Jake Alter in The Immanent Frame:

Is secular feminism feasible in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim-majority nations of the world? Isobel Coleman, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that it cannot subsist on its own and that it must be allied with a form of Islamic feminism. In her most recent book, Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East, she argues that we are already witnessing the emergence of many progressive social movements within the Islamic world. At “On Faith,” she explained:

One question I get is why is there a need for Islamic feminism – isn’t secular feminism sufficient to push for women’s rights? Well, the most conservative countries of the Middle East do not now have, nor will they in the near future, secular systems. Moreover, secularism – meaning the separation of mosque and state – is not viewed in a positive light by millions of Muslims. If Muslim women in these countries must wait for a secular system to improve their status, they will be waiting a long time indeed. That does not mean that secular feminism and Islamic feminism cannot work together. Indeed, some of the most effective women’s rights campaigns in the Middle East in recent years have seen a blended approach between secular and Islamic feminism.

Her book highlights many of the movements active throughout the Muslim world, including the grassroots reform of the Muslim family code (Moudawana) in Morroco and various other movements in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. She also highlights the preeminent Islamic feminist thinkers involved in these movements. Her book does not overlook the plight of many women in various Muslim communities, but argues, rather, that the most effective approach to tackling these issues is through Islam itself—whether it be a practical or principled choice. The truth of the matter, she argues, is that secular feminism, in and of itself, will take many years to catch on in many of these societies, and it is thus time to begin looking to Islamic tradition to achieve the same goals.

Melody Dye in Scientopia:

In previous research, Mischel has found that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to perform worse than upperclass children on tests of delay of gratification. Given that he’s also found that the time children spend delaying in the cookie task is predictive of a suite of life outcomes – including everything from their later social well-being to their academic achievement and professional advancement – he makes a logical leap: Might social classes diverge, he asks, based on our ability to exercise self-control?

It’s critical that I note that Mischel is not a biological determinist on this [1]. He is not suggesting that people who live in poverty are all simply indolent and stupid, or that they are somehow morally suspect. To the contrary, Mischel tends to remove all moral weight or judgment from his discussions of self control, and in much of his work, characterizes control as a largely learned behavior. If he makes generalizations on the basis of class (which he does), I believe this derives more from his training as a scientist, and less from any particular political attitudes or leanings. He is simply looking to make sense of trends in human behaviors, and uses “delay of gratification” as a prism through which to understand them.

In any case, the question Mischel poses become doubly interesting in light of Ramscar and Tran’s findings. As detailed above, and in earlier posts, their results indicate that “self control” behavior in the cookie task is strongly tied up with verbal ability. Indeed, they found that vocabulary is a better predictor of delay times than age or cognitive control.

What I haven’t mentioned yet – and what may surprise you – is what predicts vocabulary.

As it turns out, one of the best predictors of how many words a toddler knows is socioeconomic status.

William Grimes in the NYT:

Tony Judt, the author of “Postwar,” a monumental history of Europe after World War II, and a public intellectual known for his sharply polemic essays on American foreign policy, the state of Israel and the future of Europe, died Friday. He was 62 and had lived in Manhattan.

The death was announced in a statement from New York University, where he had taught for many years. In September 2008, he learned that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In a matter of months the disease left him paralyzed and able to breathe only with mechanical assistance, but he continued to lecture and write.

“In effect,” he wrote in an essay published in January in The New York Review of Books, “A.L.S. constitutes progressive imprisonment without parole.”

Mr. Judt (pronounced Jutt), who was British by birth and education but who taught at American universities for most of his career, began as a specialist in postwar French intellectual history, and for much of his life he embodied the idea of the French-style engaged intellectual.

