It was only while serving in an army barracks in Bangalore that the young Winston Churchill began reading books. At the comparatively late age of twenty-two he tells us in My Early Life, the desire for learning came upon him. He had always liked history at school and decided to begin with Gibbon; from there he went on to Macaulay. He already knew by heart (as so many children of his generation did) the Lays of Ancient Rome. He progressed to philosophy, beginning with Plato’s Republic and ending with Schopenhauer and Darwin’s Origin of Species. For Churchill, this was a preparation for life. He learned, for example, for the first time, that “ethics” did not mean “playing the game”, or esprit de corps; he learned that it concerned not just knowing the things you ought to know, but also the way you ought to do them. His greatest discovery was the “Socratic method” which was “apparently a way of giving your friend his head in an argument and progging him into a pit by cunning questions”. Like the young Winston, Patrick Hennessey also found himself fighting in Afghanistan.

more from Christopher Coker at the TLS here.

From Letters of Note:

In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month – February – the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.

Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.

Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival. Transcript follows.

More here.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

In the fiction category, the award went to Irish author Colum McCann for “Let the Great World Spin,” his novel focusing on the lives of various New Yorkers on the day in 1974 when French trapeze artist Phillip Petit walked a tight rope between the World Trade Center towers. McCann dedicated his award to recently deceased “Angela’s Ashes” author Frank McCourt saying, “I think he’s dancing upstairs.”

The nonfiction winner was T.J. Stiles for “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” who reminded the audience as he accepted the award that “the book lies at the heart of all of our culture.” The award for poetry went to Brown University professor Keith Waldrop for his book of recent verse, “Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.” For Waldrop, the award was a long time coming – he was previously nominated for a National Book Award 40 years ago, but did not win at that time. Even last night Waldrop took the casual approach. His wife – Rosemarie Waldrop, with whom he co-edits Burning Deck Press – accompanied him from Providence to New York but did not attend the award ceremony, opting instead for the new Philip Glass opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “I almost went to the opera myself,” Waldrop confessed. In the category of children’s books the award went to Phillip Hoose for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” a biography of “the first Rosa Parks,” a Montgomery, Ala., teenager who refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus nine months before Rosa Parks became famous for the same act. Colvin – who had been almost forgotten by history before Hoose’s book revived awareness of her story – appeared on stage with Hoose as he claimed the award, waving and smiling to the crowd.

Earlier in the evening, Joanne Woodward had been on hand to present a the 2009 medal for distinguished contribution to Gore Vidal.

More here.

Galileo Galilei

Comes to knock and knock again
At a small secluded doorway
In an ordinary brain.

Into light the world is turning,
And the clocks are set for six;
And the chimney pots are smoking,
And the golden candlesticks.

Apple trees are bent and breaking,
And the heat is not the sun’s;
And the Minotaur is waking,
And the streets are cattle runs.
|
Galileo Galilei,
In a flowing, scarlet robe,
While the stars go down the river
With the turning, turning globe,

Kneels before the black Madonna
And the angels cluster round
With grave, uplifted faces
Which reflect the shaken ground

And the orchard which is burning,
And the hills which take the light;
And the candles which have melted
On the altars of the night.

Galileo Galilei
Comes to knock and knock again
At a small secluded doorway
In an ordinary brain.

by William Jay Smith
from Poet’s Choice; Time Books, 1962

From BBC:

A tiny drop of blood is drawn through the chip, where disease markers are caught and show up under light. The device uses the tendency of a fluid to travel through small channels under its own force, instead of using pumps. The design is simpler, requires less blood be taken, and works more quickly than existing “lab on a chip” designs, the team report in Lab on a Chip. It has a flexible design so that it could be used for a wide range of diagnostics.

Much research in recent years has focused on the chemical and medical possibilities of so-called microfluidic devices at the heart of lab-on-a-chip designs. These microfluidics contain between dozens and thousands of tiny channels through which fluids can flow, and as micro-manufacturing methods have advanced, so has the potential complexity of microfluidics. Now, scientists at IBM's research labs in Zurich have developed a cheap lab-on-a-chip that has the potential to diagnose dozens of diseases.

More here.

