Margaret Guroff in Johns Hopkins Magazine:

Today, Glen Carle is a recognized expert on antiterrorism. Retired from the CIA since 2007, he writes essays and appears on panels organized by think tanks such as the New America Foundation on the nature and reach of al-Qaida. In May, when headlines trumpeted Osama bin Laden’s killing, the New York Times was among the news outlets that turned to Carle for comment.

Then in July, Carle made headlines of his own, publishing The Interrogator: An Education (Nation Books), a damning memoir of his involvement in the CAPTUS case. Unusually candid in its portrayal of the CIA’s internal workings—and the toll the agency’s moral gray zones take on its operatives—Carle’s book sparked a new discussion on the excesses of the global war on terror. Though the agency has made no formal response to the charges raised in the book, some loyalists have mounted a whispering campaign claiming that Carle is misinformed about the CAPTUS case—or, worse, that he’s lying. Then, too, Carle also faces criticism from opponents of the CIA’s actions: that his confessional memoir is too little, too late.

As an agent, Carle was sworn to secrecy about whom he met and what he did. Everything he ever writes about the CIA must pass through an agency board of censors, who slashed about 40 percent of his original manuscript for The Interrogator, excising whole chapters and leaving scenes largely blacked out. To a lay reader, the book is baffling in places; one reviewer called it “by far one of the most frustrating books I have attempted to read in years.” But despite the challenges and criticism, Carle says, he felt he had to come forward. “I worked in, and know about, significant issues of national concern,” he says. “The public should know what we are doing—and most particularly, what we have done to ourselves.”

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain. This endurance need not necessarily be one's own: indeed, the experience of watching over a sibling or mate in extremis can be even more acute. But nothing, according to the experts, compares to the clutching, choking nightmare that engulfs the one who is slowly bereft of a child.

It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoléon Bonaparte said that.

What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripides said that.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

I said that.

Joan Didion, here slightly syncopating in the Bob Dylan manner, has striven with intense dignity and courage in Blue Nights to deepen and extend the effect of The Year of Magical Thinking, her 2005 narrative of the near-simultaneous sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the onset of the fatal illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael. In the course of setting it down, she came to realize that she could no longer compose in the old style: the one that she had “supposed to be like writing music.”

More here.

From The Economist:

Readers of the Independent were in for a surprise this morning: a lengthy apology from that newspaper's star columnist Johann Hari, admitting to plagiarism and the online harrassment of rival journalists (via pseudonymous assaults on their Wikipedia entries), and announcing that he was off to take a course of journalism training at his own expense.

Allegations of quote-stealing and factual embellishment by Mr Hari have been swirling for months, at first in the blogosphere and then in the mainstream media. I have not posted about the whole sorry saga to date because—at the end of the day—a hack is only a hack, and the press already spends too much time talking and thinking about itself.

But something about the weasel wording of Mr Hari's apology today sticks in the craw. I have also been depressed to see a chorus of well-known journalists leap to Mr Hari's defence, arguing that what he did was silly or foolish, but is not really his fault. One senior colleague of his told me recently that the real problem was that Mr Hari had never gone to journalism school or worked on a newsdesk, but had jumped straight to a career as a columnist, interviewer and foreign correspondent. Mr Hari adopts this own line for himself now, writing today how he rose very quickly in journalism straight from university.

More here. [Photo of Johann Hari from Wikipedia.]

Carlo Strenger in the New York Times:

Israel is at a fascinating, and frightening, crossroads. In the last two years the Knesset has proposed and passed laws that seriously endanger Israel’s identity as a liberal democracy.

It began with a law forbidding public commemoration of the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948, known as the Nakba; it continued with the demand for all new Israeli citizens to swear a loyalty oath to a Jewish and democratic country, and recently culminated in a bill outlawing calls to boycott any Israeli group or product — including those from the occupied territories.

On the other hand, in the last two months, Israel’s democracy has come dramatically alive after a long period of hibernation. Protests for social justice have mobilized hundreds of thousands in demonstrations that have the support of 87 percent of the country, according to a Haaretz poll. These protests have become an exercise in direct democracy, forcing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to move beyond party politics and listen directly to the grievances of Israel’s disenfranchised middle classes.

Existential fears have pushed Israelis to the right; only when it comes to social questions are they willing to listen to the largely liberal middle class. Who, then, represents the real Israel? Is Israel an open-minded, liberal country with a developed sense of justice, or is it an ethnocracy with theocratic leanings?

More here.

