UPDATE August 7, 2012: Bradley Strawser has written to me and strongly protested the way he was portrayed in this article. He is making a formal complaint to the independent ombudsman at the Guardian and has also published an op-ed piece to correct some of what he feels are misrepresentations of his views. –Abbas Raza

Rory Carroll profiles Strawser in The Guardian [h/t: Corey Robin]:

At first sight, Bradley Strawser resembles a humanities professor from central casting. He has a beard, wears jeans, quotes Augustine and calls himself, only half in jest, a hippie. He opposes capital punishment and Guantánamo Bay, calls the Iraq invasion unjust and scorns neo-conservative foreign policy hawks. “Whatever a neocon is, I'm the opposite.”

His office overlooks a placid campus in Monterey, an oasis of California sun and Pacific zephyrs, and he lives up the road in Carmel, a forested beauty spot with an arts colony aura. Strawser has published works on metaphysics and Plato and is especially fond of Immanuel Kant.

Strawser is also, it turns out, an outspoken and unique advocate for what is becoming arguably the US's single most controversial policy: drone strikes. Strawser has plunged into the churning, anguished debate by arguing the US is not only entitled but morally obliged to use drones.

“It's all upside. There's no downside. Both ethically and normatively, there's a tremendous value,” he says. “You're not risking the pilot. The pilot is safe. And all the empirical evidence shows that drones tend to be more accurate. We need to shift the burden of the argument to the other side. Why not do this? The positive reasons are overwhelming at this point. This is the future of all air warfare. At least for the US.”

From PhysOrg:

Positive social relationships in childhood and adolescence are key to adult well-being, according to Associate Professor Craig Olsson from Deakin University and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and his colleagues. In contrast, academic achievement appears to have little effect on adult well-being. The exploratory work, looking at the child and adolescent origins of well-being in adulthood, is published online in Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies. We know very little about how aspects of childhood and adolescent development, such as academic and social-emotional function, affect adult well-being – defined here as a combination of a sense of coherence, positive coping strategies, social engagement and self-perceived strengths. Olsson and team analysed data for 804 people followed up for 32 years, who participated in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (DMHDS) in New Zealand. They explored the relative importance of early academic and social pathways to adult well-being.

In particular, they measured the relationship between level of family disadvantage in childhood, social connectedness in childhood, language development in childhood, social connectedness in adolescence, academic achievement in adolescence and well-being in adulthood. Social connectedness in childhood is defined by the parent and teacher ratings of the child being liked, not being alone, and the child's level of confidence. Social connectedness in adolescence is demonstrated by social attachments (parents, peers, school, confidant) and participation in youth groups and sporting clubs. The researchers found, on the one hand, a strong pathway from child and adolescent social connectedness to adult well-being. This illustrates the enduring significance of positive social relationships over the lifespan to adulthood. On the other hand, the pathway from early language development, through adolescent academic achievement, to adult well-being was weak, which is in line with existing research showing a lack of association between socioeconomic prosperity and happiness. The analyses also suggest that the social and academic pathways are not intimately related to one another, and may be parallel paths.

More here.

Elaine Scarry in the Boston Review:

What is the ethical power of literature? Can it diminish acts of injuring, and if it can, what aspects of literature deserve the credit?

All these questions, at first, hinge on another: can anything diminish injury? In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker argues that, over 50 centuries, many forms of violence have subsided. Among the epochs he singles out for special scrutiny is a hundred-year period bridging the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during which an array of brutal acts—executing accused witches, imprisoning debtors, torturing animals, torturing humans, inflicting the death penalty, enslaving fellow human beings—suddenly abated, even if they did not disappear.

Attempting to account for “the sweeping change in everyday sensibilities” toward “the suffering in other living things” and for the protective laws that emerged during the Humanitarian Revolution, Pinker argues that the legal reforms were in some degree a product of increasing literacy. Reforms were immediately preceded by a startling increase in book production (e.g., in England, the number of publications rose from fewer than 500 per decade in 1600 to 2,000 per decade by 1700, and to 7,000 per decade by 1800) and by an equally startling surge in literacy, with the majority of Englishmen literate by the end of the seventeenth century, French by the end of the eighteenth, and Danish, Finnish, German, Icelandic, Scottish, Swedish, and Swiss by the end of the nineteenth century.

