Alanna Shaikh in Foreign Policy:

The world was shocked by a report on CBS's 60 Minutes this week that accused bestselling author and humanitarian Greg Mortenson of being a fraud. Not only were some of the stories from his book fabricated, 60 Minutes alleges, but the charity that Mortenson created to build schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan never built many of the facilities it has taken credit for. Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea didn't, as it claimed, bring education to rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its finances are a mess, and the charity does not even seem to have kept track of how many schools it built or how many students attended them.

While much of the uproar has been over the lies Mortenson peddled, I can't help wondering: Why, exactly, did we ever think that Mortenson's model for education, exemplified in his Central Asia Institute (CAI), was going to work? Its focus was on building schools — and that's it. Not a thought was spared for education quality, access, or sustainability. But building schools has never been the answer to improving education. If it were, then the millions of dollars poured into international education over the last half-century would have already solved Afghanistan's — and the rest of the world's — education deficit by now.

Over the last 50 years of studying international development, scholars have built a large body of research and theory on how to improve education in the developing world. None of it has recommended providing more school buildings, because according to decades of research, buildings aren't what matter. Teachers matter. Curriculum matters. Funding for education matters. Where classes actually take place? Not really.

The whole CAI model was wrong. But here's the truly awful thing: Looking back, it's clear that everyone knew that that CAI's approach didn't work. It was just that no one wanted to talk about it.

More here.

Justin Erik Halldór Smith over at his blog:

In a fine introduction to a recent edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), William Gass writes that what he admires most about Robert Burton's life-work is “the width of the world that can be seen from one college window…; what a love of all can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair.” Burton’s Anatomy, indeed, often gives the impression that its author set out to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art whose aim was nothing less than to reproduce the world.

As with the Internet, the result is clumsy and chaotic, and Burton recognizes as much; and yet, in this way, both haphazard and cloistered, he manages to create, over the course of a life, a thousand-page mirror of the world:

I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment. I never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated, as having ever been especially delighted with the study of cosmography… A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.

Burton loved the world, though he knew it almost entirely through the books he kept in his cell. While at nearly the same moment in European history, Burton’s contemporaries, such as René Descartes, were denouncing ‘book learning’ as inauthentic, as an impediment to true knowledge, Burton reminds us, as Gass so well understands of his predecessor, that whether out in the world or locked in our cell, it is the human mind that is doing most of the work of experience anyway; a rich, full life may be led with only the most two-dimensional of stimuli to carry it along. The Anatomy of Melancholy is proof of this.

Today, too, the Internet can seem an impediment to many of what are thought to be our more authentic experiences. But it may also be facilitating the sort of experience we have always had, qua human beings, experience based in love, which can be had just as intensely in virtual form (letters from friends, books about nature, the Internet), as in ‘reality’ (seeing friends face-to-face, going camping).

Timothy Beal in The Chronicle:

When it comes to the Bible, many feel there is a single right meaning—the one its divine author intended. “Well, what does the Bible say?” “The Bible is very clear about that.” This is part of the iconicity of the Bible in contemporary society, the idea of it as the one and only divinely authored and guaranteed book of answers, with one answer per question. No more, no less.

For many potential Bible readers, that expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can't find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don't know how to read it correctly, or you're missing something. If the Bible is God's perfect, infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you “what it really says.” I think that's tragic. You're letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature.

The Bible is anything but univocal about anything. It is a cacopho­ny of voices and perspectives, often in conflict with one another. In many ways, those dedicated to removing all potential biblical contradictions, to making the Bible entirely consistent with itself, are no different from irreligious debunkers of the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general. Many from both camps seem to believe that simply demonstrating that the Bible is full of inconsistencies and contradictions is enough to discredit any religious tradition that embraces it as Scripture.

Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits. They agree that the Bible is on trial.

Salman Rushdie in the NYT:

The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, but his poetry has outlasted the Roman Empire. Osip Mandelstam died in a Stalinist work camp, but his poetry has outlived the Soviet Union. Federico García Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but his poetry has survived that tyrannical regime.

We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.

Not all writers or artists seek or ably perform a public role, and those who do risk obloquy and derision, even in free societies. Susan Sontag, an outspoken commentator on the Bosnian conflict, was giggled at because she sometimes sounded as if she “owned” the subject of Sarajevo. Harold Pinter’s tirades against American foreign policy and his “Champagne socialism” were much derided. Günter Grass’s visibility as a public intellectual and scourge of Germany’s rulers led to a degree of schadenfreude when it came to light that he had concealed his brief service in the Waffen-SS as a conscript at the tail end of World War II. Gabriel García Márquez’s friendship with Fidel Castro, and Graham Greene’s chumminess with Panama’s Omar Torrijos, made them political targets.

