A Coat
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eye
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
by William Butler Yeats
Stanley Fish in the New York Times:
The views I have been peddling to various audiences (without notable success) are: (1) The academy is a world of its own, complete with rules, protocols, systems of evaluation, recognized achievements, agreed-on goals, a roster of heroes and a list of tasks yet to be done. (2) Academic work proceeds within the confines of that world, within, that is, a professional, not a public, space, although its performance may be, and often is, public. Accordingly, (3) academic work is only tangentially, not essentially, political; politics may attend the formation of academic units and the selection of academic personnel, but political concerns and pressures have no place in the unfolding of academic argument, except as objects of its distinctive forms of attention. (If academic work had no distinctive forms of attention, it would be shapeless and would not be a thing.) (4) The academic views of a professor are independent of his or her real-world political views; academic disputes don’t track partisan disputes or vice versa; you can’t reason from an academic’s disciplinary views to the positions he or she would take in the public sphere; they are independent variables.
Now, as everyone knows, Noam Chomsky is a distinguished academic, a scholar who pretty much single-handedly reconfigured the discipline of linguistics and a strong presence in the landscape of other disciplines — philosophy of mind, psychology, biology, literary criticism, to name a few. But Chomsky is also a prominent public intellectual whose opinions on a wide range of political topics — American foreign policy, the Middle East, capitalism, fossil fuels, education, etc. — are well known and often controversial. So the question was, which Chomsky was going to show up at Columbia, or alternatively, could you have one without the other? The answer, it turned out, is “yes.”
More here.
Award-winning Canadian journalist Charles Montgomery's fascinating new bookHappy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design examines how lessons from psychology, neuroscience, and design can help us fix broken cities and improve our quality of life in an increasingly urban-centered world.
Charles Montgomery in Slate:
Frank found that a white male living in Midtown, a lively district near Atlanta’s downtown, was likely to weigh 10 pounds less than his identical twin living out in a place like, say, Mableton, in the cul-de-sac archipelago that surrounds Atlanta, simply because the Midtowner would be twice as likely to get enough exercise every day.
Here’s how their neighborhoods engineer their travel behavior:
Midtown was laid out long before the dispersalists got their hands on the city. It exhibits the convenient geometry of the streetcar neighborhood even though its streetcars disappeared in 1949. Housing, offices, and retail space are all sprinkled relatively close together on a latticelike street grid. A quart of milk or a bar or a downtown-bound bus are never more than a few blocks away. It is easy for people to walk to shops, services, or MARTA, the city’s limited rapid transit system, so that’s what they do.
More here.
Cass R. Sunstein at Bloomberg:
From 2009 to 2012, the U.S. experienced a significant economic recovery, in which average real income growth jumped by 6 percent. That’s the good news. The bad news is that almost all of that increase — 95 percent – – was enjoyed by those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution.
To appreciate this remarkable finding, set out in an important paper by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez, we need to add some context. From 2007 to 2009, the recession produced a 17.4 percent decline in average real income — the largest drop since the Great Depression. Every income class was hit hard, but in percentage terms, those at the top of the economic ladder suffered the biggest decreases.
During the recovery — from 2009 to 2012 — members of the top 1 percent have enjoyed a big boost in their average income: 31.4 percent. As Saez shows, this figure almost wiped out the loss from the recession, returning the top 1 percent to essentially where it was in 2007.
By contrast, the remaining 99 percent saw measly growth of 0.4 percent, about a 30th of the 11.6 percent loss they experienced in the recession. By the end of 2012, the bottom 99 percent wasn’t close to where it was in 2007.
More here.
For me the war began in the predawn dark on the fourth. My father shook me awake from sleep. ‘Get up!’ he commanded urgently. As my head cleared I heard the air raid siren. And through its wail came, muted but steady, a droning noise, like heavy motors in neutral gear, from somewhere in the sky. Bombers, I realized. I scrambled out of bed and we – my parents, younger brother, sister and our servant boy Bhola – hustled out of the side door to stand beneath the main stairs, which is what the civil defense authorities recommended during bombing raids. The upstairs family – the two small sons not quite fully awake – were already there. The other upstairs family had stayed put. The side door of our neighbouring flat, Tariq’s, was ajar and I heard voices coming from inside. But they didn’t join us beneath the stairs. We knew why. We were two Bengali families standing there, and they were Punjabis, there was no way they going to cower with us beneath the stairs, bombs or no bombs, air raids or no air raids. Especially not during an Indian air attack. Pakistan was in its death throes and this war was the final act of separation between East and West Pakistan.