From The New York Review of Books:

How do single people find partners in our fluid, urban world? One way, used by millions, is to sign up for one of the many matchmaking sites on the Internet (eHarmony.com, Match .com, Chemistry.com, JDate, Spark, and dozens of others). With many of them, you take a test, list your requirements, describe yourself, and of course pay. While some rely on your basic demographic data like age and whereabouts, others give you a personality test, and the questionnaires designed to match you up with other people are the work of such consultants as Dr. Helen Fisher, a research professor of anthropology at Rutgers, author of self-help books, including Why Him? Why Her?, aimed at helping people understand their own basic personalities and predict the types of people they’ll get along with.

Her analyses of academic studies and nearly 40,000 responses on Chemistry .com to a questionnaire she reprints in this book have led Fisher to propose a set of four fundamental personality types she calls Explorer, Builder, Director, and Negotiator, distinctions that resemble those in many other morphological systems we’ve all heard of: introverts and extroverts; Types A and B; the Humors—still used in homeo-pathy—Sanguine, Bilious, Lymphatic, and Nervous; endo-, ecto-, and mesomorphs; the classic Air, Earth, Fire, and Water; Ayurveda; the Chinese 5 Elements; the zodiac; and many others reaching back to the mists of time, referring to body types, psychological tendencies, character, or fate. The most influential modern personality inventories usually rely on a well-established one, the MBTI, developed to help with personnel placement during World War II, by Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who in turn relied on C.G. Jung’s typological system of introverted or (Jung’s spelling) “extraverted” thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting personalities.² Fisher relies on them too—as do many modern personnel departments, and even the Pentagon.

More here.

From The New York Times:

For busy, harried or distractible readers who have the time and energy only to skim the opening paragraph of a review, I’ll say this as quickly and clearly as possible: “The Death of the Adversary” and “Comedy in a Minor Key” are masterpieces, and Hans Keilson is a genius. First published in the Netherlands in 1947, “Comedy in a Minor Key” is only now appearing in English, in an eloquent translation by Damion Searls. “The Death of the Adversary” (skillfully translated by Ivo Jarosy) appeared here in 1962, but has long been out of print. Born in 1909, their author, the centenarian Keilson, lives with his wife in a village near Amsterdam where until recently he practiced medicine, a profession he followed in his native Germany until the Nuremberg laws forced him to flee to the Netherlands. There he was active in the Dutch resistance and later became known for his work with children traumatized by the war. Although the novels are quite different, both are set in Nazi-occupied Europe and display their author’s eye for perfectly illustrative yet wholly unexpected incident and detail, as well as his talent for story­telling and his extraordinarily subtle and penetrating understanding of human nature. But perhaps the most distinctive aspect they share is the formal daring of the relationship between subject matter and tone. Rarely has a finer, more closely focused lens been used to study such a broad and brutal panorama, mimetically conveying a failure to come to grips with reality by refusing to call that reality by its proper name.

More here.

Before venturing any trendspotting comments about American literature of the past decade, it’s probably worth scanning the ground hovering behind any exciting new figures stamped on the air—in other words, to observe again that novel-writing as an artistic practice has changed more slowly than almost any other, producing not only over the last ten, but over the last one hundred-and-fifty years mainly examples of what you might call the perennial novel. The perennial novel’s degree of realism or of sentimentality; its mixture of description, analysis, and dialogue; the social and psychological variety of its characters—all of these things and more shift across time, but only slowly. The novel of this past decade, then, is above all like the novel of previous decades; and it may be precisely because the novel is so open to changing historical content—new ways of talking, eating, and dressing, along with new technologies, manners, and beliefs—that the form itself displays such a glacial stability.

more from Benjamin Kunkel at n+1 here.