When artists venture into politics the risks to reputation and integrity are ever-present.

Geoff Nicholson in the debut issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Given the choice between a book and a baseball bat, there is no choice for Buster. He’ll take the bat every time. When he’s working on a movie sequence and they’ve run out of ideas, he yells, “Throw down your pencils, pick up the bats.” The crew sets up a baseball game. By the second or third inning, probably with a runner on base, Buster will throw his glove in the air, yell, “I got it!” and they can all get back to work. Must have been frustrating for the guy on third.

You know where you are with a baseball bat. It’s not that way with books. (It’s not that way with many things.) And sometimes, when it suits him, it isn’t even that way with baseball bats either. There are times when, for the sake of a laugh, or a charity game, or in the movie One Run Elmer, Keaton will put on a show with a bat made of plaster of Paris, or he’ll pack explosive in the tip so that it blows up on contact with the ball, but that’s OK: this is only appearance. It’s all part of the show, and he’s the one running it.

And that’s how it is with the rest of Buster’s universe. Things are clearly not to be trusted. The chair will collapse, the plank will hit you in the face, the gun will misfire, the car will die on the railroad tracks, the boat will sink, the balloon will escape gravity and take you with it. The only answer is to make sure those objects are in fact props. Once things are scripted, then everything’s all right, he’s in control, the objects will do his bidding. People less so.

More here.

Pamela S. Karlan in the Boston Review:

It’s springtime, and marriage is in the air. Major constitutional battles about legal recognition for the marriage rights of same-sex couples are wending their way through the federal courts. Two couples are challenging California’s marriage restrictions; several other couples, in a series of lawsuits around the country, are challenging the federal government’s Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) for denying federal benefits to couples validly married under state law in states such as Massachusetts (which issues marriage licenses to gay couples) and New York (which recognizes same-sex marriages performed elsewhere).

Along the way, supporters of marriage equality have commonly invoked the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision in the aptly captioned Loving v. Virginia. There, the Court held that Virginia’s criminalization of interracial marriage violated two provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment: the equal protection clause, because Virginia’s law could be explained only as the product of illegitimate racial prejudice, and the liberty element of the due process clause, because Virginia denied Mildred and Richard Loving “the freedom to marry” that “has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” Restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples likewise relies on prejudiced, or empirically dubious, propositions about gay people and their families, and denies them a status that confers dignity and a bundle of tangible entitlements central to modern life.

But even as we embrace Loving and the rights of loving couples, we should remember that it takes much more than a celebrated judicial decision to realize constitutional values.

More here.

More here.

From Guardian:

Amis is made most angry by Britain's “superficiality”, by its tabloids, by “all these excited models and these rock stars in short shorts”. But he “adores” the English themselves: “they have spirit, they are tolerant, full of good humour”, he said, also praising Shakespeare – “an absolute giant”, and the UK's “very advanced” political system. “We had a revolution 100 years before France, and our civil war was not so horrible.” The interview also saw Amis describe the Royal family as “philistines”, and speak of his own encounters with the royals: the problem with the Queen, he said, is that she “does not listen to what you tell her”. He recalled telling her, “you knighted my father” [Kingsley Amis]. Her response? “She looked into the distance, vaguely staring at a picture on the wall.” Amis made clear in the interview that he would not accept a knighthood himself if it were to be offered to him. “I don't want to be linked at all to the British empire. It's so ridiculous,” he said. “No, there's no chance of that happening. Really, I would prefer not to be English.”

When he met the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip “appeared very surprised” at the bestselling author's profession. “Ah, you're a writer?” he said, according to Amis. Prince Charles, though, is “charming”, with a “pretty extraordinary laugh, like the snore of a pig”. Amis added that he recalled “one fairly memorable conversation with him on the subject of Salman Rushdie, just after the fatwa, in 1989. He was very anti-Rushdie. I asked him why. He told me: 'I'm sorry, but when someone insults the profound beliefs of a people …'” Amis replied that a novel is not a stance. “It insults nobody. It asserts nothing. A novel is a game, a mind play,” he told Charles.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

According to a new research study, Europeans are happier when they have a day off and work less, while their American counterparts would rather be working those extra hours. Published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, the research, led by Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn from the University of Texas, looks at survey results of Europeans and Americans and how they identified being happy. Based on the study results, Europeans who described themselves as being “very happy” went from 28 percent down to 23 percent as their work hours increased. Americans, on the other hand, remained at 43 percent regardless of how many hours they worked.

