Michael Walzer at Dissent:

Is there such a thing as a leftist foreign policy? What are the characteristic views of the left about the world abroad? When have leftists, rightly or wrongly, defended the use of force? The arguments about what to do in Syria have led me to ask these questions, but I am after a more general answer, looking not only at the left as it is today but also at the historical left. The questions aren’t easy—first, because there have been, and there are, many lefts; and second, because left views about foreign policy change more often than left views about domestic society. Relative consistency is the mark of leftism at home, but that’s definitely not true abroad. Still, it’s possible to make out a kind of default position and then to describe the various alternative positions and the arguments for and against them. I want to join those arguments and suggest why they have gone well, sometimes, and very badly at other times.

The basic position appears early in recorded history. I first discovered it when reading the biblical prophets, who have often been an inspiration to Western leftists. The prophets argued that if the Israelites obeyed the divine commandments, stopped grinding the faces of the poor, and established a just society, they would live in their land forever, safe against Assyrian and Babylonian imperialism.

more here.

Julian Barnes at the Times Literary Supplement:

What do “literary” novelists admire in Simenon? The combination of a positive and a negative, perhaps: a mixture of what he can do better than they, and of what he can get away with not doing. His admirable positives: swiftness of creation; swiftness of effect; clearly demarcated personal territory; intense atmosphere and resonant detail; knowledge of, and sympathy with, les petites gens; moral ambiguity; a usually baffling plot with a usually satisfactory denouement. As for his enviable negatives: Simenon got away with a very restricted and therefore very repetitive vocabulary (about 2,000 words, by his own estimation) – he didn’t want any reader to have to pause over a word, let alone reach for the dictionary. He kept his books very short, able to be read in one sitting, or (often) journey: none risks outstaying its welcome. He eschews all rhetorical effect – there is rarely more than one simile per book, and no metaphors, let alone anything approaching a symbol. There is text, but no subtext; there is plot but no subplot – or rather, what appears to be possible subplot usually ends up being part of the main plot. There are no literary or cultural allusions, and minimal reference to what is going on in the wider world of French politics, let alone the international arena. There is also – both admirable positive and enviable negative – no authorial presence, no authorial judgement, and no obvious moral signposts. Which helps make Simenon’s fiction remarkably like life.

Though his romans durs may be superior, it was the seventy-five Maigret novels that were best known during Simenon’s lifetime, and continue to be so.

more here.

Meghan O'Rourke at Bookforum:

My Struggle,the celebrated six-volume novel (or memoir) by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, is—like nearly all grand endeavors—one of those books that shouldn’t work, but somehow does. He finished the project in 2009 in his adopted homeland, Sweden, where it was both a best seller and a lightning rod for literary debate. Three volumes have now been translated in the United States. The novel draws explicitly from Knausgaard’s own life—the narrator is named Karl Ove Knausgaard—and uses the real names of his wife, children, parents, and friends. Nearly four thousand pages, it is packed with the kind of quotidian detail that is hardly the stuff of high drama: some one hundred pages on the teenage narrator trying to buy beer; long descriptions of the mechanics of cleaning house and of a fight with his wife over the dishes. Knausgaard has said he wrote My Struggle fast and without much revision. He is not averse to cliché, his metaphors are mixed (“His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me”); he often gets “needlessly” bogged down in exposition about who is walking where and exactly how his mother turns the key in the ignition and backs out of the driveway. Scenes that seem as if they are building to a crescendo, making the reader worry (will his mother get in an accident?), often just stop. On the face of it, Knausgaard seems to be making every mistake a novelist is taught not to make.

In lesser hands, these qualities would strike readers as boring and self-indulgent, but My Struggle is a revolutionary novel that is highly approachable, even thrilling to read. The book feels like a masterpiece—one of those genuinely surprising works that alters the tradition it inherited.

more here.

Clare Anderson in Carceral Archipelago

Convict hammocks at Hyde Park Barracks Museum. Photo: Eureka Henrich

These manifestations of convict heritage are indicative of my generation. By the 1980s, fuelled by a resurgence in family history, an embrace of the ‘new nationalism’ and the opening of state archives, Australians were discovering their convict ancestors anew – no longer shameful skeletons best kept in the closet, they could now be regarded as a badge of honour, or even as the founders of the nation (hence the naming of the iconic ferries). During the official celebration of the Bicentenary of British colonisation, convicts were even cast as the first migrants, credited with kicking off the ‘nation of immigrants’ in a similar fashion to the Mayflower pilgrims in America. But the government-choreographed 1988 celebrations were also marked by a profound collective unease. Could our convict ancestors be founders, as well as invaders? The gulf between stories of settler survival against the odds, and the mounting historical evidence of the violent dispossession that was part of that ‘survival’, could no longer be ignored or glossed over. As a result, the History I leant at school was vastly different to the previous generation of Australian schoolchildren. While explorers and empires still held sway, they were joined by other historical actors – workers, women, migrants and Indigenous Australians, each with a compelling claim to belonging in the story of the nation.

