Carlotta Gall in the New York Times:

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, I went to live and report for The New York Times in Afghanistan. I would spend most of the next 12 years there, following the overthrow of the Taliban, feeling the excitement of the freedom and prosperity that was promised in its wake and then watching the gradual dissolution of that hope. A new Constitution and two rounds of elections did not improve the lives of ordinary Afghans; the Taliban regrouped and found increasing numbers of supporters for their guerrilla actions; by 2006, as they mounted an ambitious offensive to retake southern Afghanistan and unleashed more than a hundred suicide bombers, it was clear that a deadly and determined opponent was growing in strength, not losing it. As I toured the bomb sites and battlegrounds of the Taliban resurgence, Afghans kept telling me the same thing: The organizers of the insurgency were in Pakistan, specifically in the western district of Quetta. Police investigators were finding that many of the bombers, too, were coming from Pakistan.

In December 2006, I flew to Quetta, where I met with several Pakistani reporters and a photographer. Together we found families who were grappling with the realization that their sons had blown themselves up in Afghanistan. Some were not even sure whether to believe the news, relayed in anonymous phone calls or secondhand through someone in the community. All of them were scared to say how their sons died and who recruited them, fearing trouble from members of the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence service.

More here. And a rebuttal from Peter Bergen at CNN:

Gall makes two astonishing claims in her Times magazine piece.

The first claim: An unnamed Pakistani official told her, based on what he had in turn heard from an unnamed senior U.S. official that “the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad.” ISI is Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency.

The second claim: “The ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: bin Laden…the top military bosses knew about it, I was told.”

It is, of course, hard to prove negatives, but having spent around a year reporting intensively on the hunt for al Qaeda's leader for my 2012 book “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad,” I am convinced that there is no evidence that anyone in the Pakistani government, military or intelligence agencies knowingly sheltered bin Laden.

How did I arrive at this conclusion?

More here.

Gregor Peter Schmitz interviews George Soros in the NY Review of Books:

Schmitz: As we speak, European finance ministers are in the process of concluding an agreement on the banking union. What do you think of it?

Soros: In the process of negotiations, the so-called banking union has been transformed into something that is almost the exact opposite: the re-establishment of national “silos,” or separately run banks. This is a victory for Orwellian newspeak.

Schmitz: What’s wrong with it?

Soros: The incestuous relationship between national authorities and bank managements. France in particular is famous for its inspecteurs de finance, who end up running its major banks. Germany has its Landesbanken and Spain its caixas, which have unhealthy connections with provincial politicians. These relationships were a major source of weakness in the European banking system and played an important part in the banking crisis that is still weighing on the eurozone. The proposed banking union should have eliminated them, but they were largely preserved, mainly at German insistence.

Schmitz: That is a pretty drastic condemnation. How do you justify it?

Soros: In effect, the banking union will leave the banking system without a lender of last resort. The proposed resolution authority is so complicated, with so many decision-making entities involved, that it is practically useless in an emergency. Even worse, the ECB is legally prohibited from undertaking actions for which it is not expressly authorized. That sets it apart from other central banks, which are expected to use their discretion in an emergency.

But Germany was determined to limit the liabilities that it could incur through theECB. As a result, member countries remain vulnerable to financial pressures from which other developed countries are exempt. That is what I meant when I said that over-indebted members of the EU are in the position of third-world countries that are overindebted in a foreign currency. The banking union does not correct that defect. On the contrary, it perpetuates it.

Schmitz: You sound disappointed.

Soros: I am. I left no stone unturned trying to prevent this outcome, but now that it has happened, I don’t want to keep knocking my head against the wall. I accept that Germany has succeeded in imposing a new order on Europe, although I consider it unacceptable. But I still believe in the European Union and the principles of the open society that originally inspired it, and I should like to recapture that spirit. I want to arrest the process of disintegration, not accelerate it. So I am no longer advocating that Germany should “lead or leave the euro.” The window of opportunity to bring about radical change in the rules governing the euro has closed.

Schmitz: So, basically, you are giving up on Europe?