Shruti Ravindran in Open:

In 2008, Mohammed Hanif blazed onto the literary scene with his exuberant, anarchic first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, much like the mysterious plane crash in which Pakistan’s General Zia ul-Haq was killed in 1988, and which served as the novel’s peg. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, the story of a nurse in a psychiatric ward in a Karachi hospital, is the follow up to his award-winning debut. A novel somewhat tenebrous in tone, its laughs feel sharp and foreboding, like spasms in the chest. One Pakistani critic appears to have felt the pain acutely, calling parts of it ‘grotesque’. Hanif, however, says he’s “pleased” with the charge, and talks of writing influences, the misery of living amid “good stories”, and about wanting to write the script of Pirates of the Caribbean 12.

Q What was the earliest clue you had that you wanted to write?

A Reading scraps of paper. Reading postcards addressed to other people. Reading and rereading a reproductive health magazine called Sukhi Ghar.

Q Is journalism the profession most suited to writing? What are the pitfalls?

A Journalism makes you sloppy and self-important; you are always in a hurry, you don’t get time for self-reflection. But if you are lucky, you might get to meet some interesting people and learn how to write a paragraph.

Q Which authors did you enjoy reading at a younger age?

A All Urdu writers. Colonel Muhammed Khan. Ibne Safi. Ismat Chugtai.

Q Which authors do you enjoy reading now?

A Bret Easton Ellis. Hanif Kureishi. Alan Bennett. Lorrie Moore.

More here.

Hani Yousuf in Himal Southasian:

Sitting on the floor of an ashram in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Ikhlaq Hussain tuned his student’s sitar, with his fingers passing over the strings. This is how he likes to begin his lessons. His student, Satch, is a yoga teacher and started to learn the sitar five years ago at the behest of his spiritual guru. Hussain sat bare-footed and cross-legged, clad in an orange tunic with vertical embroidery along the chest. He unscrewed one of two carved knobs on top of the instrument, rubbing a bit of blue chalk on it and then screwed it back into place. He fiddled some more, tightening the strings, his fingers checking to see whether they sing to his tune yet. Then, finally, a burst of melody. ‘I was waiting for that,’ said Satch with a slight laugh. This had been a stressful week for him, he said, but the sitar helped to calm him down. Satch said that Hussain has turned out to be a very different teacher than he had expected. ‘He didn’t teach me every single vibration,’ he said. ‘But he gave me a very solid structure. He’s very humble – he gives what he has learned from his father.’

Hussain moved to New York City from Karachi in October 2001, weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center. What sealed the deal was a 1999 visit to the US to perform for a fashion show being put together by Pakistani designer Noorjehan Bilgrami. At the time, home was becoming more frustrating by the minute: Pakistan, Hussain said, was an artistic and financial vacuum. In case the American dream turned out to be a nightmare, he told himself, he could always go back. By the time he got around to it, Muslims in New York were feeling particularly vulnerable, and his family and friends advised him not to make the move. Nonetheless, he packed his sitar and boarded a flight to New York, coming in on a tourist visa but eventually being granted a ‘green card’ for permanent residency due to his exceptional musical ability.

More here. (Note: Congratulations to dear friends Ikhlaq and Judit)

From The New York Times:

The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India By SIDDHARTHA DEB

Deb, the author of two novels and an associate professor at the New School, borrows his title from F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his mission is similar to Fitzgerald’s: to ponder, at intimate range, lives within a society in great ferment. “A country that has seen a sudden infusion of wealth and a rapid disengagement with its past tends to throw up people who are traveling very quickly and seem to have no clear antecedents,” Deb writes in the book’s first chapter, almost by way of laying out his thesis. This describes the Roaring Twenties as well as it describes India in the 21st century.

That splendid first chapter, titled “The Great Gatsby,” profiles the most Fitzgeraldian of Deb’s figures. Arindam Chaudhuri is hard to miss in India: He appears, in regrettable suits and a glossy ponytail, in large newspaper advertisements nearly every day, hawking the top-notch M.B.A. degrees his management institutes claim to dispense. Chaudhuri’s advertisements suggest snake-oil patter, so Deb patiently seeks to reveal the man within the salesman. Chaudhuri is, we find, startlingly insecure, so unsure of his place in modern India that he trusts no one and is driven by “this Manichaean idea of people divided into the loyal and the disloyal, of Arindam at odds with the rest of the world.” In a neat inversion, Chaudhuri makes his living off identical insecurities in his students — students who can scrape together his tuition, but whose English may not be quite be as good as their Hindi or who think they lack the sophistication required in India’s corporations. Many of Chaudhuri’s graduates can find employment only in his own enterprises, their salaries paid, in a sense, by their successors, the education-starved young men and women thronging the institute. The scheme in its entirety, Deb realizes, carries the sour whiff of Ponzi. (When this chapter was excerpted in the Indian magazine Caravan, Deb and the magazine were promptly sued by Chaudhuri; thanks to an injunction, the Indian edition of the book has been robbed of its first ­essay.)

