Amanda Little in Bookforum:

LAST SPRING, A THIRTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD COLLEGE DROPOUT–TURNED–ENERGY EXECUTIVE named Billy Parish came to talk to my journalism class at Vanderbilt University. The course focused on climate reporting, and Parish had recently been profiled in Fortune magazine as a young virtuoso in the solar industry. Students wanted to hear his perspective as an innovator: What did he consider the most important untold story on climate change? “Easy,” he said, “it’s the story of our victory in progress, the story that we’re winning—not losing—the climate battle.” Most progressive journalists hate to talk about actual progress, Parish went on to argue, so they spend their time mewling about what’s not getting done on the climate-legislation front. Science writers, meanwhile, nitpick about important but arcane details of atmospheric warming in parts per million and other mind-numbing measurements. The skeptics, for their part, continue to chant, like skipping records, their groundless but vehement doubts about the problem’s very existence. Little wonder that Americans turn a deaf ear to this issue.

Maybe they wouldn’t, Parish argued, if they could read more climate literature that matters—stories about how America is actually innovating and adapting in response to this crisis, even as global treaties have languished and climate legislation collects dust on the shelves of Congress. Parish waxed technophilic, telling stories about new carbon-cutting innovations on the horizon: wind turbines designed like jet engines, not propellers; fuels made from algae and batteries made from viruses; nanotech solar cells that are smaller than gnats and can be integrated into paints, shingles, and glass. He explained that the cost of solar energy has come down 80 percent in the last five years, and solar production has grown more than 50 percent a year. “We’ve got to stop acting helpless,” he said. “We’ve got to start telling the stories of why we’re winning.” As a budding entrepreneur, Parish is notably prone to enthusiasm. But his argument stayed with me, and after his visit I began to see climate literature a bit differently, dividing it into two categories: The first, and overwhelmingly the largest, includes stories of conjecture about climate change itself—about whether it’s happening at all; whether humans are to blame; how severe the problem is or isn’t; how catastrophic the impacts may become. The second, and much more intriguing, category focuses on the tangible, practical ways we’re beginning to adapt: stories about innovators who are trying, against vertiginous odds, to get technologies and strategies in place that can make our transition to a low-carbon economy not just possible but seamless.

More here.

Andrew Pollack in The New York Times:

J. Craig Venter is the latest wealthy entrepreneur to think he can cheat aging and death. And he hopes to do so by resorting to his first love: sequencing genomes. On Tuesday, Dr. Venter announced that he was starting a new company, Human Longevity, which will focus on figuring out how people can live longer and healthier lives.

To do that, the company will build what Dr. Venter says will be the largest human DNA sequencing operation in the world, capable of processing 40,000 human genomes a year. The huge amount of DNA data will be combined with huge amounts of other data on the health and body composition of the people whose DNA is sequenced, in the hope of gleaning insights into the molecular causes of aging and age-related illnesses like cancer and heart disease. Slowing aging, if it can be done, could be a way to prevent many diseases, an alternative to treating one disease a time. “Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease, but it’s not a disease itself,” Dr. Venter said in an interview. Still, his company will also work on treating individual diseases of aging.

More here.

Song of a Woman

With no friends of your own
you are looking only at me
and you accuse me.
You accuse me of being inconsiderate
No, not enough
No, not enough
not enough proof of loving you
how insolent of me not to look happy all the time
how impudent of me not to be able to forecast today’s weather for you
you always tell me to do things I can’t

I want to start learning magic.
I want to stop your criticism with a single glance.
I want to put your heart to sleep with one finger.
I want to go out every night riding a broom.
I want to jump over the mountain ridge
trailing my hair like smoke.
I want to fly into the sparkling moonlight
laughing away your beratings down there.