Soros: No. I am giving up on changing the financial arrangements, the creditor–debtor relationship that has now turned into a permanent system. I will continue to focus on politics, because that is where I expect dramatic developments.

More here.

David Palumbo-Liu,Cary Nelson, Judea Pearl, Noura Erakat, David Lloyd, Russell Berman, David N. Myers, and Colin Dayan debate the ethics of a boycott in the LA Review of Books:

There are several questions at the heart of this debate: What role, if any, does the academy have in matters of political and international affairs? Is endorsing a movement — such as the movement to boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) Israel — in the great tradition of academic freedom and discourse, or an example of its degradation? Does an academic boycott of Israel advance, or damage, the cause for peace and human rights in the Middle East?

We facilitated this forum at the urging of David Palumbo-Liu, a supporter of the BDS movement, in the hopes that it would engender a more informed understanding on these and many related questions. We did nothing to constrain or limit the eight participating scholars; nor did we have them read each other’s pieces until today.

We cast a wide net to bring together as many diverse voices and experts as possible, but many declined the invitation, citing the adrenalized tenor of the debate. The eight who agreed to participate, while they might not represent all the perspectives involved, are among some of the most important voices engaging these issues within the American university. It is our hope that these essays create an opening of visibility — not simply for this debate, but more importantly, for those most affected by the tragic, ongoing circumstances of the Middle East conflict: Israelis and Palestinians themselves.

All the essays can be found here.

Richard Marshall interviews Jeremy Sheamur in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: The Open Society and The Poverty of Historicism were both written at a time when the cold war orientated much thinking in the social sciences. Do you think Popper saw himself as a Cold War intellectual and so was he deliberately writing to oppose Marxist intellectuals of the left at the time? Or was he driven just by the ideas, following them wherever they led him?

JS: I would disagree with this as a reading of Popper. His Open Society and Poverty of Historicism were written in New Zealand during the Second World War, and were critical reflections on his experience of inter-war politics in Vienna, and the lessons that he thought should be learned from that, for what took place after the Second World War. His engagement with Marxism was strongly influenced by his critical reactions to the influence of Marxism on Austrian politics. While – as his ‘The Theory of Totalitarianism” (1946), now inAfter the Open Society makes clear – his critical treatment of Plato was conducted in part because he came to the conclusion that the kind of reaction to social change which he found in Hitler, was also to be found in Plato’s work.

Popper was drawn into disagreement with Soviet philosophers after the Second World War, e.g. by way of their critical reaction to his ‘Utopia and Violence’. In addition, it is clear that, after the Second World War, he became concerned about totalitarianism. In this context, he was particularly exercised to try to make sure that a split did not develop between liberals and non-totalitarian socialists. When he was invited to the initial meeting of what would become Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society, he urged Hayek to invite various socialists to take part, for fear that Hayek’s existing plans for the society would enhance the risk of such a split. (Hayek himself was at the time concerned about the risk of a split, but between conservatives – notably, among German opponents of National Socialism – and liberals, and I suspect that he and Popper may have been at cross-purposes over this.) Popper’s own political views were open to interpretation – both Bryan Magee and Malachi Hacohen consider The Open Society as containing a program for the democratic left, while Hayek thought that there were strong commonalities between his approach and Popper’s (although regretting some continuing influence of Popper’s early socialism). It was clear, though, that Popper was not a market-oriented liberal of Hayek’s kind.

All this would, on the face of it, have made him an obvious candidate for being a Cold War intellectual. However, he did not, for example, participate in the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (something to which Hayek, when he attended a meeting, did not find himself sympathetic, because it did not share his view of freedom). One might have expected that Popper would have been sympathetic to their views, but I can only speculate why he was not involved: was it, perhaps, a result of his intellectual disagreements with Michael Polanyi who played a leading role in the group in England; was it a product of Popper’s allergy to cigarette smoke, or of his at times prickly personal relations with other academics?

More here.

