The paintings in Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof series do not have the answers to what happened in Stannheim prison on October 18, 1977. They do not have the answers to any questions about who is at fault in this or any other public crisis. They do not ask us to condemn or to forgive. They do not defend any particular political perspective, either that of the prisoners or that of the society that imprisoned them. They do not invite us to take action, and they do not offer us emotional catharsis: in this respect, they are neither Brechtian nor Aristotelian. They are not cheap theater. They are not, I would argue, any kind of theater at all, and their relationship to spectacle has been invoked only to be quelled. They are not about voyeurism, and they do not really care what is happening to the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. They do not even represent the artist’s viewpoint, because viewpoint itself is one of the things they are questioning. They ask us to stand in front of them and contemplate what we think, what we feel, even as they quietly cut the ground out from under us. It is not a comfortable situation to be put in—it may even be “horrific,” as Richter said—but it is necessary, and truthful, and in that sense redeeming.

more from Wendy Lesser at Threepenny Review here.

Gyan Prakash reviews Partha Chatterjee's new book in Caravan:

IN HIS NEW BOOK, Partha Chatterjee returns to the Black Hole, excavating the layers of justifications covering British rule to reveal how these laid the groundwork for new norms and practices of governance. Chatterjee is a widely known and read historian and political theorist, and a professor at Columbia University. As one of the founder members of the Subaltern Studies Group, he is the author of several influential books and articles, almost all of them based on his intimate knowledge of Bengal’s history and culture. The Black Hole of Empire is his most ambitious book yet. Challenging existing understandings, reinterpreting the meaning of well-known events, and displaying an authoritative knowledge of an astonishing range of scholarly literature, we encounter a historian at the top of his game.

Like Chatterjee’s other works, The Black Hole of Empire also focuses on colonial Bengal. It covers the period from the birth of British rule in the 18th century to the 20th-century nationalist mobilisations against the Raj. He places his Bengal-centric account on a larger canvas, tracing the origins of the global norms and practices of modern European imperialism—and those of the modern state itself—in local history. He invites us to see the contemporary predicaments of the Indian state and its moral and legal legitimacy in light of the drama played out in Britain’s prized possession in the east.

At the centre of the book is an attempt to trace the emergence of theories and norms in the actual business of empire. It is not an account of abstract debates on political theory, law and economics but a narrative of the actual conquerors, rulers and their opponents. The work of empire on the ground mattered; it was there that enduring theories and practices of the modern empire and the state were forged.

Chapter 1 of the book can be found here.

Over at Jacobin Magazine, first Alex Gourevitch:

I come from the minority on the Left that is skeptical of environmentalism. This is not skepticism of the science, but of the politics and ideology of environmentalism.

Consider the difference between Hurricane Mitch, a Category 4 hurri­cane, and Hurricane Andrew, a Cat­egory 5.

1992’s Andrew was a more power­ful storm than Mitch, but Andrew hit Florida, where it killed about 80 peo­ple and left about 125,000 temporarily homeless. Due to the wealth and social organization of the region, most people had a place to take refuge, and nearly everybody had found a new place to live within a year.

Mitch hit Central America – mainly Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua – in 1998. It was catastrophic, killing 11,000 people, with just as many miss­ing, and it left 2.7 million people home­less. The economic devastation led to a cholera outbreak.

Why the difference?

The answer lies with Central Amer­ica’s poverty and underdevelopment.

