“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.

George Soros in Project Syndicate:

To resolve a crisis in which the impossible has become possible, it is necessary to think the unthinkable. So, to resolve Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis, it is now imperative to prepare for the possibility of default and defection from the eurozone by Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Ireland.

In such a scenario, measures will have to be taken to prevent a financial meltdown in the eurozone as a whole. First, bank deposits must be protected. If a euro deposited in a Greek bank would be lost through default and defection, a euro deposited in an Italian bank would immediately be worth less than one in a German or Dutch bank, resulting in a run on the deficit countries’ banks.

Moreover, some banks in the defaulting countries would have to be kept functioning in order to prevent economic collapse. At the same time, the European banking system would have to be recapitalized and put under European, as distinct from national, supervision. Finally, government bonds issued by the eurozone’s other deficit countries would have to be protected from contagion. (The last two requirements would apply even if no country defaulted.)

All of this would cost money, but, under the existing arrangements agreed by the eurozone’s national leaders, no more money is to be found. So there is no alternative but to create the missing component: a European treasury with the power to tax and, therefore, to borrow. This would require a new treaty, transforming the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) into a full-fledged treasury.

Julia Grønnevet in Guernica:

The last victim was buried on August 18th, and the international media is long gone from Norway. But Norwegian media are still compulsively following every development in the Anders Behring Breivik case. While the rest of the world is consumed with the 9/11 anniversary, the Norwegian papers are writing that the gunman who shot 68 kids on Utøya and set off a massive bomb in central Oslo wanted to wear white tie and tails to his court date on August 19th. “This is the most formal dress for men,” his lawyer Geir Lippestad writes in a letter to the police, “and will not be offensive to the court, or demeaning or disturbing. On the contrary, the dress will show that the accused takes the process very seriously, and wishes to be presentable as he faces the court.” The article is accompanied by one of those pictures of Breivik that has become so familiar by now, the pale face, blond hair and queasy smile of a satisfied Norwegian man. The photo appears to have been taken indoors with a flash, the colors are over bright and the details are crisp in the wrong way. If this photo were taken with a camera using black and white film it would be a picture of a 1940s gentleman. Most Norwegians my age grew up with that sort of photo hanging on the wall, photos of our grandparents and their generation, the ones who faced The War. Our ancestors’ blue eyes turn colorless in grayscale.

There was only one War when I grew up, and it marked my grandparents so strongly it was the explanation for their every eccentricity. The slices of bread at their house were thin and crumbly, because during The War they had had to save on the food. Their multi-room walk-in pantry, and my aunts’ pantries (they remembered rationing) were always stocked with incredible amounts of food that they bartered for with their fisherman neighbors. Dead bodies could have fit into the industrial freezers that were in the basement of my grandparents’ farmhouse, the ancestral home of the Grønnevets, Sunnmøre on the northwest coast of Norway. Forget about buying German cars—where I grew up, German tourists were not to be spoken to and The War was remembered at every meal.

From Jadaliyya:

JADALIYYA: What made you write this book?

HAMID DABASHI: This book is very much a product of the Bush era (2000-2008) — a record of my fears and trembling at the sight of a criminally delusional man at the helm of an imperial killing machine and lacking any moral conception of what it was he was doing when he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, two catastrophic decisions that Afghans and Iraqis continue to pay for with their lives. I was aghast at the sight of the mass frenzy that accompanied those invasions, the barefaced banality of those who supported it (even some of the most progressive American intellectuals considered the Afghan invasion as a case of “just war,” as in fact later some leading Arab intellectuals were duped into supporting the US/NATO invasion of Libya), and above all the criminally complicitous comprador intellectuals like Fouad Ajami, Kanan Makiya, Ibn Warraq, Azar Nafisi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ad nauseum who were aiding and abetting in manufacturing consent for those wars. They were doing so in the name of criticizing militant Islamism, or misogynist patriarchy, or undemocratic practices and human rights abuses that their American and European employers — and by “employers” I mean the lucrative market that was receptive to their treacheries and made them bestsellers in Bush’s America — were in fact partially instrumental in causing, conditioning, and sustaining.