Pinker singles out one particular form of reading and one particular kind of book—the novel—though, as we will see, features of poetry that long predate the novels of this period are essential to literature’s capacity to reduce harm.

More here.

Jared Diamond in the NYT:

MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.

It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”

That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so widespread that its distribution has had little effect on the different successes of different peoples. (As I learned this week, Mr. Romney also mischaracterized my book in his memoir, “No Apology: Believe in America.”)

That’s not the worst part. Even scholars who emphasize social rather than geographic explanations — like the Harvard economist David S. Landes, whose book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” was mentioned favorably by Mr. Romney — would find Mr. Romney’s statement that “culture makes all the difference” dangerously out of date.

Morgan Meis on Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, in n+1:

While reading Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, I realized that an older book, one I had encountered in the past and debated in younger days, was groping its way out of my memory. The book whose specter had been raised by The Swerve was Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966). But why was the one book calling to the other? This question remained with me for weeks.

In The Swerve, Greenblatt traces the history of an ancient manuscript written in poetic meter that argues for the materialist doctrines of the Hellenistic Greek philosopher Epicurus. The poem, known as De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) was written in the first century BCE by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius. Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about Lucretius; his personal story has been lost to history. His manuscript was almost lost as well, in the great obliteration of ancient knowledge that came with the fall of Rome. Centuries passed and classical documents lay largely overlooked in neglected monastery libraries until, as the Middle Ages drew to a close, people started to become curious about the knowledge of a previous era. Greenblatt puts it like this: “Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body.”

For some scholars, this curiosity became an obsession. Petrarch’s discovery of a lost collection of Cicero’s letters in 1345 fired the minds of many manuscript-seekers. Greenblatt’s book focuses on a less widely known figure: the 15th-century Italian scholar, writer, and humanist Poggio Bracciolini. Poggio was an incredible book hunter, and one of his greatest discoveries was the poem by Lucretius, which had been lost for more than a thousand years. Simply on artistic merit, it was an important find; with its blend of Latin poetry and densely argued philosophy, De rerum natura is a beautiful work. But Greenblatt thinks there was a much greater significance to the rediscovery of the poem. “[A]t the core of the poem,” he writes, “lay key principles of a modern understanding of the world.”

There are some that believe King and Lake Forest may have even helped Fitzgerald come up with the initial idea for Gatsby. In his 2005 book, The Perfect Hour, which attempts to piece together King’s relationship with Fitzgerald, James L. M. West III points to a story that she wrote and shared with Fitzgerald in 1916. West suggests that Fitzgerald may have used the untitled piece “in search of material and inspiration,” pointing out a handful of similarities between King’s somewhat crude short story and Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. West also points out that the story makes clear that King was aware of Fitzgerald’s habit of observing her and her friends; one of her characters, a writer named “Scott Fitz-Gerald” keeps a card file on his old girlfriends. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s writing process sometimes involved him scouring old letters and journals in order to jog his memory or kick-start his creative drive. One batch of documents may have included a 227-page binder filled with transcripts of King’s letters, which she had asked him to destroy in a letter on July 7, 1917. The first page of the batch reads, “Strictly Private Letters: Property of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Not Manuscript).”

more from Jason Diamond at Paris Review here.

Journalists are the livers of society, organs that break down the myriad poisons of war, revolution, and labyrinthine legal complexity for a body politic. They are also the livers in another sense—their professional function is to go out and live, to experience, explain, bear witness, and provide insight. On a spectrum of literary occupations ranging from the ideal of the hermetic, solitary writer, fully engaged with the imagination all the way to the the over-socialized drinker and raconteur on the other, most journalists fall squarely in the middle. These great compromisers are trapped forever in limbo between living and writing. They do not want to devote themselves to the fiction writer’s long solitary journey through the night but neither are they willing to grow in stature and be fully alive and affecting the world like those world-historical figures who they so love to profile in their magazines. They are Beta individuals, piggybacking off the lives and stories of others. And yet for some reason they persist in their quest to hybridize Apollo and Dionysus, striving for some perfect balance that does not exist.

more from Aaron Lake Smith at Bookforum here.

