Claudio Bravo. Circe. 1986.

Oil on canvas.

More here and here.

Kenan Malik in Padaemonium:

‘Cultural values that oppress and diminish women have no place in our society’, wrote the journalistAlison Pearson last week. I agree. The values embodied in the burqa and the niqab, the belief that women should be hidden from view for reasons of modesty or religious belief, should be trashed wherever they appear. But such values can be challenged, and new ones crafted, not top down through state prohibitions, as Pearson and others suggest, but only bottom up through social engagement. That is why, from the other side of the debate, Tariq Modood’s insistence that people should be ‘required’ to show respect towards different cultural mores, and that public arrangements be adapted to accommodate them, is also so problematic; it is an approach that eviscerates both civil society and the idea of freedom. The corollary to the right to wear the burqa is the right, indeed in my eyes the obligation, to challenge the practice of wearing it.

It is not just in the controversy over the burqa, but much more broadly in our discussions about culture and values, that the obsession with the state, and with bans and prohibitions, and the failure to nourish civil society, or even to grasp its importance, damages social life. If we want to get beyond the veil, in the sense both of moving the debate on, and of ridding the world of such medievalism, we need to think less about state proscriptions, and more about the cultivation and the transformation of civil society.

More here.

From Necessary and Proportionate:

As technologies that facilitate State surveillance of communications advance, States are failing to ensure that laws and regulations related to communications surveillance adhere to international human rights and adequately protect the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. This document attempts to explain how international human rights law applies in the current digital environment, particularly in light of the increase in and changes to communications surveillance technologies and techniques. These principles can provide civil society groups, industry, States and others with a framework to evaluate whether current or proposed surveillance laws and practices are consistent with human rights.

These principles are the outcome of a global consultation with civil society groups, industry and international experts in communications surveillance law, policy and technology.

Privacy is a fundamental human right, and is central to the maintenance of democratic societies. It is essential to human dignity and it reinforces other rights, such as freedom of expression and information, and freedom of association, and is recognised under international human rights law.[1] Activities that restrict the right to privacy, including communications surveillance, can only be justified when they are prescribed by law, they are necessary to achieve a legitimate aim, and are proportionate to the aim pursued.

Before public adoption of the Internet, well-established legal principles and logistical burdens inherent in monitoring communications created limits to State communications surveillance. In recent decades, those logistical barriers to surveillance have decreased and the application of legal principles in new technological contexts has become unclear.

More here.

Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians.

Robert N. Charette in IEEE Spectrum:

You must have seen the warning a thousand times: Too few young people study scientific or technical subjects, businesses can’t find enough workers in those fields, and the country’s competitive edge is threatened.

It pretty much doesn’t matter what country you’re talking about—the United States is facing this crisis, as is Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, China,Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, India…the list goes on. In many of these countries, the predicted shortfall of STEM (short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers is supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. A 2012 report by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, for instance, stated that over the next decade, 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed. In the U.K., the Royal Academy of Engineering reported last year that the nation will have to graduate 100 000 STEM majors every year until 2020 just to stay even with demand.Germany, meanwhile, is said to have a shortage of about 210 000 workers in what’s known there as the MINT disciplines—mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology.

The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers.

More here.

The Goat

El Dorado Village. Trinidad

1

I don't want to kill the animal.
I don't want to kill the goat.
I don't want to bring the machete
of subjects and predicates down
on Bobby's wedding for his daughter.

By hack saw, cleaver, and knife,
I don't want to render
the body and spirit of Boyo
into edible bits,
no matter how delicious.

2

I want the goat whole.
There is nothing to prove to the goat
as Shaffina and her sister watch
in black hajibs from the house.

