From The Guardian:

Magnificent yet daunting, Moby-Dick stands as one of the great classics of American literature, much admired but – sprawling and intimidating – seldom read. Now an unlikely combination of fans including David Cameron, Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and Simon Callow are set to change that after joining the cast of an ambitious project to record the novel in its entirety. Dreamed up by author Philip Hoare and artist Angela Cockayne, the readings are being broadcast daily online, accompanied by images inspired by the book from contemporary artists including Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley. Swinton kicks off the immense undertaking – 135 chapters over 135 days – taking the novel's iconic opening, “Call me Ishmael”, with Fry to read a homoerotic encounter between Ishmael and the tattooed Queequeg and Callow taking “the sermon”. Cameron, after much debate, will be reading chapter 30, The Pipe. “The problem for any politician is the coded messages in Moby-Dick,” said Hoare. “It's an incredibly political book, and there are entire chapters about the whale's foreskin. The difficulty for No 10 was finding a chapter which was not fraught with messages. I wouldn't say it's an anodyne chapter. No chapter is anodyne, every chapter is freighted with meaning. But it's fairly innocent.”

Herman Melville's subversive, digressive masterpiece is narrated by the sailor Ishmael, telling of his voyage on the whaling ship the Pequod. The ship's captain, Ahab, is obsessed with finding the white whale, Moby-Dick, who took his leg, investing him with an “intangible malignity” and pursuing him beyond the bounds of sanity. “Moby-Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” he is told. Unappreciated in Melville's lifetime, the novel is now, according to the American academic and author Jay Parini, a book which “permeates a culture, reinforcing and shaping ideas: ambition, for example, and the drive to conquer nature, the imperial drive, the wish to pursue an ideal to the last degree”.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our philosophy prize (details here) is over. A total of 515 votes were cast for the 40 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

So here they are, the top 20, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. FauxPhilNews: Kripke resigns as report alleges that he faked results of thought experiments
2. Tang Dynasty Times: Ai Weiwei and “Das Ding”
3. The Immanent Frame: Love's Ladder's God
4. Big Think: The Moral Significance of Sex Workers and People With Disabilities
5. The Philosopher's Beard: Democracy is not a truth machine
6. 3 AM Magazine: Imagining god creating poppies
7. Meditations Hegeliènnes: Kritik des unreinen Gedankes
8. Michael D. Stark: Faith and Uncertainty
9. Orienteringsforsok: Meaning and Mortality
10. 3 Quarks Daily: The Bhagavad Gita Revisited
11. 3 Quarks Daily: On Eating Animals
12. Ratio Juris: Toward a Philosophically Sound & Bioethically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law
13. Experimental Philosophy: Factive Verbs and Protagonist Projection
14. TTahko: The Philosophical Significance of the Higgs “Discovery”
15. Tom Paine's Ghost: Atheist Morality: Ratcheting Forward
16. Flickers of Freedom: Freaks and Geeks and Ordinal Proportionality
17. Tomkow: A Few Short Steps to the Gallows
18. The Philosophy of Poetry: Prophecy and Abstraction in a Passionless Age
19. Bleeding Heart Libertarians: Recharting the Map of Social and Political Theory: Where is Government? Where is Conservatism?
20. Philosophy, etc.: Singer's Pond and Quality of Will

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Justin E. H. Smith for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here in the next day or two.

Good luck!

Abbas

Yassin al Haj Saleh and Rime Allaf in openDemocracy:

The international media has not always been kind to Syria’s revolutionary people. For months on end, many of the latter turned themselves into instant citizen-journalists to document their uprising and the violent repression of the Syrian regime, loading clips and photos taken from their mobile-phones to various social networks; still, the established media, insinuating that only it could really be trusted, covered these events with an ever-present disclaimer that these images could not be independently verified. Since the Damascus regime was refusing to allow more than a trickle of foreign media personnel into the country, chaperoned by the infamous minders, what the Syrians themselves were reporting was deemed unreliable.

