Jan Mieszkowski reviews Jacques Derrida's The Death Penalty, Volume I in the LA Review of Books:

[T]he driving concern of the seminar is as clear as it is provocative. “Never to my knowledge,” Derrida declared in a contemporaneous conversation with French historian Élisabeth Roudinesco, “has any philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and systematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as suchcontested the legitimacy of the death penalty.” As an experiment, I shared this claim with a number of academic philosophers. Their initial skepticism quickly turned to surprise as they realized that, as Derrida observes, virtually all of the major philosophers were either ardent advocates of capital punishment, reluctant apologists for it, or markedly silent on the topic. Even those, Derrida adds, “who maintained a public discourse against the death penalty never did so, to my knowledge — and this is my provisional hypothesis — in a strictly philosophical way.”

One may raise an eyebrow at the formulation “in a strictly philosophical way,” if only because one can’t help imagining how Derrida himself, in another mood, might have pounced on it: can philosophy ever be strictlyphilosophical? Doesn’t philosophy come into its own precisely by losing itself when it seeks a way of its own? Yet these are precisely Derrida’s concerns, for at issue is not just what certain philosophers have said about the death penalty, but whether Western philosophy is in some way organized by its investment in this particular doctrine of punishment. Derrida’s suggestion is that the death penalty is both one penalty among others and the penalty of penalties, a transcendental condition of possibility of justice and punishment. Criminal law as we know it, if not law in general, would be inconceivable in its absence. The death penalty, he writes, “has always been the effect of an alliance between a religious message and the sovereignty of the state,” state sovereignty, first and foremost, being the power over the life and death of subjects. It is therefore not simply a question of maintaining that we can only understand the death penalty by explaining the relations between traditional theological, juridical, and political discourses. The reigning theological-juridico-political constellation can be approached and understood only through a study of capital punishment.

More here.

Michael J. Kramer at The Point:

The Culture of Narcissism solidified Lasch’s reputation as a leading anti-modernist critic of an America that seemed to have lost its balance as it rollerskated into oblivion. Mistrusting America’s affluence and growing technological achievements, Lasch even critiqued the anti-authoritarian liberation struggles of the 1960s, which belonged for him to the same modernist cult of progress that, failing to recognize necessary limits, would destroy all in its path. The counterculture’s myth of exaggerated self-realization was but the flipside of the retreat into basic self-preservation. Detached by state and market from connections to a more sustaining sense of purpose or obligation, Americans inhabited a culture that left them rootless.

But Lasch should not be remembered merely as a grumbling reactionary. What he feared was “liberation,” not “modernity”—dismissing anti-modernist nostalgia as the fantasy of progress in reverse. For most of his life (he died of cancer in 1994), he remained committed to a more egalitarian society and clung to the hope that change might still occur. As he said toward the end of a career that had turned, beginning with Narcissism, increasingly dark and pessimistic: he still had faith even though he lacked optimism. It was a statement that flummoxed many interviewers, but it is key to understanding Lasch’s complex vision of American culture—and of the role of the social critic within it.

more here.

Wiliam Giraldi at The Virginia Quarterly Review:

Written in 1886, The Death of Ivan Ilyich was the first fiction Tolstoy published after the spiritual upheaval he chronicles in Confession. It’s easy to imagine Ilyich as the old and bearded sage-​looking man Tolstoy was upon his death, but he’s only forty-​five years old, and this fact adds to the tremendous pathos of the story: The death of a young man is always more awful than the death of an old man. The priest gives Ilyich little spiritual consolation, and the doctors are self-​important fools, incapable of mitigating his pain. His co-​workers are disgusted by the thought of his wasting body and care only about jockeying for cozier positions once he dies. His wife and children, occupied by the minutiae of their quotidian lives, refuse to admit what has befallen him. He finds their refusal to confront this fanged truth most disgusting of all: “Ivan Ilyich’s chief torment was the lie—​that lie, for some reason recognized by everyone, that he was only ill but not dying.” His sole comfort comes from Gerasim, the peasant servant who does not recoil from the foul stench, who accepts the inevitability of all flesh. If Ilyich’s upper-​crust friends regard death as indecent, Gerasim knows otherwise: His peasant’s dirty-​hands understanding of life, his calm acceptance of every person’s fate, helps to calm Ilyich into his own acceptance. (The peasantry’s calm acceptance of death, by the way, can be noticed in Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Solzhenitsyn, to name a few—​it seems to fall somewhere in line between Russian literary trope and Russian cultural myth.) Relief for Ilyich comes only after he has followed Gerasim’s lead and acquiesced to his fate.

more here.