Since I began to research representations of transportation at convict heritage sites in Australia for the CArchipelago project, I’ve gained a new appreciation of the heritage I unknowingly soaked up as a child. As an Australian without direct ancestral links to convicts, I wonder whether I would feel differently if the connections were familial, as well as cultural. And what about international visitors to Australia – what kind of convict heritage do they encounter? And how has it changed over recent years? Heritage – or ‘things worth saving’, in David Lowenthal’s apt words – can encompass the tangible, such as places, and the intangible, such as songs; the visible, such as buildings, and the hidden, such as archaeological remains. But most importantly, the designation of ‘heritage’ significance infers an opinion, a ‘worth’, a judgement on the past and a construction of that past for a present audience or consumer. These constructions are constantly changing, making the study of convict heritage sites a fascinating window onto the ways that Australians have related to their carceral past and presented that past to others. And now is a particularly interesting time to conduct this research, as eleven of Australia’s historic places were in 2010 recognised by UNESCO as being of ‘outstanding universal value’. Encompassing colonial homesteads, probation stations, barracks, penitentiaries, female factories and coal mines, across New South Wales, Western Australia and Tasmania, these places now form the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage Property. I have been studying these sites and others from afar, combing through the writings of historians, archaeologists, tourism researchers and heritage practitioners to gain an overview of the main themes and debates in the field. A recent trip to Sydney afforded me the opportunity to experience two of these sites in person: Hyde Park Barracks, and the Old Great North Road on the Hawkesbury River. Both sites are included in the World Heritage listing, and both date from a similar period in the history of the colony, however they represent very different ‘experiences’ for a visitor, as I discovered.

Read the rest here.

From Scientific American:

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have engineered a bacterium whose genetic material includes an added pair of DNA “letters,” or bases, not found in nature. The cells of this unique bacterium can replicate the unnatural DNA bases more or less normally, for as long as the molecular building blocks are supplied. “Life on Earth in all its diversity is encoded by only two pairs of DNA bases, A-T and C-G, and what we've made is an organism that stably contains those two plus a third, unnatural pair of bases,” said TSRI Associate Professor Floyd E. Romesberg, who led the research team. “This shows that other solutions to storing information are possible and, of course, takes us closer to an expanded-DNA biology that will have many exciting applications — from new medicines to new kinds of nanotechnology.”

The report on the achievement appears May 7, 2014, in an advance online publication of the journal Nature. Romesberg and his laboratory have been working since the late 1990s to find pairs of molecules that could serve as new, functional DNA bases — and, in principle, could code for proteins and organisms that have never existed before. The task hasn't been a simple one. Any functional new pair of DNA bases would have to bind with an affinity comparable to that of the natural nucleoside base-pairs adenine-thymine and cytosine-guanine. Such new bases also would have to line up stably alongside the natural bases in a zipper-like stretch of DNA. They would be required to unzip and re-zip smoothly when worked on by natural polymerase enzymes during DNA replication and transcription into RNA. And somehow these nucleoside interlopers would have to avoid being attacked and removed by natural DNA-repair mechanisms.

More here.

Siva Vaidhyanathan in Bookforum:

“I’M GONNA WASH THAT MAN RIGHT OUTTA MY HAIR,” I sang in a full voice from the back row of a University of Texas lecture hall, over the heads of fifty cringing undergraduates. It was the spring of 1995, and I was the oldest student (by at least five years) in a history course called United States Culture, 1945–Present. That day we had a guest lecturer, an American-studies professor who had produced award-winning books on documentary expression in the 1930s and on postwar Broadway musicals. His lecture was on the importance of the latter. He had just asked the room if any of us knew any Rodgers and Hammerstein numbers. Swept away by the enthusiasm of the moment more than by my affection for Oklahoma! or South Pacific, I raised my hand and sang my reply. Professor William Stott smiled and held his arms akimbo. He paused. Then responded. “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.” His voice was rich and joyful. We had broken the fourth wall of academic performance protocols; the expert’s lecture had somehow threatened to become a song swap. The already befuddled younger students in the class were now on the verge of horror, as this pair of aged show-tune enthusiasts shared a moment of mutual recognition with passion, confidence, and a complete lack of embarrassment.

