In 1959, at a time of violent unrest among American youth, a publisher commissioned a study of juvenile delinquency from Paul Goodman. The resulting volume, Growing up Absurd, was an immediate if unlikely success. Goodman had already written more than twenty books, none of which had made any great impression. And fifty years on he is once again unknown. But to reread his book in the aftermath of this summer’s riots in Britain is to be visited by uneasy feelings. Prime Minister David Cameron’s initial response to the British riots, it will be recalled, was to blame them on something called “sheer criminality.” What that phrase meant became clear when sentences of four years were handed down for using Facebook to “incite disorder.” A month later Cameron acclaimed the “Spirit of London Awards”—according to their site, “a way of celebrating all that is good about the young, positive role models in London”—as a “powerful antidote.” One of its “London heroes,” a young table tennis player, visited 10 Downing Street to be paraded before the cameras as the acceptable face of youth. Cameron’s government has now appointed Louise Casey, “respect tsar” under former prime minister Tony Blair, to head the response to the riots. Labour leader Ed Miliband for his part has cried in the wilderness for “a new ethics.” Blair blamed bad parenting. Journalist Kenan Malik denounced the atomization and “moral poverty” of the society that had created the rioters.

more from Horatio Morpurgo at Dissent here.

Corey Robin in his blog:

From The New York Times:

Murakami has always considered himself an outsider in his own country. He was born into one of the strangest sociopolitical environments in history: Kyoto in 1949 — the former imperial capital of Japan in the middle of America’s postwar occupation. “It would be difficult to find another cross-cultural moment,” the historian John W. Dower has written of late-1940s Japan, “more intense, unpredictable, ambiguous, confusing, and electric than this one.” Substitute “fiction” for “moment” in that sentence and you have a perfect description of Murakami’s work. The basic structure of his stories — ordinary life lodged between incompatible worlds — is also the basic structure of his first life experience. Murakami grew up, mostly, in the suburbs surrounding Kobe, an international port defined by the din of many languages. As a teenager, he immersed himself in American culture, especially hard-boiled detective novels and jazz. He internalized their attitude of cool rebellion, and in his early 20s, instead of joining the ranks of a large corporation, Murakami grew out his hair and his beard, married against his parents’ wishes, took out a loan and opened a jazz club in Tokyo called Peter Cat. He spent nearly 10 years absorbed in the day-to-day operations of the club: sweeping up, listening to music, making sandwiches and mixing drinks deep into the night.

His career as a writer began in classic Murakami style: out of nowhere, in the most ordinary possible setting, a mystical truth suddenly descended upon him and changed his life forever. Murakami, age 29, was sitting in the outfield at his local baseball stadium, drinking a beer, when a batter — an American transplant named Dave Hilton — hit a double. It was a normal-­enough play, but as the ball flew through the air, an epiphany struck Murakami. He realized, suddenly, that he could write a novel. He had never felt a serious desire to do so before, but now it was overwhelming. And so he did: after the game, he went to a bookstore, bought a pen and some paper and over the next couple of months produced “Hear the Wind Sing,” a slim, elliptical tale of a nameless 21-year-old narrator, his friend called the Rat and a four-fingered woman. Nothing much happens, but the Murakami voice is there from the start: a strange broth of ennui and exoticism. In just 130 pages, the book manages to reference a thorough cross-section of Western culture: “Lassie,” “The Mickey Mouse Club,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “California Girls,” Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, the French director Roger Vadim, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley, the cartoon bird Woodstock, Sam Peckinpah and Peter, Paul and Mary. That’s just a partial list, and the book contains (at least in its English translation) not a single reference to a work of Japanese art in any medium. This tendency in Murakami’s work rankles some Japanese critics to this day.

More here.

(Un)occupy Oakland: An Open Source Love Poem

I.

They have come for the city I love

city of taco trucks, wetlands reclaimed
water fowl with attitude, gutted
neighborhoods, city of toxic
waste dumps and the oldest wildlife refuge
in North America.
City owned by spirits
of Ohlone, home
to the international treaty
council, inter-tribal friendship house

City
in which I love and work, make art,
dance, share food, cycle dark streets at 2am
wind in my face, ecstasy
pumping my pedals.

City where women make family
with women
men with men
picnic in parks with their children
walk strollers through streets.

City that birthed the Black Panthers
who took on the state
with the deadliest of arsenals:
free breakfast for children, free clinics,
grocery giveaways, shoemaking
senior transport, bussing to prisons
legal aid.

City where homicide rate for black men
rivals that of US soldiers in combat.

City where I have walked precincts
rung doorbells, learned that real
democracy
is street by street, house by house
get the money out and
get the people in.