Gerda Saunders in Slate:

For my 61st birthday, in 2010, I was given the diagnosis of microvascular disease, after Alzheimer’s the second leading cause of dementia. I was—as my rather blunt neurologist put it—already “dementing.” Insofar as I had thought about dementia until then, I was unaware that the word had a verb form: he/she/it dements, they dement, we all dement. Yet, no matter my incredulity that this absurd verb could apply to me, now, two years later, “the cloake sitteth no lesse fit” on my chastened back.

My initial denial will seem disingenuous in light of the fact that I knew the symptoms of dementia even then—and recognized them in myself. Also, my mother had a form of mental disconnect that made her increasingly out of touch with reality until her death at 82. Given that, together with the generally known fact that dementia can run in families, why did my doctor’s utterance fall so disconsonantly on my ear?

My belated pursuit of a Ph.D. in English in my 40s introduced me to the Enlightenment philosophers. I remember being intrigued by John Locke and William Whewell’s pursuit of, as Locke puts it, the “originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings,” a quest that took both men back to Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Locke describes fallen Adam as lost in a “strange Country” with “all Things new, and unknown about him”; Whewell pictures Adam doing the first work of postlapsarian orientation by giving names “distinct and appropriate to the facts” to newly encountered objects and concepts.

More here.

John Timmer at Ars Technica:

Earlier today, IBM announced that it would be using Watson, the system that famously wiped the floor with human Jeopardy champions, to tackle a somewhat more significant problem: choosing treatments for cancer. In the process, the company hopes to help usher in the promised era of personalized medicine.

The announcement was made at the headquarters of IBM's partner in this effort, the New York Genome Center; its CEO, Robert Darnell called the program “not purely clinical and not purely research.” Rather than seeking to gather new data about the mutations that drive cancer, the effort will attempt to determine if Watson can parse genome data and use it to recommend treatments.

Darnell said that the project would start with 20 to 25 patients who are suffering from glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer with a poor prognosis. Currently, the median survival time after diagnosis is only 14 months; “Time, frankly, is not your friend when you have glioblastoma,” as Darnell put it. Samples from those patients (including both healthy and cancerous tissue) would be subjected to extensive DNA sequencing, including both the genome and the RNA transcribed from it. “What comes out is an absolute gusher of information,” he said.

It should theoretically be possible to analyze that data and use it to customize a treatment that targets the specific mutations present in tumor cells. But right now, doing so requires a squad of highly trained geneticists, genomics experts, and clinicians. It's a situation that Darnell said simply can't scale to handle the patients with glioblastoma, much less other cancers.

More here.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

Ellison’s skepticism regarding modern jazz may be, in large measure, a mark of generational conflict. The musicians he revered, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Rushing, Mahalia Jackson, and Charlie Christian, were born between 1899 and 1916. Charlie Parker, whom Ellison admired despite his wariness about the historical significance of his musical style, was born in 1920; Miles Davis and John Coltrane, whom he actively rejected, were born in 1926; Mingus, in 1922; Taylor, in 1929. Ellison was born in 1913; the musicians he loved had their styles set by the time of the writer’s own maturity.

More important, the experiences and the traditions of later jazz musicians may have differed in crucial ways from those of Ellison’s generation and earlier. For better or worse, traditions shift and dissipate; they’re worn away by political and societal changes, they’re replaced by a more self-conscious composition of influences and a more self-willed construction of identity. Ellison may well be seen as a leading theorist of communitarian values and the culture that develops from them. What’s certain is that Ellison perceived, and was troubled by, a shift in the social function of jazz: it stopped being connected to the popular music that blacks listened to.

more here.

Michael Cronin at The Dublin Review of Books:

Louis Borges once grouped animals into three classes: those we watch television with, those we eat, and those we are scared of. Another more psychoanalytically inflected way of classifying these relationships might be the oedipal (you and me on the same sofa), the instrumental (you will end up by being eaten) and the fantasmatic (how exotic, sleek, dangerous you are). In Braidotti’s view a posthuman ethics implies an end to forms of “anthropolatry” which not only obscure emergent forms of species thinking but consign all other species to dangerous, destructive and ecologically untenable forms of subordination. If “becoming animal” in Hiberno-English is an occasional and unfortunate consequence of excessive alcohol consumption, for Braidotti it is a way of realising the irretrievably embodied, material nature of our existence on a planet that we share with innumerable other species that we continue to destroy in vast numbers. The current rate in the loss of species diversity alone is similar in intensity to the event that 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs. As against this, the emerging fields of eco-criticism and animal studies show the new kinds of transdisciplinary formations that are coming to the fore in the wake of the crisis of the human in the Anthropocene. In a post-Orwellian move, some animals are beginning to recognise that they might not be more equal than others and are starting to wonder what this might mean for the planet.

more here.