I recall reading about a panel in Washington DC in which Azar Nafisi had come together with one neocon illiterate or another to discuss one thing or another about “Islam” that set my antennae up and got me thinking about the duet they were singing. This was before the events of 9/11, or the US-led invasion of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), and before she wrote and published the now infamous Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), which prompted my al-Ahram essay on it, “Native Informers and the Making of American Empire” (2006) a couple of years later, which then became the basis of Brown Skin, White Masks.

More here.

Donald Brown in The Quarterly Conversation:

In 1996 Robert Pinsky published The Figured Wheel, a collected poems comprising his first four books of poems that also included some new work; the next year he would become the Poet Laureate of the United States. Perhaps not coincidentally, his next volume did not appear until 2001, the year after his tenure as Laureate ended. Pinsky achieved more visibility in the latter role than many another poet who has held the post, all in an effort to increase the viability of poetry in America. His serious attention to the task has earned Pinksy the epithet “civic poet” as an acknowledgement of the degree to which, as poet, critic, and proselytizer for poetry, he is able to express a convincing sense of poetry as a taught and learned cultural asset. Reading Pinsky, one tends to reflect on early, schoolroom encounters with poetry in poems offered not as hermetic repositories of private arcana but as encounters with language that create a vital sense of cultural heritage in “the best that has been thought and said.”

More here. [Photo shows Pinsky.]

Mohsin Hamid in the New York Review of Books:

The United States Government Accountability Office reports that only 12 percent of the $1.5 billion in economic assistance to Pakistan authorized for 2010 was actually disbursed that year. Independent calculations by the Center for Global Development suggest that $2.2 billion of civilian aid budgeted for Pakistan is currently undisbursed, meaning that total economic assistance actually received from the US over the past nine years is in the vicinity of $4.3 billion, or $480 million per year. (By comparison, Pakistanis abroad remit $11 billion to their families in Pakistan annually, over twenty times the flow of US economic aid.)

Pakistan is a large country, with a population of 180 million and a GDP of $175 billion. Average annual US economic assistance comes to less than 0.3 percent of Pakistan’s current GDP, or $2.67 per Pakistani citizen. Here in Lahore, that’s the price of a six-inch personal-size pizza with no extra toppings from Pizza Hut.

The alliance between the US and Pakistan is thus predominantly between the US and the Pakistani military. To enter the US as a Pakistani civilian “ally” now (a Herculean task, given ever-tighter visa restrictions) is to be subjected to hours of inane secondary screening upon arrival. (“Have you ever had combat training, sir?”) For a decade, meanwhile, successive civilian Pakistani finance ministers have gone to Washington reciting a mantra of “trade not aid.” They have been rebuffed, despite a WikiLeaked 2010 cable from the US embassy in Islamabad strongly supporting a free trade agreement with Pakistan and citing research showing that such an arrangement would likely create 1.4 million new jobs in Pakistan, increase Pakistani GDP growth by 1.5 percent per year, double inflows of foreign direct investment to Pakistan, and (because Pakistani exports would come largely from textile industries that US-based manufacturers are already exiting) have “no discernible impact” on future US employment.

Perhaps the vast majority of Pakistanis with an unfavorable view of the United States simply believe their annual free pizza is not worth the price of a conflict that claims the lives of thousands of their fellow citizens each year.

More here.

From Salon:

Texts from Xenophon and Aristophanes paint an intriguingly different picture of the famed philosopher

Two of Plato's best-loved works are the “Apology,” which records Socrates's speech in his own defense while on trial for his life, and the “Symposium,” an account of a drinking party in which Socrates explains his most sublime ideas about the spiritual power of love. The Socrates of these texts has become one of the central figures in Western history, a secular equivalent of Jesus. It's a shock, therefore, to turn from Plato's Symposium to Xenophon's, where Socrates seems more like a conventional, commonsensical moralist. Plato's Socrates argues that love begins with physical desire — specifically, the desire of a man for a beautiful adolescent boy — but then “mount[s] for that beauty's sake ever upwards, as by a flight of steps,” until “he contemplates Beauty itself,” the ideal, immortal form.