Seconds later the anti-aircraft guns opened up with a vengeance.
more here.
In early March of 1955, W. Eugene Smith steered his overstuffed station wagon into the steel city of Pittsburgh. He’d been on the road all day, leaving that morning from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where he lived in a large, comfortable house with his wife and four children, plus a live-in housekeeper and her daughter. He was thirty-six, and a fuse was burning inside him. He had recently quit Life, after a successful but troubled twelve years, and joined Magnum, and this was his first freelance assignment. He had been hired by renowned filmmaker and editor Stefan Lorant to shoot a hundred scripted photographs for a book commemorating Pittsburgh’s bicentennial, a job Lorant expected to take three weeks. On Smith’s horizon, however, was one of the most ambitious projects in the history of photography: he wanted to create a photo story to end all photo stories. His station wagon was packed with some twenty pieces of luggage, a phonograph, and hundreds of books and vinyl records—he was prepared for an eruption.
A hundred and eighty miles southwest of Pittsburgh, in Athens, Ohio, James Karales was finishing up a degree in photography at Ohio University. He had studied Smith’s work in class; Smith was a hero. While Smith was crawling all over Pittsburgh, day and night, several cameras wrapped around his neck, fueled by amphetamines, alcohol, and quixotic fevers, Karales was getting his diploma. Little did Karales know, his path and Smith’s were about to become one, and he would get an education no college could provide.
more here.
Antiquity is always stranger than we think. Nowhere does it prove to be more strange than where we once assumed that it was most familiar to us. We always knew that the Romans had a lot of sex. Indeed, in the opinion of our elders, they probably had a lot more than was quite good for them. We also always knew that the early Christians had an acute sense of sin. We tend to think that they had a lot more sense of sin than they should have had. Otherwise they were very like ourselves. Until recently, studies of sex in Rome and of Christianity in the Roman world were wrapped in a cocoon of false familiarity.
Only in the last generation have we realized the sheer, tingling drop of the canyon that lies between us and a world that we had previously tended to take for granted as directly available to our own categories of understanding. “Revealing Antiquity,” the Harvard University Press series edited by Glen Bowersock, has played its part in instilling in us all a healthy sense of dizziness as we peer over the edge into a fascinating but deeply strange world. Kyle Harper’s book From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity is a scintillating contribution to this series. Not only does it measure the exact nature of the tension between the familiar and the deeply unfamiliar that lies behind our image of the sexual morality of Greeks and Romans of the Roman Empire of the classical period. It also goes on to evoke the sheer, unexpected strangeness of the very different sexual code elaborated in early Christian circles, and its sudden, largely unforeseen undermining of a very ancient social equilibrium in the two centuries that followed the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 312.
more here.
The Errand
’On you go now! Run, son, like the devil
And tell your mother to try
To find me a bubble for the spirit level
And a new knot for this tie.’But still he was glad, I know, when I stood my ground,
Putting it up to him
With a smile that trumped his smile and his fool’s
errand,
Waiting for the next move in the game.
.