The researchers say that due to a lack of research in this field, they cannot completely say that working more hours makes people happier, though they do have a few explanations. Their thoughts on the reasoning behind the results point toward the different aspirations and self-worth people have. Europeans tend to be more concerned with enjoying and living life to the fullest, while Americans are busy following the “American Dream” and traveling a road toward financial success. Previous research shows that happiness can come from wealth and as a person’s income and employment status increase, so does their satisfaction with life. Americans believe that their hard work is what will move them up the ladder, so they appear happier while working more hours. They believe that by working these hours, they are achieving more and reaching more.

More here.

Jessa Crispin in The Smart Set:

From the moment Hannah Arendt’s reports on the Eichmann trial started to appear in The New Yorker, the response was deeply divisive. While thought Arendt’s work was the most intelligent writing to come out of the trial, others excoriated Arendt as a self-hating Jew, an anti-Semite, a dupe, an intellectual lightweight. Whatever your opinion of Arendt’s assessment, her reporting, collected together in the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, set the tone for how the Eichmann trial would be perceived and discussed for decades. It is still the defining document of the event.

The controversy began because Arendt was deeply skeptical about the trial from the beginning, calling it in book’s first paragraphs “a bloody spectacle.” She saw a man not being put on trial, but being used as an excuse to air grievances against all of Nazi Germany. Witnesses who had absolutely no connection to Eichmann testified for hours about the horrors they had suffered and witnessed — Arendt was sympathetic, mostly, but insisted that such testimony had no place in the court of law. “This case was built around what the Jews had suffered, not on what Adolf Eichmann had done,” she wrote, and she found that deeply dissatisfying, if not unethical. That testimony is why that trial still lives on in our imagination, as it was the first international forum in which the survivors could tell their stories. But Arendt’s dismissal was read as callousness. And for good reason.

Arendt is obviously struggling with her own political beliefs as she sits there: a German Jew, she was formerly pro-Zionist but changed her mind after seeing Israel’s treatment of its Arab citizens and neighbors and after listening to the rhetoric on which the nation was founded. As an aside, Arendt mentions a pamphlet published after the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court, a case in which two fathers kidnapped their children from other countries and brought them to Israel. The children were sent back to their mothers, “despite the fact that to send the children back to maternal custody and care would be committing them to waging an unequal struggle against the hostile elements in the Diaspora.” It was this kind of thinking, Arendt argued, that was perhaps understandably defensive given recent history, but also a dangerous foundation on which to build a nation. This disgruntled tone, as she is obviously still not sure what to make of the promise of Israel and her disappointment with the reality, pervades, and led many scholars and critics to accuse her of anti-Semitism — an accusation that is still tossed around today.

K. Anthony Appiah reviews Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism, in Slate:

Alan Wolfe is the sort of social theorist who would rather be plausible than provocative. Eschewing the lunacies of the left and the right—avoiding even their slighter sillinesses—he hews to a sensible, if unexciting, center. We must be robust—even militarily robust—against genocide everywhere, but recognize the limits of our armies as instruments of democratization overseas. We can encourage religious engagement in the public square but insist on freedom from religious imposition and the widest workable range of religious expression. Let us also welcome immigrants in a spirit of openness while accepting that we cannot absorb all who want to come and asking those who do come to open themselves to us. Wherever there is a reasonable middle ground—as here, between nativism and multiculturalism—he finds it unerringly. And, despite the Polonius-like platitudinousness of my simplifying summaries, he is attentive to the complexities of actually bringing these thoughts to practical life. If professor Wolfe had a coat of arms, its motto would be “On the one hand, on the other.” And though he may have only two hands, they are permanently occupied: He has many balls in the air. He is, as my British uncles might have put it, impeccably sound. If liberalism were just a temperament, we could agree that he has it in spades.

But, as he argues himself in this engaging new book, The Future of Liberalism, liberalism is more than a temperament; it is also a political tradition with substantive commitments—a body of ideas—and it has, as well, a dedication to fair procedures, impartially administered, legitimated by the consent of the people. Temperament, substance, procedure can all be liberal, and understanding liberalism requires a grasp of all three and of the connections among them. Wolfe's distinctive claim, however, is that the key to liberalism is a set of dispositions, or habits of mind—seven of them, in fact, each of which gets its own chapter.