He doesn't need to be led by a rope
and relieved of his life
in a little spurting fountain,
trussed up by a hind leg
in the face of his own cage
beneath the flimsy galvanized
in service to what blank red Vatican
he knows not: the poem.
Read more »

Steven E. Alford in Polaris:

In an era in which dark-skinned foreigners fly airplanes into buildings, it’s helpful to remind ourselves that other dark-skinned foreigners have helped immeasurably in shaping this country for the better. Exhibit A is Vartan Gregorian, born an Armenian, raised a Christian, and who, to our eternal good fortune, chose America as his home. The Road to Home is the autobiography of a man who, as an impoverished child, was embarrassed to be seen walking to school in his disintegrating shoes; a man who, as an adult, became president of the New York Library, president of Brown University, and current president of the Carnegie Corporation. Born in 1934 in Tabriz, Iran, Gregorian was raised by his superstitious grandmother in Dickensian poverty. Happily, his intellectual gifts were recognized in his early teens, resulting in a scholarship to the Collège Arménian in Beruit. Regrettably, his relatives and benefactors had neglected to provide him with any money. Rescued by sympathetic locals, he was provided with meals at a local restaurant. However, his bequest did not cover the weekends, two nightmarish days in which he played psychological games with himself to take his mind off his hunger. Working diligently to learn French and Arabic (to add to his Armenian, Turkish, and Persian), Gregorian became one of the school’s top pupils and the protégé of its president, Simon Vratzian, “the last prime minister of the short-lived independent Republic of Armenia.” Following graduation, Gregorian was accepted at Stanford University (one of three Armenian students on campus) where, as a graduate student, he completed a groundbreaking historical study of modern Afghanistan. Much to the surprise of both the Armenian community and his future in-laws, the diminutive Gregorian proposed to tall, blonde Clare Russell on May 28,1959, which, he ironically notes, was Armenian Independence Day. Married in New Jersey the following year, their union produced three sons and a marriage that has lasted over forty years. Teaching in California, Gregorian was awarded the Danforth Foundations E. H. Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching. John Silber enticed him to move to Austin to teach in the University of Texas’ honors program, Plan II, as well as become its principal administrator. Gregorian found Silber, a life-long friend, “ambitious, determined, and impatient, with a dose of misplaced temper.” One admires Gregorian’s capacity for understatement. Energetic, erudite, and funny, Gregorian’s aggressive teaching style embodied his approach toward his students’ education: “my ambition was to teach them to know the facts; to understand the nature and the impact of historical data and the role of individuals and ideas in shaping historical trends and social forces; to understand all the orthodoxies and be able to challenge them; to navigate through many cultures; to go beyond identity politics; and to learn how to reconcile the unique and the universal. In short, I wanted them to be able to think.” He notes that these ideas were impressed upon him by his teachers at Stanford, who “were an unusual group of people, from a different era, when students and teaching were the central preoccupation of the professors and the university, when the central mission of the university was education, when undergraduate education was the core of the university and the quality of graduate education the ultimate goal.”

Gregorian’s dynamism, charisma, and intellectual gifts were such that by 1974 he became provost of the University of Pennsylvania. Passed over for the presidency owing to politics among the trustees, he accepted the presidency of the New York Public Library, placing him in New York’s social stratosphere, with Brook Astor as his patron. At a dinner welcoming him to New York, he found himself surrounded by people he had admittedly seen only on television. “I sat at Mrs. Astor’s right, I looked at all the dignitaries and glamorous people, the elegant apartment, and reflected on the distance between 1699 Church Street Tabriz, Iran, and 778 Park Avenue, New York.”

More here. (Note: Dear friend Vartan just gave me this amzing autobiography. Recommend highly!)

From Smithsonian:

It’s a common argument of the know-it-all teen, fresh from an introductory biology course: “Life is so cushy now,” he might say, “People aren’t even evolving anymore.” As the argument goes, most people live a decently long life and have a chance to pass on their genes, since we aren’t so often being gobbled up by lions or succumbing to now-curable diseases. With this comes a dampening on the forces of natural selection, and a stagnation, or even weakening, of the human species. But the truth, it seems, couldn’t be more different. Over the past 5 to 10 thousand years, says Nature, reporting on a new study, the genetic diversity in the human population has exploded, a bloom that serves as stage one in the process of evolution.