.
by Seamus Heaney
from The Spirit Level
Faber and Faber, 1996
Liz Bury in The Guardian:
His collection, titled Yahya Hassan, has sold 80,000 copies since October and is expected to have topped 100,000 by Christmas, according to publisher Gyldendal. He has won fans among the Danish middle-class for his work, which slams what he sees as hypocrisy among the immigrant Muslim community in Denmark, and accuses them of a raft of negative behaviours, including bad parenting and social security fraud. His poetry has tapped into a rumbling public debate about Islam in Denmark, which erupted in 2005 when the daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a depiction of the prophet Muhammad with a bomb as his turban. The paper later apologised for publishing the cartoons, saying that they had caused “serious misunderstandings”. The country has a strong pro-free speech lobby, which is open to hijacking by racists. Hassan was brought up in the deprived area of Gellerup in Aarhus, with a disciplinarian father. He is vociferous in his criticism of his parents' generation of Muslims, and slams the attitudes of his peer group. He has been subject to death threats, and was assaulted in November at Copenhagen Central Station, by 24-year-old Isaac Meyer, also of Palestinian descent, who has previously served a jail term for his part in a failed terrorist plot. The racism charge was brought this week by local politician Mohamed Suleban, who told Politiken newspaper: “He says that everybody in the ghettos like Vollsmose and Gellerup steal, don't pay taxes and cheat themselves to pensions. Those are highly generalising statements and they offend me and many other people.” Novelist Liz Jensen, who lives in Denmark, said: “Denmark is obsessed with him. He's a bright, angry young man, talented and very charismatic. He deserves attention because his poetry, born of rap, is raw and urgent and has huge flair. Its observational qualities, along with its mix of Danish street-slang and sophisticated word-play has real literary merit. But would he get so much coverage if he weren't criticizing the Muslim ghetto community he comes from? I suspect not.”
More here.
Owen Jarus (Live Science) via MSNBC News:
“It is perfectly possible and actually likely that the sculptures of the First Emperor are the result of early contact between Greece and China,” writes Lukas Nickel, a reader with the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, in the most recent edition of the journal Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. (A reader is a position comparable to an associate or full professor in the American system.) Nickel's evidence includes newly translated ancient records that tell a fantastic tale of giant statues that “appeared” in the far west, inspiring the first emperor of China to duplicate them in front of his palace. This story offers evidence of early contact between China and the West, contacts that Nickel says inspired the First Emperor (which is what Qin Shi Huangdi called himself) to not only duplicate the 12 giant statues but to build the massive Terracotta Army along with other life-size sculptures.
More here.
The chief key to this interplay between Shakespeare and his company is, of course, his leading man, the great tragedian Richard Burbage. As with all great actors there is something unknowable about Burbage. The reputed self-portrait at Dulwich (he is documented as a painter as well as an actor) has a withdrawn, austere aura which is only partly due to the current conventions of portraiture, and the numerous elegies written after his death in 1619 tell us little about the man, though much about his charismastic presence in the tragic roles Shakespeare wrote for him: “None can draw / So truly to the life this map of woe”, wrote one elegist, possibly John Fletcher. Van Es writes eloquently of Burbage’s Hamlet as an unprecedented presentation of self-doubt which was also a “moment of professional self-definition” for both author and actor. The part depends on an intricately layered performance which can persuade the audience of the Prince’s interior life – “I have that within which passes show” – and of their privileged glimpses into it. Van Es cautions wisely against foisting “an ahistorical ‘realism’” onto Burbage’s acting style, though “realism” seems to be what Webster had in mind when he said of Burbage, “What we see him personate we think truly done before us”. And it is surely the case that Hamlet’s splendid advice to the Player – “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly upon the tongue . . . nor do not saw the air too much with your hand”, and so on – must to some extent describe the style of the actor who speaks the lines.
more here.
Seventy years after the appearance of the Four Freedoms sequence, among Norman Rockwell’s best-known works, the artist continues to be derided as an assembly-line purveyor of sentimental kitsch, a victim of his own popularity and of the changing tastes of the late twentieth century.
But that judgment isn’t damning. An American Art Museum exhibition recently featured his paintings from the collections of George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg. And on December 4, seven of his paintings went on the block at Sotheby’s, where his Saying Grace netted $46 million, tripling the previous record for a Rockwell sale.
Today viewers can admire Rockwell’s humor and eye for detail while dismissing the end result as saccharine and self-consciously folksy, embodying a mid-century patriotism and optimism that most Americans no longer feel or even recognize. For instance, nearly all of the figures in his pre-1960s work were white. His masters at the Saturday Evening Post, the magazine whose covers he illustrated from 1916 until 1963, refused to let him depict African Americans in anything but subservient roles.