That’s when I first began to recognize my calling as a scholar of the humanities—a vocation that these days is steeped in a corrosive identity crisis, seemingly never-ending job insecurities, and no small amount of wider cultural embarrassment. But from my outsider’s perch as a hitherto aimless humanities student rebounding from a dismaying false start to my career in the no-less-precarious field of journalism, this fugitive communion in song persuaded me, on some other-than-conscious level, that there was real joy to be had in the academic calling. And when I met with Professor Stott in his office after class, his ebullient description of his scholarly passions helped me grasp this crucial point more clearly.

More here.

Damon Linker in The Week:

Neil deGrasse Tyson may be a gifted popularizer of science, but when it comes to humanistic learning more generally, he is a philistine. Some of us suspected this on the basis of the historically and theologically inept portrayal of Giordano Bruno in the opening episode of Tyson's reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

But now it's been definitively demonstrated by a recent interview in which Tyson sweepingly dismisses the entire history of philosophy. Actually, he doesn't just dismiss it. He goes much further — to argue that undergraduates should actively avoid studying philosophy at all. Because, apparently, asking too many questions “can really mess you up.”

Yes, he really did say that. Go ahead, listen for yourself, beginning at 20:19 — and behold the spectacle of an otherwise intelligent man and gifted teacher sounding every bit as anti-intellectual as a corporate middle manager or used-car salesman. He proudly proclaims his irritation with “asking deep questions” that lead to a “pointless delay in your progress” in tackling “this whole big world of unknowns out there.” When a scientist encounters someone inclined to think philosophically, his response should be to say, “I'm moving on, I'm leaving you behind, and you can't even cross the street because you're distracted by deep questions you've asked of yourself. I don't have time for that.”

“I don't have time for that.”

With these words, Tyson shows he's very much a 21st-century American, living in a perpetual state of irritated impatience and anxious agitation. Don't waste your time with philosophy! (And, one presumes, literature, history, the arts, or religion.) Only science will get you where you want to go! It gets results! Go for it! Hurry up! Don't be left behind! Progress awaits!

More here.

Joel Whitney in the Boston Review:

When Peter Matthiessen died of leukemia on April 5, The Snow Leopard was one of the standout books of his career. Published in 1978 to wide acclaim, it was twice awarded the National Book Award. But while Matthiessen’s dive into Buddhist lore is fascinating, it is also troubling.

On September 28, 1973, Matthiessen sets out from Pokhara, Nepal for a two-month trek in the mountains, accompanied by the cranky field biologist George Schaller. They plan to observe the blue sheep’s fall rut and, if they’re lucky, glimpse the very rare snow leopard. In truth, though, Matthiessen and Schaller, like hordes of explorers before them, are searching for more than the elusive cat: a nebulous native authenticity, an encounter with pure life, whether in wilderness or in “the country folk,” as Matthiessen calls them.

When Matthiessen turns his gaze on some of these country folk—the Sherpa porters traveling with him—the book’s difficulties begin. He repeatedly projects apprehensions and urges onto them. He imagines that they wish him hurt or dead and fantasizes about holding them by their pigtails, beating them into bloody submission.

Much of this could be written off as an attempt to leaven the book’s Buddhist mystique with a bit of Western muscle. But it is an incessant thread that bespeaks deeply woven cultural tendencies. The porters are fellow Buddhists who, by Matthiessen’s own account, do their tasks well, with hospitality and good cheer. Yet he dubs one in particular a “red-faced devil,” a “yellow-eyed” “evil monk,” a “sorcerer.” The rest are “childlike” or “unsophisticated.” Matthiessen reveals himself as part of a long tradition of Orientalist writers who see themselves as gods, saviors, and knowledge bearers.

More here.

Rob Lowe in Slate:

Today is my son Matthew’s last night home before college.

I have been emotionally blindsided. I know that this is a rite many have been through, that this is nothing unique. I know that this is all good news; my son will go to a great school, something we as a family have worked hard at for many years. I know that this is his finest hour. But looking at his suitcases on his bed, his New England Patriots post­ers on the wall, and his dog watching him pack, sends me out of the room to a hidden corner where I can’t stop crying.

Through the grief I feel a rising embarrassment. “Jesus Christ, pull yourself together, man!” I tell myself. There are parents sending their kids off to battle zones, or putting them into rehabs and many other more legitimately emotional situations, all over our country. How dare I feel so shattered? What the hell is going on?