The human genome has been busy over the past 5,000 years. Human populations have grown exponentially, and new genetic mutations arise with each generation. Humans now have a vast abundance of rare genetic variants in the protein-encoding sections of the genome. Brandon Keim, writing in Wired, says, “As a species, we are freshly bursting with the raw material of evolution.” Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so. There hasn’t been much time for random change or deterministic change through natural selection,” said geneticist Joshua Akey of the University of Washington, co-author of the Nov. 28 Nature study. “We have a repository of all this new variation for humanity to use as a substrate. In a way, we’re more evolvable now than at any time in our history.

More here.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

In his Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, sec. 6) David Hume suggested that the idea of an enduring discoverable self was unfounded. Introspection revealed 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.' Many people have noticed the similarity between Hume's position here and Buddhist discussion of the self. Alison Gopnik has discovered a possible route of influence.

Listen to Alison Gopnik on Hume and Buddhism

Read Alison Gopnik's paper 'Could David Hume have known about Buddhism?' (pdf)

First, Jonathan Franzen in The Guardian with a piece generating some interesting responses:

Karl Kraus was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin-de-siecle Vienna's famously rich life of the mind. From 1899 until his death in 1936, he edited and published the influential magazine Die Fackel(The Torch); from 1911 onward, he was also the magazine's sole author. Although Kraus would probably have hated blogs, Die Fackelwas like a blog that everybody who mattered in the German-speaking world, from Freud to Kafka to Walter Benjamin, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. Kraus was especially well known for his aphorisms – for example, “Psychoanalysis is that disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure” – and at the height of his popularity he drew thousands to his public readings.

The thing about Kraus is that he's very hard to follow on a first reading – deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism, and to his cult-like followers his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the playwright Hermann Bahr, before attacking him: “If he understands one sentence of the essay, I'll retract the entire thing.” If you read Kraus's sentences more than once, you'll find that they have a lot to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment.

More here. Next, Fiona Duncan and Sarah Nicole Prickett in New Inquiry:

Chris Kraus’d lovers Fiona Duncan and Sarah Nicole Prickett were on Twitter, debating the latest instance of an old man yelling at iCloud — a 5,000-word screed against Apple, Amazon, Twitter, smartphones, self-promotion, Jennifer Weiner, poor people, young people, elderly German women, and “the ‘dehumanisation’ of a wedding” — when one of us, doesn’t matter who, decided we should cunt up the text, replacing every quoting of and reference to Karl Kraus with, well, see below.

***

“The only way I’d gotten any meetings in Rotterdam or the Cinemarket two years before had been by getting drunk and flirting with an ex-philosopher turned producer by telling him I was the grand-niece of the satirist Karl Kraus.”

– Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

Chris Kraus was an American stripper and a central figure in fin-de-siecle New York‘s famously rich life of the mind. From the late 80s on , she edited and published the influential Semiotext(e) series Native Agents; she is also an author. Although Kraus would probably have hated academic journals, Semiotext(e) was like a journal that everybody who mattered in the American-speaking world, from Acker to Baudrillard to Rosalind Krauss, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. Kraus wasespecially well known for her aphorisms – for example,“Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill” – and at the height of her popularity she drew thousands to her public readings.

More here. Also some more comments at Crooked Timber, here and here. See Amanda Hess's comment in Slate's XX Factor here. And Jennifer Weiner, whom Franzen singles out in passing, responds here.

more here.

Andrea Scrima at The Quarterly Conversation:

After the publication in English translation of Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, and War and War—which together with Seiobo There Below constitute an important cross-section of Krasznahorkai’s prodigious literary output—his bleak outlook on a human history bent on calamity has become legendary. In an interview published in 2012, he expresses doubt that the human race will survive another 200 years. Regarding our collective ability to alter this course, his prognosis is less than optimistic as he calls the authority of literature itself into question: “This kind of communication is really over and done with. Its disappearance is a rather obvious process; it is happening faster at some points of the world than at others. I’m afraid this kind of literature is not sustainable.” To compound the matter, as the incessant onslaught of information fragments our attention on a daily basis, it has to be said that reading Krasznahorkai is not particularly easy, even given the seductive nature of his prose. Moreover, with Seiobo There Below, he has set himself the task of writing about something that is essentially impossible to formulate in language. We are no longer accustomed to using words like “illumination,” “transcendence,” or “epiphany”; indeed, in our secularized Western world they can sound embarrassing and even ridiculous. Yet his is a language that flows in liquid state, eddying around obstructions to form vortices of swelling thought in which the consistency can suddenly gel, become viscous—and all at once, the writing embodies precisely what it describes as these endless, spell-binding sentences gradually alter our perception and prepare us for a brief glimmer of something outside ourselves, something that can perhaps explain us to ourselves.

more here.