Max Ajl, Peter Frase (both also in Jacobin) and Chris Bertram (over at Crooked Timber) respond to Gourevitch. Bertram:

No doubt Alex can find plenty of instances of people mouthing the sentiments and opinions he condemns. But the trouble with this sort of writing is exemplified by the endless right-wing blogs that go on about “the left” and then attribute to everyone from Alinsky to the Zapatistas a sympathy for Stalinist labour camps. Just like “the left”, people who care about the environment and consider themselves greens come in a variety of shapes, sizes and flavours. Taking as typical what some random said at some meeting about the virtues of Palestinians generating electricity with bicycles is inherently problematic. Alex argues in the piece that “the Left” should support the industrialization of “the Global South”. Well, it might be right that some countries should industrialize more. But countries don’t all have to go through some developmental phase involving smoky factories. What’s important is that people in the Global South should, where possible, have the benefits of a modern infrastructure, well-built houses, secure energy supplies, decent transportation, and so forth. Industrializing might be one way of getting those things, but it is hardly the only way.

Jacob Bernstein in the NYT:

EVERYWHERE Tony Marx goes, he does a lot of smiling and nodding. As the president of the New York Public Library (a job he took over in July 2011, after eight years as the president of Amherst), it is his job to smile and nod at big-name writers around whom the library plans events.

It is his job to smile and nod at the business leaders who serve on his board. It is his job to smile and nod at heads of foundation boards, at members of the City Council and officials in the Bloomberg administration, whom he lobbies for money and patronage, since the library (like most publicly financed institutions) has been subject to brutal budget cuts over the last four years.

Anyway, smiling and nodding are certainly what he was doing on an early September evening at a cocktail party for the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art at the Museum of Arts and Design at 2 Columbus Circle, working the room, introducing himself to anyone and everyone, offering tours, giving pats on the back and providing reassurances to people who appeared to be slightly wary of him.

Mr. Marx has had to reassure a lot of people of late.

From Guardian:

Celebrated Israeli novelist David Grossman is working with Boualem Sansal, an award-winning Algerian writer who came under harsh criticism for visiting Jerusalem earlier this year, to launch a writers' drive for peace which calls among other things for a halt to the “inhuman and immoral” situation in Israel. Supported by some of international literature's most respected names, including Claudio Magris, Antonio Lobo Antunes and Liao Yiwu, the authors will present their appeal at the closing session of the World Forum for Democracy on Thursday. Their document states that there is still a “possible solution” for the Israel-Palestine conflict, where “Israel has maintained the Palestinians under occupation for more than 45 years”, but “but maybe not for long”. The writers are therefore pushing for a Palestinian state to be created next to Israel, both with secure borders, “on the basis of painful compromises for both parties … such as the abandonment of settlements or their exchange for land, the renouncement of the right of return of the 1948 refugees, the sharing of Jerusalem”.

Sansal, whose books are banned in Algeria but who has won prizes for his work in France and took the German book trade peace prize last year, met Grossman, whose son, Uri, was killed in 2006 when a missile struck his tank in southern Lebanon, in May when he travelled to Jerusalem for an international literary festival. The threats and criticism he received for going to Israel led him to the idea of gathering writers to speak up for peace in the world. “Before I went to Jerusalem I came in for a lot of harassment [but] I did not let it intimidate me,” Sansal told the Guardian. “I decided to go to Jerusalem anyway, to mobilise people. Our enemies are organised, but we are not. Our way of fighting is literature, it's meeting, it's dialogue. We need to fight with these things.”The appeal from the authors, who include Daniel Pennac, Tomi Ungerer and Peter Esterhazy, also states that it is “urgent” that the international community “intervenes firmly to bring the Iranian nuclear programme under control”, warning that Iran is accelerating “its nuclear programme to achieve its hegemonic pretensions on a political, military and religious level, and Arab countries in the region might be driven to follow a similar path”.

More here.

