Over at the NYRB blog:

I never knew Toni Avegael. She was born in Antwerp in February 1926 and lived there most of her life. We were related: she was my father’s first cousin. I well remember her older sister Lily: a tall, sad lady whom my parents and I used to visit in a little house somewhere in northwest London. We have long since lost touch, which is a pity.

I am reminded of the Avegael sisters (there was a middle girl, Bella) whenever I ask myself—or am asked—what it means to be Jewish. There is no general-purpose answer to this question: it is always a matter of what it means to be Jewish for me—something quite distinct from what it means for my fellow Jews. To outsiders, such concerns are mysterious. A Protestant who does not believe in the Scriptures, a Catholic who abjures the authority of the Pope in Rome, or a Muslim for whom Muhammad is not the Prophet: these are incoherent categories. But a Jew who rejects the authority of the rabbis is still Jewish (even if only by the rabbis’ own matrilineal definition): who is to tell him otherwise?

I reject the authority of the rabbis—all of them (and for this I have rabbinical authority on my side). I participate in no Jewish community life, nor do I practice Jewish rituals. I don’t make a point of socializing with Jews in particular—and for the most part I haven’t married them. I am not a “lapsed” Jew, having never conformed to requirements in the first place. I don’t “love Israel” (either in the modern sense or in the original generic meaning of loving the Jewish people), and I don’t care if the sentiment is reciprocated. But whenever anyone asks me whether or not I am Jewish, I unhesitatingly respond in the affirmative and would be ashamed to do otherwise.

The ostensible paradox of this condition is clearer to me since coming to New York: the curiosities of Jewish identity are more salient here.

From Salon:

People have been worrying about the world’s pending overpopulation for more than two centuries. Robert Thomas Malthus sounded the alarm in 1797 with “An Essay on the Principles of the Population,” which predicted mass starvation and went on to influence the likes of Charles Darwin and Margaret Sanger. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” forecast a similar fate; if the population kept rising unchecked, Earth’s resources would buckle. Many of today’s environmental thinkers, such as broadcaster (and “Planet Earth” narrator) David Attenborough, have called for drastic measures to limit the planet’s population before it’s too late.

But according to the veteran environmental writer Fred Pearce, they’re all wrong. In his latest book, “The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet's Surprising Future,” Pearce argues that the world’s population is peaking. In the next century, we’re heading not for exponential growth, but a slow, steady decline. This, he claims, has the potential to massively change both our society and our planet: Children will become a rare sight, patriarchal thinking will fall by the wayside, and middle-aged culture will replace our predominant youth culture. Furthermore, Pearce explains, the population bust could be the end of our environmental woes. Fewer people making better choices about consumption could lead to a greener, healthier planet.

More here.

Who is She?

Who is the goddess of yours?
…..Who is she?
Pure fantasy, I wager.

Is she not clear to you?
…..No she is not.

Clearer than day is she
…..clearer than night.

Not clear to me.

Day in night is she
…..night in day.

I see her not.

Look inside yourself!

Difficult…

Then look at her frost
covering the grass.

by Gabriel Rosenstock

From The New York Times:

The world of science has two Sean Carrolls. One is an evolutionary biologist. The other is a cosmologist and theoretical physicist, an expert on time and the early moments of the universe. As it happened, the physicist stopped by the offices of The New York Times on a recent March morning. Dr. Carroll, a 43-year-old research professor at the California Institute of Technology, had come to New York for an appearance on “The Colbert Report.” He was in town promoting his meditation on the physics of time, a trade book with the clever title “From Eternity to Here.”

Q. WHEN YOU GO TO A COCKTAIL PARTY, DO YOU TELL PEOPLE THAT YOU ARE A PHYSICIST? SOME PHYSICISTS WON’T.

A. I do! But I know what you’re talking about. Whenever you say you’re a physicist, there’s a certain fraction of people who immediately go, “Oh, I hated physics in high school.” That’s because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams. One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we’ve taken this incredibly interesting subject — how the universe works — and made it boring.