Of all the sports Nabokov could have chosen to focus on, he took in boxing the one that concentrates as no other the pain and violence he always saw in play. But “Breitensträter–Paolino” is a very literary and verbal account of boxing – the author’s red ink seeping across a skein of metaphor into the blood on the referee’s vest – and is punctuated according to the varying rhythms and geometries of the sport: its quick flurries, its wary circlings, its duelling antitheses. In our translation we have tried to do justice to Nabokov’s dashes, staccato or metaphysical, his commas, apprehensive or explosive, and his inversions, abstract or gutsy, all so important in a piece devoted to testing how far art can go in formalizing even those parts of life that might seem most resistant – even boxing, even blood and pain. We have also tried to catch those moments, so far from the oracular pronouncements of the opening, in which Nabokov mimics the brusque street-talk of the boxing fan or commentator, mixing his voice with the voices of the crowd – a democratic ventriloquism unique in his work.

more from Thomas Karshan and Nabokov at the TLS here.

Kelly Izlar in Scientific American:

When most Americans talk about good-tasting water, they’re talking about water that tastes like their own spit.

“When you taste something, you’re comparing the taste of that water to the saliva in your mouth,” says Gary Burlingame, who supervises water quality for the Philadelphia Water Department. “The saliva in your mouth is salty.”

Salty saliva bathes your tongue, drenching every one of your thousands of taste buds. It protects you from nasty bacteria, moistens your food, helps you pronounce the word “stalactite” and even lets you know when you might be drinking something bad for you. Like water.

Pure water, that is.

Stripping water down to an ultrapure state makes it unfit for human consumption.

More here.

Ali Younes in Al Arabiya:

This past June marked the 45th anniversary of the Arab defeat of the 1967 war. War is normally measured by its final outcome, but many individual heroes faithfully gave up their lives for the Arab side, defending the honor of their nations. The actions of those men deserve to be highlighted and explained, especially the contributions of the Pakistani pilot Saiful Azam and the brave Jordanian soldiers of the battle of Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem.

At 12:48 p.m. on June 5, four Israeli jets were descending on Jordan’s Mafraq air base to smash the country’s tiny air force, shortly after the entire Egyptian air force had been reduced to rubble.

To intercept the incoming attack, Jordanian air force commanders deputized Flt. Lt. Saiful Azam, who was on loan as an advisor from Pakistan. Once airborne with other Jordanian pilots, Saiful Azam engaged the attacking aircrafts in an air-to-air combat, shooting down a Mystére commanded by Israeli pilot H. Boleh and shot and damaging another that crash-landed in Israeli territory.

More here.

From New Statesman:

In his essay “In Praise of Idleness”, Ber­trand Russell suggested that the working day should be reduced from eight hours to just four. Russell’s intention was not to boost productivity during those four hours (he distrusted efficiency). No, he wanted half as much work to be done and more leisure to be enjoyed. “There will be happiness and joy,” he suggested, “instead of frayed nerves, weariness and dyspepsia.” Russell’s theory, ironically, holds much better as professional advice than as moral philosophy. He wanted people to work less because work was bad for them. I would argue we should work less because it will make us achieve more. He would be horrified at his idea being recast by the enemy, but his injunction “work less” should be embraced enthusiastically by managers, coaches and businessmen who are trying to get the best out of their charges.

The cult of busyness

Experience tells me that excessive hard work is counterproductive. When I was a professional cricketer, before each season – just before the team got together as a group – I would block out a few consecutive days and dedicate them entirely to practising batting. My only goal was to become a better player, to develop new skills. This wasn’t the humdrum practice that happens throughout the season. This was my selfish time: it was as close as my cricket practice got to a creative exercise. Which days ended with me batting signi­ficantly better than I started out? The best days followed the same pattern – an intense morning session, around two and a half hours long, followed by a shorter, lighter afternoon session, perhaps lasting an hour or 90 minutes. In total, then, I would do about four hours, just as Russell wanted.