John S. Rosenberg in Harvard Magazine:

Their paper is a brisk mash-up of higher-education history (the evolution of universities, graduate education, and beyond); obdurate challenges (global poverty, health, education reform, and environmental degradation); and demographics (increasing longevity, the potential for “third-stage” education for professionals—beyond college and graduate school—who have talent, energy, skills, and active post-career time before retirement). From these vantage points, the authors proposed a new role for teaching and learning in “advanced leadership”—beyond extant options in executive education, retraining or vocational retooling, or leisure learning in retirement. Perhaps most important, in a University that valorizes educating leaders, they defined the term, and their aims, with unusual precision. The advanced leader-learners, they determined, would have to be prepared to address problems that are both technical and political: seemingly intractable issues where known solutions (cures for diseases, food aid) are “mal-distributed,” embedded in complex systems crossing institutional and professional boundaries, and involving diverse stakeholders. For many such problems, research “tends to be oriented toward the technical side, toward specialists’ content, and not toward action or system-change processes that draw on knowledge from special disciplines.” In other words, “[W]e often know more about what than how and who.”

Ameliorating “controversial and systemic” problems, they wrote, depends on “new action models…that involve cross-sector collaboration based on cross-profession expertise.” The best chance to build effective collaborations, in turn, lay in “a new field of practice…particularly well suited to the capabilities and desires of experienced leaders” who have already proven their capacity to shape organizations and effect change in at least one realm and are now eager to develop “solutions to significant societal and global problems.”

More here.

Maria Konnikova in Smithsonian:

In 1884, at his specially built Anthropometric Laboratory in London, Sir Francis Galton charged visitors three pence to undergo simple tests to measure their height, weight, keenness of sight and “swiftness of blow with fist.” The laboratory, later moved to the South Kensington Museum, proved immensely popular—“its door was thronged by applicants waiting patiently for their turn,” Galton said—ultimately collecting data on some 17,000 individuals. One measure that deeply interested Galton, who is recognized as “the father of psychometrics” for his efforts to quantify people’s mental abilities (and scorned as the founder of the eugenics movement because of his theories about inheritance), was speed. He believed that reaction time was one proxy for human intelligence. With a pendulum-based apparatus for timing a subject’s response to the sight of a disc of paper or the sound of a hammer, Galton collected reaction speeds averaging around 185 milliseconds, split seconds that would become notorious in the social sciences. For decades other researchers pursued Galton’s basic idea—speed equals smarts. While many recent tests have found no consistent relationship, some have demonstrated a weak but unmistakable correlation between short reaction times and high scores on intelligence tests. If there is a logic to the link, it’s that the faster nerve signals travel from your eyes to the brain and to the circuits that trigger your motor neurons, the faster your brain processes information it receives, and the sharper your intellect.

Psychologist Michael Woodley of Umea University in Sweden and his colleagues had enough confidence in the link, in fact, to use more than a century of data on reaction times to compare our intellect with that of the Victorians. Their findings call into question our cherished belief that our fast-paced lives are a sign of our productivity, as well as our mental fitness. When the researchers reviewed reaction times from 14 studies conducted between the 1880s and 2004 (including Galton’s largely inconclusive data set), they found a troubling decline that, they calculated, would correspond to a loss of an average of 1.16 IQ points a decade. Doing the math, that makes us mentally inferior to our Victorian predecessors by about 13 IQ points.

More here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in the New York Times:

Trade agreements are a subject that can cause the eyes to glaze over, but we should all be paying attention. Right now, there are trade proposals in the works that threaten to put most Americans on the wrong side of globalization.