Q. LEON LEDERMAN, THE NOBEL PRIZE PHYSICIST, HAS PROPOSED THAT WE REFORM HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE BY REQUIRING PHYSICS IN THE SOPHOMORE AND NOT THE SENIOR YEAR. WILL THAT HELP — OR IS IT REARRANGING DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC?

A. I don’t think it’s the right solution. What we need to do is find a new way to teach the spirit of physics. What we do now is water down what professional physicists do and make it into this dry puzzle-solving thing with little pictures of pulleys and things like that. We ought to teach kids more about the Big Bang and entropy and particles. Every high school graduate should know that everything in the universe is made of a handful of particles. That’s not a hard thing to know. But that’s not what’s emphasized. Yes, there is a quantitative aspect to science that should not be denied, but it can be in the service of interesting rather than boring problems. Ten years after high school, most students are not going to solve a problem with pulleys and levers. But they still might want to know about the expansion of the universe and about cool things in atomic physics and lasers — which they’ll find interesting and fun.

More here.

John Dickerson in Slate:

Risk has taken a beating recently, thanks to the financial crisis. Risk is supposed to be about choice and consequence. You take a chance and you win or you lose. But then banks and insurance companies found ways to pervert this. They devised ever more esoteric ways to pass risk on to others, so there was, in fact, no risk to them at all. In this distortion, insurance techniques, created to limit risk, exposed millions to it. The laws of probability, originally devised to solve a moral dilemma—how to equitably distribute winnings in a game of chance—wound up inequitably distributing losses to people who didn't even know they were at the table. The architects of these gambles left their jobs with enormous bonuses, and companies that helped cripple the financial system were repaid by the government bailout. They took a chance, and lost—but they still won.

In this series, I seek to reclaim risk. I want to remind myself—and you—of the buoyant, thrilling side of risk, and I will do it by telling the stories of people who embrace risk and who live with the fear, exhilaration, and ambiguity it creates without shirking. People engaged in every kind of human endeavor say that taking risks is the key to fulfillment and success. It is at the heart of our biggest thrills and proudest achievements. Ask someone when she felt most alive and she'll tell you a story about a risk she took. President Barack Obama talked about this in his inaugural address. “Greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things.”

This series presents the stories of those people.

More here.

Lewis Grossberger in True/Slant:

6:30 AM: Obama awakened by clock radio tuned to NPR’s popular morning drive-time show, Kronsky the Bomb Thrower and His Anarcho-Syndicalist Zoo. “You know what would be fun?” Kronsky quips. “Getting the workers to seize the means of production and execute the blood-sucking capitalist bosses!” “If only,” mutters Obama.

7:30 AM: on way to Oval Office, Obama ducks into private chapel, slipping off shoes and prostrating self while facing Mecca. He chants high-pitched, ululating prayer to Allah in foreign tongue then before leaving, bows before busts of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Saul Alinsky.

7:40 AM: Rahm Emanuel enters Oval Office, gives Obama secret Illuminati handshake, says, “Good morning, Comrade President. The Iranian ambassador is here to discuss his scheme to undermine America’s security.” Obama says, “Show him right in.”

9:05 AM: Snack of sweetened camel milk served with dates, figs, pita and hummus. Then Iranian ambassador exits White House through secret tunnel so Fox News won’t see him.

9:30 AM: House Speaker Pelosi arrives to plot strategy for government takeover of lucrative garbage-collection industry. Obama gives her large suitcase full of cash for bribing Congressmen.

10 AM: Editors of New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker arrive to receive weekly instructions.

11 AM: Daily intelligence briefing by CIA and Pentagon officials on activities of America’s enemies. Bored, Obama does crossword puzzle, then dozes off.

Noon: Lunch with leaders of world gay conspiracy, who lobby Obama to appoint a transsexual to Supreme Court.

More here. [Thanks to Tom Bissell.]