City of struggling libraries
50-year old indie bookshops
temples to Oshun, Kali-Ma, Kwan Yin.

City where Marx, Boal,
Bhaktin, Freire are taught
next to tattoo shops
bike collectives rub shoulders
with sex shops, marijuana
dispensaries snuggle banks

City of pho, kimchee, platanos, nopales
of injera, tom kha gai, braised goat,
nabeyaki udon, houmous and chaat,
of dim sum and wheatgrass and chicken-n-waffles.

City of capoiera and belly-dance,
martial arts, punk rock, hip-hop,
salsa, bachata, tango
city of funk and blues and jazz.

City that shut down for 52 hours
in 1946, dragged jukeboxes
into the streets, jammed
to “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” for the rights
of 400 female store clerks
to fair wages and unions.

City of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union,
who refused for a record 10 days
in 1984 to unload a ship from South Africa
in the world’s 4th largest port
faced down million dollar fines.

City of nail parlours, hair brokers, tarot dens
nano-tech, biotech, startups
women-owned auto shops
gondolas on a lake fruity
with sewage, magical
with lights.

City of one-hundred-twenty-five
freaking languages
the most ethnically diverse
in the USA.

Here on the shores of a lake
where all the waters, fresh and salt
of history and revolution mingle
they have come for the city I love.

Read more »

From PhysOrg:

New research in the UK on rhesus macaque monkeys has found for the first time that if they live in larger groups they develop more gray matter in parts of the brain involved in processing information on social interactions. The researchers, led by Jerome Sallet of Oxford University, said the results of the new study bear some similarities to research by other groups working with humans, that related brain size to the extent of social interactions. These studies include recent work that suggested a link between the volume of some regions of the brain and the number of online friends people have in social networking sites such as Facebook.

The new study observed 23 macaques in a number of groups of different sizes. The monkeys were kept in their groups for an average of over a year, and a minimum of two months. One monkey was alone in its cage, but in all the other groups, which had from two to seven individuals, a heirarchy developed in which an individual's rank depended on the monkey's ability to form successful social interactions, such as friendships and partnerships. The study used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the brains of the monkeys, and the results showed that in the temporal areas of the brain associated with social interaction skills, around a five percent increase in the volume of gray matter was found for each additional group member. The regions of the brain that increased in volume included the temporal pole, temporal cortex, and the inferior and rostral temporal gyri.

More here.

One of the last of Samuel Beckett’s letters in Volume One of this indispensable edition was written to James Joyce, in January 1940. In it Beckett thanked Joyce for having brought his work to the attention of a potential sponsor. “It was kind of you to write him about Murphy. He offers very kindly to read the translation & to ‘introduce’ me to the French public.” Nearly fourteen years later, Beckett wrote to Mania Péron, the widow of his friend Alfred, “I am in the shit fontanelle deep: rehearsals every day, translations on all sides, people to see. I can’t keep up”. And a month or so after that he wrote to his American lover Pamela Mitchell, “I went to Godot last night for the first time in a long time. Well played, but how I dislike that play now. Full house every night, it’s a disease”. The “disease” called En Attendant Godot raged untreated in Paris from its first night at the beginning of 1953, and would soon spread around the world. (When Beckett met Mitchell she was in Paris with a view to securing US rights to the play for her employer.) The thirty-three-year-old expatriate Irish writer who responded gratefully to the offer of an introduction to a French public for whom he did not exist had become, at forty-seven, a succès de scandale in his adopted country.

more from Alan Jenkins at the TLS here. (PS we are at 82% here on our fundraising drive. Samuel Beckett himself just contributed … and he is dead. What is your excuse? Please, a couple of minutes and a couple of bucks and we can be done with this damn thing. Thanks.)

At a Pittsburgh gallery in 2006, artist Keny Marshall exhibited 3D Pipes, an elaborate, freestanding installation of aged metal plumbing. “Everybody’s got 3D Pipes on their computer,” said Marshall in an interview. “The only difference is this 3D Pipes took months to build and weighs three to four thousand pounds.” Oddly inconspicuous, mistakable for exposed utilities in the gallery’s warehouse-like space, this life-size, patina’d tribute to the PC’s workhorse screen saver of the 1990s and early 2000s spoke of our culture’s recent yearnings for industrially or intimately material work, Dirty Jobs adventurism or an Etsy sort of DIY. Yet perhaps more pervasively than any other 2D commonplace of its time, the virtual 3D Pipes—and the screen saver as a genre—had woven its own frenetic, filigreed dreamwork about work. On when we’re off, screen savers are both hallucinatory napscapes and work-site facades. Though customizable, like icons and wallpapers, and comparable to other cubicle brighteners (potted plants, fluorescent stickies), they possess a distinct poetics. As boxed, watchable decor, where a fireplace or window might once have sufficed, they tend to emulate the mesmeric morphing and gelatinous luminosity of fish tanks, lava lamps, self-tilting wave tanks.

more from Chinnie Ding at The Believer here.