More here.

From Nature:

Cancer researchers can sequence tumour cells’ genomes, scan them for strange gene activity, profile their contents for telltale proteins and study their growth in laboratory dishes. What they have not been able to do is track errant cells doing what is more relevant to patients: forming tumours. Now three groups studying tumours in mice have done exactly that^1–3. Their results support the ideas that a small subset of cells drives tumour growth and that curing cancer may require those cells to be eliminated. It is too soon to know whether these results — obtained for tumours of the brain, the gut and the skin — will apply to other cancers, says Luis Parada at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who led the brain study². But if they do, he says, “there is going to be a paradigm shift in the way that chemotherapy efficacy is evaluated and how therapeutics are developed”. Instead of testing whether a therapy shrinks a tumour, for instance, researchers would assess whether it kills the right sorts of cell. Underlying this scenario is the compelling but controversial hypothesis that many tumours are fuelled by ‘cancer stem cells’ that produce the other types of cancer cell, just as ordinary stem cells produce normal tissues. Previous studies have tested this idea by sorting cells from a cancer biopsy into subsets on the basis of factors such as cell-surface markers, and injecting them into laboratory mice. In principle, those cells that generate new tumours are the cancer stem cells. But sceptics point out that transplantation removes cells from their natural environment and may change their behaviour. “You can see what a cell can do, but not what cells actually do,” says Cédric Blanpain of the Free University of Brussels, who co-led the skin study¹.

All three research groups tried to address this knowledge gap by using genetic techniques to track cells. Parada and his co-workers began by testing whether a genetic marker that labels healthy adult neural stem cells but not their more specialized descendents might also label cancer stem cells in glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer. When they did so, they found that all tumours contained at least a few labelled cells — presumably stem cells. Tumours also contained many unlabelled cells². The unlabelled cells could be killed with standard chemotherapy, but the tumours quickly returned. Further experiments showed that the unlabelled cells originated from labelled predecessors. When chemotherapy was paired with a genetic trick to suppress the labelled cells, Parada says, the tumours shrank back into “residual vestiges” that did not resemble glioblastoma.

More here.

Tariq Ramadan in Guernica:

Do the secularist intellectuals of the Global South have an alternative to propose for their own countries? Over and above the simulacrum of a debate pitting them against religious conservatives and Islamists, do they have a vision of society drawn up for the people, with the people, and in the name of the liberation of the people? The debate over secularization and political Islam is to the secularists of the Global South what the foreigner (and today, the Muslim) is to the populist xenophobes of the North: a pretext, and an alibi.

The true challenge of the day is to choose the right battle, to mobilize the creative energy of the people in the attempt to find real solutions to real problems. The march toward democracy in the Global South entails a thorough reconsideration of the three “fundamentals”: economic (and agricultural) policy, educational policy, and cultural and media policy (in the general sense). The secularist elite would be well advised to acknowledge that it truly has nothing new to offer in these three vital policy categories. At the risk of sounding repetitious, there can be no true political democracy without a profound restructuring of the economic priorities of each country, which in turn can only come about by combating corruption, limiting the prerogatives of the military and, above all, reconsidering economic ties with other countries as well as the modalities of domestic wealth distribution. Concern for free, analytical, and critical thought must take the form of educational policies founded upon the construction of schools and universities, revising the curriculum and enabling women to study, work, and become financially independent.

More here.

From Come Con Ella:

2012 has proved to be an interesting year for pakistan. alongside the staple flow of pessimistic news, one of its most successful businesses, murree brewery, has captured the imagination of the local and international press. for the latter in particular, the existence of murree brewery is a paradox. the telegraph opens on the line ‘pakistan is one of the last countries in asia where you would expect to discover a flourishing – and legal – brewery, especially these days’ in an article titled ‘ale under the veil: the only brewery in pakistan’. the economist follows suit on how an unlikely outfit in pakistan is flourishing under the banner ‘hope in the hops’. even the guardian cannot help itself with its description of murree brewery as ‘a raj-era oddity in an increasingly conservative islamic country’ under the more neutral title of ‘pakistan and india start new era of trade co-operation with a beer’.