Ken Auletta in The New Yorker:

Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. On a twenty-six-dollar book, the publisher receives thirteen dollars, out of which it pays all the costs of making the book. The author gets $3.90 in royalties. Bookstores return about forty per cent of the hardcovers they buy; this accounts for $5.20 per book. Another $3 goes to overhead costs and the price of producing and shipping the book—leaving, in the best case, about a dollar of profit per book.

Though this situation is less than ideal, it has persisted, more or less unchanged, for decades. E-books called the whole system into question. If there was no physical book, what would determine the price? Most publishers agreed, with some uncertainty, to give authors a royalty of twenty-five per cent, and began a long series of negotiations with Amazon over pricing. For months before Sargent’s visit, the publishers had talked about imposing an “agency model” for e-books. Under such a model, the publisher would be considered the seller, and an online vender like Amazon would act as an “agent,” in exchange for a thirty-per-cent fee. Yet none of the publishers seemed to think that they could act alone, and if they presented a unified demand to Amazon they risked being charged with price-fixing and collusion.

More here.

The Taimyr Tlängit

Justin E. H. Smith

[Click on the numbers to read the earlier installations in the Imaginary Tribes series: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6.]

Joan had her practical side. She warned me it's Indiana state law that you have to buy some kind of coffin or other, but she insisted under no circumstances should I buy one of those fancy models. It's going to be underground, anyway, she said, after just a few hours of display. They say the deluxe coffins are better at keeping out the elements, but so what? Who wants to stew in their own gasses for the next hundred years? I want the elements to rush in and I want to rot a.s.a.p., she said. I want to rot right back to the point where my body and the elements are the same thing. So get the cardboard.

She could also be horrifyingly cold, like when we moved down to Evansville to get away from the frat houses and the dumpy townies. She had just been promoted to regional director of Planned Parenthood for all of Southwestern Indiana, and I had only eight years left before moving to half-time teaching at Oahu, so we agreed that I'd be the one to make the hour commute, and we'd find the nice big house of our dreams in that modest metropolis on the Ohio River. We looked at some enormous Victorians across the river in Henderson, but Joan spent the whole day cringing. “I didn't work this hard just to get an address in Kentucky,” she exclaimed that evening as we strolled through the 'Fiesta' section of Tarzan and Cheetah's Global Grocery. Just like that.

Now here I am alone, Ken thought as he flipped through the latest issue of Jet, bought on a whim late last night during an antacid run to CVS, in our modest-sized but respectable brick two-story in Evansville. What did she mean, 'worked so hard'? Was she in it for the money? Was my castle built on the rotting bones of a million dead fetuses? Half of it, maybe. We always went fifty-fifty on everything. I paid half with my anthropologist's salary, and she paid half with her family-planner's salary. It's not much of a castle anyway, and family-planning is about a lot more than abortions. It's about education.

Read more »

Editor's Note: In the spirit of The New Yorker's popular caption contest, we will be presenting original cartoons done for 3QD by the very talented Robert Pichler. Unlike The New Yorker, we are not running a real contest, but just for fun, we encourage you to suggest captions in the comments area.

Nazif Topçuoğlu. Lamentations, 2007.

C-print. 114×170 cm.

More on this contemporary Turkish artist here and here.

Adam Michnik in the NYRB blog:

Something touched our hearts.

Four days after the April 10 tragedy of Smolensk, the Russian President declared: “It is obvious that Polish officers were shot at the command of the then leaders of the USSR, including Joseph Stalin.”

The crime of Katyń has divided Poles and Russians more than any other event of the twentieth century. For the last twenty years in both of our countries an arduous search continued for the truth and for the remembrance of that crime of the totalitarian Stalinist regime. Right from the beginning, some of the most outstanding Russians were involved in this effort. They were statesmen, scientists, civil servants, and regular people, and to them many a time Poland expressed her gratitude and respect.

The Smolensk catastrophe broke something in our Polish and Russian hearts. In the hearts of the leaders and of regular people. It was as if a gigantic dam opened—a dam behind which unexpressed words and gestures were piled up. In the last days, the entire world learned about the Katyń crime. And, in the face of this new tragedy, Russian politicians decided to act in an unprecedented way, a way that will remain in history.