Nevertheless, an increasing number of brave journalists dared to sneak into Syria at great personal risk, reporting the same events which activists had attempted to spread to the world. For the most part, experienced journalists were perfectly capable of distinguishing between straight propaganda from a regime fighting for its survival and real information from a variety of other sources. Overwhelmingly, ensuing reports about Syria gave a voice to “the other side” or at least quoted opposing points of view, if only for balance. In some cases, journalists found no room to cater for the regime’s claims, especially when reporting from civilian areas under relentless attack by Bashar al-Assad's forces.

It was from the wretched Homs district of Baba Amr, under siege and shelling for an entire month, that the late Marie Colvin, amongst others, testified on the eve of her death under the regime’s shells about the “sickening situation” and the “merciless disregard for the civilians who simply cannot escape.” Like her, most of those who managed to get into Syria have testified about the regime’s repression of a popular uprising, even after the latter evolved to include an armed rebellion.

Robert Fisk, a seasoned war correspondent who has covered the region for decades, surprisingly broke a mould, gradually allowing himself to become a part, and not simply a witness, of the Syrian regime’s propaganda campaign.

Sianne Ngai in Berfrois:

Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces (1998) has been sitting in one of my bookcases since 2000. I bought the postcard-sized Semiotext(e) book mostly out of surprise from seeing the name of its author in print: one I realized I hadn’t seen for a very long time and which I didn’t associate with fiction. It has moved with me between various apartments and houses for the last 12 years, unread—not even cracked open until a few months ago (as I write this, it’s the fall of 2011).

My surprise encounter with her name on the spine of Airless Spaces made me acutely aware of my ignorance. What exactly happened, in the interval between 1970 and 1998, to Shulamith Firestone? Of the few American radical feminists I actually read (it was the socialist feminists who really appealed to me), Firestone had seemed the smartest and most interesting, the one with the keenest sense of feminism’s history and of how the problems it sought to rectify intersected with but could not be totally explained or dissolved by Marxism. I thought I should do some research, then got distracted by other projects and forgot about it. Years after this, on one of the many occasions when I took Airless Spaces down and thought about actually reading it—or at least progressing past the opening story, “Of Plastic Wrapping and Cauliflower,” about a recently released hospital patient trying to learn how to use nonplastic utensils again—I deferred that reading once again by desultorily googling, assuming there must have been a string of books between the collection of stories and the work of nonfiction that made Firestone nationally known at the age of 25, The Dialectic of Sex. A string of books that, naturally, I’d be obligated to read before tackling Airless Spaces. But the internet informed me that due to the mental illness and hospitalization of the author, between The Dialectic of Sex and Airless Spaces, there was nothing. A 28 year-long gap.

The paratexts of Airless Spaces are hardly inviting: unhappy title, hospital-blue cover with dull, barely-distinguishable beige print, and large, anxious, unhappy-looking close-up of Firestone on the back cover.

Teju Cole in The New Yorker:

Two years ago, I was invited to a dinner party in New York. It took place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a penthouse apartment. Our host was not merely rich: she had a name that through long association with money had itself become a shorthand for wealth. The dinner was being held in honor of a writer, by now old and famous, on the publication of his latest and perhaps final book. And because the book was about Africa, and because as a man ages his thoughts circle around questions of legacy, the writer, who was not himself African, had requested, in lieu of a normal book launch, a quiet dinner with a group of young African writers. This was how I came to be invited.

I stood in the luxurious living room of the penthouse, glass in hand, surrounded by Morandi’s paintings and Picasso’s prints. To the sound of a small bell, from a private elevator the old writer and his middle-aged wife emerged. He was short and stout—a little fat, even, though you could see he hadn’t always been so—and he walked across the marble floor unsteadily, with the aid of a walking stick, and with the aid of his wife, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, taller than him, glamorous in her pashmina. My agent, who was also the old writer’s agent, introduced us. “Teju, meet Vidia Naipaul.”