You, so simple,
give no thought to the pain that is almost killing me.
Yet, you will calmly go to heaven by and by.
And I, having wished for witchcraft, will fall to hell
Ah, that will create ten billion years of separation.
.

by Nao Inoue
from Honoo ni tsuite
publisher: Chiyoda Shoin, Tokyo, 1950
translation: 2009, Takako Lento

Continue for original Japanese

Read more »

The Editors at n+1:

What role has the American intellectual community played in this saga, if any? Certainly we failed to prevent it. But there is more. For the past two years, since Putin re-assigned himself to the Russian presidency, we have indulged ourselves in a bacchanalia of anti-Putinism, shading over into anti-Russianism. We turned Pussy Riot into mass media stars. We wrote endless articles (and books) about how Putin was a mystery man, a terrible man, a KGB ghoul who lived under your bed. It got to the point where, arriving in Sochi for Putin’s overpriced Olympics, Western journalists were greeted like heroes for tweeting about how the curtains in their hotel rooms were falling down. It was funny, but it was also not funny. Should Putin, the president of a country with inadequate hospitals, schools, and housing for its 150-million population, have spent $50 billion on hosting the Olympics? Absolutely not—especially when a third of the money was apparently expropriated by various officials. But the gleeful complaints about Olympic conditions seemed mostly bent on humiliating Russia in toto.

It’s hard to know how much of what gets written in various places leads to American policies in actual fact. Does it matter what’s in the Nation? What about the New York Review of Books? The New Yorker? It’s impossible to say. And the media or publishing game has its own rules, irrespective of politics. Evil Putin is just going to get more airtime than Complicated Putin or Putin Who is Running a Country in a Complex Geopolitical Situation.

Perhaps the way to put it is that an intellectual mistake was turned into a political mistake. The intellectual mistake was to fixate on Putin as the bad man who came along and suddenly undid the good work of Boris Yeltsin. (Bill Clinton’s Russia hand Strobe Talbott the other day tweeted an inadvertent reductio ad absurdum of this position, “Putin has for years been systematically reversing reforms of Yeltsin, Gorbachev & Khrushchev, whose gift of Crimea to Ukraine he’s nullified.”) But as the Russian left has been telling us for years, Putin has not gone back on the Yeltsin-era reforms. In most spheres of Russian life, he has continued them—undoing the Soviet safety net, and replacing it with nothing. That he has become an authoritarian ruler while doing so is a result of the fact that these reforms are cruel and unpopular.

More here.

Carlin Romano in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Did Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger ever meet? If so, they could have compared notes on how to bamboozle de-Nazification officials after, well, one’s side loses.

No matter. Now de Man has joined that august cultural club that includes Caravaggio, Wagner, Céline, Pound, Heidegger, and a slew of other accomplished artists, thinkers, and intellectuals who were also no-goodniks. The nasty ethics in the personal lives of those cultural heavies force us to ask two tough questions that are simpler than many pretend:

(1) Is there an inevitable link between a person’s ethics and his creative and intellectual work?

(2) Is it morally acceptable to honor or enjoy the work of artists and intellectuals whom we condemn for their nonprofessional, unethical actions?

Even when a cultural figure simply bears accusations of ethical misdeeds—as in the case of Woody Allen over the years, a matter reopened after Hollywood’s Golden Globes tribute and an Academy Awards nomination—the questions, when retriggered, produce frenzied media meditations. Now, with the long-awaited publication of Evelyn Barish’s The Double Life of Paul de Man (Liveright), a two-decades-in-the-making investigative biography of the Yale literary theorist whose version of “deconstruction” shook up English and comp-lit departments in the 1970s and 80s, the high literary and intellectual worlds face their own revisiting.

According to Barish, de Man (1919-83) committed fraud, forgery (16 separate acts), swindling, embezzlement, and theft as a postwar Belgian book publisher. For his sins as head of the Hermes publishing house, he was, in 1951, “found guilty in absentia and sentenced to six years in prison with heavy fines.” Apparently de Man played fast and loose with more than a million Belgian francs to fuel his lifelong luxury spending. Cornered, he skipped out to the United States on a visa probably obtained illegally by his father.

More here.