The showing of the film Katyń by Andrzej Wajda on the most viewed channel of the Russian television; the words of President Medvedev about the guilt of Stalin; the earlier gestures and words of prime minister Putin – these are the foundation for new relations between Poland and Russia. As are all the flowers and lighted candles on the site of the Smolensk tragedy, in front of the Polish embassy in Moscow, and Polish consular offices in other cities of Russia. And the openness of the Russian side in cooperating with the Polish experts in explaining the reasons of the catastrophe.

and here’s a link to the Sting junk.

Maia Szalavitz in Time Magazine:

Increasingly, neuroscientists, psychologists and educators believe that bullying and other kinds of violence can indeed be reduced by encouraging empathy at an early age. Over the past decade, research in empathy — the ability to put ourselves in another person's shoes — has suggested that it is key, if not the key, to all human social interaction and morality.

Without empathy, we would have no cohesive society, no trust and no reason not to murder, cheat, steal or lie. At best, we would act only out of self-interest; at worst, we would be a collection of sociopaths.

Although human nature has historically been seen as essentially selfish, recent science suggests that it is not. The capacity for empathy is believed to be innate in most humans, as well as some other species — chimps, for instance, will protest unfair treatment of others, refusing to accept a treat they have rightfully earned if another chimp doing the same work fails to get the same reward.

The first stirrings of human empathy typically appear in babyhood: newborns cry when hearing another infant's cry, and studies have shown that children as young as 14 months offer unsolicited help to adults who appear to be struggling to reach something. Babies have also shown a distinct preference for adults who help rather than hinder others.

But, like language, the development of this inherent tendency may be affected by early experience. As evidence, look no further than ancient Greece — at the millennia-old child-rearing practices of Sparta and Athens. Spartans, who were celebrated almost exclusively as warriors, raised their ruling-class boys in an environment of uncompromising brutality — enlisting them in boot camp at age 7, and starving them to encourage enough deviousness and cunning to steal food — which skillfully bred yet more generations of ruthless killers.

[H/t: Quinn O'Neill]

Serena Golden interviews Lee Bakers, author of the new book Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, in Inside Higher Ed:

Q: You describe a “dramatic shift” in the first half of the 20th century, when the federal government “promulgat[ed]… policies to first destroy and then protect American Indian culture.” This swift change “mirrored shifts in American popular culture, aesthetics, and attitudes toward traditional or authentic Native American cultures.” Can you give an overview of how and why such a dramatic about-face occurred?

A: In 1883, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) developed a policy called the Religious Crimes Code, which authorized agents to use force or imprisonment to repress and stop American Indian religious practices that they deemed subversive, immoral, or an impediment to the goal of “civilizing” the Indian. This followed the much more comprehensive Dawes Act of 1887, which divided up tribal lands into small, individually-owned parcels. This allotment mechanism created a putative surplus of land that was sold to developers, railroads, and ranchers. The idea was to force rapid civilization based on individualism or speed the process of assimilation by destroying communal ways of life, but the amount of land provided to individual families was not large enough to be sustainable. The act and its various amendments were in place for almost a half a century, and American Indian families lost an estimated 90 million acres of treaty land. These two policies reinforced other punitive policies, practices, and violence tethered to an explicit “vanishing policy” — a policy designed to make American Indian culture disappear.

In 1890, Sitting Bull was shot dead, and the army quickly stopped one of the last so-called uprisings with their massacre at Wounded Knee. In 1893, Fredrick Jackson Turner delivered his influential paper on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” detailing how American culture was tied to frontier expansion, but the frontier was now closed. By the turn of the 20th century, the western frontier was finished and the threat of American Indians diminished.

Americans began to focus on preservation and conservation of land, wildlife, and water, which fueled movements to establish public spaces and establish more national parks. As boarding schools, the Dawes act, and the BIA articulated macabre vanishing policies, early anthropologists like James Mooney and Frank H. Chushing began to practice salvage ethnography. They attempted to preserve and conserve Indian culture by writing and describing the practices that they viewed as quickly disappearing. Tourism to the Southwest, a growing appreciation in Indian art, living ethnological fair exhibits, and wild-west shows all promoted a pacified yet exotic and distinctively American way of life. At the same time, summer camps and organizations like the Camp Fire Girls were promoted, and teenagers around the country began dressing up to play Indian. American Indian culture slowly became America’s exotic but safe “other.”

