motherboard:

What direction is time heading in at this very moment? Are you sure? Of course you are. Life is just a constant barrage of causes and effects, things happening beforeother things that, had they not occurred, would have prevented the other, subsequent things from happening. No one goes through their life thinking about this, the directionality of time, because it's beyond evidence and buried in the brain's deepest intuitions: you were born before you die and it could hardly be the other way around. Time moves forward.

As it is with really all of the mind's deepest intuitions, this directionality is not so easy. It's possible to imagine a wide variety of schemes involving information and information hiding that make time's arrow less clear. In fact, physics, at its smallest, deepest roots has really no interest in forward and backward; it could really go either way. Time, or the direction of time, arises as physics gets bigger and more complicated. Zoom way in, all the way in actually, and what you'll find is enviable oblivian: cause-effects, effect-causes, effect-effects, cause-causes. Something like that.

More here.

Paul Anthony Jones in the Huffington Post:

1. In the 17th century, magpies were nicknamed pie-maggots.

2. The part of a wall between two windows is called the interfenestration.

3. If you were to write out every number name in full (one, two, three, four...), you wouldn't use a single letter B until you reached one billion.

4. The part of your back that you can't quite reach to scratch is called the acnestis.It's derived from the Greek word for “cheese-grater.”

5. A hecatompedon is a building measuring precisely 100ft × 100ft.

6. A growlery is a place you like to retire to when you're unwell or in a bad mood. It was coined by Charles Dickens in Bleak House (1853).

7. There was no word for the color orange in English until about 450 years ago.

8. The infinity sign, ∞, is called a lemniscate. Its name means “decorated with ribbons” in Latin.

9. A Dutch feast is one at which the host gets drunk before his hosts do.

10. Schoolmaster is an anagram of “the classroom.”

More here.

Alex de Wall in the Boston Review:

There are four variants to the threat that arises when the U.S. supports local military establishments. First, the government receiving the funds may manipulate counter-terror operations for its own political purposes. Take Ethiopia, for instance. Close observers of militant Islamism in the Horn of Africa say that al-Qaeda affiliates were largely defeated before September 11—their cells broken, their sponsors intimidated. Small numbers of Islamist extremists were hiding out in Somalia—but unlike Afghanistan, Somalia is a commercially open society where anonymity is impossible. But Ethiopia was also fighting a proxy war with Eritrea, with Somalia as the battleground, and was deeply fearful of Eritrea’s capacity to destabilize the region. In December 2006, espying Eritrean advisers in Mogadishu, Ethiopia sent its troops into Somalia. To garner U.S. support, it announced that it was targeting al-Shabaab. The United States bought the ruse and ended up as partner and sponsor in a military mission. Seven and a half years later, there is no end in sight.

More here.

Louise Jury in The Independent:

The works for which Yasmina Reza is best known are her tightly structured plays, 'Art' and God of Carnage, and her new novel follows them in deploying a very specific form. It begins with a laugh-out-loud rendering of a lethal domestic row between journalist Robert Toscano and his lawyer wife, Odile, over the purchase of cheese in a supermarket. In its deathly ridiculousness, the description, told from the perspective of the husband, confirms Reza as a sharply observant wit. Yet just as she professed herself surprised when English-speaking audiences saw 'Art' as a comedy, the mood remains more melancholic than humorous as over a further 20 chapters and 210 pages, 18 characters get a chapter each – with three granted a second say – to recount a vignette from their lives.

…Yet, somewhat surprisingly, the strictures of the structure do allow some emotions to flow. The Hutners appear to have the perfect life but it proves anything but. At the end, the widow's reaction to the sudden end of her loveless marriage is genuinely moving and believable. The title speaks of happiness but it is the sadnesses that prevail. Paola visits the marital home of her lover Luc, surveys the decor and immediately concludes he will never leave his wife. It is hard not to agree with Jeannette Blot that “women are attracted to appalling men”. “Happy are the happy” is the second half of a quote by Jorge Luis Borges with which the novel begins and reads, more fully: “Happy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love.” So the happinesses are small; the medical secretary's memory of a cigarette shared with the son of a patient; the lover biting his tongue when the woman he realises he genuinely cares for demonstrates a painful lack of self-knowledge; the husband who throws away his newspaper of racing tips to agree to a museum visit with the wife he has publicly shamed. Most significantly, perhaps, at the end, the pleasure of two friends fishing. Reza is the mistress of subtle detail.

More here.

Joanna Bourke in The Telegraph:

In 2003, an earnest American army sergeant called Brian Turner was deployed to fight in Iraq. Unusually, he stuffed an anthology of Iraqi poems into his rucksack. One of the poems was titled “Every Morning the War Gets Up from Sleep” by Fadhil al-Azzawi, a highly acclaimed Iraqi poet and novelist. In the early hours of the morning, Turner recalls how he and his fellow soldiers would kick in the doors of suspected Iraqi insurgents; they would force the men to kneel; they would zip-tie them with flexi-cuffs and pull sandbags over their heads; they would offer chocolates to the terrified children. They would then turn off their night-vision goggles and read al-Azzawi’s poem:

Grief

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the check-out line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? She says,
reading the name out loud, slowly
so I am aware of each syllable
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

by Matthew Dickman
from American Poetry Review, 2008

Charles E. Cobb Jr. in Salon:

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
—Ella Baker

I have never subscribed to nonviolence as a way of life, simply because I have never felt strong enough or courageous enough, even though as a young activist and organizer in the South I was committed to the tactic. “I tried to aim my gun, wondering what it would feel like to kill a man,” Walter White wrote of his father’s instruction to shoot and “don’t . . . miss” if a white mob set foot on their property. If I had been in a similar situation in 1960s Mississippi, I would have wrestled with the same doubts that weighed on the young White. But in the final analysis, whatever ethical or moral difficulty I might have had would not have made me unwilling or unable to fire a weapon if necessary. I would have been able to live with the burden of having killed a man to save my own life or those of my friends and coworkers.