Xenophon's Socrates, too, thinks that lust for a beautiful boy is an inferior form of love, but his reasoning is merely pragmatic: “For, to my way of thinking, the man whose attention is attracted only by his beloved's appearance is like one who has rented a farm; his aim is not to increase its value but to gain from it as much of a harvest as he can for himself. On the other hand, the man whose goal is friendship is more like one possessing a farm of his own; at any rate he utilizes all sources to enhance his loved one's worth.” This sounds uncomfortably like the idea that you won't buy the cow if you can get the milk for free. At any rate, it's not the kind of thing that would inspire millennia of reverence for Socratic wisdom.

More here.

Fooling The Killers

Qasim,
I wonder now
where you are….
I haven’t forgotten you
after all these years,
long as the graveyard
wall is long. I always
ask the grass of the field
about you, and the dirt paths.

Are you alive,
with your poise,
your cane, and memories?
Did you marry?
Do you have a tent of your own,
and children?
Did you make it to Mecca?
Or did they kill you
at the foot of the Hill of Tin?

Read more »

From Nature:

In the latest study, Jef Boeke, a yeast biologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues tackled two chromosome segments that together represent about 1% of the 12-million-base-pair genome of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The researchers designed the synthetic segments with the help of genome-editing software, incorporating several types of changes. These changes included removing repetitive sequences that could destabilize the genome, and adding tags to distinguish synthetic segments from natural ones. To create the genetic scrambling system, the team inserted short sequences that act as binding sites for a specific enzyme, which can delete or rearrange genes if activated. Overall, the researchers changed about 17% of the sequence in the targeted segments.

The edited segments were then synthesized and introduced into yeast cells, replacing the corresponding natural segments. Tests showed that the resultant semi-synthetic strains had apparently normal growth rates, colony appearance and gene expression. When the researchers turned on the scrambling system by activating the necessary enzyme, they were able to generate mutant strains with varying growth rates, drug sensitivity, temperature sensitivity, use of carbon sources and stress responses.

More here.

Oleg Yuriev in Sign and Sight [photo from Wikimedia Commons]:

Outside Russia, and particularly in Germany, the siege of Leningrad has yet to be anchored firmly in people's minds. Not, it should be said, for lack of trying or information. The siege was an issue at the Nuremberg Trials (although the death count was then assumed to be 600,000), and there are more than enough international books on the subject, also from German researchers, with new material constantly being added to the list. And yet it remains an almost “unknown crime”. Why? Could it be that compared with the other huge crimes of National Socialism, it has remained the propagandistic “property” of the Soviet leaders, meaning that in the run-up to the Cold War after 1945 it was all but ignored?

I am not going to try now to open the eyes of the world to the of Leningrad Blockade. What I will write about here is less ambitious and somewhat more promising: the literature of the siege. First, though, I should make it clear that my use of the word “hell” in relation to besieged Leningrad, and particularly the first siege in the winter of 1941-1942, is in no way metaphorical. If hell exists anywhere, then it must literally be that: eternal coldness, darkness, unrecognisable scraps of music and news emerging from loudspeakers, marching for hours on foot with the principle means of transport used under the siege, children's ice-skates. Frozen corpses strewn on the roadside. And at home, the corpses of family members which could not be buried for days on end (because the rest of the family depended on their ration cards).

Noam Chomsky and Archon Fung discuss in The Boston Review. Chomsky:

The concept of intellectuals in the modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” produced by the Dreyfusards who, inspired by Emile Zola’s open letter of protest to France’s president, condemned both the framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and the subsequent military cover-up. The Dreyfusards’ stance conveys the image of intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life, in particular by prominent figures among “the immortals of the strongly anti-Dreyfusard Académie Française,” Steven Lukes writes. To the novelist, politician, and anti-Dreyfusard leader Maurice Barrès, Dreyfusards were “anarchists of the lecture-platform.” To another of these immortals, Ferdinand Brunetière, the very word “intellectual” signified “one of the most ridiculous eccentricities of our time—I mean the pretension of raising writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen,” who dare to “treat our generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our traditions as unhealthy.”