From Nature:

On a chilly, January night in 1986, Elizabeth Ebaugh carried a bag of groceries across the quiet car park of a shopping plaza in the suburbs of Washington DC. She got into her car and tossed the bag onto the empty passenger seat. But as she tried to close the door, she found it blocked by a slight, unkempt man with a big knife. He forced her to slide over and took her place behind the wheel. The man drove aimlessly along country roads, ranting about his girlfriend's infidelity and the time he had spent in jail. Ebaugh, a psychotherapist who was 30 years old at the time, used her training to try to calm the man and negotiate her freedom. But after several hours and a few stops, he took her to a motel, watched a pornographic film and raped her. Then he forced her back into the car. She pleaded with him to let her go, and he said that he would. So when he stopped on a bridge at around 2 a.m. and told her to get out, she thought she was free. Then he motioned for her to jump. “That's the time where my system, I think, just lost it,” Ebaugh recalls. Succumbing to the terror and exhaustion of the night, she fainted. Ebaugh awoke in freefall. The man had thrown her, limp and handcuffed, off the bridge four storeys above a river reservoir. When she hit the frigid water, she turned onto her back and started kicking. “At that point, there was no part of me that thought I wasn't going to make it,” she says.

Few people will experience psychological and physical abuse as terrible as the abuse Ebaugh endured that night. But extreme stress is not unusual. In the United States, an estimated 50–60% of people will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives, whether through military combat, assault, a serious car accident or a natural disaster. Acute stress triggers an intense physiological response and cements an association in the brain's circuits between the event and fear. If this association lingers for more than a month, as it does for about 8% of trauma victims, it is considered to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The three main criteria for diagnosis are recurring and frightening memories, avoidance of any potential triggers for such memories and a heightened state of arousal.

More here.

Mo Yan in Granta:

I have to admit that, though I did not make it public, I was personally opposed to my Aunty’s marriage plans. My father, my brothers and their wives shared my feelings. It simply wasn’t a good match in our view. Ever since we were small we’d looked forward to seeing Aunty find a husband. Her relationship with Wang Xiaoti had brought immense glory to the family, only to end ingloriously. Yang Lin was next, and while not nearly the ideal match that Wang would have provided, he was, after all, an official, which made him a passable candidate for marriage. Hell, she could have married Qin He, who was obsessed with her, and be better off than with Hao Dashou . . . we were by then assuming she’d wind up an old maid, and had made appropriate plans. We’d even discussed who would be her caregiver when she reached old age. But then, with no prior indication, she’d married Hao Dashou. Little Lion and I were living in Beijing then, and when we heard the news, we could hardly believe our ears. Once the preposterous reality set in, we were overcome by sadness.

Years later, Aunty starred in a TV program titled ‘Moon Child,’ which was supposed to be about the sculptor Hao Dashou, though the camera was always on her, talking and gesturing as she welcomed journalists into Hao’s yard and gave them a guided tour of his workshop and the storeroom where he kept all his clay figurines, while he sat quietly at his workbench, eyes glazed over and a blank look on his face, like a dreamy old horse. Did all master artists turn into dreamy old horses once they became famous? I wondered. The name Hao Dashou resounded in my ears, though I’d only met him a few times. After seeing him late on the night my nephew Xianquan hosted a dinner to celebrate his acceptance as a pilot, years passed before I saw him again, and this time it was on TV. His hair and beard had turned white, but his complexion was ruddy as ever; composed and serene, he was a nearly transcendent figure. It was during that program that we learned why Aunty had married Hao Dashou.

More here.

Peter Frase in Jacobin:

Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about 3-D printers. Until recently, these devices have been seen either as novelties or as expensive pieces of equipment suited only for industrial use. Now, however, they are quickly becoming affordable to individuals, and capable of producing a wider range of practical items. Just as the computer became a vector for pervasive file-sharing as soon as cheap PCs and internet connections were widespread, we may soon find ourselves living in a world where cheap 3-D printers allow the dissemination of designs for physical objects through the Internet.

The line between science fiction and reality is moving rapidly. Scroll throughthese links at BoingBoing and you’ll see 3-D printers churning out everything from guitars to dolls to keys to a prosthetic beak for a bald eagle.