Virginia Hughes in Nature:

Biologists first observed this 'transgenerational epigenetic inheritance' in plants. Tomatoes, for example, pass along chemical markings that control an important ripening gene². But, over the past few years, evidence has been accumulating that the phenomenon occurs in rodents and humans as well. The subject remains controversial, in part because it harks back to the discredited theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a nineteenth-century French biologist who proposed that organisms pass down acquired traits to future generations. To many modern biologists, that's “scary-sounding”, says Oliver Rando, a molecular biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, whose work suggests that such inheritance does indeed happen in animals³. If it is true, he says, “Why hasn't this been obvious to all the brilliant researchers in the past hundred years of genetics?”.

One reason why many remain sceptical is that the mechanism by which such inheritance might work is mysterious. Explaining it will require a deep dive into reproductive biology to demonstrate how the relevant signals might be formed in the germ line, the cells that develop into sperm and eggs and carry on, at a minimum, a person's genetic legacy.

A mother might pass on effects of environmental exposures to a fetus during pregnancy. So, to study the phenomenon of transgenerational epigenetics cleanly, biologists are focusing on fathers, and have been looking at how sperm might gain and lose epigenetic marks. “In the past two to three years there's been a lot of new information,” says Michelle Lane, a reproductive biologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia. But proposals for how it all works are themselves embryonic. “It's a huge black box,” Lane says.

More here.

Jonathan Freedland on Scotland's future, in the NYRB:

[I]t is, paradoxically, Scotland that has been clinging to an idea of Britain, one that has been abandoned by the rest of the UK—at least if that idea is defined in part as the collectivist spirit of 1945. As Macwhirter writes, “Scots have arguably been more committed to the idea of Britain than the English over the last 200 years. What Scotland didn’t buy into was the abandonment of what used to be called the post-war consensus: universalism and the welfare state.”

Which is why the Yes campaign’s offer, set out in Scotland’s Future, consists as much of social policy as constitutional change. The document contains few abstractions about democracy, but promises instead “a transformational change in childcare,” the scrapping of London-imposed changes to welfare benefits, and, in the move most likely to attract international attention, the removal of the UK’s Trident nuclear weapon system from Scotland. “We’re half an hour away from the biggest collection of weapons of mass destruction in western Europe,” Jenkins told me. “There’s no version of devolution that allows us to get rid of that.” In other words, only independence allows Scotland to fully realize the distinct political culture that has arisen there.

Some on the left of the No campaign warn that it will be a cruel irony if, by breaking away, Scotland ensures the isolation of its more social democratic ethos. For once Scotland no longer sends fifty-nine MPs to Westminster, many of whom represent safe Labour seats, then Labour’s chances of forming a UK government diminish sharply. If independence happens in 2016, then an England-dominated UK could be the land that is forever Tory. Some electoral analysts dispute that arithmetic; nevertheless it will be this country to which an independent, left-leaning Scotland might be bound in monetary, fiscal, and political union, with the UK Treasury and Bank of England together making major decisions affecting Scotland’s economy. Scottish social democracy could discover it was able to flourish more easily inside Britain than out.

It will be a greater irony still if the ultimate consequence of the program pursued by the great patriot and would-be latter-day Britannia, Margaret Thatcher, was to be the unraveling of the United Kingdom.

More here.

Thomas B. Edsall in the NYT:

[Simon] Kuznets’s research into the relationship between inequality and growth laid the foundation for modern thinking about what has become a critical question: Has inequality in this country reached a tipping point at which it no longer provides an incentive to strive and to innovate, but has instead created a permanently disadvantaged class, as well as an ongoing threat of social instability?

One of the most articulate contemporary proponents of the “optimal inequality” thesis is Richard Freeman, a labor economist at Harvard. In a 2011 paper, Freeman wrote: “Is there a level of inequality that optimizes economic growth, stability, and shared prosperity? My answer is yes. The relation between inequality and economic outcomes follows an inverted-U shape, so that increases in inequality improve economic performance up to the optimum and then reduce it.”