Detractors of Christopher Hitchens might want to keep that passage in mind as they go about their business of reproaching him for his “views” on, for instance, the war in Iraq. You could disagree with those views, like his close friends Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, James Fenton, and Salman Rushdie did, but the principle of anti-totalitarianism on which those views were founded seem to me worth a good deal of respect, and even admiration. In any case, a man who wrote so well and so thoughtfully, and with such Hazlittean “gusto” — his words, in writing and in speech, had that “double relish” — cannot easily be reduced to the summation of his political views, which often contradicted themselves anyway. James Wood wrote of Orwell not long ago that “contradictions are what make writers interesting. Consistency is for cooking.” The same applies to the Hitch: as Martin Amis pointed out in his eulogy at the Memorial Service, Hitchens was so argumentative, was such an auto-contrarian, that it often seemed as though the only person he thought it worthwhile to argue with was himself.

more from Morten Høi Jensen at The Millions here.

One way of understanding the sacraments, perhaps best articulated by liturgist Gordon Lathrop, is that simple things become central things. When Christians refer to the bath and the table, they refer not only to the specific sacraments of bathing and eating, but they point also to the sacramental character of every bath and every table. The setting apart of one table and one bath shows forth the splendor of all tables and all baths. That setting apart is the calling of Christians but also the vocation of the writer. The attentiveness of the writer is shown in how that writer lifts to the level of extraordinary the most ordinary of people, places, and things. Not surprisingly, the great Catholic writers are extolled for sacramental writing, often for their accounts of communion. Graham Greene’s “The Hint of an Explanation” develops around an overdue confession by a grown altar boy who stole a consecrated wafer as a child. Flannery O’Connor included profound descriptions of the Eucharist in her letters and essays but also included some playful accounts in her fiction, my favorite of which is the old priest in “The Displaced Person” who, not being able to talk theology with Mrs. McIntyre or any of her farmhands, “came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs” for the peacocks.

more from Casey N. Cep at The Paris Review here.

Like Death in Venice or The Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness is not just a book but a modern myth—everyone has read it, even if they have not done so personally. The actual book is far stranger than accounts of it sometimes suggest. It’s a shame in a way that the book has become so famous as to dull our sense of this pervasive strangeness. Re-reading it now I find it scarcely less bizarre than when I plodded through it as a mystified seventeen-year-old (we were doing The Secret Agent for A-Level). What H. G. Wells wrote of Conrad’s earlier book, An Outcast of the Islands, also holds good for Heart of Darkness: “his story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences.” Strictly speaking, the book is narrated not by Marlow but by someone listening to him and reporting what has been said so that we peer at the narrative river through a forest overgrown with quotation marks. Much of the time Marlow seems simply to be waffling on—even more extraordinary given what a short book it is, how little room there is for waffling.

more from Geoff Dyer at Guernica here.

Amy Davidson in The New Yorker:

What was so bad about what Mitt Romney said about Cairo and Benghazi—and with what he keeps saying? On Thursday afternoon, a new mob was around the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, a reminder that this is not just an abstract question. There is no prohibition, at such moments, from criticizing one’s government—and there never should be—but as a major party’s nominee for President, Romney is also, by default, a participant, the leader of the opposition, and at least he had the obligation to treat this as something other than a game. It was striking to see a man who presents “apologizing for America” as the ultimate crime turning on Americans—the President, but also low-level embassy workers—at a moment of crisis. He said that a statement issued by the embassy in Cairo “apologized” to the people attacking it, and called this a “disgraceful” response; faced with the puzzle of how it could be any such thing, given that the statement in question was issued before the violence began, he said that the Embassy had been wrong to “stand by” it. Perhaps they should have apologized for it? One might call that saying sorry for saying sorry, if not for one problem: Romney wasn’t right about what the Embassy said, either. (“We have looked in vain for an ‘apology’ in the Cairo statement,” the Washington Post’s Fact Checker said.)