The freak East Coast snowstorm answered one challenge question a few weeks early: What will happen to the encampments when the weather turns cold? Apparently they will stay. More ominously, protesters in many cities now face the prospect of sustained police crackdowns, from the hassles of permitting and noise ordinances to the violence that erupted last week in Oakland. There, police used tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets to attack protesters near city hall. One of those bullets fractured the skull of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen, leaving him hospitalized in critical condition. Since then, Olsen has become the chief symbol of Occupy’s new reality: Going up against Wall Street, it turns out, is serious business. And the more serious the Occupy movement gets, the more official and near-lethal hostility it’s likely to encounter. Advertisement As they sort out what to do next, the Occupiers might take a page from the history of American labor, the only social movement that has ever made a real dent in the nation’s extremes of wealth and poverty. For more than half a century, between the 1870s and the 1930s, labor organizers and strikers regularly faced levels of violence all but unimaginable to modern-day activists.

more from Beverly Gage at Slate here.

Lawrence Osborne in Newsweek:

To call Manny Pacquiao a “boxer” is one of those descriptions that don’t quite fly, like calling Mahatma Gandhi a “Hindu lawyer.” The pound-for-pound greatest fighter on earth has begun to move beyond his bloody sport in increasingly unpredictable ways. In the Philippines, where he was born into abject poverty, the WBO welterweight champion is an almost religious figure, whose following is ecstatically cult-like. In America, he is “Pacman”—the idol of Las Vegas mega-fights, the Bruce Lee of Marquess of Queensberry boxing: tiny, furious, and lethal. “Manny Pacquiao,” Mike Tyson has said, “is a phenomenon.” No argument there: ESPN ranked him tied for first among the world’s highest-salaried athletes this year.

Pacquiao’s fights are not ordinary fights. His battles with Miguel Cotto, Oscar De La Hoya, and Shane Mosley, his seesaws with Erik Morales and Juan Manuel “Dinamita” Marquez—against whom he will fight, for the third time, on Nov. 12 in (where else) Vegas—showcased a mortal intensity without equal. Against De La Hoya, few expected an easy fight for the Filipino. Pacquiao, however, dominated the larger man with his precision and speed.

It was ironic, in a way: Pacquiao had burst onto the American scene in 2001 on a De La Hoya undercard. Then unknown, he was brought in as a late substitute for Enrique Sanchez in an IBF super-bantamweight title fight at 122 pounds against South African champion Lehlohonolo Ledwaba. Pacquiao was 32–2, but no one really knew who he was. (George Foreman, commentating, repeatedly mispronounced his name.) After a rampant Pacquiao overwhelmed Ledwaba, however, Larry Merchant stated that “Ledwaba came in here with a chance to be a star but it looks like Pacquiao may go out being the real star.” But it was not until November 2003 that Pacquiao became a true American superstar, with an 11th-round stoppage of the menacing Mexican Marco Antonio Barrera for the featherweight title.

More here.

The Way We Were Made

Brian Palmer in Slate:

Joel Whitney in Guernica:

Since its publication in 1980, Howard Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States has sold more copies every year and has had a tremendous effect on our understanding of who gets left out of traditional histories. Zinn grew up in the slums of New York, and worked as a young man in the New York shipyards. At seventeen, he attended his first public rallies to petition for better working conditions. He volunteered as an Air Force bombardier in World War II and, after the war had effectively ended, was ordered to drop napalm on French villagers and German soldiers who'd already surrendered.

After a doctorate from Columbia University, Zinn took a job at Spelman College, an all-black women’s college in Atlanta, where he worked with students as an early civil rights advocate. In 1968, during the United States war in Vietnam, he worked on the North Vietnamese prisoner exchange and at home as an anti-war activist. He ended up at Boston University and published A People’s History and many other books. A documentary released this summer, Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train traces his career and his influence on progressives, historians, and the anti-war movement.

Guernica: I just saw the documentary on your life and career, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Could you explain the title of the film.