Who then were the intellectuals? The minority inspired by Zola (who was sentenced to jail for libel, and fled the country)? Or the immortals of the academy?

Fung:

In the domain of politics and policy, Chomsky stresses the responsibility of intellectuals to help their societies understand the truth about their governments. States, not least the United States, often act immorally, hypocritically, deceptively, and unjustly. Officials and other elites frequently justify these actions through deception and ideology. Intellectuals can help other citizens come to more truthful understanding of what their governments are doing and what is being done in their name. With regard to the foreign policy of the United States—in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East—any honest reader of Chomsky’s work over the past 50 years must acknowledge that there is plenty to criticize.

But at the risk of belaboring the obvious, criticism is not the only public responsibility of the intellectual. Intellectuals can also join citizens—and sometimes governments—to construct a world that is more just and democratic.

Barbara Fässler in Eurozine:

The more complicated matters become, the more things pile up and meanings get difficult to decipher, the more necessary it becomes to devise an itinerary of one's own and select a grid that is completely personal. In a situation where certainty and clarity are lacking, where there is no opportunity to gain a detached view, it becomes essential to follow Ariadne's thread guiding us like a red line through the wanderings of the labyrinth. But it has happened to me numerous times that on coming out in an exhausted state from one of the biennials or one of the documenta, I encounter an art critic, curator or journalist firing comments like a machine gun: “It's weak this year… a festival of mediocrity… a heap of material without meaning and an absence of any curatorial idea or guidelines whatsoever…” or things like that.

My immediate reaction has always been: “Why don't you change your job?” and “It's time you learnt how to look”, or even “Get your brain involved and use it.” I've also thought that one could seek to develop some sort of measure for quantifying the combined efforts of all the artists in order to contradict this type of judgment which sounds more like prejudice and which often is not based on genuine experience from exploring in depth and trying to understand what is in front of them. You could, for instance, ask all the artists present how much time they had invested in the works on display, and for how many years they worked as artists prior to being invited to participate in the Biennale. The sum of hours/days/decades, or indeed centuries, could almost be a quantitative indicator, even if – admittedly – it is no longer a measure of quality.

It has taken some time to understand that this position of the critic is probably – more than inability – to some extent a kind of survival reflex. To review a show such as the Biennale in its totality, with its 83 artists (of which 32 are women and 32 under the age of 35), 89 pavilions and 37 collateral events is simply impossible. To pretend to be able to manage to do this is a form of megalomania. I think that the only way of getting out of this is to make precise selections based on themes, trends or reflections which may have been sparked off by particular aspects of the various curatorial concepts, rather than specific works or pavilions. Therefore when faced with the boundless variety I decided to investigate three themes: the problem of light, the notion of nation and the principle of interaction.

Michelle Legro in Lapham's Quarterly [h/t: Elatia Harris]:

They called him “fat boy,” this seventeen-year old apprentice in the studio of Florentine painter Verrocchio who would receive care packages from his step-father, a pastry chef. The bastard son of a Florentine notary and a lady of Vinci, the boy’s doting step-father gave him a taste for marzipans and sugars from a very young age. The apprentice would receive the packages and devour them so quickly—crapulando, it was called, or guzzling—that the master felt the need to punish him, instructing the boy to paint an angel in the corner of a baptism of Christ, a mediocre painting which hangs in the Louvre for because it includes the first work of Leonardo da Vinci.