The conflicting views about the agreements are actually tearing at the fabric of the Democratic Party, though you wouldn’t know it from President Obama’s rhetoric. In his State of the Union address, for example, he blandly referred to “new trade partnerships” that would “create more jobs.” Most immediately at issue is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, which would bring together 12 countries along the Pacific Rim in what would be the largest free trade area in the world.

Negotiations for the TPP began in 2010, for the purpose, according to the United States Trade Representative, of increasing trade and investment, through lowering tariffs and other trade barriers among participating countries. But the TPP negotiations have been taking place in secret, forcing us to rely on leaked drafts to guess at the proposed provisions. At the same time, Congress introduced a billthis year that would grant the White House filibuster-proof fast-track authority, under which Congress simply approves or rejects whatever trade agreement is put before it, without revisions or amendments.

Controversy has erupted, and justifiably so. Based on the leaks — and the history of arrangements in past trade pacts — it is easy to infer the shape of the whole TPP, and it doesn’t look good. There is a real risk that it will benefit the wealthiest sliver of the American and global elite at the expense of everyone else. The fact that such a plan is under consideration at all is testament to how deeply inequality reverberates through our economic policies.

More here.

Philip Oltermann in The Guardian:

He is widely regarded as one of Europe's most influential 20th century philosophers whose writings inspired some of the important thinkers of the modern era. But almost four decades after Martin Heidegger's death, scholars in Germany and France are asking whether the antisemitic tendencies of the author of Being and Time ran deeper than previously thought.

The philosopher's sympathies for the Nazi regime have been well documented in the past: Heidegger joined the party in 1933 and remained a member until the end of the second world war. But antisemitic ideas were previously thought to have tainted his character rather than touched the core of his philosophy – not least by Jewish thinkers such as Hannah Arendt or Jacques Derrida, who cited their debt to Heidegger.

This week's publication of the “black notebooks” (a kind of philosophical diary that Heidegger asked to be held back until the end of his complete work), challenges this view. In France the revelations have been debated vigorously since passages were leaked to the media last December, with some Heidegger scholars even trying to stop the notebooks' publication.

In Germany, one critic has argued that it would be “hard to defend”Heidegger's thinking after the publication of the notebooks, while another has already called the revelations a “debacle” for modern continental philosophy – even though the complete notebooks were until now embargoed by the publisher.

More here.

Adam Thirlwell at the Times Literary Supplement:

Sure, Roth is an American novelist. But it was his European capers that allowed him to develop his sad, hysterical Americana voices, his novels of fantasy arguments. (In a lovely aside, Pierpont says that Roth’s initial title for The Counterlife had been The Metamorphosis – “but the title was already taken”.) He took the ordinary realist plots of James and Chekhov – the plots of repressed desire, of thwarted hope, of marriages gone bad and rancorous, of compromise and dead illusions – but then voiced the frenzied monologues and thought balloons of characters trapped in such situations. Or even put himself inside them, too, using his own name. The setting is grisaille, but the foreground is all cartoon. “I didn’t know how to control a non-realistic book”, he tells Pierpont, and that may be right – but he is not a pure realist, either. Metafiction and fantasia are also his fiction’s modes – it’s just that they are used for unusually deflationary purposes. Portnoy, say, with its famous punchline of an ending – “So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” – closes the narrative on a hazy seal of realism: it turns out that Portnoy’s monologue has only been in his head – for the high jinx of Portnoy’s voice may not be accurate to a real conversation. As a fantasy of consciousness, however, who can doubt it?

In fact, throughout his thirty-one books, Roth has been so much the novelist of riff and rant and self-conversation that I wonder if it really makes sense to see him as the author of discrete novels. In the retrospective of Pierpont’s book, his whole oeuvre begins to form something more like one great improvisatory frieze: not books so much as sequences – comic bits, crazed arguments, stalled paragraphs.

more here.