The incident is also a problem for Romney for some of the same reasons that the stories about Bain Capital are—and, indeed, it reprises some of the same themes. Trouble at the Embassy? Go after those you’ve decided are the employees who aren’t performing; put aside questions of loyalty, or about the difficult times they may be going through. Act as though all that’s needed for a transformation is a little managerial sleight of hand. Don’t be distracted by suffering, not even by the knowledge that some of the people doing the same jobs as the ones you’re attacking, in another branch office, are dead—that the next of kin for a couple of the victims haven’t even be informed. He wasn’t reckless and premature in his judgments, just efficient: “It’s never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values”—suggesting either that Mitt doesn’t care that he got the chronology wrong, or that he has more control over the space-time continuum than anyone suspected. (Come to think of it, time travel might explain some of his investment returns.) When a reporter asked Romney what the President himself had done wrong, given that the issue was something an embassy-worker tweeted without clearance from Washington, and from which the White House had distanced itself, Romney came up with a theory of blame:

It’s their Administration. Their Administration spoke. The President takes responsibility not just for the words that come from his mouth, but also from the words that come from his ambassadors from his Administration, from his embassies, from his State Department.

There is something in that, of course. But what does responsibility mean here? To paper over their muddling of the facts, Romney and his proxies have fictionalized the Embassy statement and demonized its authors. They are under siege, by Americans, for saying that the Embassy “condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” (The statement also mentioned “the universal right of free speech.”) As John Cassidy noted yesterday, the actual low thing that the Administration did was distance itself from its people in Cairo at the moment when they were most isolated. Obama made up for that, somewhat, in an interview with CBS in which he said that “my tendency is to cut folks a little bit of slack” given the circumstances. His appearance raised another issue for Romney: Obama looked exhausted and somber, like someone who had just lost colleagues and friends. Romney looked like what he really wanted to say was “I told you so.”

More here.

From Nature:

Lung cancer causes more deaths than any other form of cancer. About 1.6 million people worldwide are diagnosed with the disease each year, with fewer than 20% still alive five years later. Now a trio of genome-sequencing studies published this week^1–3 is laying the groundwork for more effective personalized treatment of lung cancers, in which patients are matched with therapies that best suit the particular genetic characteristics of their tumours. Two of the latest studies profiled the genomes of tissue samples from 178 patients with lung squamous cell carcinomas¹ and 183 with lung adenocarcinomas², the largest genomic studies so far performed for these diseases. A third study carried out more in-depth analyses of 17 lung tumours to compare the genomes of smokers and patients who had never smoked³.

…The studies reveal new categories of mutations and also show a striking difference between lung cancer in smokers and non-smokers, with smokers’ tumours exhibiting several times the number of mutations as well as different kinds of mutations. Non-smokers were likely to have mutations in genes such as EGFR and ALK, which can already be specifically targeted with existing drugs. Smokers were particularly likely to have damage in genes involved in DNA repair as well as other characteristic mutations. “These genomes are battle-scarred by carcinogen exposure,” says Govindan. In addition, the patterns of mutations found in lung squamous cell carcinoma more closely resemble those seen in squamous cell carcinomas of the head and neck than those in other lung cancers. That finding adds further weight to the idea that classifying tumours by their molecular profiles, rather than their sites of origin, will be more effective in picking the right drugs to treat them. Perhaps, for instance, a drug approved for treating breast cancer could be tried in a lung cancer if both carry similar mutations. And mutations implicated in other cancers did show up in the lung cancers.

More here.

At Least

I want to get up early one more morning,
before sunrise. Before the birds, even.
I want to throw cold water on my face
and be at my work table
when the sky lightens and smoke
begins to rise from the chimneys
of the other houses.
I want to see the waves break
on this rocky beach, not just hear them
break as I did all night in my sleep.
I want to see again the ships
that pass through the Strait from every
seafaring country in the world—
old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,
and the swift new cargo vessels
painted every color under the sun
that cut the water as they pass.
I want to keep an eye out for them.
And for the little boat that plies
the water between the ships
and the pilot station near the lighthouse.
I want to see them take a man off the ship
and put another up on board.
I want to spend the day watching this happen
and reach my own conclusions.
I hate to seem greedy—I have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.
And go to my place with some coffee and wait.
Just wait, to see what's going to happen.

by Raymond Carver
from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water
Vintage Books, 1985

From the BBC:

Families in the Pakistani city of Karachi have buried their dead after a fire engulfed a garment factory with workers trapped inside, killing at least 264 people.