More here.

Over at the NYT, a debate:

When the Cherokee were relocated from the South to present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, their black slaves were moved with them. Though an 1866 treaty gave the descendants of the slaves full rights as tribal citizens, regardless of ancestry, the Cherokee Nation has tried to expel them because they lack “Indian blood.”

Akim Reinhardt over at his blog:

The political standing of the Freedmen’s descendants has long been a very disputatious subject in the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole nations. For their part, the Cherokee national government has recently decided that those descendants who cannot show any descent from actual Cherokees will no longer be citizens of the Cherokee nation. Those who can show Cherokee descent will maintain their citizenship.

This may sound harsh to many readers. But the issue comes down the rights of a sovereign nation to decide its own citizenship qualification. Indeed, the United States itself is currently debating a similar issue: should illegal immigrants who arrived as small children be granted limited citizenship rights such as drivers’ licenses and in-state college tuition rates despite their illegal status?

While Americans heatedly debate that issue, no one questions the right of the United States to decide the issue for itself.

However, Indian nations are still subject to American colonialism. I’ve locked horns with other scholars about this, but I believe it is an honest, real politik assessment; this case is just one among countless examples of ongoing U.S. disregard for Indian governments and of it forcing its policies upon them. The U.S. officially supports Cherokee citizenship for the descendants of freedmen. The Cherokee nation as bucked, and U.S. retribution for that is intense.

Jonathan Rée discusses the evoluton of atheist thought over the ages in New Humanist:

[Percy Shelley's] pamphlet on “The Necessity of Atheism,” published anonymously in 1811 when he was 18, got him expelled from Oxford and disowned by his family, but he stood by it all the same. He may not have been the first atheist to come out of the closet, but he was the first to flourish the title with bravado and panache. On the other hand there was less to his atheism than meets the eye. “It is a good word of abuse,” he said, and he deployed it to advertise his revulsion from the Christian idea of a god who created the world and established the distinction between good and evil. But strictly speaking he was not so much an atheist as a pagan theist. His denial of God, he explained, “must be understood solely to affect a creative deity,” while the “hypothesis of a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.” In reflective moments he preferred to call himself a deist.

If the world’s first celebrity atheist was a deist then the word “atheism” seems to be in trouble. Hence the rise of the term “new atheism” to distinguish atheists who really mean business from those who prefer to hedge their bets. Like “atheism” itself, however, “new atheism” began life with negative connotations. It can be traced back to the 17th century, when it – or rather its French equivalent – was used to alert Christians to the threat of Spinozism. But nouvel athéisme was itself a dark phrase, since Spinoza believed passionately in something called God, though he shocked the orthodox by identifying it with nature as a whole rather than a transcendent supernatural agency. During the 19th century, as Spinoza came to be viewed as a pious mystic rather than a raucous infidel, the “new atheist” tag was transferred first to proponents of the mutability of species, then to Auguste Comte and the positivists, followed by the indomitable secularists Harriet Martineau and George Holyoake, Spencerian evolutionists and Darwinian natural-selectionists, and eventually Friedrich Nietzsche and his enigmatic hero Zarathustra.

Katrien Schaubroeck reviews Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs, in Metapsychology:

Justice for hedgehogs is written in a clear and engaging style, and it discusses the big questions of life, which are of interest to everyone, but the book is nevertheless mainly directed at a professional audience, working in political and legal theory, moral philosophy and meta-ethics. The book contains Dworkin's views on human dignity, the meaning of life, moral obligation, democracy, liberty and equality, the authority of law and many other valuable things. His conviction that the truth about each of these things is coherent and mutually supporting (that is, his belief in the unity of value) enables him to write an all-inclusive value theory merging ethics, morality, legal and political philosophy and even aesthetics. The glue is a particular understanding of 'interpretation', and the belief that that is what lawyers, artists, critics, historians, philosophers, moral agents (all of us) do: they interpret, as opposed to scientists who investigate. Interpreting is an essentially normative activity in Dworkin's value account of interpretation, because it makes the success of a particular interpretation dependent on the standard set by the best account of the value being served by interpretation in the genre to which the particular claim belongs. For instance, interpreting what another person says in a normal conversation succeeds when one grasps what this person really intends to say, because communicating intentions is the point (or value, Dworkin thinks that intrinsic and justifying goals of interpretation coincide) of conversational interpretation. In the different interpretive genre of law the actual mental states of legislators do not determine the best interpretation of a particular law because the point of legal interpretation differs from the purpose of conversational interpretation. Also moral reasoning is a matter of interpreting, namely of finding an interpretation of concepts like generosity, kindness, rights and duties that identifies and serves the value of moral reasoning best. If moral reasoning and legal judging are interpretive activities, there is no good reason why we should think it inevitable that legal requirements and moral obligations sometimes conflict. All it takes is another, and better, interpretation of the value served by these practices. Interpretation knits values together.