Howard Zinn: It comes from something I used to say in teaching when I was starting a new class. I would tell my students, “This is not going to be a neutral class.” I don’t believe in neutrality because the world is already moving in certain directions and wars are going on and children are going hungry. Terrible things are happening. And so to be neutral in a situation like this when things are already moving is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I don’t want to collaborate with the world as it is. I want to intrude myself. I want to participate in changing the direction of things. So that’s the origin of the title, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

More here.

From The Paris Review;

Arundhati Roy’s 1997 Booker Prize–winning debut novel, The God of Small Things, helped transform her into an overnight literary celebrity and something of a poster author for the boom in Indian writing. (Billboards across the country trumpeted her Booker victory.) She followed up the novel, however, with a stinging essay condemning India and Pakistan’s nuclear showdown, entitled “The End of Imagination,” and set off, as she’s said, “on a political journey which I never expected to embark on.” She was soon taking up the pen on a range of issues—big dam projects that were displacing communities, India’s occupation of Kashmir, political corruption, and Hindu extremism. Suddenly, she was seen in a very different light at home: a voice of conscience, perhaps, but also a shrill and uncomfortable reminder of what lurked behind India’s democracy. But perhaps nothing quite prepared her for the virulent response to her March 2010 cover story for the Indian newsweekly Outlook, an inside report from the jungle camps where Maoist insurgents (and tribal villagers) were locked in a deadly and drawn-out battle with government forces over mineral-rich land. “Here in the forests of Dantewada [in central India],” she writes, “a battle rages for the soul of India.” That article forms the centerpiece of her new collection, Walking with the Comrades, from Penguin Books; while Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, out now from Verso, also includes pieces by Roy as well as Tariq Ali, Pankaj Mishra, and others. She’ll be making two rare appearances in New York next month, at the CUNY Graduate Center on November 9 and the Asia Society on November 11. I recently spoke with her by phone in Delhi.

Tell me about the reaction in India to your article “Walking with the Comrades.” I know it caused quite a stir and, as you say, landed in the flight path of a whole slew of debates, on both the left and the right.

Whenever my essays are collected into a book what is missing is the atmosphere in the country at the time when the original pieces were published. These essays came at a time when the government had announced Operation Green Hunt, calling on paramilitary forces to go into the jungle and very openly branding all resistance—not just the guerrillas, but really all across the board—as Maoist. They were picking up people by using laws such as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and Special Securities Act, in which thinking an antigovernment thought is a almost a criminal offense. So when I went into the forest, my idea was that nobody really knew what was going on in there. These places were choked off; there was a siege on reporting. But what was real and what was not? I wanted to go in and deepen the story, to make it more human.

More here.

From Nature:

In the opening scene of The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg portrays a cold Mark Zuckerberg getting dumped by his girlfriend, who is exasperated by the future Facebook founder's socially oblivious and obsessive personality. Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is the stereotypical Silicon Valley geek — brilliant with technology, pathologically bereft of social graces. Or, in the parlance of the Valley: 'on the spectrum'. Few scientists think that the leaders of the tech world actually have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which can range from the profound social, language and behavioural problems that are characteristic of autistic disorder, to the milder Asperger's syndrome. But according to an idea that is creeping into the popular psyche, they and many others in professions such as science and engineering may display some of the characteristics of autism, and have an increased risk of having children with the full-blown disorder.

The roots of this idea can largely be traced to psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge, UK. According to a theory he has been building over the past 15 years, the parents of autistic children, and the children themselves, have an aptitude for understanding and analysing predictable, rule-based systems — think machines, mathematics or computer programs. And the genes that endow parents with minds suited to technical tasks, he hypothesizes, could lead to autism when passed on to their children, especially when combined with a dose of similar genes from a like-minded mate¹.

More here.

Morgan and I debate the merits of Steven Pinker's new book in The Boston Review:

Dear Abbas,

Steven Pinker has written a book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, about violence and progress. It is, moreover, an extended defense of modernity. At the very beginning he asks, “How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science?” Pinker responds that modernity has produced a less violent world. It’s a great answer. Who in their right mind could object to less killing in the world, less cruelty? And if you accept that modernity has created a less violent world, then aren’t you obliged to look favorably upon it? Aren’t you obliged to see history as a work of progress?

Pinker’s first task is to convince us, through exhaustive historical data, that there is less violence in the world today than there was in the past. He knows people don’t want to believe this. He knows that everyone thinks about the world wars of the twentieth century, the genocides in Armenia and Rwanda, the Holocaust. So he sets out to convince. As could be expected from Dr. Pinker, the facts are numerous, well organized, and well argued. I cannot find any holes in the basic argument. The data look sound. We are forced to accept the basic fact that the world is less violent than ever. There are fewer wars, wars kill fewer people, and everyday violence (murder, assault, rape, etc.) is down as well.