Freeman argues that the costs of excessive inequality are high: “Inequality that results from monopoly power, rent-seeking or activities with negative externalities that enrich their owners while lowering societal income (think pollution or crime), adversely affect economic performance. High inequality reinforces corruption by allowing a few ‘crony capitalists’ to lobby politicians or regulators to protect their economic advantages. When national income goes mostly to those at the top, there is little left to motivate people lower down. The 2007 collapse of Wall Street and bailout of banks-too-big-to-fail showed that inequality in income and power can threaten economic stability and give the few a stranglehold on the economy.”

Conservative economists look at the issue of equality from the opposite vantage point: when do government efforts to remedy inequality and to redistribute income worsen conditions by serving as a deterrent to work and productive activity?

More here.

Robert Irwin at The Times Literary Supplement:

The title Reading Darwin in Arabicnotwithstanding, most of the men discussed in this book did not read Charles Darwin in Arabic. Instead they read Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, Gustave Le Bon, Henri Bergson and George Bernard Shaw in European or Arabic versions. They also read popularizing accounts of various aspects of Darwinism in the scientific and literary journal al-Muqtataf (“The Digest”, 1876–1952). The notion of evolution that Arab readers took away from their reading was often heavily infected by Lamarckism and by the social Darwinism of Spencer. Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selectionwas published in 1859, but Isma‘il Mazhar’s translation of the first five chapters of Darwin’s book into Arabic only appeared in 1918.

For a long time, the reception of Darwinism was bedevilled by the need to find either neologisms or new twists to old words. As Marwa Elshakry points out, there was at first no specific word in Arabic for “species”, distinct from “variety” or “kind”.

more here.

Hilton Als at The New Yorker:

Ibsen starts off by telling us something about who Nora is—or, rather, the conditions she lives under. It’s Christmastime in Norway, and the Helmer household is filled with excitement. A sweet-tempered maid, Helene (Mabel Clements), scurries about the Helmers’ tidy house; she opens the front door, and our fair-haired heroine enters Ian MacNeil’s ingenious set, which sometimes revolves, like a dancer in a music box, as the actors move from room to room, trailed by Stuart Earl’s lovely score. Nora is carrying a number of packages; they’re gifts for her three children. As she sets her packages down and takes off her coat, Helene tells her that her husband, Torvald (Dominic Rowan), is in his study. After years of struggle, he’s about to be made the manager of a local bank. Things are on the upswing in the Helmer household, but something’s wrong.

Before Nora can alert Torvald or the children to her presence, she devours a chocolate that she’s secreted away. But why is her pleasure a secret?

more here.

George O'Brien at The Dublin Review of Books:

In the beginning was Newark. Everything that Philip Roth turned to such rich account in his great final spate of works inaugurated by American Pastoral is not only set in his native place but from the start derived its moral energy and edge from it. The city of Newark and especially the Weequahic neighbourhood, the local spaces that reflect the intricate geography of class and ethnicity, the mentalities of old Jews and their superannuated ways and of new Jews with their suburban affluence and unacknowledged assimilation anxieties, men’s moral crossroads and the unreasonable and irrational women who supply the materials for them – that repertoire of essential Roth concerns and interests is as central to Goodbye, Columbus (1959), his first book, whose eponymous novella made his name, as to the novels that crown his achievement forty years later. But instead of devoting himself to that repertoire’s potential, Roth wandered far and wide, following in Henry James’s footsteps in the long, slow, rather airless Letting Go (1962), doing a Mark Twain in Our Gang (1971), and in general trying a lot of modes and tones without ever seeming quite to satisfy the demands of harnessing his talent’s restless fluency to his smarts, his savvy, his wit and his ideas. He was out of Newark, but what did that mean? – See more at: http://www.drb.ie/essays/american-berserk#sthash.85WAOJMj.dpuf

more here.