Ensconced in the home, the 3-D printer is a step toward the replicator: a machine that can instantly produce any object with no input of human labor. Technologies like this are central to the vision of a post-scarcity society that I outlined in “Four Futures”. It’s a future that could be glorious or terrible, depending on the outcome of the coming political struggles over the adoption of these new technologies. As the title of a report from Public Knowledge puts it, “It will be awesome if they don’t screw it up.”

Battles over 3-D printing will be fought on two fronts, and two mechanisms of power are likely to be mobilized by the rentier elites who are threatened by these technologies: intellectual property law and the war on terror.

More here. [Thanks to Ahmad Saidullah.]

Justin E. H. Smith in Berfrois:

When it comes to texts in foreign languages, I find the closest reading I can give them is by translating them into my native idiom. Texts in English can’t be translated any further, but I can at least transcribe them: already a sort of translatio, a bringing-over from page to screen. There are few authors who inspire me to undertake such a close reading. I’ve acknowledged before thatJames Agee is one of them. Joan Didion is another.

I’ve also acknowledged before a difficult relationship to my fellow Sacramentan. I want to dissect every sentence, copy it out, parse it, anatomize it, and when I do this what I am left with, on the dissecting table, on my desktop, is a sharp feeling of unreciprocated love. One of Didion’s favorite themes is contempt for the people I happen to identify with most closely: the Central Californians who aspire to live in history-less tract houses. The ones perpetually hovering, classwise, between the meth lab and BestBuy.

Consider Didion’s destruction of Ronald Reagan, not as an aggrieved victim of his far-right, aggressively neoliberal policies (the only kind of attack on Reagan most of us even know), but as an aristocrat repulsed by his yokel tastes, and by the fact that democracy has by now spread so far that even those in power aspire to have nothing more than what the great mass of people have, if slightly more of it.

Dayna Tortorici on Shulamith Firestone in n+1:

Although in later years a private and often isolated person, the writer, artist, and feminist thinker Shulamith Firestone was at one time a formidable public force. A founder of the first radical feminist organizations in New York and co-editor of the first theoretical journals of the Women’s Liberation Movement, she was one of the most memorable characters of the second wave. Brilliant, passionate, aggressive, and uncompromising in her beliefs, possessing an intellectual confidence that lives on in her work, Firestone embodied much of the radical energy of her era. She “dared to be bad”—as she declared women ought to in an editorial for Notes from the Second Year—which meant not just disobedient, but willing to fail. Women, Firestone knew, had to take risks to find liberation, even if it meant faltering in their first attempts. And although Firestone and her peers struggled to form and maintain a coherent women’s movement—and although their movement today is remembered as flawed and tenuous—our world owes as much to their failures as their successes.

Firestone’s wit was biting and aphoristic; her words sizzled on the page. With an almost anachronistic philosophical confidence she explained the world as she saw it without hesitation, from the ground up. At age 25 she wrote the seminal book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970)—described by contemporaries as “the little red book for women”—which for the first time united the then-irreconcilable discourses of Marxist analysis and feminist critique. And then, in a turn that still mystifies her admirers, she withdrew from both the movement and from public life. Decades later Firestone re-emerged with a small, startling book called Airless Spaces (1998), a fictionalized chronicle of her later life, that spoke in vignettes to her years spent in and out of mental hospitals. But as if unsatisfied by this account, admirers of her early work still wondered: Why had she left? Where had she gone?

Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn:

I surprised myself on the day young Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban in Swat. I was surprised at how calmly (or with such overt apathy) I absorbed the terrible news.

I usually get extremely restless, and fall rapidly in and out of bouts of anger and rage whenever I hear about the madness, the mayhem and the murder being so seamlessly committed in this country against soldiers, cops, politicians, and more importantly, against the civilians, by a host of ogres, in the name of faith, fight and freedom.

But all that rage betrayed me on the day young Malala was stopped, identified and shot point-blank in the head by those who claim to have brought a superpower to its knees (the Soviet Union) and are now fighting the good fight (ordained by the Almighty), to bring down another superpower, the US.