More here.

Captain Nawa Salah Ahmed was not thinking of Hollywood when he signed up for the bomb-disposal unit in the Iraqi city of Kirkuk. It was 2004, and the young policeman was burnt out. He had enlisted in the force when the American military invaded his homeland, taking a job in the local criminal-investigations unit. And as a lawless chaos had come crashing down upon the country, business, so to speak, was booming. Cases flooded in—Ahmed dealt daily with thefts, murders, and worse. But the pressure, he says, was unrelenting. So a year into his police career, he applied for and secured a transfer—one that gave him personal ease, but thrust his family in a roiling dread. He joined the Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit, universally referred to by its English acronym, E.O.D.—and known to Americans as “the Hurt Locker guys.” As his family protested his transfer, he reassured them by saying his new job was actually safer than his old one, in which he was harangued by criminals and terrorists, made a target for revenge. “Bombs,” he would say, “don’t have tongues.”

more from Neil Arun at Vanity Fair here.

The city of toronto is stumbling toward the end of 2011 mired in a deep civic funk. Mayor Rob Ford, a renegade small-c conservative from the suburban ward of Etobicoke North, bulldozed his way to victory a year ago on a simplistic pledge to slash municipal waste. His mantra: “Stop the gravy train.” While he has yet to identify instances of reckless spending, he has ordered city officials to extract almost $800 million from Toronto’s $9-billion operating budget, the sixth-largest public purse in Canada. This punishing and potentially ruinous process may entail shuttering libraries, firing police officers, and scaling back everything from snow removal to grass cutting to transit. Municipal services — such as public housing, environmental advocacy, and even zoos — that don’t conform to the mayor’s narrow vision of local government may be eliminated, privatized, or significantly reduced. Toronto’s woes, however, go well beyond the mayor’s fiscal populism. The Greater Toronto Area — a 7,100-square-kilometre expanse of 5.5 million residents who live in a band of municipalities extending from Burlington to Oshawa to Newmarket — finds itself increasingly crippled by some of North America’s nastiest gridlock, congestion so bad it costs the region at least $6 billion a year in lost productivity. Sprawl, gridlock’s malign twin, continues virtually unchecked, consuming farmland, stressing commuters, and ratcheting up the cost of municipal services. Without reliable funding, transit agencies can barely afford to modernize, much less expand, straining the GTA’s roads and highways to the bursting point.

more from John Lorinc at The Walrus here.

Nevertheless, I am a Jew and as such I am made to understand by Jewish history that I cannot absolutely count on enlightened laws and institutions to protect me and my descendants. I observe the Jewish present closely and actively remember the Jewish past—not only its often heroic suffering but also the high significance of the meaning of Jewish history. I think about it. I read. I try to understand what it may signify to be a Jew who cannot live by the rules of conduct set down over centuries and millennia. I am not, as the phrase goes, an observant Jew, and I doubt that Scholem was wholly orthodox. He was, however, immersed in Jewish mysticism of the sixteenth century, and studied Kabbalism closely, so it is unlikely that he should have been devoid of religious feeling. I, by contrast, am an American Jew whose interests are largely, although not exclusively, secular. There is no way in which my American and modern experience of life could be reconciled with Jewish orthodoxy. So that my ancestors, if they were able to see and judge for themselves, would find me a very strange creature indeed, no less strange than my Catholic, Protestant, or atheistic countrymen. Yet their scandalously weird descendant insists that he is a Jew. And of course he is one. He can’t be held responsible for the linked historical transformations of which he became the odd heir.

more from Saul Bellow at the NYRB here.

Sam McNerney in Why We Reason:

It is often argued that religion makes individuals and the world more just and moral, that it builds character and provides a foundation from which we understand right from wrong, good from evil; if it wasn’t for religion, apologists say, then the world would fall into a Hobbesian state of nature where violence prevails and moral codes fail. To reinforce this contention, they point out that Stalin, Hitler and Mao were atheists to force an illogical causal connection between what they did and what they believed.

One way to answer the question of if religion makes people and the world more moral and better off is to look at the history books. For that, I draw upon Steven Pinker’s latest, The Better Angels of Our Nature, an 800 page giant that examines the decline of violence from prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies to the present. Pinker opens his book with the following: “Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.” Whether you’re familiar with Better Angels or not, it’s worth reviewing its arguments to show why violence declined. Let’s run through three sections of Pinker’s book – The Pacification Process, The Civilizing Process, and The Humanitarian Revolution – to see how violence declined. Doing so will allow us to judge if history has anything to say about religion being a credible source of moral good at the individual and global level.

More here.