This was the Soviet moment. It lasted from the launch of Sputnik in 1957 through Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight in 1961 and dissipated along with the fear in the couple of years following the Cuban missile crisis in 1963. (It was already going, in fact, at the time of the 1964 election; it was a piece of Wilson’s appeal that was premised on a fading public perception and was dropped from Labour rhetoric shortly thereafter, leaving not much behind but a paranoid suspicion of Wilson among egg-stained, old-school-tie spooks.) But while it lasted the USSR had a reputation that is now almost impossible to recapture. It was not the revolutionary country people were thinking of, all red flags and fiery speechmaking, pictured through the iconography of Eisenstein movies; not the Stalinesque Soviet Union of mass mobilisation and mass terror and austere totalitarian fervour. This was, all of a sudden, a frowning but managerial kind of a place, a civil and technological kind of a place, all labs and skyscrapers, which was doing the same kind of things as the west but threatened – while the moment lasted – to be doing them better. American colleges worried that they weren’t turning out engineers in the USSR’s amazing numbers. Bouts of anguished soul-searching filled the op-ed pages of European and American newspapers, as columnists asked how a free society could hope to match the steely strategic determination of the prospering, successful Soviet Union.

more from Francis Spufford at The Guardian here.

In the future, international divisions and rivalries will be a thing of the past. Or so science fiction often predicts. The bridge of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek, for instance, is a commendably multiracial place (and not all of those races are from Earth, either); and there are any number of SF novels that prophesy a world government, a kind of super UN with legislative powers. In publishing terms, however, science fiction is not quite so freely cross-cultural. Rights for English-language SF novels are frequently sold abroad in non-English-speaking territories, but the traffic is mostly one-way. Rare is the foreign-language SF novel that is imported into an anglophone country, against the prevailing current.

more from James Lovegrove at the FT here.

Today U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker struck down Proposition 8, ruling that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry. Proposition 8 was a 2008 ballot initiative that banned gay marriage in California. Both sides had said that, should they lose, they intended to appeal the ruling. Walker’s decision is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court. On a day that will find many gay rights activists celebrating, we look to the books that have provided a richer understanding of the joys and challenges particular to gay life. 20 classic works of gay literature

more from the LA Times here.

One of the first sights that greeted immigrants in New York, right after the Statue of Liberty, was a prune sandwich. The offending object appeared on the menu in the vast dining hall at Ellis Island, and it served as a warning that food was going to be a cultural struggle in this strange land. Keeping faith with their native cuisines, the newcomers made a series of counteroffers — sauerkraut, spaghetti, borscht — that changed the national palate forever. Jane Ziegelman tells this story exuberantly in “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.” Highly entertaining and deceptively ambitious, the book resurrects the juicy details of breakfast, lunch and dinner (recipes included) consumed by poor and working-class New Yorkers a century and more ago. It could well have been subtitled “How the Other Half Ate.” The address is a conceit. Ninety-seven Orchard Street was a Lower East Side tenement building, constructed in the 1860s, that at different times housed the five families in the book: the Glockners (German), the Moores (Irish), the Gumpertzes (German Jewish) the Rogarshevskys (Lithuanian-Russian Jewish) and the Baldizzis (Italian). It is now the location of the Tenement Museum, where Ziegelman, the founder and director of a multiethnic cooking program for children, is in charge of a new culinary center.

more from William Grimes at the NYT here.

From The Guardian:

Terry Breverton selects some of literature's most memorable farewells, from Samuel Johnson to James Joyce

LORD BYRON 1788 – 1824
‘Come, come, no weakness; let’s be a man to the last!’

Byron was attended by two young doctors on his death bed in Missolonghi.

Faced with the terrible problem of treating a world-famous figure for an illness which neither knew anything about, they fell back on the usual treatment of the time – to bleed the patient and so reduce his fever. Byron resisted, saying that there had been 'more deaths by lancet than by the lance', but gave in when warned that the disease could ‘deprive him of reason'. The weakened poet sank into unconsciousness and died under his terrified doctors' hands. After the autopsy the doctors blamed each other for the death

More here.

From PhysOrg:

New research published today, Friday, 6 August, in IOP Publishing's Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, describes how the researchers from the Center of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' at Bielefeld University, Germany, have built an artificial bee eye, complete with fully functional camera, to shed light on the insects' complex sensing, processing and navigational skills.