Alex Pareene at The Baffler:

One great problem with financial journalism, especially in the decades leading up to the crash, has been that it’s often written in an argot understandable only to the already highly financially literate. Sorkin doesn’t usually employ such specialized language. This has led to the mistaken belief that he’s explaining the industry to regular people. In fact, he is a dutiful Wall Street court reporter, telling important people what other important people are thinking and saying. At the same time, he is Wall Street’s most valuable flack. He isn’t explainingfinance to the people—you’d be better served reading John Kenneth Galbraith to understand how finance works—he’s justifying it.

The modern finance industry is at a loss when it comes to justifying its own existence. Its finest minds can’t explain why we wouldn’t be better off with a much simpler and more heavily circumscribed model of capital formation. Sorkin likewise can’t make his readers fully grasp why the current system—which turns large amounts of other people’s money and even more people’s debt into huge paper fortunes for a small super-elite, and in such a way as to regularly imperil the entire worldwide economic order—is beneficial or necessary. But the New York Times and Wall Street each need him to try.

more here.

Deborah Amos in NPR:

Iran is starting to see a re-launch of activist groups following the election last year of President Hassan Rouhani. Social movements were scarce after the government crushed public protests known as the Green Movement following the 2009 elections. After the decisive vote for Rouhani, a surge of hope in Iran has attracted activists back to the political arena. Iranian women, in particular, are seizing the opportunity. On a recent afternoon in north Tehran two professional women huddle with an adviser to the Ministry of Mines and Trade. They are building a strategy for promoting jobs for women in government and the private sector.

This would have been impossible under the previous president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, explains Sohaila Jelodorzadeh, a former member of parliament, now a professor of textile engineering. “We were ignored,” she says, adding, “No, it was more than ignored. We faced social and political problems.” Now, she is politically active again, working with Soraya Maknoon, a former university chancellor, to champion women's employment. Women make up more than 60 percent of the college population in Iran but are less than 20 percent of the working population. “We want to make better use of their knowledge. This is important, not just to have degrees,” says Maknoon. It is just one example of a trend in Iran, says Kevan Harris, an Iran specialist from Princeton University. “Urban issues, pollution issues, environmental issues, women's issues,” Iranians are forming groups to tackle the major problems facing the country, he says. “The universities now are back, full of student politics, so we are going through a wave of mobilization from below in Iran.” The gender gap in employment may be one of the toughest challenges despite a huge social shift on college campuses. After the 1979 revolution, Iran's Islamic government convinced even the most traditional families that it was safe to send their daughters away to college.

More here.

On a Day With a Gentle Breeze

*
You arrived on a day with a gentle breeze
crying suddenly as if you came rolling out of the heavens
All of a sudden, at that moment, inside me
rose up the roar of a lioness,
“I will endure anything for you!”

*
A baby recalls its heavenly friends
though its eyes do not see well yet
It smiles gently in the morning light
the way an empty swing
sways slightly in the breeze

*
It looks like the start of a hot day.
Golden dewdrops have formed on the bamboo leaves outside my window.
I am recovering day by day.
Looking forward to happy days when I can work
I rest for now, a clear pool of time

*
You come to me and suckle
like a little fish
picking at a lotus leaf

*
You cast a green shade
over my solitary life
like a readily swaying maple branch
arching outside my window –
just a shapeless flickering light
yet you bring me thoughts of infinity
With a few beautiful words
and a soft loving gaze
you glue my solitary life
to this world
.

by Nao Inoue
from Ooinaru Jyumoku
publisher: Sakurai Shoten, Tokyo, 1947
translation: Takako lento, 2009

Original Japanese

From KurzweilAI:

Odors have a way of connecting us with moments buried deep in our past. But researchers have long wondered how the process works in reverse: how do our memories shape the way sensory information is collected? In work published in Nature Neuroscience,scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) demonstrate for the first time a way to observe this process in awake animals. The team, led by Assistant Professor Stephen Shea, was able to measure the activity of a group of inhibitory neurons that links the odor-sensing area of the brain with brain areas responsible for thought and cognition. This connection provides feedback so that memories and experiences can alter the way smells are interpreted. The inhibitory neurons that forge the link are known as granule cells. They are found in the core of the olfactory bulb, the area of the mouse brain responsible for receiving odor information from the nose. Granule cells in the olfactory bulb receive inputs from areas deep within the brain involved in memory formation and cognition. Granule cells relay the information they receive from neurons involved in memory and cognition back to the olfactory bulb. There, the granule cells inhibit the neurons that receive sensory inputs. In this way, “the granule cells provide a way for the brain to ‘talk’ to the sensory information as it comes in,” explains Shea. “You can think of these cells as conduits which allow experiences to shape incoming data.”