Yes, dear faithful and fellow revolutionaries, our heroes, the ones whose lives are being cut short and mutilated by the American drones, Pakistani fighter jets, soldiers and cops, this time gallantly decided to take on their greatest enemy: The educated young female.

I went numb. It was the strongest bout of apathy I have felt in years. But just for a moment I did want to see the look on the faces of those who have been obsessively raising the drone argument every time they are faced with the embarrassing task of explaining (if not outright justifying) a hideous task of those whose name they dare not speak, but to whom they want to ‘talk peace.’

But then, I remembered. I remembered how when the ‘Swat flogging video’ (in which a member of the Taliban was publicly flogging a woman), was released to the mainstream TV channels, a Taliban spokesperson justified it.

His gloating was followed by a journalist, who fancies himself as a great crusader of a free judiciary, and who agreed with the spokesperson (live on TV), and then angrily took to task his own news group for repeatedly running the video.

Hours later after realising that their justifications, shamelessly constructed on their clearly distorted interpretations of religious scriptures and Pushtun traditions, had failed to stem the tide of condemnation that came charging in from across the country, the apologists suddenly changed their tune.

To them, suddenly, now the video was not showing a beating of a young woman according to the scriptures or Pushtun customs anymore; now it was a farce.

Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg in The Nation:

Nagel’s is the latest in what has become a small cottage industry involving a handful of prominent senior philosophers expressing skepticism about aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Some, like the overtly Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, have made a career of dialectical ingenuity in support of the rationality of religious faith. Others, such as Jerry Fodor, are avowed atheists like Nagel, and have only tried to raise challenges to discrete aspects of evolutionary explanations for biological phenomena. Plantinga’s influence has largely been limited to other religious believers, while Fodor’s challenge was exposed rather quickly by philosophers as trading on confusions (even Nagel disowns it in a footnote). Nagel now enters the fray with a far-reaching broadside against Darwin and materialism worthy of the true-believing Plantinga (whom Nagel cites favorably). We suspect that philosophers—even philosophers sympathetic to some of Nagel’s concerns—will be disappointed by the actual quality of the argument.

Nagel opposes two main components of the “materialist” view inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The first is what we will call theoretical reductionism, the view that there is an order of priority among the sciences, with all theories ultimately derivable from physics and all phenomena ultimately explicable in physical terms. We believe, along with most philosophers, that Nagel is right to reject theoretical reductionism, because the sciences have not progressed in a way consistent with it. We have not witnessed the reduction of psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, but rather the proliferation of fields like neuroscience and evolutionary biology that explain psychological and biological phenomena in terms unrecognizable by physics. As the philosopher of biology Philip Kitcher pointed out some thirty years ago, even classical genetics has not been fully reduced to molecular genetics, and that reduction would have been wholly within one field. We simply do not see any serious attempts to reduce all the “higher” sciences to the laws of physics.

More here. [Photo shows Thomas Nagel.]

Didi Kirsten Tatlow in the New York Times:

Could an old religious tradition from China help solve one of the world’s most pressing problems — violence committed in the name of Islam?

The irony of an officially atheist country possibly offering a way out of an international religious problem is intense. Yet that is what some Islamic scholars in China and elsewhere hope may happen as they point to a quietly liberal tradition among China’s 10 million Hui Muslims, where female imams and mosques for women are flourishing in a globally unique phenomenon.

Female imams and women’s mosques are important because their endurance in China offers a vision of an older form of Islam that has inclusiveness and tolerance, not marginalization and extremism, at its core, the scholars say.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

From Smithsonian:

There is a real science to Irving Olson’s art. So much so, in fact, that the 98-year-old photographer has converted the kitchen of his Tucson home into a miniature laboratory. Olson’s latest experiment involves photographing the precise moment when two water droplets collide. He resolved to this challenging task about a year ago, after seeing a black-and-white image of this type in Rangefinder, a technical photography magazine. “I went to work on it,” says Olson, “and I added color.”