Consisting of a light-weight mirror-lens combination attached to a USB video camera, the artificial eye manages to achieve a field of vision comparable to that of a bee. In combining a curved reflective surface that is built into acrylic glass with lenses covering the frontal field, the bee eye camera has allowed the researchers to take unique images showing the world from an insect's viewpoint.

More here.

Limits

Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone

Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.

If there is a limit to all things and a measure
And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness,
Who will tell us to whom in this house
We without knowing it have said farewell?

Through the dawning window night withdraws
And among the stacked books which throw
Irregular shadows on the dim table,
There must be one which I will never read.

There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain;
To you the crossroads seem wide open,
Yet watching you, four-faced, is a Janus.

There is among all your memories one
Which has now been lost beyond recall.
You will not be seen going down to that fountain
Neither by white sun nor by yellow moon.

You will never recapture what the Persian
Said in his language woven with birds and roses,
When, in the sunset, before the light disperses,
You wish to give words to unforgettable things.

And the steadily flowing Rhone and the lake,
All that vast yesterday over which today I bend?
They will be as lost as Carthage,
Scourged by the Romans with fire and salt.

At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.

by Jorge Luis Borges

Today, text messaging has eclipsed the telephone call to become the most frequent form of communication among U.S. teenagers. The average adult spends more than 18 hours per week on the Internet. Ipsos Reid recently reported a 35% decrease in e-mail received, but it’s really a shift in consumption to emerging communications platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and various Instant Messengers. Facebook users send an average of 16 messages inside of that platform each week. Those using MSN Messenger or Blackberry Messenger are sending even more messages on a weekly basis. There’s no question that technology has overrun our lives. Over the past century, the world has welcomed technological ‘progress’ with arms wide open and we’re living with the clicking, dinging, anxiety-inducing deluge of it. But a creative backlash is underway, helping human beings cope with the avalanche of data that passes in front of most of us every day through the use of computers and cell phones. Slow food, the back-to-the-land movement, and groups like letter writing clubs are being formed by a new subculture: the 21st century luddite, wielding fountain pen and notebook, and some checking e-mail from the public library a mere hour per week. Dolen and Fedoruk think this movement is more than a blip on the technological continuum.

more from Christina Crook at The Curator here.

American theater is a one-party town, a community of like-minded folk who are all but unanimous in their strict adherence to the left-liberal line. Though dissenters do exist, they are almost never heard from in public, and it is highly unusual for new plays that deviate from the social gospel of progressivism to reach the stage, whether in New York or anywhere else. All this explains why David Mamet, America’s most famous and successful playwright, caused widespread consternation two years ago when he published an essay in the Village Voice called “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” in which he announced that he had “changed my mind” about the ideology to which he had previously subscribed. Having studied the works of “a host of conservative writers,” among them Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, Thomas Sowell (whom he called “our greatest contemporary philosopher”), and Shelby Steele, Mamet came to the conclusion that “a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.” For the most part, members of the American theater community responded to the publication of “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” in one of two ways. Some declared that Mamet’s shift in allegiance was irrelevant to the meaning of the plays on which his reputation is based. Others claimed to have suspected him of being a crypto-conservative all along, arguing that the essay merely proved their point.

more from Terry Teachout at Commentary here.

A few years ago, the photographer Rhea Karam was standing on the edge of a vacant lot in Hamra, taking pictures for a series about the urban landscape of Beirut. The space, surrounded by tall buildings on three sides with a street running along the fourth, was full of garbage. An expensive black sedan pulled up alongside Karam. A woman of a certain age – and of a certain type who would be affectionately or derisively addressed as tante (auntie) – cracked open one of the car’s windows and bombarded Karam with abuse. “How dare you take pictures of this trash!” she shouted. “In a city as beautiful as this, how dare you focus on such ugliness?” Karam was shocked but also amused. The woman had misread the situation. Karam had no intention of photographing ugliness. She was aiming, instead, for a radiant burst of graffiti on the far wall. Still, beyond missing the point by a laughably wide margin, the woman’s anger was instructive. For her, the party at fault was not a population that wantonly litters and recklessly pollutes its own environment on a daily basis. Nor was it a widespread culture of impunity that regards trash collection as a task beneath the dignity of the local citizenry, relegated instead to an army of migrant workers. No, at fault here was a young artist who deigned to document a few self-evident facts, which is symptomatic of how Beirutis see their city not as it is but how they want it, imagine it, or remember it to be. In Beirut, the politics of seeing often demand a willful and selective blindness, backed up by baseless rhetoric. Say Beirut is beautiful and beautiful it will be. Never mind the ample evidence supporting the contrary point of view, that Beirut is just as often dirty, ugly and vulgar, or beautiful only to those wealthy enough to afford a blight-blocking view.