Why might an animal want to inhibit or block out specific parts of a stimulus, like an odor? Every scent is made up of hundreds of different chemicals, and “granule cells might help animals to emphasize the important components of complex mixtures,” says Shea. For example, an animal might have learned through experience to associate a particular scent, such as a predator’s urine, with danger. But each encounter with the smell is likely to be different. Maybe it is mixed with the smell of pine on one occasion and seawater on another. Granule cells provide the brain with an opportunity to filter away the less important odors and to focus sensory neurons only on the salient part of the stimulus.

More here.

Amanda Marcotte in Slate:

More here.

Ken Roth at Human Rights Watch:

President Obama has disappointed many by failing to make human rights a priority. True, at times he has stood up for people’s rights where there are few strategic interests at play—in such places as Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. But his readiness to compromise in places like Afghanistan, Egypt, Mexico, Uzbekistan and Yemen leaves the impression that he is not committed to the human rights ideal.

In Fred Kaplan’s view, that makes Obama a realist. But he arrives at that conclusion only by contrasting Obama’s policies with a caricature of idealism. If idealism means the string of Bush-era policies that Kaplan lists—“triumphalism,” “missionary zeal,” “regime-changing wars,” never “negotiating with dreadful rulers”—I would abandon it too. But this is not the 19^th century, and foreign policy no longer concerns only relations among sovereigns. After all, idealism was hardly needed when you could buy off an adversary by cutting a deal (or marrying your daughter to its monarch). The world has changed. Or more to the point, our understanding of it has. It can no longer credibly be called “realistic” to pretend that people have no agency beyond the machinations of their rulers, or that we can afford to be indifferent to whether those rulers are autocrats or democrats.

People do matter. As we’ve learned from Ukraine over the past week or the Arab Spring over the past three years or even Russia and China as they meet public demands with a combination of repression and responsiveness, even autocratic governments need to maintain a degree of popular consent to their rule.

More here.

Douglas Preston in Slate:

In the mid ’80s, I was living in Santa Fe, N.M., making a shabby living writing magazine articles, when a peculiar assignment came my way. I had become friendly with a group of Tibetan exiles who lived in a compound on Canyon Road, where they ran a business selling Tibetan rugs, jewelry, and religious items. The Tibetans had settled in Santa Fe because its mountains, adobe buildings, and high-altitude environment reminded them of home.

The founder of the Tibetan community was a man named Paljor Thondup. Thondup had escaped the Chinese invasion of Tibet as a kid, crossing the Himalayas with his family in an epic, multiyear journey by yak and horseback. Thondup made it to Nepal and from there to India, where he enrolled in a school in the southeastern city of Pondicherry with other Tibetan refugees. One day, the Dalai Lama visited his class. Many years later, in Dharamsala, India, Thondup talked his way into a private audience with the Dalai Lama, who told Thondup that he had never forgotten the bright teenager in the back of the Pondicherry classroom, waving his hand and answering every question, while the other students sat dumbstruck with awe. They established a connection. And Thondup eventually made his way to Santa Fe.

The Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Thondup, who had heard that he was planning a tour of the United States, invited him to visit Santa Fe. The Dalai Lama accepted and said he would be happy to come for a week. At the time, he wasn’t the international celebrity he is today. He traveled with only a half-dozen monks, most of whom spoke no English. He had no handlers, advance men, interpreters, press people, or travel coordinators. Nor did he have any money.

More here.

Sabine Heinlein at The Paris Review:

I mailed a copy of my book Among Murderers, about the struggles three men faced when they returned to the world after several decades behind bars, to Richard Robles, a pen pal serving an indeterminate life sentence in New York’s Attica Prison. Prison reading and mailing policies are designed to reinforce the feeling of punishment. Family and friends cannot simply send books; they have to come directly from the publisher or an online bookstore. Most prisons only allow paperbacks—Attica, a rare exception, permits hardcovers. I couldn’t find detailed mailing instructions on Attica’s website, so I called the prison. “Send it through the publisher—and don’t hide no weapon in it,” the employee blurted. Richard wrote me that he almost had to return the book.