Four of these dispositions will be quite familiar: “a sympathy for equality,” “an inclination to deliberate,” “a commitment to tolerance,” and “an appreciation of openness.” We're used to the portrayal: liberals as talky, tolerant, open-minded, egalitarians. It's not surprising, then, that these types are at home in the garrulous world of the academy—or that bossy preachers, convinced they have the one true story, do not care for them much. But Wolfe's sketch of the liberal adds three unfamiliar elements to the picture: “a disposition to grow,” “a preference for realism,” and “a taste for governance.”

Amit Chaudhuri in Guernica:

Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh.
—D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

I began to feel put off by Tagore in my late teens, around the time I discovered Indian classical music, the devotional songs of Meerabai, Tulsidas, and Kabir, not to speak of the work of the modernists. I was also—to place the moment further in context—reading contemporary European poetry in translation, in the tremendous series edited by Al Alvarez, the Penguin Modern European Poets. My father knew of my promiscuous adventurousness when it came to poetry, and, in tender deference to this, he (a corporate man) would buy these books from bookshops in the five-star hotels he frequented, such as the mythic Nalanda at the Taj. Among the poets I discovered through this route of privilege was the Israeli Dan Pagis, of whom the blurb stated: “A survivor of a concentration camp, Dan Pagis possesses a vision which is essentially tragic.” I don’t recall how my seventeen-year-old self responded to Pagis, but I do remember the poem he is most famous for, “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car.” Here it is in its entirety:

here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him i

The resonance of the poem escaped me at the time: This history was not mine.

Last February, a professor of biology and Harvard PhD named Amy Bishop, having recently been denied tenure by the University of Alabama in Hunstville, released the contents of a nine-millimeter pistol on her colleagues during a departmental faculty meeting. She killed the department’s chair and two others. Three more were wounded. Startling as the homicides were, and though they ratcheted up the common, unglamorous tensions of the tenure process to something fit for a media spectacle, they were hard to read as an allegory for the Problems of Higher Education. Unless, that is, you were unfortunate enough to peruse the reader comments on the New York Times’s online coverage of the killings and their aftermath. Among the helpless expressions of sadness was a large and growing strain of anger amounting to celebration. What was bizarre about the reaction was that, though Bishop worked in the Department of Biological Sciences, most of the commenters’ rage was directed toward the humanities. The dozens of hateful posts — however incoherent their stated reasons — were troubling moreover because they borrowed the rhetoric of neoliberal reform. Away with unjust privileges (like tenure), away with the guardians of unmonetizable knowledge (the humanities, the speculative sciences), away with any kind of refuge from the competitive market! Academics may not need to worry much about hostile gunfire, but they do need to worry, more than ever, about the more legal means by which hostility toward the academy gets expressed.

more from Nicholas Dames at n+1 here.

The Clock makes you realize how finely attuned you are to the rhythms of commercial (usually American) film. Each foreign clip is spotted at once, long before the actor opens his mouth. And it’s not the film stock or even the mustaches that give the game away, it’s the variant manipulation of time, primarily its slowness, although of course this “slowness” is only the pace of real time. In commercial film, decades pass in a minute, or a day lasts two and half hours. We flash back, we flash forward. There’s always a certain pep. “Making lunch” is a shot of an open fridge, then a chopping board, then food cooked on the stove. A plane ride is check-in, a cocktail, then customs. Principles dear to Denzel—tension, climax, resolution—are immanent in all the American clips, while their absence is obvious in the merest snatch of French art house. A parsing of the common enough phrase “I don’t like foreign movies” might be “I don’t want to sit in a cinema and feel time pass.” Given that nobody has given you the rules—given that you have imagined the rules—how can you be indignant when these rules of yours are “broken”? But somehow you are. If Christian Marclay returns to the same film several times—a long “countdown” scene, say, from some bad thriller—it feels like cheating. And because you have decided that the sharp “cut” is the ruling principle of the piece, you’re at first unsure about music bleeding from one scene into another. But stay a few hours and these supposed deviations become the main event. You start to find that two separated clips from the same scene behave like semicolons, bracketing the visual sentence in between, bringing shape and style to what we imagined would have to be (given the ordering principle of the work) necessarily random. Marclay manages to deliver connections at once so lovely and so unlikely that you can’t really see how they were managed: you have to chalk it up to blessed serendipity. Guns in one film meet guns in another, and kisses, kisses; drivers in color wave through drivers in black-and-white so they might overtake them.

more from Zadie Smith at the NYRB here.