Murder charges have been registered against the factory's bosses and government officials, police said.

Police are looking for the factory owners, who have not been seen since the blaze.

It was one of the worst fires in Pakistan's recent history.

Government officials are also being investigated for failing to enforce fire safety regulations at the Ali Enterprises factory.

“We have registered a murder case against the owners of the factory and several government officials for showing utter negligence to provide adequate security to the factory workers,” local police chief Mohammad Nawaz Gondal told the AFP news agency.

More here. And here is one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read, by Robert Pinsky:

SHIRT

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes–

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers–

Read more »

Matt Duss in Salon:

Not since the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee honeymoon tape has a crappier film received so much attention. Having watched the trailer for “The Innocence of Muslims,” it seems to me that the best possible response would be a new episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” Tragically, some in Egypt and Libya apparently thought this crude propaganda was worth rioting over, and the riots have now left four people dead in the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.

The attacks on the American embassy and consulate, and the deaths they caused, are clearly a criminal outrage, and responsibility belongs solely to the killers. There’s obviously no equivalence between producing a crude propaganda film and taking part in a violent riot. (Though new reporting suggests that the film may actually have had very little do with the violence in Libya.) Such a tragedy shouldn’t be used to limit speech, however offensive. If you don’t support the free speech of clearly talentless, bigoted provocateurs like the pseudonymous Sam Bacile you don’t really support free speech.

It’s important to understand, however, that “The Innocence of Muslims” does not spring out of a vacuum, and that the outrage that greeted it was intended, even if the murder of a U.S. ambassador was not. The film – which, Bacile claimed, cost $5 million and was financed by more than 100 Jewish donors, though neither has been verified – shares ideas with a growing transnational movement that preaches hatred of the Islamic faith and seeks to exacerbate tensions between Islam and the West.

Bacile himself acknowledged this goal in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying that it was intended to showcase his view of Islam as a hateful religion.

More here. And Robert Fisk has this to say in The Independent:

When a Danish cartoon in a hitherto unknown newspaper drew a picture of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb in his turban, the Danish embassy in Beirut went up in flames. When a Texas pastor decided to ‘sentence the Koran to death’, the knives came out in Afghanistan – we are leaving aside the little matter of the ‘accidental’ burning of Koranic pages by US personnel in Bagram. And now a deliberately abusive film provokes the murder of one of the State Department’s fairest diplomats.

In many ways, it’s familiar territory. In fifteenth century Spain, Christian cartoonists drew illustrations of the Prophet committing unspeakable acts. And – just so we don’t think we have clean claws today – when a Paris cinema showed a film in which Christ made love to a woman, the picture-house was burned-down, one cinema-goer was killed, and the killer turned out to be a Christian.

With the help of our wonderful new technology, however, it only needs a couple of loonies to kick off a miniature war in the Muslim world within seconds. I doubt if poor Christopher Stevens – a man who really understood the Arabs as many of his colleagues do not – had ever heard of the ‘film’ that unleashed the storming of the US consulate in Benghazi and his own death. It’s one thing to witlessly claim that the US would go on a “crusade” against al-Qaeda – thank you, George W. Bush – but another to insult, quite deliberately, an entire people. Racism of this kind stirs many a crazed heart.

More here. It now seems that “Sam Bacile”, the filmmaker, is a pseudonym for the Coptic Christian filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Gillian Flaccus in the Huffington Post:

The public face for the anti-Muslim film inflaming the Middle East is not the filmmaker, but an insurance agent and Vietnam War veteran whose unabashed and outspoken hatred of radical Muslims has drawn the attention of civil libertarians, who say he's a hate monger.