more from Kaelen Wilson-Goldie at The National here.

Every day, at three in the afternoon, I make a trip down the Danube. To travel from Germany’s Black Forest to Romania’s Black Sea takes a matter of minutes, so I try to enjoy myself as much as possible. I sink into a cushy armchair, rev up the stereo and embark on an epic voyage. “Information on the water levels of the Danube River, in centimeters,” the familiar voice on Horizont, the Bulgarian National Radio, announces with the deepest solemnity before reading out the relevant hydrographical values, first in Bulgarian and then in Russian and French. Vienna: 310 (+3); Mohács: 415 (+7); Novi Sad: 162 (-13); Vidin: 380 (+40); Giurgiu: 220 (0). The captains of river vessels can easily map a course on the Internet, but the daily radio bulletin has remained a fixture in my life. For many years, listening to the fluctuations in the water levels of the Danube was the closest I could get to traveling abroad. Regensburg, Passau, Linz, Vienna: these names mesmerized me. Even places like Bratislava and Budapest, comrades in arms against the decadent West, had the ring of myth to a boy growing up in Bulgaria. Remembering his childhood in the Bulgarian river port of Ruschuk (now Ruse), Elias Canetti wrote, “There, the rest of the world was known as ‘Europe,’ and if someone sailed up the Danube to Vienna, people said he was going to Europe.” If people in Canetti’s immediate circle, at the beginning of the twentieth century, still had the occasional opportunity to waltz up to the palaces of the Habsburgs and back, however, the “Europe” I imagined in the 1980s existed only in a galaxy far, far away. To travel up the river as a tourist during the cold war required visas, special permissions, bureaucratic ballast. To swim across it, a negligible distance of a few hundred meters, was to risk both drowning and the bullets of border guards. For nearly fifty years the Danube was a demolished bridge, a liquid roadblock. The wall may have been in Berlin, but the truly impassable one was an invisible dam on the Danube, somewhere between Vienna and Bratislava.

more from Dimiter Kenarov at The Nation here.

In the preface to his translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Marcel Proust wrote that while some people decorate their rooms with things that reflect their taste, he preferred his room to be a place “where I find nothing of my conscious thoughts, where my imagination is thrilled to plunge into the heart of the not-me.” Anyone who has stood looking at Proust’s reassembled cork-lined bedroom at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris—his armchair, his pigskin cane, his brass bed—and tried, unsuccessfully, to feel kinship with his spirit would be relieved to know that he had such a desultory relationship to his personal possessions. These remnants of Proust’s physical life survive because of the obsessive quest of one man: Jacques Guérin, a perfume magnate and bibliophile who rescued Proust’s effects from a fate worse than oblivion—destruction at the hand’s of Proust’s sister-in-law, Marthe. In Lorenza Foschini’s new book, Proust’s Overcoat, the author tells the story of how Guérin discovered and claimed, piece by piece, what was left of Proust’s belongings, elegantly teasing out the relationship between family dynamics and property. Foschini also highlights the role of objects and spaces in Proust’s work, allowing us to see In Search of Lost Time through a different lens. The result is an oblique kind of literary criticism, a material commentary on one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century.

more from Lauren Elkin at Artforum here.