Melding

After supper, the dishes done, the news
over, the boozy father snoozing in his chair—
now is the hour when mother and I repair
the rips of the day's separations. She woos
me to the cards with cakes and tea: we play
Canasta, the melding game, with double decks
to cut and shuffle. Sharers, two of a sex
are we! We deal, we squeal, we moan, we pray
out loud for luck. It's flirtation, dalliance.
The cards splay in our hands like a geisha's fans,
we gaze in one another's eyes. She scans
me; I'm her poem. I goad her; it's a dance
we danced till I was twenty-five. “Play!”
she pled. I sighed and put the cards away.

by Kate Bernadette Benedict
from Here from Away
Wordtech Communications, 2003

From The Wall Street Journal:

Indian-American Siddhartha Mukherjee’s non-fiction account of cancer won the Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category when the awards were announced in New York City late Monday. A cancer physician and researcher, Dr. Mukherjee’s book drew upon his experience practicing medicine to write “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” which documents the disease from its first appearance thousands of years ago to the medical battles still waged by doctors to combat and control it today. The Pulitzer Prize citation described the book as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.” The prize comes with $10,000 in award money.

Published in the U.S. by Scribner and in India by HarperCollins Publishers India, the book was inspired by a personal event. One day a patient with stomach cancer asked Dr. Mukherjee a simple question about her prognosis: “Where are we going?” That led the author to think the larger scope of the question in terms of cancer research. The author, a Rhodes scholar, said in an interview that when he started writing the book in 2005 he thought of cancer as a disease, but as he wrote, he began to start seeing it as something that “envelops our lives so fully that it was like writing about someone, it was like writing about an alter personality, an illness that had a psyche, a behavior, a pattern of existing.”

Before winning the Pulitzer, Dr. Mukherjee has already received critical appreciation for his book, which came out in November 2010. The British newspaper The Guardian, in its review of the book said, “It takes some nerve to echo the first line of ‘Anna Karenina’ and infer that the story of a disease is capable of bearing a Tolstoyan treatment. But that is, breathtakingly, what Mukherjee pulls off.” Perhaps what may differentiate the book from other vast literature on cancer is the way Dr. Mukherjee deals with the subject and its narrative. Laura Landro wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “He has a certain awe for cancer’s victims, for their ability to withstand the ravages of the disease and the sometimes drastic measures taken to treat it. The stories of his patients consume him, and the decisions he makes about their care haunt him.” “The Emperor of All Maladies” found coveted spots in the New York Times list of “The 10 Best Books of 2010” and in “The Top 10 Non Fiction Books” list by Time Magazine.

More here. (Note: Heartiest congratulations to dear friend and co-worker, Sid!!)

From The New York Times:

The other day, Paul Simon was rehearsing a favorite song: his own “Darling Lorraine,” about a love that starts hot but turns very cold. He found himself thinking about a three-note rhythmic pattern near the end, where Lorraine (spoiler alert) gets sick and dies. “The song has that triplet going on underneath that pushes it along, and at a certain point I wanted it to stop because the story suddenly turns very serious,” Mr. Simon said in an interview. “The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”

An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another. The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool. Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians. And what really communicates emotion may not be melody or rhythm, but moments when musicians make subtle changes to the those musical patterns.

More here.

Greg Miller in Science:

In 1688, an Irish polymath named William Molyneux wrote the English philosopher John Locke a letter in which he posed a vexing question: Could a blind person, upon suddenly gaining the ability to see, recognize an object by sight that he'd previously known by feel? The answer has potentially important implications for philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Now, researchers working with a medical charity that provides surgery to restore vision in blind children say they've found the answer to Molyneux's question. It's “no” but with a twist.

Molyneux posed his question in the midst of a philosophical debate about how we comprehend the world around us. An affirmative answer to the question would support the argument that we possess innate (and presumably God-given) concepts that are independent of the senses—for example, that we possess a concept of a sphere, regardless of whether we have only seen one, only felt one, or both. A negative answer to Molyneux's question would support the alternative argument that any concept of a sphere or other object must be tied to sensory experience. In that view, a blind person would have only a tactile concept of a sphere that would be of no use in recognizing the shape by sight.

More here.