With the Coptic Christian filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in hiding, film promoter Steve Klein has taken center stage in the unfolding international drama. He's given a stream of interviews about the film and the man he says he knew only as Sam Bacile, and is using the attention to talk about his own political views.

Nakoula, who used Bacile spelled multiple ways as a pseudonym, contacted Klein months ago for advice about the limits of American free speech and asked for help vetting the movie's script, Klein said in an interview with The Associated Press. The filmmaker asked the 61-year-old grandfather if he would act as a spokesman if the film “caught on,” and he agreed.

More here. And I posted this to my Facebook wall yesterday:

Every few years, it seems, we go through a cycle:

1) Some ill-advised and/or racist provocation to Islam is published in the West, designed specifically and very deliberately to elicit violent protest in the Islamic world.
2) Someone, somewhere, in the Islamic world obliges. A few people are hurt or even killed.
3) That a clash of civilizations is imminent is confirmed in many Western minds.
4) Other Western minds piously and “bravely” reiterate their commitment to free speech and how we must not ever give in to intimidation by barbarians.
5) No one (at least in the mainstream media) bothers with any sort of in-depth historical/political/economic analysis of why there is so much anger in various Muslim-majority countries and the West's complicity in, if not responsibility for, oppression and injustice there.

Here's what I had to say about all this when the Danish cartoon madness happened six years ago. I think with a few substitutions it applies fairly well to the current crisis in Libya and Egypt:

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/02/cartoon_crazine.html

From the Telegraph:

Airplane – which features classic one liners such as 'I am serious and don't call me Shirley' – came out top in research conducted by a panel of members of movie subscription service Lovefilm.

They calculated the precise number of 'laughs a minute' for the top 10 comedies chosen by Lovefilm members.

The panel recorded the total number of times each film generated a laugh, before dividing it by the films' total length in minutes to calculate the precise 'laugh a minute' rating for each movie.

With a 'laugh A minute' score of three, Airplane beat nine rival comedies to top the list which has been created to mark The Hangover becoming available to stream on Lovefilm Instant.

The Las Vegas man-movie featuring the bachelor party to end all bachelor parties marked its arrival onto the Lovefilm Instant service by scoring a 'Laugh A Minute' rating of 2.4.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad completed the top three with a 'laugh a minute' score of 2.3.

Foul-mouthed Superbad managed a 'laugh a minute' score of 1.9, followed closely by the outrageous and least politically correct movie ever made, Borat, with 1.7.

More here.

The myth of de Gaulle is all the more remarkable considering the number of contradictions it has absorbed. The French Army commander who grew up in a Catholic household spent most of his career squaring off against the military and the church. The leader who desperately clung to the French empire in the 1940s vigorously dismantled it in the 1960s. The patriot who evinced skepticism toward supranational institutions is now sometimes hailed as a visionary of the European Union. Consider, too, the array of admirers de Gaulle has attracted: men of the left like Régis Debray, who converted from Guevarism to Gaullism in a Bolivian jail; men of the right like Henry Kissinger, who has told Americans to become students of the French statesman; Osama bin Laden, who liked to quote from de Gaulle’s War Memoirs; Newt Gingrich, who compared his time in the political wilderness in the 2000s to de Gaulle’s retirement to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises in the 1950s; and Yasir Arafat, who at diplomatic summits made a point of sporting the Cross of Lorraine sent to him by de Gaulle.

more from Thomas Meaney at The Nation here.

Apologists for the Bahraini regime claim it is offensive to compare the moderate, pro-western king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, to the Assads or Gaddafis of this world. They point out that the death toll in Syria is far, far higher than in Bahrain. True, says Khawaja, “[but] one of the things you have to do is look at things per capita. Bahrain’s population is 600,000 and you are looking at 100 people dead. If Bahrain had the same population as, say, Egypt, that’s [equivalent to] more than 11,000 people dead in just a year and a half.” Meanwhile, thousands of Bahrainis languish behind bars on trumped-up, politically motivated charges, including around 90 children under the age of 18. Torture, in the words of the government’s own official inquiry, is “systemic” – detainees have been beaten on their backs and the soles of their feet; deprived of sleep; subjected to sexual assaults, including the insertion of hosepipes and rifle barrels into the anus; forced to urinate on themselves and, in one reported case, eat their own faeces.

more from Mehdi Hasan at The New Statesman here.