Jeremy Noel-Tod at Literary Review:

'The Infant Modernists' is one of the great unwritten works of critical biography. Shiningly specific childhood experience, the oeuvres of Woolf, Joyce and T S Eliot all insinuate, lies at the heart of their sophisticated mystery. John Updike put his finger on this when he parodied Eliot's later critical prose with an essay called 'What is a Rhyme?', which begins, with ponderous coyness, 'I do not know whether all childhoods are painful. My own, or that drastically edited set of snapshots which is all that remains to me of my own, did (or does) not seem especially so.'

If there is ever an adequate biography of Eliot, it will regroup and recolour all the 'drastically edited' snapshots that he scattered through his writings. Whoever attempts the restoration work will find an indispensable model of imaginative scholarship in Linda Leavell's Holding On Upside Down. As Leavell notes, Eliot and Marianne Moore 'were born within a year of each other in the same western city' (St Louis; Moore was born in November 1887). This remarkable coincidence for modernist poetry, she observes, 'may be at least a little explained by the value their grandfathers placed on education'. It is the formative experience of that turn-of-the-century ancestral imperative – New World in ambition, Old World in breadth – that the first half of this biography brings valuably to life.

more here.

Jed Perl at The New Republic:

Carpeaux reminds us that many of the experiences that matter most—certainly many of the artistic experiences that matter most—can’t be fit into column A or column B, as if they were answers filled out on a multiple choice test. This man who went through the rigors of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (the mother of all art academies), competed for all the prestigious prizes, and after many frustrations ultimately won the Prix de Rome, loved the art of the past with a passion so overheated that it freed him from conventional academic thinking. For Carpeaux, tradition wasn’t rules and regulations, but the supernatural heroism of Michelangelo and Raphael, which astonished him when he finally reached Rome in 1856. It may be Carpeaux’s yearning for an unattainable heroic power that gives his work its captivating energy and anxiety. His mythic protagonists aren’t quite as dramatically dark as Delacroix’s. His countesses aren’t quite as sublimely sensuous as Ingres’s. What Carpeaux gives us instead is the ordeal of the nineteenth-century imagination—the imagination that reaches for an ultimate greatness that remains just beyond his grasp. You can’t quite explain the particular quality of this work, which is by turns romantic and realist and classic and sometimes simultaneously all of the above. You feel that unresolvable power in every gallery of this remarkable retrospective. The exhibition has a terrific title—“The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux”—but it could as easily have been called “The Ambiguities of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.”

more here.

Rose George in The Guardian:

Today I went for a run. I put on my £20 Nike wicking-fabric T-shirt and my £25 Nike wicking-fabric leggings, then my £25 compression socks and my £110 Brooks Ghost 6 shoes. I strapped on my £100 Garmin Forerunner 210 GPS watch, and zipped up my £40 Saucony high-vis orange windproof jacket. I inserted my iPhone into my armband, plugged in the headphones, then opened the door of my house in north Leeds and headed up Harrogate Road. I checked my watch every so often to see if I was keeping to my marathon pace; I stuck to the roads; and by doing what I was doing and wearing what I was wearing, I symbolised something that Richard Askwith doesn't much like. He calls it “Big Running”, and he means the industrialisation of an activity that should be free and natural. “How can running be an industry at all?” he wonders early on. “There's no more need for a running industry than there is for a tree-climbing industry or a hide-and-seek industry.”

…I've read a few, from Murakami to the recent Running Like a Girl by Alexandra Heminsley. They all have the same problem: they run their course before the end. I began to wonder whether it is possible to write interestingly about something that is, after all, just putting one foot in front of the other, at a speed of your choice. What is compelling about running is what goes on along with it: inside or outside your head. The best writers about it are writing about something else: about being alive, in Askwith's case, in predawn darkness in a Northamptonshire field; about being at peace with freezing rain and puddles and mud and bogs, rather than scared of them, and rather than putting up a barrier of weatherproof, waterproof health and safety against them. This is the Fifth Age of Running, though by now I've lost track. It's also what he calls Slow Running, although it's nothing to do with pace and everything to do with quality, as Slow Food is about valuing ingredients. In Slow Running, the ingredients are the outside world, and the runner's focus turns from digital numbers and Big Running kit to muntjacs and mice; to the ghosts of night-time animals; to exactly how the wind is blowing.

More here.