If coherence were the sole criterion, one would think that several sets of beliefs resulting from interpretation could be equally successful. But Dworkin is not only a holist about value, but also an objectivist.

Ashley Mears in the NYT [photo from Wikimedia Commons]:

AS the designers, stylists and editors of Fashion Week pack up to leave New York City today, one group of participants isn’t going anywhere: hundreds of young models, the surplus labor of the fashion industry.

Ten years ago, I was one of them. When I told my dad excitedly that I would be walking in a fashion show — which paid in dresses instead of money — he summed it up succinctly: “That and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.”

Fashion Week, despite bringing over $400 million to the city each year, is unprofitable work for most of the people wearing the designs. Because modeling is freelance work done on a per-project basis, models don’t receive benefits, have little control over the conditions of their work and never know when their next job is coming. They are arbitrarily selected and easily dismissed. And vast disparities exist in payments among models who do equivalent work; for the same show, top models can earn between $1,000 and $5,000, while others are not paid at all. Some models even work under arrangements that recall indentured servitude: they are in debt to their agencies for visa expenses, plane tickets, apartment rentals, even the cost of bike messengers who transport their portfolios to and from offices.

Fashion is a glamorous industry, but rub off the sheen, and quite another scene emerges.

Alan Glynn in The Independent:

Published in 1925, 'The Great Gatsby', a “consciously artistic achievement”, is a study of the power of illusion. It's a deconstruction of our dreams – of romance, of identity, even of consciousness. It's a love story, an American fable and an echo chamber of the 20th century. For these reasons it is also one of those rare books that you can read at different times in your life, and each time it'll do something different to you. When you're young, Gatsby's desperate pursuit of Daisy might break your heart. When you're older, the fragility of Gatsby's reinvented self might crack your soul. Whenever you do read it, though, you'll never be in any doubt that you're reading something extraordinary. If the book is tugging at your heart, you'll find the language lush and iridescent, and the imagery sensuous, with its calibrated system of blues and yellows, of eyes and water, of honey and straw. If it's chipping at your soul, you'll find the language weighted and resonant, and the imagery quite simply unforgettable, with its poetic elevation of the quotidian to the level of the profoundly philosophical.

In fact, with the elaborate but unstrained imagery of the Valley of the Ashes and the eyes of Dr TJ Eckleburg, Fitzgerald pretty much did what Joyce did in 'Ulysses' and Eliot in 'The Waste Land'. By pitching an all-seeing God against an all-pervading advertising billboard, he looks back in sadness to an imagined lost world, but also looks forward in anxiety to a burgeoning new one. But let's not forget Jay Gatsby. Whenever I revisit the book I imagine that this time, somehow, it will all work out for him. 'The Great Gatsby' retains that tension, that pull on the reader, taking us back, every time, to this blue lawn, and the green light at the end of Daisy's dock.

More here.

From Science:

This video may be the closest you come to a visit with a real-life Tatooine. Astronomers have discovered the first planet that, like Luke Skywalker's fictional home world in Star Wars, orbits two suns. The stars are a binary pair: They are about 1.5 and 4.5 times smaller than our own sun, and they orbit each other every 41 days, causing brightness dips that have been detected by the Kepler space telescope. Kepler also spied additional dips, produced when a Saturn-sized planet transits across the stars every 229 days. Both stars and planet orbit in the same plane, suggesting they formed together from a single spinning disk of gas and dust, researchers report today in Science. Until now, astronomers weren't sure whether or not planets would be able to form around binary stars. In particular, they thought that when the stars were in an eccentric orbit, as is the case here, they would strongly perturb dust particles that might prevent their coalescence into larger bodies. Kepler was lucky to find the Tatooine planet: Because of our slowly changing view of the system, there will be no planetary transits visible between 2018 and 2042.