From My Shelf Runneth Over:

The Reader is a novel that has generated some controversy because of the way it characterizes Hanna Schmitz, an illiterate German who worked as a prison guard at Auschwitz. The trial of Hanna forms the central point of the novel, and her lover tells its story. People have therefore been concerned that Bernard Schlink seeks some kind of sympathy or absolution for the more ignorant perpetrators of the holocaust. I think the accusation is unfounded. The novel does ask its audience to confront a story they've not yet been asked to confront: how do non-Jewish Germans recover from the stain upon their country and their forbears, who, whether tacitly or not, consented to the persecution of millions of humans?

I think it important to note that the novel has a misleading title. The narrator, young Michael Berg, is the eponymous”reader,” but only in the eyes of Hanna. By giving the book this title, Schlink suggests that the important perspective is Hanna's. Hanna, however, is never the agent who defines meaning in the novel. Rather, she is an object that moves in and out of the the narrator's life, and allows him to put a face on the atrocities of the war and to prevent them from becoming numbing cliches.

More here.

A generation of British Islamists have been trained in Afghanistan to fight a global jihad. But now some of those would-be extremists have had a change of heart. Johann Hari finds out what made them give up the fight.

From The Independent:

The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.

But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.

But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.

Seventeen former radical Islamists have “come out” in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

The television commercial for the wildly successful Xbox 360 video game Gears of War (2006) – which has, so far, sold more than five million copies – opens with an image of a war-torn cityscape silently smouldering; it radiates as much sinister Gothic pathos as a Tim Burton film. As a view of this digitally-rendered war zone unfolds, a hunched, metal-clad Übermensch appears. He stares dolefully into a pool of water, alone, apparently, in the aftermath of a great battle, his square jaw, weathered skin and narrowed eyes oozing the stoic resolve of the most iconic anti-hero. As this sensitive brute cradles the semi-obliterated face of a porcelain putto in his palm – a passage so heavy-handed it is almost camp – the ground around him begins to erupt and, in an effort to escape, the commando flees quite literally into the jaws of a ravenous alien beast; part scorpion, part beetle and wholly flight-of-fancy. The commercial fades to black just as our nameless hero unleashes a hail of bullets upon this seemingly unassailable monster, the drama of this David-and-Goliath encounter emphasized by a moody tenebrism worthy of Georges de La Tour.

more from Christopher Bedford and Jennifer Wulffson at Frieze Magazine here.

From Wired:

Recently released images from Tim Burton’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland adaptation reminded moviegoers that the quirky London-based director possesses one of the most extravagant visual vocabularies of any filmmaker now working. Underscoring that fact, New York’s Museum of Modern Art kicks off a Tim Burton retrospective Nov. 22 with a collection of 700 art pieces produced by the goth maestro over the past three decades.

As a companion piece, the auteur behind fantastical spectacles Mars Attacks!, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman and a host of other morbidly twisted movies is publishing The Art of Tim Burton, a 434-page tome packed with drawings, doodles, paintings and evocative concept art dating back to Burton’s teen years in Burbank, California. “Most of what appears in this book was never intended to be seen by anyone,” Burton writes in a preface to the book, noting that his collaborators sorted through “40 years of notebooks, scraps of paper, napkins, etc.” Author and co-editor Leah Gallo writes that Burton’s intention is “to allow his fans a broad look inside his private pages.”

More here.

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

By Theodore Roethke

From Scientific American:

In a few short weeks, world leaders will assemble in Copenhagen for the much anticipated United Nations Climate Change Conference. Their goal: to draft an agreement that will limit global warming, chiefly by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As the 12-day meeting gets closer, the chorus from jaded pundits and politicians gets louder: “It can’t be done.”

Nonsense. The naysayers have two reasonable concerns. One: Countries will never agree on limits because they are out to protect their own interests, which differ. Two: Even if they reach an agreement, it will never hold because it will raise energy prices, which people will resist. Fortunately, both worries can be resolved.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

Numbers make modern life possible. “In a world without numbers,” University of Rochester neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon and her colleagues recently observed in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, “we would be unable to build a skyscraper, hold a national election, plan a wedding, or pay for a chicken at the market.”

The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt. History provides some support. The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s.

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

More here.

Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

These guys took down a plane with box cutters. They used crude weapons to attack a far more sophisticated and effective fighting force. The most fearsome of them was captured at home, in his pajamas. It's not like we're putting Magneto on trial and need to keep him away from metal filings.