One of the great gifts of my life has been having my two boys and, through them, exploring the mysterious, complicated and charged relationship between fathers and sons.

More here.

Vanity Flare

Don’t get me wrong: I know
that knowledge is power,
that mystery’s water,
that hunger makes
a gargantuan
lover,
and yes, I’ve drunk
of the river Lethe,
from the breath of the Celts,
from the echo of
the bugling elk,

and yet,

alas,
here I be,
small and twee,
all liquored up
on song and love,
hard as rails
and light as air,
expecting the heavens
to throw down a flare,
to send in the clowns,
to burn a bush,
strike up the sea,
anything

that might mean
those cloudy bastards
have noticed me.
.

by Wendy Videlock
from Poetry, Vol. 193, No. 5, February
publisher: Poetry, Chicago, 2009

John Caruana at the LA Review of Books:

THIS IS AN ODD TIME in history to be reading and discussing theology. On the one hand, Richard Dawkins — a rock star, if atheists ever had one — avers with the utmost confidence that no sane, educated person could possibly take theology seriously. Thinking about God, for him — and a significant segment of the educated classes — is akin to mulling over the existence of unicorns. The only measure of truth is empirical observation: if we can’t observe it, it ain’t real.

On the other hand, some of the most brilliant secular minds of our time have stumbled on theology and discovered it to be an indispensable tool. These late-comers to theology see in it an important antidote to the ethical and political cul-de-sac brought about by the past century’s fashionable intellectual bandwagons. Ironically, just as organized religion has effectively collapsed in Western Europe, some of the most important European thinkers have been insisting that theology offers invaluable critical resources for thinking about the most vexing problems we face today.

For many of these philosophers, the turn to theology is not motivated by a newfound faith (most are self-declared atheists), but rather a recognition that theological questioning allows us access to ways of thinking that conventional philosophy might otherwise foreclose. Thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Simon Critchley, and Slavoj Žižek have defended, sometimes vociferously, the necessity to engage with theology.

more here.

Anne Helen Petersen at The Believer:

One didn’t have to be friends with the stars to write about them. Rex Reed’s “Do You Sleep in the Nude?,” a profile of aging star Ava Gardner, serves as the lead essay to The New Journalismcollection. Much like Capote’s profile of Brando, it flips the genre on its head. Reed describes her “Ava elbows” and declares her “gloriously, divinely barefoot,” claiming that “at forty-four, she is still one of the most beautiful women in the world.” But Reed also manages to make her look like what today’s gossip columnists would call a “hot mess.” After kicking her press agent out of the room (“Out! I don’t need press agents!”) she queries Reed: “You do drink—right, baby? The last buggar who came to see me had the gout and wouldn’t touch a drop.” She then pours herself a “champagne glass full of cognac with another champagne glass full of Dom Perignon, which she drinks successively, refills, and sips slowly like syrup through a straw.”

The whirlwind interaction that follows—in which several men come to call and the assembled group leaves the hotel room, avoids swarms of autograph-seekers, and retreats to the Regency Hotel bar—seems to oscillate, dreamily, between Gardner’s cynical analysis of her career and palpable evidence of her charisma. When Reed asks of her tenure at MGM, she responds, “Christ, after seventeen years of slavery, you can ask that question? I hated it, honey. I mean, I’m not exactly stupid or without feeling, and they tried to sell me like a prize hog. They also tried to make me into something I’m not then and never could be.”

more here.

Jeremy Lewis at Literary Review:

Dramatised in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Dirk Bogarde rather improbably played the leading role, Patrick Leigh Fermor's kidnapping of a German general in Crete in the spring of 1944 was one of the most dashing and unconventional episodes of the Second World War. Leigh Fermor published little on the subject during his lifetime – a very brief account is provided in his 2003 collection of essays, Words of Mercury – but Wes Davis's book usefully plugs the gap. First published in America last year, too early to benefit from Artemis Cooper's biography of Leigh Fermor, it draws on previously unpublished papers in the National Archives and the Imperial War Museum, as well as on Antony Beevor's exhaustive history of the German invasion and occupation of Crete, and on the published memoirs of other veterans of the long guerrilla war. The result is an exciting, fast-moving and crisply written adventure story.