Thomas Nagel, Professor of Law and Philosophy at NYU, now in his seventies, has made it part of his life’s work to keep us honest about a few small crucial distinctions, in particular to fight off reductionism: to fight off the oversimplifying tendency in scientific empiricism that would reduce our concept of mind to neurochemical phenomena alone. In mainstream science of mind, presently, reductionism rules. Everybody aims to discover “neural correlates of consciousness.” Everyone is watching MRI images in which brain-parts light up while subjects’ thoughts play. The ruling belief is that, when we have a “thought,” no part of it is an immaterial thing like a puffy dialogue-balloon over our heads; the thought has a physical, neural basis. The orthodox view is that the thought has a strictly physical basis. This is called the identity theory, that a “thought” and its nervous-system flicker are the same event. The identity theory, in the words of neuroscientist John Kihlstrom at Berkeley, explains the mind as nothing fancier than “sparks and drips at the synapses.” Thomas Nagel has been insisting that we must remain patiently agnostic in the face of this reductionist identification of mental with physical. In a famous essay from 1974, called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” he defended the sovereignty of subjective consciousness. Each of us conscious beings, when we experience a simple thing like yellowness or a handclasp or anger, enjoys a personal, non-fungible subjectivity, whose mystery will never be accessible to the measurers of sparks and drips.

more from Louis B. Jones and P. N. Furbank at Threepenny Review here.

First, Malcolm Harris in New Inquiry:

If you judged by TV and movies alone, you’d think “pure” drugs were seeping out of American society’s every pore, along with hot doctors and secret agents gone rogue. Even if suburban 15-year-olds don’t ask their dealers for THC percentages after seeing Oliver Stone’s Savages — and smart money says some of them are — craft beer isn’t the only boutique intoxicant buzzing around the nation’s subconscious. In the shadow of the high-fructose-corn-syrup backlash, everyone from the Olive Garden to the proverbial Brooklyn popsicle startup is trying to cash in on craftsmanship. Meanwhile, screenwriters (clever advertisers in their own right) have found that the easiest way to hook viewers on drug-dealer protagonists is to sell crack as small-batch artisanal rock cocaine.

Would AMC’s Breaking Bad be as popular if high school chemist turned meth cook Walter White made an average product instead of his “99 percent pure” blue glass? From the pilot on, the quality of White’s output has driven the show’s narrative arc. As a careful midgrade cook with DEA connections, he could have flown under the radar in a community overrun with the stuff and taken care of his chemo costs and family just fine. But what makes White more attractive than your garden-variety tweaker to both international cartels and viewers alike is his craftsmanship and attention to detail. He brings class to the New Mexico meth scene.

Second, Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

Breaking Bad is a fish-out-of-water story: A disgruntled white chemistry teacher applies his scientific genius to the manufacture of methamphetamine, discovers a revolutionary new synthesis, and claws his way to the top of the Southwest drug trade.

Harris sees the whole premise of Breaking Bad as a Mighty Whitey trope, wherein the white lead immerses himself in a foreign culture and beats his hosts at their own game, thereby proving that white guys are the best–the best Mohicans, the best Samurais, the best aliens, the best breakdancers….

That’s a premature accusation. It’s only a Mighty Whitey if the white guy wins. If the white guy barges in where he doesn't belong and falls flat on his face, it's not a Mighty Whitey. Walt inserted himself into a unknown world, but he hasn’t won yet; and judging by the flash-forward at the beginning of Season 5, in which he’s a fugitive buying a machine gun in a Denny’s bathroom, his odds don’t look good.

The Shampoo

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
— Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

.
by Elizabeth Bishop
from Elizabeth Bishop-the Complete Poems
Harper Collins, 1994