After three years as an apprentice, twenty-year old Leonardo took a job as a cook at the Tavern of the Three Snails near the Ponte Vecchio, working during the day on the few commissions his master sent his way and slinging polenta in the evenings. Polenta was the restaurant’s signature dish, a tasteless hash of meats and corn porridge. The other cooks at the Three Snails cared little about the quality of the food they served, and when in the spring of 1473, a poisoning sickened and killed the majority of the cooking staff of the tavern, Leonardo was put in charge of the kitchen. He changed the menu completely, serving up delicate portions of carved polenta arranged beautifully on the plate. However, like most tavern clientele, the patrons preferred their meals in huge messy portions. Upset with the change in management, they ran Leonardo out of a job.

Much like a modern struggling artist, Leonardo da Vinci was in his daily life a line cook, tavern keeper, and chef-for-hire. “My painting and my sculpture will stand comparison with that of any other artist,” he wrote in a humble introduction to Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan, by way of a job application. “I am supreme at telling riddles and tying knots. And I make cakes that are without compare.”

Janny Scott in the New York Times:

At just 34, and in what her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, describes in a foreword to the book as “the extreme stages of grief,” Mrs. Kennedy displays a cool self-possession and a sharp, somewhat unforgiving eye. In her distinctive breathy cadences, an intimate tone and the impeccable diction of women of her era and class, she delivers tart commentary on former presidents, heads of state, her husband’s aides, powerful women, women reporters, even her mother-in-law.

Charles DeGaulle, the French president, is “that egomaniac.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is “a phony” whom electronic eavesdropping has found arranging encounters with women. Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, is “a real prune — bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.”

The White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, loved to pick up the phone and say things like “Send all the White House china on the plane to Costa Rica” or tell them they had to fly string beans in to a state dinner. She quotes Mr. Kennedy saying of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.”

More here.

David Bellos in The Independent:

Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn't an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary. In fact, at bottom, it doesn't deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before. It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.

The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments. Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what's been submitted to it.

More here.

Prayaag Akbar in the Sunday Guardian:

There is a certain recklessness that comes attached to a life lived in poverty. At least, this is how it seems to those of us lucky enough to escape that fate. Every day we see poor people take unfathomable risks: scurrying blind across four lanes of uncaring traffic to save a few seconds; walking, in Bata chappals, through a lake of stinking, stagnant rainwater instead of around it; hanging off a train with two toes and two fingers for grip instead of waiting for the next one; cycling on the wrong side of a dark road. And all the while the rest of us, the privileged few, surround ourselves with items from a growing list, rubber gloves, safety belts, hand sanitisers, jock straps, bicycle helmets, wet wipes, air bags, construction hats. On the subcontinent – perhaps everywhere, who knows? – the trappings of safety and the badges of privilege are too often one and the same.

For much of Mohammed Hanif's frenetic new novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, it seems he is trying to convey this recklessness born of destitution.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

UCLA life scientists have identified for the first time a particlular gene's link to optimism, self-esteem and “mastery,” the belief that one has control over one's own life — three critical psychological resources for coping well with stress and depression. “I have been looking for this gene for a few years, and it is not the gene I expected,” said Shelley E. Taylor, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and senior author of the new research. “I knew there had to be a gene for these psychological resources.” The research is currently available in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and will appear in a forthcoming print edition. The gene Taylor and her colleagues identified is the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR). Oxytocin is a hormone that increases in response to stress and is associated with good social skills such as empathy and enjoying the company of others.

“This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to report a gene associated with psychological resources,” said lead study author Shimon Saphire-Bernstein, a doctoral student in psychology in Taylor's laboratory. “However, we wanted to go further and see if psychological resources explain why the OXTR gene is tied to depressive symptoms. We found that the effect of OXTR on depressive symptoms was fully explained by psychological resources.” At a particular location, the oxytocin receptor gene has two versions: an “A” (adenine) variant and a “G” (guanine) variant. Several studies have suggested that people with at least one “A” variant have an increased sensitivity to stress, poorer social skills and worse mental health outcomes. The researchers found that people who have either two “A” nucleotides or one “A” and one “G” at this specific location on the oxytocin receptor gene have substantially lower levels of optimism, self-esteem and mastery and significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms than people with two “G” nucleotides.

More here.