Leigh Fermor's mentor and precursor as a Cretan resistance leader was John Pendlebury, a Cambridge-educated archaeologist with a glass eye who had worked on the Minoan excavations at Knossos before the war and liked to wear traditional Cretan clothes, complete with cloak and turban. Pendlebury was captured and executed shortly after the German invasion of the island in May 1941, and Leigh Fermor took his place fighting alongside the andartes ('guerrillas') of the Cretan resistance.

more here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Dutch celebrity daredevil Wim Hof has endured lengthy ice-water baths, hiked to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in shorts and made his mark in Guinness World Records with his ability to withstand cold. Now he has made a mark on science as well. Researchers have used Hof’s methods of mental and physical conditioning to train 12 volunteers to fend off inflammation. The results, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹, suggest that people can learn to modulate their immune responses — a finding that has raised hopes for patients who have chronic inflammatory disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.

In 2010, as a graduate student, Kox was exploring how the nervous system influences immune responses. That's when he first learned that Hof had said that he could regulate not only his own body temperature, but also his immune system. “We thought, ‘Alright, let’s give him a chance’,” says Kox. “But we thought it would be a negative result.” Kox, and his adviser, physician and study co-author Peter Pickkers, also at Radboud University Medical Center, invited Hof to their lab to investigate how he would react to their standard inflammation test. It involves exposure to a bacterial toxin, made by Escherichia coli, to induce temporary fever, headache and shivering. To Kox’s surprise, Hof’s response to the toxin was milder than that of most people — he had less severe flu-like symptoms, for example, and lower levels of inflammatory proteins in his blood².

More here.

Peter T. Leeson on OUPblog:

In eras bygone, in societies across the globe, governments didn’t exist—or weren’t strong enough to provide effective governance. Without governments to govern them, the members of such societies relied on self-governance.

Self-governance refers to privately supplied institutions of property protection—whether designed by individuals expressly for the purpose, such as the “codes” that pirates forged to govern their crews in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, or developed “spontaneously,” such as the system of customary law and adjudication that emerged to govern commerce between international traders in medieval Europe. Reliance on such institutions, especially in historical societies, is well known. Less widely recognized or understood is historical societies’ reliance on superstition—objectively false beliefs—to facilitate self-governance.

Consider the case of medieval monks. Today monks are known for turning the other cheek and blessing humanity with brotherly love. But for centuries they were known equally for fulminating their foes and casting calamitous curses at persons who crossed them. These curses were called “maledictions.”

Read the rest here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

The birth of Herman Poole Blount on May 22, 1914 was, for him, the least significant of all his births. Blount begat Bhlount and Bhlount begat Ra and Herman begat Sonny and Sonny begat Sun. Sun Ra left Alabama for Chicago and Chicago for Saturn, until he never quite understood how he got to planet Earth in the first place. The name ‘Ra’ — the Egyptian god of the sun — brought him closer to the cosmos. Each rebirth erased the one before it, until Sun Ra’s past became a lost road that trailed off into nothingness. The past was passed, dead. History is his story, he said, it’s not my story. My story, said Sun Ra, is mystery. Sun Ra’s lived life between ancient time and the future, in something like the eternal now. He told people he had no family and lived on the other side of time. Rebirth might not be the right word for the journey that Sun Ra took. Awakening is more precise, like how the ancient Egyptians were awakened. As Jan Assaman wrote in Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, to be a person in ancient Egypt meant to exercise self-control. In powerlessness, unconsciousness or sleep, a person is dissociated from the self. The sleeping person, then, is like a dead person. But the awakened one is a person risen.

A great one is awakened, a great one wakes,
Osiris has raised himself onto his side;
he who hates sleep and loves not weariness,
the god gains power…

Sun Ra believed that the whole of humanity was in need of waking up. He wanted to slough off old ideas and habits, brush off sleepy clothing and shake off drowsy food. Because present time mattered little to Sun Ra, they say he rarely slept.

more here.

Graham Priest in Aeon:

Western philosophers have not, on the whole, regarded Buddhist thought with much enthusiasm. As a colleague once said to me: ‘It’s all just mysticism.’ This attitude is due, in part, to ignorance. But it is also due to incomprehension. When Western philosophers look East, they find things they do not understand – not least the fact that the Asian traditions seem to accept, and even endorse, contradictions. Thus we find the great second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna saying:

The nature of things is to have no nature; it is their non-nature that is their nature. For they have only one nature: no-nature.

An abhorrence of contradiction has been high orthodoxy in the West for more than 2,000 years. Statements such as Nagarjuna’s are therefore wont to produce looks of blank incomprehension, or worse. As Avicenna, the father of Medieval Aristotelianism, declared:

Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.

One can hear similar sentiments, expressed with comparable ferocity, in many faculty common rooms today. Yet Western philosophers are slowly learning to outgrow their parochialism. And help is coming from a most unexpected direction: modern mathematical logic, not a field that is renowned for its tolerance of obscurity.

Read the rest here.