Nicholas Epley in Salon:

One of the most amazing court cases you probably have never heard of had come down to this. Standing Bear, the reluctant chief of the Ponca tribe, rose on May 2, 1879, to address a packed audience in a Nebraska courtroom. At issue was the existence of a mind that many were unable to see. Standing Bear’s journey to this courtroom had been excruciating. The U.S. government had decided several years earlier to force the 752 Ponca Native Americans off their lands along the fertile Niobrara River and move them to the desolate Indian Territory, in what is now northern Oklahoma. Standing Bear surrendered everything he owned, assembled his tribe, and began marching a six-hundred-mile “trail of tears.” If the walk didn’t kill them (as it did Standing Bear’s daughter), then the parched Indian Territory would. Left with meager provisions and fields of parched rock to farm, nearly a third of the Poncas died within the first year. This included Standing Bear’s son. As his son lay dying, Standing Bear promised to return his son’s bones to the tribe’s burial grounds so that his son could walk the afterlife with his ancestors, according to their religion. Desperate, Standing Bear decided to go home.

Carrying his son’s bones in a bag clutched to his chest, Standing Bear and twenty-seven others began their return in the dead of winter. Word spread of the group’s travel as they approached the Omaha Indian reservation, midway through their journey. The Omahas welcomed them with open arms, but U.S. officials welcomed them with open handcuffs. General George Crook was ordered by government officials to return the beleaguered Poncas to the Indian Territory. Crook couldn’t bear the thought. “I’ve been forced many times by orders from Washington to do most inhuman things in dealings with the Indians,” he said, “but now I’m ordered to do a more cruel thing than ever before.” Crook was an honorable man who could no more disobey direct orders than he could fly, so instead he stalled, encouraging a newspaper editor from Omaha to enlist lawyers who would then sue General Crook (as the U.S. government’s representative) on Standing Bear’s behalf. The suit? To have the U.S. government recognize Standing Bear as a person, as a human being.

More here.

The Tao that can be named is not the real Tao.
………………………….. —Lao Tzu

Myself

I am planted in the earth
Happily, like a cabbage
Carefully peel away the layers of language
That clothe me and soon
It will become clear I am nowhere to be found
And yet even so, my roots lie beneath . . .
.

by Chimako Tada
from Hanabi (Fire Works)
publisher: Shoshi Yuriika, Tokyo, 1956
translation: 2010, Jeffrey Angles

Joe Fassler in The Atlantic [h/t: Tunku Varadarajan]:

Dinaw Mengestu is a National Book Award Foundation “5 Under 35” writer, aNew Yorker “20 Under 40” writer to watch, and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. His other novels are The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air.

Dinaw Mengestu: I came to Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the Northlate in life, shortly after I had finished my second novel and was just beginning to make the first tentative steps into the third. I read it once, and then a few weeks later, once more. I began to carry it in my bag, next to my laptop, or in my coat pocket where it easily fit. I opened it at least once a week to no particular page. After a few minutes, I would close the book, slightly uncertain about what I had just read, even though I knew the outlines of the story better than almost any other novel. I would often wonder why I had never heard of the novel before, and why the same was true for most people I knew. Under the broad banner of post-colonial literature, it deserved a place next to Achebe’sThings Fall Apart, but to think of it only in those terms undercuts its value as a stunning work of literature, as a novel that actively resists the division of art into poorly managed categories of race and history.

Those divisions are a fundamental part of Salih’s novel. The story, set in a recently independent Sudan, with footprints in England and Egypt, mocks and eviscerates the clichés that come with looking at the world as a division between us and the Other. That fractured gaze, whether it is born out of race, gender, or privilege destroys the characters in the novel, none of whom are merely victims or perpetrators. Through them, the story becomes an argument for a better way of seeing, which has always struck me as being one of the novel’s better gifts, something which it is uniquely poised to do, if only because it demands the reader’s imagination, and by doing so affirms our capacity to live beyond the limited means of our private lives. We read not to encounter the Other, but to see ourselves refracted in a different landscape, in a different time, in shoes and clothes that perhaps bear no resemblance to our own.

More here.