It has been a challenge to reconcile this fact with nonviolence, the chosen tactic of the southern civil rights movement of which I was a part. yet in some circumstances, as seen in the pages of this book, guns proved their usefulness in nonviolent struggle. That’s life, which is always about living within its contradictions. More than ever, an exploration of this contradiction is needed. The subjects of guns and of armed self-defense have never been more politicized or more hotly debated than they are today. Although it may seem peculiar for a book largely about armed self-defense, I hope these pages have pushed forward discussion of both the philosophy and the practicalities of nonviolence, particularly as it pertains to black history and struggle. The larger point, of course, is that nonviolence and armed resistance are part of the same cloth; both are thoroughly woven into the fabric of black life and struggle. And that struggle no more ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 than it began with the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther king Jr., and the student sit-ins.

More here.

Mark Mazower in The Guardian:

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said President Obama at West Point last month. His speech was a reaffirmation of the US as the indispensable nation, destined to lead the world. We have lived with this kind of rhetoric for a long time now, so long that it seems to have been with us forever. Adam Tooze's new book takes us back a century, to the time when this was all very new. It offers a bold and persuasive reinterpretation of how the US rose to global pre-eminence and along the way it recasts the entire story of how the world staggered from one conflagration to the next.

In the late 19th century, the world was dominated by imperial European great powers, happily carving up between them any available territories in Africa and Asia. The United States watched from the sidelines, a bit-player in international affairs, the energies of its politicians dedicated to overcoming the bitter internal legacy of the civil war. With a negligible navy and a tiny diplomatic service, it was scarcely a power of even the second rank, and, apart from the unfortunate inhabitants of Cuba and the Philippines, people around the world could live their entire lives in ignorance of the Stars and Stripes. Tooze shows, more emphatically than any other scholar I have read, how decisively and how sweepingly the first world war ended this state of affairs. In the midst of the war, financial and naval power in particular moved across the Atlantic never to return. In this situation, Woodrow Wilson did not seek merely to replace the British as the hegemon of a liberal trading order, as historians used to tell us. Rather, he wanted to move the international system as a whole beyond the practices of imperial great-power rivalry that he blamed for the war itself.

More here.

William Logan at The New York Times:

In the early fall of 1912, a blandly handsome, tousle-headed American schoolteacher arrived in London. Nearing 40, coming without introduction or much of a plan — except, as he later confessed, “to write and be poor” — he was making a last attempt to write himself into poetry. It would have taken mad willfulness to drag his wife and four children out of their ­settled New Hampshire life in a quixotic assault on the London literary scene. Still, he was soon spending a candlelit evening with Yeats in the poet’s curtained rooms, having come to the attention of that “stormy petrel” Ezra Pound, who lauded him in reviews back home. Little more than two years later, the schoolteacher sailed back, having published his first two books, “A Boy’s Will” (1913) and “North of Boston” (1914). He had become Robert Frost.

The modernists remade American poetry in less than a decade, but like the Romantics they were less a group than a scatter of ill-favored and sometimes ill-tempered individuals. Frost was in most ways the odd man out: He despised free verse, had only a patchy education and wrote about country life. He knew the dark and sometimes terrible loneliness that descended upon stonewalled farms and meager villages. Looking back on his work, this throwback to Chaucer and Virgil plaintively asked one of his correspondents, “Doesnt [sic] the wonder grow that I have never written anything or as you say never published anything except about New England farms?” (“North of Boston” was originally titled “Farm Servants and Other People.”)

more here.

Steve Donoghue at The Quarterly Conversation:

For centuries, men of letters and plenty of his fellow historians took great pleasure in reducing the prototypical chronicler, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, to the status of a mere wonder-monger, the garrulous and credulous counter-weight to the austere objectivity of his younger contemporary and immediate successor, Thucydides. In fact, it was a thinly veiled slight in Thucydides’s great work on the Peloponnesian War that got the tradition of Herodotus-bashing started; after that, a bitterly moralizing essay by Plutarch kept it going, it flourished in the Renaissance, and it persisted into modern times. Even fifty years ago, the great classicist Peter Green was gently mocking the standard reduction of “The Father of History”:

Here is Herodotus: a garrulous, credulous collector of sailors’ stories and Oriental novelle, ahistorical in method, factually inaccurate, superstitious and pietistic, politically innocent, his guiding motto cherchez la femme et n’oubliez pas le Dieu

more here.

Margaret Macmillan at the WSJ:

A hundred years ago next week, in the small Balkan city of Sarajevo, Serbian nationalists murdered the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and his wife. People were shocked but not particularly worried. Sadly, there had been many political assassinations in previous years—the king of Italy, two Spanish prime ministers, the Russian czar, President William McKinley. None had led to a major crisis. Yet just as a pebble can start a landslide, this killing set off a series of events that, in five weeks, led Europe into a general war.

The U.S. under President Woodrow Wilson intended to stay out of the conflict, which, in the eyes of many Americans, had nothing to do with them. But in 1917, German submarine attacks on U.S. shipping and attempts by the German government to encourage Mexico to invade the U.S. enraged public opinion, and Wilson sorrowfully asked Congress to declare war. American resources and manpower tipped the balance against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and on Nov. 11, 1918, what everyone then called the Great War finally came to an end.

more here.