Murree brewery, however, is far from an oddity and a contradiction. since its inception in 1860, the only period when it ceased productions was after bhutto’s declaration of prohibition of alcohol. a subsequent court order led to the resumption of operations on the basis that bhutto’s laws breached the rights of minorities. aside from this it has always enjoyed the support of the government, military or otherwise. the greater paradox perhaps is that a powerful leader like bhutto, who loved his drink, felt compelled to appease the religious right through prohibition. until his ban in 1977 alcohol was freely available in army messes, clubs and from licensed stores.

But that of course is not the pakistan of today.

More here.

Natalia Viana in The Nation:

As the Boeing 777 from London arrived at the gate of Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo on December 2, 2010, its passengers queued up to deplane, many with the local newspaper under their arm. “Brazil fears terrorism at the 2016 Olympics, says US Embassy” blared the headline of the daily Folha de S. Paulo—a front-page story generated from the first of tens of thousands of classified US diplomatic cables obtained and released by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. Unnoticed among those passengers was a young woman with a backpack slung over her shoulder. Concealed within a bundle of messy clothing inside her bag was a pen drive containing nearly 3,000 sensitive cables to and from the US Embassy and consulates in Brazil between 2003 and 2010—a cache of documents provided by WikiLeaks.

This trove of records covered the two terms of President Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s progressive government and captured the policies, operations and diplomatic efforts of US presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as those of the Brazilian government itself, at a time when the country was on the rise as a world-class economic and political power. As WikiLeaks-generated stories appeared in the Brazilian media in the ensuing months, the cables would reveal how the Bush White House curried favor with the country’s defense minister and military, how Bush tried to persuade Brazil to spy on Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and how the Obama administration became increasingly uncomfortable with Brazil’s close relationship with Iran. Brazilians would learn some startling details about their own government as well.

More here.

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might.

Frank Thadeusz in Der Spiegel:

The entire country seemed to be obsessed with reading. The sudden passion for books struck even booksellers as strange and in 1836 led literary critic Wolfgang Menzel to declare Germans “a people of poets and thinkers.”

“That famous phrase is completely misconstrued,” declares economic historian Eckhard Höffner, 44. “It refers not to literary greats such as Goethe and Schiller,” he explains, “but to the fact that an incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany.”

Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion — unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today's level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers.

The situation in England was very different. “For the period of the Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation, we see deplorable progress in Great Britain,” Höffner states.

More here.

Zach Weiner in The Weinerworks:

The following is an idea I’ve been mulling over and talking to friends about for a few months. I thought I’d finally share it to see if anyone liked it or was interested in working on it.)

Warning: Evo psych just-so story to follow. Think of it as a parable, not as a theory. It’s just here to contextualize the idea that follows.

Suppose there’s a monkey. Suppose also that the monkey has evolved to have an inbuilt proto-toolmaking behavior.

For this specific example, let’s say he’s learned to snap a twig off a tree and stick it in an anthill. When he pulls it out, it’s covered with tasty protein-rich ants.

This monkey is unlike you and I in that he takes no pleasure in finding the right stick. He knows the stick must have certain qualities – long, thin, not too brittle. However, he does not experience any pleasure until he actually eats the tasty ants.

Suppose this monkey represents a species. This species does well because it has this one trick for getting protein out of the ground in abundance at a low cost.

Now, suppose one day a monkey is born who has a quirk. Instead of taking pleasure in the ant part, he takes pleasure in the stick selection part too. That is, when he finds an appropriate stick, his brain rewards him with premature pleasure. So, whereas his brethren experience pleasure only upon eating the ants, this one monkey gets pleasure from selecting an appropriate branch.

More here.