It was a situation Rockwell attempted to remedy with his most influential and perhaps greatest work, The Problem We All Live With.
more here.
“Dance? Dance is pretty much just people dancing.” The choreographer Mark Morris is responding to a question from one of fifty or so earnest music lovers gathered for a performance of his work. It is the second night of the Ojai Music Festival, held in the bucolic hippy enclave of Ojai, California, about a two-hour drive northeast from LA. Morris is looking very pleased with himself, in rumpled cargo shorts, a red polo shirt, matching red socks and Franciscan-style sandals. With his broad chest and even broader belly, a scraggly beard, leonine head of graying hair and gleaming greenish eyes, he looks like a Welsh poet, a mischievous Buddha, a disheveled and possibly disreputable emperor. In his right hand he daintily clasps a tartan umbrella angled to protect his eyes from the waning sun. Something about the arrangement of his limbs as he perches on a stool—the extreme angle of his knees, perhaps—reveals the uncanny flexibility of a former dancer. “I was a fabulously good dancer,” he tells me later, and it’s true, too. I’ve seen the tapes.
more here.
John Gray reviews Umberto Eco's The Book of Legendary Lands in New Statesman:
Eco thinks it is not too difficult to explain why humankind is so drawn to legendary places: “It seems that every culture – because the world of everyday reality is cruel and hard to live in – dreams of a happy land to which men once belonged, and may one day return.” Nowadays everyone believes that the ability to envision alternate worlds is one of humankind’s most precious gifts, a view Eco seems to endorse when, at the end of his journey through legendary lands, he describes these visions as “a truthful part of the reality of our imagination”. Yet Eco highlights a darker side of these visions when he describes how the Nazis drew inspiration from legends of ancient peoples, variously situated in ultima Thule (“a land of fire and ice where the sun never set”), Atlantis and the polar regions, who spoke languages that were “racially pure”. Himmler was obsessed with ancient Nordic runes, while in an interview after the war the commander of the SS in Rome claimed that when Hitler ordered him to kidnap Pope Pius XII so he could be interned in Germany, he also ordered the Pope to take from the Vatican library “certain runic manuscripts that evidently had esoteric value for him”.
The Nazi adoption of the swastika began with the Thule Society, a secret racist organisation founded in 1918. Legends of lost lands fed the ideology of Aryan supremacy. In 1907, Jörg Lanz founded the Order of the New Temple, preaching that “inferior races” should be subjected to castration, sterilisation, deportation to Madagascar and incineration – ideas, Eco notes, that “were later to be applied by the Nazis”. Legendary lands are idylls from which minorities, outsiders and other disturbing elements have been banished. When these fantasies of harmony enter politics, a process of exclusion is set in motion whose end point is mass murder and genocide.
More here.
Via brainiac.
Richard Marshall interviews Massimo Pigliucci in 3:AM Magazine:
3:AM: Philosophy of science is a big interest for you. Science vs religion has been making headlines but you’ve recently written about the demarcation problem – the issue about how we make the distinction between science and pseudo-science, and this strikes me as being as equally problematic and important as the atheist vs believer dispute. This is something Karl Popper discussed and Larry Laudan more recently too. Before saying why aren’t they the last word for you can you briefly introduce us to how they tackled the issue?
MP: The term “demarcation problem” was introduced by Popper, and it refers to the issue of what, epistemically, separates science from non-science and pseudoscience. Popper was interested in it because of his concept of falsificationism – the idea that the reason science makes progress is not (as popularly believed) because certain theories are confirmed to be true, but rather because some theories are falsified (and permanently discarded) when they fail the empirical test. For Popper, that is, real science advances not by accumulating truths, but by eliminating falsehoods. So, for instance, Popper thought that Einstein’s theory of relativity was good science (it could be shown to be wrong, in principle), while Marxist theories of history, or much of psychoanalysis, is not (since the “theory” can be constantly adjusted by its supporters to fit whatever data may come in).