A Hunger So Honed

Driving home late through town
He woke me for a deer in the road,
The light smudge of it fragile in the distance,

Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh—
His hand on my hand, even the weight
Of our voices not speaking.

I watched a long time
And a long time after we were too far to see,
Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs,

All phantom and shadow, so silent
It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened,
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state—

The mind a dark city, a disappearing,
A handkerchief
Swallowed by a fist.

I thought of the animal’s mouth
And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger
So honed the green leaves merely maintain it.

We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,

That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.

The second time,
There were two that faced us a moment
The way deer will in their Greek perfection,

As though we were just some offering
The night had delivered.
They disappeared between two houses,

And we drove on, our own limbs,
Our need for one another
Greedy, weak.

by Tracy K. Smith
from The Body's Question

I won’t lie to you — the day I started reading this book, I was tripping. In Book IV of The Odyssey, as Menelaus and Telemachus weep over their fallen comrades, Helen slips into their wine a drug that undoes “every grief and rage” and dries a man’s tears though his brother or son be slain before his eyes. Called nepenthe by poets, it’s known as oxycodone to us moderns. Helen got hers from Egypt, but I got mine from Walgreen’s. I’d just had dental surgery, so naturally I reached for two things that always make me happy, an opium derivative and poetry. They work even better in combination; just ask E. A. Poe. Not that, in this instance, a pharmaceutical boost was needed. I liked Yusef Komunyakaa immediately when I read Dien Cai Dau (1988), fell hard for him with Neon Vernacular (1993), and decided I wanted to be him when I grew up after Talking Dirty to the Gods (2001). So, naturally I swam, through ebbing pain and growing bliss, toward The Chameleon Couch, his thirteenth book of poems. As I read, though, I thought, dang, this is hard. And beautiful as well, and often funny.

more from David Kirby at the LA Review of Books here.

On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form. Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally, farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the grates, but never a man in a suit. “Even his tie and shoes were still on,” Shafiq told me. He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the man’s identity: Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposés of the Pakistani military. Shahzad had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country. Meanwhile, the zamindar—feudal lord—of a village twenty miles upstream from the dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.

more from Dexter Filkins at the New Yorker here.

“Having labored in the dusty groves of academe for over twenty years, I felt – as a new millennium unfolded – a desire to write more directly and personally than had previously been the case.” Terry Castle is as good as her word. These largely autobiographical essays (six short, the seventh very long) are at times extremely personal, strong, provocative, and sexually explicit. At the same time they are ruminative, questioning, open. I doubt if her particular groves were ever dusty. Part of the charm of her book comes from Castle’s willingness to think aloud, to entertain doubt and uncertainty, and to be alert to the dangers of self-censorship, even while exercising it at times, she says, to protect the privacy of other people. A “late developer”, Castle’s homosexual awakening was tentative, but blossomed at graduate school in the upper Midwest, where an affair with a closeted older woman – “the professor” of her title – lowered a difficult backdrop against which her subsequent relationships played themselves out (the stage is now more happily occupied by Blakey, whom Castle married a few years ago in San Francisco). Certainly “the professor” did much to determine Castle’s choice of dissertation topic: “Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) – a massive, morally ambiguous, relentlessly tragic epistolary novel about an intelligent young woman who is tricked, seduced, and harried to death by a charming amoral rake. Gosh, I wonder what made me choose that for a subject”.

more from Angus Trumble at the TLS here.

Chandran Kukathas reviews Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

The Polish lawyer and Holocaust survivor, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term 'genocide' in a book published in 1944 on Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.[1] Lemkin devoted his energies over the next four years to agitating for the recognition of this crime by international law and was instrumental in the drafting and eventual promulgation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Since then, legal analysis of this controversial notion has grown as the term has come to occupy a distinctive place in law and, no less importantly, in popular discourse. Everyone knows the term 'genocide'. Over the past 60 years there have been countless historical studies of particular genocides, as well as numerous comparative discussions, notably Ben Kiernan's Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.[2] Yet while historians, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, political scientists and international relations theorists have published extensively on the question of genocide, philosophers have been conspicuously silent on the subject. Larry May's study is the first substantial philosophical work on genocide.[3] This is surprising given the controversy that has surrounded the concept from its very beginnings. It is not so much that disciplinary boundaries matter, or that lawyers and historians are incapable of conceptual analysis. It is rather that there are questions that have preoccupied philosophers that are thrown into particularly sharp relief by the problem of genocide, and there is much that philosophers can contribute — and learn — by paying greater attention to this moral notion.

Larry May's philosophical study is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of genocide, as well as to our appreciation of a number of theoretical problems that are addressed in the book.