Jesi Egan in Slate:

Sarah Reardon in Nature:

A clinical trial has shown that a gene-editing technique can be safe and effective in humans. For the first time, researchers used enzymes called zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) to target and destroy a gene in the immune cells of 12 people with HIV, increasing their resistance to the virus to the virus. The findings are published today in The New England Journal of Medicine¹. “This is the first major advance in HIV gene therapy since it was demonstrated that the ‘Berlin patient’ Timothy Brown was free of HIV,” says John Rossi, a molecular biologist at the Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. In 2008, researchers reported that Brown gained the ability to control his HIV infection after they treated him with donor bone-marrow stem cells that carried a mutation in a gene called CCR5. Most HIV strains use a protein encoded by CCR5 as a gateway into the T cells of a host’s immune system. People who carry a mutated version of the gene, including Brown's donor, are resistant to HIV.

But similar treatment is not feasible for most people with HIV: it is invasive, and the body is likely to attack the donor cells. So a team led by Carl June and Pablo Tebas, immunologists at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, sought to create the beneficial CCR5 mutation in a person’s own cells, using targeted gene editing. The researchers drew blood from 12 people with HIV who had been taking antiretroviral drugs to keep the virus in check. After culturing blood cells from each participant, the team used a commercially available ZFN to target the CCR5 gene in those cells. The treatment succeeded in disrupting the gene in about 25% of each participant’s cultured cells; the researchers then transfused all of the cultured cells into the participants. After treatment, all had elevated levels of T cells in their blood, suggesting that the virus was less capable of destroying them. Six of the 12 participants then stopped their antiretroviral drug therapy, while the team monitored their levels of virus and T cells. Their HIV levels rebounded more slowly than normal, and their T-cell levels remained high for weeks. In short, the presence of HIV seemed to drive the modified immune cells, which lacked a functional CCR5 gene, to proliferate in the body. Researchers suspect that the virus was unable to infect and destroy the altered cells. “They used HIV to help in its own demise,” says Paula Cannon, who studies gene therapy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “They throw the cells back at it and say, ‘Ha, now what?’”

More here.

Siddhartha Deb in the NYT Magazine:

“I’ve always been slightly short with people who say, ‘You haven’t written anything again,’ as if all the nonfiction I’ve written is not writing,” Arundhati Roy said.

It was July, and we were sitting in Roy’s living room, the windows closed against the heat of the Delhi summer. Delhi might be roiled over a slowing economy, rising crimes against women and the coming elections, but in Jor Bagh, an upscale residential area across from the 16th-century tombs of the Lodi Gardens, things were quiet. Roy’s dog, Filthy, a stray, slept on the floor, her belly rising and falling rhythmically. The melancholy cry of a bird pierced the air. “That’s a hornbill,” Roy said, looking reflective.

Roy, perhaps best known for “The God of Small Things,” her novel about relationships that cross lines of caste, class and religion, one of which leads to murder while another culminates in incest, had only recently turned again to fiction. It was another novel, but she was keeping the subject secret for now. She was still trying to shake herself free of her nearly two-decade-long role as an activist and public intellectual and spoke, with some reluctance, of one “last commitment.” It was more daring than her attacks on India’s occupation of Kashmir, the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or crony capitalism. This time, she had taken on Mahatma Gandhi.

More here.

Michael Walzer reviews David Nirenberg's Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, in the NYRB:

What Nirenberg has written is an intellectual history of Western civilization, seen from a peculiar but frighteningly revealing perspective. It is focused on the role of anti-Judaism as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Christian and post-Christian thought—though it starts with Egyptian arguments against the Jews and includes a discussion of early Islam, whose writers echo, and apparently learned from, Christian polemics. Nirenberg comments intermittently about the effects of anti-Judaism on the life chances of actual Jews, but dealing with those effects in any sufficient way would require another, and a very different, book.

Anti-Judaism is an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Nirenberg tells us that he has left a lot out (I will come at the end to a few things that are missing), but he seems to know everything. He deals only with literature that he can read in the original language, but this isn’t much of a limitation. Fortunately, the chapter on Egypt doesn’t require knowledge of hieroglyphics; Greek, Hebrew, and Latin are enough. Perhaps it makes things easier that the arguments in all the different languages are remarkably similar and endlessly reiterated.