[My] name wasn’t on the “buyer’s side” of the invoice. The guard said something about a new rule that prisoners have to buy the book. But as you can see I did get it, after another guard said something to him. Miracles, right?

I did consider it a small miracle when, a few weeks later, I began to receive letters from men who had borrowed the book from Richard. Prison is a dark world far away from ours, and communications travel slowly. We may have forgotten “them,” but they never forget us.

more here.

Phillip Longman in Washington Monthly:

[H]ow much Texas’s growth in jobs just reflects its growth in population. For many decades, Texas has grown much faster in population than the U.S. as a whole, indeed about twice as fast since the 1990s. On its face, there is nothing particularly impressive about a rate of job formation that is just keeping pace with increases in population.

But in the conservative narrative, this population growth is largely driven by individual Americans and businesses fleeing the high taxes and excessive regulation of less-free states. In other words, Texas’s rate of job creation is supposedly more a cause than a consequence of its population growth. If that were true, the Texas boosters would be right to brag. But among the many problems with this story is the reality that, even with an oil boom on, nearly as many native-born Americans are moving out of Texas as are moving in.

For example, according to Census Bureau data, 441,682 native-born Americans moved to Texas from other states between 2010 and 2011. Sounds like a lot. But moving (fleeing?) in the opposite direction were 358,048 other native-born Americans leaving Texas behind. That means that the net domestic migration of native-born Americans to Texas came to just 83,634, which in a nation of 315 million isn’t even background noise. It’s the demographic equivalent of, say, the town of Lawrence, Kansas, or Germantown, Maryland, “voting with its feet” and moving to Texas while the rest of America stays put.

And despite all the gloating by Texas boosters about how the state attracts huge numbers of Americans fleeing California socialism, the numbers don’t bear out this narrative either. In 2012, 62,702 people moved from California to Texas, but 43,005 moved from Texas to California, for a net migration of just 19,697. That’s a population flow amounting to the movement of one village in a continental nation. Far from proving the merits of the so-called Texas model, it shows just how few Californians have seen fit to set out for the Lone Star State, despite California’s high cost of housing and other very real problems.

More here.

Marina Warner at The London Review of Books:

Versions of the Flood from around the world record memories of different disasters, not one single universal deluge – this is accepted now even by Biblical scholars. But the different accounts share several dramatic elements: the figure of the one man who is chosen to survive, the extraordinary hope placed in the building of a boat, its measurements and vast size, and the processes of caulking and stocking it. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ark is a six-decker vessel; in the Bible, the specs seem so exact they inspired many believers to attempt to make models. Atrahasis is the name of the hero who is spared and wins eternal life in the poem that Ipiq-Aya, Junior Scribe, pressed into the wet clay with his reed pen. In Gilgamesh, the survivor is called Uta-napishti, and Gilgamesh meets him when he is travelling to the underworld in order to bring back from the dead Enkidu,the wild man whom he loves. But the half-divine hero fails, and although he is told how to pick a magic coral-like plant from the seabed, which will guarantee his immortality, he loses it when he is bathing in a pool: a snake comes by and takes it.

The Babylonian Noah tells Gilgamesh how he survived the rains; in Atrahasis he sees in a dream that he must build an ark; in the later Gilgamesh, the counsellor god Enlil whispers the warning in secret:

Load the seed of every living thing into your ark,
The boat that you will build.

(John Gardner’s version, 1984.) The animals do enter two by two in some versions, but here the ark is a sperm bank, a granary.

more here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

Was Whistler just as belligerent toward his art as he was with the wider world into which he sent it? You might think so, judging from reports of how he went about making it: “His movements were those of a duellist fencing actively and cautiously with the small sword,” according to one witness. But no, the results show very little evidence of Whistler’s aggressiveness. Henry Adams can’t have been the only observer to have noticed the contrast between Whistler’s “witty, declamatory, extravagant, bitter, amusing, and noisy” public manner and his art of “nuance and tone,” though perhaps he was one of the few to speculate that it showed how the painter might have been “brutalized…by the brutalities of his world.” That might be putting it a bit too strongly, but still, something must account for Whistler’s conviction that “the Master stands in no relation to the moment at which he occurs—a monument of isolation—hinting at sadness—having no part in the progress of his fellow men.” Whatever the cause of this inner core of loneliness and sorrow, none of Whistler’s biographers, including Sutherland, has ever come close to touching on it. Perhaps that’s just as well, because the beauty of the art transcends its motivating ache—by communicating it in a homeopathic dosage.