Laudan, in a very influential paper published in the early ’80s, pointed out that philosophers of science had long abandoned simple falsificationism (it doesn’t work as neatly as Popper thought, because of something called the Duhem-Quine thesis – more on this another time?). Laudan further argued that it is pointless and dangerous for philosophers to engage in demarcation projects. Pointless because it is not possible to come up with a sharp definition of science (or pseudoscience), dangerous because making public pronouncements about the rationality or irrationality of a given belief or practice has serious social consequences.
More here.
Thomas Crowley in Jacobin:
[T]he website arvindkejriwal.net.in (clearly run by a fan of Kejriwal, not the man himself) proudly proclaims that Kejriwal is a “popular socialist.” And while the Delhi manifesto of Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi (“Common Man”) Party is far from revolutionary, it is filled with proposals that tilt leftward: fighting the privatization of water in Delhi, building more government schools and imposing an upper limit for private school fees, breaking the stranglehold of monopoly capital in the electricity sector, replacing contract labor with permanent labor as much as possible, and empowering workers in the unorganized sector.
This manifesto was prepared for the Delhi Assembly elections, the first big test for the fledgling Aam Aadmi Party (commonly known as the AAP). The election results, announced on December 8, stunned the political class, though they came as no surprise to the party’s supporters. In an impressive showing for such a young party, the AAP won 28 of 70 seats in the Delhi Assembly (the equivalent of a state legislature, except that as the national capital, Delhi, much like Washington, DC, is not quite a full state).
Delhi’s ruling party — the dynastic, dithering Congress — got walloped, winning a measly 8 seats, as voters expressed their discontent with rising food prices and a series of embarrassing political scandals. Congress’s perennial opponent, the business-friendly, upper caste-dominated, Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), gained the most from the anti-incumbency mood, taking 31 seats.
But Kejriwal himself scored the most telling victory, soundly defeating Congress’s Sheila Dikshit, who has served as Delhi’s Chief Minister (the state-level equivalent of Prime Minister) for the past fifteen years. Dikshit and Kejriwal were fighting to represent New Delhi, home to the nation’s top politicians. The lopsided nature of the contest was stunning: Kejriwal won by more than 30 percent. Post-election analysis revealed that much of Kejriwal’s support came from slums in the area; the working class residents of these slums, many of whom work in the service sector that supports the lavish lifestyles of politicians, had come to recognize the hollowness of Congress’s promises.
With this kind of support base, why does Kejriwal eschew the leftist label? After all, in India, unlike the United States, the words “communist” and “socialist” are not merely epithets used to tar political opponents. But perhaps “left” is becoming a dirty word among India’s political class.
More here.
Barbara Kingsolver in Orion Magazine:
It starts with a craving to fill the long evening downslant. There will be whole wide days of watching winter drag her skirts across the mud-yard from east to west, going nowhere. You will want to nail down all these wadded handfuls of time, to stick-pin them to the blocking board, frame them on a twenty-four-stitch gauge. Ten to the inch, ten rows to the hour, straggling trellises of days held fast in the acreage of a shawl. Time by this means will be domesticated and cannot run away. You pick up sticks because time is just asking for it, already lost before it arrives, scattering trails of leavings. The frightful movie your family has chosen for Friday night, just for instance. They insist it will be watched, and so with just the one lamp turned on at the end of the sofa you can be there too, keeping your hands busy and your eyeshades half drawn. Yes, people will be murdered, cars will be wrecked, and you will come through in one piece, plus a pair of mittens.
More here.
Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:
The Bing Crosby and Bob Hope of this road movie — alas, there is no Dorothy Lamour — are Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, recently retired from the post of professor of public understanding of science at Oxford University, and Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist at Arizona State University. They are among the most outspoken of the “new atheists”: scientists and other intellectuals who have tired of having sand kicked in their faces by the priests and mullahs of the world. So the scientists are indeed mobbed like rock stars at glamorous sites like the Sydney Opera House. Inside, they sometimes encounter clueless moderators; outside, demonstrators condemning them to hellfire. At one event, a group of male Muslim protesters are confronted by counterprotesters chanting, “Where are your women?” In between, there are airports and taxi rides and endless cups of coffee.
More here.