Olson rigs a little water chamber, extending from a tripod, above a pan of water. (See a similar setup here.) He dyes each vat of water a different hue with food coloring. Using a device called a “Time Machine,” Olson controls the number and size of the water drops released from the chamber’s electric valve, as well as the length of time, to the thousandth of a second, in between drops and in between the release of a drop and the flash of his Nikon D800 camera. “When you release a drop of water into a pan of water, it drops down and it jumps back up out of the water about two inches,” says Olson. “The trick is when drop number one has come up about two inches, the second drop has to come and hit it right on the head.”

More here.

On the Pennsylvania State Road Atlas

I didn’t know where we were going
But that, I guess, was our goal.
He would say only it was time to go,
Saturday afternoons before he died.
Chambersberg. Bedford. Lockhaven.

We got in the car and drove until
It got dark, exits sounded exotic,
And a few turns found a stoplight,
A drive-through and a hotel.
Tarentum. Nazareth. Warsaw.

He knew that taking your leave
Takes practice. I remember headlights
Pulling us between two rows of pines,
The stiff smell of cleaned linens.
Shay. Freeport. Saxonberg.

But what did he tell my mother
Sundays when we came back?
“I want to wet my feet and wade
Into not being John of Swarthmore.”
Palmyra. Burbank. Spring.

I want these words to be the map, not
To steer him home but to get me back
To a town off I-80 where no one stops
Except relatives and whoever can’t go on.
Milton. Mifflinburg. Scotts Run.

I want to return to two beds, a curtain
Outside which windless rain fell,
The highway whispering with travel,
His sleeping breath, steady, certain.
Drakes Mill. Transfer. Mount Joy

by H.L. Spelman
from Blackbird, Fall 2011

Bruce Fleming in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

They're educational institutions, but do they actually educate, and furthermore, do they produce “leaders” as they claim to? And are they worth the $400,000 or so per graduate (depending on the academy) they cost taxpayers?

After all, we already have a federal program that produces officers—an average of twice as many as those who go to the academies (three times for the Army)—at a quarter of the cost. That program is ROTC, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, which has expanded considerably since World War II, when the academies produced the lion's share of officers.

No data suggest that ROTC officers are of worse quality than those graduating from the academies, who are frequently perceived by enlisted military as arrogant “ring-knockers” (after their massive old-style class rings). The academies evoke their glory days by insisting that many more admirals, say, come from Annapolis than from ROTC. But that is no longer true. Between 1972 and 1990 (these are the latest figures available), the percentage of admirals from ROTC climbed from 5 percent to 41 percent, and a 2006 study indicated that commissioning sources were not heavily weighted in deciding who makes admiral.

More here.

Nina Martyris in The Millions:

In his newly released memoir Joseph Anton, which is narrated in the third person, Rushdie briefly describes how he went through a phase when he found himself immersed in Super Mario Bros, the popular Nintendo game that his son Zafar taught him to play.

Those were dark days for the 41-year-old writer. Every morning brought fresh reports of either The Satanic Verses being burnt or him being burnt in effigy. Then came the chilling news that the police had foiled a group of assassins dispatched from overseas to execute the fatwa. If it sounded straight out of a bigoted video game, well, it wasn’t – or not yet, at least. But more on that later.

Given Rushdie’s lonely and claustrophobic circumstances in what his late friend Christopher Hitchens called “the time of the toad,” it was scarcely surprising that the fantasy-loving novelist whose favorite childhood stories were The Wizard of Oz and The Arabian Nights should occasionally transform himself into Mario the mustachioed plumber and run away to Mushroom Kingdom. The magic console was the next best thing to a magic carpet or magic lamp, and it quickly became the “Genie-come-lately” in his fantasy arsenal. It helped that in this digital world of magical mushrooms and fire flowers, he was hunter rather than hunted. A vital role reversal, even if his wife didn’t think so.

More here.