Ramachandra Guha at the Financial Times:

The city that really shaped Gandhi was Johannesburg, where he lived between 1903 and 1913. Following the end of the Anglo-Boer war, the gold-rich Transvaal was attracting immigrants from all over the world. Marauders and exploiters came to Johannesburg in search of wealth, eccentrics and free-spirits to escape convention or ostracism at home.

One of these dissenters was Henry Polak, a Jewish journalist sent out from London by his family in a vain attempt to thwart his relationship with a Christian socialist named Millie Graham. Gandhi first met Polak in a vegetarian restaurant; later, after Graham also came out, the couple were married with the Indian lawyer as a witness. The Gandhis and the Polaks shared a home, where fierce arguments raged about diet, religion, politics, and the respective merits of radicalism and meliorism. Another strong influence was Sonja Schlesin, his secretary. The Russian-Jewish Schlesin was an energetic feminist, who – like the Polaks – moved Gandhi away from his inherited social conservatism and patriarchy.

more here.

Melissa Katsoulis in The Telegraph:

Steve Almond in The New York Times:

When Elizabeth Gilbert was in fourth grade, her teacher, Ms. Sandie Carpenter, announced a fund-raiser. Students were asked to sell grinders — New Englandese for “sub sandwiches” — to pay for a class trip. There was never any question whether Gilbert would participate. Still, door-to-door sales of a perishable foodstuff can prove intimidating, even to a zealous 9-year-old. So her mother, Carole, initiated a training program. She made Gilbert go outside and close the front door. Gilbert then had to knock, introduce herself and explain what she was selling and why. “Our family’s going on vacation next week,” Carole might announce. “What if we want the grinders two weeks from now?” To which Gilbert would generally respond, “I don’t know!” and start crying. “Back it up,” her mother would say. “Try it again. Get it right, kid.” And close the door. They did this, Gilbert recalls, for what felt like a whole afternoon.

A decade and a half later, Gilbert took an elevator up to the offices of Spin magazine to ask for a job. Her only connection at the magazine was having met the publisher, Bob Guccione Jr., at a party once. She had no experience as a journalist — her degree from N.Y.U. was in international relations — and enough good sense to be terrified. The doors to the elevator opened. Gilbert took a deep breath. Come on, she told herself. You’re Carole Gilbert’s daughter. Go do this! The receptionist was, to put it gently, unmoved by her appeal. A concerned secretary appeared, then a personal assistant. Gilbert politely refused to budge. Guccione eventually agreed to see her but had no recollection of having met her. Look, he said finally, my assistant is going out of town for three days. You can do his job. At the end of this stint, Guccione pulled out his wallet, handed Gilbert 300 bucks and wished her good luck. Some months later, Gilbert placed her first short story in Esquire, which published it with the subtitle “the debut of an American writer.” She sent the story to Guccione with a note that read, “I told you I was a writer!” He called and offered her an assignment on the spot. The lesson was obvious. Life was just a big grinder sale. Your job was to knock on the door and not to leave until your ambitions were met.

More here.

Spring Sonnet, with my sister's favorite bit of Deborah

The way I see it, every season comes through
With a blessing—winter: dazzle; summer: evening;
Autumn: cold; and this particular spring
It's got to be you, monotonous cuckoo
Or whatever you are, blasting that major third
like a downbeat for the music of the spheres.
And who's to say it isn't, that the stars
And planets aren't guided by a bird?
You voice certainly seems to carry far
Enough, its two persistent notes so pure
They must keep the air's orchestra in tune.
Who cares if they're the same again and again?
I'll stop waiting for that new, exquisite song.
I've got two notes; even I will sing.

by Jaqueline Osherow