It's one thing to be afraid of terrorism. But there's no real reason to be afraid of terrorists, and as Daphne Eviatar argues, there's good reason not to look like you're afraid of terrorists:

The contrast of seeing these ordinary-looking men on trial in an orderly U.S. courtroom — where they’re accorded the right to a lawyer, the right to speak in their own defense and the right to call witnesses — could go a long way toward publicly revealing the absurdity of their cause, as well as the justice that a fair and functioning legal system can provide.

Trying these guys publicly, as well as holding them in normal prisons like common criminals, is good public relations.

More here.

In Guernica Magazine:

Amitava Kumar: Here’s a question: is war more a fact of life for South Asians? Is it a consistent theme in fiction written in the South Asian diaspora?

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It’s hard for me to answer that with complete confidence when I still struggle with the question of how race and ethnicity relate to literary genres and classifications. How do you think it does? People often talk to me of South Asian literature, and I’m not sure what they mean—writing by South Asians? About South Asians?

Certainly, writers in the South Asian diaspora deploy a great variety of styles—but some common themes. All fiction is political in some way, and it’s interesting to see fiction play out in some South Asian spheres in which talking about politics has become dirty, something polite people don’t do. And of course fiction does all sorts of things, goes all sorts of places, that polite people don’t go. So I was fascinated to ask some terrific fiction writers about politics and war and see what would rise to the surface, what would bubble up, and what would stay in the background.

And some things also stay in the background because in parts of South Asia and its diasporas, war and a kind of unstable politics have been normalized. I am always fascinated to watch characters dealing with their personal lives without explicitly acknowledging the hold politics has on them, even as it affects everything they do. Have they become desensitized? And how does one write about violence without fetishizing it?

Tara McKelvey in the Boston Review:

When Roger Benimoff arrived at the psychiatric building of the Coatesville, Pennsylvania veterans’ hospital, he was greeted by a message carved into a nearby tree stump: “Welcome Home.” It was a reminder that things had not turned out as he had expected.

In Faith Under Fire, a memoir about Benimoff’s life as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff and co-author Eve Conant describe his return from Iraq to his family in Colorado and subsequent assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retreated deep into himself, spending hours on the computer and racking up ten thousand dollars in debt on eBay. Above all, he was angry and jittery, scared even of his young sons, and barely able to make it through the day. He was eventually admitted to Coatesville’s “Psych Ward.” For a while the lock-down facility was his home. He wondered where God was in all of this, and was not alone in that bewilderment and pain.

In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them. The Yale study found that these soldiers were more likely than others to seek mental health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) when they came home. It was not that these veterans had unusually high confidence in government or especially good information about services at VA hospitals. Instead, they had fallen into a spiritual abyss and were desperate to find a way out. The trauma of war seems to be especially acute for men and women whose faith in a benevolent God is challenged by the carnage they have witnessed.

In the Immanent Frame:

Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na’im both stand at the forefront of the challenging and constructive exchange taking place today between European and Islamic traditions of political, legal, and religious thought. At a recent event organized by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, the two scholars traded questions and criticisms concerning the concept of human rights. Moderated by José Casanova, the discussion addressed the intrinsic limitations and historical failures of the language of human rights, as well as its formidable capacity to challenge autocratic and state-centric distributions of power, creating openings for democratic contestation and political self-determination…

Talal Asad: José suggested that I should talk a little bit, first of all, about some of the main points from yesterday’s lecture. The lecture was an exploration of a number of concepts that that seem to me to lie at the origin of human rights, something I’m thinking about for my next book. But if I could just summarize, first, some things from that lecture, then I will try and make some points about Professor Abdullahi’s work, particularly his famous book, which has been much more influential than mine—my work on secularism is purely academic, you know; it tries to determine where the real effects of politics come from—and also to indicate the things that I think are good about secularity and then pose some questions I had, which it would be good to have you answer. And finally, I’ll say a few words about actual politics. I would like to begin with the effort to move some of our countries towards a more democratic form of politics and government and so on, which is not always the same thing as speaking about what one would like to see.

I basically tried to stress a couple of things yesterday, and perhaps I should focus on the most important ones. First of all, that the emotions that we talk about, like compassion and sympathy, which are supposed to lie at the base of human rights, are really much more mobile, much more unpredictable, much more uncontrollable than one thinks. They are both necessary and dangerous, one might say.