But there is something that his art is trying badly to assuage. “Great anomalies are never so great at first as after we have reflected upon them,” Henry James wrote in his 1892 story “The Private Life,” and the anomaly of Whistler is one that keeps growing. Imagine if Giorgio Morandi had written the pugnacious manifestos of F.T. Marinetti.

more here.

From delanceyplace:

Today's selection — from The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James. In 1933, American teenagers — at least those lucky enough to have escaped the maws of the Depression and embark on a path to college — smoked cigarettes and pipes for their health, watched King Kong, wore cardigan sweaters and tried top stave of worries of their own fragile futures: “It was the fourth year of the Great Depression. One in four working Americans — ten million people — had no job and no prospects of finding one, and only a quarter of them were receiving any kind of relief. Industrial production had fallen by half in those four years. At least one million, and perhaps as many as two million, were homeless, living on the streets or in shantytowns. … In many American towns, it was im­possible to find a bank whose doors weren't permanently shuttered; behind those doors the savings of countless American families had disappeared for­ever. …

“In March an oddly appro­priate movie had come out and quickly become a smash hit: King Kong. Long lines formed in front of movie theaters around the country, people of all ages shelling out precious quarters and dimes to see the story of a huge, irrational beast that had invaded the civilized world, taken its inhabitants into its clutches, and left them dangling over the abyss. …”[In 1933], dozens of … American newspapers had run a single-frame, half-page cartoon. Dark, drawn in charcoal, chiaroscuro in style, it depicted a man in a derby sitting dejectedly on a sidewalk by his candy stand with his wife, behind him, dressed in rags and his son, beside him, holding some newspapers. The caption read 'Ah don't give up, Pop. Maybe ya didn't make a sale all week, but it ain't as if I didn't have my paper route.' But it was the expression on the man's face that was most arresting. Haunted, haggard, somewhere beyond hopeless, it sug­gested starkly that he no longer believed in himself. For many of the millions of Americans who read the American Weekly every Sunday, it was an all too familiar expression — one they saw every morning when they glanced in the mirror.

More here.

Andrew Pollack in The New York Times:

In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the final paragraph of a paper: “The biological significance of these sequences is not known.” Now their significance is known, and it has set off a scientific frenzy. The sequences, it turns out, are part of a sophisticated immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. And that system, whose very existence was unknown until about seven years ago, may provide scientists with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life. In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants. This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will,” said Charles Gersbach, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University. Already the molecular system, known as Crispr, is being used to make genetically engineered laboratory animals more easily than could be done before, with changes in multiple genes. Scientists in China recently made monkeys with changes in two genes.

Scientists hope Crispr might also be used for genomic surgery, as it were, to correct errant genes that cause disease. Working in a laboratory — not, as yet, in actual humans — researchers at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands showed they could fix a mutation that causes cystic fibrosis. But even as it is stirring excitement, Crispr is raising profound questions. Like other technologies that once wowed scientists — like gene therapy, stem cells and RNA interference — it will undoubtedly encounter setbacks before it can be used to help patients. It is already known, for instance, that Crispr can sometimes change genes other than the intended ones. That could lead to unwanted side effects. The technique is also raising ethical issues. The ease of creating genetically altered monkeys and rodents could lead to more animal experimentation. And the technique of altering genes in their embryos could conceivably work with human embryos as well, raising the specter of so-called designer babies.

More here.

Rabbit

Let me have a sheet of drawing paper
Please use the white pastel
to draw a vast snowy field
Please draw me in there
Don’t hesitate, use the white pastel

There I will play
closed in by a vast white expanse
I will be free for the first time
closed in by the vast white expanse

With no distinction between me and the surroundings
I will be invisible for the first time
I will dance
No need to go all the way to the moon
the snowy field on this drawing paper is my place
I simply sleep, eat, and play

Rabbit, Rabbit, what do you see when you jump?
I see the full moon when I jump
.

Wakako Kaku
from Zero ni naru karada
publisher: Tokuma Shoten, Tokyo, 2002
Translation: 2009, Takako Lento

Translator's Note: The last two lines are from a Japanese children’s folk song.
In Japan, the shadows on the face of the moon are said to represent rabbits
making rice cake.

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Zach Nader. Optional Features Shown, 2012, video still.

More here and here.

Thanks to Ryan Moritz via Jaffer Kolb.