A certain view of Judaism—mainly negative—gets established early on, chiefly in Christian polemics, and then becomes a common tool in many different intellectual efforts to understand the world and to denounce opposing understandings. Marx may have thought himself insightful and his announcement original: the “worldly God” of the Jews was “money”! But the identification of Judaism with materialism, with the things of this world, predates the appearance of capitalism in Europe by at least 1,500 years.

More here.

Daniel Nexon in the Washington Post:

Russia’s political organization is fundamentally imperial in character, composed of a hodgepodge of political units that range from the fully integrated to the semi-sovereign and autonomous. As my colleague, Charles King, wrote in 2003:

“Central power, where it exists, is exercised through subalterns who function as effective tax- and ballot-farmers; they surrender up a portion of local revenue and deliver the votes for the center’s designated candidates in national elections in exchange for the center’s letting them keep their own fiefdoms.”

Nowhere is this kind of arrangement more vividly illustrated than in Chechnya, where Moscow ‘solved’ its separatist problem by devolving power to a local viceroy, Akhmed Kadyrov and, after his assassination, his son, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Second, Moscow’s strategy for managing its internal relations — relying on subalterns, exploiting ethnic divisions, deploying military forces and using the toolkit of electoral authoritarianism — extends, if often in attenuated form, to those states it considers as falling within its “privileged sphere of influence.” It has long backed and leveraged secessionist movements in, among other places, Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan in the pursuit of political control. Although not always successful, this pattern dates back to the Soviet era and, before that, the Russian Empire. Indeed, the Kremlin’s power-political practices are as perennial as they are limited. In a theoretically sophisticated Security Studies article, Iver B. Neumann and Vincent Pouliot show that Moscow’s quest for great-power status and recognition, combined with its inability to achieve “insider status” in the international order, invariably drives it back to the same repertoire of asserting great-power perquisites in ways that shock and alarm the international community. Did German Chancellor Angela Merkel describe Putin as living in “another world” after her March 2 phone conversation with him? If not, then sometimes truth does indeed reside in fiction.

More here. For more on the Ukraine, also see Anatol Lieven, and Alexander Motyl.

Jenny Jarvie in The New Republic:

[T]he headline above would, if some readers had their way, include a “trigger warning”—a disclaimer to alert you that this article contains potentially traumatic subject matter. Such warnings, which are most commonly applied to discussions about rape, sexual abuse, and mental illness, have appeared on message boards since the early days of the Web. Some consider them an irksome tic of the blogosphere’s most hypersensitive fringes, and yet they've spread from feminist forums and social media to sites as large as the The Huffington Post. Now, the trigger warning is gaining momentum beyond the Internet—at some of the nation's most prestigious universities.

Last week, student leaders at the University of California, Santa Barbara, passed a resolution urging officials to institute mandatory trigger warnings on class syllabi. Professors who present “content that may trigger the onset of symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” would be required to issue advance alerts and allow students to skip those classes. According to UCSB newspaper The Daily Nexus, Bailey Loverin, the student who sponsored the proposal, decided to push the issue after attending a class in which she “felt forced” to sit through a film that featured an “insinuation” of sexual assault and a graphic depiction of rape. A victim of sexual abuse, she did not want to remain in the room, but she feared she would only draw attention to herself by walking out.

On college campuses across the country, a growing number of students are demanding trigger warnings on class content. Many instructors are obliging with alerts in handouts and before presentations, even emailing notes of caution ahead of class. At Scripps College, lecturers give warnings before presenting a core curriculum class, the “Histories of the Present: Violence,” although some have questioned the value of such alerts when students are still required to attend class. Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers,advising faculty members to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” to remove triggering material when it doesn't “directly” contribute to learning goals and “strongly consider” developing a policy to make “triggering material” optional. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”

More here.