[H/t: Linta Varghese]

Alain de Botton in the BBC:

In a future world without aeroplanes, children would gather at the feet of old men, and hear extraordinary tales of a mythic time when vast and complicated machines the size of several houses used to take to the skies and fly high over the Himalayas and the Tasman Sea.

The wise elders would explain that inside the aircraft, passengers, who had only paid the price of a few books for the privilege, would impatiently and ungratefully shut their window blinds to the views, would sit in silence next to strangers while watching films about love and friendship – and would complain that the food in miniature plastic beakers before them was not quite as tasty as the sort they could prepare in their own kitchens.

The elders would add that the skies, now undisturbed except by the meandering progress of bees and sparrows, had once thundered to the sound of airborne leviathans, that entire swathes of Britain's cities had been disturbed by their progress.

And that in an ancient London suburb once known as Fulham, it had been rare for the sensitive to be able to sleep much past six in the morning, due the unremitting progress of inbound aluminium tubes from Canada and the eastern seaboard of the United States.

At Heathrow, now turned into a museum, one would be able to walk unhurriedly across the two main runways and even give in to the temptation to sit cross-legged on their centrelines, a gesture with some of the same sublime thrill as touching a disconnected high-voltage electricity cable, running one's fingers along the teeth of an anaesthetised shark or having a wash in a fallen dictator's marble bathroom.

[H/t: Anil Kalhan]

The Woman Who Collects Noah's Arks

Has them in every room of her house,
wall hangings, statues, paintings, quilts and blankets,
ark lampshades, mobiles, Christmas tree ornaments,
t-shirts, sweaters, necklaces, books,
comics, a creamer, a sugar bowl, candles, napkins,
tea-towels and a tea-tray, nightgown, pillow, lamps.
……..Animals two-by-two in plaster and wood,
fabric, oil paint, copper, glass, plastic, paper,
tinfoil, leather, mother-of-pearl, styrofoam,
clay, steel, rubber, wax, soap.
……..Why I cannot ask, though I would like
to know, the answser has to be simply
because. Because at night when she lies
with her husband in bed, the house rocks out
into the bay, the one that cuts in here to the flatlands
at the center of Texas. Because the whole wood structure
drifts off, out under the stars, beyond the last
lights, the two of them pitching and rolling
as it all heads seaward. Because they hear
trumpets and bellows from the farther rooms.
Because the sky blackens, but morning finds them always
safe on the raindrenched land,
bird on the windowsill.

by Janet McCann
from PoemMemoirStory, Grove Press

From The London Times:

Antony Flew was one of the best-known atheists of his generation but he finally repudiated the label. As an academic philosopher he subjected the question of God’s existence to careful, non-polemical analysis. When he declared himself a theist in his old age he annoyed many of his admirers — which might have been the intention. Antony Garrard Newton Flew was born in London in 1923 to a Methodist family. His father was president of the Methodist Conference for the one-year term and was active in other organisations including the World Council of Churches.

He was educated at St Faith’s School, Cambridge and then Kingswood School in Bath. At 15 he was struck by the incompatibility of divine omnipotence and the existence of evil, and lost his faith. He later identified this as the first step towards his career as a philosopher. His study of that subject was delayed by the war; he studied Japanese and served as an intelligence officer in the RAF. After the war he went to St John’s College, Oxford to read Greats, of which classical philosophy is a part. His interest in the philosophy of religion led him C. S. Lewis’s Socratic Club. He was impressed by the Christian apologist, calling him “an eminently reasonable man”. He was attracted, but not persuaded, by Lewis’s moral argument for God’s existence. He studied other traditional proofs for God’s existence, and developed his philosophical skills in opposition to them.

More here.